skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've always built my own. I like being able to plug a box into a TV, or three monitors, or put on a different OS every week, use it for modern PC games, streaming multiple videos on multiple screens, or editing a spreadsheet.

I wonder if the big prebuilt companies are the canary in the coalmine here. It's hard to imagine in five years just putting a tablet in my living room as a media center, tomshardware and pcpartpicker going dark.

Looks like drive manufacturers are doing ok, but only by transitioning to higher priced models for enterprise:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomcoughlin/2014/01/03/hdd-proje...

I wonder if other part manufacturers are starting the same transition.

Sigh, maybe I should build that last PC this year after all...
Yeah, probably a better place. I don't reddit much. In the past I would have spent hours researching what to buy, these days 15 minutes feels like I'm running out of time.
These all seem a bit ridiculous for 2014, maybe 2024. There are so many hurdles to overcome to get self driving cars, or private drones.
The map that saved the London Underground
The flip side of spreading your data across several providers is that you are increasing the odds of finding a problem. But the problem will have a smaller impact (hopefully).
you've only had this kind of recourse for the past 50 years. before that, for 5-10,000 years, money in all its forms worked just like bitcoin.
Diffrient World Chair. Very comfortable according to me and my friends.
Yessir, my tounge-in-cheek username has been crafted for optimum douche-bagginess. The lulz are all yours friend.
As someone who writes a lot of C++ and has played with Rust (ie, hello world) how does the language work when you remove shared pointers?

Say I have an early-generated state tracker for a whole bunch of events propagating in an event loop somewhere, that I want discarded when all the events finish. They are all separate tasks in different threads, so I either need to have some job that just checks if they all finish to clean up, or pass around shared data structures. How would you do that in Rust?
I find it funny that on the very same site where we see an endless supply of NSA privacy-invasion complaints, we also see an impressive defense in support of Google's efforts to the same.

Do ya'll hate Marco that much?
I usually just ignore this sort of “I hate Google and so should you” post that pops up every now and then, it’s just a waste of time to bother with it, I thought this might be different but it isn’t. I stopped reading after the author recommended Hushmail so I didn't waste too much time.

Because even though I could almost tolerate the generic anecdotes, the overbearing tone, and the mandatory simplistic “NSA” invocation I couldn’t deal with the author suggesting shitty services with shitty privacy record and claim the opposite: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/11/encrypted-e-mai/

Also I think that members of the HN community by enlarge are perfectly capable of seeking alternatives by their own if they wish, so I don’t really get who is this post is supposed to be for.

Edit: I just scrolled further down and the author actually recommends Microsoft and Apple stuff as alternatives while citing the NSA in the intro?! this is sick!
FP Ivory tower? There are plenty of imperative only programmers who believe PHP isn't a sane choice.
HTTP is used since it won't be firewalled.
Deflation is better for holders of a currency. Price deflation means that the value of your currency is rising as compared with goods you want to buy.

The world is naturally deflationary. The price of things falls over time with increases in production efficiency, economies of scale and return on investment from capital stock.

It's only with persistent antics of rulers and governments that the current case of persistent inflation is the lived experience of most people. Going back through history, many generations on earth lived in a time when 'things weren't cheaper back then', but then all the other generations have suffered through a time when rulers/governments have granted themselves a monopoly on the monetary system, usually for the purposes of waging war or building grand monuments to themselves.

What is different about bitcoin is that it is essentially un-monopolisable like gold, but much more suited to high frequency, remote transactions. I don't have a dog in the fight but I set fascinated on the sidelines.
That is never his goal.
Who are "hackers" here? Software engineers?

Curious about the type distribution of IT entrepreneurs (founders, co-founders, CEO's, and CTO's).
The article mentions ezbob, another player in that space. I was surprised that, although the home page shows an example loan repayment amount, it does not include the interest rate, display of which, I understand, is required by the law[0].

The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) states[1]:
"In particular, the regulations provide that - if an advertisement includes an interest rate or any amount relating to the cost of the credit - this triggers a 'representative example' including a 'representative APR'. This must be representative of agreements expected to be entered into as a result of the advertisement, and at least 51 per cent of borrowers must be expected to get the advertised APR or better. The representative APR is also triggered by a non-status or comparative indication or incentive."

At first, I thought that perhaps ezbob isn't offering 'consumer' loans, but business loans, but the footer on their web site[2] clearly states their consumer credit licence number (647816).

For reference, their example[3] works out to an APR of about 43% (3% per month, compounding: 1.03^12-1 = 0.425...).

[0] Consumer Credit (Advertisements) Regulations 2010 (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/all?title=Consumer%20Credit%20...)

[1] http://oft.gov.uk/about-the-oft/legal-powers/legal/cca/guida...

[2] http://www.ezbob.com/

[3] http://www.ezbob.com/our-loans/repayment-examples/
YELP critics can't stay anonymous, court rules
"What it's like when the FBI asks you to backdoor your software" : You say 'No' in the most emphatic terms while giving him a dressing down like a boss, apparently.
This has existed for a while in the military training space, although I'm sure the economics are only starting to make sense for consumers now (it might still be too early, no idea). I worked in a slightly related field over five years ago, and saw several such systems on display at conferences (and got to play with them, etc--very cool tech). Here's the first Youtube video I could find[0] demonstrating the concept.

0. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ja6oy3I1rdw
I agree that the pricing for B2B apps should be "a no brainer" for your customers. Although sometimes it's hard to quantify (put into dollars) the value you provide. Maybe you just remove frustration, without saving much time or money. I wrote an article the other day about all the paid services I use and how little correlation there is between the amount I pay for each and the value I get: http://www.manuelflara.com/thoughts-on-pricing-for-developer...
Pux - Extreme fast router for PHP
I'm completely on board with the idea that eliminating milk from the northwest european diet would be hugely disruptive and have unknown knock-on nutritional effects due to long-term adaptation to milk consumption. My point in that area was limited to the idea that hunger wouldn't be an issue.

However, my other point, that Norway can easily import 100% of its food demand (see "if Norway entirely stopped producing food, it would still eat just fine"), stands.
Tesla Model S Center Console
I'll conceded that PHP in 2014 has some awesome frameworks but argue it doesn't matter because PHP was designed (very) badly from the beginning. BTW, PHP was my first language ;)
> Which you don't have access to if you are DIRECTLY making bitcoin payments from customer to merchant.

Sounds like how I can't chargeback dollar bills I use for a money order.

I don't imagine it will ever get to the point where people perform financial transactions with bitcoin using raw addresses. They will probably always use third party services like coinbase, which has a fractional commission, for the security, both in having a remote wallet (ie, bank) and providing chargebacks.
I'm Australian and read a story about this sovereign fund yesterday. It's been on my mind since. The Norwegian funds works out at roughly $200k per person. Not sure if Australia's Future Fund is a fair comparison in any way, but that is roughly $4-5k/person. Someone else has noted that superannuation works out at roughly $70k/person, but I don't think that is much of a equal to what Norway have done?

While governments here have gradually privatised various state-owned entities, Norway has built fair, national strength. StatOil is Norwegian. It's not going to play capital strike and up and leave if the political climate doesn't suit it was Rinehart threatens and mining tax opponents claim.

It amazes me that the mining tax hot potato of recent politics in Australia was ever an issue. Surely that was a great opportunity to do something similar either short term or long-term for Australia?
> In what freezing fucking hell is a dual-core, 1 GHz computer with gigabytes of RAM and tens of gigabytes of storage and 3D acceleration that can fit in my pocket memory-starved and CPU-starved?

lol, sir, lol.
Sort of looks like Safari trying desperately to fit the page into viewport. Never seen that myself. On my iPhone I get the normal HN in both Safari and Chrome.
It's ironic that you say that, given that if you don't get the whitespace correct, you'll have a syntax error. That's one of the big reason Python rubs me the wrong way: white space is semantic.

Not to pile on but this is exactly backwards. The whitespace saves keystrokes and errors because it's giving a semantic meaning to something that programmers put in their code anyway.

Now that I've actually written some code in ruby, I can't comprehend how rubyists aren't driven insane by the 'end' tokens. I'm sure this is a newbie mistake but on multiple occasions I've written something like this:

def foo(x)
if x > 5
puts x
else
puts 5
end

foo(7)
foo(3)

Any experienced ruby programmers should see the error pretty quickly. But it LOOKS pretty good. Here is the error you get:

test.rb:9: syntax error, unexpected $end, expecting kEND

What's on line 9? That's just the end of the file. Nowhere near where the syntax error actually is. In this trivial example, tab-checking the indentation using my editor will reveal the error. But this is a trivial example. In more substantial code this technique is not nearly as effective. In erb templates its harder still.

That never happened to me in python, even as a newbie. If I forget a colon I almost always know instantly because the editor will try to indent my code dramatically wrong. And if I inadvertently delete the colon at a later time without updating the indentation (this happens a lot) I get an instant syntax error that points me right at the line where the colon is missing. It's an error you can fix in your sleep. You don't forget end tokens because there are no end tokens to forget. The block ends when the indentation level decreases.
I guess you'd also need a larger battery if you were to both compute graphisms and deal with the synchronization with other peoples over the Wifi. Plus it'd be lighter and in case of any collision there would be much less hardware that could be damaged, so I think sending rendered images over Wifi is actually a pretty cool idea
I don't see any mention of normalisation in the release notes.
Bit of a risk, considering that impersonating a federal employee is a felony.
For the majority that aren't concerned with realtime processing (total fine grained control isn't needed) concurrent FP is much simpler than the alternatives. FP code (ala Haskell) can also be very aggressively optimized.

Also, most of the time programmers shoot themselves in the foot with that total fine grained control some languages give. This doesn't mean they don't need to exist, just that FP can server a majority who think they need total control much better with more than acceptable performance.
Lenovo to release multiple Chromebook configurations this summer
At CES in Las Vegas, Lenovo president Jay Parker announced that the company will be expanding its Chromebook line over the coming months. Speaking to CNET, Parker said we would be seeing "multiple Chromebook models" come available by summer 2014 across varied price points and configurations.

While Lenovo already offers Chromebooks for the education sector, Parker said at this year's CES that the company feels it is a market that "will accelerate greatly in the next 12 months." Based on numbers from IDC, Lenovo is the world's largest PC vendor, so no doubt its involvement in Chromebooks could speed things up considerably.

Parker also added some updates on some of Lenovo's other businesses. The company is also looking to expand its smartphone and smart TV business into the US, but there doesn't appear to be a solid schedule at this time. Back in May of last year, the company said it would have smartphones Stateside within a year, as of right now it still can't offer "a specific timeline," only saying that the company is "interested in it being sooner rather than later."

Beyond that, we know the company is interested in and actively researching wearable technology, but has no further updates at this time. "Right now with the technology available, I'm not sure that the market is ready for it in a mass scale...We'll take a wait-and-see approach but develop our own plans," Parker said.
What a missed opportunity. The proper response would have been to "take it under contemplation", get his name & ID, and get as much documentation of the request as possible (enough to verify, does this guy actually work for the FBI, or is it some random "jokester" of the kind that hangs out at security conferences).

As it stands, it's basically one level up from an urban myth. Some guy asked her to do something shady at a security conference, and it's easy for the FBI to claim they don't know anything about it.
that first version is hilarious. i'd consider it hideous at any proficiency level in any language :D
I believe Intel eventually fixed Itanium with more support for dynamic instruction scheduling which sort of goes against the very concept of VLIW. SIMD (via GPUs) rather than MIMD then took the performance crown for HPC tasks and hasn't looked back.

VLIW still works very well in DSP-style applications, where static scheduling is quite feasible.
R. Luke DuBois Mines Data to Reveal Art
What the? Why is that?
Another thought: Is the distribution the consequence of natural selection/evolution? Does it mean that hackers are losers in the survival game?
People in the US are now forced to buy health insurance (or pay a fine/tax).
If anyone has any idea how we can fix this, I'd love to not have to explain to all the investors/customers why I am messaging them pictures of cleavage..
Big advantage of the dollar is you can use it to keep the IRS from throwing you in jail.
Prediction: Snapchat Will Be Acquired In 2014
The interstates were built over an earlier system of federal highways...

Which is a complete misnomer, as US numbered highways were and still are maintained by state and local governments [1].

I grew up near the "birthplace of Route 66" so yeah, I've heard of it. It was maintained and improved by a private organization (imagine that!) [2] until the federal interstate push of the 1950s.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Numbered_Highways

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Highway_66_Association
> Online maps were traditionally made for one purpose only, car navigation, not to show a complete picture of the world.

That tradition didn't last much longer (if any?) than the current state has already lasted.
So is unauthorized access to a protected computer, yet a lot of that goes on at security conferences too.
Anything like a rustforpythonistas been mentioned anywhere?
The difference is that nothing can remove the confidence behind gold - not even forced confiscation by the state (which just results in hoarding and buried treasure).

However, it's easy, simple to undermine confidence in fiat currency - just overissue and prevent conversion to other forms.

Can confidence in Bitcoin be removed? Not sure about that one. Would banning trade in it like gold can be banned remove all confidence? Very hard to say, and something to watch.
I opted to give the city a 5-star review. Maybe now it'll show up easier. :P
Totally wrong. There are thousands of altcoins.
My guess is that shortly thereafter her tax and investment records were getting a good going over by the DOJ and IRS.

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-story-of-joseph-nacchio-a...
Google also has a ton of computing power and disk space...

That said, homophones and homonyms only would make the 3-gram sets smaller, but it would only detect homophones and homonyms being used incorrectly. I could still use a word incorrectly, and if I'm banking on that software to detect my mistakes it wouldn't.
>The tax pays for public health care, welfare, free education, 49 week paid parental leave (100% of salary) and other benefits. If you compare with another country you need to include this in the cost of living.

None of those things would really benefit someone who only lived there for a year though.
What it's like to release a game on Steam
Not talking about altcoins, which by the way I support but it's unproven if they'll gain any real traction; hell it's not proven Bitcoin will yet.
Best guess is that you will receive the current USD value in coins back.
They are likely to release a consumer product late this year or early next year, with an updated dev kit coming some time before that. Always subject to change of course since this is bleeding edge tech, but they can't delay too much or they risk Microsoft or Sony beating them to the punch.
Opt out is located at: Gmail Settings > Email Via Google+ > Who can email you via your Google+ profile? > No one.
Or maybe ziggy from quantum leap.
Sometimes when people "misspeak" like that it provides insight into what they have been discussing internally, but haven't yet announced externally.
Not very true.

Some languages prefer inheritance to express is-a relationships and composition to express has-a relationships. Some languages try to shoe horn is-a into being equivalent to has-a, but they usually have trouble expressing non-structural subtyping.
There is an opt-out mechanism, which is mentioned in the original Gmail blog post.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-i1l-4aC-wpk/Us3x3EySkOI/AAAAAAAABM...
Blogspam. The correct link should be http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2014/01/how-the-us-almost-k...
Thanks for the pointer to Eye Tribe. I ordered an EyeX but hadn't heard about them. Eye Tribe seems more developer friendly, with tech specs front and center.
> Deflation is better for holders of a currency.

No it isn't, you're forgetting that with deflation comes less wages as well. Deflation is the whole economy, not just a few sectors.

> Price deflation means that the value of your currency is rising as compared with goods you want to buy.

Which is meaningless when you're getting paid less as well.

> It's only with persistent antics of rulers and governments

Alright, tinfoil hat guy, we're done. I need no lessons in Bitcoin from you, I hold them and actively trade them, you don't know anything about them I don't already know.
The editor cannot know how to indent that properly. It's not a problem in most other languages.

It will have a pretty good idea. If you paste the snippet, then hit 'tab', odds are high that a good editor (I use emacs python-mode) will Do The Right Thing on the first try, although sometimes you'll have to hit tab again or backspace a couple of times to get the right indent level.

Occasionally I need to use a keyboard macro to fix the indent after a paste, but this is very easy to do and doesn't happen to often, really. I'm sure by now with python's popularity there are more advanced indentation management tools but I still just use emacs keyboard macros.

It's a very small price to pay for the huge benefits of semantic whitespace.

Generally the worst case scenario for copy/paste is that I'm using emacs in a terminal window and I forget to switch to fundamental-mode before pasting. Because the terminal is handling the paste, not emacs, python-mode treats it all as if it had been entered one line at a time and auto-indents everything after a colon, then pasting in lines that already have indentation and the result is a complete mess. (but then I just undo it all and re-paste it the right way) GUI emacs doesn't have this problem.

The worst case scenario I can think of for semantic whitespace (outside of copy/paste) is accidentally changing indent level of a piece of code without realizing it and a syntax error doesn't result, meaning there's now a logic flaw in your program you don't know about. Python is more susceptible to that than sort of regression error than most languages. That said, usually that sort of mistake WILL cause a syntax error and be easily fixed.
You can get grumpy about the hyperbolic language, but this defense of Google -- and most others I'm seeing here -- is rather missing what those of us who are increasingly exasperated with Big G are annoyed about. Let's try it without the cursing, shall we?

Google has taken a collection of services that are not functionally related -- a search engine, a mapping engine, a hosted mail service, a social network, a video sharing site, a web-based document editing system with cloud storage, and more -- and made the following unilateral decisions:

(1) The default is to have one Google account that links you to all services.
(2) You are strongly encouraged to use your real name for that account.
(3) The default for linking services together is opt-out rather than opt-in.

Google puts a lot of effort into making you have one account across all of Google. The signal difference between them and, well, everyone else (with the possible exception of Facebook) is that it's increasingly difficult to not be part of the Google ecosystem. Yes, the median HN reader can come up with a laundry list of other services to replace everything Google, but most users can't and even most technically competent users probably aren't going to.

The upshot of the three principles above is that in practice, anyone with a Google Account -- which is at this point probably a substantial percentage of the world population -- has a very good chance of being able to send email to you if they have no other information but your real name.

Is that the end of privacy as we know it? Of course not. But do you really, really think that only crazy weirdo Apple users would possibly find it just a touch troubling that Google thinks it's okay for this to be the default? Do you really think it's insane for me to think that Google should perhaps consider that their users might deserve privacy from both other Google users and Google itself, as opposed to just the "privacy" granted by better spam blocking algorithms and SSL?
Is that the case? I thought it was more that the GPL rejects distribution on the App Store.
For all X and Y, there's still the problem of the speaker being associated with something called "Hacker School." Just like "Beefcake School," "Baller School," "Stud School," or any other "Positive Connotation to a Certain Demographic School," it doesn't pass the laugh test.
Some of them don't seem entirely ridiculous. Anonymity going mainstream could likely happen due to everything that happened in 2013. Similarly, Drones got really big towards the end of 2013, seeing them get even bigger doesn't seem all that unlikely.
If you are a US citizen or live in the US, where you pay taxes for breathing.
"Bug-Driven Development"!

That's all I have to contribute to this discussion.