skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The PowerPC as a processor really was a powerful chip. And it was arguably more powerful than contemporary Intel chips. It's hard to directly compare the two because to unlock the performance for either architecture requires an optimized toolchain. I'm not sure that the toolchain Apple was using was ever quite up to par with Intel. But since they are difference architecture styles (RISC vs CISC), it was really hard to get a good comparison. On HPC workloads, the Power chips were really good. I'm not sure that ever translated to workstations well.

The differences between the PS3 and Xbox 360 processors and toolchains is probably a good analogy. While in theory the Cell of the PS3 is more powerful, it was easier to get the Xbox to work optimally. (Although, ironically, they were both PowerPC based CPUs).

But the reason why Apple changed over to Intel chips had nothing to do with raw performance. It had everything to do with power - as in watts. Apple was beholden to the PowerPC manufacturers (Motorola/IBM) for their chips.

The major markets for PPC chips was either at the very high-end (HPC) or the very low-end (embedded). While Apple was the main customer for the mid-range chips, they didn't have much relative volume, so they didn't have much sway in the chip roadmap. Because of this, it was difficult to get high-performance/low-power chips. Apple went for years with a G4-based Powerbook because they couldn't get a G5 version that would work in a laptop - it required too much power.

The reason why they switched to Intel was that Intel was already working on the high-performance/low-power chips that Motorola just couldn't offer.

The PowerPC architecture itself was very high-performance, but recent years have shown that raw performance isn't as important as performance per watt for consumer use. If you're building a super computer, that's another story. From a pure CPU architecture standpoint, I'm still a fan of RISC.
Games do age. Something that was looked impressive 20 years ago will probably look very dated by current standards.

Great games or not, trying to sell them at a price that is two or three times that of a "premium" game like Grand Theft Auto is ludicrous. The market has been conditioned to expect mobile games to sell for a dollar or two.
Show HN: Find your Twitter audience .
I don't see why new currencies should start at $0.
Think of AWS and getting a "100 EC2 m1.large instance hours" only instead of a single voucher you get 100 amcoinz.
How Xerox Evolved From Copier Company To Creative Powerhouse
Well, there was the Star Trek project...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project
Is there a modern day Feynman that can explain this to us not familiar with this but still interested?
My first Mac was a white iBook purchased from Amazon in December, 2002. My then girlfriend was home when the package arrived. She hid it and made me hunt for it when I got home from work. I finally found it in the dryer.

Inside the box was a pearl white slab of plastic. The best part about it was the smell...

I have not experienced boredom since.
Perhaps I will show my ignorance in the realm of physics here, but a few weeks ago I was mulling the idea of quantum entanglement over in my mind, and I had an interesting idea that I have yet to bounce off anyone, so perhaps someone could correct any layperson inadequacies.

Quantum entanglement in summary is that two or more particles are such that their quantum state relates them to each other, correct? In the big bang, all matter existed at a single point in "time", but we are confused about why there is more matter than anti-matter, correct?

Would it be at all possible that perhaps at the big bang or prior, the universe was more balanced in it's symmetry or perhaps even anti-matter existed in greater quantities than matter, but at some point there was (again, forgive my lack of physics knowledge) some sort of a collapse or antimatter blackhole which generated the big bang, and as antimatter collapsed in on itself and was spewed out the other side it became matter, with a side effect of quantum entanglement (since the matter (previously anti-matter) had existed at the same point in time (or some groups of matter had at least)). Now here is the key part, what if anti-matter isn't the opposite of matter, but it is indeed the preferred state of matter (eg, matter seeks to become anti-matter) but the only way that it can do so is to mass together until it becomes a black hole and collapses back into the anti-matter universe? (which would explain the lack of anti-matter where masses of matter exist)

Crazy lunatic layperson hypotheses:
1) Matter can become anti-matter and vice versa.
2) There is a natural tendency for balance in the universe.
3) Black holes are where matter goes to become antimatter.
4) White holes are anti-matter becoming matter
5) Gravity and many other observable effects are side effects of this process.
OT: I've got an iOS app that collects an incredible amount of actionable metrics, and I'm looking for some help with exactly the problem you're solving at BayesianWitch for websites. Is there a way I can use your product to help what I'm doing?

Email me at erich@rollrandom.com if you'd prefer to answer privately.
Errr... you just said that $1000 buys you .10, 1.97 and 15.83 (those numbers don't even make sense anyhow), which means that .10 bitcoins equals 15.83 dogecoins in value.

So what difference does that make... I can still spend 0.0001 bitcoins or 0.01583 dogecoins which would each equal a $1 in value. There's no difference in "cost-of-stake" at all.

Why do people have such trouble understanding fractions?
Dogecoin can't be a real thing one day?

Those people probably said the same thing about a website called Mt. Gox: Magic The Gathering Online which went on to be the leader in BitCoin exchange.
Neat, I knew about `:set +m` for enabling multiline input, but not `:{ ... }:`.
Our PM is really into crypto-currencies and when we talk about dogecoins it always makes me smile and feel better. I don't own any dogecoin yet but they surely make me healthier and more productive!
You're right, there's a missing piece to this that I haven't expressed yet. I can see it in my mind, but I'm having trouble figuring out how to communicate it verbally.
They could acknowledge the driver was working for them. That would be a start.
You say the outside observer sees that it takes forever for something falling in to hit the event horizon...

To make sure I understand, would it be correct to say that relative to us, the time dilation of any massive collapsing star means that it would never even collapse to a black hole in the first place because it would take infinitely long, relative to us(?)
JEnglish: Complex websites created with simple English
I was upgrading jQuery, and had a lot of different versions on the site. One of them was this gem: https://gist.github.com/jcampbell1/8601940/raw/f409862786b8f... I think it is jQuery version 0.3.

It was actually being used on a few minor pages, and still worked on modern browsers.
3 Years of Remote Work and Counting
https://developer.apple.com/legacy/library/documentation/Coc...

Quote from appendix B, grammar:

"This appendix presents a formal grammar for the Objective-C extensions to the C language—as the Objective-C
language is implemented for the Cocoa development environment. It adds to the grammar for ANSI standard
C found in Appendix A of The C Programming Language (second edition, 1988) by Brian W. Kernighan and
Dennis M. Ritchie, published by Prentice Hall, and should be read in conjunction with that book"

ANSI C grammar is a subset from Objective-C's grammar.
IIRC, the original compact Mac cases were also sensitive to some cleaners. I remember mandates of "whatever you do, don't clean it with 409."
Why are these posts not moderated out?
The frame on the new F150 is still steel, it's the body that's changing to aluminum. It's still using a steel ladder frame design, although they're using a higher strength steel to remove some of the weight from the frame.
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
The problem is that you don't understand how an event horizon works. It's not a definite border where suddenly there's a lot more gravity. It's the point at which gravity becomes strong enough (note that gravitational forces are still very strong right next to the event horizon) that not even light could avoid being pulled into the singularity eventually.

You wouldn't have to travel directly into the signularity, if that helps clarify things. You could orbit around it for a while and your orbit would decay in a spiral pattern.

This excerpt from Wikipedia might be helpful: https://mediacru.sh/rd-9YJEtJRGo

I would expect that you'd be torn apart by tidal forces before you reached the event horizon anyway.
no dogecoin celebration shall be complete without looking at the scary graphs

http://coinmarketcap.com/mineable.html

(I personally think it's a bubble but hey, it's growing while others falter)
Not sure why you got downvoted. It still is slower than expected. I published a jsperf here with jquery 1.11.

http://jsperf.com/jquery-show-hide-vs-css-display-none-block...

Show()/hide() is still very expensive because it checks the visibility before setting it.

What surprised me though is that $elem.css('display', 'none') is equally slow. That smells like an upcoming pull request.

$elem[0].style.display='none' is still the way to go.
> If the criminal/fraudulent activity which occurred in New York was directed from management based in California, wouldn't the crime become a federal one?

No, though that may make it so that a federal crime (e.g., wire fraud) was committed in addition to any state crime that was committed.
I've done a not-quite-so-bad commute, Seattle to Redmond, only 20-40 minutes on the way to work, 50-70 minutes on the way home. I found it soul-crushing. Most of the wait on the way home was in the line to get on the freeway. I became a worse person, unwilling to let other cars merge in, always assuming the worst of other drivers.

Currently I have a 20 minute pleasant bus commute to work, and I wouldn't go back to that commute. For me, it wasn't worth it.
To me it says they open new economic opportunities by bringing black car service to the masses and fairly cheaply (I compared Uber to a cab for a trip I'm taking soon, UberX was much cheaper). AFAIK, black car services weren't very accessible by the public not that long ago. Services like Uber or Gett let the drivers make money in a new way, which sounds about spot on to me.
Each Uber user benefits when there are more Uber drivers. They can get rides faster and more conveniently. Each Uber driver benefits when there are more Uber users. They can get clients faster and closer to their current position and thus make more money with less downtime. These are the network effects.

As nickpinkston said, those are economies of scale, which is a related concept, but not the same.

A consumer can use two social networks as well.

Yes, but this is where the difference highlighted above kicks in: in a social network, the total number of users is not as relevant as the number of connections the user has, so the user can be "stuck" even if he feels the product is not good enough. In a product like Uber, there's no such effect; people can switch as soon as they feel like trying the alternatives.
ehh??
> If you’re trying to bootstrap, being based in San Francisco is awful.

Especially if you have a family. I rented a four bedroom house in a great neighborhood in Sacramento that was a bike ride from Midtown for $2900/mo. We ended up buying a bigger house in the same neighborhood for even less per month. No commute, food is cheap, etc. The cost savings are enormous, and I'm sure it's more expensive than St. Louis...

Yep:

http://www.bestplaces.net/cost-of-living/sacramento-ca/st.-l...

The trick outside the Bay Area, if you are consult-strapping, is keeping the contracts coming in. Probably better in areas like St. Louis than in Sac.
The idea is that it warns you first and you agree to the increased price because you really want the car. This makes them more money (obviously) but it also incentivizes more drivers to get on the road when demand far outstrips supply.

I personally feel like that's not price gouging, so long as it isn't your only method of transportation. If you were very price conscious, you would probably be using a cheaper Uber competitor to begin with.
This is awesome! I'm going to encourage my students to use this in my web design class to draw basic mockups.
Wouldn't you start by charging $99? (And then start a bidding war, and then...)

I don't think it was nkoren's intention to provide a complete model of the economy, but simply to illustrate how markets can underserve segments of the population.

Examples like this can often be "disproved", sometimes with ease, but that rather misses their purpose. A similar point was the topic of a recent xkcd: http://xkcd.com/1318
Ask HN: Are there any good opensource android apps?
I am new to Android app development. I would like to read the source code of a good app and understand what are the best practices.
Did I read this right, they added back support for IE6, 7 and 8 on the 1.x branch?
> I have chosen 60-character password length, upper-lower-numbers-spaces-special characters mix (as a rule of thumb, a longer password is preferable to a more complex password).
For whatever reasons, some services refuse this combination - and that's a huge red flag:

That would be the websites of nearly every financial institution I've ever come across.
You cannot orbit a black hole immediately outside the event horizon. The smallest distance at which a circular orbit is possible is called the photon sphere because you must be moving at the speed of light to maintain a circular orbit. The photon sphere is at 1.5 Schwarzschild radii.
> If you take the mass of a sun and squeeze it into a few miles wide, you are definitely going to get inescapable gravity no matter what you want to call it.

3.8 miles (1.9 mile Schwarzchild radius), to be a bit more precise.
That what label we put on things does not affect what they actually are? Whatever it is out there in the real universe that are these really massive things, they aren't waiting for little humans a billion light years away to decide what they are or are not.
It's mainly so that you can use Browserify [1]. Browserify and Bower both integrate the Node.js module system into client-side JS.

You basically get a unification of backend and frontend languages -- both using JS, the same dependency and versioning system, the same way to require modules, and of course the same code. Being able to use the same libraries on the backend and frontend is huge. (But not required. Browserify/npm are still useful if you don't use Node.js.)

And it's cleaner. Relying on the Node.js dependency system means you can just import modules the same was in Node.js, instead of maintaining an ugly "vendor/" folder where you manually copy things like jQuery.

I suspect (I haven't gotten this far yet) that you can more easily unit-test your code this way. You just need a "headless" browser environment (using jsdom etc.) that's compatible jQuery.

Browserify is actually very small tool. It leaves all package management to npm, and all Browserify does is to generate a JS file that includes all your package.json-specified modules in neatly namedspaced dependency-initialization order, ready to be imported using a script tag.

There is also Bower [2] from Twitter. Unlike Browserify, Bower is mainly a wrapper around npm that acts as a separate package manager, but doesn't actually implement the glue needed to import any JS on the client side.

[1] http://browserify.org

[2] http://bower.io
I'm not defending Uber.
>All currencies are going to start off at $0, being worth nothing.

Bull. At this moment, I'm issuing an AqueousCoin to your pessimizer-account. In order to spend it, all you have to do is prove your identity by logging into HN in front of me or in front of a notary public, and I will send you $1 (minus postage.)

Done?

Sometimes (or possibly always by definition) the vendor comes before the currency.
a) inflation promotes careful investment rather than just sitting on heaps of cash

b) Saving is really only good when the money is put to work for other people, rather than just sat on

c) The average lower and middle class person is in debt

Deflation would not promote healthier habits, it would limit cash supply and create incentives for people to limit it further. Money is a medium of exchange, find something else if you want a store of value.
I was using the term "modern personal computing" to refer to a computer using what would become the standard cross-platform interface for computers: the desktop metaphor[1].

While the Apple II and the Commodore PET were undoubtedly very popular and did put computers into the hands of home users, they really were not "modern" computers. To quote the Wikipedia article I referenced above:

"The first computer to popularise the desktop metaphor, using it as a standard feature over the earlier command line interface was the Apple Macintosh in 1984. The desktop metaphor is ubiquitous in modern-day personal computing; it is found in most desktop environments of modern operating systems: Windows as well as Mac OS X, Linux, and other Unix-like systems."

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_metaphor
This was a nice read, thanks.

I always find it useful to remember this when sitting down to write: the word "essay" comes from the French, meaning "to attempt." Montaigne used it to mean, he was making an attempt to put his thoughts into words. In some sense, it is like saying you write as a beginner: you start with only your thoughts -- no idea of the outcome -- and go from there.
Yah I recall that 10.2 seemed like first version of Mac OS X that had a lot of kinks worked out. Each release thereafter got better and faster. Apple had one solid release after another throughout the aughts.
Was yours 256K RAM? Mine was, and yet everyone talks about the Mac SE or 512 like those were the earliest ones ever.

I bought a 2nd FD and a 300/1200 baud modem to go with it. I regularly schlepped that sucker (heavy!) in its canvas bag 3/4 mile across campus from my dorm to the math building. (Yeah, we had a PDP11 as well.) I used it to desktop-publish (sort of) a newsletter for our sci-fi club. We didn't have the ability to scan in the masthead or any pictures, so there was old fashioned cut and paste going on as well. :)
Employees bored at work.
It certainly shouldn't be worth more.

Why should it be worth the same? If you farm vegetables they don't stay the same forever, nor do they appreciate in value.

Inflation is a tax on the cash-rich. This does not describe the poor, who are typically in debt.
Poll: JSON pronounced "Jay-sohn", or like the name "Jason"?
However, in the face of inflation that can still end up ill-defined, requiring measurements that can not be taken from the inside. And recall that while the specific inflation that our universe actually experienced may not fit directly into Einstein's original equations, a "cosmological constant" that permits a certain type of inflation does exist.
manhole lets you attach to a running process and muck around. It's a pretty neat feature.
I was in St. Louis for Strange Loop 2013, and I was pretty astonished at how nice (and uncrowded) the downtown was. I asked about it at http://www.reddit.com/r/StLouis/comments/1mlum2/whats_wrong_... and got some interesting responses. The "what's wrong with..." was in the sense of "surely it can't be as great as it seems here?", by the way.
Close but not quite. Yes multipool auto switches between coins. It has been doing mostly DOGE lately since it has been the most profitable. It tells you what you're mining, it isn't hidden. And no, it doesn't convert to BTC automatically. You get whatever you mine.
3 Things You Must Know Before Starting An Online Business
Did you read their statement?

They were more worried about being associated with the accident than the accident itself. Lots of weasel words and excuses in trying to claim that the driver didn't work for them, or that the driver wasn't active or doing a trip.

If I worked for Uber, I would have posted something simple and left it at that e.g.

"We have been informed by law enforcement that there has been a traffic accident in San Francisco involving an Uber driver. We send our deepest condolences to the family and victims of this tragic accident."

The end.
Plain JavaScript
Are you pointing out the size? or the style?

Efforts are being made to move here: https://twisted.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
Is this seriously happening...
> Although we have great talent as far as theoretical computer science is concerned, we have not yet acquired any experts in computer hardware on our team

Note to readers: the exact wrong time to use an appeal to authority is this, the moment after your authority been disproven by facts.
What surface? A point has no surface.
I may be oversimplifying again... But what it actually says that not moving enough lowers your metabolism? The only new thing is that it is neurological process.
Nobody's selling them because the few people who've tried to target an upmarket price point have failed miserably and the sort of investment needed to make a game "worth" $50 in the world of mobile games (filled with insane players who seem to think a dozen hours of gameplay isn't worth $3) would be a massive, massive risk. The only people able to actually move units at a price point over $10 seems to be Square themselves, and even they're not doing a great job of it with that mind-boggling back catalog of games and name recognition to use to their advantage.

I'm making a 2D JRPG right now - first wave of platforms being PC/Mac/maybe-Linux, second wave being mobile and tablet devices. The PC version will be priced between $15 and $20; the mobile one will by necessity end up around $8-$10 because that is the ceiling that people seem willing to pay for games (and not a lot of them at that).

From where I sit, the mobile market is largely quality-inelastic (unless you measure quality on 'reactivity of your Skinner box') and while I'm porting my game, I wouldn't bother otherwise if it wasn't solely a learning experience for me. Even if I was at an AAA shop I certainly couldn't justify spending the sort of money necessary to "validate" the existence of a $50 title on iOS.
There will be n! of the smallest heads, the ones which don't spawn any new heads. Total heads, though, will be 9 + 9 * 8 + 9 * 8 * 7 + ...
Beginner's Guide To 3D Scanning (written by the CEO of a 3D scanner maker)
looks cool. hoping it's subway (no network connection) friendly!
If Gett isn't taking legal action against Uber, then this just sounds like a good marketing ploy to get attention.
Vitamin D Supplements Don't Help Your Health: Review
I agree with all your statements. I don't have any opponents in the sense of people I oppose. There are some people who think any regulation is defacto bad and a 'free' market will solve anything, and I think they are misguided. In particular, they forget that 'free' markets are complex institutions and standards and conventions and rules about things like what constitutes fraud that have evolved over centuries.
Yeah, they are practically laying out the red carpet for tech transplants. http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2014/01/23/google-engineer-...
Beyond that, there's a very limited range of games smartphones can support. Because of the lack of dedicated physical buttons, most action game just do not work. The action games that do well are runners, because they remove nearly all the controls except for dodge. Because the screen is a touch screen you inherently cover the screen as you control the game. It's the reason the DS has two screens, so you can cover up part of the second screen without blocking the main action above.
You need to change what you mine to whatever is most profitable. If you only target a single, popular one then yes, difficulty will increase and profitability will probably decrease. See http://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency/