skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
FWIW: Gnome on wheezy is way snappier than unity (12.04 with or without unity-2d and 13.10 14.04 with unity) on my old and trusty eee-pc (n280+gma950).
My father is engineer, once he was renovating a shop in a intersection, he told the builders to use five tree trunks to hold the second floor while they demolished and rebuilt the first floor merchandise display. The builders decided to use only three, and pocket the money of the other two to themselves, and the building fell, thankfully my father had started working before signing the contract, so he could not be sued.
>Alt+Tab is completely broken

This is kind of an opinion. There is no rule book that says it needs to behave a certain way. I prefer this.

>ruining the very purpose of virtual desktops

I use virtual desktops to separate windows in overview mode so when they're presented for picking they aren't really small. And also for organization.

>Gnome's "workspaces" are not as powerful as traditional virtual desktops. The biggest problem is that they're dynamic: for example Gnome won't let you have an empty workspace - it will kill it and re-arrange apps from adjacent workspaces to fill the space.

Why would you need an empty workspace (except at the end, which gnome provides)? Seems to make since to me. It doesn't really "re-arrange apps" it just moves the work spaces to fill in the empty gap.

>Last, but not least, Gnome's way of launching apps gives me nausea: it insists on animating every pixel on my 30" desktop every time I want to launch an application.

Eh.. Animations aren't for everyone. They have not bothered me though, and I think for most users it provides a better experience than just having things "happen".

>Finally, Unity is much more responsive and less buggy

I'm running gnome 3.11 on an i5 with intel graphics also, and it seems pretty snappy, after all, it's just javascript. I have not experienced any bugs outside of experimental software I installed. To be honest, I have never experienced a snappier desktop than gnome 3.
Why Don't Older Americans Want Time Machines?
Stalking the Wily Hacker [1988] [pdf]
I don't have pinboard, but i believe some of the differences are:

It gives screenshots, It saves content for later and it's an official Opera extension (pinboard doesn't have an official one).

Edit: Raindrop.io also let's you save the content of video. That's a pretty handy feature pinboard and dragdis don't have. I don't know of anyone else that has it.
We'll let Ω be the judge of that.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/Friedman...
If masonry is able to withstand the weather an order of magnitude longer than steel - wouldn't it make sense to reinvent masonry building techniques for building stuff that's expensive to close down? I get that labor cost is prohibitive for this kind of stuff - maybe we will see a renaissance of masonry once we have flexible enough robots to handle it?
Surely that should be 'growings-up'? Motion to burn at the stake the author/poster until we reach a conclusion
Check out RealPython.com. We offer custom mentoring/tutoring as well as a full course taking you from the basics of the syntax up to advanced web development with Django and Flask.
You're describing the situation 10 years ago. It's not at all clear whether that still holds today.

Also note, just because objects can have COM-accessible reference doesn't mean they always need to have one. It's quite possible they're just wrappers created on demand.
Reflections on an Indie Failure – StarLicker Postmortem
China's JD.Com Will Be Offering An Accelerator For Hardware Startups
Top 5 things to do after installing ubuntu 14.04 LTS ( Trusty Tahr )
Two Chatbots Talking to Each Other
I think if you use Packer you can create boxes in multiple formats. But once created, the boxes are just simply packaged VMs with some metadata. The formats are different for VirtualBox and VMware.
Depends what happens to the paper thereafter of course . Somehow, printing out articles from the web seems pretty small beer compared to felling trees in the forests of North Carolina for conversion to wood chips and transporting them 3,000 miles to Drax Power Station in the UK. Not a one-off! There is a purpose-built dock at Chesapeake Port, just across the state line in Virginia.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2290444/Madness-How-...

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/feb/21/drax-scraps-...
I noticed Nautilus moved a menu I rarely used from toolbar into the main menu but that does not bother me much (actually "Show hidden files" is more accessible now) and they added back "backspace = up directory" feature which for me is great. I think we are lucky to have so many GUI alternatives while still being able to reuse the best tools GNU/Linux can offer. And what's great is they are evolving even if slowly and backtracking (like backspace in Nautilus :)).
Crashing competing media players on Android
Synapse may not have an active upstream any more, but, well, the Ubuntu package is still well-maintained (in the synapse-core/testing ppa), and it does everything I need it to.

An aversion to orphaned software is clearly good for things at a security boundary (web browsers, sshd, etc), but is it really an issue for a launcher? In 3-5 years it may not be good enough, but shrug, if that's the case I'll have another look around then. It's not like launchers have lock-in.
There was quite a lot of debate about it at the time as far as I recall but the core devs seemed set on it and have since stated that they aren't planing any more syntax changes[1] so I think it's pretty unlikely they will change it now. I think it's an unfortunate choice as well, although mainly because it's not a very visible character.

>they really debate what's best, and check alternative implementations and discard stuff if they feel the need, even listening to community criticism (unlike some other recenty popular language designers who get in a "you're doing it wrong" defensive mode)

When this kind of debate came up again last year on the mailing list it ended up with the mods threatening to ban people and the list being put on full moderation[2]. Along with rather unfriendly messages from the mods such as: "Normally I would warn about the code of conduct, but tbh, in this case I think [person criticising the syntax] deserved it" and "when you want to shut people down in the future (a rolethat is very much needed given the number of cranks that Rust
attracts"[3]

It may have come up again since but I unsubscribed from rust-dev at that point.

[1] https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust-dev/2013-November/00...

[2] https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust-dev/2013-November/00...

[3] https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust-dev/2013-November/00...
Many people in the US, when asked about Colombia, think of negative things; drugs, etc. Also, down in Colombia, the Caribbean coast was often looked down upon by those from the capital -- seen mainly as uneducated people with strange customs and a different way of talking. Gabriel Garcia Marquez uplifted not only the image of Colombia world-wide, but also the image and culture of the Caribbean coast. I am proud that my family is from that region and he made me proud to tell the world that I am Colombian. May he rest in Peace.

Also, I think this quote (from an article in NPR) sums up why he's so admired in Latin America:

"Garcia Marquez is speaking about all the people who are marginal to history, who have not had a voice. He gives a voice to all those who died. He gives a voice to all those who are not born yet. He gives a voice to Latin America."
How much does that really save? A base install of Ubuntu is only around 6-7GB anyway. Very surprised to see it didn't even take up half of the 16GB on an Acer C720 Chromebook.
Creepy: A Geolocation OSINT Tool.
I agree the point where purpose and incentives don't align isn't companies, it's government(s). However how can you fix that ? Democracy at least puts some limits on how far it can go, but doesn't seem to fix the problem.
Autonomous Technology and the Greater Human Good
Duetto 0.9.6: debugging C++ web applications within the browser
I have found the best way to deal with this, is to just deal with it. Don't tweak it, don't customize it. Treat it like Mac OS where you can't. Just get to work with what you're going to do.

I could sit and tweak a Linux install for hours, kind of like an old car. But of course I never get any work done that way.
A picture of the axe http://www.vipukirves.fi/images/isokuva_kirves1.jpg
If wordpress is not capable enough for you it is either 1) what you are trying to do is not within scope of normal web interaction or 2) you have very limited experience using wordpress.

you need to consult a web developer that you trust for these issue.
Funny you bring up the aspect of saving the trees, because I followed up the post with a suggestion for how Google can reduce the waste by taking more control of the print experience in Chrome: http://www.modrenman.com/2013/05/01/save-the-rainforest-goog....

More than anything else, I just wanted to bring attention to something I think many people don’t know about, because I think it’s mostly a case of people not minding printed web pages rather than them not caring.
Nice to discover this Podcast. I was looking for a long time for something related about objective-c to listen at work.

Keep up the good work!
Saying "X is pretty" is not much use, but it is not mean.

Saying "X is ugly" is not much use and is mean, thus more likely to attract downvotes.

Saying "I think X is ugly. Here's why {list of subjective reasoning}" may be useful and is not as mean.
Show HN: Online Booking Simplified
Agreed. It gets out of your way and looks good.
It amazes me when someone makes improvements to a job as old as splitting wood. Millions (billions?) of people have been doing it for thousands of years, and there's still room for improvement.
I completely agree with you on this. The level of customization that can be done with KDE is unparalleled. Every bit of it is hackable
> This is kind of an opinion. There is no rule book that says it needs to behave a certain way. I prefer this.

In case you wanted more proof of this I think both of these are wrong and it should be by window not application. Thankfully MATE does this and is coincidentally available now in Ubuntu 14.04.
On the use of software design models in software development practice
AMD Q1 2014 Quarterly Earnings Analysis
It's based on grown-ups. So I think, it's correct.
Most HN readers are developers (who all have unique and specific tastes in their machine setup), and have enough experience with Linux to find it easy to install alternative window managers.

For "popular adoption", I'm sure the completely standard Ubuntu install is just fine.
I don't find this post that useful. It goes through some sites, criticizing what they do wrong (what the hell does "anti-print" mean?), but offers no explicit examples of sites that get it all (or all-1) right. Kottke.org has colored links and sidebar (on a print out? those are useless). I'm not a designer, but I still like to create nice looking things. No points are given on what makes a nice printout, even though some of the examples given look completely fine to me.
For me the Unity animations are the perfect balance between the elegance I notice and appreciate when I'm in "relax" mode and the usability and snappiness I need when I'm in "work" mode shifting between many windows and workspaces. 14.04 snappiness improved noticeably and that's great !
I don't think those that would contribute to "popular adoption" are reading HN comment threads. They would also probably not be able to download, burn, and boot an ISO live disc either, which is the principle issue with adoption - it needs to be default.
Apparently what we think of as Postel's law is a bastardization. http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2014-March/0781....
I don't know if this is a "new" stage of life or rather a return to an earlier way of life. The whole phenomenon of kids leaving the house at 18, moving across the country, and not coming home again is fairly recent and fairly unique to the Western world.

My wife and I are "grown ups" in the sense that we both are done with grad school, have professional jobs, and have a kid. Yet, my mom lives with us during the week and we spend nearly every weekend at my parents' house in D.C. Not because they need our support, but because we need theirs'. This is a living situation that wouldn't be unfamiliar to my grandparents back in Bangladesh, where the expectation, back then, was that a young couple would move back into the husband's parents' home after marriage. It's novel relative to what I encountered growing up (in the U.S.), but it's not "new."

Various studies have shown that Millenials are closer to their parents than any generation in recent memory. They are not only likely to live with them after graduating college, but turn to them regularly for career advice, take them on job interviews for support. It's the opposite of the rebellious streak that characterized the baby boomers.
Um, some of us like to keep work on the work PC and home on the home PC. If I install Dropbox at work work now has access to my things at home.
Discover the 5 fastest growing FrenchTech startups
So basically this Shodan service scans the web, indexing devices such as IP cameras and routers. You can then search their database by device type or model, and then try the default user/passwords on these devices and create a VPN account for your own use?

I wonder how many botnets use this technique instead of randomly scanning, whether it's their own implementation/database or using a service such as this. Also an interesting business model, "I've got the addresses of 10,000 XYZ routers, model 1234, for $50.00"
The first Tuned Mass Damper was in the John Hancock Tower.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hancock_Tower

From an engineering standpoint that is a pretty depressing read.
Based on what I'd assume the user base for this kind of thing is, I'd support IE6 before I worried about printing.
Building Blocks for a Generation Ship
Well, that was fun. The upgrade crashed halfway through. I rebooted in recovery mode, finished the upgrade using the dpkg repair option, and then restarted a few times and found that it still wasn't working. Looked like a video problem, so I checked /etc/X11 and found the xorg.conf files had been backed up and not replaced. A comment in the last one inspired me to run nvidia-xconfig and it worked fine. Pretty typical when you use Nvidia drivers, and still a lot less painful than upgrading Windows XP to 7.
I think many people forget that Google wasn't really sure how to make money until they completely changed online advertising with AdWords/AdSense. Everyone else was content with your standard banner ads and rates. Google made those relevant to the search context. Since that time they have made money hand over fist.
GoConvey's new web UI
Thanks, I'd love to take a look at it!
" Have it email me nightly or weekly recapping what I've bookmarked."

Yes, yes, yes please.
I was on Kubuntu when it shifted from 3.5 to 4.0. Gods, what a mess that was! I presume it's had time to settle down now; is it back to being as reliable as 3.5 was? Or do people with long memories still have to grit their teeth at all the missing features?
Botnets typically just infect a site and do drive-by exploiting of the client. Then they don't need a proxy and they get to siphon user information. Proxies/VPNs are only useful for things like C&C servers.
Hardware-acceleration of video decoding on Android is really a mess...

In addition to the point of the article (asserting on a file that is not processed correctly, instead of slowly bailing out), every piece of CPU/GPU behave differently and the Android test suite is extremely limited. On top of that, there are many layers (OMX IL, stagefright, MediaCodec, OMX AL, Java Media) that interact together in a complex way and everyone messes in those layers in a different way...

For example, fora long time, even after mediacodec API was out (4.1), you could get the data back from the codec, but the frame format was not standardized and there were no tests in the Android validation! So every GPU was doing something differently.

On top of that, the hw decoders don't even give the profile and level they support, so you have to guess them.

And even those days, there is no way to get a YUV 420 surface that works on most devices, even when using KitKat APIs.

And so many joyful things :)
Every point you make except, to my knowledge, the last, is easily fixable via the gnome tweak tool or extensions. I found the same things to be frustrating when I switched to gnome, but I've been able to tweak it to the point that I now find it to be a productive work environment. That said, I've used gnome, unity, cinammon, xfce, mate and KDE, and have found each to be good in its own way and frustrating in others.

I love the fact that I can choose between many great options.
I was commenting specifically on "JIT Compiler". It should really be "JIT Interpreter". Naturally, it's possible to write an interpreter for any language that is compiled (though sometimes the semantics don't make sense). For a language like Rust, you'd probably want to compile to a bytecode to interpret, to allow all the compiler checks to be preserved.

Out of interest, I did a search, and there does seem to be a (depreciated) Rust REPL.
> "...a place where I put things I'll never read."

Bingo. I stopped using bookmarking services after finally admitting this to myself.

I also had this nagging feeling from having a list of "to read" links that I never read -- like having a long list of "to dos" that you never get around to doing, it makes you feel bad.

And whenever I did make the time to read some of these things, they were disappointingly insignificant.
Excitons observed in action for the first time
Value is what the market is willing to pay for it--for anything, not just companies. The EMH says that that value is always discounted perfectly on a risk-adjusted basis of all current knowledge about the company. Therefore if a company exceeds its risk adjusted expected performance in the future, it wouldn't be possible to predict beforehand.
"I don't remember at any point having a specific language stop me from achieving my goal because it has some traps or design flaws."

I have to admit, a language has never stopped me personally. But it most assuredly has hurt me when trying to program with other people, who do not have a direct psychic hotline into my brain that tells them what preconditions must hold before my code will work properly, and what things they can and can not do with a certain library, and most importantly, why they can and can not do those things. Languages that allow me to encode more of those things into the program itself, instead of the ambient documentation-that-nobody-ever-reads-even-when-I've-put-tons-of-work-into-it, work better.

And as my memory isn't all that great, it turns out that if I'm away from my own code for long enough, I become one of those people who don't have a direct hotline to my-brain-in-the-past.
Many people are on the complete opposite side of the spectrum. I personally believe that autonomous vehicles are undoubtedly the future. They'll save an enormous amount of lives, allow new businesses to be created, eliminate the need for a drivers license (bye DMV), reduce insurance costs, and allow people to work, socialize, and actually have meals in vehicles (can turn the seats around and put a table in the middle). There are probably dozens of advantages that I missed in this post, but I don't see any reason to not aggressively pursue this technology.
> "Raindrop outsources some of their development to Ukraine."

What makes you say this?

Their Twitter account is mostly in Russian, and its location listed as St. Petersburg (Russia).
This submission just links to the homepage. here is the permalink: http://danmcinerney.org/how-to-exploit-home-routers-for-anon...

perhaps a mod can update the URL.
British Pathé uploads 85,000 historic films to YouTube
What Heartbleed Looks Like When Its Running Its Code [video]
The X10 costs a wee bit more than $100K though. Considering they've carefully controlled access to it to just a small handful of key genome centers, I doubt they'd be handing the things out to random startups.
Giving it a try now, but I have to say the amount of space wasted by the header bar of each window really bothers me.

Example: http://i.imgur.com/bKGyEo3.png
Prismic.io: Writing Room and Content Query API
This sort of story never gets old.
How to do you make a Google glass app?
How does one go about making a google glass app for surgeons to livestream their operations / store the content in the cloud. hipaa compliant.
What's With All the Twins These Days?
It sounds so natural that I immediately started thinking I had actually been saying it wrong all these years.
I recently moved to xfce on Ubuntu as well. I felt like it's much more "by hackers for hackers" than the Ubuntu or Gnome UI stuff. For instance, I can have my 10 virtual workspaces, and focus follows mouse and all the other things I've gotten used to having over the past 15+ years.
The most questionable thing is why did they keep the assert in production code. Looks like unfinished job to me.
You know about http://erlangonxen.org/ ? Also something like http://corp.galois.com/halvm . That's probably still not quite low enough level to turn off the MMU, but it's getting there.
I bought a Vipukirves axe early this year. I have a wood-fired pizza oven in my backyard and use small, nicely split pieces of wood in order to retain some control over the fire.

Before buying the axe I used a four-sided wedge (basically an elongated pyramid) and a sledgehammer for splitting.

So, how does this axe perform? Overall, I am very happy with it and proudly show it off at every opportunity. After spending some time learning how to use it, I can report that, for some types and conditions of wood and with the right grip on the handle, it truly does split wood in the manner shown in the video.

As noted in the other comments, certain types of wood are easier to split than others. After my pizza oven was finished, I somewhat foolishly bought a 1/2 cord of apple wood from the apple-growing region of Washington state. This wood is incredibly dense and has proven difficult to split by any means, even after 3 years of seasoning. The splitting issue is made worse by the overall knottiness of the wood.

I also bought a 1/2 cord of mixed wood from a local supplier. The axe is at its best on straight, dry, knot-free pine, oak, cedar, and so forth. The vertical motion is translated into horizontal motion milliseconds after the blade of the axe penetrates the wood and the split-off portion flies to the side with explosive force, often landing 8 to 10 feet away.

It took me an hour or two to learn to use the axe properly, with a relaxed grip to allow the head to rotate after it strikes the wood. Wearing gloves (recommended in any case) can make this even easier.

The blade of the axe is not razor sharp and does not require sharpening or other maintenance.