skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not a hypothetical for me.

More than a few years ago, I was a manager at a hotel. As such there were several days each month when I had the emergency pager (yep, pager). The only time I ever got a 911 on the darn thing was while I was in the middle of a movie. I've never booked out of a movie theater so fast! I called back to the hotel to find out a fire alarm in a crawl space had triggered.

In the end it was just a loose wire in the actual alarm system, but obviously we didn't know it at the time. And thankfully, the movie staff had seen me in my haste, so when I returned several hours later, they were kind enough to let me watch the next showing of the movie for free.
I think these predictions are way off base. One trap that the author falls into is by measuring time spent using a computing device. The idea being that this is the most important metric, but it's not. Not all computing activities are comparable in importance.

There is an underlying value of the time spent computing, and that in turn affects the need to own different computing devices and so on. Today computing is ubiquitous for some people, but the value people place on the time they use a mobile phone to catch up on facebook or reddit may not be the same as the value they place on the time they use a tablet or a pc to do something more substantive.

Moreover, tablets are still less mature than other computers and don't have the same market penetration so naive comparisons don't necessarily spell universal truths.

I think ultimately the average person will end up using both smartphones, tablets, and keyboarded computers in the future. With varying degrees of use depending on their own habits, hobbies, and jobs. I especially don't think that the tablet is going to go away, it will have its niche and it will be a big one.

Edit: I think a fundamental problem with DCurtis' reasoning is the idea that we are at the end of a massive change in computing, rather than at the beginning of a new revolution in personal computing. I believe that the latter is true, that the changes which will occur over the next 20 years in computing will be more profound and more impactful on daily life around the world than what has occurred over the past 20 or even 30 years. Part of that will involve the penetration of tablet style (or hybrid tablet/laptop) computers into the workplace, something that has not yet happened to a significant degree. Part of that will involve the revolution in education via educational software that will almost certainly occur within the next 20 years, which will likely be most commonly used on tablet form-factor computers, not phones.
> Why compromise between unit tests and integration tests when the two aren't exclusive and serve different purposes? Why not actually have good unit tests and good integration tests, instead of beasts that are neither fish nor fowl and are less than optimal as either?

I wonder this myself. Unit tests serve a completely different purpose and should not get in the way of integration testing. They may/should help with structuring the code so that it is easier to integration test. They definitely shouldn't hinder. Then there is also the system level test, and then manual testing as well. All of these serve different purposes and can live happily together.
if you build with CGO_ENABLED=0 then you'll have fully static go binaries on osx (but TLS won't work)
I'm still trying to figure out why Web and digital design in general seems to have abandoned high modernism. Many of the problems with the design mentioned have to do with this abandonment.

I really feel we need a new Bauhaus school for digital objects. Or at least another Loos running around yelling about ornamentation interactions are crimes ( http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornament_and_Crime)
Personally i believe the Phone and the Laptop will sort of merge.
A lot of us use our laptops and PC's to Work and Create, Our Phones to Stay in touch,communicate and Play.
It is not fun/easy writing Python Code on your mobile so why not just plug it into a laptop-like case with a Keyboard and Screen then Plug it out when you are done.
Phones already have the computing power to do this and we already have a couple of OS'es (Ubuntu OS) that work well on both Mobile and Desktop.
I believe this is where we are headed.
You may want that, but all the evidence from average revenue per unit for PC manufacturers is that the average consumer, on the other hand, are not willing to pay for performance any more:

Bargain basement PC's are fast enough for most users to the point where it is a massive problem for everyone but Apple (who commands a massively higher average price), and this has been the case for years at this point.
Agreed, and do think that will exist in the near-term as well. It's so exciting to see all the movement in this space.. it's a huge win in the name of user experience and I think that things will continue to move quickly here.
I'm in South Africa, developing a public transit planner for Johannesburg and surrounds (you can check it out at https://rwt.to [search for "Naledi, Soweto" to "Hatfield Square, Pretoria" as an example], also obviously still under development).

I opted not to use GTFS as it didn't meet my needs with regards to many things, for example I built a pricing engine/calculator which calculates prices dynamically based on a set of rules, and as a result for train services that are priced based on track distance, I needed to draw the tracks accurate to a few meters per km, so that I can extract the pricing information from there.

When I have time in the near future, I want to write a Node.js script that converts the data that I have to GTFS, fairly trivial but not a priority at this point :)
There are tons of media articles, conferences, books, and other mentions of MUD1 and Bartle, including prominent newspapers, magazines, etc. The MUD1 story is all over the place.

As for your comment "not any Stanford affiliated source" -- if you read the Gamasutra story carefully it has a prominent link to a Standford website page (on game history!) talking about, in its first sentence even,"the first online virtual world, MUD1."
There's another as-yet-unexplored hazard though, and it's the emotional aspect of showing people convincing facsimiles of their loved ones.

Tempting people into making emotionally charged decisions while they're in the fragile state of confronting death is an ethical sinkhole. If people actually believe that their dead relatives have gone off to live on the great server farm in the sky, what comes next? At the very least, a profound emotional attachment to an air-conditioned warehouse filled with noisy machinery.

Alive or dead, any convincing artificial construct of a human being is going to carry a lot of weight and social currency. It's a phenomenon worthy of experimentation, but there's a very real hazard of making irrational, emotional decisions that revolve around these things, which might carry little practical benefit. There's some serious risk in being deceived by artificial creations, into behavior that is not in our own best interests.
I honestly hope so. Not because I refuse to believe the 21st century exists or because - well, not entirely because they extend the NSA's reach so much, but just because they sound so earthshatteringly bad.

The phone network isn't supposed to sound like that. Compare AMR, EVRC-B, and mu-law side by side sometime.

That being said, the PC has a level of flexibility that mobile devices really can't touch. If the PC really is dying, then I think it's a failure or a lack of interest from consumers to take full advantage of their capabilities.
> Since this is the internet, I would like to nitpick and point out that Dijkstra never said that gotos are always evil.

To further nitpick your nitpick: I never claimed Dijkstra did say that gotos are always evil. I only said that he cried foul on goto, which he did:

> More recently I discovered why the use of the go to statement has such disastrous effects, and I became convinced that the go to statement should be abolished from all "higher level" programming languages (i.e. everything except, perhaps, plain machine code).

As an aside, the Jacopini paper [1] doesn't really seem to have anything to do with eliminating jumps. In fact, all of their example normalizations given in figures 20-22 clearly contain jumps.

[1]: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.119...

Edit: After further reading the Jacopini paper, I think I see what Dijkstra was hinting at: abstracting the jumps into 2 basic operations which are less powerful than a generic jump -- a conditional jump and an iterative jump. Jumps remain in the normalizations but are more restricted, and in some sense "abstracted away". However, the paper does explicitly say that not all flow diagrams can be decomposed this way.
Sigh. You're making my point for me. But the irony escapes you I guess.
Co-routines are great! Have been using them as part of Common Node (https://github.com/olegp/common-node) via node-fibers for a number of projects. Both stability and performance have been admirable.

For example at StartHQ (https://starthq.com) we have a framework that automatically fetches data about web apps from a number of sources, some as frequently as once every few minutes (blog RSS feeds) for all the 2K+ apps. At the same time we've had as many as a few hundred concurrent visitors on site at peak, all on an EC2 micro instance, with no noticeable impact on responsiveness.
No, Japanese mobile phones could already do most of what you can do nowadays on a smartphone with web interfaces instead of application for most of the services available in Japan. They had defined a specific protocol for mobile phones web pages to make it easy to navigate and display information. Technically you did not need a PC for most services anymore - that's precisely why I am using Japan as an example. If you don't believe me, go back and check what Japanese mobile phones could do back in the 90s. They were not pretty, but you could do a whole lot with them.
Hey, what are you up to in your back yard, neighbor?

In ways I agree with you, in others I don't. You shouldn't just be able to "fly it wherever I damn well please" unless you own the airspace above or maybe if it's land designated as acceptable for that purpose. I think certain laws of public access will probably translate well, if the government doesn't use this as an opportunity to curtail freedoms and liberty again. I for one don't want you "flying it wherever you damn well please" unless that means I can "shoot it down however I damn well please"
That's so great. Who was Eliot? :)
Well, of course you are going to get majorities of risky (or even careful) people in particular subsets of society (e.g. Wall Street, Silicon Valley). However, I find people in general have always gotten upset when it comes to criticism. I find myself getting upset when it comes to criticism, even though "antifragile" is my tendency and ideal. I just don't think most people are wired to take harsh criticism and big risks. Wonder if there are studies out there on the matter?
For anyone who is too lazy to read, something like 80% of these links are opinion and conjecture, 10% are things that people did reacting to information that Facebook users made public, 5% are unsubstantiated, and 5% are genuine privacy issues.
This is a huge win for all of the people who use facebook login that care about remaining anonymous on the internet.
I hate this "gets it" mentality that gets brought into the picture anytime any product can be described with the word "social" in the description. It's a product, and taking the Hank Hill approach, the quality of the product should be the priority.
provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice; keep intact all notices stating that this License and any non-permissive terms added in accord with section 7 apply to the code; keep intact all notices of the absence of any warranty

Removing notices can be very dangerous, and should not be done without legal advice. The default way to include GPL is to also have an absence of warranty, which is explicitly required to keep intact in modified version.
There is a semi-oficial “Who is hiring / freelancing?” post appear the first day of each month. Next edition is tomorrow. You should post your info there.
The Fountainhead and it's effect on our head
You could have all that with airplay/chromecast and a bluetooth keyboard/mouse.
How does CrossRef relate to the DOI Foundation? In particular I am curious as to how the DOI data is shared - for example what caused that DOI to be resolvable on dx.doi.org but not doi.crossref.org?
Oddly, even a retina iPod is far more readable to old eyes like mine than the non-retina one. I found this out when I upgraded.
I look at it the same as a car. You can't just drive anywhere. So why is a drone much different. At least under the height for a commercial license.
They won't go completely extinct, the way mainframes haven't. But they'll get relegated to smaller and smaller niches.

My computer is in a huge tower case. In the mid 90's I could go into any computer store and pick one up. Today, finding even a full size ATX case on display is a rarity, and most of the PCs on sale local to me are in form factors closer to Mini-ITX, or are all-in-one PCs.

Most people simply don't need enough computing power to need the big units any more - their needs may increase, but they're increasing at a slow enough pace that the size of computer they need keeps dropping.

It may not "cut it" for anything beyond basic browsing and basic use today, but that's rapidly changing. My phone performance over the last 3 years have increased several times faster than my desktop and laptop performance (to a large extent because there's lots of "cheap" gains still for phones). The gap is narrowing.
That was me a while back with just learning Scala.

Years later I got a gig doing Scala. I did not like it at all working with Scala and other people code.

The libraries and their classes or traits expect a certain type and juggling between them via type casting several time until you get the correct type wasn't fun. The reflection class, at least for me, was hard to use.
Legendary VC Tim Draper dances to Pharrell's "Happy" [video]
Isn't this pitched idea basically exactly http://nitrous.io/ -- especially with their recently launched "Hack on Nitrous.io" button for GitHub?
Mobile devices are rapidly becoming "real computers". I have 4 cellphone sized ARM devices in my house that are capable enough to use as desktops. I have wireless keyboards for them. Several devices supports streaming the display.

For many Android phones, you can already use them as desktop replacements of sorts, with HDMI out (including some with "wireless HDMI") and bluetooth keyboards.
These all seem pretty basic CSS facts.
I believe this is what most people who argue that the a mobile device will become peoples primary computer mean.

And you can already do this. Pretty much all Android phones and tablets supports bluetooth or USB keyboards, and many supports wired or wireless HDMI out.
Thanks for the comment and the support, I hope you like the game!

The game is built with Unity, so on that side of things, a mobile port is pretty straightforward. There are some challenges though.

- Performance: The game uses physics simulation pretty heavily, with the ragdolls, ice cubes, and that sort of thing, which might take some rethinking to hit a mobile CPU budget. And while our graphics aren't that intense, they weren't built with a mobile GPU in mind, and would also likely take some work.

- Controls: Life Goes On doesn't require very much precision platforming, but the levels are designed for a player at a keyboard, or with a controller. We don't know how well this would transition to touch controls.

- Market: The biggest challenge for a game on mobile is finding an audience, and standing out from the crowd. Though if we can build enough fans on the PC, then we might have this hurdle overcome.
Since my large monitor & keyboard are nailed to my desk, having a box under it to drive it is not a burden in any way - and those boxes are cheap.

I would like a PC without fan noise, though.

I bought a Galaxy tablet for reading books, because it is nearly paper-sized, had an HD display, and is completely silent. It's marvelous for that, and I'm very pleased with it. But it's still too small to program on, both the display size and the inadequate storage.
There is still enough that are genuine issues that I thought there was a question that was worth asking.
TLS will work, you just can't pull the host CA bundle (osx keeps it in the keychain), so certificate verification won't work without proving your own.
Arrington is still around? When will he go away? Thankfully techcrunch is mostly irrelevant lately, but ugh seeing Arrington posts is enough to last awhile.
This is simply untrue.

Most modern web frameworks do NOT come with fairly good account management systems.
This is a much needed wake up call for everyone, as we've started to go down the rabbit hole that the post describes. It was articulated in a clear way with tons of concrete examples. I think we'll be looking back at this piece in a few years.
In fact I can't just randomly go walking wherever I want. I can't walk through your backyard, or just stand and hang out there. I'll get arrested for trespassing. Right now the problem is that these rules haven't been defined, but most likely just like cars and walking there will be places where you can and can't go.

I highly suspect that the space above a private property up to the commercial line will be considered part of that's person's space. After that it will be like most everything else, there will be places you can and can't fly, just like there are places you can drive a car, take a walk, and so on.
> But in every field, the incentives are not set up to do good science. That's a fact, and until it's understood there won't be any progress. Until then, you'll just see a slow grind of academia eating itself.

I think this depends on what you mean by "doing good science". I agree that incentives in every field are not set up to do the _best_ science, but in many fields the incentives are not such that people are drawn to doing _bad_ science. So if academia is "eating itself", I don't think it can be universally attributed to incentives regarding good vs bad science.
Anonymity can certainly enable better/more information but the anonymity of it makes it substantially harder to take seriously. You'd probably need persistent IDs and a track record. But then it gets trickier to remain anonymous.
Look up some of the stories of people literally becoming homeless due to losing their coins when they were stolen from Silk Road 2. People aren't rational. They don't store "just what they can afford to lose and no more" in a webwallet, apparently.

You could counter that by saying "Oh, those are just drug addicts. Normal people aren't that dumb." To that, I can point at the example of the Mt. Gox collapse. There you have a case of people going from millionaire status to "looks like I'll have to find a job and keep it for a long time" status in the blink of an eye. One of the bigger losses was 4,700 BTC: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1yv26o/gox_horror_s...

And lastly, you can't have it both ways. Either Coinbase is trustworthy enough to keep your personal savings safe, or it's insane to trust them with any amount of money that you care about not-vanishing.
You can buy and install a cellphone extender for your house.
Great stuff. I think the author may be using the release version 0.2, as the boot time issue has been rectified now for the most part in the next release, 0.3. The next big slow-load issues is packages, that'll be post 0.3 though.
It's not personal safety, it's sizing up the situation.
If you are completing a "Login" on Facebook, the word "Anonymous" will never, ever apply to the Login action. Ever.
A doctor on-call can go without going to the movies. I say this having been on-call (not as a doctor) myself. When you're on-call, your life is seriously curtailed. You can't drink, you have to be within range of tools to do your work, you have to be immediately accessible. Being on-call sucks, but it's no reason to argue against passive signal blocking in theatres.

As for the babysitter, deal with it. If you're not contactable for 90 minutes, you're not contactable for 90 minutes. This perma-connectivity is an entirely new phenomenon, and there's no absolute need for it. Essentially this argument is saying that the parent's inability to deal with lack of connectivity is a convenience which trumps the general theatre-going public's convenience of not having people talking on the phone, or who light up the people behind them because they're bored with the movie and are playing online.

Being uncontactable for a short period is not the horror that it's made out to be in these arguments. The good old argument that someone can't sit through a lecture without connectivity "in case Auntie Mabel dies", but of course it's just a cover for having phone access for other things. If one were to believe the excuses that get trotted out, you'd be forgiven for thinking that human mortality had skyrocketed since the public acceptance of mobile phones :)
The New Aaron Swartz Documentary Looks Powerful. Here's the Trailer
Google is a dinosaur, it's sad but at this point it's pretty clear that's how it is. The top executives are detached from the way that the internet is used / moving towards. They grew up before an era where internet communication is the dominant form of communication. I hope they do great things with AI and wearables but in internet communications they are done.
Even that is not enough. The raw power advantage of the PC will probably continue for some time. There is no way to cram the amount of CPU/GPU power plus RAM/storage capacity that exists in a PC into a slate style device, whether smartphone or tablet sized. That power may not be useful to a great majority of the population, but it is useful to some. And it will probably be decades before that power differential stops being relevant. Though it's hard to imagine how increases in the power of small form factor, low power devices won't also translate into even greater increases in the power of larger form factor, higher power devices.
This seems odd unless they are expecting to be able to release substantially better numbers soon. I would think the negative signal that a delay sends is worse than any macro goings on.
By that criteria Go doesn't have any support for DLLs either at the core language level, it just happens to export some Win32 API functions (LoadLibrary, GetProcAddress, etc) via goc (like cgo but specific to the Go bootstrapping build process) in the win32 version of the syscall package that allow you to do your own DLL late binding.
You might like this, it was posted here in the last few months. A really well done CSS selector tutorial (and a really good example of how teaching can be done on the web w/ interactive exercises).

https://flukeout.github.io/
China poised to pass US as world’s leading economic power this year
You don't know the federal government very well then. It is _exactly_ why they do it. It is the sole reason why our government is deemed to have been "productive" by the number of laws it passes. Because the government is not a market governed by scarcity, make work and busy work is exactly what keeps it busy and speciously relevant and necessary.
That's assuming it's not an attacker who would prevent you from leaving in the first place.

Is this really such a pandemic in the US these days?
Corrupting the ARM Exception Vector Table