skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One reason for the apparent drop in mobile Internet usage as Americans grow from teenagers to 20-somethings has to do with work. Compared to high school students, young professionals (and, to a lesser degree, college students) are much more likely to use laptops. Many of them have to use laptops or desktop computers for at least 8 hours a day.

So, the statistics may suggest that mobile web usage drops off in the 20s range, but that may not mean that 20-somethings are any less savy or interested in it.
Perfect linkbait title. The details matter tremendously, both companies get a lot of things.
Perfect observation and you're right - the outcome of this social media explosion will be terrifying. Couldn't help but think of:

"People resist a census, but give them a profile page and they'll spend all day telling you who they are."

― Max Barry, Lexicon
Vision Paper: Enabling Privacy for the Paranoids (2004) [pdf]
Thanks, receiving calls is really the big one for me. I know a lot of people working in fields requiring them to be on call 24x7 unless they're on leave. A 2 hour delay in calling back is just barely tolerable for most of them, and unacceptable for some. It'd suck to have to stop enjoying something outside a couple vacations a year because some people are inconsiderate and other people can't tune them out.

That said, making calls to emergency services, if you have to run outside to make that call, you've lost 30 seconds or a couple minutes. And you can't follow their directions in aiding the person because you're outside, and the victim(s) are inside. That's assuming it's not an attacker who would prevent you from leaving in the first place.
That high-powered pocket-size device will be nice, but it's existence will mean that I can have a 20x as powerful desktop-sized device. And I'm going to want that for software development even though the pocket-sized device can run an IDE, because my desktop is going to have a much better IDE that does all kinds of code analysis and live testing for me as I work, and it's going to be able to compile my code much faster than the pocket device will.

Today's mobile phones are much more powerful than yesterday's PCs, but they didn't replace yesterday's PCs. We just have much more powerful PCs as well.
This is not a reasonable solution.

There are many situations that it is necessary that I can know when someone has called or messaged me while I am driving, under which circumstances I need to pull over to the side of the road to respond/acknowledge the call/message. Cell phones these days are sometimes necessary, and there are situations where it is absolutely necessary that people respond to them, as long as it is done in a safe way, ie. pulling off the road somewhere that it is safe to do so.

You can restrict people from answering or responding to phones in certain situations (ie. driving), but there is absolutely no situation where you can restrict people from having them on or being alerted to them. In the case of movie theaters or even driving, a vibrate in my pocket is enough to satisfy this requirement, but by no means do I respond to it without putting myself into a safe situation, or a situation where I won't disrupt people, before doing so.

The problem with coming up with solutions to problems is that you need to also think about all the possible repercussions of said solution.
The reason why I believe that PCs will never go completely extinct is that you need large computers for a number of specific applications. 3D rendering, Video editing are computing intensive. Gaming is extremely intensive and it will be even more so with the Occulus Rift and the like, and there's no way mobile devices will bring the same level of graphics as a 1000 dollar graphics card eating 500 Watts, unless there is some kind of technology breakthrough nobody knows about yet. Plugging your mobile phone into a larger screen will work fine for basic browsing and basic use, and that's certainly where Ubuntu wants to go (and they are not alone), but anything beyond that is not going to cut it.
I suppose I should have said 'hyperinflation resulting in economic collapse', but I think my point stands. Look at your examples - except for Argentina, all your examples involve war or de facto dictatorship.

I think it is unusual relative to the number of countries in the world and the time involved. There's a list here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflatio I count 21 examples in the last 50 years, of which half were directly corrleated with the collapse of the Soviet Union and most of the rest were in Latin America, a region with a long history of poor governance.

Of course Bitcoin can function as a hedge or a store of value, like gold historically has. But the majority of people who extol it for this purpose as in the developed world and the US in particular, where the probability of hyperinflation is very low. The closest we've come to a crisis of that kind in recent years is Cyprus, and (again) that's a place with an unusual political problem.
The blame is being placed on the wrong thing. It's not the state graph model that is the issue, but modeling it with object oriented constructs. The article actually also agrees that the the concept is succinctly modeled with the state graph diagram, and yet the object oriented version is hard to understand [1].

It's like saying Hashmaps are hard to use, when using List operations to manipulate a map stored as a list of tuples.

What the author needs is a library that can model state graphs in a much more readable way. I developed a state graph library for JavaScript when creating a turn-based game [2], which helped clean up my code immensely. There also appears to be a fairly popular Python library, with a nice looking API [3].

[1] "it’s generally difficult to understand what’s going on in the code without having some sort of a state diagram in front of your eyes."
[2] https://github.com/munro/stategraph
[3] https://github.com/jtushman/state_machine
Always thought that was an urban legend. I'm not from the US, however in New Zealand the lights would never change as an ambulance/police car went past. They'd just slow down as everyone moved out of their way.

Have witnessed this also for our Prime Minister driving past with a convoy of police and black SUV's.
Here is a reasoned counterpoint to the notion that the iPad has maxed out:
http://www.asymco.com/2014/04/30/the-ipad-discontinuity/

I know so many older people who now live entirely on their tablets - heck, in Canada, I've got family who do all their email and browsing on playbooks .

Personally, I could never, ever, live without a Laptop (Not a day goes by where I don't spent at least 15 minutes on Terminal.app) - but, I totally understand how 90% of the population has different "jobs that need to be done" than myself - so there will be some tablet/Smart Phone that will take over those jobs.

The 20-30% of us hackers, knowledge workers, and gamers will keep a vibrant PC / Laptop market going for at least another 5-10 years, until Tablets/Smart Phones get powerful enough to just drive a display technology and get hooked into a keyboard.

That's the day that I carry my entire processing/storage/memory unit in my pocket.
> you've lost sight of what BTC is supposed to be: a currency

it could be many things. as to what it's 'supposed' to be, i'm not sure what you mean. the inventors of the system can't know exactly what will happen.

i agree that the dollar/btc exchange is a terrible measure of faitthfulness. a good measure would be 'how many addresses have had hundreds of coins for over a year' - because whoever holds each of those addresses has 1) a lot of faith in bitcoin and 2) enough resources to live their daily lives.

that says something. i'd rather have the currency be the main 'storage' of people's faith in the world - which would mean it'd be just as volatile and crazy as the stock market, because people's faith changes every day. if that kept the volume low - so that most people saw it as 'confusing hacker money that seems to get wealthy but is hard to use daily if you don't understand security' then the daily volume of transactions will be close to nothing.
Aaaaaand, my personal favorite long-running virtual world, Federation is still around: http://ibgames.net/
I wonder why he just didn't ask a young person?

I did. I asked a 15 year old cousin.

"I use my mobile phone exclusively for email and internet."

why?

"I have privacy on my phone and it's the only thing I can use at school and at home."

Huh. Makes sense.

But when these students get older, and aren't as concerned about privacy from their parents, and aren't restricted from using other devices by school rules, I suspect they will adopt the device appropriate for the task at hand -- just like older folks do now.

Maybe tablets as a separate product are going to be more niche but I personally don't see it. But one thing I'm fairly sure of, as long as people have to type long things, a real keyboard is indispensable. I'm not sure what the 2030 Macbook Air will be, but i feel pretty confident that it (or similar) will be.
Thanks for the feedback! Project is definitely under daily development and subject to changes but it should be ready for reuse soon.

We use OpenTripPlanner for translating GTFS in a format to use with this. What type of bridge did you have in mind? What city/services were you looking at?
Nod is touchless interaction done right
"i think pg already captured this idea when he said that once mobile phones were powerful enough to run an IDE, so you could carry it in your pocket wherever you go, plug into a monitor and keyboard and work - then the PC would be dead."

No, then it becomes a 'PC'.

This topic get's framed around hardware when it's far more nuanced than that.

Workflows & Usage based on age and context of use. There's a strong bell curve correlation between age and content creation.
500 festival half marathon in Indianapolis Indiana
This seems to be perhaps the fate...like 'digital media' or 'social media' expertise 10 years ago was a thing...now its just baked in. 10 years ago, design was not really a 'thing'...it was brought to prominence but it's perhaps best not thought of as a corporate function like HR or Finance. It's best thought of as part of the DNA of the product/engineering teams working together.
I'll make the claim that I've not noticed reception issues in theaters in at least the last 5 years. My use-case is typically texting (usually with the other members of my group, things like "Hey, I'm on the 5th row up") though, but even then I usually see 2+ bars, sufficient for voice calls.

My apartment has worse reception than that (I can make calls from my sunroom, nowhere else).
There is some difference between the Japanese Mobile Phone market, and the Smart Phone Market, in terms of jobs could be accomplished. The smart phone market was effectively launched when the Android/iPhone devices that could run third party apps, came about in 2007/2008. The disruption that these devices brought about was not to mobile phones, but to laptops/PCs, and should be viewed from that angle.
The PC will never die because a phone / tablet or even a laptop will never be able to do what a desktop can do. Both technologies are constantly getting more powerful and they will never be equal.
I can't even get enough affordable solid state storage in my PC and you are telling me a phone is the answer?
Delightful to see explanation not just of a result but also of how it was thought up, which is unfortunately rare in mathematics.
I think most people are not reading the article. He is not saying that the tablet form factor is dead, just that in the long run tablets and phones will converge. (So we will be calling things that operate like tablets today phones.)

This will either mean we all start carrying around really large phones, or that technology gets to the point where you can fit an object the size of a phone in your pocket and have an experience like a tablet. (Using some unforseen tech)

IMHO augmented reality converged with VR is the long run future. I have to imagine we are all going to be wearing comfortable opaque goggles in a few years that will project whatever we want wherever we want.
This entirely misses the point: As you say, the mobile still does not replace every of the PC's uses. But that is rapidly changing.

The performance of the average persons PC is stagnating. Not because they can't get faster PC's, but because people increasingly have opted to slow their upgrades, and upgrade to cheaper units.

Meanwhile smartphone performance has skyrocketed.

Couple that with wireless streaming of display, and wireless keyboards, and we're very rapidly converging on a situation where a large portion of the population can get everything their want in terms of computing from their phone.

This is not something Japan has had since the late 90s.

Maybe people won't use their phone, but the current desktop form factors are as good as dead. They've been rapidly shrinking for years already. My local stores pretty much only have all-in-one PC/screen combo's and various tiny form-factors already. There's no reason to believe the shrinking won't continue, and when the phone form factors and PC form factors meet, there'll be little reason for most people not to carry their primary PC with them.
PCs will never die. They are productivity machines and something of that form will always be needed in order for work to be done. Teens don't need to work, they play.

But what I can see is the PC moving to the phone, such that a monitor and workstation accessories can be plugged into the mobile device.
Psychology tends to be picked on more because it's easier to understand and communicate. Researchers in psychology tend to be in areas that have names that are meaningful to humans (like "short term memory" or "interpersonal violence") rather than jargon ("systems" or "finite mass spectroscopy"). Really, psychology has the bad luck of having jargon that maps to lay knowledge -- imperfectly, but the reporters don't care.

Overall, most scientists are ethical. Very few people are deliberately falsifying their data.

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.
What's important after two years of programming
A Website That Uses Math to Make Your Difficult Decisions For You
I still play on http://new.vampire-wars.com :)
sorry to repost; mistyped url last time.
I think it's more related to information architecture. I guess a true industrial designer (in this context, UI/UX designer), should be very aware of the importance of IA for a product as a whole. Too many eye candies in industrial designer world. That's why top players in this field are so valuable. Bringing fusion of aesthetics and functions to the table always gives you the edge. It's just too difficult for most of us to achieve that.
Smartphones are not technologically capable of doing all things a desktop can right now, but they are quickly moving in that direction (in terms of speed/capacity). When they are and you can dock your phone to a larger screen/keyboard at work and then take it when you are ready to go and access the same apps/data on the go, the traditional desktop PC market for the majority of people will die quickly.

Technologically, consumer electronics in Japan is not as far ahead of western countries as it once was in the 90s. Going into a Japanese electronics store, you will find it does not look that much different from a Best Buy in the US. What does look different? All those "different kind of devices for different purposes" have folded into smartphones.
All Code Is Bad, So Don't Stress If Yours Sucks
In the demo (http://conveyal.com/transitive.js/) the blue and orange line unnecessarily overlaps with each other near Rosslyn, and the path from Start to End through Farragut North Area is unnecessarily overlapping with blue and orange line. Any particular reason?
You are being reasonable and measured, which I appreciate. But I have to forcefully object.

I don't think these observations, which are obvious, and which have obvious rejoinders given nearby, move the conversation forward. Repeating them whenever some metric or other (and the metric in the article is cooked, by using purchasing power) exhibits a US/China crossover is just not interesting. Doing so in this bizarre horse-race style ("who is winning") is ridiculous and deserves to be condemned as intellectually vacuous.

What would it look like to actually move the conversation forward? Good question.

Maybe the actual cause for celebration should be lifting millions of Chinese out of poverty. (Exclusive of considerations relating to the US!). Or maybe the interesting phenomenon would be when Chinese start using their new purchasing power to get political influence over decisions affecting their lives.

Viewing this as some kind of horse race forces a mostly inherently-Chinese phenomenon (that we should all observe with interest and pleasure) into a perverse "I mostly care about this because it knocks me off my #1 rank." Which I feel is missing the point in a deep way.
It sounds a bit like you don't like learning new interfaces. That's not the same thing as dealing with bad design.
One day the interface will be on our retina. The form factor will no longer be relevant.
The personal computer is not dying. Yes, people aren't buying desktop and laptop computers as much, but there is a very simple explanation people often like to brush off to the side when making wild claims like this. The reason is computing power has reached a point where you don't need to upgrade your computer every year to run the latest games or suite of word processing software. My Core i5 PC which I was running for years before only recently upgrading is still going and can still run everything I throw at it. People just don't need to upgrade as often as they did during the nineties when computing power was increasing basically every year as was storage.

As a developer who can't do his day job without a PC, I couldn't picture using my phone or a tablet to code with or administer servers. Believe me, I've tried using my phone for many aspects of my job and besides being able to maybe restart a server, NOTHING beats a good old fashioned terminal and keyboard. The restrictive nature of applications available for devices like iPhones and iPad's also means there are certain things I cannot do (like transferring large database dumps that are tens of gigabytes to a remote server).

I work for a design-led agency and let me tell you something, you cannot design on a mobile phone or tablet (well tablet you sort of can, but the results aren't that pretty or easy to accomplish). I'm sure some will argue otherwise, but I challenge you to open up a 1gb PSD file on an iPad and see how well you can work with it (switching between layers/groups, text sizes, resizing things). Some devices aren't meant to do everything and people like Dustin have been generalising and proclaiming these new portable touch devices will replace everything, but the reality is they cannot replace everything.

People use different devices for different purposes. I've never seen anyone coding on a train using an iPad or their iPhone before. People seem to use their portable devices for email, gaming, phone calls and social media mostly. How often do you see someone on public transport on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram? A hell of a lot more then you would using said devices for other purposes.

Then there is the issue of battery life. These new phones (especially phablet phones) are lucky to last a day on a full charge with the stock battery because of the constant drain of the screen, GPS and Wifi. You can't rely on a smartphone, not even in 2014 to be reliable. Battery life followed by form factor are the two biggest hurdles and the bigger you go, the less you can call the device a phone or tablet. I can get like 5 hours from my laptop, comparative use on my phone would maybe be half that...
That I was able to get a manual license (in Australia) without needing to demonstrate a hill start to my tester is a complete joke.

Perhaps it would make you feel better to know that here in America, there is no distinction of licenses for a manual transmission. You can pass in an automatic and then drive whatever you want. So not only do you not have to demonstrate a hill start, you don't even have to know how to know how to use the clutch at all!
How to make programmers work 60-80 hours a week?﻿ No, you don't. No you can't.
Do you similarly disagree with vaccination? After all, that is also a government-led imposition for the greater good of improving the population's health.
I found it a lot more comfortable once I got it up to 6-700wpm, though I'm not sure I'd switch to it over reading the regular way - but I can see keeping it bookmarked for when I encounter the occasional wall of text with no or few paragraph breaks. I feel like I would prefer the text to slide rather than page, having it all change at once is a bit disorienting and seems to be at odds with the basic design concept. But it's early days and obviously you're going to go through a bunch of iterations.

Anyway, I think it's the best speed-reading tool I've seen, and I'm usually very negative about apps of this sort.
I decided to do the "Five minutes of Wikipedia browsing" you suggested.

Under http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD I found this:

"In 1978 Roy Trubshaw, a student at Essex University in the UK, started working on a multi-user adventure game in the MACRO-10 assembly language for a DEC PDP-10. He named the game MUD (Multi-User Dungeon), in tribute to the Dungeon variant of Zork, which Trubshaw had greatly enjoyed playing.[18] Trubshaw converted MUD to BCPL (the predecessor of C), before handing over development to Richard Bartle, a fellow student at Essex University, in 1980.[19][20][21]

MUD, better known as Essex MUD and MUD1 in later years, ran on the Essex University network until late 1987,[22] becoming the first Internet multiplayer online role-playing game in 1980, when Essex University connected its internal network to ARPANet."
For some very, very, very small percentage of the population, that extra power can be useful - but I strongly suspect that, outside of gamers, that percentage is less than 10%.

For most people, PCs and Laptops became powerful enough about 5 years ago. I am a serious power user, run VMware, Cisco Network Simulators, Multiple Drawing Applications, Aperture, the entire Office Suite, VPNs, plus the normal host of twitter, text editor, skype, google earth apps, iTunes - all simultaneously - and my 2010 MacBook Air is still sufficient . I'm still doing all my Desktop PC work (Mostly Outlook and Visio) on my 2004 Dell Precision 650 (All that I've upgraded is the SSD and Monitor).

The Laptop and PC market is wildly over served today for 90%+ of the population. A MacBook Air is way more powerful than people need in terms of Processor, Wireless, and CPU performance for those people.

Yes - of course you will be able to take advantage of more powerful systems, but if we've already reached the point where I can't, then it won't be too far off before Phones/Tablets will have more than enough processing power for most ordinary people.
Absolutely!

By the way, having poor enemies and neighbors can be destabilizing as well. Think of Israel, or South Korea.
Actually if you are mindful of saving and restoring the right state at the right points, and restrict the "yield usage level", you don't need anything more than one stack that all the coroutines share at different times. I've written code (parser-related) that involves a few coroutines manipulating some shared data on the stack ("shared local variables", if that makes any sense). This sort of thing is almost impossible to implement (efficiently) in an HLL, but pretty easy in Asm.
I can't program on less than a 30" or so screen. And I need a full size keyboard, too.

I can't imagine trying to write complex code on a phone. Heck, I can't even imagine trying to write an article, or anything much longer than a tweet on those tiny phone screens.