skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would've even said ~15 years. I don't think I saw a laptop computer IRL until 2001-02 or so, despite living in an upper-middle-class part of the USA. When I entered undergrad in 2000 I'm pretty sure I had never seen one in person. They started getting common a few years later though.
C++, you mean. There are no classes in C.
http://johnmunsch.com/2015/01/31/the-best-part-of-any-angula...
If you want to see how susceptible we are are to manipulation, go see a good magic show (no pun intended).
I don't think it really occurred to most writers that a laptop was competition for newspapers back then.
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Recently I logged onto readwrite.com any my Adblock plugin (Chrome) went ballistic - I was able to block more than 1400 requests from dove.saymedia.com within a few seconds.

Is anyone else experiencing this?

What is the root cause?

Is this malicious in any way?
PCIe2 has 5Gbps lanes. PCIe3 has 8Gbps with updated encoding.
It depends on your use case. React is just the VIEW layer, the core is till lie in Objective-C layer.
Leechblock(Firefox add-on) did the job for me; you can make the websites available only for some amount of time per day/week and then they'll be blocked. The effect of this after a while was that I lost interest on reading news endlessly.
In the general case, I think that first you need some tools that force you to change your behaviour; after a while it becomes a habit and you won't need then anymore.
I'm pessimistic enough to think that nowadays, due to social requirements for the saturated startup scene, that classic story of a single tech founder being matched with their biz cofounder via joining an incubator/accelerator is merely a myth of bygone days.
At my job, they hired a contractor to do a wordpress site on a fixed-bid contract. The contractor stopped answering our calls and now I'm stuck maintaining the POS.

As a small freelancer, fixed-bid is a nightmare. If the client doesn't have a good spec, you'll be haggling whether it's done or not. You show the client your version, then the client realizes what they really wanted all along (which doesn't match what they originally told you), and now they're refusing to pay until you make the changes.

Having spent a couple of weeks on the project, when the client asks for more work, the incentive is for you to do it so you can get paid for the work you already did.

As a small freelancer, it doesn't pay to spend the legal fees to write and enforce a contract.

If you help the client write a spec before starting the project, then they'll just shop it on one of those elance sites and then they won't need to hire you at all.

So I've seen fixed-bid be a nightmare, both for the employer side (maintaining someone else's garbage) and from the client side (you'll do the work, and then spend most of your time arguing if it's done or not so you can get paid).

Fixed-bid pricing encourages shoddy work. You do just enough to get paid and no more. It's a race to the bottom.
Why is there only one "beginning of life" on earth? If life is likely to form in earth-like conditions after a few billion years, shouldn't there be more than one "last universal ancestor"? Does this suggest that life on other earth-like planets may be very rare, or that ours is a unique life form for our environment?
Most voted Hacker tools of last week, 30th March
> Spotify is not as good as Google Music.

> Why does everyone forget Google Music?

I believe you've answered your own question. Spotify doesn't have to be better, users just must enjoy the experience more.

“No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.” —CmdrTaco, Slashdot (regarding the ipod versus the Nomad)
CodeFightClub – ES6 Classes vs. ES5 Prototypal Inheritance Fight
Exactly. And if music I want isn't on Spotify... I just don't listen to it. For better or worse. I like Garth Brooks, but I haven't listened to his stuff in ages because it's just not available to me. I don't own a CD player and I have a 16GB iPhone so local music is out even if I wanted to pirate it.

I mean, I'm not even going to switch to piracy. Local music is out and it's not coming back for me. If Mr or Miss Big Name don't want me to listen to their music, there are a thousand other bands I will switch to.
Or for a longer read, David Brin gives it an excellent and lengthy treatment in Existence [1]. He even works in an exhaustive analysis of the possible answers to the Fermi Paradox, as well as possible events constituting The Great Filter. I won't give spoilers but it's definitely worth reading.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Existence-David-Brin/dp/0765342626/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1428283635&sr=8-3&keywords=existence
That sounds like it's said by someone who does not understand the feeling.

There are over 7 billion people. By definition they cannot all "excel way beyond [their] peers".

There's a certain philosophical impossibility to your advice that it's best for everyone to think outside the box and not follow the status quo. If everyone is trying to think outside the box, then that becomes the status quo.

But to start with, why should someone's goal be to "make it to the top"? What's wrong with living a good life, be nice to other people", helping make the town a nicer place to live, or any other equally noble, and more achievable goals? People need vets, and plumbers, and doctors, and yes, even programmers, without always needing the best in the world.

The flip side for all the people who try to be the next <fill in the blank>, and fail, and ruin their lives by doing so. The divorces and suicides and alcoholism and severe depression of the tried-to-reach-the-top-but-failed aren't as well known as the success stories. Or are simply brushed aside for "not trying hard enough."

Picking winners after the fact is tricky. If Jobs gave up, we might have had BePods and BeWatches, or the latest line of AmigaPros laptops. Also, I think you mean Pixar, not DreamWorks.
Open Source Lab Equipment
People did never end up taking laptops fishing.

People won't do anything with computers when you have to fight absurd screen-glare every second of use.
Maybe because they get sent to solitary confinment for using social media? (At least in SC, I'm sure it's frowned on by prisons elsewhere) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/02/hundreds-south-carolin...
Ah, I read the "start it as an... intentionally unprofitable company" as one that starts in the red but doesn't necessarily have to remain unprofitable forever.
PHPUnit Beginner Part 2: Data Provider
Part of the reason Ninja doesn't support pattern rules is that it would require matching patterns while choosing what to compile. In projects like Chrome (with hundreds of thousands of source files) that can take a while.
Several pieces of evidence point to this not being true:

There's a fairly large government program specifically designed to award technology and R&D contracts to small businesses. http://www.sbir.gov/ There's even a good bit of hand-holding through the process to make sure the business knows how to sell the resulting product.

I've also seen many, many dozens of sole proprietorships awarded non-SBIR contracts.
I should've pre-empted this, but I didn't. If you're gluing libraries together, it seems like you're sort of creating an ad-hoc framework. Is the difference just that you're making it up as you go along and you're not creating something that attempts the same kind of generality?
When I was doing my time in the Fed (1995-2000), my friends & mom had set up a web page for me.[1] Sometime around '96 or '97, the prison Captain (responsible for security) found out and had me fired from my "good" job. (Good job meant I was working at the Unicor factory, where I could have eventually made $200/month). I was transferred to be an "orderly" (which means janitor), earning $5/month at the Captain's office, so he could keep an eye on me.

Eventually I found out the reason he had me fired was because the prison officials didn't like the attention that my web page brought, and they also though I was somehow accessing the Internet from the Unicor factory (they had terminals there, which I wasn't allowed to be near). My case started getting attention, media interviews, etc. At one point, I was told directly by the prison staff attorney to stop all the attention. I scaled it back enough to where they stopped harassing me. It's definitely a tradeoff - the more attention you get, the more they will fuck with you in there.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/19990222022940/http://www.parano...
Because it's hard to have the cake and eat it, temporary, seasonal and other type of short time jobs are a market necessity. The beef I have is with the (not so) recent trend of them encroaching into the territory that used to be exclusive to full and long term "career" like jobs.

Were partly to fault at that, just look at how many Jobs you had and compare it to your father, now I'm not saying that going back to the 2-3 jobs before retirement average is needed, but some middle ground has to be set.

Because how i see it the jobs companies can't outsource today to low income countries they try to fill with low income or to be more accurate low cost jobs, partially because they no longer can reap the benefit of employees staying for 10 or more years (since very few employees choose to do so today) and partially because market dynamics dictate it.

But it's also because we allow them to do so by both accepting such jobs and by legalizing jobs, when companies can advertise a part time position permanently, when zero hour contracts can be established with no limits, and when firing an employee can be as easy as to give them no notice at all something is wrong.

Now again this isn't advertisement for the Dutch workforce system where firing some one with a permanent contract requires a court appearance, no need for such extremes, although the Dutch economy seems to be doing just fine even with them.

From my fairly short perspective over the past 8 or so years of employment (5 of them for a single company) I've seen a horrible decline in job security, companies offer less benefits, less security, all under the "pretense" of flexible hours and less work. However I've not seen any actual benefits, people work more get paid less (whether in actual or effective salary e.g. benefits).
If you want more freedom how about legalizing a shorter work week and more lenient hours rather than offering companies less security in their employees and accepting a less secure position in return?
Why the next big social network could be on your wrist
Is global collapse imminent? (2014) [pdf]
I think it is more likely that PCs will continue to trend towards the fully integrated like architectures of mobile devices than the reverse. Things that are on daughterboards will continue to migrate to the mainboard, and things that are on the mainboard will continue to migrate to the main die. All in one desktops and compact laptops are likely going to continue to gain market share over modular desktop PCs.
There are a lot of good streaming music services, but Spotify is the only one that seems to be committed to working everywhere on every device. That means a lot more to most people than having a specific artist or audio quality.
Science did not suggest this, a single man did, and his idea is questionable.

> organisms on other planets obey the same laws of conservation of energy that we see here on Earth

But, the energy required to keep warm your body is not the same if you are from mercury or pluto.

> Larger animals need more resources and expend more energy, and thus are less abundant.

Wrong at both sides of the reasoning.

Larger animals are less abundant because large animals have lots of small animals living inside; small animals instead can not have a single huge animal living inside its body.

A huge 2 meter lion's mane jellyfish needs (much probably) less energy to live that a small dog. Because his body is basically water and there is no need to warm it, float with the sea currents and don't need to carry his own body (so its investment on "bones" is zero).

Some animals can create its own energy, and are tiny and huge at the same time (photosynthetic corals)

Other possible ideas for future articles:

"Aliens are tiny and super-smart, they live inside other huge brainless animals".

"Aliens are exactly of the size and shape of a cat sleeping in a sofa... because, law of conservation of energy is strong in their kind".

"Cold blooded aliens are taller than warm blooded aliens but shorther than alien plants. Aliens visiting the earth are enormous, because you must be taller than this line to pilot a spaceship"

"mathematical models predict that aliens can be of two types: Floating or Integer"
Calorie counting only works if someone else is counting for you. There have been multiple subjective finding, and full blown scientific studies that the vast majority of individuals cannot accuratly count calories. People will do things like put two tablespoons of something in their food and count it, but will not count the tablespoon they put in their mouth, they may not even fully realize they ate the tablespoon of food they did. When under recording dieters consistently underreported there caloric intake, mostly because of habitual dietary habits they are unaware of.
> 30 years later you can't go outside without seeing someone with a laptop computer.

You certainly can, particularly outside tech hubs. Even in SV, when I was out and about, I don't think I ever saw more than perhaps 10-20% of people in my sight line using a laptop.

It is a small minority of people who routinely use laptops outside their home or office. Unfortunately, they will be disproportionately represented on HN.

I think the article's underlying thesis remains correct today. "Computers" are mostly used at a person's home or the office. Regular on-the-go use is niche, both because few people have the need, and because laptops are awkward to use without at least a decent table and chair (and tray tables don't qualify!). It is smartphones and tablets, with a vastly different interaction model, that have become a constant presence, and even those chiefly for entertainment and personal communication -- not work.

The most "wrong" thing in the article is simply overlooking that laptops would eventually become small enough, light enough, and powerful enough that they could usefully substitute for desktop computers without being meaningfully less convenient to haul back and forth than "a few floppy disks".

But the ability to use one computer both at home and the office -- or even from a hotel room -- does not significantly detract from the author's point, which has much more to do with usage model.
This doesn't imply there is one beginning, I think (with no attempt at proof) it's possible there were multiple, but it's pretty easy for things to get wiped out and to lose part of the chain. The last universal ancestor is just the one that you can get to by not breaking the chain.

As to your questions, they have vexed scientists and philosophers for ages, so there're no easy answers, but I am assuming you didn't expect one!

The conditions for life as we know it are bounded, so that reduces the surface area of possible places life could exist. Add to that, the requirement that the bounds not change dramatically for long periods of time, and they reduce further.

The universe is pretty huge, though, so there's a lot of opportunity for life out there, but because it's so huge, and because life is so fleeting, there's a lot less opportunity for two unique forms of life from different planets, solar systems, or galaxies to actually cross paths at the same time, or even to do so before one dies off.

For further reading, check out the Drake Equation [1] and Fermi's Paradox [2].

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

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
It wasn't so much that people didn't use PCs in the mid-80s--though they were by no means universal. But they weren't necessarily useful traveling. Email, especially outside of walled-garden company systems, was relatively uncommon so having a computer on the road wasn't a big win.

I got an MBA in the mid-80s and PCs were absolutely used universally although typically in the computer lab. I had a personal one but I was in the minority. When I went to work afterwards, we exclusively used a minicomputer based system for a number of years.
Which, really, is easy to fix: no more phone calls.
React (outside of React Native) is being used on many high traffic websites.

- Facebook comments, chat, search, ads creation, photo upload, tablet website... and basically every new product being written.

- Entire Instagram website

- Yahoo Mail: http://yahooeng.tumblr.com/post/101682875656/evolving-yahoo-...

- A lot of the Khan Academy front-end: http://khan.github.io/react-components/

- Netflix website and TV experiences: http://conf.reactjs.com/schedule.html#beyond-the-dom-how-net...

- Many Airbnb new products: http://www.slideshare.net/spikebrehm/the-evolution-of-airbnb...

- Flipboard mobile website: http://engineering.flipboard.com/2015/02/mobile-web/

- ...
Music is already 'nothing.' Just sounds in the air. But then, life is also pointless if you want to go down that road.
I believe that if the Internet had never become popular, the predictions would have been true.
They're not saying that there's only one universal ancestor only that of all the universal ancestors, one must have been the most recent. Which is almost certainly true, if in fact there exists a universal ancestor.

Perhaps you meant to ask if there could have been no universal ancestor? In that case I think most evidence points the other way. There could possibly have been multiple 'origins' of life but those seem to have died out or have been driven to extinction by our ancestors.
The new way of buying and selling marketing services: Jungggle
It's very possible that life arose independently multiple times, but one group grew fast enough to drive all the others to extinction. The life forms we observe now almost certainly came from one ancestor due to the numerous molecular similarities (e.g. use of the same form of DNA).
I would never have normally spent $120 per year on music, yet I do for Spotify. I also listen to a ton more music than I would have otherwise, because after my $10 per month its 'free' - if an artist I'm tangentially interested in releases an album, it's likely I'll listen to it. Traditionally, I would never have done that because I wouldn't have paid >$20 for the album.
You say it's deceptive, but surely anyone who is contacted in this manner can read between the lines and see it is about recruitment - what other goal would the business have in mind?

And as for the suggestion of making an offer up front, I feel that is jumping the gun. I'm sure the business would already have a good idea of what figure to offer, but if you discuss that before anything else I see several scenarios playing out.

1. Candidate declines. A good outcome, quick and painless
2. Candidate accepts offer. Bad situation - do you really want a candidate that doesn't try to sell themself or get a better offer?
3. The conversation is hijacked by discussing the offer and terms rather than the position. This is not productive, and the candidate has all the leverage. May or may not end with an agreement
4. After more talks you decide the candidate is not a good fit. You retract the offer, and candidate leaves with a bitter impression of the business, feeling he was lured with an impressive offer.

I agree that the business could be (should be??) more upfront, however an immediate offer is not the way. Perhaps instead give a realistic ballpark and go from there.
IIRC there's a great passage in "Steve Jobs" (Isaacson) that eloquently describes how the iTunes store got people to pay money for music they were previously getting for free.

Here's the Gen-Y version.
Doesn't the existence of multiple LUAs contradict either the word 'last' or the word 'universal'?
Quentin Skinner on Meaning and Method
> I'm curious what the net amount of money going to musicians are, as opposed to the amount of money going to record labels.

Before It didn't really matter. Yes artists were screwed on sales, but they were getting a lot of money before hand with juicy contracts. On a 10$ CD sale they used to win around 1$. The rest was made with touring ... So unlike today artists were getting a lot of money upfront. Anyway there were still getting 1/10 on each sale, compared to the pennies they get with Spotify...

A way to bypass labels hey? but running a label is a full time job. It's like saying, why don't artists do their own promo? why don't they do all their own design, videoclip, PR ,manage sells on digital plateforms, send DMCA takedown requests to thousands of websites, and design and sell tshirts/merchandize on their own ?... well you can't really make music, shows, be on the road,and manage all these things at once.

Sure,if you're JayZ,you can own your own label, your own plateform, and a whole team dedicated to all these stuff, but all artists aren't JayZ

Labels used to be "banks" for artists ,no more, no less. Try to bypass banking and see what happens.

Yet I'm optimistic.Things always evolve in an unexpected way. But to say "artists are better off without labels" is misunderstanding the role of labels.
I've been studying some frameworks and trying to make a visual tool for creating diagrams and mind maps.
I'll try GoJs (I would prefer if it uses SVG).
Marc Emery did the same thing and BOP threw him in solitary for criticism on his blog that his wife transcribed for him. I imagine Manning's privs will disappear quickly now that this story is out.
There are many reasons for why life would only have appeared once on earth.

Firstly, the current environment is radically different from the conditions in early earth:

* Atmosphere composition has changed a lot, and largely due to the presence of life (more oxygen, no more ammonia, etc).

* In early earth it would be possible for complex organic compounds to accumulate in the environment. Nowadays, those would be rapidly consumed by life forms.

There is also a matter of competition:

* Almost every ecological niche on earth is already occupied by life and there is very little space left for alternate life forms to evolve into.

* Current life forms compete against each other and that competition might also affect other nascent life forms. For example, one of the leading theory on the origin of life predicts that early life was largely RNA-based but nowadays lots of the planet is coated in RNA-digesting enzymes that organisms excrete as a form of protection against viruses. In fact, scientists working with RNA have to be very careful to avoid having their RNA be degraded by environmental enzymes.
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