skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I suspect the €1000+ laptop market is going to keep shrinking

Possibly, But the high end laptop mark is eating into the workstation market from the bottom now that 32GB and and decent Quadro cards are common in laptops. At work basically all our CAD and 3D modelling people use laptops, whereas a few years ago they all had workstations. Same seems to be happening with video and music production. Even more and more of the gamers I know are option for laptops over desktop computers.
I'm glad you said this; I feel much the same way. There's all sorts of fallacies and pop culture theories throughout the article, though the author is a competant writer.

One of the ones that really bothered me was the assertion that we should be respectful of the decisions that these young men make - despite the decisions of young adults rarely being taken seriously by society, regardless of the context.

As for 'men are clearly wired for war', well, no they're not. As a demographic, they have to be trained hard to take a life (in person at least). Plenty of men can do that, but to suggest it's an innate wiring is just plain wrong.
Are you equating «self-taught» with pet/personal projects here? Self-taught is as in «not learnt coding in a university».
No, it's the opposite. They are saying let the poor decide what services are essential for them, and not facebook/telcos/government.
Zero hours contracts are just another method that companies use to avoid paying employee benefits. This is precisely the type of behaviour that is being targeted by this lawyer. You have the responsibilities of being an employee but the company does not have a corresponding duty to you as an employer.
"But take any of the recent genocides (Rwanda) or even ISIS - innocent people are unquestionably being killed."

Yeah, take that. What you don't talk about is that what we call ISIS today was US best friend just months ago. They were called euphemistically "moderate rebels fighting for democracy in Syria" and they were supported economically and with weapons by the US and Saudi Arabia to kill innocent people there(and put a puppet state in place).

Of course they took the weapons and crossed the border to occupy Iraq, as the failed state the US created made it so easier than fighting against a well organized, and Russia supported army.

Media creates your perceptions based on their own interest. If the news come from far away, media has total control of shaping your emotions, as you don't have family, friends, eyes or ears in the place.
I've had zero hours contracts as well. My working hours were still scheduled in. All it did for me was when I was sick for a few weeks, they just stopped scheduling me in so I would receive sick pay.

Uber drives can at any given point in time get in their car, log in and start accepting rides.
Vodafone Startup Iceland Hackathon 2015
Why do people here applaud to this activity?
Exactly, I'm in favor of open source, but I'm against of open sourcing something useless and drain funds that might be useful in somewhere else. The example I get in mind is the gnupg project, that guy almost got broke for such an important tool.

Your idea is nice, and I won't discourage to pursue, those projects might need some kind of air to survive until something/someone finds it back, and get them back to the spotlight.

An Open Source project can be a bold idea, or it can be an advance scam system, for the first possibility I'm not against as some good projects might come from a bold idea, who am I to close that, but the second one, the community has to protect itself.

Something I dislike from the current situation of the linux userland status is the amount of programs or libraries that you might need and for the next version, some parts of your code are incompatible, and no way to ask any fix as it is open source you can get the sources to fix it, but not the time to do it.
GW1 militarily was a huge success, Kuwait - a "five feet high nation" in the Lloyd George sense, was defended from aggression from its much bigger, nastier neighbour. The principal of territorial integrity was upheld. The strategic aims were upheld.

It was our business, and should be our business. That's the whole point of things like the UN charter - remember there were a series of UN resolutions condemning the invasion of one sovereign nation by another. Without recourse to more powerful countries keeping the peace what defence do smaller nations have? That was the real tragedy of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the undermining of that moral authority.

You're also trying to have your cake and eat it by saying we shouldn't be involved in other countries affairs and then laying the failure of an internal uprising on the West. It wasn't an invasion where we asked the locals to support us, it was a national revolt (also in the North) as a result of the dictator being seen as weak following his failed invasion of Kuwait.

The USA made a few radio broadcasts, that's not enough to kick off an entire revolution. Iraq was in social turmoil after the Iran-Iraq war and the Gulf War, it was a powder keg waiting to go off.
In Italy you can actually avoid double taxation, in small LLC companies (less than 10 partners, only natural persons) you can opt for a "fiscal transparency" mode in which you avoid corporate revenue taxes.
> “I have friends who are anthropologists and primatologists and evolutionary psychologists … [who are under] an enormous amount of pressure to generate data that shows that all gender differences are cultural.”

This documentary is really interesting in that regard:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVaTc15plVs

It's a Norwegian documentary from 2010 about "Why do girls tend to go into empathizing professions and boys into systemizing professions? Why does the labor market become more gender segregated the more economic prosperity a country has?"

A lot of the scientists interviewed didn't even bother to consider evidence that innate sex differences exists.
Tutum (a docker platform) offer this: https://www.tutum.co/writing/

[not affiliated with tutum, just a happy user]
I also remember Bloomberg submitted in 2005 some very nice template library changes that avoid some very real pain points of STL:

www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2005/n1850.pdf

"Using an existing implementation of the
C++ standard library as a base, we made backward-compatible modifications to
enable such per-instance allocators."

I still don't know how I'd achieve per-instance allocator in modern "part-of-standard C++ STL." Is it possible? If yes, how? Does anybody know?
After I became more focused in the Java and .NET world, the OS started to matter less to me.

Same would apply to most modern programming stacks that come with batteries.

Given that I used to like Windows, before getting into the UNIX world. As it was huge improvement over plain *-DOS for someone with Amiga envy.

Going back wasn't a big deal specially given the Windows office requirements.

I enjoy playing with Macs since the LC days at the university, but always was put off by the hardware combination that was given at their price range.

For me the GPU/CPU combo is quite important.
This unacceptable and outright disgusting. For me, Wikileaks lost all credibility. It is wrong to violate the privacy and confidentiality of employees and contacts of the company. It does not matter if there are clues of wrongdoing or if somebody calls the contents trivial.

Government ties, connections to the military industry and support for politicians? How is that a scandal? And how is that worth violating people's rights. Nothing is redacted. Nothing is explained in context. This is awful.

If something is worth a scandal, it's the chutzpa of Wikileaks.
And the other half is about C++.

Well, to be fair, talking about a language is also about talking about what makes it different from others.
All those that were early enough to see twitter go through their growing pains probably.
I remember when Matt Dillon (of Dragonfly BSD) did the same: http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/kernel/2012-03/msg0...

That's the result that you want after a long slog of debugging. It's not as fun to dig into something for 12h and finally find a misplaced parenthesis.
> And gentlemen in England now-a-bed Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here, And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

It's from Shakespeare's Henry V and it's part of the speech given by the titular King to his troops just before the Battle of Agincourt - which fell on St. Crispin's day. The Battle of Agincourt became a major English victory against the French during the Hundred-Year War and led to Henry V being recognized as Heir Apparent to the French crown, and his son, Henry VI, claiming the title of King of France as well being King of England.

In simpler terms the quote is saying that the glory gained by fighting in the battle alongside their King will be so great that any man who could fight who was not there will be jealous and will think of themselves as lesser men when in the company of those who fought.

The whole speech is here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Crispin%27s_Day_Speech - and well worth reading.
Toll-free analogy doesn't work - https://medium.com/@amod/the-broken-analogy-toll-free-vs-zer...

This post is from CTO of Flipkart (India's #1 ecomm site) who supported NetNeutrality & was opposed to his own org's initial plans of getting into Airtel's zero-rated plans (akin to internet.org).

Two days back Flipkart withdrew themselves from those plans convinced that zerorating violates Net Neutrality.

Here's a (India's #2 probably) travel site withdrawing from internet.org with solid lucid reasoning that answers more of your Qns - http://blog.cleartrip.com/2015/04/15/cleartrip-is-standing-u...
UK parties’ general election promises on surveillance
Worth noting that this device, typical for Apple, gets the worst "repairability" score:

>The MacBook 2015 Repairability Score: 1 out of 10 (10 is easiest to repair)

There are several reasons why this happens; the optimist says that to save space Apple had to glue and solder so much, the pessimist says it's so that Apple can charge more for repairs/replacements.

But I think both can agree that this generates more e-waste than necessary, and I wonder whether this may be an incentive for the EU to step in. They've already standardized mobile chargers - starting 2017, all mobile chargers in the EU have to be of the same standard to reduce electronic waste.

I wonder whether a similar law for PC/laptop components could work and how it would look like...
If the startup has lost any traction, and you've tried and failed to pivot, and see no other opportunities to make this work for some time... it's probably best to change tracks, get employed or do another startup, and return to the old startup in you mind every now and then to see if it's become viable with new insights, a changing market etc.

But as an outsider with limited info, it seems it's 'failed'. I wouldn't attach that word to it myself but you asked. If you're not pursuing the business model, and just doing client-work, you essentially stopped running the startup already.

Tech is a tricky field because its history has a number of 'big stories' of 'close to failure, but we had grit, and we succeeded'. The likes of FedEx, who had $5k to pay a $24k fuel bill, the owner went to Las Vegas and gambled the last 5k, miraculously won enough to pay the bills and continue on to create what is now a billion dollar company. But for every 1 of those stories, there are a 1000 who tried and failed anyway, with great consequences (debt, depression, negligence of friends & family etc).

So I definitely, personally, wouldn't keep trying 'no matter what'. Grit and perseverance is hugely important, but investing it in a dead idea is not. If you truly see potential and opportunity in your startup idea, the market etc, then you may want to keep trying. But if that were true, you probably would have had some traction, and less doubt. Seems like you should try something else.

Good luck whatever you end up doing.

As for 'losing at life', I don't feel like explaining but, it's just not true. Don't worry about it, really. I do know what you're feeling but you're not losing at life.

At most you could say that you're playing a game you don't want to play. Startup life carries with it the possibility to live on a few hundred bucks a month, while your friends have junior positions and talk about their next promotion. That's not for everyone. But you're not 'losing at life' buddy :)
Stating something first and then negating it in the same comment is a pretty weird way to make a point.
Ask HN: What are the most uplifting comments you've read on HN?
I was searching for something on HN and I happened upon this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2262527

I thought the top comment by neilk was just beautifully written and really encouraging (with the slight irony that he encourages the OP to stop reading HN!). I have bookmarked it and resolved to re-read it when I'm feeling low.

It got me thinking, there's a lot of introspection and self-criticism here on HN, but there's even more wisdom and kindness. What are the most positive and uplifting comments you've read?

And to neilk and people like you, thanks. You've probably helped more people than you realise.
New, qualitative, fast and free classified ads website
I am sure there may be one but I don't quite see any reason for running Docker inside a Windows VM in AWS?

Run Docker with ECS or with Machine with EC2, or any native linux VMs. Adding another abstraction layer seems pointless. Unless it is for Azure.
For Good Measure: The Undiscovered [pdf]
The CNET demo doesn't look that bad, though.
> especially on the Mac.

I would say this is also because Apple is perceived as quite hostile to open source development[0], so things in OS X land do not get the same level of attention the get on Linux and Windows.

It used to be the same with Windows, but I think things has gotten a bit better there.

[0] For instance, having to pay 100$/year to ship your free, open source software to users is bound to push developers away...
Except that go is hardly a "new" system language.
Sure, but there's a lot of people who basically claim that the massive hormonal and genetical differences between the genders have no impact on personality, behavior and interests.
However a Macbook Pro is not a viable product when compared with a ThinkPad W540 in terms of features/price for 3D related work.

More expensive and less powerful GPU.
Sony Corp is a private business. It is not a public institution so we can go after them and expose their dirty laundry to the public.

I can't understand WikiLeaks anymore. They seem now like teenage trolls with infantile attitude and manners.
Seems like you'd use fuel cells instead of batteries.
> Government ties

You mean, corruption ?

Yes, this is worth publishing. Even if this corruption has become mainstream.
Another way to think of a register transfer level hardware description languages is as a type of dataflow programming language.
I think this makes it fair game:

Quote: "Sony is a member of the MPAA and a strong lobbyist on issues around internet policy, piracy, trade agreements and copyright issues. The emails show the back and forth on lobbying and political efforts, not only with the MPAA but with politicians directly. In November 2013 WikiLeaks published a secret draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) IP Chapter. The Sony Archives show SPE's internal reactions, including discussing the impact with Michael Froman, the US Trade Representative. It also references the case against Megaupload and the extradition of its founder Kim DotCom from New Zealand as part of SPE's war on piracy."
The directors are fully liable if their actions are found to be fraudulent. It's "limited liability", not "no liability whatsoever".
I think in Estonia any invested money is exempt from taxation, that is to say, if you invest your profits, you will not be taxed.
Yes, but there also isn't any NULs in the parent. So you can understand the confusion.
I'd hardly call over a decade of regional stability a farce. It checked any expansionist tendencies of other regional powers. It helped make a very powerful point to Iran who didn't cause any problems with the Straits of Hormuz for a long while after, to Libya who had been invaded Chad only years before etc.

It was the 2003 invasion of Iraq that kicked off the nightmare and heightened regional and global instability. It was that massive miscalculation which hugely multiplied the number of jihadists and gave victories to radical Islamists.

Remember Iran had been chanting death America for years by that point, religious zealots already hated America and the West.
From my experience, the problem with open source projects and Mac is that many developers who contribute to open source run Linux and possibly Windows, but do not have access to expensive Apple hardware. So they cannot test on Mac and have no clue that UX is sub-par.

Mac ports are usually done one-off by contributors who are not core developers and cannot do bigger modifications to the code. They just tweak things until it works.
> generates more e-waste than necessary

I'm not so sure. Apple have free recycling and even the most repairable equipment will end up being chucked eventually.
Differences in Mobile App and Game Testing
"Repairability" really means two things:

1) You can fiddle with the insides
2) You can fix it when it goes wrong

Despite what you may read on places like HN and Reddit, no-one in the real world gives two hoots about #1, and if you make a product that has good reliability then #2 becomes moot.
The Fan Bridge and the Rolling Bridge
I would love to see some of that functionality to go into Blender, because that is a major cross-platform media workhorse already. The sequence editor is already very usable, but could use more audio-related features.

For me that would be useful since I normally never record anything for pure audio, but rather for Youtube videos. Others may appreciate the 3D Audio/animation functions already in Blender, with which you can design stereo or surround sound.
All cows are animals, not all animals are cows. Most of the war mongering politicians are in fact old men.
Aaaand lovely proof that HN is broken. It's a $1300 netbook but this comment is not allowed to be seen.
Oh agreed. Apple has no presence is this market. My point was about the market for expensive laptops in general.
I sometimes entertain myself with the thought, that respect for military and disdain for prostitution should be reversed: the job where you are trained to kill effectively is glorified, the job where you give love (physical at least) is frowned upon.
How is this more e-waste than a typical laptop? Aren't Apple laptops known for being highly recyclable and using less harmful materials overall?

If you're saying more easily repairable laptops would stick around longer, I'm not sure that's how most consumers treat computers that break on them, especially laptops. Many times it would be "I need a new computer".

I would think all of the produced-as-cheaply-as-possible laptops would be far worse in their environmental impact, but I can't back that up.
Company wouldn't: funding Open Source unlike charities doesn't buy you a good generic PR.

I wouldn't: hate registering in 1000 places, Kickstarter is good enough.
Former bloomberg employee here. While the bloomberg service usually runs very well, its built mostley on spaghetti code that has been copy pasta'ed since the 80s and 90s. It might have improved since I worked there, but there were some serious deficiencies in development methodology.
What's an effective reaction to the fact that offense fundamentally outstrips defense as technology grows? I can only think of two paths: a) Luddism, b) world government by benevolent AI. Both of these paths are very risky. So in the short term, it seems worth it to incrementally slow down the growth of offense technology, by using activism etc. That gives humanity a little more time to figure things out.
They should have stood their ground then.
The adorable new rolling Star Wars droid is not CGI
I look at this and cannot help to compare the need for so many types of screwdrivers with the need for so many javascript libraries[0] or xml parsers[1] or anything not invented here, like a csv parser [2]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_JavaScript_libraries
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:XML_parsers
[2] http://tburette.github.io/blog/2014/05/25/so-you-want-to-wri...
Not politically correct, but essentially the truth about human nature.

These two statements:

1. “War is so compelling that you can even get a room full of pacifists to pay money to be entertained by it.”"

2. "“My sister is a complete and utter feminist and pacifist,” he explains. “She doesn’t see the irony. She’s participating in this wonderful festival … that’s reenacting a battle. Nobody reenacts the Treaty of Ghent. [It] just isn’t that compelling.”"

I find particularly profound.

Any attempt to "window dress" our base nature, is just that - "Window dressing".
What is the name of your startup and where are you based?
I wonder if Rust would support something like the following. Say, I have a mmapped file, and in this file I'd like to store data-structures such as maps, sets, lists, etc. Basically, they are the same data-structures as one would use on the heap. Because the mmapped file is offsetted at a different point in memory every time it is opened, the actual pointers used to access these data-structures will be different every time. But the pointers inside the data-structures will be the same every time the file is mmapped. So, this requires some special pointer arithmetic (and perhaps a special type system). It would definitely be a very interesting and useful feature!
Back in the day I learned about using VHDL to design circuits, is that the kind of compilation also used for FPGAs?

That language paradigm is close to modern dataflow oriented programming languages. It should be theoretically possible to compile an application program written in that style and have the logical circuits in the FPGA be a direct mapping of the business logic in the application.
> Immature 4Chan memes (trollface etc.) have no place in a business, not even among developers.

Oh, they do. E.g. to make fun of those trying to look sooo professional.
(https://www.facebook.com/search/str/%23biteracy/keywords_top (I am not biteracy.com)

You can ask me to talk with camera, keyboard, or voice, I am easily background checked, I am at https://matrix.org/beta/#/room/#Biteracy:matrix.org / http://web.archive.org/*/https://news.ycombinator.com/user?i...)
What's the actual legal status on this?

It definitely seems to circumvent the law - but is it clearly criminal? Have such abuses been prosecuted successfully in the past?
LOUD NOISES!
They announced at the London summit that Java support in Lambda would be launching soon; it sounds like they're aiming to support lots of languages.
Mac is a commercial minority platform. Linux may be a minority platform on the Desktop, but gets much more attention from open source developers due to it being, well, open source. You just can't expect as many open source developers to care about a platform they have zero control over and is not as popular as Windows.
But you can threaten an individual and everyone else will just mind their own business