skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The old default android browser was so much nicer than Chrome in this area; you zoomed in until it was comfortable, then double tapped and the text, not the whole page, would reflow to fit horizontally.
There are many many options for you if you want a laptop that will run windows "well" (even if most of them suck).

This is for people who want a laptop where all hardware is well supported by open and upstream drivers in linux.

If you're running Windows or OS X, most of the point of this is defeated. You can't tell much about privacy, security, etc. The hardware switches are nifty, but they're an add-on due to popular demand, not the main feature.

(It is a bit annoying the the marketing isn't clear that this is just a nice modern laptop which supports linux very well and avoids you supporting Apple or Microsoft with your purchase.)
The Amiga was undeniably magical for those lucky enough to experience it in the 80s. We've seen lots of magical platforms since (mobile, tablet, maybe VR soon). I often wonder what about the Amiga took hold so strongly. Was it just that it was so much more advanced experientially than its peers, or the fun personality down to the hardware naming, or some more technical aspect? Is that magic still alive for young people today when they first explore ipad+xcode development, or (maybe in the future) Rift devt?

If you were to design a system today to try to re-create that magic for young developers and users, what would it look like?
I also really recommend Firefox's readability mode (with the book icon), it works really really well and I'm using it all the time !
I have my own domain with a developer account (I can install my own software) for a couple hundred dollars per year with unlimited email accounts. You can get hosted domains with some limitations for only a few dollars per month. And I get immediate phone customer service 24/7. Years ago I decided not to use gmail or any of the free crap to avoid the kinds of problems you are having.
Don't have your employees find out by seeing their boss ask on HN how to handle layoffs.
> PHP is considered a beginner-grade toy, despite the comparatively vast expertise one needs to write correct code in it.

As someone who's built a career on (mostly) writing PHP, this this this. It is indeed incredibly easy to write "working", terrible, insecure PHP. Honestly, people who write garbage PHP would write garbage rails/python/node too, because the errors fall into a few buckets:

1. Not using a framework's API/reimplementing boilerplate poorly.

2. Not paying attention to user-generated input (escaping, etc).

3. Not using best practices for major tasks (e.g., manually mysql_connect()'ing instead of using PDO)

4. Failures in logic ("brain farts").

These problems are the same in any language. If you CBA to pay attention to the basics in PHP, you won't do it in rails either. Blame the programmer, not the language.

The counterargument is that some languages won't let you make these mistakes, but the counter-counter is that those people would make those mistakes if they could, which is not really an improvement IMO.
Sure, it's a specific case, it was to demonstrate the impact of bandwidth and not to forget it in todays very high xFLOPS.
Can't use this without full-text search... it's a shame. I was looking for something more pretty than Tomboy Notes, but so far nothing is beating it.
Are Kenya and Ethiopia Violating Citizens' Privacy?
34 CSS Puns That’ll Make You Laugh
Will Robocars vastly increase battery life?
The Paige Compositor (1997)
Ask HN: As a recent grad, should I change my job if I'm not learning anything?
Hello there,

I joined a large Silicon Valley company 6 months ago as a new grad. The company is more of a hardware company than software and there is no culture of developing really good software. Hence, I feel I'm learning very little in my current job. I belong to the Cloud Computing group which I think is cool. In spite of that, I haven't had much opportunities to learn so far. The product that I work on is small but critical, has a small codebase and there hasn't been too many chances for me to write large amounts of code or make design decisions. And, it is nearing completion. In mean time, I've done my best to learn things like build systems, deployment, cloud computing et al.

I've had conversations with my manager about this and he has promised to give me more opportunities in a new product that's coming up. But honestly, I don't believe the company can offer me more simply because it's not known as a pure software company.

How do you suggest I approach this situation? Is this normal for most new grads or am I being too impatient? Should I start looking for jobs if things don't improve? I'm concerned that it wouldn't look good on my resume to quit my first company before I complete at least one year.

I'd really appreciate your advice. Thanks in advance!
How about .sql files?
> I can take a earphone out if I want to talk on the phone, or quickly view a youtube video. Without finagling with the audio player.

That sounds much more awkward. Pausing music on my phone is at worst pushing one button on the inline control (or on the lock screen), no need to mess with the earphones. And since my phone's playing my music it knows to pause it if I get a call.

> I can plug my phone in anywhere I want to in the room while going to sleep with my ipod in my ears.

But then you'd need to recharge the ipod separately.

> It's just awkward to me, ok.

Sure. But you were saying you didn't understand people preferring their phone.
I’m beginning to think that Google is too large to have actual customers, per se, since any group of paying users is still too small for Google to need to pay attention to.
Did I really need to spell out the geometry of the RAID I was creating to avoid this kind of nitpicky follow-up?

It was a 20-something disk RAID 10 [1], arranged so that every mirrored pair of disks spanned different enclosures, in order to mitigate the failure of any one shelf — that is, interleaving mirrors across controllers and shelves, exactly as you suggest I should have done — and further, such that any one shelf failing only affects the mirrors that had disks on that shelf.

EMC's software wanted to allocate the drives from two shelves, with an unequal number of drives per shelf. It was just grabbing the next however many disks, linearly.

So, no, they weren't trying to balance the mirror across enclosures or controllers. They just weren't thinking.

[1] By "RAID 10", I mean "striped mirrors" — that is, create a bunch of mirrors that span shelves and then stripe across them — not "mirrored stripes" which is what you appear to be suggesting, with "it is better to have two disks on the same controller/chassis in raid 0, then raid 1".

A striped mirror is recommended in everything I've ever read on the subject, because it puts the redundancy at the lowest level of the array's geometry.

Using a mirrored stripe, on the other hand, means that when one disk fails, any other disks striped with it, still presumably perfectly functional, can't be used; the controller must instead read from and write to the mirror. If a disk in that mirror subsequently fails, you've lost data — and remember that when striping, the chance of failure is multiplied by the number of disks in the stripe.

EDIT: Footnote.
I obviously touched a raw nerve among the gold bugs.
Sorry; but some people think gold is just a metal.

Why not back a currency with tin or lead? I know! Cattle would be the best commodity. No? How about gasoline?

According to this ... http://www.nma.org/pdf/gold/his_gold_prices.pdf
Gold was not $35, it was $26 ounce at the time. After a recent run up no less. Where did you get your info, some Rand Paul/Zero Hedge site?

FDR did this to expand the money supply. The U.S. was suffering from deflation.

Do any countries actually back their currency with gold?

Any modern country ? Not "stores a bunch" but actively exchanges currency for gold on a consumer level?
> All I see in them is the addition of a hardware switch and the installation and configuration of trisquel.

I'm not aware of any major commercial computer with a FOSS BIOS or a hardware RF killer for the wireless parts.
This is a nice / modern hardware laptop, which you can have confidence supports any recent linux distro well, because all hardware drivers are "upstreamed". Further, there are as few closed-source firmware blobs as possible. Various people care about that for various theoretical reasons, but one good one is that any firmware that could be infected with a virus could also be patched.

It is annoying that the marketing is not clear on this fact. This is a nice, if pricey, laptop which supports any modern linux distro well. And when you buy it, you avoid your purchase supporting Apple or Microsoft. (I've purchased a couple Apple laptops over the years, begrudgingly, just to run linux on them. I'm excited to have an alternative.)
I was hoping for an in-depth analysis on how "innovators are killing us", instead social commentary and etymology lesson. (and a hard to follow one at that)

Gig economy is getting more spotlights these days, so any analysis based on even cursory empirical evidence would be interesting read.
So the point is that sometime we can innovate the wrong thing.

Not useful or particularly insight.
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=143725996614627&w=2
Good luck Mohamed! There's nothing stopping you :)
Nice find! I just tried it out myself and got the same result. I wonder how well this is tested...
As with many late 80s memory management papers, cache effects obsolete the conclusions in this one. In fact, the compiler's ability to coalesce all the stack allocations in a single procedure call into a single pair of stack manipulation instructions makes the conclusions almost meaningless in practice: inlining optimizations and modern CPUs make that cost essentially zero nowadays. I'd almost argue that the methodology in this paper, combined with 2015 assumptions, offers an effective argument against GC. Appel's memory management papers really need to be taken with a grain of salt :)
The L4 kernels have just been porting Linux, etc to user-mode to run the untrusted apps with calls to underlying API. Might be the best that can be done outside some kind of source to source translation with heuristics.
Not much, according to this article, as there are many firmware blobs that are still entirely opaque: http://blogs.coreboot.org/blog/2015/02/23/the-truth-about-pu...
You think you're cute, but you're missing the point.
weight matters if you're trying to travel light, not just for carrying around.
What is the author saying? That innovation cannot be commoditized?

I would go further and say that innovation shouldn't be considered a goal but rather a result (of hard work, intelligence, strategy and more).

Making innovation your primary goal is like making success your primary goal. It will give motivation but no guidance.
Isn't this also one of the goals of bunnie's novena? http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?tag=novena

Something built from the ground up, where you can build and (with inspection) trust every part of it.
Modus Operandi: Poses as an investor to be wined and dined, then disappears
Gonna hafta call [Citation Needed] on anyone killed by ballistic birdshot.
How Sanctions Helped Iranian Startups Thrive
Yep, instantly closed
How do you think about the OS accessbility zoom features?
Bluebird – Promises in Node.js
Linus Torvalds has been pretty coarse with his lieutenants in the past, but on the other hand he does not sit around in programming forums telling novice programmers that they should feel bad because they used a language which doesn't have static typing. That is a passion, but the passion is not programming. The name for that passion is "sadism" and while some sadists program, to a first level of approximation, if the primary output of someone is public sadism then programming is at best on that person's back burner, likely not something they're actually very good at, and plausibly not something they really even do.
Why do you assume that most people want (external) power in their lives? Note that it's one thing to talk about getting more money and actually being serious about it. This is where I can see lots of people not wanting all that money, after all. They would want it if it was somehow free but they're only willing to work for much lesser amounts, so they don't really want it.

A reasonable amount of (relative) wealth is accessible to most people if only they're willing to do focused work to gain that sort of income and accumulate that wealth. But the majority of people are willing to buy a lotto ticket they say for fun or a basic 9-to-5 job, and leave it at that.
After discovering PG's essays, I spent a couple of weeks trawling through them. Eventually came across "What I learned from Hacker News" and decided to check it out...
Passion fruit panna cotta
Because programmers

Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (aka utah2000 or utah2k)

By Rob Pike (Lucent Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill)

“This talk is a polemic that distills the pessimistic side of my feelings about systems research these days. I won’t talk much about the optimistic side, since lots of others can do that for me; everyone’s excited about the computer industry. I may therefore present a picture somewhat darker than reality. However, I think the situation is genuinely bad and requires action.”

http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/
It's interesting you bring that up. I hate those newsletter signup popups that appear on sites. With that said, I can attest that they do actually work and surprisingly really well. My first experience with them I figured people would signup and then unsubscribe fairly quickly. However, the complete opposite ended up happening. We got tons of signup, people stuck around, and shared our content more than ever before. Needless to say, as much as I personally hate them, I will use them on future projects.
Appears to me that 'innovation has been replacing the word 'invention', best way to describe genuine scientific and technological developments.

If you accept the premise we have technological stagnation, innovation seems to solely rely on what's left of that time to grow the system that has been destroying it in the first place.
With the usual set of locks, cache contention and pauses on cascade deletions of deep datastructures it brings.
Sure, that's the legal environment we find ourselves in, and in many respects it's short sighted and counter productive, i.e. it actually fosters weak security in critical settings and the chance of those weaknesses being taken advantage of by malicious entities.
There are plenty of businesses with goal of making money that work well. And since we know that differentiation leads to profits and innovation leads to differentiation , innovation is actually a decent guidance.
memcached has the same default to this day - listen on all interfaces, no auth.

These things are designed for use by people running them on servers that are not directly exposed to the internet. If you're running it in a dev VM with no public address, it's fine. If you're running it on a database-optimized server in your datacenter/cloud which has a firewall only allowing connections from your web-application servers to particular ports, it's fine.

In fact I wouldn't trust mongodb auth anyway, that's not it's focus, much less its strength. Leave the auth to other mechanisms designed for it.

I try not to worry about the infinite multitude of idiots who can follow some bad advice and get some software running. No matter what you do to make things foolproof, human ingenuity comes up with better fools, and in the process you make things more complicated for people who know what they're doing.

"completely unacceptable"? no, reasonable.
ProductHunt number 1 this sunday: artistic photo collection CCO
>My little 5'3" sister running around bossing grown men like it was nothing.

There's nothing strange or unusual about that.
I'd recommend getting an old thinkpad or macbook compatible with libreboot (http://www.libreboot.org/) which is apporved by FSF and only runs free software in the bootloader/BIOS. Purism, on the other hand, uses a proprietary bootloader, as well as proprietary BIOS, as well as proprietary code for Intel FSP, Intel ME, Intel VBIOS, and Intel CPU microcode updates.
I don't think we'd see any qualitative differences at a high level. Just everything would be slightly better - higher resolution cameras and so on. Compare to Juno which was launched four years later.
I'd take offense if I knew what the hell he was talking about.
Satellite radio does sound quite a bit worse than any recorded medium you can buy today. The difference isn't due to errors, but overcompression. That's not a problem with 128K or better AAC streams, or 192K MP3 streams for that matter, yet Young apparently isn't objecting to having his songs played on SiriusXM.

So: yeah, it's safe to say it's all about marketing his snake oil.
Oh, didn't know about KeyMouse, looks interesting. A litle bit like a DataHand. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DataHand
actually, those claims they made during crowdsupply phase have not been incorporated into final design. See http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/3anjgm/on_the_librem_...
A book about how to write an interpreter from scratch
Hello,

My name is Mehmet. I am the author of "Practical Interpreter Construction".

I am not writing for promoting my book.

It is a more story and a contra attitude than just announcing yet another book about compilers and interpreters.

There are some books teaching compilers. When I decide to write an interpreter from scratch, I first googled about compiler books.

I bought some of them but liked none of them because of the heavy theory they include. Also, I don't think that a practical programmer needs to read an even difficult to carry book.

After some struggle and seek and then cancel, I found out James Hague's blog post exactly about what books to read if one wants to write an interpreter or compiler, here it is:

http://prog21.dadgum.com/30.html

As he suggests, I have read Jack Crenshaw's famous "Let's Build a Compiler" text, http://compilers.iecc.com/crenshaw

It really is amazing text about compilers.

I have learned a lot by reading Mr. Crenshaw's text.

Despite it is a gem and it does teach a lot, there is something that puts off many in his text: it is target platform is Motorola 68K, besides, it does not teach much about writing an interpreter. It is more a compiler book.

Then afterwards, I decided to write a book about writing an interpreter from scratch.

There is parsing and interpreting expressions, strings, code comments, variables, arrays, while loops, if-else case and functions in the book.

It is heavy-theory free and a practical book. You don't have to be a computer science student to read it.

Any programmer can read it.

I hope I will help many programmers to write their own interpreters and learn how interpreters work.

It is a very useful mental process and it really is fun!

Here is the book link on Leanpub.com:

http://leanpub.com/pic

Greetings,

Mehmet Emin Coskun.
---
It does say a lot about what it is
I still have mine, although i don't actually use it as a ipod anymore, but i bought a watch band for it so now it's actually a quite cool watch, worth the 30bucks or whatever they want for it if you want a different watch

http://www.shophex.com/vision-metal-watch-band-for-ipod-nano...
Many GC languages have stack and global static memory allocation as well.

Go being one of them.

Others, Oberon family of languages, Modula-3, D, Eiffel and even .NET to a certain extent.

Having managed heap doesn't mean other allocation types aren't available.
AR Screen
I'm pointing out that these laptops are no more free then any other laptop out there. It's just an average laptop shipping a Linux distro.

These guys won't be able to get the binary blobs from neither Intel nor Nvidia released, this have been pointed out many times before from several places.

They are even kind enough to mention it themself: https://puri.sm/posts/purism-software-freedom-deconstructed/

http://blogs.coreboot.org/blog/2015/02/23/the-truth-about-pu...

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/3anjgm/on_the_librem...
They're pretty terrible, at least on Android. The latest stock android browser doesn't have have a text zoom option, and the text zoom features in chrome or firefox don't really work reliably.
You thought of the LISP machines too, eh? Ill mark GC results under my meme: failure to learn from the past. One exception Azul Systems' Vega machines that have a hardware-assisted, concurrent, pauseless GC. What do you think of their approach? Worth emulating in a smaller, hardware project?

Note: As usual, I'm thinking along lines of safer, processor design with possible GC. Needs to be a tad faster than i432. ;)
I started a project[1] a while back when it became clear that the underlying architecture for the new devtools in Firefox was going to be as problematic as Firebug's had been. Longtime Mozilla contributor Wladimir Palant just published a post a few days ago touching on some of the problems with devtools that he ran into when trying to work with it.[2]

The idea with sepsis-inspector is that it should be able to replace Hewitt's old DOM Inspector codebase and be stupid simple to extend with third-party viewers. (For anyone unfamiliar, DOMi has the ability to inspect not just webpages, but e.g. the Firefox UI [and Thunderbird, and SeaMonkey] and extensions as well.)

The interface between the Inspector itself and the viewers is nice and modular for the most part. It's basically Unix pipes in GUI form, with a few services for sugaring. Altogether, this makes its design a good foundation for a generalized inspector framework. (And I do mean generalized. Let's debug PNGs, PDFs, and Haxe, too, but I'm not even talking just the Web here. Want to use it to debug Gnome Shell or your Mono app? Sure. I mean, why shouldn't we be able to?)

Since DOM Inspector, Firebug, and the new Firefox devtools exist, I've focused most of my time on getting the architecture right and then teaching the Inspector how to do some things that those tools can't already do, rather than necessarily shooting for parity from the start. This means that if you download the sepsis-inspector add-on[3] right now, you'll find that it's missing some things that existing tools can do, but at this point, it's just a matter of layering those features on. There's still work to be done underneath, though.

The sepsis-inspector's dependency on XUL needs to go away, for example.

Allen Wirfs-Brock did some research on JS mirrors[4] a few years ago, although nothing seems to have come of it, AFAICS. Everyone decided to roll their own debugging/reflection APIs, I guess. But it's blindingly obvious to me that something based on mirrors is what needs to be powering our inspectors, and that your chosen inspector should be able to do a lot more tricks than what the current crop of web inspectors can do (including, as I said before, doing more than just debugging CSS, JS, and the DOM).

If anyone is interested in collaborating here, you'll find that, for the most part, the sepsis-inspector code is extremely well commented for a Mozilla add-on. Patches wanted.[5][6]

1. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Sepsis

2. https://palant.de/2015/07/17/javascript-deobfuscator-reloade...

3. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sepsis-inspec...

4. http://www.wirfs-brock.com/allen/posts/228

5. https://gitlab.com/crussell/sepsis-inspector

6. http://www.colbyrussell.com/2013/08/06/patches-wanted.html
Functional, but not usable (as you have to scroll a bunch of times to read each line).
What do you consider "real" physics? Dark matter is not some voodoo word, it's part of the standard model of cosmology. While we know it exists, we don't know how it works, and theorizing & experimenting about it is crucial to understanding Nature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter