shasheene

SD cards are optimized for sequential IO (reading/writing photos, video, music). For an OS root partition, random IO is much more important for general use. If the root partition is mounted from an external USB drive with higher random 4K IOPS benchmarks, IO performance should be greatly improved.

Wearable health monitors are really the future.

It's a marketer's dream: arrhythmia causes young healthy people sometimes suddenly drop dead without any prior symptoms. It happened to Sheryl Sandberg's husband. Sudden cardiac death kills 600,000 people per year with 50% having no prior cardiac disease. [1]

Hopefully the Apple Heart Study turns out to allow early detection of arrhythmia. Apple will end up selling millions of watches based on people's (myself included) mildly irrational fears.

[1] ttp://www.clevelandclinicmeded.com/medicalpubs/diseasemanagement/cardiology/cardiac-arrhythmias/

There's a decades-long meme that Apple purposefully slows down older hardware to push people to buy completely new hardware.

Interesting that this effect may be a byproduct of automatic scaling the CPU frequency based on remaining battery capacity, rather than the newer OS versions being purposefully poorly optimized (like most people assume)

Anyone know the price to low-earth orbit using New Glenn? (perhaps can be inferred from Eutelsat or OneWeb's financial disclosures to regulators?)

With Jeff Bezos selling $1 billion worth of Amazon shares a year to fund Blue Origin, will he choose to sell below cost for significant periods of time to stay competitive with the Falcon 9 and Heavy?

Why weren't a series of speed bumps suitable?

That's a reasonable estimate. While the journalist used 'household', I don't think there was a reason to. Looks like there was a lot of news articles published between 2010-2015 with the $1 trillion figure being cited (haven't found a break down of that yet though).

Anyway for fun here's my estimate: The mean US population between 1971 to 2015 (inclusive) was 262.1 million [1]. There were 44 years in that period (inclusive). Therefore:

1E12/(262.1E6*44) = $86.71/person annually

[1] http://www.multpl.com/united-states-population/table and a spreadsheet

"The [Portuguese] Health Ministry spends less than $10 per citizen per year on its successful drug policy. Meanwhile, the U.S. has spent some $10,000 per household (more than $1 trillion) over the decades on a failed drug policy that results in more than 1,000 deaths each week."

That's a intellectually dishonest and misleading statement: it's comparing Portuguese annual cost per citizen to US cumulative multi-decade cost per household.

Does that matter though? Is there any legal restriction on them re-using the name? Seems like a huge missed opportunity

I've been using the Samsung Chromebook Plus (ARM chip) laptop/tablet hybrid the past 4 months and it's one of the best devices I've ever owned. Very cheap and has high build quality (great screen and aluminium body). The 4 years prior I used the first ARM Samsung Series 3 Chromebook (much lower build quality, but it was great before it died).

I currently use tablet mode for 2-3 hour session for portrait reading (Wikipedia Android app, long-form articles) and from time-to-time light note-taking (Squid Android app) and PDFs. Haven't used crouton or done dev work on this Chromebook yet.

Here's a quick review of modern touch-screen Chromebooks used as tablets. While the hardware is exceptional, the software is terrible in tablet-mode. Here are the painful issues that I can currently remember:

1. Easy to accidentally close the entire browser by brushing the X button (I was thinking the browser was crashing the first 4-5 times it happened, very frustrating as can't CTRL-SHIFT-T in tablet mode)

2. Easy to accidentally close a single tab for the same reason. On an Android devices there's a little undo popup to reopen tabs, but that kind of obvious touchscreen user-interface polish isn't there on ChromeOS yet

3. Two finger touchpad scroll doesn't work on Android apps for scrolling -- painful as heck when Wikipedia links open in the Android app in laptop mode

Side note: I wish there was a good app to non-destructively markup PDF files with the stylus. I think it was at WWDC this year, Apple showed great work in this area, but sad not to have found software that appears as good for Chromebooks/Android yet.

I know Google engineers will come across this post, so hopefully these pain points can be fixed eventually. Chromebook hardware is so good (and cheap), but there's a few painful areas still.

Search for an official Google Chrome extension (such as Chrome Remote Desktop). You'll see a 'By Google' logo (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/collection/by_go...) as well as an 'offered by google.com'.

This just has the 'offered by google.com'. I would have assumed a 'By Google' logo would have been added after acquisition?

Just a note that the lock you found may have not been abandoned.

Many bike posts in my university's undercover bike shed often had several locks without a bike in sight. It turned out many people leaving bike locks on posts they often use (it doesn't take up much space or prevent someone from using the post).

It saves those cyclists the hassle of carrying the the lock with them (only the key), which is particularly an issue with those very heavy bike U-locks and D-locks.

For software intended for regular users, POSIX via WSL isn't a replacement to the Windows API.

In addition to the feature needing to be manually installed, developer-mode must be enabled. WSL leaving beta does not appear to change that.

If the feature was installed by default, and an X server was bundled, it would risk the Windows platform. WSL allows developers to be placated without affecting the business side of the platform.

Last I played with it, the latency on webrecorder was uncomfortably high for always-on recording of personal web usage (the pages only display once fully rendered). I wish webpages would render as normal and get asynchronously archived once loading is complete.

That would allow constant archival of every webpage a user ever visits -- an immutable record over the user's years of crawling the web.

Full transcript here: https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/6b043z/tom_mueller_...

His comments regarding competitors are pretty obvious, and have been given by SpaceX executives in the past 5-7 years. I doubt Tom Mueller will have much issues for the comments themselves.

That said, for those following SpaceX, there is some very good parts of this speech + Q&A

I'd like to subscribe to The Economist, but a 12-month digital-only subscription costs US$285 from Australia, nearly double the US figure, which I can't yet justify as a relatively casual reader.

The leaky paywall (and convenient scraped ePub versions for eReaders) makes it even easier to not contribute to funding quality journalism. If I could choose a dollar amount, I'd happily donate US$75/year recurring for what I'm currently paying $0/year for.

And remember even a booster with a 10-launch lifetime can do a reusable-priced expendable launch on the final flight before "retirement" :)

I believe Homebrew on macOS uses it for formulae (Ruby scripts to actually download and build the application)

Wow, that's surprising. Was that position you're describing doing software development? Where were you based?

> Gitlab IMHO has the worst UX of all git based products out there

Remember that git-based products include Gerrit (a UX which I hear hate about, but frankly, I like a lot)

> There's actually no reason why it couldn't have fit on a Dual-layer disc. Our only guess as to why it'd be a double disc game is that maybe it was cheaper, and since it is installing itself, there's no need to disc-swap after the initial installation, more or less erasing the biggest annoyance with multi-disc console games.

One possibility was that the optical disk lasers on early Wii units had issues reading dual-layer disks like Super Smash Bros Brawl, causing disk read errors. Nintendo's official laser cleaner disk helped to some degree, and (if I recall correctly) the power of the laser could be increased with software modifications to help.

There are multiple goals on the featured Patreon page. The arrows on the goals box allow scrolling

> $8,000/month -- You paid one month's liability insurance!

> $30,000/month -- DNA Lounge is in the black!

> $50,000/month -- You paid one month's rent and utilities!

> $65,000/month -- If we hit this per month, then in 12 months, not only will we be in the black, but also you will have paid off all of our unpaid bills and debts so that jwz doesn't have to!

> $110,000/month -- You paid one month's payroll and payroll taxes!

From https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2016/12/19.html (copy and paste link into address bar):

> I know that with this level of transparency and vulnerability I'm setting myself up for a bunch of wisecracks from people who are all too eager to tell me what I did wrong and how they totally would have done it differently, having created nothing of lasting value themselves. How this situation [could have been avoided] or that was "obvious" [that it would happen]. Haters gonna hate, I know how it goes.

I really hope this will work out for the proprietor. They're asking for $110,000 recurring donation per month to meet monthly payroll, San Fransisco rent, utilities and unpaid bills (without offering a tangible reward).

While that amount of money ($1.32 million annually) arguably could be better spent on more worthy causes, it will be incredible if the recurring donation business model turns out to successfully fund relatively niche content of this magnitude.

An absolute classic. One of the most underrated games for the Gameboy Advance! :)

Marcan mentions FreeBSD is not a particularly secure OS.

My understanding is the BSDs have a reputation for being more secure than Linux. Is this not the case?

I've had the same incredibly intense deja-vu from walking through a certain building the first time at my university in South Australia, realizing soon after I had played a custom map/level of that same building years earlier in the Half Life 2 engine. One of the weirdest feelings...

I fully expect many such moments in San Francisco after so many hours of teenage youth spent playing GTA: San Andreas online! :)

The Economist recently did a good article on the financing of Elon Musk's companies that flew under the radar of Hacker News that probably warranted further discussion [1] [2]. (Though the author of that piece completely misses the relative importance of each company to Musk, suggesting "he could try to sell [...] SpaceX, through gritted teeth, to a defence firm")

It's unfortunate there's a bit of a reality distortion field around discussion Elon Musk's companies sometimes. Maybe because everyone wants his companies to succeed...

[1] http://www.economist.com/news/business/21709061-entrepreneur...

[2] http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2016/10/ec...

> With her assistance, he left Nigeria shortly afterwards, to study in America.

> Although they have not met each other again since, she continued to provide him with financial assistance until he completed his degree a few years ago and got a job in the American oil sector.

Heh, maybe the 419 scam is continuing! The long con! :P

More discussion on the resubmission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12712611

The less hip Linux distributions have very good support for the less popular CPU architectures. For example, Debian Jessie has an official ppc64el (ie, POWER8) release as well as mips and other platforms with low mindshare [1].

In my experience with Debian armhf of a ARM Chromebook (via crouton), all the packages repositories all work out of the box and I haven't noticed any issues. The only exception I've had has been (ironically) the Chromium browser -- but that application is famously complicated to build.

The past few years I've been pleasantly surprised smoothly developing on machines using different CPU architectures is with open-source software (thanks to good automation (build bots), robust unit testing, and hard work by Debian maintainers and their upstream developers)

Compared to the closed-source world of applications (application compatible between Windows and Windows RT, or Apple's transition from PowerPC Macs to x86 Macs), being CPU architecture agnostic using purely open-source software requires no effort at all. But being architecture agnostic using closed source applications of course suffer from the same issues as the other platforms.

[1] https://www.debian.org/ports/

IBM POWER looks to be the most performant libre computing platform in existence, but $4100 for Raptor Engineering's Talos is still too pricey for me -- I'd suggest US$1000 to US$1500 for plain ATX motherboard + CPU, supporting affordable standard commercial consumer components is probably the point where crowd funding is viable as a desktop computer for regular software engineers and tinkerers (well the kind of people who seriously consider buying a Novena).

But Talos is expensive as it uses a custom board, with custom open-source firmware at relatively low volume, so a more affordable Talos desktop is probably infeasible.

I guess for that it needs to be a desktop (not a workstation) -- so a much more stripped down system dropping expensive components such as the FPGAs that a secure internet connected server, or a typical software engineer's desktop don't need.

In other IBM POWER news, Google has recently announced it's Open Compute Project POWER9 server -- the Zaius P9 Server: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12709995