skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This has nothing to do with whether Apple's model is good or bad, and everything to do with why this particular guy thinks it's bad for him. Like, the fact that he has to hire developers for every platform. Boo hoo.

Also, very poorly written: "... And single channel businesses are vulnerable to the vagrancies of the market place." Yep, those pesky vagrant marketplaces. What are you gonna do.
App Store Ranking Algorithm -- Discovered
The future may very well lie there, the present most certainly does not. Above all else I'm pragmatic and no matter how pretty SQL might be for getting the data you want, even if I ignore that it isn't actually relational, it simply doesn't fit well with the rest of the environment necessary to put a working application in front of a user today.

While I admire Alan Kay greatly, he's always been a bit of a dreamer. Dreams don't pay my bills, but object databases most certainly make me more productive, make my apps better, and my job much more enjoyable; SQL however, despite the fact that I know it very well, is always an annoyance that makes any project take long and require much more code than would otherwise be necessary.

As for Greenspun, everyone, no matter how famous or who taught them, is wrong about many things. Look at this website, we're having this discussion on a very popular site which uses a home-brew object database precisely because for many such sites a relational database is simply unnecessary and massive overkill and would create as many problems as it would solve. Relational database have their place, but they are a massively overused and over-applied solution. No blog, small website, or small biz appliction needs a relational database, they'd all be much simpler and work just as well with an OODB and quite frankly be faster and cheaper to develop.
I can verify this anecdotally. I just bought a cheap Dell laptop with Win7 for my father-in-law. Awesome machine for the price ($400) and it comes with 3GB of RAM. I'm playing around in it and decide to open Task Manager. Holy moly, 1.7GB of RAM is being used and I just have IE8 pointed to the default MSN homepage. I had no other apps open at the time, not even Windows Explorer. I boot my MacBook Pro running OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard and open Firefox and it consumes just around 300MB total. Even WinXP with Outlook 2007 running in VirtualBox on my Linux machine is using only 270MB of RAM.
What the heck is using all that memory in Win7? And why? Or is this a case of Win7 using the available/unused memory for caching kinda like what Linux does?
When you love what you are doing and try to make it as good as you can, using the right tools in the right way is a major part of the experience.

That's the point: "It's about giving people a great experience".

You made a mistake right off the bat by setting up the argument that "it's all about selling stuff to consumers" instead of the one actually made in the article. You're disagreeing right past agreement.
Money. Students in high school may not have enough money to buy a laptop.
The problem with such epic n00bs, though, is that there are so many of them that the "survivors" alone can destabilize your business.

Heck, without noobs, would we even have spam? Somebody is paying those people to make it worthwhile. The tiny fraction of the world that encourages spammers cost everyone else massive amounts of time and energy and money accounting for or fixing their errors.
"For all people who already had a Google profile, the list of people they were "following".. was automatically added to their public profile"

No, it isn't. Although it indeed appears to expose your contacts, it actually doesn't. This was the case on accounts I set up the first day and, out of curiosity, I tested it again a couple days ago. See my comment here for details:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1127647
Very nice. Here's a feature suggestion: allow me to specify the two locations in the URL so I can create bookmarks to pairs that I use all the time (e.g. Hamburg/NewYork, Hamburg/SanFrancisco...).
I hope they're not including disk I/O caches in this figure. My (Linux) workstation with 8GB RAM currently reports 250MB free. More than 5.5GB of the occupied memory is acting as a block cache, though.

It's interesting that the average amount of RAM in a Windows 7 PC is 3.3GB. That's a typical maximum that the 32-bit version can actually use.
My understanding is that Windows 7 speculatively populates your memory with your most frequently used set of applications to improve startup times. This is on the quite reasonable theory that if your machine doesn't have, e.g., the browser in memory then all the machine is doing for you is costing you seconds the next time you open the browser. (This also reduces the necessity for makers of heavier applications to do various tricks to keep their apps in-memory themselves. IE, Firefox, MS Office, and I think Open Office will all aggressively try to load themselves ASAP to decrease boot time.)

More broadly I think that "zomg my memory usage is too high" is one of those things that a) we should never, ever expose to non-developers because it tells them useless or harmful things and b) even many developers evaluate incorrectly. Consistently having free memory is NOT a good thing in this day and age. It means you're not using the RAM you paid for to do stuff which actually matters to you.
Nifty Blog Flickr Feeds via iPhone
> Barth acknowledged that XPnet's data couldn't determine whether the memory usage was by the operating system itself, or an increased number of applications

In that case I call "full of shit"
Adobe Flash Catalyst does away with AS3 and suggests building a restaurant site
Run the flash uninstaller on windows, it will remove everything. If you want to install an older version of flash make sure to restart first.

http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/141/tn_14157.html
Actions Are Methods
You use Monodevelop with a different backend (it supports c++, although it doesn't have any ui designer integrated afair). Or simply use Eclipse, or KDevelop.
Using a lot of memory could be a good thing. The better the OS, the more effectively it should use memory to optimize it's operation. Could be it is just caching things.

Just because it says "100% of memory used" doesn't imply that there is no memory left for other things.

I can only present an anecdote from Java development, where the VM would often report high memory use. But that was because the garbage collection would only kick in once the memory was really needed (on some mobile VMs anyway). So by instantiating more objects, the memory usage would fall from 90% to 20% (or whatever), because it would trigger the gc.

Therefore I assume this, as well as the constant bickering about "fat FireFox", are a non-issue.
"Fastest growing" is usually an annoying statistic. It's really meaningless. Say Germany produced 100,000 scientific studies last year, and this year produced 150,000 studies, they grew at 50%. If Iran produced 1,000 studies last year and this year produced 2,000, they now have a 100% growth, capturing the "fastest growing" title.
It appears we have a troll? I've noticed a number of epic-downvote-sprees in the past couple days, where any disagreers (even with valid points) were dropped at least -2 extremely quickly.
I totally agree that Kuler and Google Analytics don't and have never needed flash. In fact most web application needs don't need the HTML 5 or Flash like capabilities. AJAX and DOM tech turns out to be good enough technology to cover most web application use cases.
New Laser Zaps Mosquitoes in Slow-Motion Video
As I said and repeated and really like to repeat here again: children should have limited rights and they actually do have limited rights in Germany. Spying is ok. Reading their E-Mails and going through their drawers is ok. But only up to a point. The parents just cannot limit their rights without limits.

I'm also not really sure why courts should not decide what's necessary and justified. That's all we ever did in our cases in the introductory course on public law and basic rights. (Basic rights in Germany have an influence on how courts have to decide in civil cases - just before anybody says anything about this being only the case in public law, i.e. citizen-state relationships, not citizen-citizen relationships)
Why is this a bad thing? Look at the following screengrab:

http://invalid.ed.ntnu.no/~jostein/qupload/files/taskman.png

My laptop is running Firefox, PuTTY, Visual Studio, parts of the Office 2010 beta and I still haven't maxed out, but I do use "massive" 2GBs of memory.

Now let's look further at that: It's says 1019 MB is "cached". This means that things are buffered, ready to use, improving my machine's performance. Why should we have all this RAM if it isn't used for anything? That would be a bloody waste IMO.

As the article only mentions memory usage and not what it is used for (cached isn't mentioned once), I will assume this is mostly cached data improving performance, not the opposite. In fact quite like it works in Linux:

http://invalid.ed.ntnu.no/~jostein/qupload/files/top.png

Until proven otherwise I'd say this article is entirely without merit, or that at best it proves that Windows 7 in fact results in better use of available resources.
Lindsey Vonn Boyfriend Affair
HBO announce online streaming
Personally I'm glad they are getting sued. Google has the mentality that they can do whatever they want and that they are above the law. If its illegal then they will get the law changed. I used to be a huge fan of google but as time goes on their true colors seem to be coming out. They don't give a damn about anything but getting data.
The real question is: where is the criminal investigation?

This breaks so many laws it's not funny.

And the kid originally being disciplined at school for something he did at home.

It's the first time for a while news like this has made me feel physically sick! Lock them up :(
It's useful for other things. I was only joking about the "I am at home" bot. But I think such things exist, that create shadows of moving people if you are not at home.

Makes me wonder if having a home is worth it.
http://kuler.adobe.com/#create/fromanimage that's something thats trivial to implement in Flash, but much harder with JavaScript I imagine.
"they do allow you to view another persons followers"

If that person took the extra step of setting up their buzz profile.

And although your profile might show your followers/following to you, the profile doesn't show the same information to other users. See my comment here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1127647

It is indeed confusing and the way it's designed gives the impression that it exposed gmail contacts, but ThinkWriteMute is absolutely right and it's disturbing that he's being downvoted.

"Couple that with auto following everyones gmail contacts and its easy to find a list of my gmail contacts without me having done anything."

The "following" terminology seems to be the source of most of the confusion, since it makes it sound like something new is being exposed when it isn't. If you haven't set up your buzz profile, the only information your followers can see is you name, picture and chat status updates and anything else that was public, which is what they could see before when they were still just "contacts."
Indeed. The more interesting fact in this paper is how China is picking up with the US in number of papers.
That's a violation of various computer misuse laws. Get him to file a police complaint.
Yeah, 35 seconds is a bit fast, though interesting in its own way. It really shows the repetition which was hidden in the original by sheer length.

And that color-cycling one is... I dunno, hallucination / head-trip inducing o_O I can't tell if I want to keep watching or not. It's kinda too much, but it's pretty...

* stare
Now he can program in a proper language.
Ultracold chemistry
FCC plans for 100M bps to 100 million households
Really? I have 3 PC's running Win 7 Ultimate: A Netbook with 2 GB RAM that I use for developing when I'm on the road. My workstation with 4 GB RAM that I use at home, and my wife's video editing PC with 8 GB RAM. I've been really happy with all of them. I haven't noticed any page file useage on any of them. Then again, I practice pretty good computer hygeine, and I routinely uninstall any programs that aren't being used.

My wife edits 5-10GB video files for a living using Adobe Premiere, and she rarely tops 4GB of memory useage.
I'm on a Windows 7 laptop with 4GBs of RAM, but due to chipset limitations in the laptop itself I am unable to use more than 3.3GBs despite running 64-bit Windows. Pretty annoying, but not unbearable.

I'm guessing it is a decent mixture of cheap/old chipsets in the laptops sold and the OS itself.
whuh?
Tracking uniques with Flash cookies rather than browser cookies (when possible) should compensate for the one-user-many-browsers problem. I know there are ways for individual users to clear Flash cookies, but I don't believe this is being done on a scale wide enough to be statistically significant.
Steganography via VoIP
Very nice web application, I'm going to use this a lot.
All the Smartphone OSes: A Beginners' Guide
History of Django's Model Validation
Papers are about as good an indicator of productive output as lines of code.

As mentioned briefly in the article, citations are probably a much better metric.
This was the first thing I was asking myself too.

AFAIK only a limited group of people is allowed to do such a thing (law enforcement) and only if the have a court warrant for it.

If they really pulled this off, then they are in very deep shit..
This was part of a program on PBS called Digital Nation. The show was very interesting, and there's a section where the school IT administrator demonstrates his ability to pull up a students laptop ... and working webcam.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/learni...

The relevant part starts at about 4:35. "They don't even realize that we are watching. I always like to mess with them and take a picture."
...and in the past, companies used to call bugs "features"
Free Silicon Valley strategy call 8amPST fr startups
Free Silicon Valley call 8amPST for startup /entrepreneurs who could potentially earn $1mil in revenues but struggle http://bit.ly/ccy42u please, share.
Psst: this can help you for SEO if you do it right. (Though you'd have to add a bit of content/links to have a hope of getting all of them indexed.)
What if the reason for the (undisputed) Flash crash-happiness on OSX isn't only Adobe's laziness (what a ridiculous statement), but also some sub-par OSX system components that almost always seem to be involved when Flash crashes or performance goes down to nil (e.g., on my machine, ATSserver)?

What if Apple's C/C++ compiler (i.e. gcc) just doesn't optimize as well as Microsoft's (which, from my experience, it certainly doesn't)?

Let's not forget that it was Adobe who tried to firmly establish SVG (and burned a lot of money in the process). I for one can't blame them for investing where content creators and the users are.
Nobody should have bothered learning how to use a fountain pen, because they should have known ballpoints would be around eventually?

Notice that nobody cares about nib maintenance anymore, and that ballpoints made fortunes before they became commoditized. Those fortunes were made by innovators who could tell the essentials from trivia and mechanics.

Would you consider it acceptable to spend a couple hours in the library every day but still not know what the Dewey Decimal System is?

Since we have computerized indexing, one could just go to serial numbers and not lose a bit of functionality. Physical browsing would lose out, but that's hardly a loss of essential function. Cover Flow shows how this could be replaced and enhanced. Lots of librarians are actually wrestling with such implications. Just one example:

http://ramblinglibrarian.blogspot.com/2009/03/if-every-book-...

There was also a Google tech talk about this.

This facebook login thing is like you went to the library every day for the same book, but instead of learning its location in the shelf, you ask the librarian and blindly grab the book he points at

Your analogy falls down. URLs are much farther from everyday reality than objects like books. The level of abstraction is different, which is the essential point.
XML has become Java's official internal DSL.
that's too much oversimplification.. moreover there is, if any, a inverse correlation between lines of code and productive output. not so with papers,
Create An Elaborate Plan
Greece Bans Cash Transactions Over 1,500 Euros
I knew some folks who worked at a neighboring school district and while laptops never went home with the children, Remote Desktop screen caps of the sleazy superintendent engaged in affairs with teachers and potential new hires were taken. From the stories I hear, the administration in most PA public school systems is disgustingly corrupt.
Diner Dash 5: Boom Collector's Edition Game Download Free
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I've found that asking people to stop at large events doesn't usually make them stop. Tragedy of the commons style, people justify to themselves that one more person wont break the network.

Of course asking people to stop, explaining why stopping would fix the network problems and stating abusers will get kicked are the correct first step just to let people know what's going on.
"Frameworks such as Grails bring it [Java] to parity with Rails or Django." Apparently the author has never bothered to actually use Rails or Django.
The reason is Apple wants to have control with the App store. Period.

I don't think they pull other Apps just because they consume battery. Crashes also shouldn't be a concern on the iPhone because apps are shielded from each other (or so I would hope).
The Global Debt Bomb
Oh no, a major cyber attack against the US, we'd better call in the experts :

> Michael Chertoff, who played the national security advisor in the exercise

A lawyer

> Stewart Baker played national cyber coordinator

Attorney

> Jamie Gorelick

Attorney

> Frances Townsend

former Counsel to the Attorney General

> Charles F. Wald played Defense secretary

a retired Air Force general

> John Negroponte

Profession Diplomat

> Stephen Friedman

Juris Doctor (i.e. Dr of Law)

> John E. McLaughlin

former Director of Central Intelligence & magician
Clicker Raises Another $11 Million To Become The TV Guide Of Online Video
They certainly did to me. They spammed my Gmail contacts with my RSS feed and Orkut profile picture without my consent; these are separate accounts and I intended to keep them separate. So Google forced my hand on that and I may forgive, but I certainly won't forget that. Similar stories abound. That some of that information is public does not mean I want Google to take advantage of my social network to broadcast it against my will; there's a clear difference here that Google does not want to recognize. This is all about dissemination control by the end user rather than Google.
The studio tends to have these removed from YouTube for copyright infringment. Here's a direct link.

http://www.stargatestudios.net/
And why?

That's the important question, why? To decrease performance or increase performance? The article assumes that it decreases performance, but provides no evidence to back that up.
Or is this a case of Win7 using the available/unused memory for caching kinda like what Linux does?

And, if so, whose bright idea was it to tell the user that this memory was "unavailable" in the task manager?

The whole thing is rather silly. "Operating system X prints this number, while totally different operating system Y prints a much bigger, possibly unrelated number! Everybody panic!"
> So the idea that you can’t do Flash in a mobile browser is just not the case as you can see.

Nobody that I know of has claimed otherwise. The claim is that you wouldn't want to run it because of stability, performance and battery life issues.

> In my opinion Apple do not like Flash and AIR because it is a major threat to revenue from App Store sales.

That's a common opinion, but I don't see how it holds up. If you're talking about free Flash games the obvious competition would be free iPhone games which Apple makes no money off of. If you're talking about ad-supported Flash games then the competition would be ad-supported iPhone games, which Apple makes no money off of.

> The other aspect of Flash that worries Apple is obviously control. They have none over that content. So if someone wanted to produce a strip poker app with full nudity, for example, they could, and have it running full screen on an Apple device.

That's also reaching. They have no control over any webapp you build either, and you could certainly pull off a strip poker game online without flash. You could even use real people.
You should make him an Ubuntu Live CD/USB for home use.
whoever wrote this article hasn't been following windows software news for a long time:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/09/why-does-vista-use-...
This article is mostly a historical rehash with few-to-none specific points highlighting the "Good Parts" of Java. I was ready to read about them, and I personally know there are some very compelling Good Parts to modern Java, but the article didn't address any of them.

He makes vague mentions of the need to debunk Java myths, but doesn't debunk any himself.

He advocates Java on the client side, where apparently "one must acknowledge that somewhere along the line, manipulating a DOM/markup language with a scripting language isn’t the most effective development platform for everything". Love it or hate it, history seems to be disagreeing by sheer volume of numbers. He offers up JavaFX, a platform that is about as obscure as you can get, as an alternative to not only HTML/DOM/js but also Flash. Given that HTML5's tide may already be washing over top of Flash, which is likely orders of magnitude better supported than JavaFX may ever be, this seems like a crazy, almost non-sequitur point to bring up in an article presumably about Java's Good Parts.

Next, highlighting the JVM as a strength of Java feels weak since most of his argument focused on a call to arms to get people to host more dynamic languages on top of the JVM. This is hardly a strength of Java.

Finally, while he mentions that open source really mattered when it came to Java's evolution, if this article had done an actual analysis of any language features itself, it would have had to admit the reality that Java is in many ways falling behind direct competitors like C# -- which is decidedly run in a much more closed than open style by Microsoft. In the face of this, when comparing Good Parts, how is this a strong argument? To me it seems that open sourcing Java at worst just ensured that a language that was on shaky ground continued to survive, at best nudged it forward a notch or two. For an example of how an open process doesn't guarantee rapid progress with respect to Good Parts, just look at the sluggish and fractured deliberation over Java's closure proposals.

Somebody needs to take the title of the article and write the one we all expected when we clicked the link. I expected a meaty homage to Crockford's work.
I have to admit that it took me a little while to figure out exactly how cool the JVM is, and how much of a standalone product it is. Its exciting to see so many languages targeting the JVM and taking advantage of the many years of development and optimization that have gone into the JVM.
I have to say that Eric Schmidt's record on privacy does not inspire confidence.