skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Supposedly, with Android you are free to install software from arbitrary sources ...

Certainly. Go to Settings -> Security and tick "Unknown sources" option.

> With Android devices there is a distinction between “rooted” and “unrooted” devices, which sounds suspiciously similar to “jailbroken” and “unjailbroken”.

Sounds like it, sure. But as majority of top Android manufacturers have an official page [1][2][3][4][5] describing how to unlock their bootloaders so arbitrary OS can be installed, that similarity disappears.

> With a PC, I don't have to perform some arcane operation to actually have control of the device.

Ask your average PC user how to install a different OS, or even how to re-install the same OS and you'll soon find, the process is "arcane" on all platforms. Also note that I found all the official links I listed, to unlocking various android phones, in 5 minutes.

> Moreover, it seems to be common to discriminate against people who have the gall to “root” their device, or to disable some functionality of the device if such “rooting” is performed.

Nothing stops a PC app developer to put in checks on what ISP you're connected to for example or whether your user has root access. I use Cyanogenmod on my phone and not one app so far has discriminated against me having root access. Point is that it's very uncommon.

> I believe there are even online banking applications which reserve the right, in their terms, to detect if a device is “rooted” and refuse to operate on them.

Yes, they are the developers and they set the terms. There are also banks whose websites simply reject a particular browser by name, not because it lacks a certain functionality.

[1]: http://www.htcdev.com/bootloader

[2]: http://developer.sonymobile.com/unlockbootloader/unlock-your...

[3]: http://developer.lge.com/resource/mobile/RetrieveBootloader....

[4]: https://motorola-global-portal.custhelp.com/app/standalone/b...
Well it's perhaps not ridiculous to consider user experience and functionality as large factors in the capability of a device operation system is it?

But I was more interested in what made you think that Maemo was more capable that iOS (i.e. what do you think it did better than iOS)?
You mean terabyte, right?
Much respect to anyone addressing the huge student-loan debt crisis.
Chegg aren't doing anything to help out students sell their books?
This is an awful article. It's written assuming you agree with the author already.
Microsoft Careers Site Was Vulnerable to Attack
Amusingly, I'm in the reverse situation: loving working in Haskell and reeally want to try Rust but I just don't have the time.

For what it's worth, Haskell can be compiled to code that's quite fast. Somewhat unfortunately, the difference between GHC's vanilla output and its speed-optimized output can be quite vast, which I think gives the impression that the language or a given program is necessarily slow.
Care to provide some examples of iOS Viruses and exploits that install themselves and are un-removable due to restricted user experience? I have never seen any of those before.
What do you mean about promotion rules with auto?
Yes, that's exactly right. Ballmer wanted to react to Google's Motorola acquisition and Nokia got a good deal out of it. Ballmer was heavily criticized (by the board no less) and the acquisition was mostly a write-off [1]. Compare this to Google's Motorola acquisition, it's clear that Nokia was a bad buy and Elop netted the company the most amount of money possible so all in all a good outcome for Nokia. As per Don Harrison, head of M&A at Google: [2]

> I think the Motorola transaction has been a success for us. Financially, we bought the asset for $12.5 billion. It had $3 billion in cash; we were able to sell the Home division for $2.5 billion; we ended selling the handset division for $3 billion. There were some other tax assets as well. When you work through the math, you realize we spent between $2.5 billion and $3.5 billion for the patent assets. At the time, the nearest comparable transaction was the Nortel patent auction where Microsoft and Apple teamed up to buy that asset for $4.5 billion. And there’s a good argument that the Motorola patent portfolio is a better portfolio.

Which is why the INSEAD article seems so off base.

[1]: http://www.businessinsider.com/satya-nadella-just-undid-stev...
[2]: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2014/02/12/a-peek-at-googles-ma-...
I think it would be hard in practice to allow root access but limit it to people who know what they are doing and understand the risk. People will follow arbitrary instructions to modify settings and enter commands (that they don't understand) for the most trivial things and from the most untrusted groups (for example: to install pirated software, to customise their user interface, etc.), and will merrily click past every warning without reading it.

As a result, there will be more malware if you even make enabling root access an option. It isn't surprising that Apple and others are happy just not catering to that small segment of the market.
Good argument, except: On Android, currently, we have 3 completely separate "App with no permissions" to "Full bootloader unlock" exploit chains. (in 5.1)

Malicious people always find a way to abuse your system.

Restricting freedom for security means you will get neither.
The character of Mozart in Amadeus is more frivolous, more alcoholic and more undisciplined than the real Mozart could have been, given his extraordinary compositional output over such a short lifespan. But the film also shows Mozart taking his art incredibly seriously and with a sense of great dignity. He's determined to make time for working very hard (even as he lays dying in bed), and fights movingly and eloquently for the commission of works he passionately wants to create. And that passion is shown to be driven by a need to express vital things about the human condition, with all its weaknesses and sense of fun and as well as its sublimity. He's not just a buffoon, the character has real depth.

The real Mozart on the other hand, as we know him from his letters, did have a penchant for the vulgar, for the irreverent, for scatalogical humor, for good booze, for pretty ladies, and all the rest of it. Of course that's just one side of him.

Young musicians aren't so incredibly stupid as to be "harmed" by Amadeus – it's clearly entertainment. One of its messages is that you can dedicate yourself absolutely to the development of your art while retaining a sense of playfulness. Another message is simply that this music is incredibly rich and exciting and profound, music you can explore for a lifetime.
I've never actually owned a smartphone. Well.. that's not true. I had one of the first internet connected phones (I think) back in 2001. I used the internet like 10 time on it. It was (as you can imagine) pretty horrible.

Fast forward to now. I don't want the internet at all times. I don't want a $100 a month phone bill. I don't want a $500 device that can fall in the toilet. And most especially, I can't abide little tiny screens. I have $12 Nokia flip phone. My monthly phone bill is less than $25 on pay by minutes. I also have an internet phone at home which costs maybe $30 a year or so and I use for most outgoing calls.

I look at everyone, (including my GF who couldn't live without her smartphone) and wonder what it is I don't get. Sure, mobile net could come in handy at times. So I went and got a nexus 7. It hasn't been powered up in 6 months and that was just to make sure a web app I was working on displayed correctly. I'm a tech guy. Not a Luddite (I don't think). But I just really can't stand smartphones for some reason. All that poking at a little tiny screen... when I have a keyboard and 2 27" inch monitors in the next room along with a couple of laptops. A spiral notebook at the cost of 33 cents works really well for keeping shopping lists and notes. And the form factor is a lot better too. I guess I'm getting old. I just don't get it.
If I could choose between a touch-only sleek smartphone and modernised version of N95 with all its original features, I'd definitely go with the N95.
If you do the math, becoming an entrepreneur is insane
Not really; it seems like it's for getting people within a neighbourhood to get to know each other. And, apparently, racial profiling (http://fusion.net/story/106341/nextdoor-the-social-network-f...).
The researcher programmer, a new species? (2012)
To be precise, the film is based on a stage play and character portrayal came from it, too. The theme of genius vs mere human can be traced back further, to Pushkin's short play "Mozart and Salieri" in 1830 [1].

But I agree that the movie is so good that many people would take it as "based on true story".

[1] https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/p/pushkin/aleksandr/p98mo/
The point about it being almost exclusively a consumption device might be, in a way, extreme but not at all silly.

" It's a messaging device, a photo and video taking device, it's great for email, I record audio for my college classes on it etc."
Majority of what you are referring to as productive tasks are merely the users consuming various services on offer. Although they are useful devices, I agree with the opinion that any significant production work is rarely performed on them. If anything the we subject ourselves to unnecessary consumption more than increasing our productivity.
Yes, but Nokia had a big head start with Maemo/Meego but they were playing with it for too long without focus while the Symbian people treated Maemo as a toy

They had the n800 6 months before the iPhone
Vulnerability Spotlight: Libgraphite Font Processing Vulnerabilities
Founded for the Poor, Mass General Looks to the Wealthy
I always find fantastic how these kinds of arguments can be made blatantly ignoring that they basically are a plea for authoritarian governments.

Do you realize how bad basic freedoms are? Most people are better off without them, because many would harm themselves. And can you imagine the gains if instead of letting people speak for themselves, we has a single entity vetting everyone's discourse? Man, dictatorship is so great, so efficient.
The "problem" would be the number of high profile projects on GitHub.com vs GitLab.com - a subtle but important difference, I think.
And now compare it to OS X installations. Or Linux. A platform that doesn't have a rampant malware problem and still isn't completely locked down.

We managed to somehow survive 30 years of unprecedented innovation and computer usage and NOW we suddenly need locked down devices where a single company decides which applications may be used on them and can forbid and innovative competition at will?

Why would you defend that?
Cool :D One command and POOF :) Simplicity is the best <3
It couldn't be much more kafkaesque, could it?
You can emulate Android on a PC :)
Just because you won't outrun your chain, doesn't mean you're not a slave. Maybe a happy one, but still a slave nonetheless.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2016-1...
The system used by Chegg is almost the same as the one used by Bookstores and Retail stores. DustyBooks focuses on facilitating transactions between students themselves without any third party involved
And yet, look at this blog post from 2 days ago: https://github.com/blog/2110-migrate-your-code-with-the-gith... still offering to migrate your existing SVN or Mercurial repositories to GitHub, without any mention of all the other data that are typical of a software project like issues. Should I migrate my Trac or Bitbucket issues manually to GitHub?
> "Guys, great software, but can't I just buy it and run it on my own hardware without having to trust you with all my data?"

More importantly: "Guys, great software, but how am I supposed to use this
after you go out of business?"
No problem: http://blog.binamuse.com/2014/09/coregraphics-memory-corrupt...

If you got an older iPhone, it's best not to open random PDFs anymore.
Is it 2008 again? Small, efficient cars work just fine for a lot of people for most day-to-day tasks, not everybody wants to drive a truck all of the time.

If we talk education OK, but things have gotten much better since the iPhone/iPad first came out: you can buy your kids a Raspberry Pi Zero for $5 (a $5 truck!) and plug it into an old TV so they can start exploring the endless possibilities of a mostly open general purpose computing device - seriously, how cool is that?!

That said, programming isn't the only creative thing you can do with a computer - e.g. iMovie on iOS was great the last time I used it, I also learned to play my first piano songs on the keyboard with Garageband (on my phone)!
Exactly. When I started SageMath in 2004, by design it built heavily on Pari, Maxima, GAP, Singular, etc., which were all started in the 1990s (or earlier).
It leaves you in control. You can do anything with the OS, install anything, develop anything for it. Without an iTunes/Google/MS account. It's not limited to some proprietary connection over USB. There are so many things... As it is, no need to "jailbreak" it or something.

Obviously it's not as fast, user-friendly, or easy to develop for.
Or get bought out by one of the corporate behemoths and killed off in 18 months.
"SSRN's Data Integrity System has observed an unusual download pattern
either from this computer's IP address or for this paper.

As part of SSRN's commitment to quality data, SSRN's Manager of Data Integrity investigates unusual download patterns to minimize system problems and identify attempts to corrupt or manipulate download statistics.
"
Int underflow in the ProcessCommandsInternal function in dec/decode.c in Brotli
Vote Trump, get a despot - have Americans live with the consequencies of locked down technology, surveillance.
The difference is that you purposefully opt-in to a smartphone, but can't opt-in (at least, not on an individual basis) to a regime. Would a totalitarian state be as objectionable if people had to chose to move there, and could leave as easily as one can change phones?
IIRC N9 was banned from being sold in US/UK/Germany etc., all major markets in order to justify killing off Meego later in favor of WP. I remember Germans had to order it in Switzerland. It was clear Elop was playing politics by doing gradual phase out of everything that was Nokia in favor of MS, i.e. first restrict Meego to an unwanted child (yet they still sold more N9s than Lumias with WP7 so that part didn't work out), stop future development, make own factories redundant and later justifying selling off Qt as the only internal platform capable of challenging MS. Please remove your rose tinted glasses, this was a pre-mediated and carefully executed destruction of Nokia.
We don't remove the possibility of open hardware either, there are options for partially or completely open smartphones (as a quick web search will attest) but the most popular products sold by Samsung, Apple, et al. are not.

Equally, as for free speech, there are options for completely uncensored speech (although fewer than you think, and even then if you say certain things you'd better hope they can't be traced back to you or have an escape plan) but the most popular ways of communicating (whether online or off) are also locked down to a significant extent.

So it's not actually much different for speech vs. access to devices. Feel free to argue for anarchy if that's what you want, but let's not pretend that smartphones represent a special and particularly nefarious restriction of important freedoms.
Yeah, I heard the infightings between Maemo/MeeGo and Symbian teams weren't very nice...
Interesting. Thanks.

This looks like it's from a very functional (FP) view of the world. I like a lot that's here, but I fear it will make my OOP friends' heads explode.

Also, as a nit, the essay feels a bit on the "thrashing" side. I know when I'm trying to express complex concepts many times I will hit the same topic a few different times from multiple angles until I get something that's tight. This essay feels like on of those attempts -- nothing here to throw rocks at; it just doesn't feel "done" yet.
More like "Henry Ford is my favorite growth hacker"
Reiner Stach is probably the best to ever write about Kafka, and if you have any interest in him then the biography set is worth reading ASAP. Unbelievable scholarship and perspective.
In some ways I agree but it's mostly a pervasive error in perception. Often smartphones are over-marketed as productivity enhancing devices, and that somehow smartphones and tablets are making PCs obsolete.

I see them as overpriced for what they provide and I agree with him that a lot of the power available in a smartphone's hardware goes under-used.
Not only isn't this relivant it isn't even true or at least very misleading.

Apple patches the newests version of iOS. Sometimes older versions get a security update here or there, maybe. So you'd have to be running the latest version of you want security fixes. Which isn't always possible due to compatibility or performance/stability.

If your iPhone is 3 or more years old you can forget any support from Apple whatsoever.
Your entire argument is focusing on the micro, not the macro. Buying a house is an investment for the person who did it. But if the person you buy from turns around and spends the money on consumption, there is no net investment. One person shifted to investment, another shifted to consumption, the macro effect is zero.

A net investment in houses would involve more housing being owned than before. This would require more houses to be built, and this in turn would require people a shift of workers/materials/etc from other uses into housing construction. Present day consumption goes down in return for an increase in future consumption.

The result is that in the future, productive capacity has increased and more housing is available to consume.

If you want to see the result of a lack of real investment, look at SF. All sorts of games being played with money, but nominally wealthy people can't even afford a flat without roommates.

But as I keep trying to tell you, consumption is the motor of capitalism. It is the demand part of supply and demand. Without consumption, there is no production. And production is what creates all the wealth. Everybody would be poorer.

Why don't you explain the mechanism by which this occurs in real terms? I'm pretty sure you've wildly misunderstood Keynesian economics and are conflating the Keynesian cure for prideful workers (which we don't have now - full employment) for some sort of general growth prescription.
> Phones are unique devices in generally requiring you to buy new hardware after 2 or 3 years if you want up-to-date software.

That's totally software's fault. I find it kinda hilarious that my sister is looking for a new smartphone because her few years old Samsung is laggy while all she does is chatting with friends and watching their pics - things people did on dog slow PCs from the '90s.
Almost every app (and many games) being made nowadays are thin clients making api calls where all the work is done on the server.

I don't like it. I like having games from decades ago and still being able to play them long after the companies are dead and its employees working on other things.

On my own time I try to come up with software that can run entirely without the need to communicate with servers, or even without internet access.

The only problem with that is the software becomes that much easier to pirate, but oh well, I guess. I care more about the longevity of my work for my personal projects than whether or not I'm going to make the megabucks with them.

And honestly, for a few games I've worked on for companies in the past, pirates are the only thing keeping those games accessible at all.
The argument is "it's an allowable trade off for a hardware product to be locked down and for consumers to decide whether they still want to buy it given the restrictions" not "all hardware must be locked down and all software approved by corporations/government"- the latter is clearly not OK.
Raspberry Pi 3 Model B in Feb/Mar
First Week of Supply Chain Course Is Already Getting the World Naked
They are spears pointing to the vulnerable places to killing the uro? nape and two zones of the belly. Other pictures of the same series could be interpreted also as traps, and with a little of imagination, even pools of blood under both uros.
React, Automatic Redux Providers, and Replicators
>Code that takes a full structure when it only needs to operate on a part of the structure is badly designed.

No, it is not; this is done all the time with methods and it improves encapsulation - you may not want your clients to be able to decompose your data structures. Do you really mark every member of your data structures as pub??

Sorry but this is a poor ad-hoc defense of an actual annoyance in the borrow-checker.
Hopefully, he has--cough--written paragraphs that are easy to delete, not easy to modify. Ha. Ha. Ha.

But seriously, this general idea strikes me as being applicable to writing words as well. Write in such a decoupled way that it is relatively easy to excise paragraphs and sections without destroying the rest of the piece.

That may introduce a small amount of redundancy, but it also makes it easy to read in smaller chunks, reorder, or remove outright rather than edit portions that no longer fit.
Well, the last Symbian devices weren't supposed to be locked down. Heck, there's even the Delight fork.

http://n8delight.blogspot.co.uk/

At the time of PW 808 the OS was on the level of iOS, but nobody cared then, not even Nokia (the 808 wasn't really advertised, and was hard to get...).
I think there's a general tend towards things being more functional these days, where possible, even in OOP languages. Since lambdas were added to Java, I know my code style has dramatically changed.
Is Productized Consulting *Really* a Good Fit for Your Business?
> When you look at all those apps people install, like 5 different IM apps, 5 social network apps, 10 games, 5 productivity apps... like what the hell?

I agree, this is so wrong, broken. It shouldn't be like that.
neat bug, although only the iPhone 4 and earlier would be unpatchable for it, and those devices are pretty much stuffed from a security standpoint anyway as they're vulnerable to the old DFU mode jailbreaks...

I was kind of thinking more of examples of malware where people were actually using the lockdown of the OS to stop users removing it, but hey I said exploits and that's an exploit.
Ask HN: What is the coolest app/website about POLITICS you have ever seen?
I am especially interested in applications that improve transparency and representativeness. Indications about projects related to big data and gamification within politics would also be welcome.
I'm not sure why distaste in x86 suggests one prefers pre-computing environments unless you really internalize x86 as computing, which many people don't.
I don't. I find them of little interest and debatable taste. Alongside pomelo it's one of the fruits I like least (of those I've eaten, I won't pretend an encyclopedic knowledge of fruits and there are many fruits I haven't tried yet, durian being pretty high on that list)