skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Package management is really useful for servers, or other systems where there's a bunch of dependencies. Desktop apps hardly need it, and OSX apps in particular don't need it. The combination of the drag-to-applications-folder installing and checking for new updates to the app when you launch it solves the vast majority of this problem for the vast majority of users.
GNOME itself has evolved nicely but the wheels fall off the Ubuntu UI when you start installing applications. If you're careful and only install GTK apps it's bearable but once you mix in QT apps and other non-GTK stuff you have a horrible mix of UIs that lack consistency.
I like it - Ubuntu is supposed to be the "consumer" flavor of Linux, so why should it concentrate on information density over usability?

My mother is the type that would start panicking if her computer looked like Mission Control in Houston, so I think it's great that Ubuntu is freeing up some space and paying real attention to layout, and this includes proper use of whitespace.
The odds of knowing your cousins: 23andme Part 1
The more you change it, though, the less likely you are ever to get it back to a previous set of settings. :( Switch to KDE and back to Gnome in Ubuntu 9.10, and you'll find yourself, bizarrely, with a KDEesque mouse theme, even after you uninstall all the kubuntu-desktop stuff (which should not be necessary, I would expect).

I use Ubuntu because I have the free time to screw around with my home computer, but I wouldn't recommend it for people who don't have the time and knowledge to do that, unless all they ever want to do is use what it comes with out of the box.
I think cover.jpg came from doom9 [1]

I guess robux4 was talking about the old system, which I honestly didn't know existed before you brought it up. If the new system doesn't use the 16 bit format then yeah, it isn't well specified.

[1] http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=388815#post388815
Provisioning is annoying but once you get used to it and setup, it doesn't take that much time. Interface builder doesn't have obvious documentation at first, but once you get used to it it's very quick to work with.

I find the iphone sdk rather obtuse in working with arrays & dictionaries, slicing and dicing strings around and parsing XML with.
> unless all they ever want to do is use what it comes with out of the box.

Most people don't. At the very least, most (non-geek) people don't switch desktop environments often. The people that are 'too busy' will just settle on a desktop environment and stick with it.
Dell did make a serious Ubuntu effort in 2007. They had a fair selection of Ubuntu machines, but they didn't make any money. Other OEMs dropped their plans to sell Ubuntu, and all you can get with Ubuntu from Dell now is a few netbooks.

I bought one when they were brand new (in fact, I'm using it right now). It was not ready for prime time - there were suspend/hibernate problems, among other issues. I could not have recommended it.

That with Dapper Drake. Karmic works a lot better, but it's so bloated that I can barely use it. I had to get rid of GNOME and run fluxbox, and I don't use Firefox anymore because it takes fully half of my RAM (not that that's Ubuntu's fault). But I think regular Ubuntu would be ready for prime time on a faster machine. The only thing really holding it back now is inertia and software compatibility.

But I expect that it will be awhile before OEMs want to try again. Canonical shouldn't have pushed it to OEMs before it was ready.
Playlists and metadata are just a better abstraction than a hierarchy of directories and files for music. Why should anyone care where the data is stored when they just want to hear a playlist?

Of course, control is the reason Apple/MS don't also allow access to the filesystem on these devices.
ArsDigita was a good story about funding killing the company:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArsDigita

Though, another POV suggests that it was the greediness around newfound money:
http://michael.yoon.org/arsdigita
> Why not link to this one: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6368227.pdf

This is a mock patent. It was obtained by an IP lawyer for the exact purpose of demonstrating the absurdity of the state of the patent system in the US.

The legal counsel person in one my previous companies was a close friend of this patent author. That's why I know.
Hmm, maybe linpus (never heard of it, but what a horrible name, makes me think of a wound with purulent discharge) offers a better crapware kickback or something like that.
The activity described isn't hacking... it's just creating an alternate, more efficient interface to the website, to increase their ticket purchasing efficacy.

I wish the article had more details, so I could confirm or refute my suspicion that nothing was "hacked".
Do you think mathematicians should be able to patent formulas too? Some are novel, unobvious and valuable.

The argument, I believe, is that formulas aren't invented, they're discovered. That's why I think it's totally, unequivocally absurd that you can patent genomes. Who invented the human (or any other naturally occurring life form's) genome?

Just because something's not obvious or novel doesn't mean you can patent it. You can't patent music or poetry, no matter how obvious, novel or valuable it is.

At least this example is an implementation detail. That seems more reasonable to me than, for example, UI patents. If someone patents a way to make steel, you are free to make steel any other way you can figure out. The same seems to apply with the implementation detail patents, but with the "multitouch" patent Apple's suing over, it seems that the question of how HTC has implemented the functionality doesn't matter because the patent covers the user interaction. And that makes no sense to me. If it's so genuinely difficult to make, then they can patent the implementation. But patents were meant to cover "the process P which accomplishes B from A", not "any means of accomplishing B starting with A even if totally unrelated to P."
> Moderators can ruthlessly move comments from the "comments" to meta-comments as they see fit.

What about the other direction?
Stuff like this is why it's important for all developers to study computer security. It is possible to create computer systems such that malicious users are unlikely to break into them, even if they have the entire system's source code. For example, look at heavily used open source software.

It seems like a lot of developers write closed source, commercial systems with the assumption that malicious users will never see it.
What? It sounds like they wrote software which automated the buying of tickets on these sites, presumably looking for arbitrage opportunities.

Hardly "hacking," and I have a difficult time understanding how that is at all fraudulent. What am I missing?
I don't see why they can't install crapware on Linux, cut out MS, and cut prices for customers while keeping a bigger cut for themselves.
Link to the actual indictment, which has a lot more information: http://www.justice.gov/usao/nj/press/press/files/pdffiles/Wi...

The indictment has lots of interesting technical details about what they were doing.

Also very interesting and not mentioned in the article is on page 27: 41. It was further part of the conspiracy that, in or about 2008, having damaged the Online Ticket Vendors' ability to distribute Event tickets fairly on a first-come, first-served basis, defendants LOWSON and KIRSCH would establish and operate Renaissance Events Management ("REM"), a company that proposed to sell Event tickets on behalf of artists and venues as a competitor of Online Ticket Vendors.
"Work on the software at home at night, patent it, sell the patent to Apple or Microsoft or another big company for a couple million dollars."

Your employer will usually own the patent then, as part of your invention disclosure agreement. California's the lone state that doesn't let employers claim ownership over inventions done in your own time, but there's a big exception for inventions that relate to the current or forseeable businesses of your employer. If you work for a big tech company, that could be practically anything.
Otherwise, someone would have to make their own fan site for stuff like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Buffy_the_Vampire_Slaye...
Are Crowdsourcing and Outsourcing No-Nos For Startups?
apple is still a small part of the smartphone market.
Tom's Guide Tears Down Apple Macbook Pro as Stale and Outdated
4 formas de adherir valor y construir la lealtad del cliente
Articulos de mercadotecnia, aprende estos 4 pasos para adherir valor y construir la lealtad de tus clientes..
Why is that illegal? Apart from acting against somebody's terms of service and circumventing some protections?

Selling tickets for fixed price is kinda strange idea. They should put up some continuous auction. Maybe that would better reflect the actual value of tickets at different moments in time.
It's just a matter of time before these body scanners are overruled.

Based on what? You have no particular right to get on a plane, nor do you have especially strong privacy rights when passing through an airport.

I am also glad to see people refusing to use them, but am more pleased by the fact that the people running the system are telling those who are opting out that their option is to choose another mode of transportation. Random screening selection and consistent application of policies are a good start for any such system.
Circumventing security measures to make a computer behave in unintended ways sounds pretty close to the definition of hacking, at least the Computer Misuse Act has a definition which is close to that.
Marble Machine 3
Dude, do not argue that software patents are ok because genome is patentable. That's going in the wrong direction.
I bet a big reason as well is all of the games on iPhone, and soon on the iPad, which is a huge market that Steam can't tap into. If iPhone games can be considered essentially Mac games then there has probably been a million percent increase in Mac game development in the last couple years. I'm sure with little work most of these games could be released for the desktop -- Valve could become the store for Mac games. If they have success I'm sure it will push Apple to start offering desktop apps/games on iTunes.
There are a few other comments on here who are surprised by this. How is it really surprising? The two main points:

a. Wire fraud. They probably had some type of fake bank accounts set up or something to launder the money because they knew what they were doing was wrong.

b. The tickets were sold at substantially higher prices than on Ticketmaster. They were able to do this by gaming the system/or cracking the schemes in place (captcha's) to prevent people from doing this.

c. On a lighter note, they named their company Wiseguys Tickets. That's like the Mafia naming themselves Mafia, Inc. - "We Handle The Rough Stuff". A name like Wiseguys Tickets is just asking to be investigated.
That's been a good description of Linux UI since OSX first appeared. Before that, it was an unholy bastardization of Windows.
Collision Watch - visualization of traffic fatalities across the US
Good bye flash
When working correctly, patents allow information that would be a corporate secret to be more openly disclosed. In my career, I've been able to discuss technical details more frankly in blog posts and academic publications because we know that our large, well-funded competitors would not be able to abuse that disclosure to harm our business.

The public good here is hard to measure from the other side, as a reader of those blog posts and papers; if it were not for IP protection, I would not willingly endanger my job or business to discuss the technology so openly.
To be fair, it's not just a linked list. It's a triply linked list. Must be at least 3 times as hard to figure out as a singly linked one...
Shopzilla co-founder discusses how .tel will change the way we communicate
Thanks Eliot.

They say good startup founders improvise and come up with new solutions. I thought this might be something that would work, at least for the short-term.
His example (around minute 12) doesn't sell static over dynamic typing for me. He asserts that using static types makes a program more provably correct but then he doesn't really back this up. In my experience a type system helps avoid mistakes in API calls and (more recently) with refactoring in IDEs. I've never seen an example where a type system makes a program more correct. I suspect we need just as much unit testing in a statically typed language as with a dynamically typed one.

Scala's type system tries to improve on Java's Generics, but in my opinion it makes things worse.

With Scala we end up with a part of the language where library writers use advanced things like covariance and contravariance, and a smaller part of the language for us mere mortals (a similar situation to C++ and Ruby). I'm preferring the Lisp style where the normal developer uses the same tools as a library writer (e.g., first class functions, closures and macros). And as far as implicit conversion, I agree with Dean's assessment that it can easily be too magical. It's necessary because everything is an object along with the static typing.

On the evolving Java front, I'd like to see JVM based languages move farther away from their Java underpinnings. Having interoperation is fine, but I'd like to only use it for third party libraries.

Finally, sounds like Dean is moving away from the everything is an object thinking similar to Rich Hickey. I find this sort of alternate very interesting as I explore functional programming after doing OO most of my career.
You're absolutely right, but as a developer, package management makes a significantly more pleasant experience.

I also really hate how every OSX app has it's own way of doing updates. Even if the OSX makes desktop apps not need dependencies, it would be really nice if I only had one 'update' button to push. As it is, 5 different things want to update practically every day.
I just installed UNR for my mom last night -- she loves it. She said it was "beautiful" and very easy to use.
the current trend of plugging together frameworks and libraries does lead to some pretty boring, frustrating work. And the unfortunate thing is that in many cases they don't even reduce the complexity of the solution. (They certainly don't simplify the /problem/)

There's a fascination with shiny new things and it's tempting to think that the latest and greatest download from some smart guy solves the problem you are solving. But after a couple years working in that manner I'm not so sure.

I think it's tempting to view frameworks and/or libraries as an implementation of software patterns, and also as a way to avoid learning your trade. That's probably not concious thought behind it, but you see it in so many things... if you just learn this framework or use this library, you won't have to learn html, or css, or sockets, or synchronisation, or searching and sorting, or...
Is this an instance where it might be reasonable to create a 'powerful path' and a 'simple path' to support both needs?
Wonder how much of this will happen once Jobs retires.
We've long believed that personalization makes search more relevant and fun.

I can't say I've ever wanted search to be fun. It's a utility - I just need it to work.
The problem isn't "is it a good idea?"

The problem is, "Is math part of the structure of the universe?" Is pi a discovery that is fundamental to the existence of reality, or is it just a useful shorthand for thinking about things we don't understand?

If math is discovered, and algorithms are math, then algorithms can't be patented. You may reject the notion that math is discovered, or that algorithms are math, I disagree.

I'm fine with patenting a specific sequence of instructions on a particular chip, because they're extra fast or something. that's an invention.

You can't patent an electron, or the idea of an electron. You can patent a device for moving an electron around.
This is pretty cool, I've been working on a similar MacRuby app that I use myself. I used to use some AppleScripts for moving windows to a specific position.

The tiling is great, but I would also like to be able to instantly move a single window to a desired position instead of only being able to tile... I'm sure this could be done with a similar interface that tiling has, only available with one selection though. I also really like the dual monitor support.

One thing I think would help would be able to show the keyboard shortcut panel when WindowFlow is activated but hide it when it's gone. Right now it seems that you can either have it showing all the time or not at all, so you have to manually toggle it on and off when WindowFlow is active to see your options.

Also, I believe that "option" should be used instead of "alt" on Macs. I know the key says alt as well, but option is more prominent and it's the standard in the Apple world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Option_key

Hope this helps, I'll use it for a while and see if I can get used to it. The selection interface does seem a bit awkward at first for me.

I was thinking you could do something with selection of the first 9 applications with number keys, similar to how TextMate does it, but that conflicts with the shortcuts for tiling. It's an idea anyway, I don't know if you could figure out a way to make that kind of thing work...
None of those definitions obviously apply, why bother listing them?

If you stretch the fifth definition to include Apple, then you would brand any company trying to enforce any patent against anybody a patent troll.
By the way, you forget that the purpose of patents is not to allow you to get rich, it is to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". The relevant question is if you think progress of science is promoted by the current system, or if progress is hampered because software patent litigation puts a damper on it?

The multitouch patent, for example: Do you think Apple wouldn't have bothered with the iPhone if they couldn't patent their "invention" (which wasn't theirs either, but that's a different issue)? In that case, the patent has promoted progress. But it's sure standing in the way for ubiquitous competition and rollout of touch devices now.
I'm using the Droid Sans font for the UI. It's a great improvement in conciseness and should be the default interface font.

Here's a good argument as to why it shouldn't:

http://troy-sobotka.blogspot.com/2008/07/why-droid-isnt-answ...
Excellent news. The screenshots heavily imply to me that they've ported the HL2 engine (and HL2, portal, TF2, L4D) to OSX.

I haven't had a windows machine at home for several years, because of that, I shifted most of my gaming to consoles. If they port to OSX, I would likely buy my valve games on OSX.
"including computer code that was intended to defeat security measures that online ticket vendors put in place to prevent automated ticket purchasing"

That just describes a bot...
Maybe I just remember it differently because at the time I was using Linux and always looking for ways to deal with everyone else who used Office and/or Exchange, but IMO the "New Apple == Old Microsoft" comparison is way off base.

Apple is easy to avoid, trivial even, you can buy one of many other music players, buy other phones and use other media managers. You don't need to use any Apple product unless you opt-in to their system (buying a device) and even if you do opt-in, if you buy DRM-free tracks (which Apple pushed for, btw) you can leave iTunes any time you want if you buy a non-Apple device (the only exception being video which is still DRM-laden AFAIK).

Old Microsoft was impossible to avoid because government and businesses opted you in, and you couldn't opt-out no matter how hard you tried if you wanted to interact with those systems. Word documents were difficult or impossible to reverse engineer and MS did what it could to prevent any advancement in that area, and Exchange was nearly impossible to interface with (it's still problematic) if you weren't using Outlook.

I mean, it's not like government and businesses are using iTunes and thereby forcing people to buy Apple products to interact with the corporate iTunes system (as was the case with old Microsoft, Exchange and Office).

Besides, Apple is certainly behaving badly, granted, but in this case they aren't even pressuring the labels to stop doing business with Amazon, they're pressuring them to stop giving Amazon a day of exclusivity. The Old Microsoft way was to threaten to cut off vendors just for competing, not for giving a competitor an advantage.
Interesting, I always thought reCAPTCHA randomly combined words for each instance. These guys were able to get around it because each CAPTCHA has an id. Have some people from mechanical turk build a database of responses and you're set.

Assigning a non-unique id to CAPTCHAs that are reused kind of defeats the purpose I guess.
>The legal system is there to figure out if a patent is absurd

If the legal system was free and fast, you would have a point. However, the legal system is expensive and slow. A system where a patent as clearly absurd as this one can survive to the point of requiring a legal challenge to be overturned is simply unacceptable.
I kinda thought the same thing when I read this. I guess the fraud was that they intentionally went to great lengths to make it look like individuals were buying the tickets instead of a single company.
The original website was posted on HN a while ago.
On the surface, this looks ridiculous.

I don't see how this is a criminal suit and not a civil suit. What they did was clearly against the wishes and TOS of TicketMaster, the MLB, and others. But criminal? Hardly.

They found a way to buy tickets better than the rest of us.

Why the government is pursuing criminal charges on behest of TicketMaster and Co. baffles me.

This isn't an industry, and these aren't companies, that I think need a lot of protection from Uncle Sam.
I agree.

I don't know why they didn't just charge them for a million counts of scalping, which I'm sure could put them in jail for quite a long time.
But remember that even Ubuntu has many different official flavors already. I really don't think they are selling out, they are just putting on a new face, and frankly, it's just a cleaner face.
Except in the cases that they have lossless copies from the artist, it's all transcoded crap, mostly from crappy MP3s.

Wikipedia's also a big user, and their stuff is almost exclusively transcoded from other lossy codecs, because they care more about their self-righteousness than worldly concerns like passable quality, much less the ability for any of their users to decode it.
Ugh, why does almost every paragraph end in "xxx said"? Dull reporting.