skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I personally love craigslist's 1996 academic webpage design: very little divergence from browser default styles, minimal positioning, and "font-family: serif;".

The "design elite" DESPISE craigslist. There was a long stretch a few years ago where prominent dimwits were putting up their total redesigns of craigslist just about weekly. There have been multiple organized design contests based around it!
Last two paragraphs:

If you could go back and show my 10-year-old self an iPad — millions of colors, video, photographs, gorgeous typography, a touchscreen interface, networking (wirelessly!) — and offered to let me write web apps for it in exchange for my agreeing never to touch an Apple II again, I’m pretty sure I know what the answer would be.

Something important and valuable is indeed being lost as Apple shifts to this model of computing. But it’s a trade-off, because something new that is important and valuable has been gained.

I'm sure a lot of early audiophile tinkerers would be gobsmacked if someone shoved a Bose system at them through a time portal.

Perhaps our fears of the death of tinkering are like laments about the death of penmanship. Maybe what's essential survives in a different form?
If we were omniscient and could tell who would pay back their credit, and who wouldn't we could do this.

If we're not omniscient, the best we can do is put people in bins: "99% of the people in this bin will pay back their debt in full ...but only 65% of the people in this bin will pay their debt in full".

So...what do we do with people who are in the 65% bin?

Do we cut off ALL of them from access to credit?

Or do we give them access to credit, but at higher interest rates?

Personally, I don't think that someone X who shares demographic traits with someone else Y who will not pay his debt should be punished by lack of access to credit.
The iPad doesn't matter as much as you think it does
And honestly, making the openness of Apple products your raison d'etre is a bit like getting furious about the mechanical details of your favorite brand of dishwasher.

I'd guess Cory's complaint is not specifically that iPads are closed, but that Apple and others are trying to create a future where closed systems are the default, and open systems are either illegal or heavily marginalized. If you accept the premises, that actually is a big deal.

one guy, forcefully advocating an opinion about something that really doesn't matter that much to most people, and that he can't really change.

So, pretty much like nearly any public advocacy of anything.
My top-picks:

1. Dropbox
2. Wufoo
3. Mixpanel
4. Directed Edge
5. Cloudkick
South West Scotland Drumlamford self catering rental cottages
Heroku is categorized as 'Finance' -- is that applicable?
Change scares users. By forcing developers into one consistent UI, Apple has done the correct thing from a user-friendliness standpoint.

* Want a consistent interface? Shut the fuck up and write some code.*

This approach leads to the exact opposite of a consistent UI. Look at desktop Linux.
Most people have been well seasoned just to click through any warnings.

I think the solution is just to allow anyone to install an alternative "unlocked" OS on the device. You'd have to jump through some hoops to do it, but once you did you could do as you pleased (and give up your right to any support from apple). Basically allow jail breaking w/o the need to find an exploit to do it.
I thought April Fools was yesterday.
YES.

Have you been following the kerfuffle behind Other OS yankage?
Thanks for the tip, we just just fixed it, and is now development.
I don't see how it could be interpreted as a joke. I've given up Java because of its verbosity, but anything that reduces it is a win.
The Federal Prosecutor
Subversion has no future as a DVCS tool. Let's just get that out there.

It's fortunate that the developers are smart enough not to go down that road.

The big problem with svn is that the simplicity of the underlying model does not translate into robust features on the front-end. The idea of directories as subdirectories and branches and tags is the result of muddled thinking that will make it impossible for svn to ever have reliable merge tracking. Partial checkouts are a useful feature, but they are not worth botching the architecture so as to make it unusable for basic version control needs like history tracking, diffing and merging.

The idea of an atomic repository with an identifying hash is so powerful, as exemplified by git and other DVCSes, even for mundane development tasks and workflows, that svn is basically a dead-end. They can't fix the situation without breaking backward compatibility, and they can't break backward compatibility without a huge uproar from existing repo administrators.
That's some complex filter you got there, Ethan. Hope you catch something good.
Yes, a monkey can run an organization for 2.5 centuries if they don't have to worry about making money and someone else (i.e. taxpayers) will pay their bills. It's not rocket science.

If you actually think about it, USPS has government granted monopoly on delivering first class mail and somehow they still manage to lose billions.

I completely fail to comprehend how USPS is a success. Could you please explain what is your criteria for success is? For me, success for any organization is when they create value (produce more than they consume).

Again, the programs you have mentioned (Diebold and Blackwater) are actually government run private programs. And I am not surprised that they have failed. Compare this with Google, Apple, Microsoft, Exxon and other businesses where they serve their customers extremely well and has produced billions of dollars of wealth.

Also, if you already accept that government is not able to produce a superior product, why should they be allowed to spend the taxpayer's money? In light of national wiretapping done by Bush administration, I would really question your stance that government will be able to maintain privacy of my emails.
Have you tried running an Android with multiple apps going at once, especially when its memory is close to full?

No multitasking on iPhone is a feature.
That's a 5 year payment plan supervised by a judge, and at its conclusion if your reorganization fails, your debts are resolved. Most reorgs fail.

Even after the BK "reform", the US still has a generous bankruptcy system compared to the EU.
You're not answering the question : where is the win for the tinkerers ?
> You're not even saving any time by going to the dealership and back, plus waiting around. You're certainly not saving any money (I can save $45 changing my oil myself).

Actually, even this has gotten a bit debatable. My dealership has wifi available, so I can take my car in for an oil change and I don't have to take any time off work to do it.
I would like to see the people who design business models that target the kind of people who file bankruptcies multiple times serve some sort of jail term.
Fire appengine datastore queries from javascript on your browser
I expect we'll soon see a news story where a 13 year old makes a game that Apple refuses to put in the App Store because it's too violent for kids.
This would work as long as you can get support if you reflash the "locked" firmware before calling.
<blockquote>... just wanted to point out that the world has had "open" computers for nearly 30 years and so far, I would argue they have not been better for the consumer.</blockquote>

Then again, the world has had open browsers for just a few years, and they kicked off a flurry of innovation on the web - which itself is built on open technologies.

Imagine if Windows web sites would only load on Windows computers.
Guess who benefits from the generosity of the US bankruptcy system? That's right. People on this board, who survive the demise of startup after startup until they manage to start one that lasts and creates hundreds of jobs.

Most startups are on a trajectory towards bankruptcy. That's the point. It's why you can "work very very hard for a couple years and then not work anymore", to paraphrase Graham. Extreme risk.
Hi5 CTO: Zynga Is Mediocre. It Just Discovered An Opening For Spam
Yeah. But it is hard to send local branch to review to other team members when Subversion is used on the project.

We use Savana to add proper branches to Subversion. Tool lacks polishing, but it is helpful. It is simple to use: you can create private branch, sync your private branch with parent branch, and promote your private branch to parent branch ( http://savana.codehaus.org/gettingstarted.html ). It is not a git replacement, of course.
Oh, also, if transportation is a concern, you might have success figuring out a carpool on the mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/sd-hackernews/
Cutting Angels’ Wings
If the iPad were a car, it would be illegal to open the hood.

That's incorrect, if the iPad were a car opening the hood would void the warranty.
Yes human. I summarize articles I find most interesting and would be of interest to the HN community as a whole. As long as I'm up-voted then I'll keep doing it.
How so? Why would the most popular stuff always be the stuff worth reading? That's certainly not true for most media. Do you suppose that the Billboard Top 100 is the music most worth listening to?

Not saying that having an editor pick them out is necessarily going to do a better job, but there's certainly room to do a better job.
Companies that issue no-doc 0-down ARM loans should be forced under. It's hard for me to care that much about the unfairness of the "consumers" in that scenario. The real problem is the vast network of Wall Street arbitrage opportunities that radically incentivized stupid lending.
Why not fix Java to have compile-time checked not-null types? Given that not-null is a strict subset of nullable, it wouldn't break code to annotate the standard library with not-nulls. Then we can avoid these run-time checks entirely.

Oh and while you're about it, please re-parent InterruptedException onto RuntimeException, and make Object's default toString method use reflection to print the contents of all fields in a readable format with recursive toString calls.
"One might conclude that it's doesn't matter if you choose a nice, good-looking, smart etc. person vs another poor choice."

It's more like, as long as you're looking at quality women (that is, you've constrained yourself to all pretty good choices), it doesn't matter very much which specific one you pick.

Some people have a mental model of marriage (much like the one in the original article) in which 99.9% of the effort and return come from picking the exact right person, at which point everything just falls into place. This model is wrong and indeed harmful, as it implies the other person makes the marriage work automatically.

Instead, we say, put in a small amount of effort to make sure you're looking at a set of quality women (so don't pick up Trampy McSkanksalot at the club.) But as long as you're looking at quality women, don't worry too much about getting the exact right one; the more important optimization is how you behave yourself and how you treat her. Only a small percentage of your effort should go into the picking process; most of it should go into making sure you're a quality person and you treat whoever you mutually pick with love and respect and all those other things.

I have a fantastic marriage (to the poster you're responding to). My dad and my father-in-law, who are both very much like me, also have fantastic marriages. Our wives are all very different from each other, but they are all quality women, and we all treat them in the ways Dove originally described. If you swapped our wives' personalities, we'd all still have quality marriages for exactly those same reasons.
I'll contact you.
What tools in particular do you mean? Maybe Objective-J could have similar tools.
That's not what that means. The author assumes that the reader understands that your code must be legal JavaScript. It's an article about coding style, not coding correctness.
It's interesting. When you simplify USPS as essential service, it's fine. But if I take your 'essential service' argument and simplify it even further, I am doing 'gross simplification'.

Please don't even get me started on public education in United States. I would gladly allow 3 more USPS organizations to waste taxpayer's money if they get rid of public schools and adopt a school voucher system.

Please look for 'Stupid in America' show on YouTube and watch it. It will seriously change your opinion about public schools. Also, how many times have you heard people moving to certain district because they have better public schools? Have you ever heard anyone moving to certain district just because they have better grocery store?

I fail to comprehend why you think profit motive is a bad thing. Just like a private school has a profit motive, the customer (parents in case of private schools) have an incentive to get best value for their money and trust me, they will.
Exactly. No one is entitled to more than what is needed for basic necessities (a roof, clothing, and food). Although some of the blame must go to the companies that enabled people to get into this level of debt.
BK Trees Explained
My comment was meant as a sarcasm. Of course both of them are not neutral, its hard to say if one can be truly neutral but at least we expect most journalist/author/reviewer/whatever-you-may-call-them to be somewhat objective in their views when doing reviews. Both Doctorow and Gruber have very polarized views on this subject.

Expecting Gruber (or Doctorow) to have neutral (or even an appearance of neutrality) views is quite silly.

Fan-boys will remain fan-boys and Gruber is a classic example of a fan-boy who will take any criticism of apple or their products, personally.

Yes, even fan-boys can say things against their idol occasionally, doesn't make them any less bias.
I went to public schools. The goal seemed to be keeping young people off the streets while their parents were working while also "creating jobs" for dozens of unionized schoolteachers of varying, often poor quality.

Some government programs accomplish a useful goal, and the USPS is one of these. But many government programs accomplish goals which are orthogonal or counter to their stated, useful purposes.
1) Before iTunes you could buy DRM free music from emusic

3) Before the iPhone App store, you could get applications freely without any problem on the Treo or even on windows mobile...
Thanks man! They're out there, just need to find them :-)
I don't get the whining- jailbreak the damn thing!

It takes five minutes with a single click GUI front end. Are there really that many budding hackers who can't be bothered to google 'program on an ipad'?
The problem is that Gruber is presenting a false dichotomy.

> Something important and valuable is indeed being lost as Apple shifts to this model of computing. But it’s a trade-off, because something new that is important and valuable has been gained.

The trade-off here isn't a "you can't have it both ways" type of decision. It's a business decision by Apple to only allow apps through the AppStore. The iPhone and iPad could be just as user-friendly of devices while remaining open.

[ As a side note: Comparing the 'openness' of the web app angle for the iPad/iPhoneOS is a bit disingenuous, because you need to have hosting ('in the cloud' or not) to deliver such an app. You didn't need to have that 'back in the day' when you were creating BASIC apps on an Apple II. A better solution to 'openness' would be to just charge the $99 for the devkit and allow apps to be installed outside of the AppStore. ]
Very nice and simple. What I really like about it is it gets to the 'just get something started' mentality.

Great work.
very little content for an HN thread so it may be converted into a tweet: OMG, IMVU Memcached @ 150k RPS per node!
No, that would be reasonable. Apple has specifically stated in filings to the Copyright Office that jailbreaking is and should be a criminal act: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/02/apple-says-jailbreaking...
DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine for the past 7 months
The post you replied to (and the parent article) are talking about garnishment, interest, fees, etc when debt is collected upon.

If you ran your credit card up to the limit and did nothing (including doing nothing when you were sued for the debt), you would end up with your wages garnished and proceed to pay far more than $11k, just as I said.
In a lot of cases I would be happy to have the creditors take the loss. The credit card companies are not simply innocent victims. They deliberately try to lend money to people who will have trouble paying it back, because the longer people take to pay back the principal, the more interest they'll pay.

The cases where people incur too much debt even to pay the interest are just instances of the credit card companies' algorithm missing slightly-- like a torturer accidentally killing his victim.
I agree, he could have made a truthful point about that. But he didn't.

Will the iPad battery fail before the useful life of the device expires? I doubt it[1]. But if it does there is a convenient procedure for replacing it. Eventually there will no longer be a procedure, but the device will have passed from "useful" by then.

Look at the numbers: Applecare on an iPad runs from month 13 to month 24 and covers a new battery if required = $99. Battery replacement on an iPad = $99. Apple is not expecting significant numbers of batteries to die in two years. (Or they are and aren't expecting anything else to go wrong.)

it has long been the expectation that users are responsible for changing out batteries

And car users used to be responsible for keeping the water topped up in their batteries. That day passed. In an nice parallel to iPads, my Honda FIT has a tiny sealed battery in a unique size. They worked the mass/volume tradeoff[2] and came up with a completely unique battery. (At least they didn't put a pull cord on the dash or a kick starter on the floor.)

[1] My nearly three year old iPhone is just fine and I can still skip charging at night and get through the second day if I need to. The device is about to be orphaned by iPhone OS 4.0. Given the cost of a phone vanishes in the cost of service the only reason I'll keep it is because I have the original, cheaper, plan in place.

[2] I deleted my section on mass/value/cost/ruggedness tradeoffs of glue/screw, custom/commodity cells, and compartments/torsion box. I've covered that too many times before. I'd still love to read an article comparing a handful of devices that make those decisions different ways. My personal estimation is that using screws and having a replaceable commodity battery would add 50% to the thickness of the device keeping other factors the same. It would still be a cool device, just slightly less so.
I'm about to move from a place with 18Mbit down to a place with 2Mbit down. I expect my use of Netflix Watch It Now to drastically decline.

Mail is only a temporary problem if you define "temporary" as "ten to twenty years". There are plenty of people still stuck on dial-up.

Nobody is going to run fiber ten miles outside of a city of 20,000 people just for me, and apparently the movie studios don't trust me enough to slowly pre-download Watch It Now movies during sleeping hours.
> If the iPad were a car, it would be illegal to open the hood.

It is legal to open the hood, just not to tinker with a limited set of the contents. It's the same in cars nowadays, as I understand it. There are plenty of boxes in cars that are protected by DRM of sorts so that you can't reverse-engineer them. (Well, mostly so that it's illegal for you to reverse-engineer it, not that they have to be very secure from being broken)
Why should your family care?

Another word for closed platform is no virus, no installation, no manual.

That seems to be pretty down someone like my dads alley who love the internet but always have issues with his laptop.
Would you concede your geek card to me, please?
"Most startups are on a trajectory towards bankruptcy. That's the point" Spoken like an irresponsible gambler.

You could utilize:

1.) Savings - Money saved up, maybe used to purchase things, fund companies
2.) Lean startup method - one should bootstrap until a market/user fit is found, while working full time
3.) Scale up when you have the revenue/demand, not until then.

Otherwise, you're just gambling with other people's money. We have enough gambling in this economy as it is. (Goldman Sachs is leveraged 100 to 1)
More accurately, if the iPad were a car, you'd only be able to listen to Apple-approved radio stations.
How easy do you think it is to find a nice, small house that's affordable?

People buy the McMansions because that's what's being built in nice neighborhoods.
The same change-of-address form you're supposed to use when you move would work just fine.
Ad hominem, dude. Ad hominem. “He is a fanboy!”/“He is not neutral!” is a classic ad hominem when not backed up by actual arguments :)
I guess it depends on what we mean by 'opening up the hood.' Sticking to the analogy I would take that to mean cracking open the physical case. Most of the 'black boxes' in a cars engine are also protected with various DRM methods to make it illegal for others to reverse-engineer them (therefore making it so that mechanics have to pay the manufacturer for access to the devices). I would associate those with the actual chips inside of the iPad/iPhone as well as the OS.
Ask HN: Why do automated bank transfers take X "business" days?
I'm fighting with a transfer to an Amazon account from my bank, and it frustrates the hell out of me that it takes "5-7 business days". I initiated the transfer almost a week ago, and it's almost 5pm on a Friday, meaning it probably won't complete until next week.

Ok, I can understand that it has to take a little time, but the "A" in ACH stands for Automated. Why does a computer care whether it's Tuesday at 9am or Sunday at 1130pm? Execute the transfer and mark it complete. Case closed.

It just seems ridiculous to me that automated transfers are restricted by business days/hours, and the overall slow speed in general irritates the crap out of me.
hotmail hack
Reading a comment like this one for the second time in this very thread, it too much reminds me about those folks who really wanted Pandora to be real.

So, hmm. Maybe scientists should start heading for some technology that converts really really hard wishes to reality.
> 3) Before the iPhone App store, the only way you could get an application was through a carrier approved store.

Actually, this isn't true. While it's now much easier for consumers to install software and for developers to get paid from software, the actual process of getting an application on a phone is much harder.

I wrote little cardcounters for poker in highschool to run on my WinMo 5 phone. Compile it with the C# compiler for ARM, and e-mail a little exe to my phone and run it. No fees, license agreements, provisioning profiles, etc. involved.
Why don't you get Todd to do it? Seems more logical to me
How Not to relaunch a website (Pro sports league edition)
I personally find macs virtually unusuable due to the way the interface forces visual clutter all over the display. I can only do one thing at a time anyway (unless I'm listening to music or radio in the background), I'm not sure why I need to see half a dozen things at the same time.
Haiti: CrisisMapping
If I had a government issued email, I probably wouldn't bother checking it, and nor would most people. Judging from the spam the USPS gleefully stuffs into my mailbox every week already I cringe to think what would happen to my email inbox.

The USPS does what it does very well, and any naysayers should try living in a country with an unreliable postal service. That having been said, I wouldn't trust them to do anything innovative. That dog's too old to learn new tricks.
Preventing attacks on a user's history through CSS :visited selectors