skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They knew it belonged to Apple.

They paid someone in order to obtain property that didn't belong to the seller.

They expose and mock the poor sod that lost it.

An extremely poor performance on Gizmodo's part. I appreciate their excitement at the discovery of this phone, but they really should _not_ have paid for the damn thing and they should have returned it voluntarily by now -- it's what honest people do.

As for "at least doing the right thing"; they don't deserve any credit for this, since they are _obligated_ to return it. It doesn't belong to them. In fact it could be easily described as receiving stolen property, since they knowingly bought something that belonged to Apple.

Gawker are a pretty sleazy mob as far as I can see.
The problem is that it keeps using an IP address after the lease has run out and the address may have been given out to another device. The difference between universities that see this problem and those that don't is probably that the latter assign the addresses for WLAN clients from a large pool (try 10.0.0.0/8) that allows them to keep the association between mac address and IP address for the whole term or even longer.
> it might not take long for Adobe to update CS5 and all those developers could have 4G ready high-res apps in less time than it takes an Objective-C developers to fire up Photoshop.

Right, because Adobe has always been known for the speed and quality of its updates, especially on the Mac platform.
From my understanding, the iPad continues to use the IP address after the DHCP lease is expired, which could cause other clients assigned that address to be confused.
There are two big problems with all this fretting over Gray:

1) Um, he was allowed to leave the Infinite Loop campus (or wherever he works) with the phone -- indeed, was presumably supposed to. The risks of accidental lossage are a calculated risk that Apple took a long time ago.

2) Is there any indication whatsoever that his mojo at Apple has been harmed? If it has, that speaks far worse of Apple than it does of him.
Just looked at the speaker list... Maybe they should change the name to "Big NYC."
Other things being equal, I bet smarter and/or harder-working kids end up at private schools. So I'd expect the "grade inflation" (I hate that term * ) effect to be amplified there.

* I hate the term because it is so often used as if to imply that if the students at a university do too well, the explanation cannot be the merit of the students, but that the courses are necessarily too easy. If getting 95% on an exam represents a high level of learning/knowledge/work, and all of the students score 95%, they should all get A's. Professors sometimes attempt to combat "grade inflation" by giving ridiculously hard exams (coughAndrew Ngcough), but IMO all this does is bring to the fore uninteresting factors like how well one performs under time pressure, or how quickly one can perform arithmetic, or whether one has a photographic memory.
I don't understand what you are trying to say. Will today's apps magically support the features of tomorrow's phones, just by using Apples SDK? Like even if it has no awareness of a camera, suddenly buttons for two cameras appear out of nowhere? That doesn't seem to make much sense to me.

Typically, you'd use the technology that supports the things you want to do. If you want to program a 3d shooter, at the time being you wouldn't choose HTML 5 as the underlying technology. For a Twitter client HTML 5 might be preferable to OpenGL. Likewise, if your app needs a camera, you'd pick a framework that supports a camera.

Also, even if you don't use the Apple SDK, you would still have to use the Apple API, so you would still get all the benefits of the Apple UI anyway.
I'm not in the US. I'm in Brazil. You cannot go into a reputable store here and find other players. Perhaps if you are really determined to buy non-Apple and are willing to spend a couple of hours looking you might find something but probably it will be no more than a memory stick that can play mp3s.

You might go to on street vendors who import a variety of cheap and mostly low quality iPod clones directly from Hong Kong.

I don't remember it being very different in Australia and a couple of European countries I've been to, but I might have been blinded by my fanboyism. :-)
502 bad gateway:

1) Check that your Mongrel is still running. If not, restart it.

1b) #1 could be done automatically by e.g. "god" monitoring software or monit.

2) Add a configuration setting in Nginx which will give people a better error message if this happens again. error_page 502 503 504 /50x.html; You can customize 50x.html as much as you wish.

3) See my upcoming blog post about preventing downtime as a solo entrepreneur.
If you don't inflate your price substantially above your own cost, you can't afford a marketing budget, which makes it more difficult to grow additional customers.
Game Theory at work!
No, there's a point to doing the unnatural thing of, "Keep working on it till you're sure you got it right."
Any Jewelery
Sorry if this is too meta but:

I usually think the wikipedia.org items on HN are just a silly waste of time (e.g, not news) but I do have to admit that this one got me. Neat algorithm. Hadn't heard of it prior and wouldn't have thought of it spontaneously.
Nice and clean tool...
really a big plus for freelancers discussion UI wire-frames with clients.
Avoid isolation

This is an increasingly murky notion to me re: the web.

At any other time in history [1] sitting alone in your room reading something would have been a solitary task without question. There was a social component insofar as you were interacting with an author, but since that's one-way communication (read-only medium) it was still clearly distinct from social activities.

Fast forward to now when the thing your reading and writing is near-instantaneous updates to/from other reader-writers like you and this phenomenon is looking sufficiently different from traditional at-home reading as to defy most meaningful distinctions between introverted and extroverted activity. "But that's only text, you're not talking to people and seeing them like in real life." C'mon, I'm in an ambient Skype call with my girlfriend right now. We leave the thing on for hours at a time - yes, it's a way to cope with long-distance but also interesting because of how similar it really is to hanging out in the same room. "But you still can't feel or taste each other." No rebuttal... (and I'm still waiting on that Linux driver for my smell-o-vision).

[1] Although it's so easy to think that your moment in history is unique. There are at least definite parallels between what's happening now with the web and past revolutions in publishing and communications, including the printing press, telephone, radio and television.
One advantage the original design has is its low cost of ink. Just look at SquareSpace's redesigns and those huge blocks of black, red, and blue. Just trying to eye it, I would estimate anywhere from an 800% to 1000% increase in ink. Multiply that with the enormous amount of tickets printed, and that's a lot of ink....and a lot of money.

Yes, they are prettier, easier to use, but I'd be interested to see a design effort with this additional parameter of saving cost on ink or paper.

Notice how, while Virgin America does seem to be printing a lot of colors on the backside of their tickets, their ticket size is about half the size of standard tickets, thus, saving money on paper stock.

Edit: looks like some of the updates from other designers have addressed a more minimal use of ink. I think the Wallet Size one in particular wins for me. There's just no convenient place to carry standard-size tickets.
No, they would not fire him then, without knowing what happened to the phone, because of the possibility he'd be needed to get the phone back.
Are you asking why Apple allows the same stuff you can find in a Barnes & Nobles but refuses to allow porn?

Maybe Steve does the B&N test?
>Professors sometimes attempt to combat "grade inflation" by giving ridiculously hard exams (coughAndrew Ngcough), but IMO all this does is bring to the fore uninteresting factors

Agreed. I am not a fan of the testing strategy where the average is a whopping 30% and a curve is used to bring scores back within the normal letter grade buckets. Testing relative performance at this level encourages students to study exclusively "to the test". It reaches the point where gaining inside knowledge about the possible contents of the next exam by hounding professors/TA's or analyzing a friend's exams from last semester takes precedence over comprehensive learning, since the difference between a C and an A can be as tiny as predicting the presence of one particular question and nailing it from rote memorization. Such a deep curve also discourages students from studying collaboratively, since getting a good grade relies on X other students getting a worse score.
Has anyone heard if Gray is going to continue working at Apple?
RIP Gray Powell
If the rumours are to be believed then that advantage will disappear this summer. The iPhone already comes with two different CPU speeds and soon it will have two different resolutions, so any advantage on that front is rapidly disappearing.
Jeff Atwood has stated in podcasts that one of the goals of Stack Exchange was to kill phpbb and its ilk.

e.g. http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/03/podcast-85/
The guy who originally devised the algorithm is a professor at the University of Guelph, in Ontario, Canada. He's a pretty interesting professor - escaped from being drafted into the Polish army during World War II, wrote some of TCP at Stanford in the 70's, somehow ended up teaching networking, operating systems, and some other random subjects in an off-the-beaten-path Canadian school that's mostly known for farming.

I'm a student there; it's neat to see an article about his creation pop up. :)
Ask HN: SOAP vs REST, which one do you prefer working with ?
We are looking forward to build a web service and would like to know which architecture HNers liked most. How hard would it be to implement both SOAP and REST ? Is there any framework that implements both "protocols" (for lack of a better word) seamlessly ?
A brief history of past Apple leaks, and what Apple did about them.
I've honestly never had a problem with a boarding pass - regardless of the format it's pretty easy to decipher.

His boarding pass is flawed in a number of ways

- It lists a time - is that the boarding time or time the flight is due to depart? (The one linked below has got this covered though)

- The time is stated in 12 hour clock format. Every single time you find in an airport is listed in the 24h format - the quickest way to hunt for your flight in my experience on the boards is to first find the time as that's what they're ordered by

- A lot of flights have 4 numbers - I'm not sure he could fit 4 in the tear off strip

- These days, most people print their boarding pass at home. I'd be really annoyed if this is what I was presented with, it's a colossal waste of ink and if (as I do) you have B&W printer, the contrast is not great

- His last design is frankly laughable. He shows a map of the States with JFK -> SEA. The JFK is on the left and SEA is on the right... doh

- He has not included anywhere the airport terminal of either departure or destination airport. It's a good sanity check when you get to the airport (if you've printed your own boarding pass) and also it's a good sanity check when you arrive at the airport and you then need to get a connecting flight - you remember which terminal you're in and the need to change
Some people here think this is about coding without testing. No, it's an example of thinking through before testing, about the kind of thinking that's separate from testing. It's not meant as an example of what all programming is about, but a probe of an aspect of programming. So why.

Is it okay to write down a guess, then look at it with edge cases in mind, fix and iterate? I think sketching is okay for this exercise as long as you follow through and finish.

The difference is that sketching doesn't tell you what the bugs are. Whereas testing can tell you specifically. One's an aid to thought and the other's... an alternative, to be neutral about it.

A couple people have described case analysis like simulating tests in your head. I hope they actually use more principled thinking than they're letting on.

Iterative coding breaks into two cases: either the task is subjective/aesthetic, like an interaction or layout problem, or it really is an exact task but you don't have it clear in your mind. Everybody recognizes the value of iterating on a fuzzy problem, put that aside. The question is, if it's an exact problem but you don't understand it well, then will test-writing clarify or obscure things?

Sometimes I iteratively write and run or test a program until I get to a point where I say, "Okay, now do I understand what this is about? Can I explain it thoroughly in full sentences?" Even so I'm sure I've fooled myself with tests.

In real world coding, you aren't given small problems. That doesn't mean small problems are poor examples. Obviously we should break big problems into as small and comprehensible problems as possible. Testing doesn't do that (although it could make incentives).

Not to mention the fact that there's no such thing as a complete test for a program with an infinite set of possible inputs. You can test for what seem to be the kinds of bugs the program could have.

The unstated assumption of many here is that somehow in the process of testing we'll come upon all the right tests for that program, without any sneaky missed cases. Then you will look at the tests and code and somehow extrapolate or judge that you've covered all the bases. But how sure is this if you still aren't sure exactly what the problem is, or if you don't think about bugs and cases very well?

There's a kind of thinking you have to do within and around testing anyway. The write- before- testing challenge tests how well you do that necessary thinking, and how reliably you judge how well you've done. It's an artificial light on a real issue.

Btw, my test file, meant to be easily processed in any language: http://www.mac-guyver.com/switham/2010/04/Binary_Search
This was a great summary, thanks. As I'm in the process of starting my own online business, I've been wondering why some merchants apply sales tax, while others forgo it.

On a related note:
Does anyone have experience with sales tax for online businesses in Canada?
While your statement is most likely true, the study controlled for this effect by comparing students with comparable SAT scores.
Interesting; thanks for the insight.
Wallet size has no tear off to be collected by the gate agent so it's no good.

Also wallet size is only good if you print your boarding pass at the airport - if you print at home, you don't really want a flimsy piece of paper that small - and you would then have to cut to size.
Putting one more nail in the coffin in the trend of making a "twitter streamer" to demo any new web technology.

...but seriously, without source code, why is this on HN? There are already github projects like http://github.com/technoweenie/twitter-node that have implemented it. This isn't particularly remarkable except for the topic chosen.
Apple co-founder who sold his share for $800 has no regrets
Use OLAP to measure Credit Card Acquiring Performance
Arun Sarin on Leadership - Haas School
Interesting read. I would add that, when it comes to learning, one size does not fit all.

See some research done by Richard Felder at NC State on different styles:

http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/ILS...

Find out what your style is:

http://www.engr.ncsu.edu/learningstyles/ilsweb.html

Effects of learning style in the context of engineering education:

http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/Pap...
Actually, this uses technoweenie's excellent twitter-node project. Hats off to technoweenie.

An example of real-world node.js, that's all. And it's 420.
Aaand you're a part of the problem. I could reply with anecdotes about which majors seem to have the most neckbeards, but you know what? It wouldn't matter.

Go away.
Not very helpful without it's counterpart chart which shows browser versions:

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qp...

IE6 continues it's downward decline, but it's still sad to see it at ~18%
I worked on this for Air New Zealand, it downloads your flights to your phone and displays a barcode that can be scanned at the check-in kiosks and at the gate.

iPhone App: http://itunes.apple.com/app/air-new-zealand-mpass/id30485120...
J2ME app: http://blog.rabidgremlin.com/2008/11/01/mpass-is-live/
I am not a fanboy.
I own an iPhone, an iPad, and a Macbook. I read Daring Fireball, TUAW and Macrumors. I believe that Apple's hardware is superior to all others in the market. People like to call out how I'm always "tuned in" to Apple news.

But I am not a fanboy.

I don't think the Operating system is the best. It is fraught with inconsistencies underneath its friendly veneer. There is a reason why Windows is popular and it may have something to do with usability. I use OS X because it is simply the best Unix desktop out there.

The iTunes application is a beacon of monolithic programming. It reeks of legacy-oriented design, completely contradictory to Apple's touted design mantra. Yet it exists unaltered, version after version solely because of the revenue it generates. Design and Engineering be damned, we're making money here. I use it because they threatened and killed every other music player for the Mac. I have never bought an iTunes song.

I unlocked my iPhone within the first 2 hours of owning it. I paid for my hardware, not the AT&T tithing. I am completely happy with my 50$ a month, fully functional smartphone.

I run a jailbroken phone despite the security risks. The app store is a breeding ground of corporate adware and get-rich-quick wannabes. The only thing it doesn't contain is what Mac developers were renowned for -- small, independent and creative paid software. Some innovations found in Cydia deserve more attention that they get today.

I bought an iPad because it was the cheapest and best way to acquire a manifestation of things Xerox invented 20+ years ago, and what Microsoft has been researching for 10+ years. And I am impressed with what I see.

Overall, you're still the best products money can buy for what I want to do.

I respect Apple because it has the best engineering in the world. It takes a spectrum of well understood technology, and creates the best possible device in that category. Every other part of Apple: its lawyers, its strategists, its leaders and its marketing do not matter.

I am aware that the new Apple, Inc. caters to exactly two kinds of people. The busy soccer mom with a 6 figure family income, and the rabid nerd who chants Objective-C while worshipping at his local Steve Jobs altar.

This is not a rant. It is simply a statement that Apple has more these 2 kinds of customers. The third kind is me -- the tinkerer, the hacker, the fan of good technology. The kind that rejects rules, limitations and playgrounds of corporate malfeasance.

I am the one who Thinks Different.
I don't know if anybody already made the remark. But I find this issue very similar to the issue of women in science, here is an out of box article: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

The general theme is, what if women avoid (computer)science because that kind of career sucks?

The question to ask is... why would women want to work 80+ hour workweeks with unpaid overtime - effectively getting a similar salary to a maid (yes I exaggerate a bit!) - they can just go working as maids with less stress.

Lets face it. Most of CS companies ain't no Google or Microsoft. And most of CS people don't stand any chance of gaining access to that kind of company - ever. Most of computer people work for retarded PHB's. Any sane person can see that it's much better to be a PHB than Dilbert.
This is by far one of the best talks on leadership I've come across in a while.
The writer totally ignores android, which should offer a competent alternative to the iPad within a year as long as a reputable hardware manufacturer steps up.

I was pretty excited about the iPad until I found out it would be locked down running the iPhone OS. If a more open alternative (Android with USB ports?) appeared on the market I think it would make a lot of tech savvy people who aren't locked into the Apple hype very happy.
Nobody disputes, or should dispute, the right of a sovereign nation to perform invasive searches at international borders. What is most serious and egregious in the DHS/CBP behavior is the slippery slope of trying to change the definition of an international border. The 4th amendment in no way protects you from a border search, but saying that 100 miles inside the country is an international border is ludicrous.
(Re) Writing Code [2001]
Perhaps it is each airlines particular systems or operations that requires the torn tickets. Virgin America's tickets don't come with any part to tear. At boarding, they scan it in and hand it back to you. That would work for a wallet size as well. For people printing a pass, well, they're using a full sheet of paper anyways, so there could be a different design for printed tickets, the same way printed concert ticket designs are different than official tickets that are mailed to you.

Also want to note that I missed the part about the thermal printing, which would nullify the ink cost issue.
Web hit by hi-tech crime wave
>it's circular and possibly an appeal to authority,

It might be an appeal to authority, but there isn't any circularity. If you're going to play fallacy bingo, at least get it right...
Eh?

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/lunkhead

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=lunk

Google has 346K results.
Another question: would a migration tool to move away from phpbb to SE have helped?
There are laws against reporting those names for that very reason. Because there is an ethical obligation by reporters to report all the facts and we as society have decided reporting those details isn't acceptable so we restrict them from reporting those details. Just as we do with the names of children.

But the very existence of those laws proves the point I was making which is that reporters should be bound to report all details. Not the other way around
The law on this matter is, as I understand it-IANAL, that a password is a product of the mind and so it would be a violation of your fifth amendment rights to compel you to give up the password, as it would be "testimony against yourself." A password written on a piece of paper or a physical key would be a different matter. This doesn't mean they can't confiscate your laptop and/or image the hard drive to try and crack your encryption later though, it just means if you have encrypted files you can't be penalized for failing to disclose the password (probably).

This lecture from Defcon 17 may be relevant:
https://media.defcon.org/dc-17/audio/DEFCON%2017%20Hacking%2...