skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Exercise: what are the downsides of the current generation of DVCS ?

(Assume you may be something other than a coder that carries all files in a laptop.)
That's a goal for eg: http://people.gnome.org/~newren/eg/
Those 30 million people were reclassified from normal to overweight. People with BMIs between 30 and 31.9 would've been reclassified from overweight to obese, but I see no indication that there were 30 million of them.
I'm not sure if they read all email, but they definitely warrantlessly monitored telecommunications during the Bush administration, severely enough that our government had to pass a bill saying you couldn't sue your phone company for breaking surveillance laws.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepting_v._AT&T

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_co...
No Passion = No Startup
May I suggest getting rid of the overridden arrow key behaviors? I don't mean to sound harsh, but I gave up trying to read the post because the behavior of "up" and "down" is weird, unnecessary, and comes with an obnoxious animation. I figured out what they did pretty fast, but then I'd lose my reading place by absently pressing "down" in an attempt to scroll the post.

Also, the blue bar might work better if it spanned the entire width of the right column and fixed to the top of the content area. Right now, because of the content that appears above it and all the white-space to the right of it, it feels like it's floating over and blocking content.
It's also missing the point that others are free to design their own UI on top of Android and indeed the big players are. Sense (HTC) is really rather nice and definitely doesn't feel like it was designed by a committee.

But this can be a downside as well. You say 'Android' and people associate the one with the other, but there are a multitude of 'Android' devices which are either inherently incompatible (http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20002508-1.html) or whose basic interfaces are different enough because of that customization that it can be confusing to initial users.

Also, the fragmentation of Android by hardware leads to fragmentation by software. Software designed for too large of a screen might not work on smaller screens. Software designed with a hardware keyboard in mind might not work on the onscreen keyboard.

People are still selling Android phones with version 1.6 on them, which won't run software requiring newer versions (which software won't show up in the marketplace at all, confusing users).

Customization is great, but by not mandating any sort of rules, the market is getting fragmented in a lot of different ways, and people are just going to get more confused, presented with an overwhelming list of options. This one has a hardware keyboard, this one has better GPS, this one has newer software, this one is faster, this one has a higher-resolution screen. The very purpose behind Android - customization, distinguishing yourself from the competition - is what fragments the market.

Apple's approach, however, is very simplistic. Here's the iPhone. How much storage do you want? 16GB? Ok, here you go. Apps will work. Accessories will work. Cables will work. Cases will fit. There's little to no confusion for the user.

That seems to be what the original article is suggesting. Simplicity and ease of use that starts before you even make your purchase.
Update from the bottom of the article: "the Obama administration withdrew its request for warrantless access to the complete contents of the Yahoo Mail accounts under investigation."

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20002722-38.html?tag=mncol...
Theora On Nokia N900 with optimized ARM and DSP code
The great american bubble machine. Excellent article about GS by Matt Taibbi on the Rolling Stones magazine:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/29127316/the_grea...
>Fake moons? Phobos and Deimos? Not sure how they are fake.

Clearly, they were just photoshopped in.
I remember when the Palm CEO dismissed the iPhone, and I'm pretty sure that Ballmer has dismissed every single thing Apple has ever done in the press while rushing to get his engineers to copy it.

You can only assume that fortune 500 CEO's are clueless for so long before you start to assume that they're merely disingenuous: They dismiss all of the competition's products and features until they can release their own copies.
Well ObjC straddles a very interesting place. It's as low-level as C++ but has high level message passing method dispatch as well. If it seems a little crufty, it's because it's living in a very peculiar place trying to serve a variety of masters.

Hopefully 4.0 will start to pave the way for the ObjC2.0 stuff to come to iPhone. They are really big improvements to the language.

Also, rule-based syntax translators could give you a ton of stuff as a preprocessing pass to your code. Write something for NSArray literals and you'll be a hero.
How we're going to hire our next web developer
Would compression help much for an ssh terminal connection? The only time I usually hear about compression is in the context of an ssh tunnel.
The broken window strikes again.
I'd pay for a ChromeOS pad - probably a fair amount. With some UI tweaks and a decent context-sensitive onscreen keyboard a ChromeOS pad would be stellar!

(though I am an oddity and only wanting a pad for internet use and nothing else :))
> I claim the secret sauce to their APIs is actually a character at Apple named Ali Ozer who, along with his crew, has maintained a firm hand on the tiller, and learned a huge amount about object-oriented design for interactive systems over the past couple of decades.

I agree with this. One of the things that makes most Apple APIs great is that they are not part of the Taligent legacy that so infects other languages. They keep class hierarchies relatively flat and lean heavily on the relatively inexpensive delegation that ObjC offers. It's very refreshing and feels far more smalltalk-ish than Java-ish.
Inability to check out a subset of a repository.
wmcc stated he was in the same OS class as the blog poster.
I believe the preference of one system over the other is based mostly on how they feel to the user.

Git is like a swiss army knife. git checkout can do just about everything and anything. Mercurial seems to be more split. hg update and hg revert do separate things.

Again a lot of preference comes down to personal feel. I prefer modularity. Others may prefer one tool solving it all.
I did the exact opposite--one time I came across a very cheap keyboard with the keys wobbly and floppy. Was a relief to my hands.

Since then, as long as I used standalone keyboards I bought cheap keyboards where the situation of my fingertips hitting the key caps was that the caps evaded my fingers a little and required some kind-of adjusting of my finger movements to the individual key once my fingertips hit the key in question.

I guess the added movement helped to relax my fingers.
> Okay, you despise Java -- and that's fine -- but you prefer a product that can only be programmed in Objective-C? Schizophrenia much?

I don't see how holding an opinion would constitute schizophrenia. What's inconsistent about this choice?
Reading that would make me cringe if I were a RIM investor. Obviously this is a snippet of a keynote, but I wonder if he mentioned apps? Apple and Android will destroy any shot RIM has at the consumer space if they don't get onboard with a sexier product. It may already be too late....
I do not disagree with your tax argument in theory, and I'm all for capitalism and free enterprise.

If i-banks like GS want to pay large salaries and bonuses to their employees, that is fine by me, as long as they also accept the negative consequences of the risks they take.

I'm also not a fan of the automobile bailouts; to paraphrase Plato, two bailouts do not make a right.
Let me finish that quote for you, since you didn't seem to like the second half of it:
"We were told that we would wait at least four months for an NHS appointment so for the first time in both our lives we went private. We were told we would get an appointment in about six weeks."
Others are free to design their own UI on top of Android and indeed the big players are. Sense (HTC) is really rather nice and definitely doesn't feel like it was designed by a committee.

But if you're writing an Android app, should you use the Android HIG, the Sense HIG, the Blur HIG, or the Nexus HIG?
Not too shabby, but a few things concern me:

1. The air vent. Does this thing get hot? How necessary is the air vent? My iPad is always cool as a cucumber, regardless of what I do on it.

2. The size seems a bit big. Not only is the screen a tad on the large size (or the German pillow girl a tad on the small size), but it also looks pretty thick. The iPad is right on the edge of being to heavy, I wonder what the weight on this thing is.

3. How polished is this thing going to be? They have more features, ports, etc, but that also introduces complexity. Apple had three iphones with which to work out ui bugs, hardware problems, and other issues.

I'm excited to see how it's received, and also excited to see the upcoming android based tablets. But I'm not holding my breath.
Isn't one of the big problems here that "rule-based syntax translators" are kind of disallowed?
Prosper Raises $14.7 Million For Peer To Peer Lending Market
The sad thing about Flickr is that it's being killed by Facebook and their massive picture uploading. And the only way that's a superior service is in sharing with friends, it falls way short in every other way. I suppose the sharing aspect is just what consumers have decided to value most.
I don't know anything about the company, but the only thing this would tell me is they don't care enough their hiring process to check the form. I'd see this as one of those companies that puts up a form to look like they're really busy and hiring, but just for show. I wouldn't take them seriously. It says more about the company appearing to have zero attention to detail than it does about my abilities. That's just me though. I like the idea of having a cool little test to filter developers, but this doesn't appeal to me as the way to do it.
It's not so much a cultural shift towards "just giving stuff away" as it is a shift toward easy access, ease of use, and portability.

The image comparing pirates vs. paying customers is critical. The technology exists to distribute music and video directly to consumers, with a minimum of hassle. Consider examples like Netflix, Hulu, Pandora, streaming sports packages like NBA League Pass and ESPN360, justin.tv, and atdhe.net. These have various monetization models, but they all share one thing in common: for me as a consumer, they just plain work. Some of them have short ads, but none of them make me sit through long previews or make it difficult for me to watch from my wife's computer.

Load up any one of those things and start watching or listening. Then start watching something on a DVD, and notice how much more hassle you have to go through in order to skip previews and such. Or put a DRM-free mp3 file you ripped from CD three computers ago onto your wife's ipod, and compare the experience to fighting with DRM-laden files when you replace your device with a new one.

It's not that the industry needs to "just give stuff away". But they need to come up with distribution models that give consumers what they want with a minimum of hassle. Subscription-based streaming services work. Ad-supported streaming works. Paying for non-DRM digital copies works. Trying to install spyware on every PC in the US, sue ISPs, and throttle or filter internet traffic does NOT work, it just further alienates consumers.
European air tracker adds volcano ashes layer
Oops, we're all spambots now: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=91
Watch Manchester City VS Manchester United live free broadcast
DOJ abandons warrantless attempt to read e-mail
A language I've discovered with delight is Cobra. It is python-like, with built-in unit test support, contract support, and currently on top of the .Net platform (but a backend is flexible enough that some work at targeting Java and Obj-C has been done).

http://cobra-language.com/
Interesting way for the software developer to engage its users and promote collaberation.
It seems that most people's strong reaction to Apple's decision is not just because it's a mistake (which I think it is), but because it directly affects their life and there is no serious alternative to avoid the consequences.

Example: I don't really care what restrictions Microsoft will impose on developers for its next phone OS, because I don't care about their products. It does matter for me, however, that Lotus Notes design is horrible (and getting worse with every version), as that's what I'm forced to use at work and there is no alternative for me.

If HTC/Android were such a strong alternative to iPhone/iPhone OS, most developers would simply ignore Apple's move: "They made a stupid decision?" - "Very well, our community and market share will grow as a result".

Unfortunately, as Stanislav notes above, for many developers and users there are not many alternatives to the iPhone, with it's high quality design and strong eco-system.

And that's what makes people furious.
This is a super level headed response from Linus on a topic that he usually rants about. That's pretty cool.
Lack of a good way to edit recent history.

Suppose I sit down for a collaborative session with someone. Over the course of a few hours, we might generate 10-100 commits between the two of us, and several branches, all to implement a single feature. I.e., I commit, say "hey, pull from me, you had an off by one a few minutes ago."

At the end of the session, we only want to generate a single commit to the public repositories.

Mercurial queues are a tolerable way to handle this, but they aren't great.
It's sorta true for me, depending on how you read it. A device without a physical keyboard has lower usability, and I really like the RIM keyboard. So given a choice between a device with a physical keyboard and a device with a touch keyboard, physical wins. That doesn't mean touch can't be there too. My Treo used to have touch and a physical keyboard, 4 years ago. I also find a stylus works better than touch for drawing, just like a pencil is better than finger painting. Fat fingering is just a little too literal for me...
Good point, kls. It is definitely my side of the post.If you ask the CEO, his side would be: I joined the company when there was nothing. I brought immediate value bringing with me, the VP. of Eng., and VP. of Marketing. You were the problem - you didn't let him do his job, and in the name of filling gaps, and acting as if you know all the answers, you made him fail. Then, the second VP. of Eng., yes, we rushed into it bringing him, and he really was inadequate. You were the one who approved the second VP. of Eng., and it was only for the purpose of you finding someone who you could work with, I bought into it, knowing fully well that he may not work out. As you know, you and I agreed that he needed to develop in certain areas, and I gave the feedback to him (as a proxy for you), except he thought it was unfair, never going to work out and quit.

Of course, the above conversation hasn't happened, but that's how I would reconstruct his version of the events. Which brings us to your request for me to "self-reflect and see if there were some issues on my part". Hard to self-reflect, but I do agree that as a big stakeholder who cares deeply about the success of the business, I may have tended to assert my view. Which is why the current third VP of Eng. is left to run things without interference from the rest of the exec team. I hope he succeeds, the business succeeds, and the CEO succeeds.
Cool, thanks. I am currently in the developer program so I'm going to install this on my phone and play with it!

edit: this isn't the iPhone source...
Back when my son had some kidney problems, the wait in the States would have been 72 days to see a specialist. In the lousy Hungarian public system, he saw a specialist the week we arrived. (Dual citizenship hath its privileges.)

Later, we lived in Puerto Rico, also cursed with a public healthcare system that had us in a specialist's office in two weeks.

We're in the US proper now (the real estate is just so damned cheap here and the school system is good for both our kids at the moment) but the lack of working health care will probably drive us out again in a couple of years.

The only people who think US health care is good are people who have never experienced any other system.
I'm definitely noticing a lot more people carrying Android phones in the last few months. I also know people that originally wanted an iPhone, but couldn't afford it, so they got a cheap android phone. Now they're in the Android ecosystem, and might get a more powerful one the next time around. I can see it taking off in the next year or so.
Music Photography: Quality vs. Memory [Poll]
"So one of the worst downsides of CVS is _politics_. People, not technology."
For what definition of "dynamic language" is that statement true? Both languages do late binding of methods to objects, Java merely happens to smear on a layer of typesafety above it.

Frankly, the two languages are semantically all but identical, modulo the ability of Obj-C to fall back to a "bare memory" data model when you want to.
I would try it out, but right now my iPhone is on Craigslist and a Nexus One is in the mail. :) I run Linux so that wouldn't be very easy to do anyway.

Re: Interface Builder, I agree, but I don't think anything like that would work well for Android. It targets all kinds of devices and screen sizes; it really has to be flexible and that'd be harder to do with a WYSIWYG UI tool. That being said, someone made one for Android, but I still prefer coding it by hand: http://droiddraw.com/ (it ain't the prettiest thing but it seems to work; you can even load up your own layouts).

I don't question the rest, and I simply don't know enough about the iPhone APIs to compare it to Android, but I will say this: everything certainly works together in the Android APIs. I'm not 100% sure what the purpose of CoreData is - preferences? generic data storage? - but they are both part of Android as well.

Funny that you mentioned everything working together (albeit in a different context); that's the biggest difference I noticed between how iPhone apps work and how Android apps work. See Activities (Android) vs. Apps (iPhone), Content Providers, Intents -- just about everything about Android apps is designed around working together. For example, in every iPhone app I've used that has a browser in it, it's always essentially a WebKit view with some primitive controls, or it says "Halt app and switch to Safari?". In Android most apps open up the native Browser app's main activity, and hitting Back will close it and go right back to where you were. It's not really based on multitasking or switching apps, it just reuses the Browser's Activity to accomplish the same task. Applications are all on the same level, even built-in ones, and can all work together beautifully by simply calling Activities of other apps for performing specific tasks, or controlling them through Intents, etc. iPhone apps tend to be much more isolated.
Poor or inefficient support for large binary assets, such as compiled objects, images, or video. Especially in the context of video game development, binary assets that constantly change are highly painful to deal with in Git or Mercurial.
A minor usability point. If you hover over an X on the left, your cursor should change to a hand. Site looks good.
First off, the only quote from Lazardis is "famous".
So I'm taking much of this with a grain of salt.

I sincerely hope that if Lazaridis said anything remotely similar to what the article says, that he was actually pointing to the fact that there are multiple ways to get your mobile OS on a larger screen, and a full blown tablet isn't the only one.

With respect to touch-screen popularity, the article says 'touch only' phones. And it is true that many people prefer a click keyboard AS WELL AS a touch screen.
I agree with this completely! I think that 3.3.1 will make it easier to find good apps, and that alone will help keep Apple on top.

If Apple's policies are incorrect, people will switch increasingly to competing platforms. But that's not going to happen, because Apple makes great stuff! Other companies could do it, too - if they copied Apple's principles, and not just random features or random visual elements.
You're forgetting something important...I don't know about you, but I'd be more inclined to make babies with a supermodel than a hobbit.
Git makes this easy. It supports "rebasing" commit trees, and for what you want, a "squashed" rebase is absolutely trivial to do.
My experience matches this as well.

I used to see a chiropractor for back pain, and honestly it did help a bit.

But I started exercising for other reasons, and that marked the real change. I felt better, even without going to the chiro.

I can still feel the difference today. If I go on vacation, say, and skip exercise for more than a few days, I can feel soreness and stiffness returning. But once I pick back up the exercising (and stretching, too, I suppose), the discomfort dissipates.
Just as floppy has become the icon for Save buttons. You and I have used floppies, so it makes a fair amount of sense, but many people will never see a real one.
I program solo, and for fine-grained version control, I use comments and conditional compilation, which I remove when the time comes. I also take periodic tarball snapshots of my code just in case.

Before you downmod me to -∞ for my uncouth approach, consider this:

According to Linus, Git > tarballs > CVS > SVN (he made a statement about tarballs being better than CVS somewhere else). That leaves Git and tarballs.

Now, Visual Studio is my primary development environment, and it does not integrate with Git (as far as I know), and Git just isn't well-supported on Windows (there are some fragile solutions). Secondly, I probably spent a whole day playing with Git where it's supposed to shine (OS X with GitX), and I just find it kind of awkward and unintuitive for no benefit.
No way to move files between repositories and retain their history. Luke Palmer talked about this a little here:

http://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/2008/11/12/sketch-of-udon-ve...
"I would never in a million years want to develop Android software; why? Because it's written in a language I loathe, and the API is workmanlike but completely uninspired (disclaimer: I've never written any code for it). "

i.e. I'm making a judgement on something I'm ignorant about and never made an effort to know.
Facebook must be killing them on the consumer side.

On the higher end, photographers are using services like http://smugmug.com/, http://carbonmade.com/ and http://livebooks.com/

I fancy myself as belonging to the prosumer/dedicated amateur photographer segment, and Flickr's still the best bet for me due to its social features and willingness to let me upload high-res photos.

But I'd jump ship in a heartbeat if I could find another service that gave me a large community of like-minded photographers looking to improve their craft, AND the ability to securely store all of my RAW files.

Seriously, I cannot overstate how important it is to me to be able to stuff all of my RAW files and finished products somewhere secure (in the data backup sense).
That's very interesting. It would be nice to see corroboration from other local periodicals doing the same to see if it holds up.
My wife and I always refer to our multiple citizenships as "the backup plan" for exactly this reason ;)
- When you work with large binary files that don't diff well (psd), it's a pain to have the entire repository history local.

- Hard to explain to even fairly technical designers/copywriters.

- With all that easy branching, I sometimes just have a hard time getting a decent version of the codebase together from everyone.
Are you thinking of former Treasury Secretary and GS CEO Henry Paulson? The Paulson in Paulson and Co. is John Paulson, no relation.