skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel like they're eventually going to try to sell me a laptop with a 2048x100 pixel screen where I have to read one very long line of text at a time. What is wrong with laptop screen manufacturers? I haven't bought a notebook in years from anyone but Dell (upgraded screen each time) and Apple (generally saner than other manufacturers).
Apple has been working on resolution independence in its OS for several versions now. Didn't make it into Tiger, Leopard, or Snow Leopard. Maybe we're finally going to see the fruits of resolution independence in iPhone OS first?
Cyberattack on Google Said to Hit Password System
I'm not sure how this doesn't apply to Apple's current approach? We've left AOL and CompuServe far behind; OSS is waxing while closed source is waning. Even IBM and Microsoft are reaching out to the open source community.

Apple is thinking different.
Texas's per capita income is 20% lower than California's
I hate to break it to you but you'll fail interviews at the better companies with that attitude(1). No matter much support your work methods give you, you have to be able to hold and work with a few moving parts in your head at once, correctly.

(1) Don't ask me how I know :)
The ad makes me think more about (and appreciate) Steve Jobs the individual rather than the Apple brand.
Bah...there are many things you "should" learn while not being necessarily motivated to do so. By persevering and mastering them, you'll often reap great rewards.

We shy away from challenging, intimidating tasks on a psychological level by nature. Fighting through this is one of the few things that keeps us moving forward. If you're unmotivated to learn something but you really "should", I suggest you find a way to become motivated.
I don‘t really understand why it is necessary to show a photo of the guy and give out his name. Seems sleazy.

Tell the story if you must but show some restraint, maybe?
There are so many rules to break, and so few of them are made by Apple.
Why not 5x, or 15x? How do you quantify how much "better" one app is than the other? That, to me, is the hard part. Instead of aiming for 10x, continuously and incrementally improving your product until it reaches the threshold will suffice, especially since that threshold will vary widely depending on what kind of product you have.
How much VCs get paid
It's interesting how animated and expressive both pg and Jessica are. I remember noticing in multiple pg interviews how much facial expressions are used, and Jessica is the same way. They move their eye-brows, modulate their voices, their smile, lean into the camera, use manual gestures, etc.

It definitely comes off as friendly and engaging, but could probably be intimidating in something like the YC interview setting.

I also wonder if one didn't rub off on the other (we unconsciously pick up the mannerisms of our peers), or if it's one reason they get along so well.
The locked-downness is part of Apple's approach to entering the corporate market.

Interestingly, this approach (consumer -> corporate) is precisely the opposite to RIM's approach with the Blackberry. It almost seems too crazy-bold to have been planned from the early days of the first ipods, but it does seem to be slowly working out.
the wide variety of Android hardware does make for a major pain point

Right now the overwhelming majority of Android phones have 320x480 (iPhoney) resolution or 480x800 or 480x854 (Droid). That's just two densities and really only two sets of art assets to program for. iPhone will soon have two densities and iPad, which is really neither better nor worse. iPhone apps are easily targeted at a particular resolution with interface Builder while Android apps have a cumbersome and ugly system of trying to achieve resolution independent layout that most developers don't understand or use correctly. There's no saying what will happen to Interface Builder when it faces the challenges Android set itself with varied device standards.

But for now iPhone has a significant advantage in ease of development here.

On the plus side for Android now is that higher density resolution makes websites a pleasure unimaginable in my iPhone. On the minus side, I keep getting user requests to support their trackballs and other exotic hardware.
'lunk' - a word is coined!
I am not so sure about that. A number of things make this case quite different, such that it may violate federal criminal statutes in multiple ways. The effects might spread beyond Gizmodo, at that.

Gizmodo offers (some) more details...
http://gizmodo.com/5520438/how-apple-lost-the-next-iphone

...while Gawker Media head honcho Nick Denton seems to confirm they bought the thing...
http://twitter.com/nicknotned/status/12474394397

Either their lawyers are no good or they didn't bother to check with them in advance, or they would have been told about their (federal) criminal liability under the economic espionage act of 1996, which can result in prison for up to 10 years, or fines of up to $5m for the organization.

Seriously - there is not much room for interpretation here:

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/usc_sec_18_00001832----...

Edit: Gizmodo is in SF, not NY. D'oh.

I am not a lawyer.

Edit: Apple already sent a cease-and-desist letter in January to Gawker Media, warning them they were inviting a violation of California Trade Secrets law.
http://gawker.com/5448177/update-apple-wins-the-first-prize-...
Get packing: Brussels decrees holidays are a human right
Speaking of employment laws, I'm curious how common "at-will employment" is in the US? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment) I've recently been hired by a US company on at-will terms, and I understand it's much more common in the US than in New Zealand where I'm from -- things are much softer on employees in NZ.
Heroku announces pricing for Memcached
Not always... there are lots of mobile phones where you can change the imei with simple tricks - temporarily or permanently. I know it was trivial to reprogram this on many siemens sets ~6 years ago.
They banned it because Google Voice would make the switching cost from iPhone to Android easier. If you don't have to change your phone number or even talk to a phone company to port it, switching carriers becomes something you can do on a whim. It's the same reason they are banning cross-platform development systems.
Could the leak be part of Apple's marketing?
Joseph Stiglitz & John Sulston: The Case Against Gene Patents
1.5x is a nightmare on Android requiring me to get artwork done twice for every single asset. 2x would be a typical Apple brilliancy--make things easier by using quality hardware. On the other hand, I can see them telling devs to update or get left behind.
Have you started on the Mixergy book yet Andrew?
OK, I'll say it - Apple is a marketing company, always was and always will be.
Apple supports three languages for development; they're just all equivalent and none of them is any better than Java. (C, C++, Objective-C)
Unlike many of its neighbors, Texas has state laws that prohibited consumers from using home-equity lines of credit to increase borrowing to more than 80 percent of the value of their homes

This certainly would fight inflationary/bubbly pressures. Forced financial responsibility. Nice. I wonder how many other states follow this model.
Oil at $80+ a barrel?
Gruber ignores the Droid, which has sold far more units than the N1, does not have the Pentile subpixel reduction, and has an 854x480 display. A 960x640 display would rock but given that the LCD is smaller than current iPhones, I think it will be a 1.5x increase which will look fine with antialiasing and font/UI element scaling. So 480x720.
Everyone who has been following Apple closely for more than 10 years knows that 300+ dpi on every device has always been Apple's goal. They haven't pushed it in OSX due to the massive legacy effects. The Mac typographic layout system was designed for a 300 dpi future.
This is why I am a programmer today. I was strongly pushed by guidance counselors + my parents to not pursue a teaching career purely because of the risk involved. My Mother works as a teachers aide, and often mentions the extreme levels that male teachers will go to to avoid any implication or suspicion. The mere rumor of anything would be both career ending and life threatening.
I would think a DSL would be more appropriate than straight Python for the proposed purpose.
I'd think a DSL would be better for this purpose (defining rules for a specific type of financial assest) than Python in general.
EDIT: False. Richard Dreyfus. They sound quite similar, though.
For a long time, Texas prohibited second mortgages against a residence -- so even this allowance was a liberalization.

I've also seen mentioned elsewhere that state banking regulation and monitoring was tightened after the S&L crisis of the 80's, which helped discourage the fast-and-loose real-estate loanmaking that drove the latest bubble elsewhere.
True but I'm really not sure what this has to do with Apple. Those things would have happened with or without Apple.
It's one of Nick Denton's rags. Of course it's sleazy. Sleaze = Page Views.
You could add code to your ircd to recognize it is being spoken to in a websockets way and speak the necessary HTTP voodoo to make it work.
I would rather see these companies rated for success by a large pool of vetted 'judges'. Yes it's subjective, yes it's how they got into the TC40 to start, but it's a lot more useful than the monthly uniques, which can't even be accurately known by us.

As long as the judges are careful not to associate blog press as success/promise, I think one could create an yearly rating for a large pool of companies and track the success of various conditions such as investors, awards, location, etc.
God, can we please unplug from the incredible myopia that is the geek viewpoint of Apple?

They still make amazing products, they still use and contribute a huge amount to open source. So they have their phone OS locked down, there are reasons for that, and they mostly revolve around the best experience for most users. (read not you)

Get over it already.
FWIW, Gray is a close friend of mine and a wonderful engineer. He's been passionate about Apple since the day I met him, and tirelessly defends the company when I give him a hard time about their policies.

I truly hope Apple doesn't fire him over this. Any company would be lucky to have him, but I know Apple is where he wants to be.
Absolutely agreed. In fact all sorts of conflicts and ambiguities can easily get missed, as well as ambiguous terms such as the bond issuer at its discretion can rearrange payments. (Yes, this has happened. And money was diverted from top tranches to lower rated ones.) Furthermore the entire reverse engineering process is a lot of work for a very imperfect result.

So this is definitely a big improvement.

But my point remains that it is not perfect. There still are ambiguities.
People in Boston still do. I don't really understand why.
Designing Without Gradients
No, it's Richard Dreyfuss
"They're not fond of rules"
'At-will' employment is the norm in the US for non-unionized jobs. The Wikipedia article describes the exceptions fairly well.
Any further back-story you can provide on how this happened? I'm guessing not.

The consequences to Gizmodo for all of this should be interesting.
Lost iPhone 4G (san jose downtown)
They were always about the control, starting from the Mac. The Apple ][e was what I cut my teeth on, from a programming perspective. It was a marvelous machine! And you could do anything on it, because there was BASIC and an assembler (after all, what else could one possibly need?)

I saw my first Mac in the store in 1984, just before I graduated high school, and I loved it on sight. The cute little face! The crisp graphics! I had precisely zero dollars, but I looked into a developer's kit. There was exactly one. Apple sold it. It was $1200 or something - an incredibly high bar. Unattainable for me, of course, but even at the tender age of 17 I had the impression that couldn't bode well for the Mac.

The IBM PC wasn't nearly as attractive, but within a year of its release there was software to do anything you wanted, and the Mac still didn't have anything to speak of, except for what the big boys had written for it.

So my answer: Apple balances Jobs yang with Woz yin. And lately, there's been no Woz yin. It's all about controlling the experience - a media thing. They talk about being rebels, but it's the rebelliousness of, say, Twilight.
There are many reasons to pay for a dating service beyond the number of users, such as a preference in any of these categories:
1) communication process / privacy controls
2) interface features (filtering options, etc.)
3) advertised or implied goal of the service (marriage, hook-ups, etc.)
4) strong concentration of users in your demographic

Also, some of the things that the article discussed, like the "desperation feedback loop", apply equally to paid and free dating services.

I normally love to read OK Cupid's blog posts, but this one struck me as a little vicious and disingenuous.
That can be checked in the emulator.

Honestly, I am just glad that if I make an Android app, it won't be rejected.
It would be interesting to perform a purchasing-power-parity comparison here.

Houses seem to be 1/2 to 1/4 the California price in similarly nice (but not as wealthy on an absolute scale) neighborhoods. When I stroll the aisles of a grocery store in the Austin area, many staples are 1/2 the cost of bay area supermarkets.

Edit: upped low-end of house ratio to more realistic 1/4 from 1/6
One additional wrinkle is that customary practices at large firms are a bit different. Because they're worried about unlawful-termination suits (even if they'd end up winning them), large companies rarely fire specific people, except for really egregious things (like embezzlement), even though in theory at-will employment means they could fire anyone for any reason. Instead they only get rid of people in general downsizing/layoff rounds, like closing a whole division, or doing a blanket 10% reduction in staff--- and even then they often offer severance packages for long-term staff, to make it a mutually agreed upon parting.
Startup aims to repair heart damage by stimulating healing in the Heart
No, and I'm sure he doesn't want to/can't talk about it. Techmeme was the first I'd heard of it.

Even when we talk candidly, he's always been fiercely loyal to Apple and respectful of their IP.

A worse thing couldn't have happened to a better guy.
IPad doesn't obey DHCP lease expiration under certain conditions.
Geniuses are not fond of _other people's_ rules.
I went to school with Gray and he lives and breathes Apple... way beyond the point of sanity in many cases, but his loyalty is beyond reproach. Apple is lucky to have employees as devoted as he is, and hopefully they'll recognize it and let him keep his job after perhaps a personal spanking from his hero, Steve "Stevie Poo" Jobs. If he does happen to get fired, I'd recommend him to any bay-area startups looking for a seriously passionate developer who happens to like a beer (or 5).
I don't see why not. Aside from a small number of hackers, how does this conflict with how the general population perceives Apple?

Their customers love them. They're still perceived as incredibly innovative. They bring new technologies to mass market with unparalleled success. Even the vast majority of iPhone developers are incredibly grateful for the opportunity the App Store provides them.

It's just a vocal minority here on HN that has decided that Apple is evil. Outside the echo chamber they're still rebellious, disruptive, innovative, pioneering, etc.
Behind the Air Force's Robotic Space Plane
Anti-Cancer Agent Stops Metastasis In Its Tracks
That number is meaningless without the context of cost of living. According to cityrating.com, you need a 45% increase in income to move from Houston to San Francisco.
Your argument doesn't make sense here.

Most consumers would choose to be at the luxury end of almost every product. It's just not a choice for almost everyone.

As to producers, it isn't inherently better to be a luxury market or a general market -- it's highly dependent on your product, market, and competitors.

For consumers, they get a wider selection of products at lower price points, though they do not get the design cachet.

That's a kind way of saying that consumers have a very diverse pile of crap to choose from.
I'll let the lawyers sort that out, but I don't think Apple wants to take the PR hit of sending a blogger to jail for taking pics of a gadget that was left in a public place. It didn't even have a material effect on stock price, Apple will have a hard time proving anything but an ego was hurt.

I could be way off base, so if Denton get hauled odd to jail feel free to reply and get in your kicks.
Zotonic outperforms php/mysql by an order of magnitude in a simple benchmark
Another point that could have been mentioned: the Texas legislature is part-time, and only meets every other year(!). They're not the professional busybodies of California's legislature, thinking up new "juice bills" year-round.
yeah I have, having a blast out here. People are great, food, life and the net is good. In comparison to South Africa it is heaven broadband wise. But you tend to miss the sticks and bush, constantly being surrounded by concrete. From that perspective it is hard. Also those Gbps lines are only in built up areas - so you cannot have the best of both worlds.... unless someone on this forum knows of a sweet spot. Please let me know someone if you know of Gbps area in a natural spot - I am due for a house move soon.
This is definitely a strongly-typed-language situation.
It is significantly cheaper when you look at unsubsidized costs. An ebay G1 is $120 versus $275+ for an iPhone.
I have to agree here -- just because many people disagree with the way Apple is going doesn't mean they're not trend-setting.
Loud and fast music at restaurants makes people eat faster and drink more
Ahem. Many of us still believe them to be disruptive, innovative, and pioneering. Just maybe not in the way some developers like...

I still have to give Apple credit for the modern smartphone revolution.
You're probably right, but compared to the DSL that hasn't been specified and that no one has agreed on, Python wins.

The more I think about it, there should be a DSL for all laws. (Something better than the legalese dialect of English, at least.)
Which only 50% of us can solve correctly the first time?
I've forgotten where I read this, but read the questions/problems AND attempt to solve them before even reading the chapter. You will learn the material better.
An array of length Maxint?
This reminds me of this article about the iPad and Steve Wozniak: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1247922
They should be ashamed. This benefits no one.

Edit: I'd like to highlight TUAW and Slashgear, who have both shown more class and decency than Gawker and their ilk by choosing not to plaster his name and photos all over their articles. Unfortunately, they seem to be the exception.
The Cognitive Science on Thinking About Tomorrow
Compared to the average free webmail service out there gmail was easily 10x better at launch. The quantitative storage size increase was really a qualitative change removing the need to prune old/unneeded emails, which was a frustrating and time consuming task with the web interfaces of the time. Moreover, the heavy use of AJAX in gmail transformed webmail from a clunky second class citizen to a fully capable first class email UI (at least for personal mail). The addition of super fast full-text search pushed gmail over the top.
Amazon.com sues North Carolina over customer data demand
Python has some FP features. More importantly, it's incredibly easy to learn, available on just about every platform (JVM users and .Net users can use it, Mac, Linux, Windows, etc).
Bioinformatics Courses
A list of bioinformatics courses from around the world that use the textbook An Introduction to Bioinformatics Algorithms.
It doesn't feel controlled to me. It makes both Apple and the news organization look bad (bad at keeping secrets and unethical, respectively).
F5 Week in Review April 12th - 16th
But then you need a standard DSL interpreter platform. For any platform that investors use. I suspect this is a solid reason to take and use an existing language.

Saying "You need a standard install of Python 2.6 to execute this", versus "You need a SECLang 2.6 compatible interpreter with support for Spec version 9.1".

Remember - it's not just about providing a common platform for developers to build their code. The purpose is to have investors able to run the program, punch in their assumptions and get numbers out.
I'd peg it at 2004/2005 with the huge mass market success of the iPod and the Intel switch. That's the point where you couldn't feel sorry for Apple anymore or think of them as anything less than a major industry player. To me that's still pretty cool but I can see your point too. It's certainly less romantic. Apple pre-2001 was basically a good ole fashion tragedy story. Apple pre-2004 was still a feel good diversity trumps adversity -- return of the king type of story. Apple post-2004 is just a really successful but unique business story.
Even if Apple would do something like this, which I don't think they would, Gawker media's the last company they'd ever give it to.
Does Mint really have 250 million users as this site claims?
I don't know what to say. I feel bad for the guy and I hope he doesn't get fired but if he fiercely defends Apple then he's defended the practice of firing people for stuff like this. You're free to suck up to a dictator but if you do don't complain when the dictator turns on you.
I still think Google's Adwords customer service is pretty pathetic. When you spend $50,000+ a month and have to go through a lot of work to get the phone number for the first time and then can't get a consistent account rep it is very frustrating. At those kinds of spending levels a lot of companies will roll over for you, even if it isn't a 1,000,000 dollar account.

They also apply their policies very inconsistently, and greatly favor large advertisers. I think their documentation is great, but they need to make a better effort to reach out to advertisers. I am not a huge fan of Microsoft's adcenter, but their customer service is incredible. Their number is always nice and prominent and when you call they will do anything to help, and work hard to get it solved then, where as Google will take their time.

Again this is a sample size of one, but google goes out of their way to not talk to you, they even hide their customer support chat service through several layers of help screens.
Loud and fast music at restaurants; Tina Brown publications. Two things I do not like.
See http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/12/opinion/12krugman.html where Krugman compares Georgia and Texas.

The two states have a lot in common, but Texas has strong consumer-protection regulation, Georgia lacked these government regulations.

Krugman points out that the absence of these regulations landed Georgia in their current disastrous situation.

For many people, comparing Georgia and Texas and highlighting the strong consumer-protection regulations in Texas may not be as much fun as bashing California, but this is worth a read
What if the rules are self-mutating bytecode?
cost of living has nothing to do with attracting manufacturing jobs. The lower the labor costs the more jobs you get. Same reason China has more manufacturing that California