skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Easier doesn't mean "write once". Sure, write less, and a more pleasant experience than years ago. Definitely not "everywhere, period".
To be fair, MS never announced that Courier was a real product.
As of this writing neither Slicehost nor RackspaceCloud offers Lucid Lynx images.
LOAD "warning about how aranging to meet strangers for sex in a non-public place has been a bad idea since the invention of sex"

RUN
This is slow as hell. I do not understand why people think HTML5 can replace Flash. Flash is big and bloated but still perform better than HTML5 in all the so called demos i have seen.
I have an extension that blocks flash from any page I visit. I can turn it on by clicking the in the little box where the flash content was supposed to appear.

I'll put it this way, my finger sometimes gets so tired clicking to turn the flash content back on that I sometimes just disable the extension.
My guess would be Grindr or one of its clones.

Loopt, colorful popped collars notwithstanding, is not particularly gay.
Balsamiq Mixergy Interview
Also, the lawyers have promised to basically sue open source developers who do not pay royalties.
Remeber Microsoft trying to kill Netscape? We want everything to be open standard, any standards our competitor makes we will embrace and extend.

We all know how that turned out, just because companies dress up their actions in warm and fuzzy PR speak doesn't mean they're not playing for keeps.
Roll 5 d10 and take the median. You get a bell-shaped distribution, but you don't have to do any addition-- the result is immediately visible.
Solving The Web's Identity Crisis
I'd love to see some research on, say, MonoTouch generating crappy code compared to average developer's Objective-C.
Also, I would say that if the absence of "desktop grade" UI functions makes the web dev's focus on the app's core functionality at the expense of eye candy, then I'm all for it. But then, I don't use drag & drop too much myself.
But at the time, not all gold coins were the same. A florin from northern italy was not necessarily worth the same as a ducat of identical weight. Different mints formulated their metal differently and counterfeiting was a real and serious problem. The rumour that a king had ordered the adulteration of the currency could cause prices to swing wildly. Asset backed currencies were not some edenic pre-lapsarian device of peace and plenty. As an economic mechanism they have serious problems; in some respects more so than a fiat currency.
Give it time. And it is not suppose to replace flash, just greatly reduce its scope.
That's not about keeping users stupid, it's about not making them worry about stuff they should not worry about.
The user may be the world's best neurosurgeon, does that mean that they have to learn about filesystems?

most computer software is generally poorly designed

You are right about this one. But the thing is that Apple does exactly that: offering well designed software.
It's not about buying fish, it's about hiding unneeded complexity. How do you drive the car: press the gas and it goes, press the brakes and it stops. Turn the wheel to the right and it turns to the right. You need zero knowledge about what's going under the hood.
Now take the iPad: tap an app and it launches, press the home button and it stops. Swipe to the right, swipe to the left…
> When I started writing this post last week, it was going to declare the end of the web. I'm not quite ready to call it dead, but it's on thin ice.

That's where I stopped reading and lol'd
I agree that the end implementation of a User login and registration system will be highly customized for each application.

However, I think there is a TON of reusable code out there that is shared across apps: simple things like setting properly salted and hashed passwords, providing a password reset mechanism, and a base user object with permissions and groups.

Django gets a lot of this stuff right, what they get wrong is the complete lack of customizability which means you need to throw everything away once you go outside the box.

A few simple base classes that could be extended and overridden with custom fields would solve that problem entirely - the reason Django doesn't provide this (IIRC) is because the built in auth system was written before their ORM properly supported inheritance.
BJARNE STROUSTRUP, the designer of C++, the most
influential programming language of the last 25 years, has
said that “our technological civilization depends on
software.”

I stopped reading there.
But they leaked existence and now they required to leak its death. That is good enough to qualifies as vaporware.

Aside from that. I like, "Microsoft Kills iPad Killer" perfect headline for this news. http://blogs.forbes.com/velocity/2010/04/29/microsoft-kills-...
My download is timing out at 419 KB, anyone else having problems?
Freddie and Fannie did absolutely nothing to fuel the subprime mess. They were not allowed to invest in any subprime mortgages during the bubble and were later forced by law to invest in them when the crash was already happening, because that was Bush's plan to stop the crisis. This is just an excuse that people that caused the sub-prime mess use.
Yeah, HTML5 is more open. But flash has advanced the web much faster than html and javascript have. We should not forget that HTML5 draft started in 2004. HTML4 was complete in 1995, and XHTML was complete in 2000.

Say what you will about flash, but I don't think going the pure html5 route is the solution. Flash and Silverlight and other plug-ins serve as great ways to test out new approaches to the web and add additional functionality to the browser that isn't there already.

I think HTML5 and javascript is the way to go, but sometimes you can't wait 5-10 years for innovation to be supported in ALL browsers with a consistent api.
I'd have guessed Grindr, but this is saying that while the police press contacts don't know what app it was, it specifically wasn't Grindr:

http://joemygod.blogspot.com/2010/04/phoenix-man-stabbed-to-...
The courier did its job. That and the news of the HP slate (on indefinite hold) were timed to try and get some free press out of the pre-iPad hype. The fact that no actual product was close to shipping didn't matter.
Can we have a little more risk and a little less nanny state please?

C'mon man, 3/4 of what I wrote was about legislatively reducing state oversight of capital management, and how strongly I favor the idea, for the same reasons that you do.

And in the other 1/4, I talked about using the mandatory public consultation period to shape the SECs decision, as has happened before and which (IMHO) is much easier to argue on its merits to a regulatory agency than in the febrile atmosphere of a legislative session.
> Please, let's talk about the actual bill. It's at http://banking.senate.gov/public/_files/AYO09D44_xml.pdf and the relevant regulation is in Sec. 412.

Yes, let's do that.

> It says that the Securities & exchance commission should raise the threshold, using its existing authority, as the Commission determines is appropriate and in the public interest, in light of price inflation since those figures were determined;

Actually, it says "shall". Should is a request. Shall is a mandate.

There's some wiggle room in "determines is appropriate and in the public interest" but the marching orders are pretty clear. Do you really think that they're going to come in significantly lower than where the inflation numbers come out?

I'm serious - the inflation numbers give us $2.3M. What's your "I was wrong" number? Is it anything over $2M? How about $1.5M?

Note that Section 412 has two parts. The second "(2) adjust that threshold not less frequently than once every 5 years, to reflect the percentage in crease in the cost of living." doesn't have any discretion.
Once again, we rejoice.
Okay. I like that it's intelligently argued. It's just too much, though. I can't really ask even a talented web designer to do this:

HTML5Doc(
body(onload='func_with_esc_args(1, "bar")')[
div['Escaped chars: ', '< ', u'>', '&'],
script(type='text/javascript')[
'var lt_not_escaped = (1 < 2);',
'\nvar escaped_cdata_close = "]]>";',
'\nvar unescaped_ampersand = "&";'
],
Comment('''
not escaped "< & >"
escaped: "-->"
'''),
div['some encoded bytes and the equivalent unicode:',
'你好', unicode('你好', 'utf-8')],
safe_unicode('<b>My surrounding b tags are not escaped</b>'),
]))
Benefits of HTML5 WebSockets for Freeciv.net
In fact, don't download over http, just use bittorrent. Leave http for people who don't know how to use bittorrent or otherwise can't (firewall restrictions).
It is not illegal, to my knowledge no court has ruled on the matter and the only judgment (PYSTAR) that even remotely relates to OSX on no apple hardware and it had to do with copyright violations. Copyright protects distribution and public display of the media not the use of the private use of media. Companies have tried to blur this line by expanding what copyright encompass. If they want it to be illegal they need to provide a crypto key at the hardware layer that the software communicates with, as breaking cryptography does violate several laws.
Do they do email distribution? I personally just throw out every non-digital picture I get (after scanning the ones I want to keep). I may be an anomaly in that regard now, but I won't be in 10 years.

Either way, it would be relatively easy to add more digital methods of distribution if the market shifts that way.
The bill does not have these things in it. It is merely a huge overreaction. Most people that complain about this section, are really worried about other parts of the bill but do not want to admit that they are worried about those other parts of the Dodd bill. So this is merely a red herring and people that know what they are doing recognise it as such.
They are open just like Microsoft :-)
Al Jazeera English: The Most Hated Name in News
Isn't it hypocrisy to criticize someone for doing the very same thing you are doing? (ie, taking ages to adopt cocoa fully).

It's even worst if you are supposed to be leading by example, as cocoa is apple's own design.
Stop word distributions are also sufficient for identifying gender in most English corpora with about 80% accuracy -- and you don't need much text, either.

[Edit to add linky: http://u.cs.biu.ac.il/~koppel/papers/male-female-text-final.... ]
If you really wanted to head your advice you could focus on one single browser that works on all operating systems and have your users download that as their app.
Last time I used Arch, they had just moved to libjpeg7, which removed libjpeg6 and immediately broke a small army of programs that still required 6.

The recourse for users was to manually manage a copy of libjpeg6 themselves, outside of the package manager.

Suddenly, a 6 month release cycle didn't seem like such a bad thing.
Mashape got a Lemon
I remembered a framework that stitch exactly those (Werkzeug/SQLAlchemy/Jinja2). It's called http://glashammer.org/
Releasing Flashcache
Blaise Aguera's setup
Here are the ones from the iso's I downloaded

d044a2a0c8103fc3e5b7e18b0f7de1c8 ubuntu-10.04-desktop-i386.iso

3e0f72becd63cad79bf784ac2b34b448 ubuntu-10.04-desktop-amd64.iso
Good news in the sense that it gives a WebOS based slate (which would be way more interesting than that thing HP showed at CES) a fighting chance.

While the Courier wasn't something that interested me over an iPad, there were some interesting ideas in those mockups.
Didn't you hear? Steve Jobs officially ruled Flash useless! Get with the times, cretin!
>or contribute to SproutCore[4]

The President and CEO of Sproutit, Charles Jolley, has been employed by Apple since 2006. I guess that would count as contributing to SproutCore.
"Memory ballooning to dynamically in- or decrease the amount of RAM used by a VM (64-bit hosts only) (see the manual for more information)"

Awesome. I'm definitely not a VM expert, but I think that means I can fire up my VM, and if not much is running in it, it won't consume as much memory on the host. Is that correct?
At 712 points this is the highest upvoted post I have ever seen on Hacker News.
Mine is at 428 KB. :P
Wasn't Duke Nukem Forever slated to run on a Courier? Damn, I guess it'll never come out now.
Q&A with Norm Winarsky of SRI, about Siri and next AI spinouts
See the top comment in this thread by pohl: "it would be hypocrisy if Microsoft forbade middleware and Apple complained about whether or not it was right for Microsoft to do so."
http://releases.ubuntu.com/10.04/MD5SUMS
>The truth is Apple doesn't want to be disintermediated. Apple wants developers to be strictly dependent on its tools and APIs, and not use anything between the app and the platform. This is particularly offensive to me as a software developer, and it's far worse than anything Microsoft has ever tried to pull. It's the reason why 3.3.1 is phrased the way it is, and it has nothing to do with Flash and everything to do with locking developers in.

Microsoft did the same thing with DirectX and OpenGL. OpenGL was cross-platform. Microsoft stopped supporting it, and instead insisted that developers use DirectX. This essentially killed cross-platform gaming for Mac/Linux. DirectX games port between Microsoft platforms and Microsoft's Console, but require significant middleware to port to OpenGL and non-Win32 platforms.

Use of an API, public and documented, is a form of dependence and lock-in. Apple has done. Microsoft does it. Oracle does it.
Hard to argue with a title like that =)
There are no requirements that the increase follow inflation numbers. It only says that the SEC should increase the rates as "the Commission determines is appropriate and in the public interest, in light of price inflation." I guarantee you the SEC will not double the standards over night. They will have a long rule making session will ask for comments from the public as they are required, and will slowly increase the standards while studying the effects.

So yes every article that says "The Dodd bill also raises the net worth and income thresholds to $2.3 million and $450,000, respectively" like this WSJ article is dead wrong. The Dodd bill does no such thing.
Jobs never said that Cocoa is an open standard. He just state that Flash is as proprietary as Cocoa Touch. Market share =! Open.

His point is that on the mobile web, HTML5 is open, not Flash.
Good for Linode, but I can't say I expect any VPS hosting company to have Lucid (or any other brand new release) day one anyway. I'll give them a week or so before I start to wonder.
Which file are you downloading? I'm trying virtualbox-3.2_3.2.0~beta1-60785~Ubuntu~lucid_i386.deb

I downloaded the Guest Additions without problems.
Class-based generic views would go a long way as well; Django's generic views are pretty useless in their current form.
Here is Steve Jobs verbatim: And Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms. For example, although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5. Adobe was the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X.

What the author points out is that it's odd (hypocritical?) for Jobs to pick on Adobe as the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X when Apple itself has not finished that transition (iTunes) and was very slow to do so in some cases (Finder).

I did use "in effect" to avoid going back and getting a quotation. I was lazy. But the quotation is there. I think it's overkill to describe me as using a straw man argument.
The point is that if you build your application correctly no one will even notice it's not a Cocoa app.

Take the iTunes App Store for instance. Nearly the entire application is a Webview, the AppKit equivalent of stuffing a Safari window into your application. It's all HTML (or an HTML-like markup language) and CSS. It's a little clunky sometimes but you can't say it doesn't "feel" like a real application just because it uses web technologies.
I think they mean OOP:

"Simonyi introduced the techniques of object-oriented programming that he had learned at Xerox to Microsoft."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Simonyi#Microsoft
Setup pull backups. Rsync.net does this for me. How it works is they ssh into your box using an SSH key and pull down the backups. That way the password is never stored on the box that is being backed up.
...unless you can get more done by working shorter hours.

In my experience, the people that work the longest hours waste the most time at work. Work expands and contracts to fill time.
Did you read the same article I did?

Trying to figure out the connection with this comment :)
I think it means you can increase the RAM of a VM without shutting it down. With Xen, the VM needs to be rebuilt (a couple of minutes off)
Ask HN: Which is highest up-voted submission on Hacker News?
I hope its not steve job's flash thoughts.
Hey guys, heard about this new programming language? It's almost likey writing English. People reckon it will make writing software so easy that anyone can write whatever software they need - making professional programmers unnecessary within a few years.

It's called COBOL.

(from ca. 1960, that's what people really thought back then)
'Leads to' is an unfortunate choice of words at best.

Unless there are details not yet divulged, this appears pretty similar to, e.g., 'Casual Encounters section of Craigslist Leads to Murder of Phoenix Man'.
Yeah man, you don't get that 'about to crash' feeling when you see the pinwheel in OS X?
Well, it's hungarian notation that's associated with him in particular, like it or not.
It was only ever a design exercise. I suspect that Microsoft never had plans to develop and sell the courier. However, based on the excitement and demand, I wouldn't be surprised to see one of the hardware vendors pick-up the torch.
Heh. I'm actually busy with features current users are asking for. But the "The reason this is so valuable" paragraph does sound like exactly the people we help. Some kind of integration is probably in our future. Of course, all Picwing has to do is pull from RSS feeds and they'll be integrated with everybody.
To deride Adobe for not porting applications to Cocoa and for Apple not to have: that is hypocritical. Only one example in the article. I don't see the problem of usage.
Hacker news is on the low end of the webapp scale.
"Programmers don’t know what a computer user wants because they spend their days interacting with machines. They hunch over keyboards, pecking out individual lines of code in esoteric programming languages, like medieval monks laboring over illustrated manuscripts."

Isn't this a bit like saying that architects don't know what kind of houses people want because they spend all day poring over diagrams? Or like saying landscapers don't know what people want because they spend all their time landscaping?

I hate to break it to the New York Times, but programmers are actual people. We're not that different from other people. No really!
Yes, email distribution is way easier than prints, so I think you can count on them implementing that feature, certainly before you're a grandparent. :-)
You're asking for a redefinition or sharpening of a word that is often used in a sloppy way. That's fine - and potentially very useful.

But my point was more limited: the parent poster writes as though vast numbers of people don't understand the simple concept of hypocrisy. That might be fine, too, except that it's his definition of 'hypocrisy' that is non-standard.
I didnt say it was, I was merely saying that a pen based device is an unexplored niche, one that I was hoping the courier would fill.
Oxytocin Spray Increases Empathy
Non-technical responses, lots of dodging and hand-waving, saying things are a smokescreen without rebutting direct points. Very, very bad move for Adobe. Why would they want to get into a pissing contest with Apple and let Jobs control the conversation?
I think he's right that browsers need to innovate, not by innovating new ways for web apps to do things, but by innovating new ways to interact with existing web apps. There's a whole load of potential integration between browsers and web content, and while there are various browser based twitter/whatever clients and whatnot, most of them feel tacked on rather than integrated. The internet tends to feel like a giant cobweb, rather than a woven spiderweb.
Agreed, but we will likely never get there (many professional programmers are incompetent, to say nothing of the amateurs that need to do little snippets, and there will always be beginners that are incompetent now just because they are learning to be competent).

A concept like this, if it is possible, can work from the other way and help prevent the incompetents from being dangerous. I doubt it will ever prevent people from needing to do low level programming, abstractions leak as the article says. But if done well, it could help people with minimal knowledge create truly useful things. This would help free the truly skilled programmers to work on hard and important problems.
On the contrary, its a written standard that you "have to simulate in your head". If you have an implementation, you can simply run the code and see what it does!
Yes, same here, at 996 KB.
What percentage of users do you suppose that is?

PS3s used for scientific research don't have to upgrade, unless they're also secretly using them to play new games.
What happens with the frame? Wifi connection problems?
I wouldn't take this news as the huge bummer that it looks like. One thing Microsoft doesn't have with the courier is the element of surprise. Windows phone 7 is coming out later this year, so I would think that they want to focus on that as much as possible and then consider how to scale that experience to something like a courier/tablet device.

As amazing as the concept video looked, something even better could be on the horizon.
This is the first time I've heard of the Courier...
Actually, we also just released an API so other services can send their photos to Picwing.

http://www.picwing.com/apidocs

Would love to work with OurDoings. Wanna chat about this sometime?
"the news of the HP slate (on indefinite hold)"

Where did you hear that? If you're referring to WebOS I don't think HP is going to cancel a product already in the pipeline for a product that is at least a year away
> The recourse for users was to manually manage a copy of libjpeg6 themselves, outside of the package manager.

That was because you did an upgrade from a mirror in which not all packages where updated. Bad luck.
We are removing Flash support from OS X
I have no issue with him shutting out something that really sucks today at the cost of potentially missing out on something awesome to do with it tomorrow. The awesome scenario just doesn't seem likely to come to pass. If tomorrow there's a completely great thing on the web that can only be done with flash, then I think Jobs is pragmatic enough to reevaluate.

But the fact that the main use for Flash on the web these days, beside video and unusable websites, are animated flash ads that use up 40% of my much more powerful Macbook Pro's CPU time means I'm in no hurry to have flash on the phone, openness dogma be damned. When Jobs limits my general purpose computers, I'll be angry, but until then, I'm glad he's making the tough design decisions instead of just letting the device be a free for all.
What if, is not the question here. What is, on other hand, is more relevant, and at present the most obnoxious experience of web advertising is via flash.