skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He's not going to prison. He could have taken the phone out of the engineer's pocket intentionally and still not go to prison.
Truthfully, these sort of issues have been completely eclipsed by stories of Apple and the iPhone, and I can only suspect that Verizon is loving every minute of it. This was a long standing issue why I hated VZW, and made the eventual move over to T-Mobile; i.e. they locked you out of so many features and forced you to use theirs, which came at a premium.

If you ask me, this is considerably more of a snake in the grass problem than Apple deciding to give Adobe and the flash platform the boot, when it comes to power hungry mobile service providers.
"Flash cross-compiled apps on iPhone == Bad" because it's not... open...

Neither stated nor implied. The logic doesn't "match up" because it's a separate issue, addressed with different arguments:

"We have discussed the downsides of using Flash to play video and interactive content from websites, but Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices."

He then goes on about third-party middleware, e.g.:

"We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers."

Jobs does not make the openness argument in reference to Apple's proprietary platform at all. It seems to me that you have to ignore the last third of the article to think that he was.

He's trying to come off as an 'open crusader for the web against Adobe'

Is Jobs lying when he says Apple supports open web standards?
Longest Tweet Contest winners announced, including one fish
If the federal government were to aggressively enforce this it would amount to a default ban on cash transactions between businesses.
People seem to get very hung up on the word hypocrisy. The fact is that Apple is calling out Adobe on the exact same things that they themselves do, and acting like they're Jesus for it. If you don't think it's 'hypocrisy' by the letter, then that's fine, but it doesn't make their actions any less asinine.
I thought we were done using the word 'rockstar'?
I am trying to figure out the criminal aspect of this as (to me) it makes no sense to search the guy who returned the product but it possibly could make sense to investigate the guy that "found" it. (In his story the phone was in a silicon case so you could not see the design). If I return someones' wallet the police don't bust down my door, so what (apart from the "Apple") is different here?
Textie for the iPhone - From the creator of Tweetie
DotNetKicks Launches a Fresh Design for .NET Programmers
This is the strongest argument against Jobs' anti-Flash post today I have read, and the only one that doesn't mis-paraphrase it.

The rebuttal to this parody, though, is this: If Flash were booted from OS X, within months, much of the content users would be missing would be available in ways other than Flash, and IMO, the world would be a better place.
Seems like a really nice system, actually. The idea has room for growth and could turn into something really neat
Sadly, I was hoping to find some secret setting to I didn't know I should have turned on/off.
Flash History
They give the masses what they want; rubbish is much easier to watch than real news.
"Congress wants to do these things, and the tax code is the easiest way to do them. Congress will STILL want to do these things even if you do fair tax."

Sounds to me like Congress is the problem.
You make it sound like faxes are infallible. Every time I've had to send somebody one, we've had to cycle through several iterations before it actually worked - Ah, looks like I need to dial 9 to get an outside line. Oh, your fax machine isn't switched on right now? Still nothing? Ok, read me your fax number again one more time. Oh crap, I put the documents in upside down...
That’s what happens when you have to fill 24 hours with news. The format just doesn’t make any sense.
What I meant was that the commercials show a lot more of the device's potential that just isn't really there.

btw UMPC's exist too; they just sucked like Surface.

Have you interacted with a Surface device or UMPC? Did the features and possibilities match the commercials? From my experience, the answer is no.
In my experience, analog fax has been neither problem-free nor spam-free, even with a solid fax machine over POTS. Feed errors, pages turned the wrong way, machine running out of memory, feed or print jams, poor quality, power loss, etc, have all contributed towards fax headaches.

Email works significantly better than fax: it just appears to have more problems due to volume of electronic mail.
This is like a high-res Sarbanes-Oxley.

Can anyone figure out who inserted this clause?
I havent used either Flightcaster or Fair Isaac extensively. A cursory glance at their websites suggests that both companies actually transform the available data substantially, almost to the point where it is fundamentally new information. Flightcaster does this with their Machine Learning voodoo, while Fair Isaac does it by summarising and analysing existing data to create a credit score / report. In either case there is a worthwhile value add. From my point of view what these two companies do is very different from Reuters and Bloomberg who take great pains to not do analysis (that would be a conflict of interest with their clients). In short - the post I replied to made the assertion that data by itself has no value. I quote - "People don't pay for data, they pay for decisions". The two examples I provided (Reuters and Bloomberg) provide merely scrubbed data, they do not provide analysis. Hence there appears to be a sizeable market for data.
> If he sold it for $5000, then he stole $5000

Simply not true. If I find your car and sell it to a chop shop for $300, then what was your car worth? If I paid you back the $300, would we be even?

You wouldn't want $300 back, you'd want to be "made whole." There simply is no way that Apple can be made whole in this situation. The genie is out of the bottle.

Re: the criminal angle, there was no crime in finding the phone, and possibly none in taking it home. It seems possible that there was a crime in converting it to his own benefit instead of turning it into to Apple or the police. So far the DA seems to agree.
$1500 wasn't nominal when I was young (early 20s) and unemployed.
A lot of the articles I got looked odd and messed up because of the content being chopped into your site. Webcomics especially suffered (Hark a Vagrant didn't even display until I opened it in a new window).

Perhaps an iframe or something similar so we can see the site itself, with your site becoming a top or sidebar?
It has to have sunk in by now that Apple can now bankrupt him at will. This was definitely one of the all-time stupidest capers.
The assertion is worded badly.

It isn't the OS that crashes, it is only the Flash process (in OSX 10.6). In 10.5 it runs in the same process as Safari, so in 10.5 the Safari browser crashes when Flash dies.

Safari itself is impressively stable, even the pre-betas.
Don't pretty much all bills work this way? Was the healthcare bill really so different to the norm?
The author is wrong here, because that sentence exists to support the decision to not allow Adobe to interpose themselves between Apple's platform APIs and developers. Neither the Finder nor iTunes presented an impediment to improving the platform because neither of them interpose in any significant manner. That they have managed to bring MacOS X this far without touching them is evidence of this.

Regardless, Apple's own development is under Apple's own control. The current question is why they are not willing to be at the mercy of a vendor that is not only beyond Apple's control, but also has an established history of lagging. You may not like their decision, but it is prudent, consistent with their stated values, and consistent with their actions.

The author did not understand the function of this paragraph, and based his attack on a faulty interpretation.

I'm surprised that so many denizens of HN seem to be having trouble with the concept of a chain of dependencies, and how that makes the cases of iTunes and the Finder very different.
The tweets are the worst. They read tweets way too often, and the anchors clearly have never seen the tweets before because they stumble over every abbreviation, misspelling, etc. And the tweets almost never present an interesting opinion. It's just a stupid gimmick to make people feel "engaged" and "part of the program" which theoretically improves ratings (I say theoretically because I change the channel whenever they bring the tweets up) at the expense of any semblance of quality.
we need to redesign the mess that is our federal government.

it is careening towards disaster and the fools in Congress just want to rev the engine.
I'm just trying it out with my wife's iTouch to my Droid. So far there's about a 50% loss rate on texts sent from Textie and a few that never got received (maybe 10%). A small sample, obviously, and it is free. Still, not a great initial showing.
Even with an iframe how would I deal with wide pages? I want to avoid nested scrollbars.

You're right that it may just be worth sidestepping this issue somehow. Rendering issues have been persistent on readwarp[1]. It's kinda useful to see articles with standardized typography like the readability plugin provides, but it may be too much effort to make perfect.

[1] Though my handful of users haven't complained about this in a while (I've been fixing bugs as they come up). Time to go find the stories you ran into - thanks for the feedback.
You are asking for user comments, I take it, so my comment will be about a first impression from visiting your site. You are gathering information about user preferences, but I didn't see a convenient link to your site's privacy policy. While I can certainly trust anyone who posts on HN not to do anything nefarious with my personal information (can't I?), it is industry-standard practice for consumer-facing websites that gather personal information of any kind to have a posted privacy policy. That may or may not have any legal effect, but it can have a user-reassurance effect that will encourage more people to use your site, if that is what you desire.
Bad as this provision is in itself, even worse is the broader idea that such items should be "slipped in" to omnibus statutes that are so indecipherable that no reasonable legislator or member of the public can know all that is in it before it becomes law. It is indecent that such items should pass and get signed into law without meaningful debate as to their implications and without any form of public scrutiny whatever. In the meantime, we the taxpayers are stuck with the consequences.
Definitely not if I have to click it every time I want to use it. I think this would be better suited as a browser plug-in.
$400? What are you talking about? Apple's margins on the iPhone are reportedly between 20-50%; by your logic, since Apple itself lost the phone, this guy should only be on the hook for ~$300 or so!

Of course, using reality-based logic, the story is a little different. The reality is that if this incident caused Apple to reschedule the iPhone unveiling by one day, or pushed the release date of the phone back by a week, or took an engineering team offline for a couple days, or forced Apple to spend 80 billable hours with outside counsel, or... look, there's probably not a single action Apple could have taken in response to this that doesn't immediately incur 5-6 figure damages.

Could this guy have possibly realized that? Not Apple's problem. Not the world's greatest caper, this one.
The Upside of Deep Procrastination
Thanks. I get it. From your short description sounds like more human overhead involved in planning how to do it as opposed to using worker threads (not available in IE yet).
Error in above - I keep saying 'Comptroller of the Currency' when referring to section 413, which actually says Comptroller General, part of the GAO. Sorry if this has resulted in confusion.

Also, this link for the bill is slightly more up to date than that of the banking committee, although the passages discussed above haven't changed substantively - the only difference is that section 413's 3 subparagraphs have been reconfigured as sections 413, 414, and 415: http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=11...
> it also proves Jobs' point: cross-platform, least-common-denominator stuff almost never provides the level of enjoyment that native, non-legacy stuff does

Not really. If the difference was that big, he would have devoted resources to porting his own software. Being the perfectionist he is, and not porting his own software, one has to conclude the differences just aren't that big.
"Don't pretty much all bills work this way?"

Yes. That's why they're generally such train wrecks.
These linked ones are the education ones. They are completely different in content from the ones used in in the product team roles.
What many people seem to be missing or ignoring is that he is primarily talking about Flash content on websites.

Jobs said all standards pertaining to the web should be open, not all software. He admits that they have proprietary systems for native apps.

Apple believes that browsing the web should not require a proprietary plugin. I don't see any hypocrisy in that.
Not a bad idea, posting here.

Next time just go to Reddit and post

'Free jailbait porn, click here'
The real reason Fax is still alive is because in most states/provinces a faxed document with a signature is legal.

This means warrants, contracts, etc hold up on court where a document that is emailed and printed off will not.

This is not a particularly good reason - but that is the bottom line.
Don't get caught up in the competencies. Levels are all about scope. And the odd ones require a jump in mgmt chain signoff, so start working with your lead on them early because they ain't getting them for you at the last minute.
Thanks for the reminder, I'll add a policy.

And yes you can trust me :)
"The place looks like a building site and here's why: in Greece you pay no taxes on a building 'til it's completed, but since the weather is fine all year anyway, why not just leave the top floor unfinished?"

Interesting. The exact same thing happens in south Italy.
call 1000 people today, tell 500 of them football team A is going to win this week. call the other 500 people, tell them that football team A is going to lose this week.

Football Team A wins.

Next week call 250 of the people that you told team A would win this week, tell them football team A will win again. Call the other 250 and tell them that football team A will lose.

by the end of the season you'll have a dozen or so (i think?) people that will believe anything that you tell them

[if anyone can tell me the source of this idea (book/movie?) let me know!]
I defend Flash in the same way I defend people people's right to free speech even when I violently disagree with them.
No joke, radio.
You should consider that while some laws are not enforced, it's yet another lever that the government can use against you. In this case, it would probably give the IRS even more broad reaching powers to audit people and businesses for not being compliant.
I would suggest a dictatorship instead. I am willing to be the dictator and I promise I will address all of these problems right away.
Flip back through the pages of history: during the few hundred years that the Roman Empire was collapsing, the tax collectors became so violent and generally oderous that in some cases Romans living on the geographic fringes of the Empire welcomed invaders because a change of government looked good to them.

I expect the same to happen in the USA. Local governments and the federal government need money to operate on. In the best case scenario, two things would happen: drastically reducing government spending on the military and not-so-essential social services, and, slightly raising taxes. Neither of these reasonable things will get done.
Great design and a cool idea, but I really think that 101 things is way too many. I had the patience to put in about 5. I doubt that very many people will be able to think up 101 things--of course maybe I just have fewer goals in life than the average person :-)
"the first prototype of what he calls 'the mind-brain computer interface.' It's a sensor in his phone that can compute brain waves and then send them via bluetooth back into the phone to dial numbers."

Read that twice, did I accidentally sleep through the singularity?
I see. I remember when libjpeg-7 were introduced some people had problems either with async mirrors or they forgot to rebuild packages in AUR. Yours was a particularly unfortunate case, sorry it happened at your first experience with ARCH. I'd suggest you try again sooner or later. It's a nice distro, really.
They are charging service provides (lawyers, recruiters, etc.) $1500 to attend. So why is it wrong to charge startups $1500 for the chance at getting funding, whereas it's perfectly ok to charge lawyers $1500 for the chance of landing a client?

Also, have you ever actually hosted a conference? Getting this many people in a room is a full time job that takes months, in addition to monetary costs. The idea that other people should be obligated to work for you for free is ridiculous.
> I think it's more likely that it's a practical reason

> They are establishing Adobe's track record of keeping current on underlying platform enhancements.

None of that refutes whether or not Apple considers using the Cocoa API exclusively as a norm. I think it's quite clear that they do. Are you really suggesting otherwise?
That may be the point. I have joked for years that cash would be made illegal, and perhaps now it is not such a joke.
Are you sure about that? Maybe email+print alone will not hold up, but check the ESign act of 2000:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Signatures_in_Global...

There are definitely electronic forms of contracts that are legal without me ever having to put an ink pen on a dead tree.

I bought car insurance from Geico entirely online. Never signed anything or faxed anything. Just typed in my initials and checked some boxes ... only thing I had to print was the card that goes in my glove box.
I watch Al Jazeera English sometimes and IMHO it is better than CNN International and nearly as good as BBC World.
The Barbarian Group is known to be a top design agency that creates really impressive creative design. So probably them.
Hold on! I'm almost ready! ...with the personal genome browser I'm building
http://devonjensen.com/screenshots.html
Ask HN: Review My Startup Site - Not So Beautiful People (nsbp.me)
Hi all,

My name is Boki and I'm the founder and developer of a new little dating site startup called Not So Beautiful People. Link: http://www.notsobeautifulpeople.com or http://www.nsbp.me

It's meant to be a dating site with a bit of a twist: no really hot people. It kind of started as a joke between myself and the other co-founder, but has grown into a full featured site.

We are releasing the beta version I'd love it if you guys could take a look and give us some feedback.

A bit of a warning tho...the site uses explicit language.

Thanks again,
Boki
Nice. Making the commands visible without clicking the button (but more subtle/better designed) would be nice, else I'll just forget the button is there. Good stuff. And yes, pik means dick in Belgium too.
"Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind." http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/E._B._White

Odd: I just came across a similar analogy in Cory Doctorow's "Eastern Standard Tribe":

"The difference between reading a story and studying a story is the difference between living the story and killing the story and looking at its guts."
Someone named Kevin Rose forked Reddit on GitHub...
I think this is pretty good. You should focus on simplicity. I'm thinking about signing up (haven't yet). It's a nice reminder and a cute way to motivate oneself.

An API is vital imo. This whole concept rests on simplicity and friendly motivators. I'd want a nice widget display or a json output of my list so I can add it to a blog or wherever I'd like to promote/remind myself of my goals. This of course is a huge marketing benefit for you as well.

Hope this helps.
Doesn't seem so bad to me... http://i.imgur.com/W7NIR.png
Bullshit.

The author even specifically removed text from his quote that undermines his own statements. That text being: "Apple later disclosed the patents under the W3C's royalty-free patent licensing terms."
Olmert is a political opponent of Netanyahu. He's also about to get convicted of supposedly the most serious corruption charges in Israeli history. I wouldn't call him a paragon of credibility.
Seems it's just due to it being a young project:

BossDB is a database abstraction layer used for querying and updating the database. Currently only Tokyo Tyrant is supported, but other drivers will be added in the future.

http://www.chicagoboss.org/api-db.html
This is depressing. How can you work for Microsoft, see that, and not be depressed? Whatever you think of the company's technology over the years, you have to wonder how old timers feel about starting a career at a software company and ending it at a company that exists solely as charity for office workers.
Standards: why?
Is there anything like an HN community for Japanese startups?
Well, I think that's a step backwards, but at least that would mean you were willing to admit that what we're doing right now isn't working any more. [immediate edit:] Most of us have too much knee-jerk nationalistic pride to think about changing the system on a fundamental level.
True. Moral of the story: Big Companies like to give the shaft to consumers.
Wow, really?

I guess hyperlinks aren't required for sharing, but they are so cool. The fact that on the web you can try a service just by following a link that a friend mails you makes things so incredibly frictionless. I supect that conversion for "just go look on abc.com" is a lot worse than "click this link".

Same thing for advertising. If there were no hyperlinks, you wouldn't be able to track conversion on your ads. That seems important.

Not to mention the fact that URLs are unique identifiers. So you can do analytics and find all the referers to your app/movie/article/whatever.
Not at all. This bill is notable for its complexity, scope and unpopularity. Day by day people disliked it more and more and everyone involved wanted to get it off the TV as soon as possible. When a bill is more popular there is less thrashing. People don't need to desperately alter things to appease individual politicians. Each of those patches is essentially a hack to cover one corner case. This bill is full of them. Popularity equates to a more stable code base. Politicians are also more productive when doing something popular. They are less likely to "grab what they can" and more likely to contribute to the bill's success and thus their re-election.

We've all been there... A few nights before a release we realize we have an unmaintainable mess and the deadline needs to be pushed so we can go back to square one. This is what happens when you release anyways.
I don't really think he is, I'm just bothered by some of the sentiments floated around here about the severity of the crime.
I know, but since there are a number of other sources that corroborate that account (see the Wikipedia link above), I think it is credible. Surely you don't claim that absolutely everything Olmert ever said is a lie, do you?
Have you ever looked at the postgres documentation at all?
Paul is a great guy, genuine and whip smart.
I can't believe I'm the first to post this nugget:

"In a seemingly serious situation, what nuggets of humor or irony can I find?"