skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The App Store guidelines pretty much rule out most big applications. Just like the iOS guidelines, you can't download loadable code bundles, you can't use your own licensing system, your own update system, etc.

Matlab, Photoshop, etc, are not compatible with the guidelines, so unless Apple wants to do away with entire market segments, they're going to continue allowing traditional development and installs, with the App Store being an optional distribution method.
The parent says it's $20/mo off for no-contract, at that rate ($60) the no-contract comes out to $1960, barely a savings of $100 overall. Definitely worth the contract if you don't have $520 to drop when you need a phone.
Apple Ships Paul Graham's Dream Setup
Hey Paul, how does it feel to be possibly the only interviewee to get what was asked for?

Lifted from PG's March 2009 "The Setup" interview

What would be your dream setup?
(Paul Graham responds)
"I'd like it if the Air was about half the size. I don't know why Apple won't make something in between the Air and an iPhone."

Link-
http://paul.graham.usesthis.com/
Yeah, I came out quite underwhelmed too.

I really like Mission Control, but I want to hear about a finder that's finally good (tried the alternatives, didn't like any of them) or resolution independence.

None of these features had the whiz-bang appeal of past innovations like Time Machine, etc.
If by the "standard model", one means the general model of Black-Scholes and modern mainstream mathematical finance, I stand by my original claim.

In practical terms, modern mathematical finance's modeling of market with the Gaussian distribution has the implication that it is possible to add together a number of risky items to get a product which is less risky. This was the basis of Long Term Capital Management and this was the basis of the "synthetic" Triple A bonds built out of sub-prime mortgages.

The "free money" comes of out the risk combining/hedging approach through the implication that by adding up supposedly uncorrelated risks, you can create a lower-risk financial "vehicle" that still delivers a rate of return somewhat comparable to underlying items. If a bank pays 1% interest and you can get a 5% "virtually risk free return", then you've got 4% profit. Now Black and Merton of LTCM went one step further. They were so mathematically impressive that they got a virtually infinite line of credit to borrow against to use in the risk-combining approach. The implication was they would be, again, getting a nearly-risk-free rate of return and so investment banks could lend to them nearly-risk-free too. Even their massive failure didn't convince people. The entire stable of CDO etc product sold on the same basis, the basis of providing risks no greater than the highest rated corporate bond but with significantly higher return. We can see how "risk-free" they really were.

Moreover, it is true that if you can find a bunch of small, uncorrelated risks with finite mean and variance, you can add them up to get a big, tractable Gaussian distribution with a very small variance (that's the mean-value theorem, in fact). So the synthetic bond approach rests firmed on the standard modeling of the market as akin to Brownian motion.

The problem with this approach is that, as Mandlebrot pointed out is that one doesn't actually wind-up dealing with distributions having finite variance. Adding up distributions without finite variance gets you a distribution in the L-stable family of distributions, which are in general much less tractable, not having finite variance themselves. In this light, it seems clearer why synthetic bonds turned not to be the free money they claimed to be.

One might argue that this mean that the "efficient market hypothesis" itself would imply that markets don't follow a Gaussian distribution. I'll leave that those who still some faith this formulation - I'd personally claim this "hypothesis" isn't even a coherently position.
That's about a 33% premium. Unfortunately you can't go elsewhere because the SSD industry is packing SSDs in a ridiculous 2.5" form factor.

The industry needs to develop a standard size SSD for ultra-portables, especially one that Apple is likely to use in future devices.
I'm not 100% on board with the direction they're taking this, but at least they're taking it in a direction.
Not that hard. It is like other professions: you need skills and intelligence. With a strong math and computer science knowledge base, plus 10 years of programming experience, should be enough for addressing most difficult problems.
This thread hit close to home, so I wrote a blog post I've been meaning to write for awhile, and framed it as a response:

http://www.aaronboodman.com/2010/10/wherein-i-help-you-get-g...
According to the presentation, it's supposed to be made a standard. I'm assuming this would hit the IETF's Audio/Video transport working group, so that'd be where to keep a lookout.
I think you mean Hobson's Choice.
Claiming that data point 1 may be the start of the slippery slope certainly sounds like "fear, uncertainty and doubt" to me.

It's also worth noting that the slippery slope argument is widely regarded as a fallacy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
I work in sales so I get rejected every single day... =) It's not the same though because I don't take it as personally.
Plugging Frustration Leaks
I like the icon. I am really glad to see they didn't go the same direction as the new iTunes icon.
A visit to id software (1993)
I think that's part of the reason they've kept all this features separate. From the demo it appears if you don't want to use them you don't have to.
I was actually thinking today that Apple should buy Skype ... recalling the recent post about Apple buying Facebook, I think Skype would be a better fit.
Only if you venture in to those subreddits. That's the nice thing about it. You can select which sections of the community appear on the top bar.
How would Microsoft run afoul of anti-trust laws? I could see that happening if and only if they made their app store the exclusive software channel.
Since when did your Atom become the same thing as a C2D ULV? They aren't even in the same class. Nearly every subnotebook (yeah, the original name) using Intel ULVs runs over 800 dollars. The difference in processors (seriously, a C2D ULV will absolutely smoke an Atom) and graphics card (320M will leave whatever crap Intel packages with the Atoms now standing still) makes up a large part of the price difference.
It's a good place on average with a few loony subreddits.
In this case, it's political. The conservative end of the spectrum is borderline rabid right now, so comments implying things like "Fox News is comically untruthful" will be taken in an "us vs them" frame of mind. Regardless of Fox News's truthfulness.

Downmod away.
It's not an enhanced chat. It is the trojan program that may make a go at replacing telephony. What happens when they add:

• audio only facetime.

• the ability to audio only facetime with people on telephones.

Facetime is then an open system for contacting people on a wide variety of devices with graceful fallback to even simple telephones. It becomes 1st choice and total minutes used of voice telephony dwindles.

§

Or not. Apple is comfortable putting a product in place and waiting to see if it is a goer or not. Apple TV has been sitting around for years waiting for favorable licensing. It might be getting close, or maybe not.
That's great until they balk at turning over a few hundred thousand dollars for whatever reason.
>> Language does matter.

I would say "Languages do matter. All of them." Now, I certainly don't mean iterations on a single language (though experiencing that evolution first-hand can be very instructive), but insofar as Java 1.3 and C# 1.0 were nearly identical languages, they were still worth learning even at that time because experiencing the vastly different ecosystems completely cuts through all of the dogmatism that every language has.
Comparing XP to Windows 7 is like comparing OSX 10.1 to OSX 10.6
My 2007 iMac boots from USB - in fact, since its internal drive died it's running permanently from an external drive. PowerPC Macs couldn't boot from USB (but could from FireWire), but as far as I'm aware all Intel Macs can.

Target Disk Mode is something else, and wouldn't really work over USB since it has a host/device model which FireWire doesn't.
Minecraft.net is down because of what I believe is an attack
Thanks all for your feedback. I replied to him offering to give him the files for $150, his original offer. Otherwise too bad--it probably means that he does not want the files and at that point even giving it away from free likely wouldn't change anything.
The price I'd be willing to pay for a powerful MacBook Air sickens me.

And I hate to think what more they could include if they weren't so obsessed with the tapered edge. More than 4 GB of RAM? A real SSD? WWAN?
Agreed. It makes it sound like we cannot come up with new ideas or new words, which we all know that we can. My first language was a form of BASIC. Then I mostly programmed on my calculator in another BASIC-derived language not far removed from assembly (GOTO was the only flow control it offered). When I moved to C, suddenly the patterns of if/then and do/while/for loops immediately made sense: I had been using them the entire time without realizing it.

And math? I can't help but use it. When people ask for estimates, I always do some math based on known quantities rather than just guessing. I keep track of how far off my estimates were to apply later corrections and reason backwards to figure out which of my assumptions were wrong (leading to better estimates in the future). I've done merge sort by hand on stacks of paper (and found the speedup when you have a big gap between two merged piles and can move an entire chunk to the sorted pile).

And that's not even counting my job, where I end up doing lots of geometry. Knowing the formulas for mutually tangent circles or the formula to find the two intersection points of two circles is surprisingly useful (the case where you have zero or infinity intersection points just doesn't come up and even having one point multiplicity two is rare).

I wish I knew more math. I know more than most people and I even have a degree in it, but there's so much great stuff like linear algebra, statistics, graph theory, and game theory that I never feel like I know enough about any of them.
Why set the minimum OS to Snow Leopard? That sounds a bit of a far-fetched requirement for some videoconferencing software.
Vinyl art wall stickers
According to Jobs, he's the only reason computers have typography whatsoever:

> Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

> None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.

Quoted from http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/1422863/posts
I wouldn't call several days or almost a week of standby with a healthy battery a "fast drain". Nobody on HN leaves their computer sleeping for more than few hours anyway, right?
Flight booking sites: stack up the new vs the old
That depends entirely on the cost of maintaining two very different codebases, keeping track of two different APIs....
About Drupal | drupal.org
Barbados or Trinidad. They have good net connections and are very picturesque
I'm with ya, and I don't think they'd need 'permission'... but usually Apple announces a deal to go along with stuff like that, you know, $15/month 3g plans on iPads.

Basically what I'm saying is that the carriers will be super pissed if all the sudden all of their users are using all of their purchased bandwidth because they can shove a card into their laptop. It's like ketchup, the majority of people don't use all 500mb/1gb/whatever of data per month, but they still pay for it. The telecoms want to keep it that way.
Learning To Ignore Your Clients
But no hardware discounts.
They can take the role of a VC for a startup - providing capital. EA can absorb a $10 million budget for a new game, where Rovio might have difficulty convincing a bank to loan them that much.
> "For instance, the bill that massively increases the size of government, putting a permanent burden in taxation or inflation on the economy that Obama claims will "Stimulate" it."

Which bill is it that massively increases the size of government?
This looks magical :-)

Are you sure you're decoding bits from an octet stream (normal 8-bit bytes) and not using logical booleans? I ask this because I don't see any bit-manipulation operators, except maybe for "1 :> 'T" which looks like the SML module type casting, but I could be wrong.
Five bucks says Apple moves towards touchscreens on even their mainstream laptops/desktops. The Springboard on OSX, and the completely iOS-esque UI on the new iLife suite... it all sets the stage.
Lucasfilm's Keeper of the Fans Is Leaving
I'm not sure you understand why Lehman went under. It was not because of some mysterious event called lack of confidence that came out of nowhere and drove them to insolvency. Confidence disappeared because the fundamentals of their credit derivative business created massive losses that was driving them to insolvency. You've blamed the symptom for the disease.

Business is more than just words coming out of an executives' mouth. There are real dollars, real inventories and assets, that are the basis of the whole field of security analysis, devoted to determining whether a company deserves confidence given the state of its business.
Sex.com sells for $13m
It sounds like you are ready to get fleeced if you are asking these things on HN without Googling around enough to have a basic idea of what you are talking about.

Some suggestions:

1. If you don't have talent on board to assist with this, and you have the money to, then why aren't you talking with them?

2. As detailed in many other places on the web, just making your site/webapp provide textual content without a lot of crap or images/flash containing the important stuff is a step in the right direction. Try this out: http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html What do you see? Is it content that you think a search engine would view as crap (would you view it as crap) or does it look like something that someone searching through it would view as representative of what they'd be searching for if they were looking for something that your site provides?

3. This does not mean that you have to axe images, flash, etc. (although it might help), but use alt tags, etc. and put in metadata, descriptions, etc. that would help someone looking at the source of your webpage(s) as if it were a human reading through it. (right-click -> view source, etc.).

SEM is getting listed in the ads in google, etc. Google Adwords are great and can help get yourself noticed if you are selling something and competing against a lot of others for the same search terms that are in the top of the results, but doing the SEO stuff (even by itself) might be better if you rank highly enough in the search results for the terms you want people to find you with.

There is a lot more to it than that and the tricks change over time, but odds are someone told you that you need SEO, and now you are freaking out. Don't. Your site may suck. Fix it. Consider getting your URL out there in other ways (printed ads, business cards, etc.).
Sub 13" != netbook
Remember, we had sub 13" laptops (we called them sub notebooks or ultraportables or something) before netbooks came out. Recall the confusion when netbooks first came out. In fact, the original netbooks weren't even close to 11.6" large. 11.6/12" was solely the domain of subnotebooks until the ~3rd generation of netbooks (amazing how quickly they pumped those out).

So stop comparing this to netbooks. Compare them to Thinkpad X series and other non-Atom powered sub 13" laptops. Hell, compare it to the Alienware M11z if you want. Even that's a more accurate comparison than netbooks.
Well, if in "a few" you include most of the largest ones, including /r/reddit.com, /r/politics, and /r/worldnews.
Consider the frequency of patches for apps like the CS5 suite.

Now consider frequent updates consisting of a full download of the whole suite for every little update, rather than a little patch or bundle.
I think he probably spoke about "Designing and Programming Personal Expert Systems" by Carl Townsend that dates back to 1986.

From http://www.faqs.org/faqs/computer-lang/forth-faq/part5/

Contains LISP and Prolog emulations in Forth,
including a unification algorithm. It also has some
minimum distance classifier code.
The application is fault diagnosis in locomotives.
Still do. Their office is literally a room in the corner.
Forced obsolescence.
If it works similar to Ubuntu Software Center then it should be a very nice option for many people. I like being able to quickly download applications through the Software Center, while also having the ability to manually install packages or compile code when necessary. As long as those choices remain on OS X, it should offer a good balance for all user types.
You just made me laugh out loud, which I rarely do while sitting at a computer. I honestly thought rflrob's comment made a lot of sense, until I read yours.

I have to say though: I absolutely loathe doorbells and ringing phones, they stress me out. Ideally, my doorbell would have a vibrate mode, making the floor gently purr.
Does yours overheat? Mine did. Except for that it's close
to ideal.

(I managed to fix the overheating with http://coolbook.se, at least most of the time. It still overheats if I watch video for more than about 10 min.)
I'm all for innovation, and I don't mind change. I just don't particularly think this is a good one.
> My old boss at Apple told me back in the day if you wanted a job you just showed up at the door ready to work. A few weeks later if you lasted you're hired.

Sorta sound like how people joined Project Mayhem in Fight Club.
I must have overlooked that bit. That's good to know. I'm sure some of the features will be useful in some instances, but I would hate to have them as my only options.
Would you consider reddit analogous to a country, and the sub-reddits to states?

Can we raise the dixie flag of /r/circlejerk and rabble rouse for states rights to stupidity?
> The community is the loveliest on the internet

I'm going to post this every time I see a misconception like this (and I really don't care if I get downvoted, it's more important to get the truth out).

Reddit is one of the biggest anti-semitic hate sites on the 'net.

One of many examples: http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/ccnir/im_gonna_get...
>As long as you don't need extreme computing power

e.g. as long as you don't want to play a 720p flash video, say something off of Hulu

Or has adobe finally started supporting hardware accelerated video on OSX?
Software distributed through the Mac AppStore is not restricted to a single user license so I doubt any higher priced applications will make the jump.
If your job isn't to handle security, this may be slightly overstepping your bounds (ie taking time away from whatever you do to toy around with the latest exploits).

Probably better to give it to the people in charge of security.

If that person is your boss, then you have a dilemma. Either your boss doesn't fully understand what happened or perhaps the bug you found undermines his security work and he viewed your testing it as a sign of insubordination.

I'm sure your company is open to this sort of thing, but send it through the proper channels. If there aren't any proper channels, this would be a good time to ask around to see if something can be created to handle situations like these when they come up.
Re. point #2: IIRC, in the talk today, Jobs mentioned that apps installed via the mac app store will work on all your personal macs.
I wonder if I'll go from being called "Steven" to "Steve" when I'm a billionaire. I would think that having that much money would make you want to use your formal name more.
The taper gets your typing angle right (I am guessing).
//'App' is definitely a better term than 'application' or 'program' from a UI perspective if more people can so easily understand it, but I don't understand why or how this happened. They're the same thing! It's strange

I think it's a change in perspective. A 'program' is how a programmer would describe what he codes. An app, is what it should look like to someone who is interested in just using it.

Since those using "an app" should outnumber those who wrote "the program", it is better if it's called an app.
It's like how the term 'bacon' is better suited than 'pig's belly'.
"I find html is often located on web servers..."

Comedy gold, f00li5h.
> "I wonder who will answer that phone number?"

Thanks for that. After reading that line on TFA, as well as the rationalization for the lack of color on the card (seriously??), I had an image of a misty-eyed fanboy staring longingly at the business card while getting strangely aroused.
The original story is from 1999. It doesn't seem to have worked out.
Developing code, especially complicated algorithms and data structures, is all about proofs. Not long, formal proofs but the kind of informal proof you do in your head to convince yourself that your code will work. Studying maths will give you a hell of a lot of practice working with proofs and exposure to lots of different ways of proving things. Even if I didn't use any of the material I learned that will still be valuable.
They don't mention specifically whether they tested dual n-back, which as far as I know is the only task that some studies have shown to increase fluid intelligence.
Indie/FOSS apps should be in heaven on the iOS store, assuming changes needed to the app are minimal.
If your battery (on both devices) can handle it, bluetooth 'tethering' (the term getting increasingly inaccurate) is a good compromise.

On the iPhone, you can leave it turned on and it only activates when requested. Turning it on is as simple as selecting 'connect' from the bluetooth icon in the menu bar.

You probably wouldn't want on-board 3G to connect automatically anyway (for cost reasons if nothing else), so it's not much more work.

But the down side is that leaving bluetooth on will affect battery life on the phone and laptop. Everything's a compromise.
This is such a great idea. Let's just hope no one on the ground gets hurt!!
The Average Teenager Sends 3,339 Texts Per Month
Not really.

Skype is strong in businesses. In the office-setting people first and foremost use the text-chat, then the audio calls, then the conference calls. Video calls come dead last. I wouldn't be surprised if even desktop sharing is used more than the video feature.
I enjoy the Boston weather. People in CA have weather which is too 'nice' all the time (SF excluded, big time) and as a result never know how to appreciate good weather.

I love having seasons and wouldn't trade my beautiful autumns just to be in CA.
Both have platform limitations at this time:

Facetime: iPhone <--> Mac

Yahoo Messenger : iPhone <--> PC
Oh, no, you don't have to look for any signatures. Windows will look on your behalf and warn you if needed.