skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Right now I just don't download random OSX apps for fun. I only download applications that I really need - and I make sure it seems like a reputable company. And I certainly wouldn't download fart apps, or a lot of the other 5-second novelty apps that have a lot of traffic on the app store.

The first time an OSX app store has malware in it, it's going to be big news. And it's going to make Apple look bad, since by putting it in their store their effectively condoning it.
Kind of pissed that if I want the 2.13 ghz processor, I have to buy the 256 gb storage version. Otherwise I'd have already ordered.
As a Russian reader and the son of two Russian parents who sometimes had problems with learning English later in life, I can agree with you there 100%.

Of all the weird English rules, idiosyncrasies, etc. that would confuse my parents time and time again, words in all-capitals were never one of them.

I'd chock this up to the Chinese alphabet.

It's all to do with what your original language has and doesn't have. My parents still can't understand why you need the word "the" or where you're supposed to use it, since Russian doesn't have anything like it.
This looks related to prop 19 :-)
I think you dismiss my point to quickly.

You comment on my point about disk drives. However, the differences between mass storage media is most certainly a factor that authors of many applications need to consider. Capacity and performance characteristics are relevant in video editing, for example. Optical disc burning software must consider the quantity, performance, capacity, erasability, etc., of the drives (and discs) present -- and must deal with different driver interfaces as well.

The difference between graphics adapters is an extreme difference. Authors needing advanced graphics capabilities must be able to handle different capabilities (resolution of course, but also shaders, etc.), and in extreme cases, GPU code downloaded to the adapter. They may have to deal with different software interfaces (DirectX vs OpenGL). And the handling of multiple monitors is a common question these days.

Even CPUs, as glibly dismissed, have far more differences. For some kinds of applications the developer may need to deal with the presence of SSE2 or SSE3 instructions, for example.

There really is a tremendous amount of fragmentation in PC-compatible hardware.

And your reply about "writing a device driver" is, of course, part of the answer. When the variance is sufficiently important, developers create abstraction layers so that they don't need to worry about it -- that's the point of things like OpenGL or TWAIN.
Hmm. So that's the price of an iPad with a keyboard and USB port.
A very obscure, complicated and short term bill that lets democrat congressmen go back to their districts and run political advertisements that claim they "passed legislation to help america's small businesses", etc.

Minimal effect, and on top of it, it is overwhelmed by bills already signed that do significant damage to the economy. 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. Making things more expensive and preventing businesses from expanding is not stimulative. Adding more workers to the government payroll is a drain.
Group Texting Apps Have Benefits for Adults
How so? Honestly? Why would it ruin Facetime, but not ruin iChat?
I'm with you on this one. If I had shorted AAPL because I thought that AppleTV wasn't going anywhere... That would have been an epic investment FAIL, to use your term :-D
It's not the best machine you can afford though for a lot of people. I have a X200 thinkpad at 12" which is 600 grams more than the 11" and 300 grams more than the 13". But it has a dual core i5 at 2.5 gigahertz which is a fair bit faster than low clocked cpus of a generation that was released in 2006, 4 gigs of ram (rather than 2) and an Intel 80gig SSD running Ubuntu 10.10. The battery is 7 to 11 hours. With their batteries in it it'd be even lighter than it is, most of the difference is right there. It already has an app store with nearly a 100/0 free/paid split (I think I've heard there are paid apps in there somewhere). It cost $1150 or so with the SSD as an extra $200 (but I have a 500gig external drive now too). It's the classic very attractive "they use these on the space station" thinkpad case, well designed with water-spill catching design et cetera.

So yes, the macbook is a good machine. But for people who aren't developing for OSX and still want well designed hardware it's hard to argue there aren't other options that are easily better if you can handle 300 grams of extra weight. And yes, I've had macbooks fail on me (case cracking and hdd failure within one year) so I think they are probably average quality in that regard (i.e. the internals don't match their good looks and are possibly compromised by them sometimes).
> It has a good CPU.

Compared to my TI calculator, maybe.
Small != Netbook

I don't think many people consider the Thinkpad X series to be netbooks either.
Application is currently in development for launch Q1 next yr
I bet there are already more non-geek users of FaceTime than iChat because it's so approachable. Adding features like those caters to the wrong audience. The beauty of FaceTime is its simplicity.

(This sounds like an Apple fanboy thing to say, but I'm really not.)
Did the target disk mode ever work with USB? I’m also not sure whether that means anything, I think you have been able to boot from a plethora of devices including USB sticks for ages. Target disk mode for USB sure would be nice, though.
What is Akshay hiding from his wife Twinkle? | Pure Garam Masala
> At times I worry about installing random dmgs I find on the web.

You must be terrified by all things in general.

Hint: there's an easy fix for that. Search for people reviews on that download service or app ;)
Dashing Kangna lets the cat out of the bag | Pure Garam Masala
Linux will get that influx as soon as it is possible to design nice apps under X-Window. Keypoints: font rendering, color management, printing stuff out, managing fonts, and some other things.
720p is a video standard that specifies a resolution of 1280x720 in progressive format (hence the name "720p") Apple, fortunately, seems to be sizing their screens based on HD formats, but giving some extra space for UI chrome.
Exactly, but if he doesn't know much math, and he does suck at math, and it doesn't think he uses it much in his day-to-day programming, he will think it's pretty useless. And he'd be wrong.

As commented in another reply:

... Never used more than a trivial amount of the math
content, but the math processes of thought have been
invaluable.

In spades.

How many people are crap at something, realise they can get along without it, and thereby conclude that it's useless? Most. It's like being incompetent and unaware of it. It's an unknown unknown.
Two points;

1) Most distributions will have patches for this in short order, so unless your customers are running on unsupported versions they will be fine once they update. If the aren't on supported versions, if you roll your own version, if ssh access is something your clients provide, if they are high profile targets, if they have staff with poor password hygiene then you may have a problem.

2) Given your manager's response, you may want to give serious consideration to moving to somewhere that rewards initiative and forethought.
Why not a i5 or i7 then?

E.g. the MacBook Pro 15" (i5) comes with a Nvidia GeForce GT 330M.

Does the i5/i7 and related chipset dependencies take up more space maybe? They seem overall more performant and better battery savers than the Core 2 Duo.
My x200 12" appears to have the docking port on the bottom.
I rather have it separately because I rarely open my iChat. Adium FTW :)
CERN scientists eye parallel universe breakthrough
Physicists probing the origins of the cosmos hope that next year they will turn up the first proofs of the existence of concepts long dear to science-fiction writers such as hidden worlds and extra dimensions.
The stock must be acquired between 27 SEP 2010 and 1 JAN 2011.

You then hold it for at least 5 years, and subject to the other provisions, it's exempt from federal tax (especially AMT!) when exercised.

So, this is a bet on LT capital gains rates circa 2016+. But, a bet that doesn't particularly cost anything, assuming you were going to start the business in the next 3 months anyway.
4GB is $100 more. At some point apple stopped overcharging for RAM. They now charge more than the minimum you can find it for from fly by night places (As they do with everything) But in line with market prices.
In my experience as someone with a lot of math in my toolkit, many, perhaps most, of the people I work with end up wishing they had similar skills. It's not just me saying math is useful, it's the people who have seen it used.
Ah, I guess it could be read that way:

"which includes a temporary exclusion for 100% of the gain recognized by non-corporate investors from the sale of qualified small business stock (“QSBS”) acquired after September 27, 2010 and before January 1, 2011"

so the dates apply to "acquired" rather than "recognized." It's pretty ambiguously worded.
Just another possible explanation - cognitive dissonance. You work hard to "gain" a tool, you're going to think it was worth it.
Richard Branson: Having fun should be an essential part of your business
Even more important, the screens. Apples have historically had very good screens.

I look back at one of my older Windows laptops, which had exquisite res (1680x1050) and maybe cost me $1600. When I compare it to any of my Apple devices (even the low end ones), the screen is so horrible that I don't even know how I was able to work on it day in, day out.
You only get told if you create a page - what if you only read it?
Sounds to me like you were being proactive.

Get 5 minutes with him, bring up the topic and ask him why?

His reaction was probably symptomatic of another issue. By talking to him you can either figure out what you did wrong or hopefully get to the bottom of the issue that caused the reaction.
You don't have to look further than iOS to see that yes, it is a problem. Charging developers a yearly fee aside, excluding apps that Apple is not comfortable with due to competitive reasons is a HUGE problem.

Also, a lot of us who develop on OS X actually use the unix tool chain. Something like homebrew or fink just won't fit into the app store framework.

Edit: that said, I do see the positive aspects of it. So long as it is permanently optional, I think it's a good thing. Sadly, it seems Apple does not have good relationship with it's developers. At least if you take the number of fearful comments as evidence.
Apple is growing Mac sales at significantly higher rates than the rest of the PC market. Apple has been competitive with others on prices for about 20 years.

Apple doesn't compete on the low end of the market. The people who think Apple is expensive are the people who compare an ATOM internet pad to a Macbook Pro and think they are both the same value because they are both "laptops".
So perhaps:

there is a strong correlation between the programmer's exposure to mathematics and his belief in its importance.

?
…and they can't include both the integrated graphics and Nvidia, because of space constraints.

See http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/05/new-intel-ulv-proc...
So I guess we should wait a year and expect to see a 7.9" tablet?
No need to use apt. Apt is great for handling dependencies, but when it comes to mac apps there are just two parts: OS X and the app. No dependencies between apps and no dependencies on libraries not part of the OS. Nice and simple.
It's fast enough. But it can be flaky/unreliable on no-name hardware.
Honestly, I think most people who "prove" things using induction don't really understand what they're doing. Then again, most people don't really understand recursion either.
I think higher pricing is actually an advantage for Apple. It sets them to be somewhat "luxury" products. Not "signal I am rich" luxury, but to the point that they are more desirable for it. If they were priced the same as other laptops, and were as ubiquitous, I think they would those some of their appeal to some people.
> So this is different because it can also connect to iPhones (...)

That's exactly why I think it's a big deal.

There are already techs/apps/whatever that let people video chat and video chat with phones, but Apple has a pretty good track record at exposing this kind of thing in a way such that non-techies actually use it.
In the role of dev workstation, I'd personally be willing to switch to Linux, at least as a protest vote. As a target OS to sell software on, a pragmatic vendor would be less likely to abandon it, agreed. However, if in order to ship a Mac app, you not only had to only distribute through the App Store and also could only develop with XCode, Objective-C, that whole inane overly complicated bureaucratic software development rat's nest, then I for one would abandon it, definitely. I currently sell downloadable Python-based software, written in vi, with no insanely overly complicated build, approval or distribution process, and it works just fine, thanks. If they forced me to jump through many more hoops, and over-complexify my software, they'd lose me in a heartbeat. That's a line I will not cross.
OS X has supported booting from USB drives for quite a few years now.
Lunascript, Lunascript, Lunascript - The future of web apps
I'm thinking because it's not using AIM or any chat server, seems like the backend is new, run by Apple, and dedicated solely to this.

If I were to predict the future, I'd say iChat will probably stagnate feature-wise, and the features that they want to keep will be migrated to facetime.
Last time this got discussed:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1053753

someone in this comment:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1054048

said:

"especially for a web developer" is the important part.
As a fellow web developer, I agree. I'd certainly like
to get into the mathier side of programming someday, but
it's rarely necessary for my day-to-day operations.

That misses the point entirely. How do you know it would be useful if you don't have any? And do you only, ever, and always want to be a web programmer?

Why limit your options?
Until Apple releases one, but it's not just a 7" tablet, it's a the full-fledged 9" ipad, but minified.
People assume apple wants absolute control. They don't. They want absolutely great user experiences. Personal Computers are a different category from mobile devices. Apple keeps your mobile device safe, but lets you browse any website you want, because the damage is minimal. On your computer, apple lets you do whatever you want.
This unlikely to happen as long as Apple wants to have portion of enterprise market which has different requirements from end-user one.
OTOH, if they manage to incorporate most of requirements by it departments into their app store and convince companies to use it this will bring them even more market share.
I disagree it's unsolved. Folks have been distributing and monetizing software for desktop-class machines since the 80's, just's fine, thanks. Been there, done that, have the T-shirt, and the T-shirt still fits fine.
Yep -- looks like it's got a push listener running in the background, even though FaceTime isn't running.

$ ps ax | grep FaceTime
5317 ?? S 0:00.38 /Applications/FaceTime.app/Contents/PrivateFrameworks/IMCore.framework/imagent.app/Contents/MacOS/imagent
5318 ?? S 0:00.25 /Applications/FaceTime.app/Contents/Frameworks/ApplePushService.framework/apsd-ft
I can related to that experience. For a significant part of my professional life, my day job was there to provide a paycheck to feed my addiction/passion to the martial arts. At 5 o clock I was out the door and for the next 3 hours it would be martial arts training and conditioning. I would train and compete and travel for competition. Work was just work and a paycheck so I could do what I really wanted. Although I did enjoy software development, it was strictly only at work.

At the time I would look at people who only had their career and career related activities and friends to be missing out on more interesting pursuits.
Interesting.

IIRC, the X301 dropped the bottom dock connector. One guy I know spent hours with support trying to get the USB dock to work. He ended up not using the dock. The dock on his previous X-series worked like a charm.
Except that it won't suck.
This will help founders as much as it helps angel investors. Assuming you're building a business which is likely to exit at $50mm or less (i.e. most consumer internet companies), the biggest hardship is holding on for 5 years, which could be a couple years after M&A exit.

This also encourages founders to bring early employees into equity ownership by purchasing founders stock, vs. options, so those employees can get this favorable treatment. (generally, buying your stock with a right of repurchase ends up being a win because it converts ST to LT capital gains, anyway).

i.e. on day 0, the company is worth $10k, because the founder puts in $8k of his own money, and the first 4 employees buy their grants for $500 each.
Perhaps people will notice that it isn't just the California Highway Patrol that is doing this. Check out the Transportation, Justice, and Parks and Recreation agencies for instance. They may not always be quite as egregious, but they all have people who are receiving huge pay raises in one year from some 'Other' source.
I am curious to see what tptacek thinks of this as he's in the security industry... Can anyone ping him for me? :-P
Which is also why it is not a netbook. Apple haters have it both ways- they complain the processor is too slow compared to a macbook pro, and that the price is too high compared to an atom running netbook.

sigh.
The MacBook Air's Geforce 320M is a significantly better GPU than anything Intel has shipped.
Disagree it's FUD. It's an intelligent observation or prediction of what this might be the first step towards. It's called the slippery slope phenomenon. It happens.
"back in the days when typography is rare (the Mac,which popularized desktop publishing, has not been released yet)"

There was plenty of great typography back then. The difference was that you had to pay a professional to do it for you.
I have a CS degree, I have done my fair share of math, its a requirement. That being said, I'm not amazing at math(working at becoming better), I'm passable for sure, understand concepts, not amazing on the details.

It all comes down to the question "How do you solve a problem you don't know how to solve", a lot of times hints for how to approach these problems are given in certain areas of computer science and mathematics. If you don't have the tools(computer science and math) it can make your life significantly harder for a particular subset of problems which probably align pretty well with the problems you realize you don't know how to solve.
It would be exciting if I'm proven wrong, but I'm not buying the hype about video chat.

Even if/when I'm able to video chat anyone from my iPhone without being on wifi, I still don't imagine it being terribly useful. And the few times I've tried using video chat in a business setting have not been very fruitful.
Well, shit, I had no idea that I compared Atom "internet pad"s to Macbook Pros that way.

Thanks for the valuable insight!

Bah, commenting on HN is a complete waste of time anymore.
Ugh, I can already feel my SAD kicking in :<
I would also say using iChat also dilutes the FaceTime brand.
Are you sure? That seems to be nothing but delivery of transport streams over HTTP and suggests nothing of negotiating calls ala SIP.
Full context of quote:

Andrew: Have you ever regretted selling when you did instead of holding on for a little bit longer?

Steve: A little bit longer, no. Also, when we sold it was the fall of 2006, right before the economy totally tanked. And so, if we had held on a little longer, I think we would have had dark days ahead. If we could have seen the whole future that in four years things would recover and Reddit would be huge and traffic would be great, yeah, I wish I still owned Reddit now and owned it for the last four or five years.

For everything to have gone right for us, to have the stomach to survive that economy, I mean, who knows, like Conde Nast’s umbrella helped us during that economy. We could still hire and pay market salaries when a lot of people couldn’t. So, maybe we wouldn’t have even survived. It’s hard to say.
The Cocktail Creationist (how the Grey Goose brand came to be)
So why not go ahead with both means of distribution?
The day I have to get new versions of Unix-style software from an App Store, or the day I have to go through some Orwellian build/publish process to release a new version of a Python app to my customers, is the day I switch to Linux for good.
I would personally place the blame squarely at Intel's feet. They no longer allow nVidia to make chipsets for Nehalem onwards, so instead of having a chipset with integrated graphics, you now have to have an additional chip on the motherboard for standalone graphics. In this form factor, that's just not an option.

I guess Apple could also be faulted for wanting to standardize on decent graphics, but I just can't bring myself to see that as anything but a good thing!

It will be interesting to see how this changes with time. Sandy Bridge, Intel's upcoming CPU release, has graphics on die, but it will still be vastly outclassed by the nVidia 320M that's in the new Air. Unless Intel comes along with vast improvements with their 22nm refresh, Ivy Bridge, Apple's still going to be in the same bind - in 2012.
Some studies indicate that a reclined position is much better for your back than sitting up at a desk[1]. My back starts hurting after a couple of hours at a desk, but I'm never uncomfortable in bed. I really think that horizontal computing is the way of the future.

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/6187080.stm
That's certainly one way to put it...
Of course there will never be an android device that is equally specced but half the price. This is just the kind of lie that apple bashers have been spreading for decades. Falsely comparing the Air to a netbook running atom processors and claiming that Apple is overpriced. Reality is, for the market segments apple competes in, they generally deliver significantly more value for slightly less price. But getting an honest comparison from apple bashers is pointless-- they don't really care, they just hate apple.
I used to think starting with the higher price was better, but now I think it definitely depends on the feature set at the beginning.

It's more subtle than that: you need to discover what the current features are worth to people.

You might be surprised to find that value is higher than what you would think, regardless of the number of features.

It's possible that even one (great) feature is something you can charge a lot for.

As for the psychology of it, people are ok with paying less for something that used to cost more, but the opposite situation can create resentment.

Are people more likely to spend $24 or $36 upfront than $3/month?

There's some research I've read about the psychology behind the failure of web-based micropayment systems you should read (I can't find the reference now, but I think Shirky wrote it).

Anyway, the gist of it was: at too low a price (e.g., $1, $2) people just don't bother getting out their credit card to pay for something.

So you're much better off bundling it in a larger package, or in your case, for a longer time period.
well the hiring thing, they only had like what 4 employees?
+1 for the Matt Foley/Chris Farley quote