skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed. I had the exact opposite reaction when I started doing some Android dev after coming from iPhone.

I find Xcode to be at least 80,000 times better than Eclipse (memory usage, UI, interface builder, speed, general bugginess).

I also REALLY like Apple's docs and the ease of integrating C code (no NDK!) when you need to do something like real-time audio.

My only really big complaint is the certificate signing process which can be a real pain.

I mean, I can totally see why Android might feel better or more familiar to a Java programmer though.
Does your dentist have receptionist who takes care of appointments and generally treats you nicely while you wait? He's in the customer service business.

Does your dentist have his diplomas, fellowships, and awards on his shelf? He's in the marketing business.

Does your dentist work on your teeth and makes you suffer and withstand amazing pains? He's in the dentistry business.

Does your dentist have a website? He's in the software business, regardless of if the website is a simple website so you can find his phone number or if the website provides a way to check your appointment date (or some other service).
The other thing with protocols is...

Naively, on first glance, to me Facebook looked like just a nice interface on top of standard Internet functionalities. And there are standard protocols for all of these.

* Messengering we have
* Micro-blogging we have.
* Selectively sharing information is pretty simple. Give your "friends" a password to your website and let them connect via SSL or Oauth or something.
...

Nothing seemed that new. My first thought was, "why couldn't you just slam a UI/Application on top of this existing stuff and call it an open Facebook implementation"? Ah, but there is a funny thing I realized looking at the situation (and discussing it here). The unique selling point of Facebook and its open competitors boils down a "share and revoke" function. The umpteen Facebook users want to imagine they are "safe" when "privately" sharing their photos. They don't look too carefully into what "safety" or "privacy" involves and they probably don't want to look that carefully but they really want to have it. Facebook has flattered them into thinking they can just carry their real world intuitions into virtual space. Of course, this isn't quite "real world privacy" as a number of fired employees can atest.

Thus the "competing Facebook protocols" aim to provide something like "personal DRM". Without going into the details of the inherent problems, I'll just ask, "why would you want to?".

I would argue that rather than trying to simulate something that's impossible, that Facebook doesn't and can't give you, why not educate people. Allow secure sharing of information but start people learning about what makes sense to share or not. And sure, that's a big job but the Internet itself is kind of doing that.

Looking at the situation as a whole, Facebook is leveraging people's lazy, foggy and "intuitive" notions of privacy taken from the real world. Anything Facebook-like is going to "leak-like-a-sieve" and the more people learn about the Internet, the more they will realize this.
I share your confusion. If all I want to run is a browser, I can easily achieve that today. The only point in its favor I can see is that it removes "attractive nuisances" for users that only use email and a browser, but I don't see anything it offers to geeks or even moderately knowledgable users.
I'd have to mention an exception to the "stores do very litte for marketing". The parts of the Apple App Store that are edited / curated by employees do have a significant affect on sales and can be seen as app store marketing. Also, the commercials from Apple that show apps boost sales also.
New features in JavaScript 1.8.5
I don't want to veer O/T, but that's not the hard stuff in CLLocation.

There's a lot that could be discussed, but as one example: optimizing for battery conservation requires knowing which radios are currently powered up.

iOS makes its own decision as to which of the 3 styles of location service to engage, based on the desiredAccuracy and distanceFilter values.

However the WiFi/GPS radio have different costs for runtime and warmup, so this API doesn't help when you are attempting to optimize for all 3 of: Accuracy, Timeliness, Battery conservation

Furthermore, the accessible battery percentage in UIDevice.batteryLevel is only reported to the nearest 5%, which is not granular enough to be of use in real-time server-based tweaking.
Same reason I quit using email.
See the first and fourth paragraphs of
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lars_Bak_(computer....
I'll make just one refutation to this: I am not a Java programmer :)

I had to learn Java specifically for this project. Python is my preferred hammer for most nails, but not an option on mobile. I've also been a professional C programmer before, wreaking havoc in the kernel. I've got opinions on Objective-C, but that's a subject that deserves a whole separate post.
Discuss HN: Affects of Efficiency Increases on Economy
So I was recently sitting around watching an episode of Futurama -- namely, How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back -- and I got to thinking about bureaucracy and efficiency in the workplace. It's generally accepted that a large majority of people don't work at maximum capacity or efficiency during their day jobs. I think I even recall PG estimating that we generally work at around 30% of our max (source?). Every day I see articles and discussions on how we can increase our work efficiency and get the most out of our working hours. Clearly it makes sense for each of us to work better -- more free time, less stress, etc. It also makes sense for businesses to want this -- time is money, mistakes are bad, and unnecessary jobs arise out of operating inefficiency.

Where this thought gets interesting, though, is when you think about what would actually happen to our economy if we really did eliminate large amounts of efficiency in the workplace... It would stand to reason that by working more efficiently, many unnecessary jobs could be cut across the country. While that would save tons of money for corporations, it would also mean a greatly increased unemployment rate, which would surely be bad for economy. Others might argue, however, that this saved money would result in more money for research and exploring new technology which would ultimately lead to more jobs. It's all purely speculation, but the repercussions could lead to something slightly disturbing -- that slacking and inefficiency, to an extent, are actually quite helpful to the health of our economy. What do you think?
I really want to try one of these, but I can't lie to Google. I don't use the Web for anything. I listen to music with xmms2 on the command-line. I write in Emacs. I read my email in Emacs. I download TV shows from Usenet.

I realized that Emacs is the Chrome OS, except with 25 years of libraries and applications to show for it.
First featured in Self many years ago, done by the same folks (Lars Bak and crew) who brought you V8. Then Sun bought their Smalltalk/Self-based company, and they built HotSpot for the JVM. Then Google hired them to do the same for Javascript, and now we have V8.

It generally takes about 10-20 years to get truly new ideas from the labs to consumer-level products.
And thankfully they didn't screw up the ability to open links in a new tab.
It's not that all software should be straight forward, simple, and as you say 'pruned to the essentials'. It's not a case of simple, it's a case of as simple as it can be. If your product or app or whatever needs to be more complicated because of some business need, then it should be more complicated, but there's a point where more features can be too much and it will decrease the quality of the software. Again, it's not 'keep it simple stupid', it's more like 'keep it as simple as you can while satisfying your requirements'.
This may not be 100% literally true, but it is definitely true in spirit. (The previous poster is referring to Lars Bak, but both Hotspot and V8 are/were team efforts.) The family tree here is:

self->hotspot->V8

But, yes, Lars is the man.
It seems to me that your assertion that Asian countries "have a difficult time with creativity" is unproven. Yes, the culture encourages conformance. But it not clear from anything you've cited thus far that either the Chinese government or a significant number of the Chinese people think their supposed lack of creative thinking is somehow holding them back. The government's recent ability to completely flout the spirit of the WTO rules while obeying them in the letter strikes me as fairly creative, for example. (I'm thinking of the defacto emabargo of rare earth metal exports to Japan, wherein "independently" several dozen exporters stopped shipping on the same day.)

To cite the field of software and content for examples is a mistake, I believe, because it's based on a presupposition that IP can't, won't, or shouldn't approach zero cost. If I were a Chinese administrator, I wouldn't care much if the blogging software my people were using was a clone of something from the West nearly as much as I'd be concerned that their creativity of expression was kept within the bounds of the Greater Good.
Event time zones in Google Calendar
They could build a page-transition graph: for each page, what are the links that people are most likely to click? This could let them figure out what the top one or two most common next-pages are, and those could be pre-loaded.

That would be more work for the GitHub guys, but I'm pretty sure it would work.
I thought the same thing - and then read the fine print:

> I understand that Google will only ship the device to a US-based address and cannot send this device to a P.O. Box or address outside of the US.
Postage to a UK address is 75p, postage to a US address is £1.50. That's costing you £3 (less than $5) per year more than it would cost us in the UK.
From the web page:

>Chrome OS is for people who live on the web.
It runs web-based applications, not legacy PC software.

Google apparently thinks that being in control of your own computer is a "legacy" concern.

I guess directly empowering users is out of date, while trusting Google unconditionally with all your personal data is the new, hip, digital totalitarian future.
As for the "Use it for what?" thing, I kept hearing that a lot, but every single person I showed it to, from other IT workers to my technically illiterate brother, all got hooked once they started using it to organise their lives.

But that's the problem - there's weren't enough people who knew how to use it showing the rest.

E-mail works badly - terribly sometimes - but it works good enough. Wave never reached critical mass. There weren't enough people saying "hey, this is how I use it". Screencast please!
Comshop
I don't know anything about the Nexus, but T-Mobile's service has been great for me on the East Coast. I switched from Verizon about a year ago and with prepaid service spend well under half what I used to. I can also make calls from inside the house again, something I couldn't do with Verizon (except if I stood on one leg in a corner).

It also saves time because it's one less monthly financial transaction to monitor--I just buy a bunch of minutes every few months or so. I recommend it for anybody looking to reduce costs and complexity (start-uppers, for example).
It's a tradeoff between compatibility with existing JS versus perf/capability enhancements. The ECMAScript committee goes back and forth on this topic. The biggest stride in that direction was strict mode, which is intended to catch most of the low hanging fruit. I know Brendan Eich has mentioned a number of things that could change to get the language faster. I don't, however, know if I read it all in one place or I'm combining nultiple one-off examples.

I'm not confident enough in my memory to write out a probably incorrect list of things I remember. Here's a list of the various things I've read from Brendan in case you're interested in tracking it down:

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3851#comment-57671

This is the LtU thread my previous comment referred to. It's a large (and fantastic!) thread, but I believe that comment and children are the most direct comments back and forth between Mike and Brendan. Andreas Gal is also on the thread and from Mozilla.

http://www.aminutewithbrendan.com/

Brendan's weekly JS podcast. They're relatively accessible and generally cover a lot of area. A good way to get in the language zeitgeist.

http://brendaneich.com/

Brendan's blog, mostly focuses on ES Harmony stuff and Mozilla specific topics.
There is business strategy involved as well. Google wants to reduce its dependency on Apple and Microsoft. Unless you were a GNU+Linux/BSD enthusiast, you were accessing their products from a laptop running the software of one their competitors. Similarly, this is one of the reasons for Android. They could have just made apps for the iPhone, Windows phone, RIM, etc, but they made apps for the iPhone and Android to help reduce the dependency and give themselves more freedom
It's not though. What $300 laptop has a "jail"? None of them.

It's just expensive phones and expensive designer tablets that have "jail". Everything else? Free as in ... not being in jail.
Too bad they don't ship to Canada :(
JQueery
I'll give it a shot once there's Canadian support... took years for Mint to get Canadian support, but let's see what happens.
Seems like a reasonably good product. The biggest issue still remains that you need to get your data into it and, because it is designed to handle really big datasets, that data could be terabytes or more.

Another example of an interesting Google product that no company could look at using because they won't specify how they will offer it commercially. What's the point of adding your 50 billion rows if they start charging $10/100,000/month like database.com?
I think Forbes should have come up with a different headline for this article. I was expecting AirBnB to have solved something completely different from the problem of being cut out of the middle of a transaction.
My guess is that they'll use it to gather demographics of people interested in the device. There was a ton of information to fill in that I'm sure any marketer would love to have.
You might want to darken it some more, It's quite hard to read. On a touch device, like the iPad, there is no mouse-over. Even if I touch the text, it stays light gray. My personal rule of thumb is to think twice about every onmouseover design decision because of the proliferation of touch and mobile devices.
Is there a new release coming up? (Or anything with a slightly "newsy" angle?)

Given JRuby's explosion in the last couple of years, I'd love to write it up and/or just link it in Ruby Weekly, but people tend to complain at me when I link to things that haven't been updated recently/aren't "news." Even a recent "how to build X" type article/screencast/similar would do.
Javascript execution is very rarely the bottleneck on webpages. The bottleneck is almost 90% render speed of dom updates.
A little dense, sorry; I reposted on my blog with slightly better formatting (and at least breaking out some of the math onto separate lines):

http://www.blahedo.org/blog/archives/001081.html
I am still here for you!
Hard to say without calling somebody's baby ugly.
I'm curious what they're looking for in the 140 character box. I put that as I'm in the middle of the pacific ocean, I often have high latency issues (which is a concern on a web focused OS). I would enjoy seeing some stats on who they chose at the end of all of this.
This article didn't provide any more information than the title. Can anyone fill the rest of us in. What are WebSockets and why should I care?
I was prepared to look at this thread and produce a silent laugh to myself like most over eager people this age, but I have to say that I was really impressed with your site's visuals and content. Anyone who can land you for a project or two will hopefully get an asset.

Good luck. Check me out on Twitter @kgosser or www.krisgosser.com if you need any networking help.
US only, a pity.
Damn it! WebSockets are one of the nicest things in HTML5, and even for people using a compatibility layer like the excellent socket.io, things just seem to work better when the browser supports WebSockets natively.

Of course, we're not going to get ubiquitous WebSocket support until Internet Explorer 10 becomes the new IE 6, which I doubt will happen for a long time. Even so, Firefox could make a big difference here. It would be nice.
I would word that as "Only if you don't explicitly disable it". Not trying to be super-pedantic, but I think it's important to note that the default is unencrypted, since most people probably won't change that default, especially when the feature isn't mentioned on the FileVault doc page.

But yeah, flip that switch if you're running OSX.

EDIT: Acutally looks like that is the default on Snow Leopard. Disregard this comment.
Protect Your Laptop Against Theft / Trace Stolen Laptop For Free
It is no secret that in a weakened economy, theft rates—especially for small electronics—rise. Since many computer lovers carry their laptops absolutely everywhere, it makes sense to be especially vigilant in safeguarding these devices.
Calling an HTML page "software" is stretching the definition of software to its extreme though; it's not so much akin to suggesting that businesses with client-facing personnel are in the customer relations business as suggesting that their mere ability to field a question puts them in the business of education.

I'll buy the argument that operating an e-commerce facility so that customers' requirements being met and payments being received depends on some non-trivial lines of code have entered the software business though.
I think the WebSockets movement just died a little.

It's already hard enough to write modern web-apps that work across a multitude of browsers either replicating features with crappy techniques in the older ones or being given the capability to degrade gracefully. Now, a feature that was expected on modern browsers now doesn't exist on some of them.

Yes, I understand that there are security concerns, but it was concerns like this that lead browser makers to disable cross-domain JavaScript rather than implement a solution to do it securely. I hope WebSockets doesn't end up going the same way.
This is a wonderful collection of resources. The screencast by Lau Jensen was a fantastic demonstration of how to setup emacs/slime/etc correctly. I would had never found this without your site, thank you. --Benjamin
They're bidirectional sockets between the web browser and the server, essentially. They're handy whenever you want messages going back and forth between client and server without a bunch of reconnecting, or really ugly hacks.

For example, apps like Etherpad or Apache Wave need to send messages for each editing operation (e.g. keystrokes), and it would really suck if they had to open a new HTTP connection for each one and do long-polling to receive from the server. Websockets make this sort of thing simply a matter of sending and receiving on a socket. Easy.

You can fake them with something like Socket.IO, if you want the API and are willing to tolerate unpleasant performance on browsers that don't support it.
It's not clear that this security issue is real, but the WebSocket protocol is definitely going to change soon in a major way. I've been reading the the IETF HyBi list and the whole situation is pretty depressing.
I like prey project... Has some really cool features and is free (paid upgrades available).
> The weakness of the GPL's patent protection was one of the reasons for the move to v3

I agree that v3 is more clear about patents than v2, but it's unfair to call a protection that was never used (possibly because it has been a successful deterrent) "weak". It can only be weak if it doesn't protect. So far, it has been effective.

I think the wording in v2 is clear enough. One cannot impose any additional restriction and cannot force fees on users and re-distributors. That protects not only against patents but from anything that looks like one.
The DHL Experience
What a poor survey. These notes are about the Developer version.

The final question is, "If selected, will you use this Chrome notebook as your primary computer and provide regular feedback?" This should have been the first question so people didn't have to waste their time filling out the survey if they won't use the machine as their #1 machine.

How many developers would use a Chrome OS netbook as their primary computer? A secondary computer (think tablet) sure, but for doing their day-to-day coding?

I've used a tiny Viao (pre-netbook era) as a main (home) development machine, but that had a full Linux OS and was unusual.

Other issues:

- Have to provide a US state even for people outside of the US

- Item labeled "Primary Email" with a note, "If you have a Gmail address, please supply that."

- Can only answer once to, "Which OS do you use most of the time?" (How about people who use two OSes equally?)

- Similar problem for, "Which web browser do you use most of the time?". (Different browsers on different computers? Using multiple main browers at the same time?)

- "What type of device do you use most frequently?" Again, only one answer. (I use laptop, desktop and ipad extensively)

- "How do you check your email most often?" single option. (How about people who, you know, check both work and personal email?)

- "Which apps or tools do you use at least once a week?". It names specific applications. Hard to tell if "Adobe Reader" is meant as a proxy for "PDF Viewer" or not.

- "How do you connect to the Internet most often?" only a single answer...

- (snip: other questions with only single answers that should allow multiple)
To go on a slight tangent, whilst I agree that more positive feedback should be given (and heck it doesn't cost you anything), recognition isn't necessarily the most important factor in employee retention. One of the things I was taught was that when leading/managing a team, the six things (in order of importance) you should focus on for ensuring a high performing satisfied team are:

1. Clarity - ensure your team understands the end goal and what they are trying to achieve

2. Standards - ensure standards are set (standard for quality of work, behaviour etc)

3. Responsibility - give employees responsibility, trust and hold them accountable for their actions

4. Flexibility - give employees control over their work day, don't spoonfeed or straitjacket them

5. Recognition & Rewards - positive feedback etc

6. Teaming - ensure a team spirit is developed

As someone who has managed technial teams from 4 to 90 people, I've found these 6 factors are a pretty good guide. Most people focus on #5 and #6 when discussing how to have a productive team, but you seldom see #1 to #4 mentioned - they may be self-evident, but I've seen more teams suffer from the first four factors being absent or neglected than not.
If they do ever introduce it, I sincerely hope it is completely optional. On my iPad app, I run with such tight memory constraints while dealing with large image files that it has to be freed up when I tell it to or I'm likely to get killed by the memory watchdog.
no offense taken, thanks for asking.

i did this quick search which provided a number of resources, including a jakob nielsen (year 2000) citation, plus some more academic studies.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...
Show HN: We made this 'Pandora for Music Videos', let me know what you think.
Ya, it's Awesome...
I am surprised you stuck around, to be honest. I'm not sure I would have, and I'm sure many don't. Could be argued that's the point, but it doesn't feel quite right.
The NYT is Lieberman's stalking horse for Internet control. This false controversy will be whipped up into a frenzy until Lieberman is ready to play his "moderate" card, in which he relents on the NYT and settles for a new law allowing the death penalty for unconnected publishers like Wikileaks. Mission accomplished.