skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seeing this reminds me of the Steve Jobs quote (well, associated with him anyway):

"Real artists ship."

I love to see real products working like that. Reduces company risk, quiets naysayers, etc.
I do not understand what's wrong with the current resolution. Maybe I'm getting old, but I am myopic, so I have better near vision than most, and I do not see pixels and only very occasional staircasing (e.g. When zooming in on 'w' characters) on an iPad display.

I think iPad 2 will be fine at the current resolution, especially if it can drive HD television at 1080[pi], even if programmers have to do work when they choose to support it.
It reminds me of the Israeli treatment of the humanitarian supply ships that tried to help Gaza.
I believe the rumors. Gruber's reasoning is sound enough but I'm thinking back to the iPhone 3GS where Apple lost some momentum by not pushing the hardware platform aggressively enough. The iPad is such a huge part of Apple's future it seems to me if there's any possibility of pulling this off they will go for it along with a very significant iOS update. That would go a long way towards crushing this first generation of competition from HP, RIM, Android devices, etc. It will be expensive but let's assume the sales of the iPad 1 surprised even Apple and they priced it out projecting 5-8M sales. They may have a pretty decent profit margin here to offset the costs. If they're producing 30-50 million of these displays in 2011 I don't think price will be a major concern come 2012 and beyond.
Billionaire Universities
The mistake he made is not specifically a "crypto code" problem, it was merely forgetting to increment the new variable, and that kind of thing happens in a lot of non-crypto contexts. I think that the reason people should use tested and well-known crypto code is because the stakes are high and not necessarily because cryptography is super complex; a mistake like this can have serious consequences since most encrypted data is serious by nature. As such, the maxim "don't write your own crypto" could also be applied to any high stakes programmatic endeavor; if you can't tolerate any downtime on your server, "don't write your own server", etc.

The great thing about widely used open-source utilities is the extensive vetting they receive. I was a bit uncomfortable using tarsnap's custom client and now I'm happy I went with duplicity, which is a Python script combining rsync, tar, and gpg to create encrypted archives of your data and only send the differences.

Also, perhaps Colin could look into writing a test suite for tarsnap that would automatically test for mistakes like this. It doesn't sound like the particular applicable exploit is too hard to automate.
It's hard to imagine that a doctor meant ill will by deciding the best way to deal with ongoing abuse is to medicate away the pain that it causes?

I don't find it hard to imagine there is ill will there. But even if there wasn't ill will, even if the support of abuse was done because doctors genuinely believe that abuse is good for people and it is sufficient to medicate away the pain superficially, why should that engender trust of their profession?

edit: shouldn't have gotten off topic with this. My main insight is that, yes some kids don't get enough sleep watching TV or playing video games. These are not insomniacs, they are just doing other things and then not getting enough sleep. There are also those of us that couldn't fall asleep because of the stress. That is totally different. And it is this latter group, not the video and TV group, which I assert is the one more prone to suicide, for reasons that are clear and follow from a known mechanism.

The "study" is instead interpreting the data that lack of sleep causes the problems. I look at the exact same data and interpret it that a subset of those are not sleeping because of problems in the family that are the same problems that lead to the suicides. NOT the lack of sleep. If that was true, there would be evidence across the board that less sleep leads to suicide. But that's not the case. The conclusions from the data are wrong here. The data is fine, I believe the data.

This gets to a larger issue of the way studies are done. Data is hidden from the public, and the wild assed interpretations are published as a "scientific fact". But in many cases the same facts could lead to an opposite conclusion or no conclusion at all. Just because facts are not in dispute (and that's not always the case) does not mean that the claimed conclusions follow from the data. It's seldom the case that they do in peer reviewed studies, which is a big part of the Ionaddis effect.
There is a market in developing mobile software as part of a general mobile platform. Making the mobile app for salesforce.com and what not. Also a good majority of smartphone users don't really pick up on the apps and are starting to get more into customizing their cellphone and what not, there is a wave on the horizon of smart phone users using their phones more and getting apps and what not.
Same here. With things like Spotlight and iTunes, OS X was feeling increasingly bloated. Combined with the somewhat weird development setup I found going back to GNOME better.
I don't trust them automatically, but that doesn't mean they're always wrong. I have a similar background and put up with a variety of ineffective treatments before eventually finding something that met my needs. You can mail me via gmail if you would like to compare notes.
> How many non-technical people have you ever heard complain about email apps

You should pick a better analogy. Every single non-technical person I know has complained about their email app. Usually it's some stupid Outlook/Exchange quirk...
History in pictures: Time covers
Because they don't really say this until you get to the 3rd or 4th page: This is a way that they can deploy your Java applications (packaged as a WAR) for you.
Ruby's rmagick Gem looking for a maintainer
Banks are simply idiotic about security. Instead of looking at an open system, tested independently by researchers, they opt for proprietary, security-by-obscurity solutions. Months later, when the scheme is found full of holes, banks then resort to muzzling researchers with legal threats.
The complaining is simply that the authors did not hide the payload. Consensus seems to be that it would have bought them an additional few months. However, the virus worked and hiding the payload would have added to its complexity. So, kudos to its authors.
The reason this is the most important takeaway is that Scalzi is calling the people at Facebook "stupid", despite the fact that they are much smarter than him.

"there’s very little Facebook does, either as
a technological platform or as a company, that doesn’t
remind me that “banal mediocrity” is apparently the
highest accolade one can aspire to at that particular organization."

Scalzi has never heard of Hiphop, Thrift, or Haystack. He hasn't heard about them because he is not really capable of understanding the technical problems involved with doing something as hard as Facebook.

It is really hard to make something look this easy.
Applications must be written in Java (or anything you can put into a .war and make Tomcat run) [1]

[1] http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/gs...
> Would you recommend your book as a first programming book for designers that want to learn to code?

Yes. Though if you want immediate results, EJS might not be quite as practical as you'd like -- it tries to find a middle way between theory and practice.
Update: the offer actually goes until the 25th, not the 21st.
Technically corporations can be convicted of criminal offenses just like regular people can, but the penalties don't make much sense. They end up just getting fines, since it's difficult to send the corporation itself to jail.

There was a 1980s case where a company (Allegheny Bottling Co.) was convicted of an offense with jail time, and the judge imposed a suspended sentence with probation, with a probation condition being that top executives spend their 40 hours a week doing community service. That was overturned on appeal, though, with the appeals court recognizing that the trial court had something of a dilemma (the corporation had been convicted of a crime with a sentence that in practice could not be imposed), but said that that form of "corporate probation" was too much of a stretch, and that it was up to Congress to figure out what to do about it.

People also occasionally propose a three-strikes equivalent for corporations, where three criminal convictions leads to revocation of the corporate charter. The fundamental problem is that criminal penalties are supposed to have both deterrent and incapacitating effects: the threat of jail time is supposed to be a strong enough sanction to deter people who wouldn't be deterred by mere fines, and actual incarceration physically restrains people from committing more offenses during the time they're locked up. How does one both deter corporations from violating laws, and incapacitate those that do?
Tuition free Harvard and Yale would require less than 1 percent of endowments
There's definitely a "Steve Jobs is fake Gruber" side in Daring Fireball, as Gruber constantly tries to take Apple's point of view in any situation.

As for his supposedly "insane access" to secret informations, I don't know if he knows that much. He's not often wrong in his predictions, but that's just mean he's more cautious than the average tech-related website. He certainly has connections, but since he's a reliable guy and well-respected Apple evangelist, there's nothing really strange in it.

Not much of a mystery, I think.
I'd very much welcome that. My gut feeling is that on quite a few posts, discussion seems to stick to the first comment. I'm assuming that starts to happen as soon as this top-level comment has enough upvotes to quickly displace any new postings.

I think preventing such "sticky" threads from clobbering the first pages of comments may add some decent value to the discussion. Especially in brining in different aspects and povs, perhaps sometimes yielding a more balanced discussion.
You are right. I use duplicity for remote backups too, I can really recommend it :)

However, in crypto the 'NIH' syndrome is especially prevalent because of the inherent secrecy and paranoia. Especially as there are still a lot of people on the obscurity side of security versus obscurity. A good recent example of this would be Sony...
Essential Tips for Practically Making a Venture Pitch Video
I don't disagree with you. And OTR is just one example, and may even be a straw-man by now. Just be aware that there are other valid choices for cryptosystems, while you still don't have to roll your own.
Being thankful for what you already have.
I believe it's this case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trafigura#Super-injunction
How to Make a Cool flash gallery with your holiday pics 
Here, I will show you How to Make a Cool flash gallery with your holiday pics. It's easy and interesting and the process needs no flash skills at all.
This is great! Is an HN importer coming :)
In cryptography you should always use a "cryptographically strong" PRNG, even (especially) if in doubt. There have been to many mistakes with lousy random number generators undermining what would otherwise have been a strong security mechanism.
As some other commenter already noted, this breaks browser text-search. In case you want to quickly checked whether what you want to say has been said already (and upvoted that comment instead or add something as a reply).
The nice thing is that Alan Kay's call for the Web browser to be refounded on (effectively) something like NaCl + WebGL and Tim Berners-Lee's embrace of what he called the Principle of Least Power http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Principles.html are both correct, and they can both be adhered to at the same time. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Declarative formats are a Good Thing for the reasons you mention, but it's not necessary or desirable to weld the code needed to interpret them into the browser. As it stands, the web browser is a half-hearted attempt at a dedicated reader for one particular declarative format, which has been worked up into a messy approximation to a generic application runtime. Much better to start with the generic runtime and write for it programs to handle (view, edit, inspect etc.) various different declarative formats. When it's told to open a file that's in a declarative, non-executable format, the browser can (by default) find and run a generic display program for files of that type.
WP7 dev phones
Why Drug Packaging Matters
Your stated "value proposition" is too vague. The only thing implying the use of "metrics" to achieve the goal is the company name, "UserMetrix," but that leaves one to wonder, "What metrics?"
Does it have to be raw numbers? Could it be that iPod touch sales (money) stands for more than 50% of all iPod sales?

If its true: Who buys all these iPod touch? Where I live (Sweden) iPhones are very common and touch is not. They are not very cheap either.
Well since critical thinking and "complex reasoning" are impossible to measure on a standardized test, the entire article is pretty much pointless. I.E. the media needs to stop acting like the important effects of education can be measured easily and en masse and therefore reported on in their articles.
How to Create a Venture Pitch Video
So scala, clojure, jruby, mirah ... are all ok.

Or even quercus if you are into php.

This sounds fun!
and why do you need an office building? i think that's perhaps a bit exorbitant? just work out of your home until you can justify getting an office, unless of course you need a soccer field for your league.
And innocent phrases are getting ripped on Phoronix: such as the words "free software", which on mouse over produce a popup that asks me to "Earn Cash Completing Surveys".

More on topic, to the people who are saying that GPL users had it coming: offering the binaries without the source code is a violation of the license (GPLv3 section 6, GPLv2 section 3). And even if they would somehow sneakily satisfy that clause, you've got to admit that renaming the software and selling it without so much as a nod to the original developers is sleazy to say the least.
Temporary restaurant forced to launch lean
Actually,

Neither a corporation nor an individual should have the right to cover up something like that.
...which would cover jruby apps packaged with warbler, unless there's something I'm missing.
You can find more information at http://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/
It is an amazing UI that lets you "see past the website".

I once saw one of those "Missing Manual" books for Facebook on the shelf and laughed. I wouldn't have laughed if it were for Blender or even for Word.

But then I realized: the reason I laughed is that Facebook is so simple to use that only an idiot couldn't figure it out. Nay, even many millions of idiots can figure it out.

For an application that complex, with that many features, that is quite an accolade indeed.
Facebook is not made for smart people. It's not made for the readers of Hacker News, this guy's blog, or even the throngs on Reddit. It's made for everyone else. I work in a place with some people who will work/have worked minimum wage jobs their whole life (not that there's anything wrong with that). But these same people are on the internet all the time, and you know what they do? Check facebook. Facebook chat. Look through facebook pictures. Maybe browse craigslist for a few minutes looking for a used car or a new job. But 95% of the time? Facebook. I'm not saying this type of person represents the majority of facebook users, but it is this type of internet "familiarity", for lack of a better word, that makes up the majority of facebook users, and the world's population.
Yes MySpace was created by marketing people, but that's the reason for both its initial rise and ultimate stagnation. Marketing people think "features" is the name of the game. Zuckerberg, like a good nerd, had the understanding that "platform" is really the name of the game.

Plus Zuckerberg's massive anti-privacy bias caused him to push the product in the right (superior product/market fit) direction in the face of significant user complaints (i.e. beacon).

And the speed at which facebook has been able to re-invent itself multiple times (e.g. platformization and twitterization) has been very impressive.
For better or worse I've been working on the same codebase for almost a decade; now whenever I patch the code I've got half an eye on how likely it is that I or someone else could accidentally break this code in the future.

If you've got to write code that's not allowed to fail, you can't afford set up little traps like this for yourself.
Samsung Duos W169 Price and Features | TECHGADGETSITE
An Analysis of MacScan, "The Premier Anti-Spyware Software for Mac OS X"
AWS Elastic Beanstalk (beta)
They "read the content" if you can call countless banal status updates "content" then yes. Facebook provides a useful way of sharing pictures, connecting with friends but most importantly for an ever larger number, a place to seek some sort of validation for the pointless minutia of their boring lives.
everything was great about the article except for the statement of bug free software, there's no such thing.

i think really what he's talking about is the alpha/beta lifecycle of a product except he uses the term free for a limited time. in reality, lots of applications get released when they're truly only alpha quality so it makes sense to have an alpha, beta, or both cycles for launching apps that you want to eventually charge (or not charge) for.
There's a big difference between torrenting an HD movie and watching a relatively low resolution streaming movie. I don't have the numbers at my fingertips, but I'd be surprised if the HD movie doesn't use 10x the bandwidth.
The mistake he made is not specifically a "crypto code" problem, it was merely forgetting to increment the new variable

It wasn't even that. My mistake was refactoring code incorrectly. The increment was there for two years until it got lost in the refactoring.

The great thing about widely used open-source utilities is the extensive vetting they receive

Wearing my FreeBSD Security Officer hat: It's nice to think that, but most open source code gets a shockingly small amount of auditing.
3 years for a phone is enough.

What I like about Apple is that I could get iOS 3.1.3 installed on a first generation iPod Touch. Doesn't run well, but it works, and I could get the games I play installed on it and running; most apps still run on iOS 3.x.

I also have an iPhone 3GS, with iOS 4.2 on it: there's no incentive for me to buy an iPhone 4, so I'll wait for iPhone 5 or even 6. Apple is still happy because I keep being an iPhone user.

This story about Android is pretty sad, as I was considering getting a Galaxy S. Now that Apple phones are sold by each of the 3 GSM/3G operators in my country (and for reasonable prices) ... what incentive do I have to buy an Android which I cannot upgrade myself?
Your more likely to upvote to get comments that you like higher. I typically do not upvote much but now it seems important.
Amusing and probably fairly accurate, although I will take exception with the "maps" part. If I was disappearing off into the wilderness I would not trust a phone I had to charge and a GPS signal I might not get to ensure I didn't perish. No I think a paper map will always be a necessity for a proper adventure.
No, he does have insane access. he tends to get earlier and more accurate scoops than the tech blogs. Sometimes dropping it nonchalantly in the comments of a linked list entry, ex:

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/29/wsj

As I recall it, no one was running any rumors about a display res like that at the time Gruber called it, or the front-facing camera.

And he gets scoops on things that are not happening, despite reports from other tech blogs, just as often (as in this example). If you did some digging, you'd find that his source was right almost every time.
Based on the screenshots, font rendering -- the most important thing -- still seems to suck big time.
I think he's simply cultivated a group of trusted contacts inside Apple over his years as (let's face it) a pretty well regarded tech blogger. It'd be hard to be in the business as long as he has without getting at least one or two inside contacts.
And unfortunately this is made worse by stuff that MBA courses used to teach that is considered horrible nowadays, like cost-cutting.
If it passes, I would imagine this gets repealed when a company tries to invoke its right to privacy during an audit. Tax or otherwise.
There are statistical ways to ensure that the results obtained from a study are both a) not due to chance and b) statistically significant to be applicable to larger sample sizes. Hopefully, both were applied and evaluated during the peer review process when a study gets published.
I could potentially extract the actual data from the studies but alas, traditional media consider it a sin to link to the original papers and of course, a simple 'recent studies' is sufficient for us common people.

Edit: spelling, clarity
> If Facebook isn't for you, then that's that. But it doesn't mean what they're doing is wrong.

reposted for emphasis, because this is the perfect one sentence rebuttal to that entire artic ... sorry ... rant.
Note, that corps. can claim a tax break for fines, as being a 'business expense'. Much more depth on all of this in the documentary 'The Corporation'.
HBase: Shops swap MySQL for open source Google mimic
AWS Elastic Beanstalk: A Quick and Simple Way into the Cloud
"Hand-written letters: For that matter, hand-written anything. When was the last time you wrote cursive? In fact, do you even know what the word "cursive" means? Kids born in 2011 won't -- but they'll put you to shame on a tiny keyboard."

My favorite gifts all have handwriting on them from the person who gave it to me. There's just something personal about getting something with someone's handwriting on it.

Additionally, notes. They need to be hand-written.
Yes, there are some classes where this works, but for most math classes? No. For any physics (which is just applied math), you need to take handwritten notes.

This is the first, and hopefully only, time that I ever see anyone declare that "handwriting will die".
I have an iPhone 3GS already, and there's no incentive for me to upgrade to iPhone 4.

Which is pretty cool, considering that many people buy these iPhones with a 2 year contract. There's nothing more depressing than having to pay monthly rates for a deprecated product.

Which is why I think Apple's fine with a 2-3 years upgrade cycle, as long as you keep being an iPhone user.
Well, many of them have confidential info about stuff like products in development.
> The only meaningful/hard numbers available for Android are
> for SmartPhones - so Android SmartPhones vs. iOS SmartPhone
> is the only comparison you could validly make.

Why so? If I am a developer and my app runs the same on iPhone and iPod touch (and probably on iPad if I took time to make it universal) then I care not only about the iPhones.
Wow, it's Amazon's response to Google App Engine. I like their increasingly silly naming. :-)

http://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/
Introducing AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Prior to calling for the scalps of someone peripherally involved in an incident, I think engineers should pause and reflect as to whose finger is going to be physically on the "go" button directly before something important breaks at their company.

Captain Planet -- where all environmental damage was caused by acts of malice by identifiable people -- made for a great TV show... when we were eight.
That page is blog spam crap. Check out http://vimeo.com/14821961 for the real deal.
its because what he has there isn't as much a coherent argument as it is a rant ... an arrogant and snarky one at that.

He doesn't even bother to substantiate many of his claims ... (Facebook's UI sucks ... word?). As such the highly upvoted in-kind response, shouldn't be a surprise.