skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think that headline is even remotely fair. When Apple releases a new version of iOS, it often comes with a new phone and a $200-$400 price tag. When the new Android version is released by Google, there are hundreds of different devices that already exist that have to be updated, and it gets updated for free.
All of the snakes alive must be on the trees or in the houses by now.
My knowledge of Australian folklore improved after looking up "bunyip" on wikipedia. Thanks. ;)
No, they don't run jailbroken iPhones. That's my point. They don't need to in order to get the latest OS, but you often do with Android.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/17/ios-android-breakdown/
What Exactly Is a Business Model?
Update: Apparently there was a regression introduced last week that has exacerbated this problem. Some folks are working on a fix.
What is the meaning of life? - Quora
I don't know if you've seen Dr Strangelove, but your comment reminds me of Major Kong, taking off his flying helmet and putting on his cowboy hat when it's time to go fight World War 3.
Holding down option while pressing delete in a playlist prompts you with the "Move to Trash" / "Keep in Library" deletion dialog.
He worked at Netscape as well. His LinkedIn profile is: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/michael-lopp/0/1/642
Cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KmnKhb-...
This really is the key difference between the two platforms for developers. Apple just makes a developers job so much easier, an iOS dev is safe to get excited about new features, because they can count on them being supported by customers devices almost immediately.

One of the big advantages android has is the lack of app approval. However if curated stores like amazon take off and users prefer it android will loose that advantage too.

From a users perspective it is great to know you can get 3 years of new features out of an iPhone vs ??? From an android device.
The government should have built the damn dam
Fair or not, this is one of the biggest benefits of an integrated platform. The report is evidence that the model works.
Humans have the ability to understand multiple meanings, modify the meanings and understand the mis-meanings.

Example joke: "Ever notice how we park on driveways, drive on parkways, pay tolls to go on freeways and it takes longer to get where you want on an expressway." All illustrate how our usage and the meanings of our words have been modified over time.

A driveway is a section of personal roadway that leads to a personal garage (you would never have left one of the old 70% wooden cars outside with zero rust proofing on the metal, ever). A parkway was supposed to be a scenic roadway to link urban and suburban parks with pleasure roads where people could park freely and enjoy the area, now it's commonly a synonym for any general highway. Freeways were actually speed-limit-free highways, the 'free' never had anything to do with cost until the very late 20th century. An expressway was designed as a high-speed arterial road, which may have a limited number of driveways.
I think it's just important to know a little about a wide variety of things as it is to know a lot about a few specific things. Breadth and depth are both valuable.

I ended up doing something similar to what this author tried to do starting in my sophomore year in college (although I didn't have any particular goal in mind when I started). Over the course of about a year and a half, through some combination of classes and my own projects, I programmed Standard ML, Prolog, Haskell, PHP, Ruby, JavaScript, x86 Assembly, Scala, SuperCollider, and Scheme for the first time. At that point, all I really knew were Java and Python.

I think it was an immensely useful experience for several reasons. I've now had some exposure to most/all of the major programming paradigms (and some less common ones too). A month is enough time to begin to get a feel for a language and its idioms, and being able to think and solve problems in different ways will make you a much better programmer even if you do end up working mostly in one or two languages.

Learning how to learn a programming language quickly is also an exceptionally useful skill. New languages don't scare me any more--I can usually learn enough to start hacking on something in a couple of hours, and enough to not be writing completely horrible code in a couple of days. And it's now very rare that I sit down to read a piece of code and can't figure out what's happening because I'm not familiar with the language, which is very helpful when I need to work on something I've never seen before.

That all said, there's a reason I didn't continue doing that indefinitely. Learning one or two languages really well is also very important.
Step 1. Click link

Step 2. See the article is written by MG Siegler

Step 3. Find something else to read
Hmm. Hipster style Q/A for major cities. Like a Gilt/Quora. Could work
Sight v1.3.1 out now - The Syntax Highlighter for Chrome
Export Reports from JasperReports & JasperServer in PDF Format
Aspose.Pdf for JasperReports is a flexible Java component designed to export reports from JasperReports and JasperServer to Portable Document Format (PDF) with high fidelity, identical to the report design. Its engine supports many chart layouts, such as Pie, Bar, Stacked Bar, Line, Area, Scatter Plot, Bubble, and Time series. All report features, including charts, tables, images and more, are converted to PDF with the highest degree of precision. It also supports the .jrxml specification.
I think it's a bigger achievement to write something that other people can look at and actually understand what is going on.

Then you probably wouldn't title your article, "in XXX lines of code". But the author of this particular author did, so it's assumed that he considers this to be a big achievement. technomancy merely points out that this is not really an amazing achievement.
Look, fellas, I keep seeing these kinds of blog posts and while I am waiting patiently for some fresh insights, I keep seeing the same discussion recycled. So to spare everyone the angst, here's the bottom line:

Apple takes the attitude that if you give users what they just discovered they wanted, they will give Apple money.

Apple considers this more important than its relationships with the carriers, which is why AT&T got an exclusive: None of the other carriers would play ball with a phone that the carriers can't control to the point of making their users miserable.

I am not making a value judgment that this is good or great or a revolution, just stating what I believe to be Apple's business strategy.

Google works the other way, it makes an OS that in theory is just as good as iOS or even better, but in practice Google's business strategy is about getting as many copies of Android out on as many handsets as possible. Take your pick, this is to get as many search clicks and/or other data aggregations into Google's hands or to suck the oxygen out of the market from their arch-rival Microsoft, or possibly both.

To that end, they give the carriers what the carriers want, and the carriers want to make their captive market miserable.

This plays itself out in a myriad of different ways, and it always seems to come down to the same thing: Android is more open in theory, but the gap between theory and practice is smaller in theory than it is in practice, and the cause of the gap is the carriers and Googles perfectly sane business strategy of appeasing them.

I am not saying Apple's strategy is better or worse than Google's. It is possible that each strategy is a local optimum, and the poor companies between Apple and Google--like Microsoft, RIM, and so on--are between a rock and a hard place.

But I do think each strategy is valid given its company's goals, and therefore I do not expect to see anything change unless there is a seismic shift in the industry. Until then, Apple will make a lot of money off a smaller number of handsets, and Android will dominate the numbers but its users will be hostage to the carriers.
Ask HN: Why are there so many bad developers?
As someone who runs a software development consultancy I'm constantly talking to potential new clients.

It seems like 9 times out of 10 the potential client has had a really bad experience with another developer at some point... overcharged and under-delivered, non-working code, etc etc.

What's the root cause here? All these bad apples out there make my job a lot harder.
How is it not fair? Carriers/manufacturers could easily update their phones if they were motivated to but they aren't at all, instead it's just planned obsolescence as usual. They want to force you to buy a new phone.
That's not a fair assessment at all. Many iPhone users are still on 3G and 3GS...not everyone bought an iPhone 4.
But still. Delayed updates (or getting none at all) is a huge problem affecting most Android users.

I'm writing this from a phone with Android 2.1... And HTC already declared there will be no more updates. Even the update to 2.1 came with 6 months delay, here in Germany! (HTC Hero.)
Ask HN:Web hosting(LAMP) with a budget of $50/month?
One of my friend is working on a web based startup(almost complete) that has been developed on LAMP stack. He is looking for a web hosting service that can handle huge traffic if required. He isn't into server administration that much so he will prefer a managed service. He is a student and can afford upto $50/month. Which web hosting service would you guys suggest in such scenario?
We have a little yorkie mix is shockingly bright. We haven't taught her as many things (do you HAVE a thousand different things you want your dog touching?) but she picks things up quickly.

She'll do practically anything for cheese. It took about a whole slice of american cheese to teach her to ring a bell on command; then we tied it to the door. We put her leash on and made her ring the bell to open the door - she figured it out in exactly one try.

When we show her a new thing and get some food out, she KNOWS she is going to learn something new. She'll quickly poke it, shove it, pick it up, look at you, and repeat. Just in case that's what we wanted her to do...

Dogs are amazing.

(Obligatory picture: http://www.flickr.com/photos/joshu/4557297986 )
Chance this arbitrary statistic matters to real world Android users? 0.4% Chance
That's true, and something I hadn't considered completely. I think you also need to consider that removing these viral channels makes the game less fun, and potentially decreases the amount of credits people will spend on the game. Also, I imagine Zynga would be tempted to jump ship (as they've threatened before) if Facebook starts to govern features they can include at such a ridiculous level.
As someone who has been down this path I can offer a couple of comments.

1. Crashing or crippling the program indeed has an obvious negative PR side-effect. However it can be mitigated by inducing a very exotic crash, something like "Division by zero" or better yet - "Illegal Instruction", which would clearly point at mangled code being at fault. Also stick a thread titled "Illegal Instruction" in Support forums, explain why it happens and this will be the first hit in Google for a respective search.

2. While the trialware model is the way, it does not automatically mean it has to be an annoying nagware. What worked for one of my projects was to allow multiple consecutive trials. First was one month, next was two weeks, third and all subsequent trials were a few days long. These periods were configured on the licensing server, and the program did real-time license retrieval. So for me to be able to experiment with this model and get meaningful statistics, I had to ensure that the program at the other end of the licensing sessions is authentic. From that followed a need to safeguard parts of its code from modification and I ended up doing pretty much what eps described.

--

In other words ensuring integrity of the program is needed for more than just fighting pirates. Pirates are not a big deal, let 'em steal and crack. It's the legit customers that this protection ultimately benefits.
have you checked out http://tweetsaver.com?
I don't disagree with your premise, but there can be utility to trying out a number of different languages quickly and see which approaches resonate with you. A month with a language won't give in-depth knowledge of a languages' strengths and weaknesses, but it will allow one to move past the superficial differences (syntax, originally intended problem domains) and on to the philosophical ideas behind the language.

Trying Prolog, Erlang, Haskell and Scala in the space of 4 months while trying to solve simple problems (Project Euler comes to mind) should allow one to find a language approach that works. Object-oriented, lazy functional, concurrent or logical, one of those might stick. And if not, there's Lua, Ruby, Groovy, C#, Scheme, Perl6, Python3, Forth, C++, Brainfuck, ...

Each language has a core idea or two that could fit someone's personality. Then, the next year could be spent learning that language in-depth, as you mention. Finally, build upon that experience and re-evaluate the orignal list of languages; JavaScript looks better after Lua, Haskell is Scheme with Prolog-like pattern matching and a generic type system like an advanced C++, Forth and Brainfuck are about a simplicity even beyond Scheme's, etc.
If you have to ask what hipster does, you're not hip enough to get it.
You're kinky!
Now give me an Alternative to Mathematica please! I so hate Stephen Wolfram.
iOS updates come for free as well and they offer all the features to at least the last 2 versions of the phone, covering basically two years of product releases.

> there are hundreds of different devices that already exist that have to be updated

That's exactly the problem. Also the problem is that those manufactures don't really care of those hundreds of devices, maybe they care of the latest 2 (two months product releases the most), because most likely they will have to push a brand new device the week after.
That logic does not apply to unlocked GSM phones (like mine), where no carrier is involved in the purchase.

These don't get updates either, despite (or because) the device manufacturer is in control, not the carrier.

Maybe in the USA, it is not common to buy phones unlocked and unsubsidised, but here (Germany) many carriers offer rebates if you don't buy a subsidised phone and bring your own.
Uh, they use beagles for sniffing for all kinds of things: drugs, bombs, even termites.

That said, German Shepherds are an interesting case because, as I understand it, their breed standard is actually a behavioral standard: they have to be able to perform a certain level of obedience, tracking, and bite work (think big leather gloves) to get papers.
There's a great book called Seven Languages in Seven Weeks that teaches this way of thinking to broaden your horizons.

The languages discussed are Ruby, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, Clojure, and Haskell

http://pragprog.com/titles/btlang/seven-languages-in-seven-w...
The stunning imagery aside, these are satellite images, not aerial.
If you use the same binning strategy that is used for the iOS versions then the numbers aren't so far off. 87.4% of Android users are on 2.x which compares favorably to the 90% of iOS users on 4.x. Granted there are bigger differences between each Android point version than the iOS, but the iOS data is too lacking to make this a fair comparison. It wouldn't surprise me if iOS suffered from users not being on the latest latest (4.2) version because of the lack of OTA updates.

That being said, my roommate has a Nexus S and I have an HTC Evo and would trade HTC Sense for quicker updates to the latest releases (without having to load custom ROMs).
There are two additional security features POST has that GET does not:

1- POSTs cannot be forwarded

2- some browsers (webkit only I believe) require a client to interact with a domain before they can POST to it-- this means iframes cannot POST.

When it comes to XSRF, they are equally (in)secure.
Even the author of the piece said he doesn't think it was fair, so you're in good company.
I'll say it damn well could. The idea of a Royal Commission is one of the ideas I'd really like to import from Australia to the US.

Actually the idea of a Royal Commission is just part of a smaller idea missing from US governance: the idea that an organ of the government can be completely non-partisan. Royal Commissions are instigated by politicians, but they're expected to exist far above the fray of ordinary politics; certainly I've never heard of any accusations that a Royal Commission is biased one way or the other.

Other examples of entities which manage in Australia to escape the partisanship which dominates them in the US are the High (Supreme) Court and the process for redrawing the boundaries of electoral districts.
Or making your job easier... with so many bad apples, isn't it easier to stand above the rest?
WRT to incompatibilities, it would be great for Octave if they could file bug reports.

WRT to packages/ toolboxes, Octave and Octave Forge have not quite reached maturity, and there is ongoing debate about how to do that.

WRT to Simulink,... that is such a specialized graphical thing, I don't think it is coming down the pike any time soon. Somebody else mentioned an alternative...
Check out Linode (http://linode.com). He will have to setup the server (i.e. OS selection, install Apache, mySQL, and PHP), but Linode documentation is excellent and their support is extremely helpful. The least expensive plan is $20 a month, but it is easy enough to upgrade if additional bandwidth, memory, or storage is required.
(This comment is focused mainly on web developers.)

It's a young and immature field. The clients are usually ignorant of the requirements and the level of quality to expect. This breeds a lot of half-ass developers and snake oil salesmen. I've personally known a few people who called themselves "web designers" but the work they create is God awful. Get-rich-quick types tend to want to jump on board to milk money from people. Web development is a great field for those kind of people. SEO is another.
I tend to agree. By revealing your previous salary you lose any negotiating leverage you had.
6 points in 7 minutes is great, but I'm not sure why anyone would say that they "don't think that headline is even remotely fair"

It looks like you're not denying the facts, just concerned that the facts don't favor Android (and you seem to acknowledge that hundreds of existing devices cannot be updated to the latest Android version)

In general, do you not want your headlines to reflect the facts ?

[edit: the parent comment was at 6 points when I wrote my response. Now, more than an hour later, it seems to have been downvoted down to 3 points.]
It was strange driving down the road, looking down a side street, and seeing houses underwater.
Does anyone know how much the 253,000 email addresses (userbase of threewords) could be worth to a company that runs another social platform?

I imagine that, regardless of whether threewords continues to grow, a related service (like formspring) could add threewords functionality to their own service, then email the threewords userbase letting them know what's up, and re-engaging them..

Is the response rate for those kind of emails pretty good, or would that not be a huge factor in the sale price?
One major difference might be our ability to map various signals into the same internal "sign" or meaning (synonyms, explanations, relations, generalization, instantiation, specialization, negation etc.) while dogs might have a 1:1 mapping between signal and meaning.

If you had a golf ball, tennis ball and cricket ball; all small enough for a dog to fetch. Would it know which "ball" to fetch if you had a club/racket/bat in your hand?

If yes, then two forms of learning are identical. If not, well ..
Doesn't matter much from either a regular developer or regular user standpoint as long as people are using 2.1 and above (90% of users are) - most of the apps just work.

If you are keen on OS upgrades - you just need to have bought the right phone - Nexus line or some of the HTC ones or even the original Droid. I am running Cyanogenmod 7 which is Gingerbread on my N1 happily.

I happen to know many iPhone users at my office - they don't use iTunes and don't even know there is an upgrade - they are running the version of the OS their device shipped with. Only the Mac/iTunes users (which there are few) tend to upgrade to the latest.

So yeah - big numbers but not much practical significance in comparison.
What makes you say that? The text states that they're aerial photographs taken in flyovers, and they certainly look more aerial than satellite to me (they'd be very high resolution if they were satellite).
When did you try it? I think there have been a lot of fixes to incompatible naming conventions lately.

And ... so your student's plots look slightly different? Like what? ticks on the inside / outside, or??? That that's a deal breaker surprises me.
Well, it wouldn't apply if you could argue that the carriers don't want Google selling unlocked phones and it defies them. My guess is that there are so few unlocked phones sold that the carriers don't really care one way or another about people buying unlocked phones, they mostly care about people hacking a phone that is supposed to be locked down.
And how is this different from Android?

"When Apple releases a new version of iOS, it often comes with a new phone and a $200-$400 price tag."

- When Android 2.0 was announced, it was available on only one device, the new Verizon Droid ($199 w/ contract). Even the Verizon Droid Eris released the same day did not have the latest OS. (It missed out on 1.6 and 2.0, was upgraded to 2.1 six months later, and will never see supported upgrades to 2.2 or higher.)

- When Android 2.1 was announced, it was available on only one device, the new Nexus One ($529). When 2.2 was released, buying a Nexus One was still the only way to run it at first, although some other devices did get updates a short while later.

- When Android 2.3 was announced, it was available on only one device, the new Nexus S ($529 or $199 w/contract).

Many Android devices never get updated to the latest major release. New devices are released every month or so that ship with year-old versions of the OS. Meanwhile, Apple provides upgrades for every one of its older devices, for at least the next few releases.

Among other things, this means developers must decide whether to cut off half their users by taking advantage of new OS features now, or wait a couple years for enough old devices to be updated or thrown away. I work on Firefox for Android, and a bunch of features in the Gingerbread NDK would be perfect for us... if we could actually use them any time soon.
I'd like to see some OKCupid-like analysis of the ads that were flagged off. It could provide some well-needed scam-avoidance and filtering intelligence.
OSQA is the technology behind MetaOptimize Q+A (http://metaoptimize.com/qa), a niche q+a site for machine learning and natural language processing.
I think your last point is key.

Remember back in the day.. if you wanted a Nokia phone that played MP3's, you got the special model the played MP3s. That model didn't really surf the net or have games. If you wanted to play games, you had to buy an NGage, and if you wanted to surf the net (poorly) you needed to get the net surfing phone (can't think of the model). Then there were the E series black berry knock offs.

And once your phone's model year was up, that was it. You were stuck with what you had.

I like my iPhone. It does 97% of what I want it to do. I could get the other 3% of features by getting an Android, but the Android doesn't match the 97% the iPhone has -- it's more like 80%.

Plus, in Canada, my phone has to last 3 years -- that's the contract term up here. 3G's are 3 years old and can run iOS4. Let's see an Android that you buy from Telus or Rogers today run the latest Android in 3 years (even if it doesn't have 100% of the features).