skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I will tell you the build that Apple has:
> +Dropped it way more times than I can count, usually while closed and turned off but also while it was running, and while it was open (both running and not).
Yes

>+Totally stood on it, putting my full weight on the closed lid many times.
Why on earth would I do that?

>+Left it running in my closed backpack for almost an hour (twice).
More times than I can count. My MBP has been "shut down" for a maximum of 20 times in the past 2 years.

>+Used it indoors and out during drizzle, snow, the height of summer and the low of winter, I even used it on a beach once.
Everything except the snow

>The only issue I have ever had was when I was carrying it about 6 ft. off the ground while open and running (brilliant I know) and I dropped it onto a tile-on-concrete floor. That time the hard drive crashed but everything was perfectly fine.

Done that as well. The MBP hard disk stops motion when the acceleration exceeds a certain value suddenly

-It is not just the build quality.
-It is also about merging design and technology
-Building a durable laptop can be as non innovative as carbon fibre layering.
-It is about removing point of failures/fall/mishaps by innovation like the MagSafe adapters. God they prevent the laptop from falling everyday.
-Also it is not just how it is built but also how it works. I work on Windows in my office and on my MBP by the night. The OS is exceedingly more polished and refined on the Mac.
<br />
Does that give a fair perspective?
Might as well shut the fuck up and not bother expressing unhappiness with a company you're giving money to, right?

The sharecropper analogy is so absolute it's useless. It makes for a lovely soundbite, though, I'm sure it's fun to repeat ad nauseam.
Great ideas Alexandre, I'd love to talk.
>"One measure of the suite's success is journalism school."

Journalism and other departments within US universities push Apple products because of the high profits those schools earn on Macs and iPods sold through on campus bookstores to incoming freshman using their student (and parental) loans.
Where is this "user revolt" you speak of?
How about "Meh... I'll move on."
Arguing that Apple is illogical or ought to be smarter or is shooting itself in the foot... A waste of electrons.

In my experience, employees at Apple care very much what users and developers are saying. Many of them read Marco and Gruber. Quite a few even read the Apple support forums. Although they can't publicly respond to them, it helps inform their thinking about future decisions.

Remember when Apple reversed its decision on 3rd-party developer tools and languages? Rational feedback and criticism can work.
but it was generally considered bad form when I was there to call out specific products publicly for their bad code

In a way, don't you think that by not allowing customers to know just how bad the code in the software they buy is, you're encouraging more of it?

If there are advantages to producing quick-and-dirty code that violates platform programming guidelines (some would call this sort of sloppy programming "Getting Work Done"), and there are no consequences (Microsoft knows how bad the code is but Winzip's customers don't), doesn't this exert a subtle market pressure that works against good developers who take the time and make the effort to do things right?
Which was submitted after the rule change.
Yes, it has to be that. It can't be that they are the best tool for the job.
Octopart helps nearly a half a million people find parts every month
I'm outside USA and HN is the only 'real' connection with the startup world. So I guess I'd get a little depressed.

But I think if HN was shut down a new HN-like community would be immediately created.
Android hit by rogue app viruses
In a sense, policies that affect current apps are somewhat preferable. If new policies kill existing apps altogether Apple and consumers will know the consequences of the policy. This means the policy may change to avoid them or motivate competitors to differentiate with policies that allow these apps to exist.

Killing unborn applications is more speculative. Who knows which apps didn't get built for what reason?
The hole I see in your argument is that I have never seen developing free apps on the App Store as some sort of loophole.

Apple has supported the existence of free apps. On paid apps, they get their 30% cut. On free apps, they get a token $99/year fee and all the profits from their hardware sales.

The above arrangement is both profitable and sustainable for Apple. And Apple's interests are in keeping their end users and developers happy in a virtuous cycle.

I just don't agree that developers should be called foolish unless they adopt the utmost cynical view of things.
Using web skills to create product catalog / brochure
MORE PRODUCTIVE!
I'm rather interested here... once you have routing, auth, sessions, templates and an orm... how is that not heavy? we are talking terminology here so i'm really interested in when you consider the line for 'heavy' gets crossed?

for me what you describe above would be heavy in my mind.

as i'm trying to come up w/ terminology that will convey my general idea to the widest range of people possible and yours is so far the farthest afield from what i was thinking of, you have really peeked my interest.
> I'd also like special people's names to be highlighted such as the OP's and admin's.

I like this. I sometimes find myself searching a page with the OP's name to check for responses. As for the rest though... I kind of like the "anonymity" of posting without a sig/avatar/anything because I don't do any pre-filtering of comments by user.
I'd say if you have an idea you have to act super fast...the whole Sheen topic could be dead in a month
I've been excited to get this list peer-reviewed and it seems that Kaminari and CarrierWave are 2 good alternatives from all the feedback. I'm looking forward to swapping these in on my next project.
And you can use their marketplaces without using their hardware.
do you think you would use un-opinionated were rails not known as an 'opinionated' framework? as rails used that term to set itself off against things like spring, have you found un-opinionated to be ever cause confusion?
A good way to do it might be to have different rules for different industries then.
It'll be geared towards biological researchers.
Why do you want to read the whole list to find the answer to your question?
Ctrl/Cmd+F + "the most relevant word of your query"
What is typically going on when a firm is "just fishing"? Passing information to a portfolio company in the same niche? Looking for market sizing or other research data? Checking out the type of companies/people the competition is passing on or interested in? Trying to make the senior partners think that they're busy? Any/all of the above?
>brand advocates

i.e. Everyone on this thread
Still, sometime even if it's an obvious question, it's a good way to start a conversation. I.e. Can I have some X? -> Of course, the answer is Yes, but still, it's a polite way.. way better than "Give me X".
This isn't really a refutation of what he said. If enough of the proverbial sharecroppers complain, it MAY be worth it for Apple to improve conditions. You are still at their mercy, however.

Also, it's ridiculous that people are voting raganwald's comment down. What's next, covering your ears and yelling "la la la la"?
Help raise $100 for Friends of Tom (Toms Shoes). I'll match up to $200 tonight
I agree it looks stellar. But as a developer of songwriting applications ( I believe the "Smart Instruments" are a basic implementation of our ideas ) my heart dropped when I saw the price. $4.99 for this amount of content is amazing, but also impossible for smaller devs to compete with head on.

With that in mind I hope shortly after release Apple publishes some sort of easy way to export directly to Garage Band so that more niche products can ride the coat tails.
Hey thanks for the ideas. I'm in southern California USA.
thanks!
Exactly!
I rushed to the bottom of the page to see if the Yes was there or not? Since after 10-11 items this becomes a game and the next instinct is to start from bottom.
Also if someone actually read from the top all the way to the bottom, then the second YES is the gratification.
correct! This is a simple donation not an investment opportunity.
>"The thing that Jefferson did is he did the _work_"

Jefferson didn't do it alone - his team slaved away for him.

Literally.
Why are there two comments essentially saying this? My comment never included that word.
Corporations Try to Ride the Sheen Machine on Twitter
It looks extremely cramped because it had to fit on a slide-show. And IDEs usually look complex. Here's a larger screenshot of WebStorm which uses the newer IntelliJ 10 look and feel http://www.jetbrains.com/webstorm/img/WS_mac.png
Because while all those "conveniences" are available you are not at the mercy of more opinionated frameworks like Rails. You are free to use them or add your own or use none.

I don't have time to do simple request/response building although if I did Python's Paste/Webob would be my choice so I choose frameworks that I can add in the usual "extra" requirements that I do need.

This blog post is a couple of years old but sheds some light on the abundance of frameworks in the Python world at least. The closing section sums up the difference between full stack frameworks and lighter frameworks.

http://bitworking.org/news/Why_so_many_Python_web_frameworks

Another term I've seen around is "utility library" instead of framework. Perhaps that is better?
>Plus, if you need to draw something with Quartz, you can mock it up first in Opacity, and then have it generate the source code for your drawing, which you then integrate into your class.

Wow, that's worth the price of admission alone. Writing drawing code by hand takes forever and is the worst kind of time sink: the almost-but-not-quite mindless kind.
This is something that has been already discussed here in HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2181315
Viz is an app that let's you test the app you build on redfoundry.com.

There service to build an app is not free but the app, which is for testing, was free. It's soon to be a buck a month, Apple's minimum.
After 4 hours, maybe the complete absence of comments is a clue...
>classic copywriting trick [...] make every other one bold.

Doesn't it look like a definition list then though.
try #sourceforge on freenode; live support from 8-5 on weekdays
I usually disregard usernames (because it's too much of an effort to keep track of them in a conversation) so the whole thing reads as one large internal monologue of a really intelligent, well rounded but conflicted and wandering-minded person.
I'm sorry for the harshness of the earlier reply, but yes, I imagine that it was a kind of eager, if sincere, pedantry. I get where you are coming from, and again, the harshness was more aimed at the community's collective tendency.
Microsoft Said to Plan Windows for Tablets Release in 2012
It is a sign that they have earned more credibility as a threat.
Top notch engineer / product dude looking for gig
Dear fellow hackers, please help to upvote this if you think there are startups who would benefit from this. To be totally clear, I would not gain anything from this personally. It is not convenient to put his name here, so please drop me an email at mingyeow@gmail.com

I have a buddy who is looking to be part of an awesome team. He has excellent experience in terms of scaling applications from zero to millions of users both from a product and technical POV.

Proven skillsets ranges from the actual building of applications (backend and app level) , scaling users via viral acquisition (Facebook & email), and in terms of the startup process (mostly social and consumer). Plus strong hiring experience.

As for the more intangible aspects, I can personally testify to his dynamism in knocking things off, caring about details, and taking feedback very well.

One downside is that he is of course extremely opinionated about everything, but that is a by-product of really caring about what he does. Another downside is that he probably really expects world class work from who he worked with.

He needs to be part of a world class team, who have the financial backing to give him a visa. Joining one of the big boys is OK, but he would prefer to be part of something newer and awesome ;)
Facebook Valued at $65 billion in New Investment
Thanks, Australia is high on our list when we get to more countries.
It's kind of mind-boggling that the most left-wing, union supporting, socialist website on the planet pays the people who produces the content on their site _zero_. I'm mostly progressive/left-wing/Canadian, but that fact alone makes my want to switch sides in an instant.
Ah yes, that makes perfect sense- when I read and, I read it as all inclusive rather than pick and choose.
In part they're "playing the game" because their followers want them to.

But I agree that it should be about how useful the device is, but that runs counter-intuitively to how companies work. The device must make more profit. This might mean being more marketable, or it might mean having a channel for content, or it might mean being better. Sadly, better is the WORST of the three.
Top 3 Passionate Free iPhone Apps | AllTime Best
While they may not look like fashion models, fitness models, porn stars or greek gods, there's one notable difference between all these people and the typical person: they all have significantly more muscle.

(Edit: a few exceptions: the long distance runners, the table tennis guy, the rhythmic gymnastic woman, and the fencing guy.)
I find the opposite. Back when I was working in .net, I remember one argument I got into with my boss with regards to software evaluation. MS has a testing framework and a build tool that are basically a generic xunit and an ant clone. Now, there are a great many better xunit implementations on .net, and I think we can all agree at this point that xml isn't the greatest programming language for build scripts. I was pointing out various choices that beat out the MS ones in terms of community, maturity, and features. His argument was basically that if MS doesn't have the best product, eventually they will make it better and it will become the best.

Every community has strengths and weaknesses. IMO the big weakness of the .net community is also the worst thing about MS itself from a tech point of view - a real unwillingness to look at what everyone else in the world is doing. Because of that, you see this strange effect where enterprise trends seem to happen about 5 years later in .net then they do in other communities. For example, it is only extremely recently (like in the last two years) that it started to become normal for .net shops to use ORMs, and the hot debates over whether or not to unit test are just starting to die down. And it is really in the last year that the most bleeding edge shops have started to look at DCVS (the cutting edge ones are on svn, and the majority on a cvs type system).

And for the record, I don't think .net is a bad platform or anything like that. What I do think is that the single thing that could improve most .net shops is being more open to non ms technology.
When maximized, Photoshop still uses a 50% gray background. Not only would it be far too distracting if it showed my desktop picture in the background, the 50% gray surrounding helps me evaluate the colors onscreen.
These valuation numbers for facebook left the reality zone a while ago. I'm not sure they are meaningful at all anymore- other than perhaps as a sign of a certain level of collective insanity or collective delusional hope.
When a perceived underdog bashes it's "scrappy", when a perceived leader does it it's "bullying", simple as that.

I think the thing I took away best from the original post is the presentation of some severe cognitive dissonance: huge pumping of specs, followed by carefully omitting specs that may not look the best, followed by "specs aren't important anyways".
I sometimes get the feeling that I'm talking to the HN hivemind.
Delta Skymiles customer support has been doing this for awhile now.
Well, there are subreddits for any particular political persuasion you may have - most of them have better discussion than the general /r/politics. There's /r/programming, but its a little light on content sometimes so I prefer:

/r/systems

/r/machinelearning

/r/netsec

/r/compscipapers

/r/coding

/r/compsci

/r/linux

/r/opensource

/r/csbooks

for the hacker part of me. There are also all sorts of other ones for any interests you might have - hard sciences, soft sciences, food, photography, sports, fantasy sports anything you'd like. Heres a spreadsheet with some other subreddits - its not nearly comprehensive, but it gives you an idea of what's out there.

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?hl=en&key=ttpCnxB3rD...
I actually considered this possibility after I resigned. It might sound pretentious but no I wasn't. I was just stuck with a bad board.

Why?
First it had a track record for organizational incompetence. I should have known better but few of my predecessors especially the more competent ones had had a good experience in that position. They had all warned me when I began but in my naivete and exuberance I still took the position and assumed I could change everything. Second, after I left, one by one the board turned over and it became very obvious that I had simply been shouldering too much personal responsibility with making sure our organization ran smoothly. I ended up still having to advice the organization from the outside after resigning.

Most importantly, till this day, I still have a good relationship with many of the more competent people in the organization (many of whom were recruited by me). The organization remains moribund however, bound together only by the strings of infrastructure (and personnel) I left behind.

Nonetheless, I think the more useful point I have to admit you make is that when you are joining an existing committee or group of people, there is a bit of compromise that goes on. To that, I say, make sure you check the background of the people you are working with before taking up any position. If they are people with a track record for incompetence or failure (in my case the fact that many of the people I was working with had been staff with this organization for several years should have been a warning signal),don't accept the position. Your peace of mind is way more important than any opportunity to marktime in the name of making a difference.
"In my experience, employees at Apple care very much what users and developers are saying."

Except employee 0.
Tell HN: Gingerbread rolling to Nexus One?  Got the prompt tonight.
Just a note to all that Gingerbread may now be rolling out to Nexus One phones. Got a prompt tonight that 2.3.3 (43.6 meg) was ready for download on my Nexus One. Of course classic timing I am roaming in NYC right now and apparently it won't download while roaming. Ugh!

Photo: http://bit.ly/ghbPww
From another comment, I think they have the representative press a button to indicate availability?
The Next Workspace
Nice & simple - good luck with the sales!

What marketing have you done / plan to do? If you're willing to share, would love to hear how your sales proceed.

Notes:

- the product name says "Quick URL Shortener", but the (preferences?) screenshot shows both "menuBitly" & "bitlyMenu"!

- screenshots critique: for the window, use shift-command-4 > spacebar > click - gives a nice transparency fading border. for the menu bar screenshot, trim more carefully e.g the 100% is cutoff. also any reason the app icon is not highlighted?
EC2 VM Import Connector
Smart Covers
I sort of wish I had something that went the other way. Nothing against mercurial, I just really like the git branching/rebasing workflow, and wish I could use it at work (where we use hg)
Everything ran beautifully on FF4 on my iMac. Smooth animations, was very impressed. Now that was a demo.
I love this bit:

appleMenu: IF NOT Monkey THEN
BEGIN
IF active THEN
BEGIN
KillStuff;

...
Is it possible to learn echolocation without being blind? as a kid, my doctors were worried my deteriorating vision would leave me blind, so I learned Braille (that never happened). I wonder if I could have learned this skill with vision (if your auditory senses weren't compensating for loss of sight).
>If the lawyer didn't try to shut down sites with his name in them (that are about him), he/she isn't a very good lawyer.

People don't generally own the rights to exclusive use of their name and news reporting clauses in copyright usually make such requests contrary to law IMO.

However, in the USA at least I expect it's the old "I've got money and lawyers and so you have to do what I say".
Coloured plastic gadgets are rare and new? Pardon?

http://images.google.com/images?q=digital+camera+colours

http://www.homedosh.com/wp-content/uploads/bodum-bistro-colo...

http://i628.photobucket.com/albums/uu6/economix/Sony%20Reade...

http://www.equip-u.com/shop/images/products_computers/bstk-B...

http://de-en.sonoro-audio.com/tl_files/images/site/de/cubo_2... - clock radio and iPod dock.

http://images.google.com/images?q=swatch

http://www.avreview.co.uk/news/images/elegante_range_big.jpg - loudspeakers

http://images.teamsugar.com/files/users/1/15111/34_2007/Colo...

http://www.tuccistore.co.uk/mens-1/accessories-11/paul-smith...

http://www.lovingoutdoors.co.uk/media/catalog/product/cache/...

http://www.techshout.com/images/dell-inspiron-colors.jpg

OK, so you can't get the same ADSL router in a choice of colours that I know of, or the same book with a choice of covers, but choice of colours in stuff is not innovation.
related: http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...
Impossible on the face of it. Android is not a smart phone.
What kind of "free" apps are you talking about? I'm talking about a "free" app where I download it for free, then I click a link in my "free" app that takes me to Amazon's web store where I pay with my credit card to buy stuff.

Is that the kind of "free" app you're talking about? Or are you talking about something else? Because I don't think Apple is taking 30% of the other kind of free apps, the ones that don't involve me paying for things with my credit card.
Too bad Atlas Shrugged Part 1 has already been wrapped. They could have written into the script the high-minded progressive talking head convincing others to contribute their labor "for the cause" cashing out for millions. This is synchronicity.
Nginx Proxy to Jetty for Java Apps
Um, actually you WANT the lazy jerk to contribute a good idea. For one thing, a good idea is a good idea, and the object of the game is to surface as many as possible.

More importantly, by giving the jerk copious credit, you'll do a lot to mitigate his natural tendency to derail things that may require risk and / or effort on his part. Win #2.

And of course, nothing irritates the truly motivated more than seeing a known lazy jerk score an easy victory. Chances are high that a calculated display of magnanimity from you will cause people who actually deserve credit to restore moral equilibrium by making their own (and probably better considered) contributions as well.

All that said, if you use Jefferson's approach to pre-emptivly silence a reflexive critic, yeah, it's great.
Second Acts in American Lives (1968)
Google demos driverless cars
Hot Local SexDates
Looking for Hot Sex with someone in your area? This site is for you
That site is in a story on OK Magazine - http://www.okmagazine.com/2011/03/charlie-sheen-quotes-live-...

3 other such sites are listed in the comments. I think he missed the boat already.
There you go, you're no longer thinking about whether an iPad is right for you, you're thinking whether a Black iPad with brown cover is more right than a White iPad with Red leather.

"I'd like to schedule a meeting with you, is Wednesday afternoon, or Friday morning better for you?"

;)