skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If the 'open' android model is so great then won't they inevitably win?

No, because the effects of openness, or lack thereof, are very long term ... just as smoking, or lack of it, just as eating lots of candy or not. Even if "open" is so great, people choose shiny/tasty (i.e. short term gains) over "open" all the time.

This is actually the greatest example of capitalism I've ever seen or heard.

In corner A we've got companies that benefit from closed gardens. In corner B that want to keep the Internet free, because they recognize that it's an essential ingredient to their bottom line.

That's how capitalism should work, that's how consumers benefit; and YES, the market will decide. We are used to companies lobbying for their own selfish interest, but in this case we've got companies on both sides, which will make the consumers voices heard.

The only question is, what do you gain from a the closed iPhone environment? If you're an iPhone developer, why do you fear an "open model"? Wouldn't you be happier in that environment?

Myself, both as a consumer and as a developer, I know I would be happier.
On that note: I thought that Inkscape was really cool until I tried Blender. The UI experience for Blender is hundreds of times easier because many of the things that you have to do regularly (like scrolling back and forth) are shortcuts.

Not to derail the conversation too much, but Inkscape also needs some improvement where UI is concerned, many things that should be easy are not.
If his story is true, he was sponsored by the donor the first time he attended. He applied to come back and was accepted on his own merits, and then he was blacklisted. I think it's newsworthy if TED, which is purportedly a forum for sharing ideas, lets donors blacklist attendees. The TED talks are just a highbrow facade for a get-together that is actually all about access. Access (and money) is how they lure the presenters that give some substance to the facade. Sarah Silverman showed that she did not understand the nature of the event; she did not appreciate the privilege of having access to rich and powerful people, and somebody took offense. Apparently this guy was also not sufficiently deferential to some powerful person, so he is not an appropriate attendee for an event that is all about being grateful for their presence.

Group A, (the people everyone would love to meet), and Group B (the people who want to meet those people.) The people in Group B spend the entire TED conference running around with business cards, hoping for, you know, five seconds of face time with Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniack, Cameron Diaz, or the like.

This part makes Group B sound like a bunch of insufferable assholes (which may be partly true) but when you consider the nature of the event, Group A is almost literally asking for it.
The online print version of American Scientist articles looks amazing.
Most people behave differently in "near-mode" and "far-mode".

I'm more willing to commit to donate $20 to charity 6 months from now, than I am to cough up a $20 this instant.

SwipeGood (and BoA's keep the change program) try to short-circuit this cognitive bias by getting you to commit now, but pay incrementally.
"Skype in the Classroom" Launches to Connect Teachers & Students Worldwide
Just in time for my compilation (bit.ly bundle) of interesting reads in tech controversies: http://bit.ly/openletters
Open letters - the "tech controversy" edition
Anyone else seeing the site down? Or just me? Can't get to link or parent site.
Most git actions don't need a deep understanding of Git nor a full GUI to function. I think git gui and gitx probably are enough to get a designer going.
Apparently anyone who can spare $100K+/year ...
The author calls the misrepresentation of Japan's economy in the USA a "media myth," but I would simply call it propaganda reinforcing the idea of American "exceptionalism." If you make people in a country think that they have it better than everyone else then they won't complain about things that with clear thinking they would complain about.
You're right. After jumping the gun I realized they're not "giving it to charity", but rather using it to acquire users.
It's easier because you don't have to make a decision what the right amount is and you can give proportionally to your spending! Reg our bm: SwipeGood uses 5% of each monthly donation to cover operational costs and 2.5% to cover the cost of third-party fees such as credit card processing.
Also, many (not all of them) designers don't understand the difficulties of usability, and sometimes mistakes it with "shiny". Usability of a desktop application is way more complex than a website[...]

I think usability is a blend of user experience, usefulness and intuitiveness. I have a hard time associating the latter with either the programmer or the designer.

My experience, as a programmer working often with designers, is that many of them (not all) are more concerned with the visual appeal of an interface and to a lesser extent its intuitiveness and usefulness.

For example, I've built quite a number of web management systems. Most times, when I team up with some designer they'd want to make pretty icons. However, I've come to the realization that we get more praises when the client can just look at his system and recognizes what he asked us to build and can easily guess where to go next. And that more often happens with text buttons. I believe that visual cues have their place, but I also think that many graphic memes have gone beyond useful, which probably doesn't help the relationship between programmers and designers.

On the other hand, I remember a time when I would build some quick ass functionality, but presented in such a convoluted way that only other programmers could understand the prowess and usefulness of the feature. You had to get up up early to get me to change them!

Programmers tend to be very minimalist, whereas designers are often very expressive. I think there is an effort to be made on both parts to reach a middle-ground. Designers need to learn that pretty doesn't necessarily mean useful. And programmers need to realize that just because their work is useful doesn't warrant that it's usable.

There's hope though. In time I've learned and now strive to make features as intuitive as possible. I now also favor very pretty, text-only, icons.

[...]and the current trend of "removing functionalities" is not always welcomed by developers...

In my not so humble opinion, graphic interfaces should be designed with the Pareto principle as a guideline (80-20 rule http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle). Is the feature useful? Yes. Will it be used often? No. Lets put it in the "nice to have" list.

If the application caters to a broad audience with varying levels of expertise and usage, it should present interfaces with varying degrees of complexity. I've seen this applied in real life successfully (e.g. in Ubuntu: dpkg >> apt >> aptitude >> Software Center). I definitely agree with you though, that too many software nowadays try to make things too easy without offering a way to go beyond the basics.
I love the silent updates.

You raise a valid point about not knowing exactly what is being installed, but the flip side of the coin is that security fixes and new feature support get adopted much faster.

It's nice knowing that mom's laptop will automatically receive that security patch.
Indeed, it's also a matter of actual vs imagined competency. What is the point of contributing to a project if someone with an outsized notion of their range of skills can come in and botch up previous work?

The issue is whether the person modifying or reiterating a work is competent to do so; We hear all about it with programming, but there is such a thing as "cargo cult design" too.

Also, I don't see it as whether a specific design contribution is "a work of art", with all its associated assumptions of involubility; in this context design is ever changing according to the evolution of a project.
Well, what do you know, Clojure records and hash-tables are equal (strongly.)

I will announce this great news to a few of my closest friends :-)
quoting :

4. Use CVS to store configuration files.

using CVS ? even if it was written 2009 that still pretty backward...
Although you could just keep running leopard.
> If he really thinks everyone uses macros, code generators, or code transformers...

That's not what he was talking about. He basically said that if you take two different teams, they will most likely use different subsets of C++ features. One will be all about classes, hierarchies and (god forbid) boost and other will be using C++ as beefed up C. That sort of thing.
Beautiful Time-Lapse of Milky Way over Lake Tahoe
Unfortunately, if you take this rather pessimistic position, things do line up rather nicely. It even explains why some groups seem to vote against their own best interest.

Yet it's the big discussion that is generally off the table. Rather things are framed as big vs small gov't, yet there are a lot of inconsistencies in that argument. These inconsistencies disappear when you frame it as racists vs bleeding heart liberals.
The "gives start fund cash to charity" title is just great marketing (like the campaign itself.)

- Corporations get tax deductions for donations to nonprofits too, so this won't cost the full 150k. And this will get far more than 15k signups, since people will keep signing up because of this splash long after the 150k is gone. So really, profit = (@$20/month "revenue", 5% on top of credit card fees) $1/customer/month. Real cost/user will likely be less than $5, so if LTV/user is $5 or more, this is worth it on the $$ alone.

- Donorschoose.org, one of the web-savviest nonprofits around, gives out gigantic quantities of $25/$50/$100/etc "gift cards" to basically anyone who asks for them who'll bring them good PR. (They also get large retail chains to give them out as prizes.) These cards are funded by outside donors, and they collectively bring in huge amounts of buzz and new donors (who end up donating more than the base amount on the card.) This is the for-profit twist on that... SwipeGood could likely get anyone who supports them (e.g., their investors) to put up money that [the investors] "would have given to charity anyway" for future stunts like this.

Great idea.
Yes, but the author is making it into an issue about censorship, i.e. any TED donor can ban anyone they like. As I understand it, the donor sent the author to TED in his place, and now he withdrew that offer, so it's a non-issue.

It's as if the TC author didn't even read the letter (or, gasp, has an agenda).
also: when I was in Japan a few months ago I asked two locals about the economy. Both indicated that things were good: people had jobs and could afford what they needed. I saw no evidence of any homeless people - surprising after lingin n the USA.
What's missing is single-thread performance.

(Also, I think Intel is in the 2-3B transistor range.)
We don't get anyone to contribute to open sours project, not only designers, but also business type, docs guys etc. Because, most of these guys actually have a life and a family to feed and will not do suck enormous stupidity to dabble with open source, let alone contribute to it.
I am reading this :) At the moment we don't have a package on our plans. We are reorganizing the complete installation and splitting up the module system. Maybe you can file a feature request? Then we can look into it for some future release.
Developer here, too, but I think he means the alignment of elements on the page, as in one element aligning with the other, or the title aligning with the text, etc.
We have some other *tonic projects, which is the primary reason behind the name.
Counterpoint:

Many open source contributors don't find satisfaction in their day jobs.

The work they get paid to do is restrictive and dull.

Developers are generally driven by the desire to create 'cool' things.

Many spend all day in meetings discussing why that API extension isn't good for the 99th design iteration for customer X.

And yet many rush to do this kind of work for free.

Lots of work open source projects need are quite 'boring' from the technical point of view (documentation, project files, merging, OS integration. etc).

So why do people contribute to open source projects? Because they believe in the product and like feeling empowered.
Okay. The wear leveling you mention actually creates the need for TRIM(garbage collection).

Blocks - memory address space sections? What's ambiguous about this term?

Here's more information about what TRIM does:
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2010/02/04/windows-...

Once the disk is full, "dirty" blocks have to be re-used. Clearing those for writing adds time and bandwidth overhead that slows down write performance.

So, the OSX "solution" is a temporary fix. However I'm pretty sure SSD write leveling behavior is standard across all other operating systems.
For those who don't know what DHCP v6 is it is the ipv6 version of DHCP. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DHCPv6 for more information.
Are the proceedings of ISCA really a "technology"?
Sarah Lacey wrote the article. The person who was uninvited is unknown, as its name was redacted.
Indeed, Mochiweb under Webmachine. Webmachine is the excellent HTTP protocol library made by Basho.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/nation-shudders-at-large-bl...
Review my weekend project Strangr Chat
This is going to make my life miserable.

I wish it were possible that we could say goodbye to Rosetta and Universals Binaries yesterday. However, there are a good number of "Universal" pieces of software out there in common use, that have vestigial PowerPC components. I just ran into one yesterday, on a business critical piece of software at my company - supposedly UB software, that has a command-line utility that is compiled for PowerPC, and that in the most current version of the software. Quite a number of times, I have run into software that is UB, and yet part of the install process relies on Rosetta.

Oh, and I have to run Acrobat 7 for a couple business-critical websites, because we make templates using an old build of PDFLib, and since it's legacy software, we won't be upgrading to a newer build.

I believe I will have to setup an instance of Snow Leopard in Parallels, if I move to Lion.

Well, I don't fault Apple for this. Perhaps it will force this nonsense to stop sooner than later.
And rich people.
Personally I love the first response from http://seclists.org/nanog/2011/Feb/1907

what is it about ipv6 which attracts religious nuts?
The email's author was sponsored the first time; the second time, it was accepted without a sponsorship (before being banned).
Although that is the general idea, 2.8MHz/1bit and 44kHz/16bit is an apples to orange comparison. 1-bit uses DSD encoding, under which the 1 bit is a delta. It is not widely used, and few if any studios record this way. 44/16 uses traditional sampling, and the idea is to record at some multiple of 44.1 (for audio) or some multiple of 48 for video.

Still, almost no audio engineers actually do this, and much of the material that you buy with higher sampling rates is simply shameless sample doubling. In the real world, most recording engineers just pop open Pro Tools and hit 44.1 and never bother with technical arguments or conversions or using 5x the HD space to store 192kHz stems. Prosumer electronics manufcturers and their buyers are duped, and no one is the wiser.
Alignment could refer to alignment of different objects in a design (a website, an application window).

The most important function of aAlignment is to communicate what belongs together.

Having objects align also makes for a “calmer” design. Imagine that each new place any object has a beginning or an end adds an invisible line to your design. These makes the design more chaotic. Aligning objects is a way to “re-use” the lines so that you don't end up with too many of them.

(Designer here, although I will not claim to be an expert on it.)
I'm glad to hear that they've catched up to the original UNIX. :)
I up-voted it because I thought it was supposed to be ironic.
Although the white paper is a mega-dupe, there has been some recent progress in SPDYland. If you use Chrome, you're probably already using SPDY without realizing it; you can see it in about:net-internals . Also, SPDY draft 3 is supposed to be published soon.
As others have mentioned above, you could use the extra dynamic range and resolution if you do stretching, pitch shifting and other processing.

Yes if you always record and never process the sound but just play it back, then 16/48 is good enough.

(BTW, it should be 48 damn it! not 44.1! ;-) )
I imagine it uses Apple Remote Desktop, which is apple's own version of RDP. I don't know much about it but it works pretty damn well for me.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Apple_remote_...
So there is this recent talk about sound quality from computers, and it makes sense to me that dynamic range would be the biggest culprit against good sound quality. However, every now and then I still here people chime in that upgrading your sound card will also increase your sound quality. Being curious, I went in search of sound card reviews. Of the reviews that I can find, and which aren't ten years old, I can only find reviews of the high end cards which obviously come to the conclusion that the high end cards produce high quality sound. Of course, the numbers they show are quite meaningless, because I have nothing to compare them too. Are there reviews of onboard audio anymore? I have a feeling that technology has progressed to the point that all onboard audio is good enough assuming you have decent speakers/headphones, but does anybody else know?
The End of Men
Anyone have any tips/links to convert my CD's into great quality MP3's (for listening only) ? I've been using VBR, 196, Lame etc, but this was recommended to me years ago...

Which encoder/tool/settings do you recommend for Windows (and Mac) ?
I didn't get that takeaway. He said if you're losing money, you have no standing to criticize someone else's investment strategy. He seemed perfectly willing to take criticism from Sequoia & Friends who adopt a different strategy from his own, but with the important distinction THAT THEY ARE MAKING MONEY.
Show HN: Weekend(ish) Project, An Online Interactive Town Hall
Introducing Kolena.org

What?

This is Egypt’s online interactive Town Hall Meeting. It’s a place for people to go to submit and vote on ideas for change.

Why?

If you were to ask any Egyptian, they would have each given you a million ideas for change and a billion grievances. So, after two days of no sleeping or going to class, I made a web service for that.

Kolena.org (which means All Of Us in Arabic) is the best place to go to submit, view, and rate ideas. Think of it as Egypt collectively making their own agenda or platform for change.

This is all done in an online democratic fashion, through your Facebook id, which is extremely fitting given the great role social networks like Facebook and Twitter played in the revolution. Each idea is put in a category (Tourism, Transportation, Economy, etc), roughly coinciding along the various ministries in the (now defunct) Egyptian Cabinet.

Who?

I'm a 20-year-old Egyptian-American college student studying Comp Sci & Econ at Ohio State.
This is going to be absolutely perfect for educational use. Imagine a university computer lab that lets you remotely login from home after the lab has closed to access all the expensive, specialized software the school has already purchased. I know my university was trying to set something like this up, but couldn't find any user-friendly way of doing this.
I love looking at photographs but have never really found photography to be something that I wanted to pick up and learn. I think this just changed. that. It's one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen.

And love the fact that stuff like this makes the front page of HNews. I'm here for the tech discussions, but love to come across things like this. Exactly why HNews is the first webpage I visit in the morning.
Space Shuttle Discovery's Last Launch, Viewed From the Air [video]
It's a tough row to hoe, having NIH Syndrome.
Not sure if I agree about the school.

There are schools that offer courses in interaction design. In addition many visual communication courses offer interaction design in addition to the usual print oriented design.
Almost. Record types are checked as part of full equality. So record Foo{:x 1} is not equal to Bar{:x 1} or to {:x 1}.
1) AppleWorks 6 - which while mostly replaced by iWork, is still in use by quite a few people. iWork has yet to implement a database module.

2) compiled AppleScript scripts - a certain number of those were compiled, and generated PPC binaries, and not UB. beware.
there's more to it than that.
I am shocked, shocked that our universities are failing to give graduates an adequate grasp of Sharepoint administration
Part of the two textbook thing is related to not giving students lockers at some schools nowadays.

I can't imagine the cost/waste of all those textbooks and how silly it will look when we look back on how we do it now.
I doubt there are a bunch of user accounts on a uni computer lab Mac, so this wouldn't be much different than regular screen sharing. It's also still a mess to choose which computer to try, doubly so if you're on an outside network.
Salon sends every single click to Chartbeat
I thought IP assignment was built into IPv6?
I would describe his entire writing style as annoying and abrasive which makes it so I can read barely any of it. But I suppose some people like it or the ideas as his writings seem to do well here.
Design IS optional and isn't as is important as you make it sound. Look at craigslist, hacker news, reddit.
I am a developer. With Apple's model I gain from having an environment where users feel safe to buy apps.

I don't fear an open model, but it has not been proven to be better for users - windows was open and look where that got us in the 'long term'. Seems like a pretty diseased ecosystem to me.

As a developer I want an environment where everyday users are not afraid of software. Maybe Google can create that too, but maybe not. I think it would be a disaster if we don't get to see both models tested. History hasn't shown that open is better - quite the contrary. I'd like to see the curated model get a chance to play out.

I have a feeling that in a decade's time we'll be looking at which curation model worked best - not whether open or closed was better.
NO Steve Gillmor the biggest problem you have right now is refusing to enter the conversation because you are to afraid of comments coming from those who do not use their real name.

No matter what the name, our country forefathers posted under fake names in newspapers to talk about the cause of freedom..every movement, cause world wide uses this strategy.

So Steve Gillmor join the human race! You might like it..
I change the background of my terminal when I ssh into another server, works great! (http://jeffmiller.github.com/2011/01/10/ssh-host-color)
Beyond the obvious difficulties in the very nature of git and stuff like that to be very technical. Without knowing to much about open source projects it really feels it's such a tremendous difference in scope.

As a developer, you can contribute small patches, bits here and there or step in deeper and create new features or improvements within the current feature set.

As a designer, the bits and pieces option really is no option. Design can't be applied like that. It needs to be applied to the entire project in a consistent manner. Both visuals and user experience thinking. This makes it a far bigger commitment, something I imagine not everybody is willing to do.
Agreed, it's so great to have a community like HN where we can just share everything from coding to photography to philosophy and everything in between. I was so excited to share it here as soon as I found it. That's not something you can say about most online communities.

And yeah, I've seen some spectacular photography before, but this just took my breath away.