skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I don't think having more pixel-perfect control or slightly faster JavaScript makes the web any better.

If that's all it was, then you'd be right. You can't do geolocation, local storage, audio/video, canvas/svg/webgl, etc. etc. on old browsers. It's not about making things pretty. It's about creating software that can compete with desktop alternatives.
So filtering/personalization is always present; we entirely agree on that point. Is it excessive, though? If it's not excessive, then, almost by definition[1], it's not a problem - or at least is not a major one. There is actually a huge difference between "personalization" and "excessive personalization", which was what I was trying to get at.

(Also, paragraph != sentence)

[1] Excessive meaning "more than is necessary, normal, or desirable".
Like the affective and persuasive design part
>1. Phones have a specific purpose, which for most people is the ability to make phone calls, send and receive text messages and use maps. I would guess that these are the three biggest uses of smartphones (but it is only a guess).

People who buy phones with a specific purpose buy dumbphones. The average iOS user has 50 apps on them nowadays. You've narrowed the use case too much.

That's also the appeal of the Apple brand to consumers: Buy it today, who knows what else you'll be using it for tomorrow?

With iMessage, a lot of people paying AT&T for unlimited texting are going to be dropping those plans. In theory, if all your friends have iPhones and will only have iPhones, you never need to pay for a text message plan on top of your data plan.

>Tablets are a different beast. There is much less inbuilt and obvious functionality. Apple has a vision of what the use case for this. I don't think anyone else really does (yet).

They really don't, and they're not marketing tablets to consumers intelligently at all. Regular consumers don't care about Flash. Heck, that holy war is pointless even among geeks. What consumers want is an easy way to view the view on the web: be it native apps or a flash plug in. They don't care about HOW. They just care that they can' Most consumers don't see the iPad as "crippled without Flash" because something like 80% of the video on the web is accessible through Apps. (Whereas I don't believe any of the Android Tablets have Netflix).

Netflix is trying hard to replace cable for consumers. For me, a device not having a netflix tie in is a dealbreaker.

They still have ways to go.
(honestly afraid to comment, but what the hell.)

i know its not git, but bitbucket (mercurial, same type of dvcs as github) has free private and unlimited repository hosting.
The Worst Case Scenario is that No One Cares About Your Startup
My solution is to simply not clarify, and let people think the worse. Crime is glamorous.
Righthaven Copyright Troll Lawsuit Dismissed as Sham
The price of “Free”
With the hyper-AJAXed world, client-side innovation becomes impossible.

What?
The purpose of search engines is filtering content to give you what you want. I think this is fairly noncontroversial.

What is controversial is whether "what I asked for" is a better approximation of that, or whether "what Google's model of me indicates I really want" is a better approximation.

I can't say which one wins for you, right now; but it's clear that this hinges on the accuracy of the model--which is one reason privacy and usability are at odds.
With the hyper-AJAXed world, client-side innovation becomes impossible.

Are you serious? Have you heard of the canvas element? It allows modern browsers to do things that were only possible 2 years ago in Flash. Have you noticed how there are actual web applications, not just a collection of linked pages these days? Have you noticed how with ubiquitous JavaScript, the usability and ease of websites has improved greatly?
Yet another iOS builder....when will this end ?
At the moment the only reliable solution I see for building native apps without messing with ObjC is (maybe) the future Macruby project. All these other solutions are just wrong, and should end.

No matter how good they are they will always be one, two steps behind native apps. It will be either for lack of documentation or unsupported new iOs features etc..

To be honest, I'd rather build a web app for iPhone than use this stuff. At least I'm being honest to my users and I'm not delivering crappy apps to them. I mean, I understand why we need a standard tool, but this is the way to go, running apps on top of VM is crap.

Sorry Adobe, not this time.

Edit: also, is really that hard to learn ObjC ? I find it to be a very easy language to learn to be honest. Not the most pretty syntax, but it's easy.
I find Arrington's attitude perverse.

First, if you're reporting on the acquisition of a company and you don't bother to talk to the people involved, then you're publishing rumors. If you're worried about being "scooped" by an official press release, then just have everything ready to go before the calls. The story they posted about the acquisition wasn't long. They could have easily had held space for official responses, and then published once they got them - even if that response would just be "so-and-so declined to comment." Not doing so is, in my opinion, sloppy reporting.

Second, he seems to have the attitude that he owns the information that he comes across - that the people the story is about don't have the basic right to say it themselves. Who seriously expects people to look out for the best interest of news outlets instead of themselves? What kind of a bizarre gentlemen's agreement does he think is in place? "Oh, TC is going to run a story on me. I guess I'll have to wait until they publish before I say anything so I don't ruin their scoop." For some people, a blog post is an equivalent to a press release. Perhaps he should treat it as such.
Show HN: patch that lets w3m users login and post to HN
I've noticed a few requests to fix HN's http request parsing to allow the "Content-length" (lowercase l) header. This problem prevents users of the w3m web browser and emacs/w3m from logging in and posting. Although "Content-length" is actually legal according to the rfc, it was just easier to patch w3m to send "Content-Length."

http://www.arclanguage.org/item?id=4419

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1526429

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2132674

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=134149
Google is a big organization in the business of developing web software. Most organizations are in other businesses. If I'm running a construction company, it doesn't make sense to have IT consultants come in each time a new version of something comes out. If it works, it's best to leave it alone, modulo security fixes.

Do you feel the need to upgrade your house's plumbing system and electrical each time an innovation happens? That's how most people feel about software.
That was Acer, not Asus. It's ok, it happens a lot.

Asus actually increased their production for their Transformer tablet.
Can someone post a tldr. I'd prefer to avoid giving techcrunch the pageview if possible.
I noticed a few requests to fix HN's http parsing to allow the "Content-length" (lowercase l) header. This problem prevents users of the w3m web browser and emacs/w3m from logging in and posting. Although "Content-length" is actually legal according to the rfc, it was just easier to patch w3m to send "Content-Length."

http://www.arclanguage.org/item?id=4419

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1526429

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2132674

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=134149
Submissions linking to code.ning.com blocked?
It appears any story submitted on the ning.com domain (such as two I have submitted from our blog at http://code.ning.com/ ) are automagically flagged as spam. Is there any way around this? I believe that both my recently submitted http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2675713 and the older http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2246936 are pretty relevant to this crowd.
In Sanskrit -> Koopa Manduka [Frog in the well].
I googled it up and found this link
http://www.balagokulam.org/kids/stories/koopa.php

It tries to captures the idea that it is very difficult to accept something that is very radically different from what you are used to.

For eg: In the narrative by Sivers, entrepreneurship is probably not so important to a different culture!
Well, ot in my experience. Native apps still have an edge. For example: twitter web interface is nice, but twitter the iOS app is WAY better on iPad. Also, I don't see something of the quality of Flipboard coming as web app (and clipboard get content from web, after all). May be this will change, but we are still not here.
I haven't seen a tablet yet that is as good for less than an apple. They all seem to be a mix of worse and/or more expensive (or with ridiculous multi-year carrier lockins). Until this happens, this is a non-issue. If consumers are snubbing cheaper better products to have fruit on the front, that's a story, but until then, shrug.

The tablet market just doesn't have its IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad yet.
Not only is it free riding because the UK isn't spending a proportional amount of their GDP, but it could also be considered free riding because the quantity of research by the UK isn't the same; size notwithstanding.

But you're next line is absolutely baseless. What makes you think the UK spends their research dollars more efficiently? I'd love to hear even a single reason.

While you're thinking, here are some breakdowns of spending:
US: 70.1% of spending is by private industry, 13.6 academic, 12.2 government.

UK: 65.7 private industry, 21.4 academic, 9.7 government.

I'd say they look much closer than you would have people believe.
Except that Apple stores didn't come about until Apple had lost that war.

Of course, now that they lost that war, they have an awesome prize. They are the most profitable computer maker today.
Oh, neat - I hadn't heard about that project. Just picked up the beta bundle.
That's not what he asked. He asked (facetiously) about the higher-order search bubble: ie, if I only ever search for articles about Erlang innards, I'm never going to read about The Kardashians, which is relevant to a sizeable portion of contemporary American culture. To truly pop my bubble, DDG ought to throw in completely random results every now and then.
The combination of a steep learning curve (probably easier than ObjC but not by much) plus the less than robust support for all of iOS features still makes me prefer native. Make something as easy and simple as JQuery, and make it 95% robust and I'll switch from native in a heartbeat.
JOURNAL: The Economic Juggernaut of Genghis Khan
Cable modems do it all the time. Use it, if that's the infrastructure you have access to.
Build a Bridge Over Troubled Waters on Your Browser
Looking for a calm game that will make you think, but not too hard? I recommend the Lemmings-like Cargo Bridge, a highly addictive Chrome Extension game
The iPad competitors seem to be shoved out into the light a bit early. I came across a an Android tablet on demo in a department store the other day. Hey, nice, let's see how it works. Hmm, the camera app came up with a black screen - nothing to see, no interface. OK restart, try a game - oops this game needs to download more data to start and no internet connection existed. Ok, browser - same thing, no surprise there. Sliding over into the next page of apps to find something, anything, that worked the slide animation starts to stutter. So for the same price as an iPad, I could get this? Why the rush to release when it's this unfinished? You're only going to be digging yourself out of a negative initial impression like this.
I did it once to a client who agreed to my standard rate and then tried to squeexe me down. It felt vaguely unethical. At the time he was threatening to give the work to someone who was willing to do it for $35/hr. There was no way I could bill 120 hours/week, so I called his bluff. The other guy never materialized.

OTOH car dealers do it all the time. They have a standard estimate from the manufacturer, but if they get it done sooner, you dont get a lower price.
The video is on sale for $14.99 today w/code DDMAS.

And let me know if you have any questions!
Yes: SSH allows for password-less logins through the use of public/private key pairs.
Lets put this into perspective: We are talking about Google-Apps, not Search! Marketshare is very small, and a company even considering working with GApps will not do so with IE7 anyway.

Wake me up when Google is dropping GMail support for IE7. Now that would be a story.
Foursquare has 10 mil users
How is this post of any value to the reader? It's pure gossip. I don't care about him getting scooped by his own source, and I don't care that she did it twice. I also don't care why she left a previous company. And I don't care that she's now on his shit-list.

Since when do we bitch about a personal gripe with somebody to an entire internet readership audience? That's expected behaviour if you're 14 and posting on facebook, but this is supposed to be a respectful (and respected) news site. Or isn't it?
With executive pay, rich pull away from rest of America
Yeah that's right. I want the same for websites. :)
DSL FTW?

The article/presentation seems to imply the benefit of domain-specific languages for capturing the software requirements (which is what Alexander's "Pattern Languages" sounds like to me).

How to properly create and re-use DSLs sounds very much like an artform to me...
Foursquare has over 10,000,000 users
I think he's saying that it makes scraping harder.

But today JS frameworks like jQuery give us the means to do anything we want javascript-related, in any browser that half-supports javascript. By deprecating IE7 they're just saying they're going to drop all of the extra hacks they had to use to keep IE7 working.

A lot of what newer browsers give us is just better rendering. You can replace a mess of tables and nested divs with things like border-radius, which means less client-side html to wade through.
15 years ago, I could reasonably write a search engine. Myself. 1 person. In a few weeks (modulo bandwidth and server farm). I write a program that grabs a web page, and reads out keywords. Today, if I grab a web page, quite often, that web page has nothing except for JavaScript code. That code grabs the actual content from the server, lays it out, and animates it. To write a web search engine, I need to write a complete JavaScript library.

At the time, we were talking about developing all sorts of agents. Things that would shop for you. Things that would find parts for you. Thinks that would remember what web sites you visited, and let you search them. Things that would track where in a long set of pages you were (blog, comic, etc.), and let you keep reading from there. It happened for a while, and then it died when the web became too damn hard. Writing anything that can reasonably see and parse web pages now takes many, many web years. There are only four or five organizations with that kind of resources (WebKit, Mozilla, Opera, IE, and internally, Google). There are countless things we just didn't even imagine.

It's like the DMCA. You notice all the innovations that happen, but you miss all the innovations it made impossible.
Gitolite/Gitosis/Gitweb and/or ssh access.

I could do it in ~5 minutes.

I could hack up an MVP of the features that Github has that I care about in maybe a weekend.

That said, I do use and love Github, but I use it for the network effects and general slickness.

If I need a private repo, I get off my fat ass and deploy it in less time than it takes to enter my billing address.
And yet for some reason, the search link from Google Toolbar seemed to ignore that cookie and certainly ignored my account preferences, sending me to the localized search page regardless.

Short version of long story: I used to bounce my net traffic through an ssh tunnel to a hosted VM. The VM was moved to a new machine in south-east asia. Having Google Toolbar constantly send my searches to the localized engine, despite the cookie selection, my being logged in and my preferences being clearly set, was more of a day-to-day annoyance than having my traffic piped across the Pacific twice.
Lion’s Plan: Set the Stage — Don’t Burn it Down
Um, Remote Desktop and VNC apps are on the App Store aplenty.

And there are plenty of Keyboard Docks / Bluetooth Keyboards for the iPad.
True... however, a moderately large website I have access to analytics has about 5% of Chrome users using something older than 11. It's possible to install Chrome without enabling the auto updates, so exactly which versions of Chrome they still support is somewhat useful information, I guess.

More likely, since the versions of FFx, IE, and Safari they support are the versions of another company's product--unlike their own--they feel like they have to be more upfront.
I have the Facebook Disconnect extension for Google Chrome installed for a reason.
Like SSL client certificates?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_information_system#D...

Yeah, I'm just learning about this stuff, so I cannot offer a detailed explanation whatever :/
In what sense is Google a "client-side innovation"?
Really? So there's Homeland Security going after copyright infringement, now FBI. What's next? CIA? I've seen that in Europe they are already starting to use the Interpol for such things.

When did copyright infringement become one of the biggest crimes one could do? It certainly seems to be on the Government's top priority list, not far below terrorism.
I guess one problem that occurs to me as I think about this, is how do you move your private key around between browsers?
Oops What Not to Do While Networking on LinkedIn
tl;dr: Arrington discusses how he (and others who break news) usually first contact the subject of a news piece before publishing the story in order to inform them, get their side, or whatever else. Arrington says he apologized to the CEO of AdMeld for not doing that earlier this month. He then says that some CEOs he just does not trust, however, and will thus forgo the call. He then mentions Caterina Fake (of Hunch) as an example and proceeds to detail how he had the scoop on her departure from Hunch but refused to post it without contacting her first because of their pre-existing relationship. He then mentions that on two separate occasions he tried to warn Caterina of an impending news story only for her to then blog about the story herself and out-scoop him. He then calls her a liar about the entire affair and says he still will not explain what really happened because it's not his business. But then says that with Caterina, and others that he no longer trusts, he will break news stories on them without warning.

Edit: Initially mistakenly worded the part about the CEO of AdMeld. Corrected with thanks to the comment below pointing out the mistake.
That's true. In fact that describes their whole business model.

The point that I took away from the article is that Apple hardware cannot be easily imitated. They've really innovated in this space. I haven't seen a laptop like the Macbook Pro or Air. I haven't seen a phone quite like the iPhone 4, or even a music player anything close to the iPod touch.

I think this hardware knowhow is easily underestimated. Apple really are like BMW or Rolex.
Sorry. Fixed that
No. I haven't. I've noticed maybe 1 or 2 web apps I want to use (Google Docs and Google Maps). Beyond that, I don't see anything that couldn't be delivered more effectively without JavaScript that I want or need.

Usability is not up. Each web site has its own, custom, non-standard user interface. I could teach my mom to use the web circa '96. I cannot teach her to use it today. It's too damn complex.

Usability would be up if the browser knew more about what to expect. You can look at things like Readability. The browser ought to know more about the content, and be able to present it in a coherent, usable way. The server-side shouldn't dictate presentation.
Inside the Angry Birds nest – Tour of Rovio HQ
At this point for me, it's flag-on-sight for TechCrunch posts.
There IS one kind of tablet people want besides an iPad, as proved by sales numbers:

The Color Nook

According to various recent reports, Apple has about 10% share in ebook sales, Barnes and Noble 25%, and Kindle over 60%.

Don't know the latest sales figures, but as of March 28, 2011, 3 million Color Nooks were shipped, according to Digitimes:

Barnes & Noble already takes delivery of 3 million Nook Color e-book readers, say sources

Yenting Chen, Taipei; Steve Shen, DIGITIMES [Monday 28 March 2011]

Barnes & Noble has taken delivery of close to three million Nook Color e-book readers from its production partner, according to an estimate by sources from the Nook Color supply chain.

With a clear differentiation to Apple's iPads in display size, targeted market and pricing, the Nook Color, priced at US$249, has actually taken up over 50% of the iPad-like market in the North America market, indicated the sources.

Sales of the Nook Color topped one million units in the North America in the fourth quarter of 2010 and reached 600,000-700,000 units a month during the January-February period of 2011, the sources noted.

Barnes & Noble outsources the production of the Nook Color e-book readers to Inventec, noted the sources, adding that Inventec has landed tablet PC orders from Hewlett-Packard (HP).

EDIT: formatting
Silly Sum
An American robs a bank of $1, just for free health care in jail
It only gives you that right if you are open with the software you distribute. The example is perfectly applicable to the question GP asked. It shows when you create a derivative work you are beholden to the upstream copyright holder, even if as in the case of the Sony kid your work is 100% your own effort and only references the upstream work for color. AVM might have copyright on the work they did, but as a derivative work upstream copyrights more or less trump their copyright. By violating the viral share and share a like bit of the GPL they may have lost their right to distribute their work, because it is a derivative work.
They can't, many businesses rely on Microsoft's browser lockdown support. For example strict IE from browsing through the local disk or restricting settings from being modified. Firefox and Chrome have virtually no lockdown support.
It could also add significant attention to the issue, and backfire horribly.
Thanks for the up vote ;-)
My point's just: there are CEOs of highly effective well regarded charities who are not taking 7 figure salaries. It is not true that charities basically have to shell out 7 figures because that's what people who can manage charities cost.
This includes Gmail.
The Google Spider grabs pages from other servers. That's a web client. It's a web client that was easy to write when Google was started, but is almost impossible to write today. If search engines hadn't been invented 20 years ago, they'd be impossible to invent today. The only reason they still work is tremendous work on Google's end to have its spider be able to spider complex AJAXy pages, and that content creators engage in SEO and develop to Google.
Who knew so many people checked in at their weddings and while giving birth?
Child porn is another biggie.
Most people would gladly make it harder for a single person to write a search engine if, in return, it makes it easier for them to make good web pages and web apps.
It also doesn't sound all that hard to update your browser.
I would make the dotted homepage background a little fainter. It makes the text a little hard to read and I find myself squinting.
I use 1Password on Dropbox, but is there any particular reason you can't use it with iDisk? 1Password's db "file" is really a directory and is designed to use a ton of small files for easy file-level syncing, and it notices any externally-motivated changes to the files or directory and reads the changes live. Seems like this should work just as well with iDisk as it does with Dropbox.
Your definition of "riddled" and mine must be different.

Going after former article titles and punctuation are not strong counter-arguments.