skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ultrabooks will start appearing soon, and far cheaper than the Air. For example, the Acer Aspire 3951 was just outed. 13.3" display, 13mm thick, Sandy Bridge, 160GB SSD $960, or $770 for the lowest spec which basically means no SSD.
No package manager is perfect though. Installing rubygems through apt for example is a pain because it's a custom version that will install gems to a different directory than vanilla rubygems.

Trivial to fix if you know about it, but you have to figure it out which easily wastes as much time as having to install macports.
Facebook Messenger for Android
Developing for Multi-Touch Web Browsers
You're comparing apples to oranges in the worst way: It's like asking if the police or fire department is more important to a small town (answer: you need them both). I also think the very notion of the "most valuable company" is a very loaded phrase as well.
Applications that are terminated shouldn't disappear from mission control or any other aspect of the GUI.

However, the user should have some control over what to show in mission control and elsewhere -- namely the k most recently accessed applications (whether or not they are running).
This would be the same as a DDOS attack in that you take down a persons phone line and email, instead of a website.
i agree -- you need to take compete with a large grain of salt...
Seems pretty easy to solve extrapolating current trends:

You have no app installed for action X. Would you like to go to the [Mozilla|Chrome] action app store for options?

In the Action App Store:

Below are the top N action apps supporting X, ranked by [popularity|featured|rating|price]. All apps in the [Mozilla|Chrome] app store come from verified providers who follow the XYZ privacy policy.

Most common packages of functionality would quickly be covered by roll-up apps, but around the fringes – where new capabilities emerge – there'd be openings for new entrants.

(In fact, the implied functionality/market model reminds me a bit of two old dreams of the software future:

• the 'Superdistribution' concept of Objective-C-creator Brad Cox

• the composite-document approach of Apple's early-90s OpenDoc initiative

Each saw future software being an assemblage of capabilities from many sources, enabling a richer provider ecosystem.)
It's the equivalent of a DDOS to an email server. And yes it's abuse.
Ask HN: Which site is your favorite social network and why?
Never mind the site that most of your friends use... Is Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, Google+, Hi5, Twitter or LinkedIn your favorite social network?

And, Why? Do you like your favorite social network for its features, security, simplicity or another reason?

I'll use your feedback to build a better general social network. One that will allow people to communicate more naturally online with ease.
How hard would it be for them to run a graph of the market cap of APPL and XOM throughout the day, rather than the related, but misleading %change throughout the day, which makes it look like they started equal and diverged from there.

I know that it's not something that's screen capturable with broswing to finance.google, but a little effort people.
You are absolutely correct. But that doesn't really change anything.

Placing your BTC in an exchange's wallet means you are trusting that exchange. I don't really trust exchanges -- I still use them, but I never transfer extra BTC in, and I always transfer 100% of the BTC I buy into my wallet.

After the Mt. Gox hack, it came out that many people were buying BTC and leaving it in Mt. Gox' wallet. That's a colossal mistake; there is simply no reason to trust anyone else to hold your BTC.

Bitcoin exchanges will always exist and need to be secured. Bitcoin banks serve no purpose and should never exist.
If you are storing something in database which needs to be decrypted (i.e., you are storing credentials to access some other system) it is common sense not to have that key in the database.

The key should be provided to your application on startup.

Or sometimes, the key can be in the wallet and that wallet can open only during startup of the application: application should prompt admin to enter password needed to open the wallet.

At least that how I design my systems... Maybe I'm wrong...
Now if only they would release the next service pack and make IE9 the default browser.
Twitter Adds Image Upload Option to Tweets
Feature request: please add Objective-C to the list of supported languages. Thanks!
I know exactly what you mean. I tried installing PIL and OpenCV a while back on my MBP and it was completely frustrating with all the different problems I was running into.

Finally gave up, installed Ubuntu on a VM, and synced my dev files on OS X with my dev environment with Dropbox. Ran all my code on in my Ubuntu VM just fine.

Some things I love OS X for, other things I leave to Linux because they're still much much easier to develop for.
> The top comment on a post about how to become a better programmer effectively amounts to "Don't try to be a better programmer, instead do X, Y, and Z because that will make more money"?

You missed the part where he discussed learning what to program.

While folks who leave that decision to PHBs may have good skills, I think that knowing what to program is an important part of being a good-to-great programmer.
While I've tried using various distros of Linux as my primary OS (and I used to really love hacking and tweaking my UI like crazy), I'll say that nowadays I want an environment that I can hack on when I need to, but that I rarely need to hack on.

OS X fits that role for me. I just feel like there isn't enough time in the day to hack and tweak my OS and write code for clients and my own projects.
You !=

In fact majority of people base purchase decisions on unrelated psychological factors such as making them feel good about themselves or validating their "success" or completion/reward mechanics. It is what advertising/marketing industries are ALL about, few massmarket products are sold or bought on their merits.
I find the cognitive dissonance of this stunning. If you claimed that the opposite of an Islamic future was Gene Roddenberry's view of the future I would not dispute that.

In Gene's future women wore as little as possible, religion was like a country club membership, and discrimination against any lifestyle choices was a major faux pas.

The Christians in the US really hated it back when it was first on for these very reasons, I doubt the middle east would embrace it.
I'm pretty sure MrHobbes was just waiting to jump on someone for that. Although Apple doesn't have $76 billion in "cash and cash equivalents", it's not as if those extra assets are suddenly rendered valueless because they're harder to convert to cash. As you surmise, they provide a lot of leverage.
I find that HN's comment policies seem much more relaxed on the weekends.
UK Riot Cleanup
A Cost/Benefit Analysis of the Ripple Hackathon
Of course, it's a 'works out of the box' system that requires very little configuration, as well as having a very nice posixy environment.

Of course, it's not as good as Linux for some things, and in those cases, it's not hard to get Linux access.

OSX is great.
Aren't those still rumors? Considering that the picture that was used was apparently also used for all Macbook Air rumors floating around before it launched.
How long have people been whining that Windows copied the Mac or vice versa? It's not a new thing.

Personally, I think there's some reasonable situations in which a company can say "you're trying to copy us to confuse customers and this is a real problem." This isn't one of those situations, though.
This time is different (stock market crash)
This is exactly like a DDoS attack. I don't take this to mean that email spam is hacking, though - I take it to mean that a DDoS is not. Snail mail campaigns can't get you prosecuted. Telephone complaint campaigns can't get you prosecuted. Even physical protests don't get you prosecuted. Email campaigns and SYN campaigns should fall under the same rules.
I think the author is quick to understate the benefits and overdramatize the change.

First of all, he dismisses the performance benefits, but frankly why am I even running the application if it's unused and in swap? Expunging it from memory with application-level semantics is a potential win because it can theoretically prevent you from ever hitting swap even after using hundreds of apps over the course of weeks or months. If you have an app with bad memory management this could be more than a trivial win.

As to the UX question, Apple is trying to push the envelope and say there is a better way to interact with a computer. Much like the auto-save stuff, Apple is re-examining quarter-century-old paradigms that geeks take for granted, but are perhaps not necessary in today's world of computers that are thousands of times more powerful. Now it may be that this they are overstepping and this is creating real usability problems, but it seems more likely to me that a good portion of computer geeks are simply uncomfortable with any change to assumptions they've had for the majority of their lifetime in computing.
hombrew is awesome! previously my big complaint about os x was the difficulty of installing packages a la linux. you can't really say that any more. perhaps it doesn't quite have the sheer size of packages, but what it does have is much more up to date than linux repos for the most part. it sucks that you have to pull down xcode to develop on mac(huge download, and i understand that many people doing development on a mac will never use it), but i'm doing iOS development anywho.
What exactly is the reason emailing the password is bad (ignoring the plain-text-in-database issue)?
Baseballs are up 2500%. I am not sure these stats mean quite what you think they do.
From my understanding of stealth technology (which I must admit is fairly limited), the radar cross-section is merely reduced not eliminated completely. So they could still be detected it was just that the plane might be confused with other common interference. However, I assume in the case of the SR-71, the planes were flying so fast to begin with there was no confusing them for anything, despite of the reduced radar-cross section.
Thinkpad X220.

I used a Mac laptop for years (PowerBook 12") and, although the OS was pretty good (that's high praise from me) from a user perspective, the hardware was awful.

Aluminium is not an appropriate shell material for a mobile device. Being able to swap the hard-drive is essential, unless you want to buy a new device each time you drop it.

The Thinkpad is so much better than the Apple in every way. I run Ubuntu on mine, and it works perfectly.

The Thinkpad even looks better than a Mac. Not immediately out of the box of course (new Macs look lovely), but after a few months of use, the Thinkpad's magnesium alloy shell still looks pretty good, while a Mac's aluminium is scuffed and scratched.
You may be right about that specific report, but the same seems to be true for Samsung's tablets. Nobody are selling tablets, other than Apple.
With homebrew I didn't even have to do that, since the Lion upgrade leaves /usr/local and launchd alone. The only rough spot I had was installing the App Store version of XCode, because I was a dumbo and installed the beta version of XCode in /Developer (never do this).
An old landlord of mine bought a car with the intention of fixing it up. It sat quietly in the front yard over winter, until it got warm enough to work on it.

When he opened the hood, he discovered a happy family of squirrels, and not an inch of ungnawed wire left anywhere in the engine compartment.
Yes, until Acer confirms or denies it. But Intel has laid out what classes as an Ultrabook, which includes a machine less than 20mm thick, Sandy Bridge second gen chip, and a sub-$1000 price tag. So even if the Aspire turns out to be just a rumor, other laptops will appear with similar specs soon.
> I kept wondering too, is this true for private investment (ie, angels)? Are they susceptible to the same short-term concerns? Or will Angels keep pumping money into early stage independent of the economic conditions?

Economic conditions have a huge effect on the number of angels.

For example, the dot-bomb killed a lot of angels. So did the 2008 crash. The run-up this year created some.
How hard/expensive is it to try to verify map data with a metal detector, or sonar, or radar?
It was a bit of pick your poison between a gettext() alias collision, ugly namespace syntax, and potential confusion with magic methods. Hopefully too many people aren't confused.
My guess is that it's a next-gen version of Star Trek: The Experience, the defunct Las Vegas tourist attraction.

You'd go through a transporter (it was very well done), get aboard the Enterprise, then escape the Borg and ride a shuttle which was rigged up with hydraulics and big-screen effects.

There was an original ST:TNG version, and later, a more advanced Voyager version with incredible audio (built into the headrests of your chair), some decent 3D and some well-designed low-tech effects (e.g., you'd get squirted with water after phasering a Borg, and when you were assimilated, a mechanical "probe" in the upholstered chair would start to "drill" into your lower back, no joke).

You'd exit into the DS9 Promenade (gift shops) and then into Quark's Bar (a themed restaurant). Lots of fun.
I rarely need to hack on Linux these days, but have in the past:

1) I hacked up a patch to make it boot better off of USB keys. Sadly I'm not sure they ever accepted it in the main kernel, despite being way better than their own hacky (wait N seconds for the device to settle) method.

2) I hacked up a nice little environment for a coin-operated internet machine, to stick in the corners of hotels. It was pretty cool, unfortunately the guy running the operation with me screwed up the business side and it never went anywhere.
Yes, the value has risen that much; see http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#lztgSzm1g10zm2g25 or http://bitcoinx.com/charts/

Much of the increase can be attributed to a speculative bubble, but Bitcoin's fundamentals have improved since mid 2010. AFAIK, at that time the wallet software was still pretty buggy, there were no automated exchanges, GPU mining and pooled mining hadn't been invented, etc. I wouldn't really call that volatility.
There's a standalone installer for gcc:

https://github.com/kennethreitz/osx-gcc-installer
Good point. I can see where something like CoffeeScript for PHP would be useful.
I've never understood the "no open windows but still running" model of OS X. In some ways, this makes more sense, but it also makes it more confusing, since you don't know what state the application will be in when you try to get back to it.

What I really wonder, though, is why leave it running at all if you're just going to kill it later? Seems to me they should have just changed the model to quit the application when the last window is closed, unless the application tells the OS not to.
I think the overall cost to society wouldn't be worth the savings on fiber replacement. "Mom, why are we having creamed corn for dinner again?" "Because your idiot father is in prison for shooting at a fiber line."
Having a standalone GCC installer is a nice option (especially if you have an Air with limited disk space), but if you want to avoid the hassle of debugging the occasional compilation failure, Xcode is the way to go.
This is great. I'd love to see pair programming accomplished somehow with this (on the web, not via screen or buffer sharing). Can we integrate a compiler or static type checker into it?
London riots: before and after the destruction
Online advertising industry failing to regulate itself
Really, the same pictures? I haven't seen any mention of that in the current stories. Do you have a link. The machine looks great, especially at the price points mentioned. Why does it feel like everything is taking too long to come out.
It may be OK for you because you require focus-follows-mouse to be built-in, but "It's better than it was in 1996" is pretty faint praise. If somebody told you he'd clubbed 90% fewer baby seals this year than he did in 1996, would that lead you to think, "Wow, what an upstanding guy"? All operating systems, including Windows, BeOS and Amiga, have improved since 1996.

And I think for most people, a working wireless card is more of an out-of-the-box priority than focus-follows-mouse. (Though personally, I would have liked Linux more if it just didn't cause my keyboard to stop functioning after the computer came out of sleep mode.)
To beat Etherpad and Google Docs:

Let me hit ctrl-I while typing, type something and have it appear in italics, and then hit ctrl-I again to turn off italics. Likewise for bolding, though I use less of that.

Let me apply URLs.

Do this (while keeping it fast and without introducing any bugs worse than Google Docs sometimes crashing and IEtherpad sometimes going unresponsive) and I will switch.
Yes, and here is why:

When sitting in very long, boring meetings, or very long train/airplane rides, I can still hack away on vim (or occasionally eclipse) for hours despite the complete lack of power outlets. The fact it's bash/posix means that I can run most of my tools locally as is necessary when I cant ssh to my real development servers.

So basically its not that I prefer OSX as a dev environment, it that OSX provides the same dev environment with a much, much longer battery life.

(oh also good Exchange integration via ical and mail.app don't hurt).
I'm disappointed this is for Android 2.2 and up. Not all of us Android users have that available nor are we finished our contracts that allow us to upgrade to a new device.

Facebook should have made it compatible with at least 2.0/2.1.
They actually did this, with hiding indicators on the dock by default, but then reverted it in the final GMs. It's definitely the direction they are going in, but it was probably deemed too radical a change for this release. Maybe in 10.8
AOL is now worth less than Pandora
Announcing GitHub Issues for iPhone
WEll said. I (very) briefly met Elon in Detroit about a year ago and only had a chance to make a joke about SpaceX's Falcon 9. He's quite the entrepreneur. I only wish more were like him and tried their hands at hard world-changing problems rather than financial 'innovations' or iPhone Apps.
Primarily a computer scientist, but also a developer, and an architect too. Not just in his youth, but in the mature years as well (TeX).
Dear Apple: please make "dead" apps continue to show up in the application switcher. If I kill it, fine, remove it from the switcher, but if I dont kill it, then it should still appear to be alive, even if its process has been killed.
Yes, I read that earlier. What did you find insightful in it? The people involved aren't commenting on government policy. They're looting. I think some on the left are desperately trying to spin this as some sort of popular uprising but it's nothing of the sort.
Except this one's a lot cooler and I'd actually visit, unlike the Burj Khalifa.
Hybrid solar system makes rooftop hydrogen
Personally, I think it's more realistic to place your trust in one verifiable source (i.e. using the cross-platform KeePass with the encrypted database stored on Dropbox) than assume that "hundreds" of different organizations are all going to implement adequate authentication strategies.

What seems oddly unrealistic to me is that if one company exposes your password, you now have to not only remember all of the hundreds of sites you have accounts on, but log in to each one and change that one password that you always use.
I think maybe on a macro level, but microbial life seems likely to be pretty similar to ours.

Even on a macro scale though, I imagine you'd probably see some of the same themes (assuming an Earth-like planet): photosynthesis, bilateral symmetry, hemoglobin- or hemocyanin-based blood, etc.
force = 1/2 mv^2
momentum ~= mv

Velocity matters.
Completely agree. OSX hides so many things away from me. It would take days of configuration of a fresh OSX install to get to a state where I could work with. Having to install 10 payed 3rd party programs to make the system itself usable(SFTP, File manager, KEEP A WINDOW A TOP(!)) is ridiculous. Also, having a Unix where half of the stuff was moved around is not a good starting point in case you're working with a ton of Linux Servers.
I don't see why upgrading packages (like Python or Ruby) is a bad idea. For instance I have Python 2 & 3 installed on my laptops (Arch Linux) and it just works well.
I agree a DDoS is not hacking, and I quickly looked and didn't see the terms hack or hacking in any of the articles(I could be wrong though as I only looked for a minute).

In any case I think this probably boils down to intent. If the intent was to take down the server, it's CFAA, if the intent is a non destructive protest then it's not.
I didn't say 'better', I said a lot better. Better like in this kind of chart:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology#The_theor...
While I think Mark's article is insightful about macro issues, I have a different perspective on how VC firms should react. I will never forget the partner meetings we had when the bubble collapsed in 2000. The lessons of the years that followed immediately after the collapse always stuck with me. First of all, we are long term investors (VCs as a whole). I saw numbers recently that the average time from Series A to exit was up to 8 years. Managing through that entire lifetime means that a Series A investor that is looking at the public markets is looking in the wrong place. What the public markets are going to be doing in 8 years is the real question, and it is an unanswerable one. So we all have to build companies, real companies. An exit should be a pleasant interruption of the process of building a company. Building a company means planning for good times and bad (as a company and as a funder), not having to suddenly panic because the stock market went down. The only companies in my portfolio that need to react quickly are those in registration for IPO or in discussions with public acquirers whose stock prices just dropped.
Otherwise, it's steady as she goes.

One note I will make though, is that VC valuations do seem to track (irrationally) the public markets. After a crash is often a good time to invest, particularly if other funds do pull back, and competition is diminished.
This just yet another reason that I haven't switched to Lion yet. I don't WANT to think about this stuff. I want to think about editing some text, then getting back to XCode.

Don't add some non-deterministic 'feature' that messes up my model of where my apps are. If you must quit an app to recover resources, do it whilst pretending that the app is still running, because that's my model.

Perhaps, in regularly cmd-tabbing to running but documentless applications, I am some kind of uber edge (head) case, but I suspect not.
Sparrow And Shortmail Team Up To Silence Verbose Email
It would be fair to mention that in the survey, 80% of the coders chose Windows, Mac OS 7.9%, and Linux 5.6%.
Facebook slims down with a standalone messaging app
If you're buying a baseball bat for the once every couple decade riots, you might as well see what it's all about.
I agree on a technical level, but the UX change is non-trivial. In fact, it violates an implicit promise of the UI: the Dock shows you all the applications you've opened. Maybe techies like us understand that the app was closed to save resources, and it's a mere annoyance to re-open. But to all the "moms" out there, it's just broken: they opened it so they can use it, and now it's not there anymore. This makes the OS feel broken, which makes the computer feel broken.

There's no reason not to leave an entry in the Dock so as to maintain the user's expectations, while still recouping background resources as needed.