skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really doesn't make sense to compare OS X versus Windows given the history of both parts of OS X (OpenStep and Mac OS). Mac OS was available on clones and didn't expand the market at all. OpenStep was available on multiple platforms from multiple vendors. Neither gained market share. To be fair about it, 1984 was a little too late in the game as the C64 was losing share, Apple was already pretty low (both II and Mac), and Microsoft already had a hefty advantage [1].

[1] http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2005/12/total-share.ars/5
I think Linus got it wrong.To me(I am no expert) technologies that work win. People(companies, government, etc) don't really care about openness, they care about usefulness. I believe that when it comes, to choosing a technology for a certain task, the best technology for that task, will tend to win marketshare.
I don't know anyone who defines a "bug" as "an unexpected result as a product of good programming." Bugs are when code is wrong: when it doesn't do what it says, when it doesn't do what was asked of it, when it doesn't do what the user reasonably expects. Bugs are not the result of good programming.
On a side note, the graphs / charts on this page are really quite visually appealing. Does anyone know if these were automatically generated charts, and if so what tool is used? If not, probably just some data extraction and photoshop, but still, nice looking data.
I have an AdWords campaign with this setup, I added all the keywords, settings etc and it never gets any clicks. I upped the CPC limit and still nothing. I want it to work but it just hasn't yet.
Sometimes you just want to build cool shit and you don't care if "people want this". It's fun :)
I don't know. Look for an "edit" link on the line after the title.
Another way of looking at it though is that businesses choose open technology platforms, but consumers choose integrated/closed end products.

I'd like to believe that consumers will, in the end, choose open technology (directly or indirectly). Maybe it has something to do with the rate of technological change, and it's just a matter of time before the benefits of open technology are demanded. But the evidence is not conclusive.

If anything tips the scales, it will be when consumers start to figure out that they don't own their devices or the content on them. People are getting a vague sense of that with locked-down mp3 players that make it hard to copy songs around. It will be a bigger deal when the person that gives all their books away because now they have electronic ones becomes furious when they find out they are forever beholden to amazon (and its book-deleting whims) to be able to read them.
Here's a commented version of my .vimrc, which is modeled after Steve's, albeit nowhere near as comprehensive. (Looks like I lost it's fixed width in the paste? Sorry!)

http://pastebin.com/jJQFxQpR

For me it's a lot quicker to reference comments than the :help entry for each option. Thought it might help others who are creating/modifying their .vimrc.

And of course, thanks Steve for continuing to share your stuff. I'm in love with Vim, and a lot of that's thanks to you.
Technology is not often a "winner take all" game. The PC industry is the anomaly. Which other technology industries have one winner? Sure isn't cellphones or TVs.
I went through almost exactly the same situation a few weeks ago - Air for portability, Pro for speed.

In the end, I went with the 15" Pro for two reasons - I can stuff 8GB of RAM in it for my web and audio work, and the 15" screen is way easier to read a pile of code on.

Then I pulled the SSD out of my old laptop and replaced the crappy 5400rpm drive in the Pro, and now I'm a very happy camper :)
Backdoor Trojan pushed via versatile Facebook campaign
Removal of content from Spotify, Simfy, Rdio & Napster.
i wrote a patch for news.arc to do this (more of a proof of concept as i'm sure the actual implementation may need to be different):

http://arclanguage.org/item?id=14829

and a greasemonkey script that i've been using since:

https://github.com/jcs/better_hn_domains
"Flash...is holding the web back". If anything, the Flash plugin has been helping to provide the roadmap for new html features for the past 5 years.
This is clever.

I'm not sure why Dropbox doesn't offer plans with less space, and make it more affordable. For the $100/yr a 50GB account costs, you can get 100GB (plus unlimited storage of AAC/MP3 music) from Amazon via Cloud Drive. Granted, you're not getting Dropbox's excellent syncing, just storage (and streaming of music)

I'd be happy to give $20-25/yr to Dropbox for 20GB-25GB of space and syncing.
Here are my ideas:

http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-smartphone-video-speed-...

http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-dating-site-staff-of-fe...

http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-dating-with-with-testim...

http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-dating-site-with-voice-...

http://ideashower.posterous.com/ide-date-blocket (translation: inbox-less insta-signup dating site)

http://ideashower.posterous.com/ide-kontaktannonser-med-ultr... (translation: short dating site profiles with short duration - maybe a bit like Twitter)

http://ideashower.posterous.com/ide-barcode-dating-73473 (translation: dating via stickers with those QR codes - or the user could just scribble a unique ID with a crayon on the toilet stall walls)

http://ideashower.posterous.com/ide-create-your-own-dating-s...

http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-dating-site-with-gamifi...

http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-walk-in-my-shoes-dating...

http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-lunch-meetups (not dating, but similar)

http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-dating-site-that-gets-r...

http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-misc-dating-site-ideas

http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-systemic-general-proble...
87-year-old Occupy protester can't get arrested
Start small --> Heavily test your product --> Fine tune and perfect it to the point of your users falling in love with it --> Big bang (launch big, grab land.) --> Excel in product design and customer service --> Don't worry about competition.

Good luck!
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Kindle Fire dragged into Apple's "app store" suit against Amazon
Cracking the shell: Inside Newegg's east coast distribution center
I agree with your naming gripe, but beyond that it sounds like you personally just like iOS. Different people have different opinions of what phone has really "made" Android. If the Nexus One took the place of the iPhone, I guarantee there would be at least one review for each iPhone model saying "THIS finally is the iPhone that beats the Nexus One".
"So many times"...

Can you point at such a review? Because I don't think such a pre-ICS review exists, whether Gruber wrongly claims so or not.

Every prior Android review has been full of asterisks and disclaimers. Most tended to be negative. Sure, they talked about the positives (and there always have been positives), and they talked about the benefits over its Android predecessors, but I've never seen one that openly held it as the leader. Until now.

I think it's going to take a while for some people to realize where Android has come from and where we are today. The game has completely changed, and the dated narrative is gone.

When I first equipped up with a G1, there were almost no apps, and the few that existed tended to be horrendous. The performance and usability of the device was terrible.

But I knew where it was going.

Then I got a Nexus One and it improved some aspects of the platform, but I was still left out in the cold for a lot of things: No angry birds. A terrible market. No Skype. No Netflix. And on and on. iPhone-only apps appeared for mainstream services and products and organizations.

Today I have a Galaxy S II. It isn't perfect, but the experience with 2.3.4 is pretty damn good. I have Netflix, and Hulu, and endless games and countless top-rated apps (some of which are starting to lead on Android). This is a device I would recommend to a layman.

And all of the above was the foundation on which Android captured 55% of the market.

And ICS only improves that n-degrees more? Incredible. If Android got such acceptance and loyalty before, this is quite incredible really.
I'm fairly certain the grandparent meant MacOS for which the explanation would make sense. Dos and Windows were more widely available and could run more software because of Microsoft's comparatively open business model.
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Well... That part has to be certified as a black box, but even if your code is a Mathematica notebook, it would be useful to have it published along the raw data.

Again, there is no reason to be embarrassed of comments like "this should never happen". My own code has parts that raise "ThisShouldNeverHappenError" when something that should never happen disregards my opinion and happens anyway. ;-)
Me personally? No, not entirely. But I would observe your anecdote illustrates exactly what people see to be the problem. At first blush you might think, "What is good for your employer must be good for you!", but really that's not the case. I'm sure if you sit down and think about it, you'll see why. I'm sure you can think of countless ways a law could be good for business but really bad for employees.

It is true laws that are good for your employer can be good for you, because you of course have a vested interest in your employer. But I think many people feel it should be the other way- i.e. representatives shouldn't be looking out for business and hoping to cover the voters, they should be looking out for the voters, who will do the worrying about their employers. The way you illustrate, the power dynamic is in favor of business. Some crazy people feel it should be in favor of voters.
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Any feedback is greatly appreciated.
What do the triple open and close curly braces represent?
I truly admire B&N's approach, but they may have to take a lesson from Sun in its early fight with IBM on patents [1]. It's not about these particular patents. MS has thousands of patents and can keep playing this game indefinitely. That's the shame of this system - it isn't about patents or innovation, it's just a shakedown pure and simple.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044.html
I noticed the same thing about the kindle not deleting books when I was using Kindle Library Lending. I had 30% of the book left, and my loan was up, but I never left the book. I could turn the kindle (e ink version) on/off just never went to the front page.

Finished book, went to front page and it was deleted. It's actually quite refreshing to see the choice being made on the side of the consumer for once.
OK. "Shill" is a bit too much, but you have to agree that, from your public persona on HN, you appear to like them better than the average HN'er.
Is Google giving you impressions for the ad?
In my case it's pictures. Yes, some of my pictures are on Facebook and Flickr. All of them are backed up in the cloud. And I still have 3-4 different computers synced with all of them.

You can download/stream music or movies, but I can never go back in time and take family pictures again. I might be overly sensitive to it because my grandparents lost all of their pictures in a storage unit fire, but I think it is a fair point.

My pictures fill up approximately 40-60 GB. I have about 200 GB of other files, of which maybe 1GB is critical. If I lost the rest I wouldn't really care, so I only backup the pictures in the cloud.
Linus Torvalds Takes Aim at Proprietary Tech, and Apple
Keep in mind that Balsamiq prototypes look like rough sketches instead of "professional looking mockups" on purpose.

When you show a customer a mockup that is "just a sketch" (or looks like one) you can get their feedback on the layout and content.

When you give them a realistic looking mockup, the conversation can get bogged down in minutea like in "Can you make the background less blue? Maybe like Bob's shirt?" or "I don't like that font, can you...?" At which point you have to explain that it's only a mockup, not the actual product and politely try to steer them back to what you asked them in the first place.

Also, when they see a what looks like a finished product they think the work is mostly done which sets unreasonable expectations.
Even better, draw a vertical line on the x-offset location of the graph that represents the current time. That will let everyone calibrate to their own time zone intuitively.
Hasn't hurt the gaming industry at all. That's probably where things are heading for general purpose computing.
Yeah, they were real informed last time without public funding. If you guys like to have a circus every time there's nothing I can say about that, but private funding isn't the answer. Because the outcome of that is Governor Schwarzenegger.
Realtime web app architecture with Thoonk: a series of tubes, not tables
Right before our eyes, consumers are choosing an open technology platform for smartphones - Android - which had 52.5% market share on smartphone sales in Q3 2011. Compare 16.9% for Symbian, 15% for iOS, 11% for BB and 1.5% for Windows Phone.

http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1848514
They're fold markers. When I open my vimrc in Vim it looks like this: http://d.pr/YKCM
Like Twitter, Google+ Now Has Trending Topics
Vim folds

http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/fold.html
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It was a neutrino that was discovered moving faster than light at CERN, that is what I was referring to. Tyson also mentioned that it is likely a special type of neutrino already moving faster than light is the one being observed (tachyons). What they think we are seeing is a particle that has been moving faster than light but never accelerated to reach that speed, it has been moving at that velocity all the way since before the beginning of time itself.
With everyone trying to do this, the CPC of every related keyword went up. Nice for people running sites that talk a lot about cloud storage and monetize with AdSense, but not so good for people trying to get free space.
I've been using this for a while now (not sure where I got the original link -- it may have been the previous HN post).

I find that for common symbols, it works _beautifully_. But for symbols that can be drawn in different ways (consider \cupdot for example), it seems to bork and return unrelated symbols.

One thing that I would find quite interesting is someone writing something similar that, instead of using gesture recognition uses image comparison. I realize it would be quite difficult, slow, and probably would have terrible accuracy, but meh . . . I should try that.
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Yahoo Needs To Bet The Entire Company On This Product
ISC Announces Major BIND 9 Vulnerability
And Apple keeps collecting >50% of profits with ~5% iPhone market share.
And they stole the occupyflash design and adapted it for their alternative cause. I can't help but wonder if one of these pages is a joke?
I'm sorry, but I don't understand what you are trying to ask. Can you re-phrase your question a little?
Como Tener Negocios Rentables por Internet
There are lots of possibilities between Android and Ubuntu, Lubuntu[1], for example. Also, there's a bunch of Webkit based browsers in Linux ecosystem, no need to push it with Firefox at all. Even something like Puppy Linux[2] would be more useful than Android IMO.

[1] http://lubuntu.net/
[2] http://puppylinux.org/
> pics - cloud/flickr/facebook.

"cloud"? Isn't that what Dropbox is? And flickr/facebook are fine, until Facebook decides your name isn't your name, or Flickr decides to change its terms of service.
In any event Fair Use is an affirmative defense, not a right written into SOPA.

So the only "fair use" component to this discussion is "no, the legislators may never suffer criminal penalties... but they still are at risk of having their domain removed from the internet until they can convince the censors to reinstate it."

And each new piece of media posted to their site opens the operator up to another round of "censored until proven innocent".
Indeed. Renaming everything in most functions (lines/snippets/etc) to be short names that all start the same will result in nigh unto gibberish.

Humans distinguish words from similar words largely by the first distinct letter in them, with the size/shape of the remaining bit also helping (no way I could find a citation at the moment, but I remember this from several studies I read in a cog-sci course). So the work (and time) to read something goes up with more similarly starting (and shaped) words in the possibility pile.

Also known as the "don't name characters Sauron and Saruman and then blame the readers for getting confused" rule.
I did this last year and hit the maximum number of referrals in 5 days for about $10. I used an Ad-words voucher as well.
In terms of interchangeable commodities there is space for many players. But in terms of more fundamental standards such as Windows vs Mac , JS vs Flash , VHS vs Betamax there tends to be one strongly dominant winner. The Mac only became really popular once it basically became a PC with a different GUI. In terms of cellphones pre smart-phone most were basically interchangeable since they were all capable of making voice calls and SMS over GSM , there was limited interest in developing applications for them by 3rd parties.

The disadvantage that iOS has in terms of becoming dominant is that only apple at present makes hardware which can run it (officially anyway) so it is in Apple's interest to keep the hardware cost relatively high since they make allot of money from selling it.

Once the it gets to the point where everybody wants a smartphone and tablet computer there will be allot of pressure for low cost products which Apple has no interest in providing. Android & similar can win bigger here because google does not make money from the hardware. They make money from the advertising etc so they are mostly interested in making sure that there are as many low cost products as possible that can run their software.
What I've found is that it isn't the best technology that wins every time: an option that is good enough but is heavily marketed or backed by a virtual monopoly is likely to beat out better technology.
WinPhone has the "problem"[1] of going down a rather different UI path vs. Apple and Google. You see this in a less extreme form on Android quite a bit, where apps will use (often badly-made) custom iOS-style widgets (the bottom nav bar, usually) that just don't fit in Android's patterns. WinPhone has even fewer patterns in common, thus when a dev tries to bring over iOS or Android patterns, it shows.

[1] It's a "problem" as it's not what devs/users are used to working with, not a problem because of flawed design (FTR, I rather like it)
After fighting with some dependencies I was able to compile it and running on Xcode.

I just couldn't find the piece of code in which you can activate it by SMS, it seems you can only do it by the website/settings. Also, wouldn't the theft be able to shut down the application and get away with it ?

Other than that, thanks for sharing, this will be fun to learn since I'm starting to code iOS apps.
How Detexify works
Nothing to do with old people - all my life I've known folks that hesitate to try something new. And for good reason mostly - stuff breaks, its expensive.

Agree that its death to get stuck there. Its a confidence thing I guess.
Maybe I'm overly cynical, but I find consumers tend to choose based on marketing and fashion more than concerns about quality or openness.
for many things there is simply no good animal model so you are going to need to alter somethings DNA to get a good approximation of what's going on. Sure you can also alter the DNA of a primate but the downsides are A) we know less about primate systems than mice and B) they cost a lot more.

This is not to say a primate or even a zebra finches may not be a better animal model for many diseases, just that we share a lot of DNA with mice so there is a lot of relevant information we can gain from continuing to study them. Which when combined with their low cost means it's reasonable to spend more time and money looking at mice than our closer relatives.

PS: There is a vary vary large but finite set of useful drugs we can discover. As a first pass approximation being able to consider 30x the candidates at the cost of doubling our false positive and false negative rates is probably worth it (for now). Eventually, I suspect we will be able to accurately simulate many diseases in software based on human DNA or even an individuals DNA at which point we may be able to revisit a lot of these false negatives for lower cost. Between now and then we will probably start looking at a larger array of animal models based on our understanding of an ever more detailed understanding of DNA. But, until we can actually debug diseases the old shotgun approach has a lot of merit.
Nice app, I would like to suggest adding a copy to clipboard feature for the created link, sometimes you can miss a letter or something and the message will get lost....
it is, but on my kindle 3 it's a slide button so i'm less weary of hitting it by mistake. on the kindle fire it's just a simple push button.
Bugatti brings three special Veyron Grand Sports to Dubai
This would be fantastic for working with encrypted data in a secure way.
I think there would definitely be a market for something like that (I want this USB stick for instance), but I don't think operating systems as a whole are going in that way.

Even with the rise of the Cloud, there are a lot of things that for various reasons are best handled by at least a fat client if not a full-blown PC with its own OS and processing power.
ADHD is not all bad
In at least one case, they drove a company to adopt GNU/Linux.

http://news.cnet.com/2008-1082_3-5065859.html?tag=lh

Interview with Sterling Ball of the Ernie Ball company.
It's common practice for engineering to be discouraged from looking for prior art. This leaves the lawyers alone to determine what needs to be revealed on the patent app.

http://m.paidcontent.org/article/419-why-tech-companies-want...
Weight vs mass.

Weight of air in air is zero.
Or you could buy an 8 gb USB stick for $10, load your favorite Linux distro on it using Universal USB installer or unetbootin, load all your fav software, make a separate partition for your own data, and then use the host machine's processor to run it, which will almost certainly be more powerful than a dual core 1.2 GHz ARM device. You could even encrypt the drive for privacy. All for the cost of two Starbucks double lattes.
Most people think that there is some kind of scientific classification of fruit vs. vegetable, and that the Supreme Court went with popular usage over science.

That's not actually so. Fruit is an overloaded word that has both a botanical meaning and a culinary meaning. Vegetable does not have a botanical meaning (except sometimes it is used as a synonym for "plant").
Yes, I don't think we need a huge jump in OS capability for something like that. For one, fullscreen apps are pretty common even on desktop machines. Most Windows users I know run like that pretty much all the time, and OS X Lion seems to go that way, too.
Apps that need finer grained control often are perfectly fine doing it themselves, e.g. a terminal application with split screes – or simply using screen/tmux.

If the OS would support some primitive tiling (mostly to have two apps side by side on a full HD class display), I'd say that 95% of the people would be happy 95% of the time.

The biggest issue I'd see is app diversity. Some apps might be willing to target all of the devices, some won't. But no matter how perfect your app is on small screens, if it will just scale badly to larger ones, people will complain. There would probably be a need for some finer-grained selection in the app launcher, clearly labeling what would be fine to use now and what not.
Why doesn't my Vim fold things automatically? What options am I missing?