skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm aware of the mechanical I/O bottleneck, and I'd love to have SSDs in the machines I use, but funds do not permit.

But I doubt that's the whole story. The first time I type "Ctrl-F" in a VS2010 session, the disk thrashes and there's a noticeable delay of a couple of seconds before the Find tool loads. The delay is so bad that keystrokes are lost; if I not-particularly-quickly type "Ctrl-F mystring", the find tool searches for "tring."

I'm sure an SSD could improve that situation, but the real issue here isn't that the disk is slow, it's that the software is causing disk access where none should be necessary.

I'm sure there are reasons behind it; the find tool is a module in a modular system, it's not hanging around when it's not needed, it makes a smooth fit with the rest of the framework that was used to build VS2010, etc.

But the end result, the end user experience, is worse than it was in older, simpler versions of the product. (In this particular way, it's actually worse than a DOS-era editor, running on far more severely bottlenecked hardware, was 20 years ago.) The find tool was probably built in whatever was the most straightforward way to get it to fit into the horrendously complicated system (VS2010 on Windows) it's a part of, and no effort (or not enough effort) was expended to make it any better than that.

This is just one example that struck me today. There are plenty of other situations where a Windows machine full of Windows apps will cause the user to wait in situations that shouldn't require waiting. You can classify them as I/O bottlenecks, and that's not wrong, but I think it's missing the point. Everyone knows there's an I/O bottleneck there; when you develop code, you're supposed to bear that in mind.

But backwards compatibility and shipping the damn thing are more important than optimizing, and that goes for Windows itself and all the components thereof as well. The stuff we write today has to accommodate the foolish-in-retrospect decisions of yesterday.
You are proof that they have created the greatest marketing machine the world has ever known. You are vociferously arguing that Apple is great. They don't pay you or tell you to do it, you just do it. This army of fans is the greatest marketing coup ever.

You have argued the other guy off the page! (although more from passion rather than the argument itself) I'm sure you will keep arguing with anyone else who comments on this.

It goes well beyond the simple 'they make great products and I appreciate that' mantra. No one worshiped Henry Ford or his company (imo Apple's closest historical analog). No one is sticking with Yahoo through their tough times (like they did with Apple in the 90's).

Apple has turned you into a religious zealot.
"Google is playing with fire... If they break search, they will die."

Please explain how they might "break search". I keep seeing comments on HN about how Google is messing up search, and also G+ is ruining peoples' lives somehow.

I have seen Google do absolutely nothing that you can't opt out of, or just plain ignore. For example, I technically have a G+ account, but I never ever click on G+ and I never actually see or use it, so it has no effect on my search results or my life at all. But i can see how it might add a lot of value for people who choose to use it. Again, i emphasize that it is a choice. Google is not holding a gun to your head and forcing you to use G+. They are never going to sacrifice accurate search by only presenting you with "social" search results.
Can you clarify in your video where it shows the similar slide-to-unlock as in the iPhone? I can't see that at all.

edit: qdog, I can't reply to this thread or your response, so I'm going to edit my comment with a link to an article with referencing the specific patent Apple applied for (and was granted) [1].

If you look at the diagrams, it is completely different than what is shown, as there is immediate visual response where there is none in this device... that is a key part of the patent (and requires a capacitive touchscreen).

[1] http://9to5mac.com/2011/10/25/slide-to-unlock-patented/
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I find it interesting that a motto so straight forward a child could understand now requires knowledge of the context and history in which it was coined in order to interpret it correctly.

From the Wikipedia article[0]:

Buchheit, the creator of Gmail, said he "wanted something that, once you put it in there, would be hard to take out," adding that the slogan was "also a bit of a jab at a lot of the other companies, especially our competitors, who at the time, in our opinion, were kind of exploiting the users to some extent."

a letter from Google's founders:

"Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served — as shareholders and in all other ways — by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains."

The intent seems quite straight forward to me, but if we're actually at the stage where we're debating the meaning of "Don't be evil", then perhaps it's already too late.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dont_be_evil
Bank of America Testing New Deals Service
Wrong. Slide to unlock is everywhere. Nearly all portable CD players had a physical sliding unlock button.

Just because Apple rendered this functionality in a touchscreen doesn't mean they "invented" the concept of slide to unlock. The patent is completely bogus as is all software patents.
In addition to the comments before me, it's also because the rules are not as simple as they may seem, and the rules change with practice over time. Unless you believe that the U.S. Constitution and laws are absolutely inflexible (which not even the most strict textualists/orgininalist would, I think, contend), law changes via practice and via interpretation. In the US, it's almost always been the case that the lines between treaties, executive agreements, and something called congressional-executive agreements (consent of Congress, but less than the super-majority requirement of a treaty) are blurry and ambiguous. Given that, you could either presume that whatever the Constitution doesn't explicitly forbid, it permits (in terms of executive power), or the opposite. Most presidents have presumed the former in the realm of executive agreements and treaties, meaning that, because the Constitution doesn't say that can't make these executive agreements, they've felt empowered to do so. This has been affirmed as permissible by the courts, and has happened very frequently, although that's not to say that future scenarios might arise that test the boundary between executive agreements and treaties in a way that hasn't been pushed before.

In summary: U.S. Constitutional law and the common law are very complex. It's not entirely clear that any rules are being broken, even if Obama does not ask for Senate approval. A court of law would be the proper place to resolve this, presuming the case was justiciable, which is another issue. Lawmakers themselves are no more informed than this comment or other commentators, meaning that they themselves can't provide any definitive answers.
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What you can do with 7 lines of JavaScript?
I agree management is not programming. But do you feel confident working for an engineering manager who does not understand what you are doing, even at a high level? Can you talk about design and cost with him or her? Look, managers who are not technical can still be great people managers.

The first job of a people manager is to set the vision, and inspire you to do your best, none of which requires technical skills. I believe this was even supported by empirical research Google did a year or so ago (I can't find it right now). Still, to lead an engineering org, I believe managers have to understand technology, too, otherwise they will make uninformed decisions which will end up hurting the product.

I'll give you an example: I interviewed someone a couple of days ago who had shipped large-scale real-time trading systems for a bank. He couldn't write a for loop. Fine. But I expected him to be able to do design an ETL pipeline. Couldn't do that either. How about basic functional design? Nope. At some point, I started questioning what value this person would add to the org.
Bad case of fan-boyism. Go see a doctor.

JFTR: I like many Apple products, but come on.
The 'excessive' angle seems hopeless to argue: that just leads to endless debates about what is 'excessive'.

Instead, I'd rather argue about whether this piece of personal data is 'relevant'. It obviously isn't. As you say, they could easily replace it with a UUID or, to use something permanent already at their disposal, your O2 customer-id (which might arguably also be personal information, but at least not something anyone with wireshark can immediately use to get you on the bloody phone).

It's an example of sheer laziness to send the telephone number itself instead of doing a lookup and sending something less sensitive. I've dealt with a similar situation with zipcode verification and you can bet I refused to send the zipcode straight up or hashed (the number of zipcodes is rather limited).
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Let's say I need 50TB of usable space. I can purchase an Equallogic PS6100E (a mid-level "enterprise" storage device) with twenty-four 3TB drives and 5 years of support for $85,000. Rack space and power isn't free, so let's say the total cost of equipment and facilities over 5 years is $100,000.

In contrast, storing 50TB for 5 years on S3's reduced redundancy storage would cost $250,000. If I ever need to transfer any of that data back to my data center, there'll be a hefty bill for that as well.
I've played around with extending the T.TileLayer to save remote tiles then try to load then using file:// in the future. It mostly worked, but I didn't have time to totally tweak it- my app is being entered into a competition with a deadline. I fully intend to investigate offline JS maps in the future, though.
At that scale they don't use bank accounts. Probably a lot of it is invested in short term T bills, while liquid cash is kept in a money market. And yes, apple will be making interest on it.
NYPD
List of New York Product Designers.
This isn't a coupling between those two components; it's a common dependency with a bug that was exposed by one of the components. Once the bug in the dependency is fixed, anybody relying on the incorrect behavior is hosed.
> of course in this case I should've logged out from google

Yes, exactly, what is to stop anyone from just going through your sent mail if they were already willing to go through your web history?
I do't think they are suing other phone manufacturers for financial reasons. It is a matter of principle and it is personal. It's like Mel Gibson in that movie where he fights the entire mob for the $70k somebody stoled him.

It feels awkward now because Apple is no longer the underdog but you can see how that personality made them succeed against all predictions. You may not like that personality (if a corporation can have a personality) but is easy to see how some people may feel identified with it.
I hope so as well. Something Tim said in the conference call yesterday made me pretty hopeful. He implied that the iPad was cannibalizing their own laptop sales, but that he didn't really care.

Apple has done a fantastic job in the past of destroying their cash cows if they feel that have an even more awesome cash cow in the pipeline. This is a mark of a well run business.
> As far as SPYW goes, it's all about giving the users more relevant results. This is something you can opt out of (to some extent with privacy controls, otherwise with logging out).

Except adwords is in this mix. This makes it one step closer (or is it already upon us?) for ads to be targeted to me based on the contents of emails I send and receive.

To me, email is one of the more personal and private things that I do online and even the possibility that Google will use my gmail account to target ads is too much.

edit: perhaps I should clarify – as I understand it, the ads that are currently displayed are relevant only to the email on screen when using gmail's web interface. What I meant was that SPYW opens the door to ads everywhere targeted based on the contents of all of my email. I don't believe that Google does that currently, but I have every reason to expect it's coming. And that bothers me.
The 10 Most Important Sentences from the SOTU Address
I ran the plaintext through bookshrink.com, what do you think?

1. Tonight, I want to speak about how we move forward, and lay out a blueprint for an economy that’s built to last – an economy built on American manufacturing, American energy, skills for American workers, and a renewal of American values.

2. And this Congress should make sure that no foreign company has an advantage over American manufacturing when it comes to accessing finance or new markets like Russia.

3. Their energy bills will be $100 billion lower over the next decade, and America will have less pollution, more manufacturing, and more jobs for construction workers who need them.

4. This country needs an all-out, all-of-the-above strategy that develops every available source of American energy - a strategy that's cleaner, cheaper, and full of new jobs.

5. We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly one hundred years, and my Administration will take every possible action to safely develop this energy.

6. Let's never forget: Millions of Americans who work hard and play by the rules every day deserve a Government and a financial system that do the same.

7. But no matter what party they belong to, I bet most Americans are thinking the same thing right now: Nothing will get done this year, or next year, or maybe even the year after that, because Washington is broken.

8. Let's also remember that hundreds of thousands of talented, hardworking students in this country face another challenge: The fact that they aren't yet American citizens.

9. Right now, because of loopholes and shelters in the tax code, a quarter of all millionaires pay lower tax rates than millions of middle-class households.

10. And if you want to relocate in a community that was hit hard when a factory left town, you should get help financing a new plant, equipment, or training for new workers.
This trope is getting super-tired. We even heard from someone saying that Google reducing the stock of bagels in the snack bars is EVIL!
I can't believe people are making such a fuss about a non-issue. Google isn't being 'evil' by aggregating data from all its properties. I'm surprised they hadn't been doing this already!

Think about it. If you owned Facebook and Microsoft, wouldn't you want to co-relate the data in Facebook with Windows? For example, to see how many users of Windows 7 use Facebook, and how it affects bounce rates? Do you think companies don't already do this (Bing and Microsoft, Safari and iTunes, etc.)?

Do you think Google ALREADY wasn't co-relating data from its different properties? And what exactly is wrong with that anyways? You'd have to be pretty naive (and unreasonable) to expect a parent company not to have access to data from all its subsidiary operations. How does one "opt-out" of letting Windows co-relate data with Internet Explorer, short of just not using one of them?

Have you ever tried visiting https://www.google.com/dashboard/? This page shows you all the accounts and information Google associates with your account. This was always the case. All that's changed is that the privacy policies associated with all of these disparate accounts have been combined and simplified.

You CAN opt-out of the Google tracking for ads here: http://www.google.com/privacy/ads/ I've known about this option for ages but haven't used it, simply because I respect Google's approach here. I'd like to see Facebook offer a similar option.

You can also see the profile Google has collected about you here: https://www.google.com/settings/ads/onweb/ as well as opting out of personalization.

Does this really seem evil to you?
This is really cool. Having just done a large and complicated S3 integration into a legacy soup of 20 year old filesystem based document management kludge, this would have made life much easier (and considerably cheaper!).

Not only that, it solves a lot of problems such as dangerously storing backup snapshots on-site, archival and easy deployment and access to S3's CDN functionality.

Sold as far as I am concerned!

(Yes I know it's expensive, but it's cheaper than buying something in-house and employing another hairless monkey to manage it).
The economy does a lot to give people a delusion of purpose. If u r scared that ur kids will starve, or ur wife will go without healthcare, ur focus is now on survival. If I know that "the system will take care of me and my family", I will suddenly have a lot of free time. So I now need a philosophical or religious strategy to find meaning in my life. Just consider what is already happening in the so called services economy... a lot of it is pointless paper pushing coz we have not yet simplified it to the level necessary. Just imagine if the entire banking and insurance industry was replaced by a single web scale app with a few simple rules... u'd have a huge chunk of people sitting at home. All these people "remain busy" because of the economy... I wonder whether boredom or drudgery(hand everyone spoon instead of a shovel??) is better...
The BBC Micro was actually quite expensive compared to the other micros of the time. (I don't think the IBM PC was ever considered a "micro", and other micros were probably more capable anyway.) If I remember correctly, the goal was not to produce a design that would compete mostly on cost but rather one that was British and would do the flashy stuff the BBC wanted to show on their computing series.

I agree that the Raspberry Pi will be revolutionary, not because it will rejuvenate computer science teaching, but simply rather because it's a cheap computer.
Rovio confirms: Angry Birds on Facebook February 14th
> If I send a secret to you in the post, and you put the envelope in the recycling unopened, have I disclosed a secret to you?

Yes. Intent and the fact you did it is what matters here.
You are talking about Facebook and Twitter, right?
> Life imitates satire.

The Onion stands on the precipice of prescience with their humor. I'm reminded of this article (note the date):

http://www.theonion.com/articles/bush-our-long-national-nigh...
Here's something I've been concerned about... I do Core Audio development, and participate from time to time in the Apple Core Audio Mailing list. Every so often a newcomer will arrive and ask about something basic. In response, someone will tell them to google it. This is common in coding related mailing list circles: "I just googled it and the answer is the third result down". Now, my concern is that the google results an advanced user will get are going to be more relevant a lot of times than what a newcomer – who hasn't done a whole lot of Core Audio yet – will see. They're likely to get hundreds of pages of results that mask what they're looking for, because to Google they're not a low-level audio programmer, so they're probably looking for something else. I realize it's a bit of a slippery slope argument, but something about different-search-results-for-different-people that bothers me – maybe its the fact that so many people aren't even aware that their google results may be drastically different from others. To me, it has a lot to do with what Nicholas Negroponte called "The Daily Me".
Doesn't DNSSEC allow for a way for the client to request results-plus-validation-details instead of just results-if-valid?
While buying votes is probably illegal, I've had the same thought but instead of crowd funding to buy votes, we crowd fund to support politicians in elections, with one MAJOR stipulation -

Taking the money crowd funded means you can accept no other form of donations.

Just a thought, not related to We The Lobby, but perhaps a future project?
You're THE Average User? We've been trying to sign you up for months!
I'm sure I will be able to sign up when the site is back up, but I'm a little sad it's not working right now. I am eager to join.
Popularity does not equal relevancy.

Just because FB and TW are 'popular' does not mean the results I (or a search engine) get from them are any more 'relevant' to my search than other "niche" social networks like Google Plus.
The Reality of HTML5 Game Development and making money from it
Pretty sure they do. Watch this ted talk about filter bubbling from last year: http://www.thefilterbubble.com/ted-talk

He mentions they use ~30 points of info to identify you, even if you're logged out.
I'd like to see the author in the shoes of those workers :)
Trouble is, preventing cancer is hard when we don't even know what causes cancer. Obviously smoking is a big one and people have been working hard to great success to eliminate it. How about cooked vegetables? Raw vegetables? Processed sugar? Burnt pieces of meat? Cell phones/wifi? Sunlight? Artificial light?

The reason it seems like everything causes cancer is because everyone is at risk for cancer. Living is a cancer risk. A lot of people don't die from cancer because they don't live long enough, but prevention will never happen. Cancer is inevitable.
Poland PM to sign ACTA today, massive protests in the whole country
My issue with it is mostly in the visual implementation.

I had hoped that Google would be more subtle about it, instead I look at the SERPs and see them shouting at me.
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This is more of a cowboy opinion (as in what I would do) than anything else.

I would post it. They aren't going to sue you unless you refuse to take it down. If they ask, take it down.

Of course this is contingent on there really being nothing in the contract.
It's also worth noting the high rates of returns for Android devices versus iOS devices. Activations don't really take this into account whereas net sales probably does.
Google is still very committed to providing a great place to host open source projects at http://code.google.com/hosting, that has not changed. But many of us are also fans of GitHub, and recognize that there is a great community of developers there (particularly in the ruby community).

The Google account on GitHub has been setup simply as a place where some open source Google projects can be mirrored. As another commenter noted, this is actually one of the points of a DVCS.