skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The OS has nothing to do with applications you run on it."

That's a rather technical view of the situation. The fact is that a lot of applications are only available on one platform, and basically none is available on all. So quite often your choice of OS is determined by the applications you want to run, whether they're games, a certain office suite or nifty productivity apps. This in turn then ties you to hardware, from a very restricted set (Apple) to a little more relaxed one (Windows) to almost anything with transistors (NetBSD).

In addition almost every platform creates its own culture and environment. Linux and the BSDs embody open source software. Microsoft basically is synonymous with office and enterprise. Apple caters to designers and has a pretty thriving shareware culture, with a lot of small utilities due to its history and the fact that it somewhat dominates the laptop space.

So yes, I'd argue that OS, hardware and third-party software are very hard to separate and you have to consider the whole situation when you think about switching. (In my opinion this got quite a bit better within the last decade, though)

In my specific case, while I feel that Apple is neglecting both its OS and its desktop offers, and I think that its competitors are catching up a bit in the OS space, the whole culture/3rd party thing still would play a major role and could prevent me from switching altogether. Just like someone would like to switch to Linux, but if you're working with high-end CAD software all day, that's a bit hard to do. That's probably the far end of the "switching" spectrum, basically prohibiting it, while reliance on neat productivity tools like Alfred, TextExpander and OmniFocus just makes it harder. (And for a lot of people it's not even just the specific apps, but common general qualities, whether that's clean, simple, good looking apps on Macs or being able to configure everything in text on Unices)

I might have stated it a bit awkwardly, and I hope this clears things up.
'Stylish Stouts' in 1919: The Year of the Plus-Size Model
Master These 5 Remarkable Strategies of Motivation and Go Straight to the Top
The case for zsh
> Android is no doubt a phenomenon that is sweeping the mobile world... how does Google profit or succeed from this?

I suppose Google's goal with Android is to maintain those numbers up http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_search_engine-ww-monthly-2...
> For the majority of users, Facebook/Twitter results are more relevant than Google Plus results.

Seems like Google would like to change that.
From 0 to 20,000 Pageviews in 3 Weeks on my First Site
> A split would be nice, though.

Why? One $100 share versus one hundred $1 shares is functionally the same thing.
Funny, there's no discussion of the modern bottlenecks: the bus in between the CPU & GPU, and the speed difference of the CPU and RAM. And no discussion of what else the modern machine has to do now: maintain a lot more devices (like radios), handle background work, and have a network stack.

It's not like we have faster hardware but suddenly got dumber programmers.
A similar technique seems to be in use by at least one other UK network.

I'm with 3 (one of O2's rivals) and if I access my account information from my handset connected to their network, it takes me straight to the relevant info without a pesky login. (If I try the same via wi-fi, I get a page asking me to disconnect from the hotspot and go back online via 3G.)

I always did wonder how they achieved this--sending the mobile number in the HTTP headers is likely.
States Allow Voting via Cloud for Citizens Overseas
David Beazley on "Inside the Python GIL"
As others have mentioned, if you don't have an attorney helping you with election law matters, I'd recommend hiring one or consulting with one. You really want to make sure you don't run afoul of election and campaign finance laws (there might be personal liability for you, if you do)--and, if you state that you do comply with these laws, you'll give people that donate a lot more faith that their money will actually be delivered to the correct groups. These laws all exist in a nebulous area which requires some time/effort to sift through.

I'm an attorney and, although I can't give you legal advice, I can try to steer you in the right direction, presuming you're not already in touch with a lawyer.
Those who promote open standards, free software and don't disseminate DRM. Probably you can add to the list those who are against software patents too. Unsurprisingly Apple gets a minus on every of those points.
To be fair: the USPS is being rushed out the door via a legislative hit job. They've been required to accumulate a reserve of 75 years-worth of worker benefits (retirement and healthcare) -- something I don't believe any other company or government service has to do -- and build up that reserve in 10 years, on their existing budget.

So the speed of their decline is greatly exaggerated by this and not entirely reflective of the drop in utilization.

Personally, I see no reason the USPS couldn't remain and remain as a useful service if they transitioned to being better at sending/tracking packages as opposed to letters.

UPS and FedEx are great and all, but they've nowhere near the customer focus that the USPS has. And in many cases companies offering shipping services already leverage the USPS to deliver useful mail and packages -- it's a great service for them, because they can get the attention that the average citizen cannot. I think there's plenty of room to expand on what works for the USPS, maintaining a useful baseline service for Americans.

All that said: yes, their marketing has been atrocious, embarrassing, unhelpful and utterly unnecessary lately.
If suddenly every Linux laptop anywhere in the world turned into a MacBook, everyone would smile quietly and start configuring it.

Lies. If my Linux laptop turned into a Macbook Pro, I'd reformat it and turn it back into a Linux laptop. I used to think that Apple maintained a dichotomy between their iOS arena and their OSX arena. iOS was locked down and OSX was more open. But the introduction of the app. store for OSX, and the pressure placed upon software developers to sell through that app. store shows me that Apple does not draw a distinction between iOS and OSX. It appears that the openness of OSX is a historical artifact, and that if they could get away with locking down OSX as much as they lock down iOS, they would.
>Can I have an independent "authoritative" search engine and "cool" social networking tool.

Yes, you can. But Google wants to make search better. There's no denying it's gotten worse as time goes on (and SEO gets better). The only thing to do next is to understand what you're looking for by understanding you.

"I don't want relevant search results, I just want relevant search results!" This is the problem Google faces. They've made their choice.
It's posts like this which most clearly demonstrate why people dislike Apple advocates. Your words make it seem like you're unable to consider that Apple's success might be partly due to something that you consider superficial, like marketing, rather than something substantial, like engineering or customer support. This makes you seem irrational or at least overly personally involved and that really puts people off.

EDIT:
To be clear, I don't really know you, I'm only basing this on these two posts of yours.
A refrigerator has never been hacked, but the USPS still can't manage to put my mail into my labeled mailbox instead of my neighbor's.
Yeah, the addition of Google in the title feels like link bait, although the author may not have intended it that way. It would have been more honest with email in place of Google.

Honestly, stuffing letters into file cabinets makes me cringe. I just think of the impending annoyance of having to sort through the pile of useless information that I'll feel the compulsion to shred while I do it.
Apple made $1.87 Profit in Q1 per person on Earth
A quick breakdown of Apple's recent results into human-scale terms to try to put it into perspective.
as best I can tell, that appears to be a limitation of organizations on GitHub. For example, it doesn't look like you can follow github.com/facebook or github.com/yahoo either.
The "clients" in DNSSEC are stub resolvers that just speak normal DNS. The deployment model for the protocol is that end stations don't even know DNSSEC exists. They're just programs calling "gethostbyname()". You could "allow for" anything from a bit in the DNS header to an HTTP REST web service to provide information about DNSSEC failures, but what does that matter to the millions and millions of lines of software that are built on the assumption that DNS either (a) works or (b) doesn't?

What's funny is that this is a debate we had 2 years ago, you & I, where I said "DNSSEC will cause sites to disappear from the Internet because clients don't actually speak DNSSEC, caches do it on their behalf", and you said "but Cricket Liu wrote a blog post on how clients can use the CD and AD bits to do their own DNSSEC"† --- and here we are commenting on a story about how NASA disappeared from the Internet (for Comcast DNSSEC clients) and we're still acting like this is a debatable point.

It's not. It's obvious from the architecture of the system: either we forklift out all the code written to the original DNS service model (ie, all the code that does DNS everywhere), or we accept that DNSSEC will cause total site outages in every case where TLS causes popups.

† (This itself kind of a silly point, right, because you could also just install a full DNSSEC cache on every host on the Internet and claim that as the answer to this problem.)
Sure. But since income disparity has soared in the last 40 years and crime rates have plummeted, even if they have plummeted everywhere, this indicates that inequality, if it has any effect at all, is likely pretty minor.

I think this would be near impossible to test for though. So many factors affect crime rates across difference societies, and different societies experience wildly different types of income disparity. Intuitively, I imagine places with smaller net income disparity but larger real income disparity (ie a city where everyone is relatively poor but some are destitute) have much more crime than places with larger net income disparity but smaller real income disparity (ie a city where everyone is relatively wealthy, but a few are unbelievably rich).
You can sell just part of your holdings when you have 100 * $1.
But...Google already scans your email for AdWords.
Am I the only one who has started running Gmail and Facebook in their own separately installed browsers that are used for absolutely nothing else?
How to run an Open Source Project
I'm aware of the government requirements on USPS but I believe that's irrelevant. The USPS would still be in the decline it is today regardless of whether or not they had to stash away all that money today, 5 years from now, or never.

It's simple: people don't use the mail as much as they used to. And that trend is only going to continue. People will never increase their use of the USPS.

"UPS and FedEx are great and all, but they've nowhere near the customer focus that the USPS has."

I must have a very different experience with the USPS then you. Any time I go to the post office (which now is maybe once every year or two), the employees are extremely disgruntled, not happy that you're there, and not very interested in helping you get what you need done.

More importantly, though, in my experience, the USPS is horrible at its core job: transporting and delivering mail. They have "tracking" that doesn't actually track - it simply tells you the package has left the origin and arrived at the destination - nothing in between.

Mail is consistently lost, delivered to the wrong address, or opened before delivery (by who knows).

Again, this is my experience. I suspect it's not unique, but your mile probably varies.
A better bet might be this: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-iran-oh-no-not-agai...

ZeroHedge is something else.
I think a better way to describe it would be to say that in order to make sure you earn an average salary, you have to be above average at something, and more so than in the previous century.
Cobook - The Smart Address Book for Mac
You say Apple "shows every indication of being a much worse monopolist." This is a flawed argument because Apple is not a Monopoly in any product line except the iPod.

If they become a monopoly in Phones or Computers , they will properly be restrained legally from certain aggressive actions.
Mega-man: The fast, fabulous, and fraudulent life of Kim Dotcom
I would have thought the commercial harm was obvious here. They wanted to use the image, but to get around having to pay the license fee, they essentially created a counterfeit version. I suppose you could make the standard piracy "They wouldn't have paid for it anyway" argument, but that really strains credulity here. They just wanted a discount by commissioning a ripoff.
Certainly they are not. But you have more deployment options, and while 15 miles of phone line run to a single customer benefits only the customer (and, I suppose, everyone else who might want to reach them) a single cell tower has potential benefits to the entire subscriber base.
I have no evidence but from being a sports fan for over 25 years I find people become fans of teams for two reasons. Either they are from that city|state|region or they like a particular player on that team at the time.

Being a fan of a team from your region gives you another connection to your community. It is something you all have in common. I would not call that silly. A little overly emotional maybe but not silly. It is just like the programming communities that we all fall into. I think we have all read stories on HN about someone leaving a or joining a language based on the community. Community can be important to some people.

And being a fan of a player, thus becoming a fan of the team, probably falls into your line of thinking as far as "picking a team for a mature reason". You like how the player plays the game so you want to cheer for him. If that's how you pick a team then that is fine as well. Some sports fans hate this way of picking a team but I think it is legitimate.
As per statement from O2 - They share data with their "trusted partners" for age verification purpose.

Does that mean they share my birth date with their "trusted" partners?
I joined Apple in 1987, when they were in a panic because margins on their hardware were slipping from 60 percent to 50 percent. The PC was starting to eat their lunch.

Apple recovered by making products they could sell at high margins again (with comparatively little overhead in engineering, I might add).

They still suck at stuff outside the area of consumer botique computing. It's a huge market, but it's not the whole market by any stretch.
Apple TV’s success bodes well for rumored full-fledged television
Those blog comments are pretty dismal; aside from the didn't read/don't understand/just angry, the repeated calls for a total list of trusted partners - is a blog comment really the right place to ask that? Does anyone expect O2 to answer those?

And how many people think such a list is going to be useful at all? It won't be three companies you've heard of, it will be pages and pages of sites and background services companies and test sites and so on.

Mr or Mrs "I want to make a considered decision, I might not trust them", are you really going to make a considered decision if your number is passed to, say, "TechElbonia UK Services, O2 portal processing for connections passing through dept 17 routes, and URLs matching the following 10 line regex (..)"?
Easy Way To Find Out Who Recently Unfriended You On Facebook
hotmail and dozens of others has similar feature.
Helen Hunt: a sex surrogate in the new film "The Surrogate"
Probably when Google's DNS servers do. 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4
What about imgur's ad revenue? If you're circumventing that, then you're shooting your very platform in the foot.
They raised ~$8million from Benchmark and Omidyar. It's pretty interesting that Benchmark Capital invested in a corporation that "is dedicated to creating public benefit." Not at all surprising to get it from Omidyar, of course.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/24/couchsurfing-raises-7-6-m-w...

Will be interesting to see how they monetize
It's about the 4:00 minute mark. There isn't a slider bar graphic, but he has to slide left-to-right to unlock.

Apple products work well for a lot of people, I'm just not one of them, and I don't think having to 'slide to unlock' make my Android phone an iPhone clone. Nor is it the type of thing that should be patentable, imho. It'd be like he first company to have a link to a web browser on the main phone screen patenting that concept, it's a pretty obvious idea once you have a phone.
While I agree that event programming is very different, some of the issues the author brings up can be dealt with by architecting a program for an event based system. I understand that, is the authors gripe. That it is sometimes hard for someone coming from a non event control flow background to adapt at first. But items like the loop example are examples of mixing half control flow and half event based programming. What should be done in that situation is that it should not be returning a list, it should be returning a promise that will get called on completion of the list. Or a more elegant solution would be to notify listeners when a new item of the list is parsed so that they can observe it and see if it is an item that they are interested in. I understand the authors frustration, but it appears to me, that some more articles on best practices would help bring clarity on how to deal with these form of patterns.
This is something that is very close to my family so I have a bit of experience with how the Postal Service is going.

The big sell of the postal service is that it costs the same amount to send a letter from San Francisco to Los Angeles as it does to send a letter from the bayou in Louisiana to Honolulu, Hawaii. In this, physical mail is the big equalizer.

The USPS is also required to deliver mail to even the most remote of places because if the mail system did not work for everyone then several things would start to break: collecting taxes or votes or anything that a normal citizen should require can be done through mail, at minimum.

Really, the only way to replace mail is to provide the same level of reliability and free-to-receive service for another communication medium such as telephone or internet.
On one side I always used Google service under presumption that Google is already collecting and analyzing all of its data as a complete profile.

On the other hand I really dislike the way Google is heading.

In the olden days when Google was dumber having high Google Fu allowed you to get required information faster and with greater accuracy. When Google was dumber you could use its flaws to get where you wanted.

Today it just picks whatever it believes is what you are searching for and wont budge. This is especially annoying when you are just starting out on a search of a topic you know nothing about and need a random factor to get going.
There are more atoms in the universe than there are iPhones.
Research and Its Risks
Hmm, you may be on to something here. I tend to think that Apple is just good at brainwashing people, but I'm starting to see your point that people just appreciate the fact that Apple products just WORK. I am a big Apple hater, but I got fed up with Windows and bought a used Macbook four years ago and I never looked back. It just WORKS!!! On top of that, it looks pretty, and its resale value is much better than a PC's!

But maybe it's not the absolute quality of the product that sells, but rather the difference in quality between the top two options. I'll take my macbook over a pc laptop any day but I'm plenty fine with my Android phone.
It's a federal offense to steal someone's mail out of their mailbox. No such protections exist for email.
Why Developers Hate Antiviruses
I got out the book and checked, and actually you're right, it was a more general statement than just about UX. (It was meant to be a frank and memorable statement that applied across the board, from UX to the greater good.)

On the other hand, it was mostly an internal motto, and wasn't public until Eric Schmidt slipped it into an interview. It didn't become a public statement until it had already received a lot of press.
>"In short, the problem is that an adversary can program devices to store data in one protocol and leak it in subsequent protocols, in ways that are hard or impossible to counter if the devices are reused," say Barrett and co.

You mean, if you store the encryption key and later reveal it to outside sources, your secure communication is no longer secure? SHOCK AND AWE.

It's complete fluff that has nothing to do with quantum cryptography, just the intrinsic chain-of-trust of whatever hardware you're using. If something you're using is untrustworthy, the whole chain is - this is not a new discovery.
any time I read an email in gmail, I look to the right and I see adsense. it's been there for as long as I can remember. I always assumed that what you are describing might happen already has since it's rather obvious that the ads are trying to be somewhat relevant to the email I'm reading. Is it somehow worse because it shows up on your search results page too?
Normally jokes are an unwanted distraction around here, but this is pretty amusing.
Novice programmers are still programmers. The title of the post is (intentionally) harsh, but the main point is that we have to reset expectations about what lowering the bar can truly accomplish. It's still programming. :-)
Rendering a full planet isn't bad, I did up to zoom level 15 in 48 hours. 16 would take probably 48 hours by itself, and 17 would push into another week is my guess. But, mapnik2 is fast enough to render those tiles on the fly without a huge performance hit, about 1 second per metatile (enough to cover a couple small map pans on my big monitor). I am running it on 16gb of ram and a raid10 with 6 2tb drives. My next upgrade will be going full SSD and 196gb of ram, but that will also be a nominatim and pgrouting install, so the ram and SSD's are very important for importing the DB and indexing it inside of 1 month :) Just a tileserver isn't too bad at all.
Top European Blogging Platform Acquires Timekiwi
School Lunches To Have More Veggies, Whole Grains
The problem with this is that it is unlikely to be in practical terms better than using two slips of paper to write down a 256 bit random number and using that to establish a long-lived AES-256-CTR session.

(This is without getting into the fact that a single keystream is not a secure message exchange protocol, and that conventional cryptography has well-tested ways of linking confidentiality secrets to integrity secrets and of marshalling and canonicalizing messages; I'm just answering your question on its own terms).

None of this has much to do with QC, by the way; as I understand it, QC replaces conventional number-theoretic public key crypto, not block and stream ciphers.
Earlier I said it would be a bad idea to rewrite Emacs in Common Lisp. But starting from a machine-translated variant is a great idea.

I'm actually more interested in seeing the elisp to cl translator, though. Elisp and cl are quite similar, but not 100% compatible. And with no unit tests, it could be hard to get right.
The government will always attract people and organizations who want to abuse its power to enrich or otherwise benefit themselves. Other industrialized countries do a better job than the US of keeping those people in check and keeping the government more-or-less on task.
I'm working on this. And, yes, it's difficult.