skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This, and the other articles that have popped up like it, are straw man arguments. Very few people are saying that Apple's going to combine iOS and Mac OS X into a single OS. When people talk about the "iOSification" of Mac OS X, we're talking about bringing over the visual style of iOS (see Contacts and Calendars) and reducing functionality (see the new AirPort Utility). So, yes, Mountain Lion is different from iOS, but it's safe to say that in terms of user interface it's less different than Lion and iOS or Snow Leopard and iOS.
So it sounds like the challenge at this point is getting sufficiently small wires.
We just had a very successful hackathon where I work. About 10 separate teams coded basically overnight and the results I think surprised everybody. There was something about the energy and, well, slight insanity of staying up all night just to see if we could deliver a full product in under 20 hours...there was definitely something to it. The demo the next morning, where all the teams showed what they had done was pretty dang impressive. A few of the delivered results will likely become real products.

So from my perspective, the energy and "field day" attitude of a hackathon creates an urgency and focus that's feels like the early days of a startup, where sheer adrenaline and excitement creates more productive mental state and team effort I think. It's a thing, I tell you.
The CC0 is currently under an license-review discussion at the OSI. The CC0 explicitly excludes patent rights from the permission and therefore may not be a great choice for a free software license.
Sure, but if you take all the people who will die before 60 because of their weight (what's that, 1/3 of the population in the US?) you can basically add 15-20 years to their lifespans just by having them eat properly. That's the equivalent of adding 5 years to the US's average life expectancy.
I have a MacBook Pro that was one of the last models to not have a i5 or i7 CPU. My MBP runs the Mountain Lion developer preview fine with one exception: screen and audio sharing to an Apple iTV doesn't work. I understand this: the i5 and i7 have some sweet new instructions that make video compression faster - so no complaints from me.
That's great and all that but you can't scale up production at that scale (imagine even building an opamp with it) and it doesn't mention anywhere how long the gate actually lasted. Thermal effects at that scale would probably destroy it pretty quickly.
>Not only is death necessary for new generations

Not necessarily. Look at the problems in the world. How many of them are because we've forgotten history? Every time I read something new in history I'm struck by how this has all happened before and we're making the exact same mistakes again. I would submit that if we lived forever, we would be colonizing planets by now.
If you think the US is like Italy in the 1930ies, you're completely ignorant of the history of this country. Italy, I mean. I live here, and my wife's grandparents lived through that.

That's not to say that things are wonderful in the US, but it's just not the same thing, and to make that kind of claim puts you in the same intellectual bucket in my mind as the folks who call Obama a communist.
Well if we want to take it to it's extreme end, death is a certainty. At some point all nature will decay and the universe and all energy will stop, it will all be used up. Nature will be used up and gone, barring the supernatural we will be too, so at that point even if we become naturally immortal we will die, because nature and more importantly energy will be no more. At this point Tesla, Newton et. al. will not matter, not a thing will matter, because the universe will be dead. So if we die in 85 years or x billion of years the final result is the same. Death is part of life and at some point even our contributions, no matter how great they are will be of no value. The old wisdom nothing last forever is true.
My theory is, he is a shill, but not for Microsoft. That is just how he earns money.
There's currently a lively debate on License-review about OSI certification of CC0. Contention is largely focused on these patent issues. I dig the public domain, but until the courts, legislature, and/or international treaty say otherwise I think these dedications are hazardous to those downstream.

Edit: In reply to (and without attribution) the following deleted message:

I believe there was commentary relating to unlicense's
approach on the OSI's license-discuss list in December.
In particular, one legal expert pointed out that you
can't open by dedicating your work to the public domain
(the 1st line) and then proceed to issue a license for
use.

The CC0 license was held up for an example of how to do a
dedication plus fall-back as crafted by someone who has a
background in law... but this license explicitly reserves
patent rights and is therefore a poor substitute software
license (IMHO, IANAL).

I'd love to see these "public domain statements" also
start to include a patent abandonment and/or promise not
to patent clause if the full intent is to be completely
free.
I think it's better to name the company differently from the product, but using the same idea. For instance: my startup is called SimplCloud and it is about creating products for DevOps. The first product is called SimplDS (for Deplyment Service) and I can continue with this scheme.
"Beauty, usability, and performance aren't mutually exclusive concepts on the web. It's just that most clients only care about the first one (until the site has already launched), and most designers don't have enough knowledge of the second two."

And clients are usually only qualified to care about the first trait.
"The fact that everyone is missing the point of Mountain Lion is crazy."

The author is the one missing the point. Nobody is suggesting that we'll all be using our MacBooks in exactly the same way as our iPads (ie. by touching the screen).

There are, however, obvious ways in which OSX is moving toward an iOS-like environment. The App Store? Sandboxing? The ability for Apple to kill-switch apps?
While I don't care about attribution, the disruption of provenance is problematic.

Heard that loudly and clearly several time in this thread.

Suppose that Foo Corp releases Unlicensed code that includes patented material. Baz Ltd goes on to develop a widget that uses Foo's code. Later on, Bar Inc buys Foo Corp and files suit against Baz.

Good point. The problem only exists because patent exists.
Something about death being a motivator or something like that...

We have Dragonball Z because 15 (25) year old punks don't realize that they're going to die some day...

And with that, I'm going to stop scanning HN.
good points. but to be fair most problems become hard, hard problems when your site operates at large, large scale. for small traffic sites, caching architecture is easy and most of the subtle vulnerabilities don't manifest.

background: i've been a senior staff engineer at Orbitz and i did a lot of work on the caches at Cheaptickets.com
The Distributed Web
Tribler (content search through peers) and magnet links (resource locator using content description rather than location) have provided interesting steps forward in the decentralized p2p infrastructure.

Would it be possible/useful/hazardous to apply similar moves to the web?

Maybe magnet links would kill dynamic or updated content, but maybe there are trivial technical solutions to that... I don't know.

More broadly, is the web falling dangerously behind in new resiliency innovations? Is the P2P infrastructure, due to environmental pressure, now more reliable than other parts of the Internet?
I recently read the free Kindle chapter of David Gries' book The Science of Programming, recommended at a previous discussion of this essay:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1667081

My impression of his thesis so far: unit tests are great, but the challenge is figuring out exactly what unit tests you need to write. Formal methods give you a way of doing that.
Getting Things Done Is Not So Clear: Why The Exquisite App is Broken
What about people like Genghis Khan, Adolf Hitler or Joe McCarthy? Et cetera?

The belief that personal death cannot be good for society is just as ridiculous as the belief that it always is.
>So what if we had unlimited time? Would you pursue greatness and projects that take hundreds of years to complete?

Absolutely. Being an idea guy I'm always coming up with new ideas. It's really depressing knowing that I just don't have time to do them all.
I understand your skepticism.

But, understand that, even if the USA was a fascist state, you wouldn't notice a thing. Check out this excerpt from They Thought They Were Free. This should be required reading for every citizen of a democracy.

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html

That said, I think we impoverish our understanding when we label everything we don't like as fascist. There's a vast array of horrible ways to run a country. In the 20th century alone we've had all sorts of variations, from Hitler to Honecker to Pol Pot. If you ask me, Americans aren't headed towards fascism, but something more like a banana republic.
Why on earth do people insist on comparing web frameworks on such a pointless metric as time-render-a-page? It's utterly pointless.
Hmm, you can usually buy anything in China if it is shipping. Will sniff around and see if I can find any.
God talks and does time travel. He's a crazy ass God. Do you feel lucky? God is just.

God says...
chill deliveredst longings departest Saints recommending
wooden anyone whisperings Joseph declaiming conservative

Just imagine being Moses and telling the people the murder commandment. Relax -- God punished him.

You're an atheist, right?

God says...
C:\LoseThos\www.losethos.com\text\BIBLE.TXT

ah, Chelluh, 10:36 Vaniah, Meremoth, Eliashib, 10:37 Mattaniah,
Mattenai, and Jaasau, 10:38 And Bani, and Binnui, Shimei, 10:39 And
Shelemiah, and Nathan, and Adaiah, 10:40 Machnadebai, Shashai, Sharai,
10:41 Azareel, and Shelemiah, Shemariah, 10:42 Shallum, Amariah, and
Joseph.

10:43 Of the sons of Nebo; Jeiel, Mattithiah, Zabad, Zebina, Jadau,
and Joel, Benaiah.

10:44 All these had taken strange wives: and some of them had wives by
whom they had children.

The Book of Nehemiah

----

Those are hilarious names. I donno. That's all I got out of it. What's the price in man-hours for a name in the Bible when you calculate monk scribes?

God says...
C:\LoseThos\www.losethos.com\text\WEALTH.TXT

vinces of New England in particular, have hitherto been more
republican too.

The absolute governments of Spain, Portugal, and France, on the
contrary, take place in their colonies; and the discretionary powers
which such governments commonly delegate to all their inferior officers
are, on account of the great distance, naturally exercised there with
more than ordinary violence. Under all absolute governments, there is
more liberty in the capital than in any other part of the country.
The sovereig

----

I was cracking-up laughing at DC murder rates. My logic's flawed. I donno, sometimesw you get a giggle and move on.
I'm pretty sure you're talking about some game, not hackathons.
There's also Not Always Right[1], but it's not tech related (and they're stories, not just sighs).

[1]: http://notalwaysright.com/
I will say that I, as a physics student, mentally crunched the numbers in my head when I saw a recent Wired article. It said:

Consider the action around Apple’s iOS alone: Since its 2007 debut, 500,000 applications have generated $3 billion for developers. (Android’s 400,000 apps have earned around $100 million.) ... It costs $5,000 to throw an event for 100 participants—a tiny investment considering the payoff if a participant creates a blockbuster app that the company can market... At one hackathon hosted by an upstart open source platform, I watched the winning team hoist an oversize novelty check for $10,000.

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2012/02/ff_hackathons/

If your mental math is good, you'll see those first numbers as 2 x 3000 and 1000 / 4, or $6000 and $250 respectively, in average revenues per app. So, I'd anticipate that Android can't really motivate a hackathon. Also there is some level of bias because really bad ideas might get filtered by the hackathon system, so that perhaps you are automatically in the top 10% of apps and your expected value is instead much higher, $60,000 or so. I doubt that it's quite this high, though.

Do they keep all of the submissions, or just the one that wins the prize? Because it sounded like they had 5-person app teams in this contest, and 100 people could potentially create 20 successful apps. If you got to keep all of them, then that's 20 * $6,000 - $5,000 = $115,000 expected profit before paying the programmers. Giving $10,000 to a single winning team is actually pretty absurdly conservative -- "you do all of the work, we'll keep over 90% of the profits." They can maybe get away with it because we think of ourselves as winners and splitting it up among 5, $2,000 is not bad for two days lost. Then again, assuming that everyone else is as good an app designer as you are, your expected value is only $2,000 / 20, and $100 is actually a pretty pathetic salary for that sort of competition. I mean, I know that you're "doing it for the love" or summat, but still, it sounds like these hackathon hosts have found a way to make programmers work for peanuts.

Unless when they said that the team hoisted "an oversize check", they mean that each member of the team hoisted an oversize check for that same amount. Then the profits are a little closer to 50/50 split (which is still a bit crazy) and the expected profits of your 48 hours of work are $500. Is your overtime rate $10/hour? ;-)
On the OSI's license-discuss list in December it was noted that the unlicense dedication statement is not well formed and could use the assistance/review of a legal professional.
unicode breaks it
I think just because you can do something to prolong someone's life, there used to be a time when a good doctor knew this didn't automatically mean you should.

I know my grandparents didn't fear or refuse to believe in death in the same way as people do now (and they had seen a lot of it). I hope I'm strong enough and happy enough with myself that I will gladly relinquish my hold on the reins of life when its properly time to do so, and not fear it or be sad.
What You Wish You Had The Guts To Say
The only thing I do and would use there is "logger". The rest is about showboating.

A GUI and a script should never be entangled if you ask me. There should be no coupling there. Everything script-related should run quite happily non interactive.

A GUI could drive a script however via the script's API.

I think ESR wrote about this in TAOUP (The Art Of Unix Programming) but I can't be bothered to dig through it now for the reference.
Exploit to detect which Social Networks you are logged into
In your place I would read the Google Platforms Rant (It IS about Amazon;)
It explains what do they get right (SOA)
https://plus.google.com/112678702228711889851/posts/eVeouesv...
It would be great if the government's budget included a computer and basic internet access in its assistance programs. I can't imagine this would be too expensive. Also people would benefit from the increasingly free education provided by Stanford, Udacity, etc.
Appears people have node working, judging from the comments on http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7483039/node-js-on-uclibc...

I havent tried it yet, but on todo list. Most stuff seems to be working, eg have redis working on arm.

The issue with javascript is that they do not support many architectures, other than interpreted only.
If the people who lived through the first evil dictator were still around they'd recognized the signs of the next one.
It's not always the case that you would choose a ramp over stairs given the choice of only one or the other. For example, there aren't many two-story homes that have a ramp leading to the second story. (Not to say they don't exist, just that they are a glaring exception.) That's what I mean by not always appropriate or desirable.

I feel I might be getting astray here. I simply think it's odd to impose on--what is as much an art form as it is a medium for communication--the restriction of only being able to use a certain color scheme. I'd be bummed out.

Luckily you don't have to sacrifice any aesthectics. SparkFun does a good job of making their stock status icons accessible by employing a combination of color and shape to help color-blind people recognize the status easier.

Here's a good example: http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10388
Terminal Tip: ASCII-ify your Videos
Bruce Eckel's Free Electronic Books - C++ and Java
Firefox nightlies now have a new JavaScript debugger
Personally I chose to ignore this point of view as it would imply that absolutely everything is completely without a point. What's the value in following such a line of thinking?
Getting It All Wrong: The Observer on Technology
The DB Query test is pretty interesting, actually. It draws results into a much closer range, and shows that your bottleneck for WebApp/DB style apps will probably be your database.
In the annals of innefectual, misdirected, passive-aggressive online nerdrage this system of anonymous, groupthink-driven schadenfreude really takes the cake.

Of course, here I am shaking my fist on Hacker News so who am I to criticize?
Hackathons are the opposite of "how marketing people think software is made". They are the essence of the process of development with the decoration removed.

Dave must not have been to a good hackathon. I've personally been involved in hackatons where we created what went on to become a commercial product in under a day. The code written during the hackathon may not have been part of the final product, but the creation of the product (what it is, what it does, even much of how it looks) was the result of the hackathon.

I have the diametrically opposite view of Dave in this case - hackathons are exactly the tool needed to obviate the need for months of wrangling with "marketing people". Instead you can go directly to a tangible product that can be touched, tested, and discussed in a meaningful instead of abstract way.
Mango added the ability to query contact and calendar data without the chooser UI. However it does require a declared capability in the app manifest.
You can assign real ip addresses to machines in your server room, give them dns, and firewall them externally. Just ask your isp for some addresses. There is no reason why this is any different from using nat in security, but you can use real dns. You can use ipv6 if you can't get ipv4 addresses.
I think this underestimates our most primal of instincts, survival. Those people who died at 48 a century ago had no less want or determination to live longer, than did those who die today at 78. In those times, their options were extremely limited, so as a culture, our norms prepared them better to accept death. Nowadays we have many options, and modern medicine has become the ultimate tool of our survival. Yet another profound ability that separates us from other animals.
> encouraging self destructive behavior

While that is likely true, in other segments of the population, such as vulnerable children, providing food, shelter and health care encourages "not dying".
The test is actually not completely meaningless as it illustrates how our modern web frameworks have shifted the bottleneck from the database back to the frontend-nodes again.

That's usually a worthwhile tradeoff (hardware is cheap) but one that a growing number of junior devs don't seem to be making consciously anymore. For them it's just normal to be spending more time per request in the controller code than in the database query. Whereas for many oldtimers it will never cease to feel a little funny...

A side-effect of this trend is that you can't reasonably run your beefy rails-frontend on a mediocre CPU anymore. When latency is dominated by ruby-code crunching on strings then you really want the fastest per-thread performance that money can buy.
>The problem being it's hard to prevent people from hanging out for your 12 months of training, and then jumping ship to do their own thing afterward...

It's pretty easy actually: pay them well.
Feel free to die then, but don't presume to speak for me. Death is a medical failure, and life doesn't stop being valuable after 75.

That people are starting to view death as a medical failure is one of the best things that could happen. I personally don't expect to die of old age.
How does the new AirPort Utility reduce functionality?
Yes, I agree that thinking that we gain by people dying is nonsensical. Which is why I didn't say that.

We live in a universe where all things decay. There is no known exception. Species go extinct. Stars die. As best we know, the universe itself will die: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe

You and I will die as well, and pretending otherwise causes a lot of harm. The best we know how to do now is to extend life a little; but we don't even do that as well as we could because we waste fantastic sums on futile end-of-life care. And that money also doesn't make it to the medical research that could help the next generation, or the one after that.

But I think the harm is deeper than that. Who do you think is more likely to be fully aware of how short life is? The next Einstein now toiling in a lab? Or somebody watching their third hour in a row of reality TV?
It is great that Hacker News has caught up with this -- Philip has done a great job with the Python Tutor. Next step: user-definable layout for display of different data types.
Sorry about that! It's fixed now. That was a mobile-specific style that I'd accidentally applied globally.
Yes, everything you say there is true. But in the context of the article, and the parent post, we are not talking about preventative healthcare, or first lines of treatment, or stuff that can generally fall under the umbrella of "treating people right".

The context of the article is about extraordinary actions at the end of life. This is not about keeping people healthy, it is about making very ill people live a bit longer. We clearly have a responsibility to keep people healthy. There is no excuse for allowing malnutrition to just happen (though there is an 'excuse' for it to continue while we try to rid it). Those are failures. We are responsible for those.

Those responsibilities are very different from the situations being discussed by the article, and what I thought that mistercow was talking about (which would be death in general).
Mineral supplementation recommendations for healthy humans
However, to gain a reputation so that one would be able to earn a living is the conundrum that every entertainment entrepreneur must face.

One person who solved this conundrum is the author behind The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho.

I don't get it. Paulo Coelho was already well known in '99. Two of his books were already bestsellers in Brazil and "in 1993, HarperCollins published 50,000 copies of the book, which was the largest ever initial print run of a Brazilian book in the United States."

Like Jason Rohrer, he gained his reputation before starting to distribute his novels for free.
Slaves in Egypt were working less when they built the pyramids. The one who works 16 hours a day is crazy.
Terry Pratchett created a documentary titled "Choosing to Die" which can be watched here: http://vimeo.com/25239708

It's highly relevant to the difficult questions that come up when dealing with death. I think the documentary does a very good job of exploring options available in the modern world and the issues associated with them.
Oh man -- he got the title of the magazine wrong! It's Forbes, not Fortune.

Anybody care to edit the title of the HN submission for accuracy?