skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All you have to do to adjust your expectations of the quality of vendor bloatware is take a quick look at the trash that PC vendors install on new Windows laptops. Why should we expect these same companies to do any better with their Android apps? Apple definitely has a big advantage here.

It's a shame really, because I think iOS has largely stagnated from a UI perspective or perhaps even degenerated with the ridiculous skeuomorphisms of their recent apps.
That's why I think for businesses who want to go open source, the best model is the Chrome/Chromium model. Keep Chromium as open as you want, but keep Chrome - that is built on it - only for yourself, and only you can control and modify it. If only Android worked the same way...

I believe all Chromebooks even get all the updates from Google, though it remains to be seen if that can be maintained with more than a few devices.
Of course they don't need to be updated, but when I'm paying $50+/month for essentially a luxury (I could live with a prepaid dumb phone), my expectations go up. I'm paying a lot for fun/interesting technology and I want to partake now in the new whizzy things that people are raving about, not 9 months from now.
Is there an argument that some of the patents in play here are also a potential concern for Python? Do non-JVM Python implementations share relevant implementation details with Dalvik?
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I've found things like low-level Bluetooth stuff to be appallingly poorly documented, and I would love to be able to explore some Windows source code to see how they're calling their own, convoluted APIs. Pretty much any time I've been calling out into other people's libraries, there have been times that I wished I could step through their source and/or fix their bugs.
Sorry for the large reply but please bear with me.

>Also, patriarchy doesn't imply that all men have incredible power, any more than institutionalized slavery meant that all white people had incredible power. Patriarchy also misuses men who step outside their role in the system, in the same way that white anti-slavery and anti-segregation activists were treated poorly.

You are comparing patriarchy to slavery which implies that husbands have incredible power as slave lords of their wifes and that husbands are evil.

Even if you look at the past, by comparing husbands to slave lords you are forgetting that husbands where required to work to provide, care of wife and children, be legally accountable if their wifes committed a crime for their entire lives all by them selves. Wifes also had much more rights then slaves.

Although there are differences between how man and woman suffers in a patriarchy, its safe to say that in a traditionalist patriarchy both man and woman are less free.

I think instead of assuming that woman has it worse all the time we should take in consideration all gender and sex issues. You can look at my recent post for some examples of mens issues https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3768116

Please watch the Girl Writes What videos that I linked. While I don't agree with everything she says her videos are quite insightful.

>It's true that critique of feminism is not necessarily anti-woman. Many feminists sometimes critique parts of feminism. However, when some guy turns up and turns a discussion of an actual woman's actual bad experience into a discussion of how oppressed he is by feminism, I'm still going to make some assumptions.

This is the right time and place to discuss misandry since misandry and misogyny often happens in such discussions and is not out of topic.

You are making assumptions because I'm "some guy" how is that not sexist? How is comparing husbands to slave lords not sexist? Why do you despise and distrust your own sex?

In a previous discussion
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3745578
you mentioned that only extremist feminists are sexist. I'm still not convinced that feminists are generally not sexist.

I don't agree that because there is misogyny we should forgive/turn a blind eye to misandry.

Please note that my posts are sincere and I'm open to different ideas and opinions.
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I just ranted about this too: https://plus.google.com/102672078908622237427/posts/GoDo6JeV...

I was proud to call myself an Android Fan Boy and urged my friends to get one (last year I convinced about 10 friends to get an Android phone and they did). I'm now a frustrated user myself and the worse part is when those friends read article like this and ridicule me.
Your position is not very pragmatic, and taking such a hard line is rarely productive.

The fmt package does a lot of stuff. Check out the link I provided above. To put all that stuff into the language spec - and then foist responsibility of writing and maintaining that code onto every implementation of the language - would be crazy. So it seems a good idea that the fmt package should exist and that it should be written in Go.

On the other hand, it's nice to be able to print when working on low-level libraries where fmt is not available (syscall, os, etc). The print and println functions service this need, and that's really all they're used for apart from temporary debugging prints.

It would be a mistake to use the built-in println in the hello world example because it would demonstrate precisely the wrong use of the built-in functions. Hello world should print to standard output and it should use the standard means of formatting strings. In Go, that is fmt.

There are a few of such compromises in Go (not many, though). Sometimes you need to put your ideals to the side in the name of simplicity and pragmatism.
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Do you have data to back up this claim?
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R4i SDHC is the least card which can be useful many handheld gaming that used for the nintendo ds and ds lite and it contains the same sized cartridge just like the original DS game.
Its sad that the author strongly discourages using pip to install the package.
Android needs to move beyond the 18-20 year old college or college bound male demographic if it's going to grow.

Around half of all smartphones sold today run Android. I don't think there are that many 18 year olds.

Your phone should update with the latest features as soon as they are available not a year down the line.

Yes, it should. But most users don't really care, as long as it makes calls and can get on Facebook and run Angry Birds. Apple/MS fanboys are correct that Android geeks aren't representative. But neither are they.

It's like playing roulette when buying a phone trying to find out which OEM will update there OS on time and which will not.

GSM Nexus.
I am sorry but it sounds more like you are suicidal than burned out. You may want to talk to a proffesional.
More data, more noise, or more rare events
This happened to me. T-Mobile Galaxy S, Samsung and T-Mo dropping the ball on updates, the GPS, etc., etc..

I have an iPhone 4S now, after trying out a Nokia N9, and I've never been happier.
Maybe it's impossible to find the "maximally efficient, effective ways", so you should do the interesting ones (i.e., not everyone is doing) that enrich you and make you happy, and have a measurable positive effect on others, like this guy does.

With him being well-off, would it be more "maximally efficient" for him to do something else with his money? Maybe, but he wouldn't be making people happy with his black Lambo or the "real" Batmobile he is building. We don't know what would happen if he did something else, but we do know people like what he's doing.
I consider myself to be a moderate 'techy' but rooting is not fun at all and rooted device is not fully functional. I own a HTC MyTouch. I recently rooted my device and upgraded to ICS. Camera didn't work nor did wifi calling. Finally someone else came up with another ROM (http://www.zipsnet.mobi/). Camera worked but wifi didn't and microphone was almost useless. He updated the ROM and now everything works except the microphone (the receiver on the other side complains that he/she can barely hear). I agree with you that your phone should update as soon as they are available.
> iOS (iPod and iPad2) and Android user (Samsung Exhibit II) here.

When I first read your post, I thought you intended this as a snarky remark about the ongoing lawsuits, until I looked it up and found that Samsung really does have a phone named the "Exhibit II". Why do phone manufacturers in particular have such poor taste in naming, and keep picking names with no obvious naming scheme or consistency?
In regards to regular updates, Windows Phone is looking more and more like Android. Even on Microsoft's "preferred" US carrier, smaller bugfix updates are being delayed or skipped by AT&T:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/microsoftpri0/20178567...

Previously, Microsoft provided exact details on when specific phones on specific carriers would be getting software updates, but this policy ended in January 2012:

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2012/01/microsofts-new...
We'll just have to make a few adjustments (like shifting power generation to individual houses using solar, wind and other methods that will undoubtedly be affordable by then, if only because oil will be pretty expensive).

Myself, I'd like to build a house (out of containers, maybe) somewhere near a mountain, powered by wind+solar, with a satellite or long range WiFi connection to the Internet (aka the rest of the world). I'd be happy to retire this way, hiking in the summer and snowboarding during winter :-), growing food (including farm animals) on a patch of land and a hydroponic farm...

Also, make the images here your wallpapers - there's enough space and energy for everyone, even in 2050: http://www.landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/127
The reason I looked at life expectancy at 65 is that it tells you how far medicine has come at addressing the fundamental biological limits on life--the answer is not very far. The premise behind the "technology will solve our climate change problem" is exactly that sort of science that will let us overcome what we now perceive as fundamental limits. It's breaking the sound barrier, not moderate improvements in life expectancy through better treatment of contagious diseases.

The other examples you mentioned don't come anywhere near the sorts of technologies that are necessary, and also happened quite long ago. The personal car was well on its way by 1910--almost a million cars on the road by 1912. The first regular international airline service was in 1919. Buildings were air conditioned starting in the 1920's. Frozen food dates to 1929. There have been dramatic in making these advancements cheaper since then, but they were already quite prevalent more than 80 years ago.

The time scale of global warming projections are not hundreds of years from now. In that time scale I can imagine revolutions in energy technology. 2050 is only 38 years away. For reference, NTT rolled out the first cell network in Japan about 33 years ago. The Xerox Alto came out 39 years ago, with most of the basic elements of modern GUI's: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/10/Alto_Neptune_F...
> Ever seen a president appear in court an unlawful attack on another country ?

I have seen some presidents in courts of Justice. Bill Clinton, Jacques Chirac, also in different categories, Milosevic and Saddam Hussein. I would say that this is roughly as common as seeing a wealthy CEO charged for crimes that his company made.

Basically, when you give power to an entity, you must keep in mind what it will cost to remove it when it abuses its power. Corporations or public authorities are not that different in this respect : if a fairly elected body cannot keep them in check, or step in in case of abuses, don't give them power, even if they look "nice".

That is a simple principle to avoid violent conflicts. If NASA says it wants to start inject cesium in huge quantity in the atmosphere, vote them out in the next term (yes, voting can work, even in America). If Exxon wants to do the same, make sure that a justice+police environment exists that can forbid them and coercively force them to not do that.
Ask HN: How do you compute user lifespan?
How do you compute user lifespan?

Seems like a simple question, but I've seen it done so many different ways and I'm now in the unique position of having a lot of great data (I think), but can't distill it to a good solid number.

For example, here is a link to the data for users that signed up for our service through a certain channel on 11/1/2011. A lot drop off in the first week, but then the rate of attrition slows.

Given this input data, what's the average user lifespan for these users? How do you compute that?

Thanks for any tips...

Screenshot:
http://i.imgur.com/GegBR.png

XLS:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4278514/user_att_data.xlsx
No problem. Soon there will not be that many fish left in the ocean so that won't matter any more.
You're right, but my question was more about if there's any possibility that Google bring more support to the development of apps other than using for example SL4A, since the recent legal problems with Java. But I get your point, this means a major change in the Dalvik infrastructure.
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Apple makes a significant amount of revenue from apps and media… they make an astronomical amount from hardware.

http://allthingsd.com/20110420/the-most-successful-store-no-...

$1.4b/quarter as of last year. Their margins are a lot tighter on media sales, but even so, that's probably a good chunk of change.
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I'll strongly second point 2. As far as I can tell, the biggest issue with ICS upgrades seems to be the amount and sheer complexity of the low-level changes (new GPU driver framework, move to 3.x kernel, new memory allocator, ...).

I also think Google made this a lot worse by not being more open with ICS development. If Google had been more open with the kernel and drivers along the way, I think ICS upgrades could have been much easier and could be moving much faster as well.
Besides your sentense not making a lot of sense (i.e. I have no idea what you are talking about), no one knows what a Karen Carpenter is - some kind of woodworking tool? (I suppose I could google it.)
Two things:

Say what you will about Apple, but they keep the crap off your phone. Carriers can't put a damn thing on there that you don't want.

True, but they do a damn fine job of keeping things off:

iPad 3G video downscaled, blocked over AT&T network: http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/news/comments/ipad-3g-video...

AT&T and Apple Admit Deal to Block VoIP on iPhone: http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/170661/atandt_...

AT&T cracking down unofficial tethering apps like MyWi: http://www.intomobile.com/2011/03/18/att-blocking-unofficial...

(Granted, Google's complicit to the carrier's requests here too -- however, I'm still perfectly able to install anything I want on my phone.)

But it was never updated. Not once. It took just months to start seeing apps in the Android Market that only worked with newer OS versions. [...] I've also already received 2 OS updates from Apple, which is 2 more updates than I ever received with Android.

No, it isn't. The Sprint HTC Hero got an official upgrade from 1.6 to 2.1, roughly eight months after the phone came out and five months after 2.1 came out. http://www.slashgear.com/sprint-htc-hero-android-2-1-update-...
If your aiming your phone at grandma you probably want to update it as little as possible.

Very non technical users freak out if they switch something on one day and it's all different.

It's probably the 18-20 demographic who cares about having the latest versions.
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Why is that sad? Because it goes against python community norms, or some other reason?
When i see global warming i see a scientist looking for additional funding.

I see politiciams wanting to levy taxes that will leave me poorer but not solve the problem (which i don't believe is as serious as it is generally assumed. People always seem to think the end is near)

I see people unwilling to accept that our modern life depend on cheap energi and that if a bit of ice melt then we should accept that as a cost of doing business.

What i don't see is people talking about cheap migration strategies, more neuclear plants, mirrors to reflect some of the sun back into space, etc, etc.
Most of the people I know that have trouble with their Android phones barely even correlate the manufacturer with the problems they're having. They only know it's an Android phone, and it sucks, and they're never getting an Android phone again.
somewhat, although that seems fairly heavily geared towards clusters of machines, which I've not really tried to address with piep. I've used gnu-parallel and cluster-ssh in the past for that sort of thing, though I'd likely prefer a pythonic way of doing it.
Yep. Now i need to go after another packaging tool to try it out. Well not a big deal.. However imho it would be awesome if everyone stick with the standard tools.
Yes. However, there is no definitive evidence that these threat actors are state sponsored, so the fact they're from China doesn't mean that they are China, technically. But the circumstantial evidence is convincing.

Contrary to what samstave said, Chinese APT aren't particularly sophisticated. They do leave a lot of footprints behind, although for obvious reasons that data is generally not made public.
I don't understand this faith in technology. We aren't any closer to going to another planet today than we were 50 years ago. Medicine has extended the natural limits of a human life a scant four years in the last century. Electric vehicles have been around for a century and still haven't gotten over the tipping point.

In the time scale we're talking about for global warming, three to four decades, it is unlikely that we'll see any technological innovations that fundamentally change the math. Climate change is about as far into the future as the invention of C and Smalltalk are in the past.
It's quite amazing how besides charging carriers the full retail price for an iPhone, which gives them like $350 in profit per phone, they also don't allow them to install any of their apps. If only Google had the same negotiation skills.

There are so many things that Google could do for the benefit of their users, not necessarily for themselves, if only they took a tougher stance with the carriers, or convince them somehow that letting the customer be the #1 priority, and not the carrier itself, is actually a good thing in the long-term for the carrier. And a good example of that is the iPhone, which even though had the customer (and Apple itself) as the priority, the carrier still benefited a lot from all the customers and more expensive plans.
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I would encourage anyone who feels like they're getting sick to stay at home. If it's a really small space, it only takes one person to infect everybody. Keeping things around like keyboard wipes and hand sanitizer could help encourage everyone to stay vigilant.
You are saying that Agile is supposed to mean programming in Ruby instead of Java? And only small teams can be Agile? Amazon.com would disagree with you, for one.
I'm sick of Android's permissions system. As you can't reject individual permissions it suffers from permission creep. In their first versions, applications tended to request only permissions they really need. Then every update they request more and more, usually wildly different from the purpose of the application.

For example, Google Maps requires "Allows the application to call phone numbers without your intervention" since last update. I don't want to grant that (it just needs to show a map ffs), but must, or stay behind.

What would great is to be able to selectively grant permissions to applications. I've read that cyanogenmod can do that, but have been careful with reflashing my phone. Maybe I'll give that a try now...
It's not just the Atlantic - it's every single site. The age of comments is just about finished, I expect more and more sites to remove them (unless the ad views are so high that it makes up for it).

My theory is that the only (or the majority) people who have the time to post are those too stupid to have anything else better to do. And once the majority is stupid it becomes too toxic for anyone else to bother.

Good forums (like this one) require very careful curating.
Ignoring your gut or your heart is a behavior that can be unlearned through various means, including meditation. Being mindful of your emotions has nothing to do with society and stereotypes, and everything to do with your own habits of the mind and experiencing reality as is.
Mocking Agile strawman has been a pop pastime since Yegge wrote Good Agile Bad Agile years ago.
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What "new whizzy things" are people raving about? I haven't seen anyone get even close to excited over a new OS feature since iOS 4's multitasking -- from the people I know, the response to iCloud, FaceTime, iMessages, Notification Center, ICS's Face Unlock, etc. has been a collective "meh". The only thing I've heard anyone seriously happy about recently was Windows Phone 7.5's ringtone manager.
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One solution (at least to some of the problems) is to use third party ROMs - there are plenty of them out there for every phone, made by people who know this stuff better than the manufacturers themselves. Support them and use their versions of Android - latest versions, fast, sleek, free to modify however you wish - what's not to love?

I have my old Droid and I won't upgrade until it's dead - it's running CyanogenMod (Gingerbread), has a wicked custom home screen, it's overclocked, undervolted, can run OnLive games, Angry Space Birds :-), One Piece for GameBoy Advance (loved that game on my GB!), Skype on 3G, and a s*it ton more...

I'll get a Droid 3 when I upgrade, as well - I feel crippled without a dedicated keyboard...

I see smartphones (and laptops, tablets) as simple platforms to customize to your liking - obviously, networks would have a problem with that if everyone thought that way, but it's the best way...
So what about WP7? Both as a user and as a developer I was completely frustrated with Android, so I went out and got myself a Lumia 800.

Here in Europe you pay about $525 for this device (off contract), and the 710 and 610 are about $330 and $260 respectively. An HTC radar goes for $380.
You absolutely can use `pip`, if you want. I made sure of that (or at least tested it once), because I know it's widely used and convenient. But I personally think it's a terrible way to install and distribute software, and would love for more people to try Zero Install, because I think it's the way that software ought to be distributed.
That's like saying Javascript is a very rigid language because your program breaks if you change braces to parenthesis.
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Later the next year RHL9 was introduced and our Head of Dept. gave us strict instructions to move to Linux.

When I was at uni , if I had been given "strict instructions" about what to install on my own PC I would frankly have told them where to go.

Edit:

His entire argument in this article was that he liked RH9 because the usability sucked.