skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When was the last time there was an outbreak of malware on Apple iTunes or Google Play? How many users were affected?

Compare that to the near-monthly announcement of new browser security vulnerabilities, either in the browser itself or a bundled component (e.g. Flash).

If a smartphone application exploits an image rendering or font library, it doesn't gain any additional permissions. It can't do anything with a vulnerable library that it couldn't do otherwise.

The important attack surface on smartphones is local kernel exploits, which are rare.

If every web page had its own full chroot/jail (or equivalent), then they would be as secure as native applications. But in the current model of web pages as accessed through a browser, this is impractical to implement.
I have allready used my phone as a boarding pass. Just scanning barcode which was sent on email :)
I think the only UI features I regularly use are the Firefox button and the URL bar.

Everything else has been replaced either by hardware buttons (back/forward/scrolling/new tab) or by extensions (reload with mouse gestures etc.)

As has already been said the use of the scroll bar especially seems odd to me, I'd have thought middle clicking would have nearly killed it off.
For me, Samsung's Chromebook still makes the best linux laptop. Great form factor, battery life, and screen.
It's still ridiculously overpriced, just less so. ($975 to upgrade from 6GB to 32GB???)
Current models of the entire planetary ecosystem are admittedly quite primitive, but they often have proven to be predictive

What have they predicted?
Study predicts imminent irreversible planetary collapse ... and modem tax

Imminent Death Of The Net Predicted!: prov.

[Usenet] Since Usenet first got off the ground in 1980--81, it
has grown exponentially, approximately doubling in size every
year. On the other hand, most people feel the signal-to-noise
ratio of Usenet has dropped steadily. These trends led, as far
back as mid-1983, to predictions of the imminent collapse (or
death) of the net. Ten years and numerous doublings later,
enough of these gloomy prognostications have been confounded
that the phrase “Imminent Death Of The Net Predicted!” has
become a running joke, hauled out any time someone grumbles
about the S/N ratio or the huge and steadily increasing
volume, or the possible loss of a key node or link, or the
potential for lawsuits when ignoramuses post copyrighted
material, etc., etc., etc

http://catb.org/jargon/html/I/Imminent-Death-Of-The-Net-Pred...
I don't know about US, but in other countries there are so many laptops that come "Windows-free" (and save you ~$150). Unfortunately most of them come with the completely useless FreeDos instead of a usable Linux distro. I really don't get that at all. What's stopping them from using Linux instead of FreeDos?
Creating a nice effect to populate input fields
is it easy to get, say, ubuntu on them?
There are still a lot of hoops to jump through for handling development on a Chromebook. That said, for a browser and general non-development machine - I agree that the newer Chromebooks have a lot to offer.
That's pretty typical for Apple stuff, though. Although, if I remember right, you can set Apple stuff up as just bridged. I also find it interesting that there's now an iOS app for setting up their APs. That fixes a big gap for some people. I'm just hoping that IPv6 support comes back soon...
It's not a question of whether the assertions are unsubstantiated or overblown, it's that they're sufficiently vague as to be unscientific. Things like:

Therefore, the plausibility of a future planetary state shift seems high, even though considerable uncertainty remains about whether it is inevitable and, if so, how far in the future it may be.

don't seem much more useful than my horoscope for today:

Today you may be wondering just how much you should get involved in a certain conflict between family members or in your career. There's a lot of pressure on you to find an answer to this problem. But all you have to do is not take sides and everything should work out fine. You may finally realize that it's probably best to just let things happen for once.

I mean, what would it mean in real-world terms for either of those to be wrong?
I hate being that person, but I have to honestly ask, if the scientific community as a whole cannot agree on exactly how much effect humans personally cause to the environment today, how can anyone claim with the level of surety that these people seem to have that something major is going to happen, that humans can mitigate, within a lifetime?
Pictures Of The Retina MacBook Pro - you’re looking at 5,184,000 pixels
You're using a web application right now.
18 Timeless Kanye West Tweets
Facebook's Growth: A Tale Of Two Headlines
So, what exactly does that nickname mean? I have never heard that term before...
You should be able to plug it into the wall with the old one's removable international plug if that helps.
It's not that simple.

Recording is easy. Dump the ADC output to a buffer and call it a WAV file. Or an AU.

Sending it to Siri requires chunking the audio into small pieces, compressing them with a wavelet table (I'm assuming here, my DSP knowledge is a bit dated), and shipping them off to North Carolina.

If this can't be done quickly, Siri appears to suck. Apple is religiously conservative about enabling features on hardware that might cause the experience to suck.

Audio compression was a slow thing on desktop computers when desktop computers had similar specs to the first iPad. I'm no authority, but this seems like a relevant detail to me.
Facebook gets much-needed boost from new friend Apple
Much like I noted in my comment yesterday about Creative Market, I think that services like these need to be quality-controlled if you want repeat visits from buyers and worthy sellers alike. At first-glance, the content looks pretty tacky - what differentiates this site from its equally-cheap competitors?

Another question I asked Creative Market: how do you plan on moderating resources (ensuring people aren't selling tutorial pieces or files they got/bought elsewhere) and as someone that would sell content, how do I ensure that someone doesn't just tweak my pieces and resell them (or are you equipped to handle disputes)? This sort of site seems ripe for ripping people/styles off that they see on Dribbble/elsewhere for a quick buck. Is there any incentive to bring higher-caliber designers on board while being able to keep the prices competitive?

Also from a UX standpoint, clicking a filetype should highlight it and darken the rest of the choices whereas it does just the opposite right now.

Interested to see where this goes.
I agree with you - the hardware and its configuration is very different between all of them. Yet, the basics are the same and a lot of code could be shared between the different spacecraft if they builders agreed on a certain level of commonality (and it doesn't even need to be a high one).

And yes - a common OS for spacecraft would be a giant leap forward, abstracting the differences in hardware and providing a unified interface for everyone using them.

The strongest barrier against sharing development is the security concerns. Nobody wants people to build missiles with that.

http://www.openpilot.org/ has, so far, avoided these problems.
I don't think my position is extreme. I'm not advocating for a removal of all browser features, merely removal of those which are unrelated to the browser's core purpose of document navigation and rendering.

If browser vendors spent less money on implementing audio synthesis or OpenGL, they could spend more on font rendering, SPDY, and standards compliance.
Oh, I can handle them just fine. Needed a locking diff, a 2" lift, and some oversized mud tires, but just fine.
Another guess here, but it could have been crowdsourced using Amazon Mechanical Turk. Assuming a conservative 0.05$ by picture, the total cost would be 901 * 0.05 = 45.05$.
So there's no advanced computer vision algorithms involved :(
Thanks. That's kinda terrifying. I knew a little about xul, but underestimated its usage because the little windows don't look quite as much like web pages. More blame for mozilla I guess...
In the case of a spill it's most likely the case that something in your top case has been ruined. I had this happen to me on 2008 macbook that was otherwise fine. I looked into the used parts market and you can get a fine topcase for $50 and the install if pretty easy if you can use a screw driver. (I'm assuming the MBA is different in this regard, browsing around this seems to be the case)

Looking into it further at the time there's actually a good chunk of your macbook that you can fix yourself it's just not officially blessed by Apple
At one point, the finger was pointing straight to the screen, 3D detection of finger, is i think not possible without human sorting through images. I call it Amazon Mechanical Turk for image categorization.
Snow Leopard/Chrome 19 works fine.

Seems like it's Win/Chrome.
The Antidote to e-Books
What about package managers? Windows management (e.g. Xmonad)?

You don't like the KDE/Gnome defaults and don't want to spend time customizing. Fonts? Install from package manager. Themes? Install from package manager. Or download from gnome-look.org and install using gnome-tweak-tool. Yet you go out of your way to tweak Windows to your liking.

I don't have driver issues, but that's from researching purchases before buying.
Google is a bully
If I read this correctly under Customizations: 95% use the "Status Bar" (though in which way is unclear) Yet the status bar was removed from the default UI with the argument that the space was wasted. (and replaced with the optional Add-On bar, taking up the same space)

Easier to have just provided the option to hide the Status bar for the 5%?
Rate my startup: Appfail.net
Hey guys, we'd like to get some feedback about our new startup - Appfail.

Today we are launching our public beta (it's totally free) and we would love for you to give us some feedback.

The address of our site is: http://appfail.net

In a nutshell Appfail is an exception monitoring service for ASP.NET (support for more languages and frameworks is coming

soon).

What sets us apart from other similar tools is:

1) Our focus on analytics and context. That's a biggie for us.
2) Integration with your website. Our overlay provides failure information on each page as you browse your site -- and even

replay failures in your site.
3) Instant notifications (you can be notified via email or TXT/SMS - with other forms of notification like twitter coming

soon).
4) Collaboration with developers in your team to find and diagnose errors.
5) A focus on the overall user experience.

This is just a high level overview of what Appfail offers and you can read more about it here: https://appfail.net/Blog

If you could let us know your thoughts and feedback - we would greatly appreciate it!

Cheers,
Sam & Peter
I don't know, but I also want to point out that "often proven to be predictive" is pretty weak cheese.

I mean, I have a model for predicting the result of coin flips which is often predictive. It's called "heads".
Their tag line is Linux Laptop that "just works". What does that imply about Linux? What's even sadder is that the implication is not even true. Linux these days not only "just works", but has more functionality out of the box than a stock Windows machine.
What I found interesting was that about a quarter of Americans never had credit cards -- 23% as of 2007.

I'd love to see deeper stats on who does/doesn't carry a revolving credit account. I've become increasingly convinced they're among the most dangerous financial instruments you can present someone with. Others (housing, student debt) are at least backed by assets and/or earning power, however much they may be subject to bubble inflation.
Less stuff fits on the screen.
If this is a strategy you guys have to keep away competition for jobs in Portland, it is working. :-)

(Not that I have a green card anyway.)
But... but it's a Mac!
It is easier than you think. Sometimes you don't even need to have a mortgage.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-08/man-who-had-no-mort...

http://www.tampabay.com/news/business/realestate/bank-of-ame...
Good developers are proud at their work... Some of them become rich while some don't
U.S. Family net worth plummets 40%
The raw compute time to calculate the MD5 collision used in Flame costs tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars --- there's a window of time within which the calculation has to complete --- and does not appear to have used the HashClash code that Marc Stevens published after the RapidSSL exploit. Flame wasn't a bored teenager.
In some cases, the bank simply refuses to accept payment, forces the process, and fails to respond in any way to the mortgageholder: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/17/norman-rousseau-for...
Yeah, don't people use their mouse wheel or two finger scrolling on the trackpad?
What would be interesting is if new images were periodically added and the grid adjusted in response.
The study doesn't actually say anything of the sort anyway, what it says is a typically vague:

" It is still unknown, however, what percentage of Earth’s ecosystems actually have to be transformed to new states by the direct action of humans for rapid state changes to be triggered in remaining ‘natural’ systems. That percentage may be knowable only in retrospect, but, judging from landscape-scale observations and simulations66, 67, 68, 69, 70, it can reasonably be expected to be as low as 50% (ref. 68), or even lower if the interaction effects of many local ecosystem transformations cause sufficiently large global-scale forcings to emerge."

or in other words, "fuck, I dunno, half?"
Everything that was refreshed is tagged "new" on the main store page at http://store.apple.com/us . So no :)
A/K/A a "trimmed mean".
I've never seen that in the US. All the laptops I've ever seen for sale in person (rather than online) either came with some version of Windows or Mac OS. So we not only lack Linux here, we lack anything outside of Apple and Microsoft.

FreeDos seems rather specialized and would not suit a casual consumer at all. Perhaps those laptops just have a different target market? I really can't imagine anybody but a hobbyist actually wanting to buy that. Also, perhaps people just buy those laptops to install Windows in some questionably legal way?
But scary headlines that link to the article: Free
Matthew "The Oatmeal" Inman raised $20,000 for charity in 64 minutes
Mistakes, fraud, malice, incompetence, etc.

http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2010-09-23/business/fl-wron...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020379190457660...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/16/illegal-foreclosure...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/08/foreclosure-mistake...

http://abcnews.go.com/WN/robo-signers-blamed-foreclosure-mis...

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/realestate/2015541624_...

This isn't isolated, it is a systemic problem in the banking industry right now, created by reckless (and illegal) business practices on the part of the major banks and mortgage companies.
> Linux these days not only "just works"

1) Try to make it sleep. (and wake up correctly)

2) Try to make it hibernate. (and wake up correctly)

3) Try to rotate a second screen into portrait mode while maintaining vsync and compositing. (choose any GPU for this, they all fail)

When you can do those 3 things reliably without fumbling around, breaking between upgrades, or even just do them (3 especially), I'll happily switch back to linux as a primary OS and say that it just works.
Ouch. Scary.
Aye, and it would be a much nicer experience if it were native.
Mac Pro gets half-assed “update”
I want that too.

In the meantime I got myself this[1] and can highly recommend it. No more fiddling with USB-dongles, you can just leave it in the bag and a single button press gives you a Wifi->3G bridge (for up to 5 clients).

[1] http://www.amazon.com/UNLOCKED-HUAWEI-HSDPA-MOBILE-Velvet/dp...
Are you suggesting that models are not a useful scientific tool?
Refugees From The Etsy Police Flee To Storenvy
Like it or not, Microsoft enabled an incredible level of global competition that, ultimately, has been responsible for bringing us the Internet as we know it

That's pretty rich. Networking was a fundamental feature of many operating systems that predate Microsoft's existence . The first web browser was developed not on Windows, but the precursor to OSX (NextSTEP) and MS played catch up in basic browser features around the web's early years. The vast majority of servers are Linux based.

It's silly to attribute the rise of commodity PC hardware to them as well - it's only their lawsuits that prevented Linux from seeing widespread distribution, which would have enabled just as much innovation.
Apple Quietly Discontinues MacBook Pro 17" - MacRumors.com
Perspective Is Everything | MetaFilter
Ahh the memories.

At my first proper job, we had a 8 node VAXCluster running Oracle 7, VB3 clients on Windows 3.1 on Compaq and DEC machines, Motif clients on Solaris 2.4 on SparcStations :)

The VAXCluster had 100% uptime for 4 years when they killed it and replaced it with Alpha machines.
For anyone who's interested I will be purchasing $1500 worth of hardware from newegg, assembling PC's, and selling them for only a 100% markup. And oh yeah, they'll be more powerful than this load of crap they want to sell you.
They say that good fences make good neighbors. The problem with IP is that there's no good way to fence off anyone's property. I'm not convinced there can be, because maintaining the metaphorical fences require controlling everyone else's computer.

So I put more hope in new ways of doing business to help artists profit from their work.
Agreed. The air was one of my best computer purchases I've made. It's far faster than I expected something in that form factor, and it generally handles everything I throw at it. That said, the display in these new pros is very tempting. I do a lot of design and video work, so having more is definitely better in this case. We'll see if that display gets trickled down into the other lines during the next revision.
Passing Arguments To Embedded JavaScript
The US was not an economic power until after the Civil War, or in other words, roughly only the last two decades of the 1800s, which coincided with major technological advances such as the development of the steamship and the cotton gin. The first two decades of the 1900s coincided with a major bust cycle which did not end until after the passage of the first income tax. The US had marginal tax rates as high as 90% during the post-WWII boom. During the boom of the 1990s, tax rates were higher than they were during the Reagan or Bush II eras.

Sweden, at roughly 9.5 million people, is smaller than most major US cities, let alone metropolitan areas. It simply does not have the sort of expenses that a large nation must deal with. Further, as others have noted, Sweden's industrial base was not damaged in WWII, allowing it to avoid the type of spending that most other European nations had to deal with.

Ireland's boom resulted in an even larger bust. The key driver of the boom was reduced regulations which led to rampant overspeculation by financial institutions (i.e., essentially the same thing that happened with the U.S. mortgage market).

Estonia's economic boom is the result of the discovery and exploitation of massive oil shale reserves. Unlike most oil-producing nations, Estonia is not requiring extractors to compensate, clean up, or otherwise mitigate the environmental damage.

Singapore has increased taxes several times since 2003, with minimal effects to its growing GDP. Hong Kong has also increased taxes regularly, to pay for vastly expanded government services.
Yes, those are all valid and important points -- as I said above, mobile operating systems have taken the browser's conceptual model and improved it. They've made technical improvements (using the kernel's security policies and mechanisms) and non-technical ones (providing a trusted distribution channel with the ability to ban malware apps). I agree that browsers are behind in important ways.

But I'm not so sure that local kernel exploits are that much rarer than, say, Chromium sandbox exploits, which play a similar role in mitigating vulnerabilities exposed to untrusted code. (Not all of those monthly vulnerability announcements actually allow code execution.)

I think in practice the curated App Store model helps much more to prevent outbreaks of attacks in the wild. Google Play, which does not review apps before publishing them, has had malware problems. And since users and usability are still a weak link in the permission system, not all mobile malware even needs to circumvent technical measures to gain the privileges it wants.

And browsers still offer safety advantages over native apps on the desktop systems that currently account for the majority of browser usage.
On a slightly related note, ESR is the mascot for my new static blog generating tool: https://bitbucket.org/anthonyb/shithead ;)
Buried at the bottom of this link, the "How You Earn Rewards" section goes a long way towards depicting the product, more than any other memory I had retained from the existing and this landing page. Even still, I'm kept from using yet-another-link-shortener and an analytics dashboard without providing you with credentials. How about a limited-time experience without authenticating, if it's not within fiscal interest to offer "unlimited" features that "competitors" offer?
While I'd say I'm quite libertarian, I don't see how this affects a startup all that much, at least directly.

1) Corporate income tax is a (slightly progressive) tax on profits. Most tech startups aren't immediately profitable (nor are most businesses), and even then, profits are relatively low as a percentage of total revenue, especially early on.

2) Higher taxes do prevent capital accumulation/formation, but that's more an effect of personal income taxes. A rich consultant/engineer/etc. paying 40% income taxes (state+fed) plus inflated cost of living, making $150k/yr, won't realistically be able to save the $100k/yr he would potentially otherwise be able to. Being able to use your work to accumulate capital, then invest that capital in starting a business, is key for income mobility. At least in tech the cost in capital of starting new businesses is falling dramatically, so $5-10k in savings to the business, plus a low personal burn rate, is probably enough.

3) Capital gains rates are generally low enough that they don't substantially disincent investment.

4) The overseas earnings repatriation issue is an issue, but most large and international US corporations are sitting on huge amounts of capital both inside AND outside the US. The low interest rate environment makes issuing US bonds to fund US operations, while sitting on huge amounts of international pre-tax cash, also an option.

In short, taxes are an issue, but definitely not the low hanging fruit. There are many regulatory issues to fix first, and systemic problems with the economy (it's absurd that we have 10-40% unemployment and underemployment, while at the same time we can't hire anywhere near enough qualified engineers -- THAT is the big structural defect which 100% of the society's effort should be going to fix.)
I'm lost; what part of the dance was vulgar? The mention of genitalia was in poor taste, but I didn't see anything in the dance that made me think of anything other than "The Wiggles" that my son used to watch. When he was 3.

"Horrifically bad", sure, but "vulgar"?
Likely Microsoft strong-arming. Some unspoken (because formal threats are anti-trust-bait) threats about "sell linux and your per-unit licensing costs will skyrocket".
Indeed. And airlines easily can/do send emails with new info when something changes. Wasn't there a post a few weeks back about email being all some problems need? Hoping airlines do unnecessary work to make/maintain a plug-in is kind of silly. I'd rather they focus every erg they have on running the planes well/better and just send me an email.