skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Apple section of the Best Buy stores around here are set up like an Apple Store... all the Apple products set up, turned on, connected to the internet on wooden tables with plenty of room to play with them.

At the same time, almost all the Windows laptops are either running a demo app showing specs and videos you can't quit to the desktop from, have been rebooted by someone and are stuck on the welcome screen waiting for a password you don't know, or are turned off.

I haven't been able to buy a Windows laptop in stores for a couple years. They only stock junk with dim, low-DPI 1366x768 screens, and don't let you try them out enough to tell if you want to work on that computer every day for the next few years. I've ended up relying on online reviews and videos to pick models, then using manufacturers' sites to custom build them with decent screens and SSDs (14" 1600x900 in my HP Envy right now).

If I were forced to replace my laptop today, I'd be mighty tempted to make a switch to a MBA or MBP, even if just to run Windows on it. I hope the retina displays and Win8 release push the rest of the manufacturers to build some decent alternatives next year.
The use as a menu button dates back at least to the Sidekick II: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SidekickII.jpg (though that has one long and 2 short lines).
That 30% is standard business practice for middlemen. Any time you see someone complaining about the 30% cut, you can be sure that they don't have business experience. In some businesses the middleman gets a bit lower, in others a bit higher, but 30% is boringly normal.

Do you think the farmers make more than 70% of the retail price you pay for food in a supermarket? At an eatery? Do you think that book authors (before or after the internet) get more than 70% of the retail price of each book?

In selling things, the creation of the thing is important, yes. But so is getting it to customers and changing over the money (distribution and retail channel).
it is limiting to the designer

As a user, I want the designers to be limited. Scaling by percentages and using constraints sounds like an improvement. On the other hand, I like your minimalistic tools.
Two observations:

A) That's awesome.

B) It's highly unlikely that it will be implemented in the US - not given the recent trends in this country.
How is ionospheric reflection related to your claim?
Yes, it polls. Most functions are quite fast, and fine to just poll, and it's quite convenient to be able to bind to functions when needed.

But it's all tradeoffs - in our app we have a few that aren't - for those, we profiled to find them, and added a bit of code to the functions to cache the return value.
>>many users would welcome iOS level restrictions on their general purpose computing hardware

If microsoft did that, There would have been no browser, No hacker news and you wouldn't have had opportunity to post that comment.
Skype plugin for Pidgin/Adium.  Awesome.
I'll definitely check this out, thank you!
Yeah - we're just starting and moving slowly. We're figuring out a lot of the stuff on the go (brand, price point).

We really want to make things simple so ideally we'll pick one brand of tees, and one single price per tee, regardless of size and color. We have some idea of what it's going to be but don't want to set anything in stone since this could all change.
Does torture matter if they won't remember it?
I used to work the PC dept at BestBuy in Highschool and I never noticed that the apple store goes out of it's way to make sure you can play with and try the computers but the windows machines are never (almost) in a situation you can play with.

Why is that? My guess would be that it's related to the bloatware on the PC. There is probably some agreements where they agree to have their logo and application name displayed in store on the slideshow. Or something else? Different marketing strategy by MS? Can MS really think the slideshow of bloatware logo and specifications are going to help sell?
That Carlin clip is great. Hard to believe it's all still about business-crime and the uterus.
Congrats on putting out a great looking alpha. One question I have: The entire layout is being drawn inside of a canvas. Why was this decision made? Since (at least partly) the purpose of your tool is to output css it seems that you have tasked yourself with recreating CSS rendering inside of a canvas. Seems like a huge and unnecessary burden when just outside of the canvas you have this rendering tool specifically designed to render CSS.
Developers produce bugs all the time.
I would say Go is a replacement for C++, Java and C# instead. Python and Ruby are great at quick prototyping, but Go fixes several of the major problems with those three. C++ takes forever to compile, code quickly becomes stale and the modularity isn't great. Java and C# lacks brevity, native compilation and the error handling is overly verbose and is in the way more than it helps.
I always assume people nitpicking pointless details have nothing better to say, but still want to say something. Plus, look how smart he/she looked.
Context matters.

Also, there's also the simple "If Apple, Twitter and Facebook do it, bad luck, we gotta play along" rule.

P.S. Starting with "While I may be far from a UX guy" doesn't seem like the most positive way to start an article.

P.P.S. Somewhat flattered that oursay.org was used - somewhat badly - in the final example.
Microsoft just provides operating system keys and logo stickers to OEMs. They have little to no control over how computers are sold, marketed, or presented in stores. Those demo apps and preinstalled software come from the manufacturer.
I'm weary of using structured data, that is data that is structured in such a way that you don't need to understand what it's passing around. Keeping it simple means that the developer will always know exactly what data is being passed around.

This is important for a lot of reasons not all of them are related to only development as a job.
"The difference between Apple and Best Buy"

why not difference between Apple and f.ex. Sony Center which are also designed to engage the customer, let him play with the product? I'm not a fan of Sony, but know many people who liked their stores, that's a better comparison than a supermarket.
* You can turn off the GC.
* You can compile with gccgo.
* You can call assembly code from Go.

What is the major hindrance from using Go in embedded environments?
This is something I find absolutely bizarre: for every person who is willing to make ridiculously exaggerated claims about something, there are thousands willing to believe them. One example which springs to mind is the "spam free wordpress" plugin[0], which claims to use "anonymous password authentication to block 100% of all comment spam with zero false positives."

As it turns out, "anonymous password authentication" means that it gives you a randomly generated string which you have to copy and paste into another box each time you submit a comment. It sounds like something a machine could do because it is something a machine could do with ease. And yet nobody seems to have noticed this for two reasons:

1) The author deletes all the comments on his blog questioning why the system works

2) It has a 4.5 star rating on the WordPress plugin DB

As a result, the author is still making ridiculously exaggerated claims about the capability of his system, like "If Gawker had been using the anonymous password authentication built into Spam Free WordPress this incident [the Gawker break-in in 2010] would not have happened." Another gem is "CAPTCHA is not used because it is hard to read, unnecessary, easily cracked, and reduces the number of real comments substantially."

So there it is, another snake-oil salesman spreading FUD and making users (of some very popular websites[1]) suffer.

[0]: http://www.toddlahman.com/spam-free-wordpress/
[1]: http://www.raspberrypi.org/
Because the story wouldn't produce as many pageviews.
Yeah, places like jb and dick smith have the same setup, I guess it is a condition from apple to be a seller of their laptops.
If you think about it, it may be much harder to do so in a hand written letter too....compared to typing 75 words per minutes. Writing is slower, makes you more purposeful with every word, etc.
I love how Apple takes common sense (in retrospect) to extreme levels. Not only do they do that well, they excel in thinking out of the box, for the simplest of things. Color me impressed.
JS Bin
"All Windows" Exposé is back in OS X Mountain Lion [Image]
No, they have command line interfaces.
The major purpose of this post is to get you to install the plugin, so I doubt that would achieve what they want it to.
The Graphics of Plague Inc.
The document: http://transition.fcc.gov/ib/sand/irb/weritacrnc/archives/nc... tells implementers how to handle events around the leap second. There is some discussion in the ITU-T to all together remove the leap second (but that decision will be taken only before the next leap second).
Mac Rumors topic (source of image):
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1365961

Via (of all people) creator of FoxTrot, Bill Amend https://twitter.com/billamend/status/212652549872951299
Yeah, you would think they could record thousands of hours of real world noise then randomly use sections of it on each audio captcha.
Like I said, it's relatively easy today. But how about going forward?

There will be lots more bots and lots more usages. Things might not be so simple. For example, some sites might exclude all search engine bots except a chosen few despite the fact they all honor robots.txt and behave essentially the same.

(BTW, if by "text file" you mean robots.txt, isn't that an exclusion list? You seem to be saying it's an inclusion list.)
Our government is too bloated and inept to adopt educational reform that makes that much sense.
I'm as big an astronomy geek as anyone else, but this is so pointless. Why bother wasting time and effort with this? Just let the discrepancies accumulate and adjust 6 seconds every 10 years or so. It would save everyone a little bit of effort, and you could make an event out of it.
In New Zealand, I recently went to JB. I was interested in a tablet, specifically the iPad 3, and I asked the sales person, "What's the difference between the Asus Transformer, and the iPad 3?", to which he replies, "Uhhh... the Operating System?". He kept this up, trying to make me feel like a complete idiot for asking these questions... then when I was about to purchase something he walked off. I then wait 20 minutes, and buy the Transformer, as I wasn't allowed to demo the iPad 3. (seriously?)

I hate those places with a passion, and as a deaf guy I constantly get people just leaving me without any help after I mention for the third time to speak the fuck up. I wish I had an Apple store here, maybe buying things in a store would be more enjoyable :(
You should not use SQLite in production.
They're trying to compare typical buying experiences. The typical place one buys an Apple laptop is in an Apple store, or Apple-designed section of another store. Sony laptops are much more often sold in the section with the crappy hodgepodge of Windows laptops that any electronics store has.
Who would write these perfect programs?
Icon or its descendant Unicon might be worth a look, then.
It amazes me how non-Apple phones are sold just about everywhere I go. I often go to check them out, and it's a plastic shell with a sticker for a screen. The shortsightedness of this sales approach is astounding. It's not even that this is a particularly ingenious move by Apple, it's just common sense.
> I suspect ken spends most of his time thinking rather than
> typing, and I have found this to be true of most great
> hackers.

Who cares? Slow input is still not a desirable property in a text editor.
I don't think political trolling is needed on HN.

There are plenty of other places on the internet to make controversial personality politics statements.
I have been playing with WebRTC but the API for the data channel is yet to be implemented or available in any of the browser. Currently only MediaStream and PeerConnection has been implemented in Chrome.
No, really, secure boot does add security
Much as I hate to stray this far from the topic at hand, AIDS turned out to be a much, much smaller deal than the alarmists of the 1980s would have had you believe. Not that it wasn't worth being concerned about, researching, and educating people about, but y'know what the death toll from AIDS is in the United States nowadays? Forty per million per year.

While that's still an order of magnitude above "lightning strike" it's below, say, Hepatitis C or many hundreds of other diseases that get less press.
Yeah, I suspect that the other doesn't have this problem either.
Lessons from the Failure of Readability’s Author Payment Plan
both products can be bought anywhere including the internet. the main reason branded stores exist at all is the appearance and controlling the experience, engaging with the customer in an environment where the only competing products are of their own brand. bestbuy type stores work the opposite way: fill it with lots of products of various brands and prices so anybody can walk out with something and the staff can redirect the client to the competition at any time. btw sony sections in the tv dept of many markets are also better looking.
Flash has been X86_64 compatible for a while now...

sh-4.2$ rpm -q flash-player
flash-player-11.2.202.236-91.1.x86_64

(rpm query on openSUSE Tumbleweed)

sh-4.2$ file /usr/lib64/browser-plugins/libflashplayer.so
/usr/lib64/browser-plugins/libflashplayer.so: ELF 64-bit LSB shared object, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, stripped
I like Ash and his approach to lean but this recent post feels like overkill. The lean canvas (based on the business development model) was meant to simplify planning and decision making, not make it complex and time consuming.

http://sparknlaunch.wordpress.com/2012/03/05/another-way-to-...
Dropbox stopping Public folders on new accts after July 31st
Just received this email from them:

We wanted to let our developers know about an upcoming change to the Public folder for all user accounts. In April, we launched the ability to share any file or folder in your Dropbox with a simple link. This new sharing mechanism is a more generalized, scalable way to support many of the same use cases as the Public folder.

After July 31, we will no longer create Public folders in any new Dropbox accounts. If your app depends on Public folders, we recommend switching to the /shares API call. Public folders in existing accounts, however, will continue to function as before.

Please email us at api-program@dropbox.com if you have any questions or concerns.

- Dropbox API Team
May be it is time for nokia to get out of mobile business.this is bad
Relevant API:

https://www.dropbox.com/developers/reference/api#shares
Examples of concurrent server design in Python
Yeah, that's exactly what Marx advocates.
I wonder--will new users after the cutoff be able to just create a folder named Public in their Dropbox root, and have it act semantically like a Public folder does now? I've deleted my Public folder before, and after recreating it it's still "the" Public folder.
Actually, the study found that static languages were worse. They tested students on two problems. In one there was no significant difference, and in the other the static language performed worse.

Here is that study: "An Experiment About Static and Dynamic Type Systems", by Stefan Hanenberg, University of Duisberg-Essen, 2010.

http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/cse590n/10au/...

However, they didn't use existing languages; they created a brand new language and IDE that had a typed and untyped variant. Whether this confounds or strengthens the case is unclear to me.

In any case, I think any survey of static type systems that doesn't include a language with type inference is very flawed. Java's type system is an annoyance in the small, and is a mixed bag in the large. Haskell's type system is a totally different story.
No, it's there. It's just so ingrained most people don't notice it. Insults like that are almost always targeted at the target directly or the women around them. That's because society places women on a weaker level. Also notice the emphasis on fat and ugly. It implies that if a woman isn't pretty she isn't to be valued. In terms of misogyny in our society, it fairly mild. However, it still qualifies because it exploits the general power imbalance.
Well, it is somewhat relevant to Forbes, since Best Buy has been giving all the indicators of following Circuit City into oblivion and Forbes has commented about it recently. The Apple Store (and Sony Store) is a contrast in how a well tuned, specialized store is better at selling the same product compared to a big box.
Which is interesting, considering how long the Big Box retail scene has been considered the death of small independent shops. (Cue Elton John singing about the Circle of Life..)

The Best Buy in my neighborhood is more convenient by about 90m than the Apple Store. But I generally refuse to go to Best Buy for anything that I can't find on a pegboard, like cables or a USB drive. Everything else, I get random unavailability, clueless salespeople, and a really strange mildew smell from the upholstery.

Smells like doom, really.
On the other hand, a designer that has no knowledge of HTML or CSS can open doors that you may have never considered, even if it involves more work.
I agree: I've moved to the US and the Apple stores here are AWESOME. Staff on hand, everything laid out well - they even encourage you to try out Facetime. Also, the free trainings they offer are actually very useful.

An Apple Store in New Zealand (and possibly other places) would do wonders for the brand - I only switched to Mac after a visit to the US. The next-best-thing we had in Auckland was MagnumMac - it was OK but it was no Apple Store.
Ask HN: Why don't more laptops have 3G/4G?
I'm quite tired of carrying dongles, and even phone based hotspots. Chrome books have cellular data plans, but they aren't good enough yet for programming and design.

I wonder why MacBook Air's don't have a 3G or 4G card inbuilt ala the iPad where I can choose to get a cellular connection when I want.

Wondering if someone has some insight on why this is not in the interest of companies, or hard to do, or some other reason.
You can find sales figures on the site, so it should be easy to extrapolate from there.

Note that until you've made a lot of sales, Envato takes almost 50% as commission.
It would be trivial to run Android apps on Meego. With Windows Phone, Nokia tied its fate to a product that has been on the market for some time and failed to gain attention. And it still fails.
You can say the same about just any other politician. They all made (and make) mistakes and stumble. The key is how history judges them. In the case of Reagan I think history is pretty clear about what he accomplished and what he didn't. Notice I said "I think" because that's just my opinion; everyone is entitled to one. Informed opinions are not embarrassing. Waving your arms and pushing your own absolutes on other people however can be quite so.
In 1983, 24 years before starting work on Go. That's a lot of time to fall behind on new research.
Now there's an interesting idea. Las Vegas has many things going for it as a potential tech hub, including a large metro area, dirt-cheap real estate, a lax attitude towards regulation, easy access to the big west-coast hubs, and no shortage of ways for the young and single to keep themselves entertained. What it doesn't have is an intellectual atmosphere (now there's an understatement) or a critical mass of smart people (if I move there, are my friends gonna be croupiers and strippers?).

Of all the cities mentioned in this thread, I like Las Vegas best as the next Austin (if not the next San Francisco).
Reality Check: Congress and banks privatizing profit and socializing risk
Ten Premium Wordpress Theme Giveaway
RDS or MySQL - Ten Use Cases
Vizio Announces no-bloatware Ultrabooks and Notebooks
but from what we're seeing, programmers dont want the entire thing generated

Actually for developers like myself there's several use cases where having access to the complete generated source would be awesome:

1. Separate the positioning/layout styles and the color/font/design styles into separate CSS files. That way I can include all the designs created with Easel easily instead of copy/paste one at a time for each element generated.

2. For showing a mockup to a client or knocking out quick interface for a side project using absolute positioning can be acceptable.
This is true, I should have said "it's not mature".
Photoshop is needed for anything beyond a simple design.
> a well tuned, specialized store is better at selling the same product compared to a big box.

are there some numbers to support that? I mean, f.ex. no of macbook pro and sony bravia or xbox sold in the supermarkets vs sold in brands' stores? I always get the feeling that such stores exist to keep appearances and attract new customers, not to work as a main selling point. selling 20 laptops through bestbuy is probably way cheaper and quicker than selling 20 laptops through it's own store.
Changing the User Agent, a New Google Chrome Feature
Antibody cocktail cures monkeys of Ebola
How is this useful? I can edit colors, border radius, box shadow, line height, font, positioning, and alignment in real time on a real HTML mockup using Firebug, webkit developer tools, even the Internet Explorer F12 tools.

Web design mockups that include these things should be done in HTML and CSS. WYSIWYG editors are crippling for professionals and poison for amateurs.
You can do a hell of a lot with a 10-15 person team. Unless you're consulting your company can grow much faster than your team.
In my country, Uruguay, college education used to be completely free.

That is unsustainable, so recently a new law passed, which makes all public university graduates pay a special tax, which starts five years after graduation, and depends on the length of the career (4-year degrees pay less, 5-year degrees a bit more and so on).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Uruguay

Fortunately, college debt is not something people have to consider when enrolling their children. Sustaining them through university, however, is not cheap (and public university is structured in a way that makes working unfeasible).

Not everything is a bed of roses, however... it's constantly underfunded and goes on strike lots of times.
I find it interesting how MIT's video player is really poor. Video stops playing every minute or so. Terrible buffering. Irony..?
Yes, I skipped the detail that Japanese addresses in Latin scripts are written the other way around. SCSL's address in native script as quoted on their webpage is 東京都品川区東五反田3-14-13 高輪ミューズビル (ie Tokyou-to Shinagawa-ku Higashigotanda 3-14-3 Takanawa Muuze biru).
Eating For Energy - Raw Food Diet For Weight Loss Review | Ebook and Softwere
Eating For Energy - Raw Food Diet For Weight Loss Review - Eating with regard to energy evaluation: You’ve in all probability heard the actual expression, “You tend to be what you eat”. Yuri Elkaim brings this time around house by displaying us which uncooked foods are the best to help heal a person within and out, using the guide Consuming For Power.
"because I want to freakin' kill this kid at least three times a day"

Nice. I just don't relate to this.
I think you just nicely reiterated my response to the OP, thanks.
Facebook promotion around 20 times better than Adwords?
Then why are you claiming you've done _anything_. There is literally _nothing_ new here - you're telling me stateful web apps are your invention?
The "Make me pretty" section doesn't render properly for me under Firefox 13.0 on Arch Linux, but it looks right in Chromium. Here's what it looks like in Firefox:

http://oi46.tinypic.com/29ptdtk.jpg
Attack the Block’s Joe Cornish To Direct Cyberpunk Classic Snow Crash