skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, owner of that site is quite pessimistic (even alarmist, one might say) about what goes on in the world. Still, it doesn't hurt to at least think about this kind of danger and how to face/avoid it. As for risks like heart diseases or car accidents, most people are aware of guidelines to avoid them, or at least minimize risks (healthy lifestyle, research into weaknesses running in one's own family, driving carefully or using alternate means of transportation, etc.), even if many do not follow them out of laziness or convenience.
Like I said, the site needs to be taken with a grain of salt, but there are some hidden gems there.
In a word Amber, yes, of course you are right to feel violated. Apple removed your data without your consent. The fact that you were able to recover it is impressive, and far beyond the ordinary user.

The fact that you are in the minority because you used a tool and technology (RSS) that is passe if not unpopular, should be no excuse to ignore this kind of treatment. That feed collection was your data, and Apple had no right to remove it or make it inaccessible.

The correct behavior would have been to replace the RSS reader component with a button that a) explains what happened, and b) offers a path to save your data (perhaps a data export or even a link to a MacAppStore app). It would have been particularly slick for Apple to partner with a 3rd party RSS reader to support automatic "cross-grading".

This is not a hard problem, and the fact that Apple didn't even think to solve it is, in fact, disheartening. Hopefully you (and everyone affected by this) will get an apology from them and some sort of redress.
How does "signed applications" work - Apple first approves your company? I didn't know about the signed applications, but I am not sure how it changes the gist of it, Apple controlling what gets installed.

Apps leaving the App store - we'll see how that will play out. Who still develops apps for "classcial" computers anyway?
From the LinkedIn profile of the guy who implemented Safari RSS:

Social-Software Introvert

Apple, Inc.

February 2004 – January 2008 (4 years)

Part of a very small team that implemented the news-reading (RSS/Atom) features of the Safari browser in Mac OS X 10.4, and the public news-reading framework for 10.5, used by Mail and 3rd party applications as well as Safari. I also prototyped some wild and crazy social-software applications I can't talk about here, and researched technologies like social networking, P2P, identity systems, and delta encoding.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/jensalfke

Obviously there's noone at Apple picking up the slack that Jens Alfke left behind. He's stated repeatedly on his blog that Apple is decidedly not a social software company. Which is ultimately the reason why they removed these features. The reason is not that "RSS is the past" bullshit.
"they are even content with 10%"

Nonsense.
You didn't read the article carefully. What would it matter if she made a backup? The data was in a proprietary format squirreled away in a random file and only a period-appropriate utility let her pull it out. She should be thankful, I suppose, that Apple didn't actually delete this database. RSS feed files can get quite large.

But your reaction is a powerful anecdote about the existing narratives around Apple. People tend to treat Apple like this powerful paternal figure. Father knows best, and so unless you are personally smacked down by Father than you tend to defer to him.

In reality, Apple handled this poorly but people will use the "none > bad" logic. Can you imagine if Google closed down Reader and didn't offer an export format in Takeout? But that's because there is a narrative around Google "not getting humans" even though their entire business is understanding your preferences.
As someone who owns both an iPhone 4S and a Galaxy Nexus, I can't possibly bring myself to believe that Apple is going to continue making outsized profits in the cell phone market. The Galaxy Nexus is just too good a competitor; Android has gotten so much better. Maybe Apple will find a way to reinvent the smart phone again (a la MBA or iPad to laptop). Barring that, I don't see how they can maintain their dominance.

Profits are what matters, naturally, but I think market share is the writing on the wall here.

So it goes. Company innovates and offers a wonderful new product, makes ridiculous profit, is shamelessly/lovingly ripped off, loses edge, has to come up with the next big thing or die. The story of free enterprise since forever. This time isn't different.
Something I don't understand - what does an API actually offer?

Right now, I download a zip file containing a bunch of csv files. Then:

$ unzip filename.zip

$ ipython -pylab
import pandas
sum_data = read_csv("atussum_2011.dat")

adult_indices = where(logical_and(sum_data[:]['TEAGE'] >= 18, sum_data[:]['TEAGE'] <= 65))[0]
...

How does an API benefit me? Having done plenty of work with json APIs, I can't see how it could possibly be easier than this.
I expect an OS to mostly stay out of my way and let me do stuff. If an upgrade is going to damage my stuff in some way it's the most minimal of courtesy to warn me and give me options.
I don't understand why startups would come here versus AngelList or other platforms. The $1K minimum practically guarantees a poor quality investor pool.

Just think for a moment about how conservative an investor has to be in order to (1) qualify as accredited (millionaire or very well paid) while (2) still being unwilling to part with more than $1K.

One of the problems that entrepreneurs have with sites like these is the noise - the folks who like to call themselves "angels" but only invest a random $5K once every year or two. They are more likely to waste your time with numerous questions and less likely to ultimately invest.
Castle meet Cannon: What to do after you lose?
If you do not have Mountain Lion yet,

brew install proctools
The bbc has great coverage at http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/olympics/2012/live-video. UK only, but I sure that won't stop you.
I won't dispute the utility and versatility of UNIX tools, but your comment that "nearly everything we use today is Unix" is wildly off the mark. According to the following article, it's estimated that Windows is installed on 36% of servers and 92% of desktop systems: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...
Nearlies - Your Specialist
Discover The Nearlies.

Nearlies is a way to find the best Schools, Banks, Hospitals, Shopping Malls, Super Markets and Hotels which lies near to your home or office.

- http://www.nearlies.com/
The Cube certainly had more personality than the US NBC announcers.
Whoa! Fight the power, brother!

Apple is enforcing application signatures on the Mac because it's the Right Thing To Do security-wise. Rather than get stuck in a monthly patch-churn cycle like Microsoft is, endlessly releasing Windows fixes for all the sieve-like security holes in every last system library in their OS, Apple is choosing a better, safer, saner way. Vet all the third-party code that runs on the system, or at least force a certificate trail back to abusive or unscrupulous developers.

If you want to run untrusted software on OS X, good for you. Turn off GateKeeper. But requiring developer signatures on native executable code as the default makes too much sense. Arguing otherwise, when there's an easy way for 'power users' to turn off the protection, is elevating the rights of the lazy developer to distribute their code however they like over the rights of non-technical users to enjoy an uncomprimised computer.
FaceTime still doesn't do Audio-only though. Or group conversations. Hardly a replacement.
brew install $YOUR_WEBSERVER_OF_CHOICE
Congratulations. You are now what's called a "power user". That means your argument is invalid, because normal users don't know what RSS is. Normal users don't need RSS. RSS is dead. (Obviously nobody has any detailed studies on this, us software devs just assume that the general user is a blithering idiot who needs regular reminders to remember breathing)

/s
Yes. I have played with many js frameworks, including derby, meteor, tower, and several more while attempting to build my toy app http://retr.us . While it is built in meteor, I have concluded that I liked socketstream the best because of the level of control, especially on the server side. It also was the easiest to write unit tests for.
"One would hope that his education background might have given him some insight into what "slope" was, and how to best explain it to someone in the 8th/9th grade."

That leap you made there at the end of your sentence is the crux of the issue. Most educators argue that being an expert in a subject is not even remotely sufficient qualification to teach it effectively, especially to children.
I would love to see a video of the actual talk. I have searched for it multiple times but I couldn't find anything.
Not good when your own designers are saying "too bad it looks like an iPhone". The Sony concept is interesting; it would be interesting to do a courtroom test (can the lawyers differentiate when the judge holds them up). I don't think it would e a problem with the original iPhone, but the iPhone 4 might be. Of course, Sony never created that product.
Apple removed it because more and more of their client apps are just desktop versions of iCloud. iCloud isn't getting RSS syncing anytime soon.
The point is not that security-people-hackers are off-topic, but that they are not the ones usually meant when talking about hackers on this site.
It was crappy for reading articles, but I had a few message feeds ("hey folks, everyone who wants to be notified about events x on server y subscribe here") which was really handy to have in his message inbox.
Particle physics needed the LHC. In particle physics, the fastest way to answer the question "are there new particles at higher energies?" is to collide particles at those higher energies. Also, $4.4 billion dollars isn't that much. For the price of Zynga and Instagram, you get to push out the limits of our understanding of the interactions of fundamental particles.
How are there no comments? This is the most hilarious blog post title I've seen in ages!
In case you might wonder why this doesn't get much conversation, or in case you're interested in the earlier discussion(s):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4121698

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4123480

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4124097

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4124645

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4125890

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4126185

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4126272

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4132025

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4132931 <- Many comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4133569

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4136126

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4159175

NVidia's response

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4136846

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4137000

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4141916 <- Many comments
I used it in mail, didnt need a separate app for it. Only problem was that it didnt sync, like I assume reeder does with google services
Sure, it is an absurd notion, notice my italics. But that's how people think, they want to know 'which is better'... or argue about it.

>> Nobody cares about one individual model "winning" over some other

The Internet begs to differ.
> the fact that Apple didn't even think to solve it is, in fact, disheartening

Probably Jobs would have caught it, his attention to such details was painful, probably both for him and the ones at the other end of the table.

Simplicity is an amazing difficult thing to get right. If you don't have the right man, well, just look at Gnome3's Unity or even at this incident: RSS removal could have easily been done in the name of "simplification" by someone who doesn't get it. The sad fact is that his supervisors didn't either.
I would also be interested to hear more.

500k a month in 30m pageviews implies he makes almost $17 per 1000 pageviews. I currently see two ads on his homepage, both large but for the same advertiser (an untargeted credit-card advert). I find it staggering people are selling ad-space at such a price unless it's highly targeted to a specific niche.
Cryptome Tracks the NYPD Ring of Steel [mp3]
Events Can Be Both Wonderful & Dangerous Places to Launch
I've been going through Create's profile trying to figure out if he's a crank, or just not a native speaker and overexcited. He seems like he's usually much more fluent, lucid and insightful. Still not 100% sure, but it's disappointing to see a hint of such interesting dissent, stated so invitingly cryptically, be casually dismissed and ridiculed.

I think he may have a legitimate point to discuss. This old comment of his gives a clue as to what he's on about:

"""Berner was looking at RPC as his dayjob to give control commands to machines. What Berner did, was to use the Interface Builder's precursor on the NeXT he got as a toy to put a gopher-like link into the text properties field, where the font boldness, size ...and colour and underline were. This was quite graphical programming, and not world-wide at the time (NeXT was an expensive toy). Hardly an innovation. And not everybody was allowed to toy around -- certainly not western equivalents.

Nobody has really heard of Groff, Pellow, Nielsen and the rest, who made it work multiplatform, over the command-line, etc. ie. world-wide. Nobody was astonished by them back then, because what they were doing was nothing special: several such systems existed already both commercial and academic. They were the cheap students, whose work allowed it to be opened up and given away without charge. WWW grew like it did because of two reasons: it was free of charge, because it was actually made by cheap and disposable students, and the then changing climate of the deregulation of the internet, of which some companies ie. Vermeer, Netscape could take early advantage of.

CERN likes cheap students' work, and sell if off as stellar examples of innovation by CERN. Read Facts and Mysteries in Elementary Particle Physics by Veltman if you feel to downvote this because of CERN."""

-- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4046835
Zoompf: Finding the slow to make you fast
The five 'reveals':

1. Apple’s early vision for the iPad [...] were extraordinarily chunky and included a kick-stand

2. Google told Samsung that its devices looked “too similar” to Apple’s iPad. Google demanded “distinguishable design vis-à-vis the iPad for the P3.”

3. Apple made 23 to 32 percent on gross margins for iPads sold between April 2010 and March 2012.

4. The iPhone design was inspired by a Sony designer talking about "portable electronic devices that lacked buttons and other ‘excessive ornamentation,’ fit in the hand, were ‘square with a screen’ and had ‘corners [which] have been rounded out"

5. Apple researches consumer sentiment on existing products in order to optimize future designs.
I don't agree with that; task parallelism is easier than data parallelism in an actor/CSP-based system, but both have their place. Take something like x264 -- task parallelism will not help it, unless you're encoding multiple videos at one time. But data parallelism (SIMD, in particular) is the reason it's the fastest encoder around.
To what extent might this be a self-fulfilling prophecy?
A long list of Jelly Bean voice commands for your Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 7
My problem with Mountain Lion, and Lion, and I cant rember if it were true with snow leopard, was that I needed to re-install all of my unix dev tools
I took seven minutes of video today of employees running around the opening day line at the new Apple Store Passeig de Gràcia. Seven minutes of video was 855 MB. It took me over two hours to upload seven minutes of video to youtube using the local DSL service.

When everybody can upload at non-braindead speeds, I'd expect some reddit-like site to pop up with a video commenting mechanism. Higher throughput decreases the amount of forethought you need before starting an upload and increases the time you can iterate over a heavy (space-wise) project/media/project/subject.
I like ack because I like the output format better.
I'm still hoping know the Higgs mass will lead to hover boards. I don't really believe it will, but I'm sure Maxwell never thought his work would lead to something like always-connected pocket computers. I don't begrudge spending the money at all, as there is little question that particle physics has massively impacted everybody's lives.

That said, we have limited amounts to spend on tese things (more limited than it should be!), so we should be asking, "What experiments help us learn the most?" when we spend it. We should not be asking, "What experiment will yield something I can sell?"
But everyone who have bought an iPhone have to buy a new iPhone one every two years, until they decide to switch platform.
And I'm the last person who uses the NetNewsWire desktop client. It's kind of buggy, and a better user interface would be nice, but it works well enough most of the time.
Related to this topic:
http://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/03/17/parallelism-...
Not that it is obvious in any way, but apparently you can still get the list of subscribed RSS feeds with the command-line tool "pubsub list".
If You've Had Success, You've Also Had Luck
:-) Not just the only user in the world that used RSS in Mail.app, but one of the few who uses Mail.app, period!

I have tried to use Mail.app (always with Gmail) many times, and have always gone back to use either the web interface, or more recently, Sparrow (R.I.P.).
> I don't understand what the article is about.

The article is pretty clear. She was using Mail app for rss feeds and the upgrade seemed to totally delete her rss feeds and her subscriptions. Mail app upgrade should have checked if the user has subscribed to RSS, and could have exported the feeds and subscriptions. The least the upgrade could have done to notify the user to manually export the feeds and subscriptions before going through the upgrade.

> Is she trolling for page views?

Trolling isn't defined as whatever you disagree with.

> Don't people make backups anymore?

Take backup of what? Taking a disk backup would have given her the proprietary on-disk blob which only Mail app could read, and now the Mail app refuses to do so.
Loads of apps that do this. Except they're all called "timers", not alarm apps.

https://play.google.com/store/search?q=timer&c=apps&...
OS X is proper UNIX®, so this sounds accurate.

Win32 command line utilities aren't really related to the DOS APIs in any way.
$ cd /web/folder
$ python -m SimpleHTTPServer

Free, already on your machine.
Is anyone else's Terminal.app crashing when trying to type "~" on an international keyboard layout?
I also read that Best Buy had people returning the Galaxy Tab because they had originally thought that it was the iPad.

Link: http://allthingsd.com/20120726/documents-in-apple-v-samsung-...

Now, of course one can say that the consumer should have paid more attention to the branding, but I think that's missing the point. It seems that for a few (?) people the Galaxy tab looked similar enough to the iPad to cause confusion and that the big box retailer conveyed the message to Samsung.
It is a combination of time and votes, with time decaying. The goal is that new comments can be seen but top voted comments wind up on top long-term.
Why education for Karachi slum-dwellers is a waste of time
The enscript command is gone though.
There have been a LOT of Forbes posts like this lately; I commented on one yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4303077 .
>What some developers fear is that down the road the two >specs will diverge in significant ways and HTML will become >a messy set of forked standards and varying browser support >that lands us back in the bad old days of IE 6

This is what I'm worried about myself, but I'd like to think that anyone involved with either parties would work together to ensure that it didn't.
Don't be stupid Google, if this guy is doing something this popular, it's going to continue happening whether you take him down or not. Acquire the little bastard and then figure out how to make it legal.
I had just finished implementing RSS on a website I was working for a client, making sure it worked for Safari, and that was yesterday.

=\
This must be killed RIGHT NOW.
There's a big difference between eliminating features and effectively eliminating existing user data around those features. At the least provide an export path. This was careless implementation, not design elegance.
So many people are missing the key point...it is never ok to to remove data without warning.
MerryMarry launches app for everyone invited to your wedding
Pop music too loud and all sounds the same: official
> The fact that you are in the minority because you used a tool and technology (RSS) that is passe if not unpopular, should be no excuse to ignore this kind of treatment.

It seems like just yesterday my NASA rocket scientist friend was asking me what this new-fangled RSS thing was. I explained, and his response was, "So they just reimplemented USENET?"
I feel you've perhaps read too far into what I wrote. The fact is that the vast majority of the population couldn't care less about education. The only reason they go to college at all is because they've been told that they won't be able to find a job without it.

With people like Zuckerberg, Jobs, and Gates frequently in the news as of late, people are starting to question those long-held beliefs. They see that people are successful without the education, despite what they've learned to not be true. The stigma of not going to college is starting to lift as a result. Knowing those famed people personally is completely irrelevant here.

If spending a couple of months reading up on Rails will get you a decent job, that's exactly what people will do. They really do not care about deep CS topics. They care about providing a decent home and comfortable living conditions. That is it.

I respect the academics, but you are as rare as the autodidacts.
That's a sad story, and one that's too common in our industry. Mental health issues in software are sadly under-discussed.

If you feel like making a difference I'd recommend donating to the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation. They fund studies into mental health disorders, an area of science that is still only vaguely understood.

http://bbrfoundation.org/
I know it's not like we are spread evenly across the country just Great Toronto Area (GTA) alone has over six million people out of a country of 34 million.

My small city in my small province has almost 50% of the entire population of the province in and around the one main capital city.

Clusters of people are in cities in fact I believe a few years ago Canada tipped past being a rural country to an urban one with more people in cities than in the country.

If anything you would think that would make it easier to supply mobile phone, TV and Internet service.
You know what still has RSS feed support? Windows Live Mail, the free MS email client. I don't think feeds will be dead anytime soon.
Obviously, it depends on how you define owning the consumer market.
Not exactly. They removed the feature but left the data behind. I assume they did this on purpose so it could be salvaged by the user if needed. I suspect Apple Support could have helped or perhaps third party RSS readers could look for the data and automatically import it. The only thing they could have done differently is to maybe do a runounce in Mail that tells the user RSS is gone, point them to a support KB article, and maybe point the user to the Mac App Store to search for RSS readers.
It looks like it's an in-house project at the Sunlight Foundation, by paid staff. The primary dev (going by GitHub checkins) seems to be Paul Tagliamonte, who is a Sunlight Foundation employee: http://sunlightfoundation.com/people/ptagliamonte/