skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's been some time since Apple shipped the X11 package by default. You've had to download it yourself. They're not saving anything by removing it from people's computers
> What rate could you have charged them in the middle of that for credibly offering a fix?

Plenty of course. But the odds that such person exists outside their organization is nil. The world's top programming expert would take more than 45 minutes to assess the issue. (I'm assuming that cutting off power wasn't an option.)
Cherry pick? Apple has a long history of removing what most users don't use. RS-232, Centronix ("printer"), FireWire, VGA, Ethernet, and various other ports have all been dropped over time. Floppy (both 5.25" & 3.5"), CD, DVD, and probably other media (escaping me) support gone. Blu-ray in effect dropped before even included. Likewise, various software support has been eradicated over time as use dwindled to more-hassle-than-it's-worth status. When dropped, everything still was available those needing it, provided by easy/cheap add-ons & installs. Users do well to wean off HyperCard, X11, and other things which cling to a double-digit past.

Contrast that with the Dell box on my desk right now, which still has every physical port mentioned above, plus 2 PS/2 (!!!) plugs, an eSATA port, and an I-don't-know-what; the software running thereon (Windows) will _still_ run darned near everything I've accumulated over the last 30 years. ..._WHY_ do I want to run darned near everything I've accumulated over the last 30 years?

No wonder this two-cubic-foot boat anchor has a Geekbench score lower than a barely-there MacBook Air.
I would state more explicitly that these letters are hand-written by a human, not using a hand-written font or hand written samples. i think there is a lot of gray area when something is claimed to be "hand written" and i would want to be sure, in no uncertain terms what I am buying. It is nice that you include a sample but I've seen computer generated snailmail spam that looks as realistic.
+1. <black humor>Next time they remove Dropbox because it might be a conflict of interest with iCloud. And then...</black humor>
Startups Worry that Twitter and Facebook Are Blocking Their Way
Searching For Narratives of Success
No, he said that he thought there was no chance it would clear. He said that he imagined the phone call from the bank to tell him that the cheque was nonsense.

I don't know if that's enough to avoid fraud.

In England he'd have to pay back the cash, and any interest earned on the cash, and he'd have to have good lawyers to get off any criminal charges. I think; IANAL etc.
Removing the floppy drive and ethernet ports have clear and straightforward benefits, though. Removing software, less so.
another suggestion - put the sample right on your FAQ page.
It's a good thing. X11 has joined Flash and Java in the ranks of "stuff third parties maintain".

RSS removal is a different animal. Statistically speaking, no one used it (except you and me of course) but 10 minutes of app shopping and I've got a better solution running. Much better.
At £111 for a Kindle, this doesn't surprise me very much.

I'm a teenager, but I'm surprised that my non-technical mother is using eBooks on our family BlackBerry PlayBook.

I guess the era of the eBook has come, if she is using it.
My experience: My current OS install dates back to Leopard, which was installed on my MacBook Pro back when I purchased it in 2009. I've upgraded to each subsequent OS X release since then, and maintained a development environment utilizing X11 (for gnuplot) the entire time.

It is my understanding that the X11 included with OS X was actually a snapshot of XQuartz at the time of OS release, so the config data is in line with what XQuartz expects. In the Unixy bits, OS X upgrades are a lot like other Unix-like operating systems in that package operations remove the application, but not the configuration.

After installing XQuartz, gnuplot continues to run just like it did under previous versions of OS X. I simply ran the XQuartz installer and got back to work.
Demonoid busted by Ukrainian authorities.
It depends. I have used my iPad for completely frevious purposes and to read great books (and HN).
Curiosity: Monitoring Execution of Space Craft Flight Software
As long as it's possible to install the technical apps, I don't really care whether they ship with the system. I don't imagine many technical users would care, although I could be wrong. You never got a compiler with Mac OS X without downloading and installing one separately, and many other tools people like to use have to be downloaded separately too.
From what I last understand, VxWorks, being an actual RTOS, has faster and more consistent latency rates than any Linux embedded system.

For systems which require a guaranteed response time, such as advanced robotics, this is a major deal-breaker.
Thumbprint readers stir fears in Venezuela vote
good idea - thanks for the feedback!
State #38: "Done"
> The Terminal was always limited, copy and pasting text in it was non standard, there was no default repository for ports or applications. And no matter how many cores or how much RAM I threw at it, it would beachball when copying and pasting from one terminal to another using the default app on Mac OS X.

I stopped taking the author seriously around this point: the lack of package management outside of the App Store is a serious problem but the other two distractions are signs that he's either misconfigured his system or is doing something crazy like pasting data files rather than using pbcopy / pbpaste.

For long-time users, this is a minor change and actually a good move: there were only a couple of releases where we didn't have to install XQuartz anyway to get performance or features which weren't available in the shipped version. Since this affected only a very, very small number of generally more technical Mac users I'm not surprised that Apple is moving it back outside of the default release cycle.
I do agree, I think the ideal software platform will be an OSS OS, and a healthy ecosystem of both proprietary and OSS on top.
Couldn't you just run VirtualBox on your MacBook Pro?
It depends on how one defines slow. Curiosity's onboard computer is 100x faster than the previous two Mars rovers, and has twice as much ram. But that's only 200MHz and 256MB respectively.

With the exception of Sojourner, the first rover successfully placed on Mars, all Mars rovers have run VxWorks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_embedded_computer...
Your comment only makes sense if we accept the assertion that most of the patents in question are for real inventions, and not for trivial design decisions that never should have been patentable in the first place.
Facebook’s ad product guru to advise NY big data startup Sociocast
If you've ever read a book called "Influence: The Art of Persuasion" [1] you'll recall a story about a store that sold rocks in New Mexico. The woman who owned the store was trying to offload all of her turquoise during peak tourist season, so she set the price a lot lower than normal. Although this was the most popular sell typically, fewer people started buying thus having the reverse effect of what she wanted. She relocated the stones' showcase to the front and center of the store. Sales plummeted further.

As she left for a short vacation, she left a note for one of her employees to drop the price to half of what it already was, and at least try to make a little bit of money back. But the employee misread the note and accidentally doubled the price of the turquoise. By the time the store owner got back, the rocks had sold out, at DOUBLE the price.

The store owner contacted the author of the book, a psychologist (I forget why) and he explained the reasoned this may have happened. Most of her customers were affluent and wealthy tourists who had been under the subconscious impression that you get what you pay for. When they saw high-priced stones, they knew that they were getting quality stones, at least that's what they had been led to believe through years of dealings.

This is why this guy's experiment will work and is a great idea. He is probably no more skilled than many of the hackers on here, but he stands out with his exorbitant price tag and some companies figure, 'hey, you get what you pay for.' This is especially true in the business world. So regardless of the fact he may not be worth it, or may not possess superior abilities, if he is getting the money which I hypothesize he will, more power to him.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Busine...
And it's back up now. :)
For anyone who loves to get an insight into the intellectual intricacies how another industry (in this case, law) works, this is a fantastic read.
"Basically to protect privacy. ... I personally am against these laws"

But if there weren't these laws, surely every time you use the phone to anyone (e.g. your wife), you'd have to treat everything you say as if it were public. Because the other party could be recording you and could then make the recording public, and there'd be nothing you could do about it.

Surely that's not a thing you'd want?
That ad is from 2002. X11 didn't ship with Mac OS X until 2003. Either they never believed in the spirit of that advertisement and the whole thing was a sham, or built-in X11 support isn't actually necessary for it.
I'm not him/her, but I've experienced this on Linux sometimes. It's not something you can fix as the site owner, I think.
Sleepless? Try setting a go-the-fuck-to-sleep alarm.
4 Reasons to Get a Dental PPO Plan
If you're lost in a sea of dental insurance quotes, don't panic. Sure, it can feel like finding the right dental coverage is like pulling teeth (so to speak!), but you can make things a whole lot easier on yourself by skipping everything else and heading straight for a PPO.
I'm seeing the same thing, running chromium 18 on ubuntu.
Apple went to great lengths to get OS X validated as a full-on UNIX. To what degree do developers in general confuse UNIX itself with good-riddance mis-associations therewith which cause unnecessary friction against modern development? (Can we drop vi already? fine paradigm unto itself, but counter to any other 21st-century UI...)
Carriers blame the iPhone for data caps and increased upgrade fees
I'm not sure that it is as much this way anymore.

You are required to have direct deposit where I work and I only write checks to individuals or to businesses that don't accept debit/credit card transactions.

This story took place in 1995. Some things have changed in the last 17 years.
I'm curious, what do you have problems with? For me it's been smooth sailing since around 10.5 or so - and the only OSS problems were with projects which assumed everyone would use Linux with a certain version of GCC & autotools.
Credit card fees aren't onerous, not here in Denmark at least, I think Finland has a similar deal.

Credit cards are issued by your bank, you pay one yearly fee, 175DKK around 30USD. More often than not the bank will give you a VISA debit card for free, or a Master Card with 30.000DKK limit, no interest if you pay the debt of each month (The bank will do the transfer from your account for free, assuming that you have the money of cause).

Paying bills online: Free
Domestic bank transfer: Free
Credit card / debit card: Free or fixed fee
Getting a check made out: Pretty expensive
Can you print a company logo (ours not yours) on it if you do the subscription?
Good step in the right direction. Now we need the same thing for JavaScript.
Visas come up short for entrepreneurs
I agree that linear ordering is a fallacy. But the fact that I kept slipping into it is probably deliberate, if often subconscious.

Part of that is just to make it flow better: The art of explanation is to choose one clear line of pursuit and gloss over the complications. But I think there's a more important reason: The real world is multidimensional, but feelings of inadequacy are not. When I'm feeling good about myself I can recognize that there is no one true scale on which two people can be compared. But when I'm depressed and I think about smart people I just see a bunch of folks who are "more talented".

Depression messes with one's mind, to snap oneself out of it is not always possible (save your life, see a counselor) and when it's possible the mental trick that is required is different for everyone. The "by which arbitrary yardstick?" gambit is one such trick. My essay above is an expression of a different gambit.

(In other words, my rhetorical characterization of the various arguments as "weak" and "strong" versions of a single argument is also a false linear ordering. ;) Oh, the things we do for rhetoric.)
NASA unveiled their Mars Rover Landing game for XBOX+Kinect very recently:

* http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/video/index.cfm?id=1094

* http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Product/Mars-Rover-Landing...
Niche Case Study [Part 2] Unconventional Advice For Finding A Niche
Personally, I don't think I'll buy many ebooks from Amazon or B&N in the next few years at least. Not after I've discovered that all your purchases can be permanently deleted from your account with two clicks each.
For now I'll stick with paper books and maybe some newest releases only in ebook format and see where the trends are going.
At least Valve don't do such things and their games will be with me as long as Valve exists.
Great post, can't upvote enough. I didn't start at 12 either. I didn't start at 18 even. At 18 I did try my hand at some qbasic - I tried to reverse engineer that gorilla game with the bananas and the wind. I also wrote a couple scripts for MajorMud, so I could "play" even when I was asleep and at work.

That aside, I didn't even go to college until I was 26 and it was for Biochemistry. That was too hard for my weak little brain, so I switched to CS (which wasn't much easier tbh, but it was a bit, for me at least).

I graduated when I was nearing 31, and at that point had only been programming seriously (internship) for a year.

I'm not that great still, but only been out of college since early 2009, but at least posts like this give me hope that I can be more than passable.
My favourite one is "Cruise stage separation complete. So long & thanks for all the navigation."
Too purpley.
Oh I meant fees to the recipient, There's a law in the US that requires CC merchants to charge the same price as they would with cash payment (for most goods; some, like gas, have special exemptions), so when you pay X dollars by credit card the merchant receives less than X dollars.
"the principle that nothing is impossible and that where
there's a will there's a way"

from Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler
WebGL is based on OpenGL ES, not OpenGL. (ES here stands for "embedded systems") Concurrently with OpenGL 4.3, Khronos also released OpenGL ES 3.0, the update for the spec which can reasonably expected to guide a later version of WebGL. On my reading, OpenGL ES 3.0 does not seem to require a comparable level of data safety.

The security aspects of the interaction between GPU code and HTML clients are all well-addressed by the current WebGL spec. Which particular concerns are you talking about?

One possibility where the new OpenGL 4.3 requirements might help is in current desktop WebGL implementations which translate WebGL (which is OpenGL ES) to OpenGL (the desktop). But WebGL is sometimes translated to OpenGL, sometimes to Direct3D via ANGLE, sometimes to OpenGL ES directly. Finally, relatively few desktop drivers actually implement the latest OpenGL spec anyway; OS X does not even have OpenGL 4.2 yet, despite being out for a long while now.

All this is to say that 1) I don't believe the new requirements will have no immediate impact on WebGL security and 2) WebGL buffer security is a non-issue (whether WebGL clients crash the video drivers or not is a different story).
Many prepaid plans don't offer any handsets. You need to bring your own and just buy a SIM card. The whole practice of capping the bandwidth is rather crooked, but it exits all the same even on the contract plans.
Newbie guide to common lisp
My Experience Using Spinto for a Quick WYSIWYG Site
Oh that's weird, as I run Ubuntu myself. Will download Chromium and have a look, see if I can replicate it.
I smell applause lights. Property ownership and democracy are entirely different concepts.

Right. You can have democracy without property ownership. However, property ownership and Liberty are inextricably entangled. You can't be free if you can't have a high degree of control of the fruits of your labor.
yes, we have had some customers who want the letter hand-written on their own company letterhead. We do this for the Author plan or higher. Send me an email: mike@epistly.com if you have any questions.
You can install minimal (mini or server) then add just what you want when you want it.

And yes, you've always been able to build your own distros with as much or as little as you like.
It very much depends on which locality you are in. In plenty of places it is legal to own locksmithing tools. You can find many videos of lockpicking on youtube.
Samsung announces Galaxy Note 10.1 with 2GB RAM & a 1.4GHz quad-core processor
Or really powerful lasers for vaporizing debris in orbit. :)
Apple v Samsung: Rights and Wrongs
Are there equivalent surveys for Haskell / Erlang / other functional languages?

Why is Clojure the only community that does this?
To code or not to code?
It actually always came on the install media up until very recently.
Also: because humility isn't just beneficial when you're talking to a genius.

I've regretted being brash or self-promoting fairly regularly, but I have yet to regret being humble.

Though admittedly this may be related to the low sample size of the latter.
Exploitation of Windows Kernel Intel 64-Bit Mode Sysret Privilege Escalation
Meet Ozon.ru: The Amazon.com of Russia
HNpod 5 - Google Fiber, Meteor Funding, Craigslist Experiment
>> to all css rules not understood by the browser

I don't get it. It seems like you're saying, "if it supports the -moz prefix, it's FireFox, therefore I know that it doesn't support X and needs -mox-X."

But that requires you to separately know that the browser doesn't support X - the very thing this is trying to solve.

It's much simpler to say "if it supports X, use it." If the browser releases a new version that supports X, you don't have to do anything for those users to get the benefit.

Did I misunderstand you?
In the Netherlands the use of cheques is abolished in 2002. We all use internet banking now, using (at least) two-factor authentication, and we are able to transfer money from and to our current or savings accounts. Transferring money to other bank accounts (paying rent, paying to friends etc.) is also very easy.

Most banks also have mobile applications for smartphones making money transfer even easier. I'm able to transfer money to people I've already sent money to, by just using an iPhone app, and a personal pin code. When I loose my phone, I can just block the app, just like what I'd do when I loose my plastic (credit) bank card.

In Holland we also use iDEAL [1], a nation-wide system for online shopping. It works a little bit like OAuth; I provide the webshop the bank I use, the webshop requests a money transfer, the bank creates a unique transaction, the webshop sends me to the bank, bank requests credentials and processes payment, and sends me back to the webshop proving details about the transaction. This system sounds much more secure to me than the credit card paradigm; only using a credit card number, an expiration date and a 'security code'.

I just don't understand why the USA is still using a method so susceptible to fraud.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEAL
Scala and Hadoop: Hand in Hand at Twitter
JavaScript already has this, no? Just check to see if a function is typeof undefined.
I believe the confusion between '500,000 lines' in the question vs '2.5 million/3.5 million' in the answers is the context.
The 500,000 number is involved in the entry, descent, and landing (EDL) process specifically, and the rover systems are millions overall.
Not sure why the values are 1m different, but the 2.5m citation is what is in the linked PDF.
Oh yes, you're right on that part. Denmark have a "Dankort" a national debit card, you can't charge a fee on that, but you could on other cards, but most stores don't.
Interview with an Adware Author [2009]
Smallsats Growing In Utility
As an aside, their Twitter account mentions that it was an observatory in Australia that was relaying the signals from Mars:

http://twitter.com/MarsCuriosity/status/232337630711382017

As it happens, it was an Australian observatory that relayed the first video of Armstrong walking on the moon. There was a fun movie made (made by the D-Generation/Working Dog guys) based on that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dish
This was developed for Datadog, yes. But Pup works fully stand-alone and is completely open-source - so you can take whatever you want / need from it.

Pup has a narrower scope than Graphite (which we also use and love), but optimizes for shortest time to app metrics viz.

(Oh and Datadog itself is all free up to 5 hosts - but remains completely optional)
So much programming language research in the past 40 years, but C is, no doubt, still king.
True, forgot about that, since it was almost always out of date and not worth using. In any case, it didn't get installed by default, so I think the point still stands.
I'm sorry I don't understand the scam. How did they make the cashier believe the newspaper was actually cash?
>Apple has a long history of removing what most users don't use.

Apple has a long history of removing what they think users shouldn't use.
How does hg know where to push to? (honest question)
Offensive Countermeasures Help Defenders Fight Back
The main problem with mlm companies
There’s no data from previous years to compare this to, but whatever the curve of growth of Leiningen, technomancy & co. deserve a ton of credit for shaving the yaks and herding the cats to build it up into what it has become today. People’s everyday Clojure experience is greatly enhanced by the get-out-of-the-way approach taken by Leiningen, and I think we’re all better off for it.

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! Phil Hagelberg (a.k.a technomancy and a fellow HN'er) has done (along with many others) has done a great job of providing a great stack to start working with Clojure. From emacs-starter-kit to clojure-mode to smooth integration with leiningen, all Clojure enthusiasts and developers alike save so much in yak-shaving.

Someday perhaps I will get a chance to say thank you in person, but allow me to start here - Great job guys, and thank you!
A Horse Named Gizmondo: The Inside Story of the World's Greatest Failed Console