skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That may be. But my point is that the standard that is being applied here is exactly what has been applied in hardware for decades, and what has been held up before legislators as exemplars of what patents are supposed to be for.

Incidentally I think that there was some ingenuity there. When Jacob Rabinow created the pull-button, he had been asked to improve a push-button tuner. (A review of the source informs me that when you pulled it had the station, not the volume. My bad. I have not seen one of these radios in decades...) His reason for switching is that he knew the problems with existing push-button tuners, and could design a better pull-button tuner. The manufacturer he invented it for did not want to accept it because nobody else was building them.

Incidentally the inventor of that was Jacob Rabinow. Take a glance at http://museum.nist.gov/exhibits/rabinow/patents.html to see all of his patents. Given how many inventions he had, he clearly did not spend long on each. But his claim would e that without the patent system he would have had no incentive to invent them, and would have worked on other stuff.

I'm not defending this either way. Merely stating the official view of what the patent system is supposed to have been for. (And my personal feelings are the other way.)
Especially given the recent fuss around Ouya, I wouldn't be all that surprised to see valve have a go at a high powered linux flavoured console.
Here's a low-level Countrywide loan officer that got 15 years in prison: http://www.fbi.gov/phoenix/press-releases/2012/former-countr...

Here's the ex-CEO of Countrywide getting his criminal investigation dropped after settling with the SEC for $67.5 million: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/02/19/criminal-investigatio...

I'm seeing a pattern here.
Based on how everything else works it would be simple enough for the "Save As" to basically "Duplicate and Save." You press it, give it a file name and you how have two windows. Don't know why Apple didn't do it this way.
"how many YC companies would not succeed without the alumni network acting as a network of customers and referrers."

I agree but this happens in time. First I need to start and show that it is possible to build successful internet companies without going to school. All of the information is available online.
Simple Passphrase Conundrum
In Lion, Apple changed the File model completely (everything is saved automatically by default. you no longer have any "in-flight" changes that aren't saved), but they haven't properly educated the users, causing people to assume it's "broken".

With the new model, if you want to edit a copy of a file instead of the original file, you need to Duplicate first. I've been bit by this a few times as well, since it's hard to break 20 years of habit, but from an outside perspective I think the new model is less technical and could be more intuitive to new users (real life has no equivalent to "unsaved changes").
On the contrary there is very much doubt that Apple copied Sony. A terse description does not a design make.
Thanks for submitting this story, this is a great reflective comment. The one point that I'd add is that, going into the matches, no-one felt time-keeping could be a big thing that would break, or be significant. It's always (maybe tautologically) the things we think that are too small to notice that trip us up the most.
It's a minefield.

No, it's a fallacy. And by, "it", I mean this idea that couples make poor founding teams. It's a theory that's usually stated with utter certainty and without proof ... not a winning combo.
And looking at this from the eyes of another real person:

At various times over the past several years, Apple has sued Nokia, HTC, Motorola and Samsung, plus several smaller companies over a wide variety of smartphones and tablets using many of the same design and user interface patents. This isn't about Apple being offended by copying. This is about Apple using the legal system to attack their competition. Note that many of the patents involved (like "data detection" and "universal search") date back to Macintosh user interface features from years (sometimes more than a decade) before the iPhone.

Sadly, I expect the judge wouldn't allow it, but I'd love to see the Samsung lawyer show the jury the whole gallery of devices (from all vendors) that Apple has sued over using these patents. That would make what is going on much clearer.
I was playing around with some stuff that required a 48GB hash table and, to the very best of my ability to understand this stuff, the run time was completely dominated TLB misses. I say this because, based on my throughput, every lookp was taking the time of about 3 memory accesses on average; i.e. there were page table lookups for every single memory access I made. I don't know the tools that would let me actually monitor the true number of TLB misses.

Had I pursued it further, it seems that using a hugepages interface could alleviate this, but hugepages are a royal pain in the ass to get going as they require kernel parameters, rebooting, and special memory allocation routines, and praying that your memory doesn't get fragmented. Of course I was doing this in C, and if my application had been in any other language it may have been extremely difficult to get this to work.

My use case may have been unusual, but as we store more and more data in RAM it's going to become less unusual. When we care deeply about the latency it seems that virtual memory pagesize is going to be a big problem, and already it seems that there are few use cases where 4kb pages are large enough.
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So, where is this special country where the rich do no use their wealth to manipulate justice, what ever justice actually is? The rich always have done, do so now, and always will. China is nothing special.
Is Big Data the Next Billion-Dollar Technology Industry?
The problem is that "Save As" has a very specific meaning that Apple's new implementation doesn't respect. In every other DE / other OS X applications / prior versions of OS X, "Save as" means "take the current working copy and save to disk under the given name, presevering the original". In Mountain Lion, "Save As" basically means "Rename". If Apple called the feature "Rename", this wouldn't be an issue; it's an issue because Apple co-opted a very well-established term for a completely different function
If we were starting without multiple years of experience using "Save As". The problem is a workflow that was expressly used by people to not mess up the original now messes up the original. This is so not good. If we were using OpenVMS (versioning of files is obvious), but it is really a bad design decision. Bringing auto saves to the Mac in the way they did is foolish.
Looks like a long, 11-part patch set. Would be interesting to hear back from 'bjork' after his try to see if it is still trivial ;)
I understand what you are saying, but have yet to encounter any of the same problems. I didn't know I could create aliases in bash though, so that really invalidates that portion of my article. Thanks for pointing that out. I will certainly look into that, and if I have any of the same problems I will certainly think about just switching back to bash and using aliases.
You're seeing a pattern in two datapoints?
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we've been with liquidweb for the past few years, but lately their support staff seems to get more and more clueless, changing stuff on our server we didn't ask for when we create a support ticket, etc. can anyone recommend a good hosting company with reliable 24/7 support?
Does Bernie Madoff's sentence lie on or off the line connecting your two datapoints?
I cannot believe how the Apple engineers implemented this feature, thinking this makes sense???

switch (menuEvent) {
case FILE_SAVE_AS:
NSString *newFileName = prompt_for_saveas_name();
[document writeToFile:originalFileName];
[document writeToFile:newFileName];

?!?
I'd like to recommend "Web Operations" by Allspaw

http://www.amazon.com/Web-Operations-Keeping-Data-Time/dp/14...
That is how it works now. When he says "it silently saves the original file", he's missing the point that OS X is always saving your files.

In Lion/ML, if you create a new file, Save it with a name, and afterwards add some text and then close the window, it doesn't prompt you to "save changes", since it's always saving changes. In a model like that, there's no reason for "Save As" to suddenly not save changes in the original window.
> That sounds bad. But we have no idea what the company does, so we don't actually know if this is a problem or not.

That's true. The description of the company does lend itself to the belief that it was sufficiently large enough to make these things a problem. If you have people working in cubicles there is, more than likely, a need for them to have a computer, phone, etc. While it might be possible for them to not those tools, I would expect a different style of working environment if office work were not a significant component of their job.

> We have no idea how much the inefficiency costs or how much was saved by the cuts. So we have no idea if this was a bad OR good thing for the company.

From the sounds of things, they didn't have a problem with inefficiency prior to the cuts. It sounds very much like they had just the right number of just the right people on hand to keep things running smoothly. At that point, it's like you have an engine and decide, I really don't need all this oil, let's get rid of some of it. You might be spend less on the oil but then you have to deal with the increased wear on the rest of your engine or risk having it seize up completely.

Yeah, we don't know the real size of the company or what the company did but, the kinds of things he's describing will lead to a degradation of overall morale and you'll find that "broken window syndrome" starts taking over. You'll find that the IT people hate everyone and that everyone start's hating IT which makes the whole situation worse.

So the question is, do you save a little money now to find you have a massive expense in lingering in the future?
Indeed, real life has no equivalent to "unsaved changes". And it sucks.

Thats why a smart entrepeneur developed the eraser.
Not to mention, what about people that drive in from other cities/states, rental cars, etc.? You can't visit SF without getting a tracker installed? Imagine the effect on tourism revenue.

A gas tax is pretty close to a tax on miles driven, and significantly less complicated.
I wrote one of these for the course catalog at UH (Hawaii). Nobody cared.
This is wrong. The algorithm was buying and selling constantly, sometimes losing small amounts of money (usually about $15) each time, sometimes as often as 20-40 times per second for each of about 150 symbols.
Valve aren't trying to make a business out of selling to Linux gamers. But Linux gamers are free, enthusiastic beta testers and bug hunters for Valve's console. I imagine most Linux using gamers already have some of Valve's games on Windows, and that Valve will throw in Linux ports as they did for the Mac. So there really cannot be many new sales there. But for beta testing, long time Linux users will do great QA, and Valve's console is their big ticket out of vendor dependence.
YC founders and startups have nothing to do with the story IMO.
They're generally engineers that make their own companies.

Executives as depicted are however the general standard for most companies. They generally have never created any company from scratch.
Is working remotely an option for this position?
Files are always saved automatically in Lion/Mountain Lion. It's more like this

-(void)dataChanged {
[document writeToFile:fileName];
}

switch (menuEvent) {
case FILE_SAVE_AS:
NSDocument newDocument = [initWithDocument:oldDocument]
[newDocument writeToFile:newFileName];

It would be wrong for "Save As" to suddenly unsave your changes.
I'm a little disappointed how this article and many of the comments here ignore the specifics of what actually happened.

Yes "use different passwords" and "use a password manager" are good general advice. But this blog post expressly uses a specific case - the Honan hack - as a case study, without highlighting the one major lesson from that case.

The actual problem most strongly highlighted by the Honan case is that your Gmail account is only as strong as the "backup email address" it is tied to. Honan's problem has nothing to do with using the same password -- he /had/ different passwords which you know if you read his post carefully. Problem is, his iCloud email was his Gmail backup email, and Gmail apparently allows arbitrary persons to instantly take over an account as long as they control the backup email. No waiting period, no warning email to the Gmail account, no SMS notification. Yes this can be fixed with two-factor auth (apparently) but by default that is off and by default Google badgers you about setting up a backup email address until you do so. By default Google does not badger you about two-factor auth.

The other big issue highlighted by the Honan case is that it is way too easy for bad guys to wipe your Apple devices. In retrospect, it really seems like there should be more between having your laptop, phone, and tablet wiped than a single password. At the very least, a security question, but ideally something like a credit card number (compared against a stored hash), confirmation SMS to a pre-registered backup phone (spouse's phone, friend's phone, relative's phone, etc) or a confirmation robo-call to a work phone number.

If you think about it, it's a little insane that you can protect your Gmail with two-factor auth but you can't protect your laptop the same way.

Maybe a password manager would have encouraged Honan to use a stronger iCloud password, and maybe a stronger iCloud password would have prevented this attack, but that's not established because we don't know how the attack was pulled off. It was a seven char alphanumeric password and the attacker specifically told Honan it was not a brute force attack.
I'm pretty sure they don't do all their trading with one algorithm. What makes you think they do?
> duplicating before editing (bad)

Why is this bad?

edit: Why are people downvoting me for asking this question? I'm genuinely curious.
They are even listing the return of "Save as" on the "new features" page:

http://www.apple.com/osx/whats-new/features.html

Quoting:

Keyboard shortcut for Save As
Use Command-Shift-Option-S to save a document using a different name and location.

It does not say "Use Command-Shift-Option-S to save a document using a different name and location and also overwrite the existing document", even though that's exactly what it does!!!

Crazy!

Edit: You're right, I saved a file.txt from TextEdit, then cat'ed it from a Terminal, then edited it even without trying to save or duplicate or save as; in fact the TextEdit window still shows "File1.txt - edited", but cat shows the new contents.

They shouldn't have brought back "save as" at all if this is they way they are going to handle things, much less list it as a killer feature of 10.8.
And why OS X Lion/ML has Versions and Time Machine
So basically, hopefully Valve's entrance into the Linux market will propel Blizzard to join as well. Or more accurately, to leave Windows.

Perhaps it is forthcoming: http://kotaku.com/5929569/blizzard-isnt-happy-with-windows-8...
Anyone coming from an iPad or iPhone has no experience of "Save As". These are the users Apple are now targeting. Like it or not.
This is not a redesign. He's removed ads and put his product in place of them. It hardly qualifies as a redesign at all - some of the after photos are exactly the same as the before photos above the fold.
Wells Fargo admits to 55,000 counts of perjury: http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/10/28/us-usa-foreclosure...
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I see 2 flaws in an otherwise fine argument.

1/ I don't think anyone is worth 10 million/year no matter how "good" they are.
I sure believe a good CEO should be paid adequately but those are just ridiculous amounts, and the CEO is only one part of the puzzle, even if important. As a CEO its hard to screw up (even thus many do), its hard to be very good, but its easy to be in the middle. Like most jobs in fact.

2/Working 2H a day certainly is an issue. Simply because it doesnt mean you're ultra efficient, obviously. You need more than 2H a day just to be able to talk to people in the company. One shouldn't put extremes like that as they can be misunderstood.
It's ok to work 5h-7h a day, or even less some days if you're efficient. But 2H, is just not realistic, you can't even speak that fast.
Multiplying two 32-bit integers will always cost a certain amount of power. Building specialized hardware can get rid of other costs, like the cost of decoding instructions, but the fundamental cost of the multiplications will never go away.

If your algorithm requires a million 32-bit multiplications, that sets a firm lower bound on how costly it is. There is no way to magically perform all those multiplications for free.
On a large project you optimize the hotspots using an excellent profiler...
"With the new model, if you want to edit a copy of a file instead of the original file, you need to Duplicate first. "

And this is why I think it's broken. There are times when I don't know ahead of time if I want to keep the edits in the document I've worked on, or 'fork' it and give it a completely separate name. Making me decide up front is forcing me to do more of the work instead of the computer, which is not how it should be.

I will probably bite the bullet and upgrade to ML this year - still on Snow Leopard right now, because I really don't like these sorts of mental model changes.
Nope, sometimes they bought stock they sold themselves!
Did you not read what I wrote? OS X no longer has a concept of "Unsaved changes". It's always saving your file. You write in a new sentence, it saves it (virtually) instantly. The original file was already overwritten when you selected "Save As".

The new "Save As" just makes the old "Duplicate" more handy. I agree it's a poor choice of name, they should have kept it named "Duplicate".
The Comma Operator (Yes, you can overload it)
https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/1/25 Sounds like a race condition which is pretty awkward to avoid.
It requires me to decide whether or not I'm going to want to keep a change, before I've even started on it. Otherwise I have to plow through a big undo stack, even assuming undo is supported (and persisted) for everything I did.
That's insane; it must be a bug. Perhaps they should just stick with the new document model. We'd have to relearn, but a clean break is better than this nonsense.
No idea why you were downvoted, I'm interested in learning about this too.
If I hear the "big data" buzzword one more time, I'm going to throw up.
Apple's answer to this is that you if you made changes you don't want to keep, you should revert them. In Lion you had to use Versions for this, but Mountain Lion can revert to the last opened version.
Wilson's highly readable "Uniprocessor Garbage Collection Techniques" is a far better overview: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.138.... You could write a decent GC with just the info in that paper.

It doesn't cover parallel or real-time garbage collection (which both get far more complicated); for those, you want Jones et. al's _The Garbage Collection Handbook_ (http://www.amazon.com/The-Garbage-Collection-Handbook-Manage...) and plenty of time to explore its bibliography. (His older book is also good, but doesn't cover those topics.)
In ML you can set "Ask to keep changes when closing documents" in the system preferences.

Then OS X is not supposed to overwrite your file without your consent, but it does in this case.
The executive community is quite on board with the mindset of "engineers are fungible cost-centers to be reduced as much as possible" so why should engineers not be wary themselves?

Engineers being culturally complacent and not willing to make a fuss is precisely why companies like Google, who have revenues per employee twice as high as say Goldman Sachs, get away with paying their engineers a fraction of what financial professionals at Goldman get paid.
That is not an eraser, thats making a copy of your current work every minute, try something new, and if you don't like it, stop what you're doing and retrieve the old one from the filing cabinet.

So now every program needs an infinite, crash and restart resistant, fine grained revert option.

I applaud Apple for their braveness in changing such a core functionality, but I don't want to imagine the trouble this brings when accessing data on network shares (or even the lifespan of your SSD cells).
I've been really happy with MediaTemple.net

They have great support and helped me a whole lot when I was first getting started with server administration. They were always available to answer any questions I had about how to do something.
Please excuse my ignorance, but- I thought the decline of public market IPOs for up and coming tech companies is because everyone is cautious to avoid repeating the mistakes of the dot-com bust?
So that whenever I want to do exploratory work that I probably want to either fork or toss, I have to go into time machine to do it, rather than simply not saving, or saving under a new name.

Apple is quickly losing touch with reality.
There's a "Revert" menu item that reverts to the last opened state, and if you managed to close the file, there's Versions.

The change is really confusing to long time computer users. I wonder if Apple could have avoided this confusion by changing the names of "Save" and friends to something completely different.
Because it's a horrible UX paradigm to require. If 'Save As...' had never existed, it wouldn't be unreasonable, but it is (was) a reasonable behavior that every other system I'm aware of has maintained.

This passive versioning thing is quite nice in some aspects, but it's very unknown with most people I've seen. They see a file changed, they assume it's stuck like that now and the original is gone forever. Why would they expect otherwise? Their unsaved file gave no indication of being saved. Every application they open it in, and everyone they email it to, will only get the most-recent version. Even the file-system doesn't tell you when you have multiple versions of something.
From the sounds of things, they didn't have a problem with inefficiency prior to the cuts.

He includes no details about the IT staffing levels in the company, what the budget was, the size of the company, what the company did, what the employees did, the reason for the cuts (other than speculation), or anything else.

For all we know, it was a company with 5 non-IT employees, and a staff of 50 IT people who flipped a coin once a day to decide which of 1 of them was going to work that day.

Prove me wrong. How many people were in the IT dept? What was their budget? What did the company do?

You have no idea.. because there are no details in the article. So you do not have enough information to say if there was an efficiency problem.
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It can sometimes be the right approach. It's not a decision to be taken lightly, but it should be on the table.

Especially if your goal is not to duplicate the functionality of the old software precisely, but to provide a significant upgrade. It really depends on the requirements.
In China, financial fraud is punishable by death. It is at once crude and effective. The subprime bubble may never have ever occurred if the perpetrators knew they would literally be risking their lives.
Ah in that case it's definitely a bug.