skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sorry, but that simply isn't true for plenty of applications, particularly if they happen to be built on relatively slow platforms like PHP, Ruby, Python, etc. That's even before we get to the bulky frameworks built on top of those!

If your data store structure and queries (SQL or otherwise) are designed to perform and scale, you can get in and out very quickly (milliseconds or less), after which you'll spend most of your time turning the data into something useful.

(That's even before we talk about caching so you don't have to talk to the data store at all...)

Facebook didn't write HipHop (and reduce CPU utilisation by 50%) because their database queries were slow!
I'd prefer a cleaner healthier planet than foodsteps on Mars. We need to learn to take care of this planet before we start messing around with other planets.
Who's Watching the NSA Watchers?
Operating at telecom wavelengths (i.e., the range commonly used in fiber-optic
communications), the new device is completely scalable, from near-infrared to
terahertz wavelengths, and simple to manufacture.

Ho ho, very clever use of words there. Terahertz is far-far infrared, (1mm to .1mm (1,000,000-100,000nm) wavelength) while NIR is around 1,000nm. Visible light is 740-380nm.

To the best of my knowledge, (this isn't my field) nobody has ever made a visible-light metamaterial. The antennas are too small. There's no real physical reason we can't make red-light metamaterials, the problem is just fabrication. (A parallel can be drawn here between metamaterials, desktop nanofactories, and fusion reactors)

Additionally, it would be tricky to make a panchromatic metamaterial lens: metamaterials are tuned very precisely to one frequency, (color) constrained by the physical size of the antennas, and they can't transmit any others.
Their web experience is superior in my opinion. I feel far more capable of making informed decisions using their interface.
I'm mystified that an anecdote that's very likely fabricated and is filled with misinformation is one of the highest rated pieces here.

I'd say people who upvote before they read are part of the problem but I'm more concerned that many people did read and still upvoted it.
If they didn't know about him, they were incompetent.

More likely, they knew about him and made a bet he would side with them. They were wrong.
I'm not afraid to say that on iOS, the "jail" makes the experience better for me. The entire iOS is amazing for what I need it for and for what many people need it for. I'm happy to pay the higher price because there's no other product that can substitute for the experience. I don't care about the "jail". If this is a jail then lock me up for life because it's a damn nice jail.

OSX on the other hand isn't a jail. You can install whatever you want. It's a computer. In fact I prefer Apple's jail to Microsoft's jail and pay more because I get a better experience and have found no substitute. Can I customize the OS? Fuck no! But if I wanted to then I wouldn't buy Apple because I know what I'm getting into before I buy. As a developer there isn't anything I can do on another platform that I can't on OS X. In fact, because its based on BSD I get the best of the Unix world and Apple's world. And Apple's world, or jail as you call it, is beautiful, well designed, has better font rendering, it's fast, it makes the right assumptions about my use, and so one. So I can't hack the kernel. So what? I don't need or want to. That's kind of why I bought an Apple to begin with.

Philosophies about freedom, free software, or really any philosophies or beliefs do not apply here. That argument is just a red herring. The value of the machine is in its substitutes. My Macs don't have any substitutes. There's not a single PC out there that can match the quality, beauty, and experience of my Macs. But not everyone uses them like I do so I can understand if others don't believe they're valuable. But as far as Samsung goes, what they did was basically try to trick people into thinking that they'll get the Apple experience on a Samsung just because they look alike.

And just so everyone knows, at my job I work 8+ hours a day on a Windows7 PC. I've had an Android phone. I also have a Linux laptop. I love my Linux box but it still doesn't hold a candle to my MacBook Air. This isn't about fashion. It's about people finding a product so impressive that they truly love it. I own a lot of stuff but very few of my possessions are as valuable to me as my Macs. Call me a fanboy. I don't give a shit. That argument is a lame copout. People see people like me being truly impressed with something, they don't get it, then they write it off as fanboyism. It's just a meaningless argument meant to explain something people don't understand. A lot like how people ascribe religious significants to events they don't understand. No, that's not hyperbole. It's just like that.
I like wearing suits. But I don't like the effort involved. I may be a slob, but the ease of shorts and a tshirt outweighs almost all benefits of looking good most of the time.
I have virtualized OS/X with the specific naughty versions of VMWare in question on windows boxes as part of UI testing setups. While I would not play games on it, it'll run Safari just fine.
Was it plug-compatible with Apple's connector? That would seem open-and-shut for infringement. I thought it just looked similar, which makes it a judgment call for a jury.

I could accept most of what Samsung did as a technical choice, but that power charger really leaped out at me. Proprietary chargers suck for end users.
Although I'd guess you're saying that in jest, it seems what the OCP (original comment poster) is getting at is something that happens to resonate with me. Almost any chance I get, I'm reading articles, thinking about how one thing relates to another, trying to pick up a few more phrases in this language or that, etc. Therefore, I should have, or create, a job where I can share what I know or where I'm looked to for answers (since that's a symptom of my habit). Come to think of it, I wouldn't call what I do procrastination, since I'm rather quite addicted to learning and it really would be a dream job if all I was expected to do is keep learning all day, every day.

The phrase in question reminds me of another that basically says something to the effect of "a person should be judged on what they do when no one is looking." Though, I'm not sure I'd like to know, among possible Redditors, what that is.

edit: As for fingerprinter's response, there are some good points in there (like sometimes having to do what you like instead of what you love) though your argument in general seems dependent on if you have a family to take care of.
Austin: The Best Place for Your Startup?
Obviously she didn't mean the type of procrastination wherein you are on blogs/reddit/HN, watching netflix, etc.

I suppose it's the type of inter-project procrastination wherein you focus on the part that you 'like' while avoiding the part that you don't like.
I agree. I was a Windows user for most of my life. Now that Apple products are better, I'll use them.

If something else comes along that's new and better, I'll use that.
* How about building and running your own kernel on your phone. Is that something you would be interested in? Most Android phones can do that.*

No, I'm interested in browsing the web, reading and sometimes replying to my email, checking my calendar, doing online banking, finding restaurants via Yelp, reading my Instapaper queue, checking my RSS feeds, reading and replying on Twitter, listening to and downloading new podcasts I subscribe to, occasionally reading ebooks, listening to my own music and Internet radio, getting turn by turn navigation and sometimes walking or transit directions, and checking in on Foursquare.

In other words, I want a smartphone. Ideally, I want one that works without dorking around with a damn kernel recompile. Android phones can absolutely do all of those things (without damn kernel recompiles). And, darned if iPhones can't just as easily.

In practice, applications aren't lock-in. Data is lock-in. What Apple can do to piss me off is locking in my data, which is a potentially grave concern with iCloud. But just about everything I mentioned above is stuff that would take me about a day to migrate from iOS to Android or vice-versa, because nearly all of it involves open data formats.

Being able to put a new kernel on your phone? Sure, it could be fun. But when push comes to shove, the best thing a smartphone can do for me is to make its inner workings as invisible as possible. When I want to spend time cursing at a Unix shell prompt, that's why I have Arch Linux. Not on my phone.
Sorry, read sbierwagen's comment for the bad news: metamaterials like those used to construct this lens are tuned for very specific wavelengths so unless your photographic aesthetic is centered on a very particular colour of IR then you will be out of luck for quite a while.
I seem to recall running a PARK program to park the drive heads before turning off the power, even in the DOS days.
Actually, if you plant hybridized seeds, you have to buy seeds each year since you can't grow your own seed crop. That's farmer DRM.

If you go organic and plant all heirloom/non-hybrid seeds then you won't have that problem. That's kind of like switching to Linux.
I travel full time, and have been living all over the world for the past four years and never had this problem. From Romania to Chile, Venice to England wherever I am, my iTunes works the way I'd expect.

Compared to HULU and Netflix, Apple is one of the best in this regard. I have to get on a VPN to the USA to use my HULU or Netflix accounts, but iTunes just works, globally.

I have a US itunes account, and use it in whatever country I am in with no problem. Apple has never checked my IP address (so I think that's speculation on his part, or a mistake on the part of the support person he talked to.)

It doesn't make sense to have multiple iTunes accounts, and it would be good if Apple would let your merge them.

But it isn't Apple that is making them tied to regions, this is a requirement of the record and movie industries who seem to think that price and release discrimination by region makes sense.

In fact the only time I've had any problems as in Mexico where iTunes Match wasn't working (though Apple has rolled it out there now) but that was likely due to low quality internet, because here in Chile, with no iTunes match, my US iTunes Match is working fine (but a great internet connection.)
I hope you understand why you are going to be aggressively downmodded, and it's not because of any nationalism. It's because this sort of comment is beneath the basic standards of cordiality in any serious discussion, even in a forum as notoriously crass as this one. Not to mention it adds nothing to the discussion of substance, having even less impact than "Me too!"

What's more, it's not even fair. Indeed, the entire point of this trial was for Apple to make a case that consumers are confused in America. So you can't really accept the verdict of this case and then say this is implausible or "Americans are stupid." If Apple is right, then Samsung has engaged in deliberate deception. If Samsung is right, then it's not unreasonable to ask if Apple actually has been overcharging people off on phones dictated by basic design principles.
Starving the Future
> I wonder what essential resources could end up having no viable alternatives in a lifetime?

Not many. Most rare resources are durable, i.e. used in applications where they aren't destroyed. So if indium reserves in the ground run out, then as the prices rise, (1) the prices of new devices that need indium will rise, discouraging their adoption and (2) the scrap prices of old devices that have indium will rise, until it becomes profitable to recycle them to create a new supply.

At a fundamental physical level, if you have a rare substance made of common elements (e.g. many fuels and plastics are just H, C and O in various arrangements) there's usually a chemical process you can use to create them with basically only energy as input.

If you have a rare substance that is partly or entirely made of one or more rare elements, you can generally create them by refining the products of nuclear reactions (e.g. this is where plutonium comes from).

Where lack of a particular material becomes an obvious bottleneck, money will flow into R&D which will unlock more alternatives over time (we've known oil is a bottleneck since the oil shocks of the '70s if not earlier, think of all the billions that have flowed into alternate energy R&D between then and now, and how many new things we have like wind, solar, geothermal, hybrids, biofuels, synfuels, etc., or energy-efficient CPU's with dynamic frequency scaling and market competition on performance-per-watt metrics. These do work and can substitute for oil in many applications.)

Eventually asteroid mining will probably become a very profitable way to produce certain key materials (rare earth elements do come to mind) because it will turn out to be more a cost-effective way to produce some materials than chemical or nuclear reactions. Especially if we can figure out ways to utilize them that don't involve shuttling things into and out of Earth's gravity well so we can use extremely energy-efficient ion drives that can cross the solar system on a few pounds of fuel instead of rockets that use tons of chemical propellants. Perhaps self-sufficient space factories, entirely robotic, which build computers on asteroids using local materials, which when finished are powered and linked to the Internet by solar or nuclear power, rented as a new EC2 instance by the hour at dirt-cheap prices (but still a profitable business since the manufacturer doesn't have to bid high to win some of Earth's dwindling local supply of rare earths, the power plant doesn't have to worry about where to dump its nuclear waste since it's a million miles from the nearest human, and the R&D costs can be amortized over a thousand-asteroid deployment).
i got 99 problems but recruiters spamming me with job opportunities ain't one.

given the economy and the unemployment rate, i'm thankful for what i've got.

just a bit of perspective
> I don't think Apple willfully infringed anything here.

Apple knew this was coming. See the stuff in the case about the Sherman act. They're "willfully infringing" to the extent that they are "refusing to end negotiations and pay the fee Samsung claims they own."

Samsung seems to have brought this in to show what the dispute was really all about. And that show with the Intel receipts didn't address the entire problem from my reading.
That title of the is all wrong. How do you deduce "consumers" from one conversation at Starbucks. That is wishful Android fanboyism at its finest.
I find your last line about forcing people to give you control hilarious since it comes after your (false) claims that another entity was taking control from you.

Sounds like you got bit by an ideological bug more than anything else. I'm sure the quality of the AppStore has improved.

Frankly, after its success we had far to many people "Switch" because they wanted to get rich quick and pump out really crappy apps polluting the store.

And of course they bitched about it at the time, every difference was proof that apple was evil.

I'm tired of the past four years of Apple haters thinking their uninformed ideological nonsense is relevant simply because they are a "developer" and have Apple hardware.

Apple is pro-developer, and unlike google actually practices "don't be evil."

But there are people who hate good and will rail against is day in and day out and call it evil.
Yes, tying the region of the account to the region of the credit card is a pretty damn flexible way to do it, given the movie and music companies are forcing them to tie their sales to regions.

Much better than the IP address BS you see from other companies.
TextDrive is coming back
Have you considered using VMs for these environments (ie. XP, Vista)? You're potentially leaving a chunk of your users out in the cold if it stops working properly in Windows 7 / IE 9+ / Chrome / Firefox.

(I have no idea if you're doing web or application development.)
Metamaterial lenses, if you can make them in visible-light frequencies, might be useful in the microlens array for light-field cameras, where they could act as both the bayer color filter pattern and as focusing element, and where their excellent optical qualities would be really helpful. (The Lytro light-field camera's lousy optical performance is mostly due to the microlens array: they have to be made of conventional materials, and the only lenses that would fit are singlets, which have chromatic abbertation and barrel distortion out the ass.)

But as the primary light gathering element, no.
> I'll go out on a limb and guess

It isn't on a limb to repeat the nonsensical accusations that your ideology has been spewing all over hacker news for the past four years (and everywhere else too.)

Of course its also something that would never happen, if you are honest about how Apple operates.

You can even install unregulated software on a stock iPhone..... just downloaded from the net. Javascript Apps were there a year before the AppStore-- full apps, that run without a net connection and have access to the full iOS UI.

Of course this fact is inconvenient to the "Apple monopoly" story and so you guys never mention it and probably many of you who have never used iOS or developed for it don't even know about it.

We don't need your sympathy-- we're living much better lives with more freedom here on Apple's platform.

I'll take Steve Jobs and his compatriots looking out for my ass over Richard Stallman dictating my life, down to my very thoughts, any day.
There's any number of browser tools to let you adjust or disable a sites CSS or clean up the articles. I've never had a problem with Groklaw, but on the other hand I do have styles installed for HackerNews to darken the page considerably (dark charcoal background and near white text)... If I read Groklaw more often these days (not so interesting since SCO fell apart) I'd probably have done the same there.
The USPTO is dumping shit on the judicial system and they are taking it. We're hoping they won't take that for very long but I doubt it. Courts will keep doing what they do, apply the law, even if the law sucks. Perhaps when the system is clogged and companies can't release a product without wasting lots of money going over useless patents.. then we'll see some change.
Based on the quality of recruiters I've dealt with I honestly think you could automate their job comPletely. They seem to do key word searches to find my resume and have zero idea about development tools, process, and technique. At least a computer would know the difference between Java and JavaScript or that asking me if I prefer VB.NET or ASP.NET is a nonsensical question.
What is fanboyism? Really, I'm serious. I don't think such a thing exists. I think it's all people who don't get why other people value product X explaining it away with the fanboyism argument. I don't mean to detract or disagree because that was my first reaction but when I got to thinking about it I realized that I could easily be labelled a fanboy. I don't want that argument used against me so I won't use it against someone else anymore. There's some kind of weird jealousy or something going on there but its also much more. I haven't quite nailed it yet but I think saying someone or some view is a "fanboy" is a lazy argument now.

But I secretly agree. But please ignore that last sentence.
Although this demands we ask the question, "Is this bad?" It's sort of inevitable that popular designs will be mimic'd in the industry. Why is it bad, so long as Samsung retains a positive and strong branding so that they're not confusing people about who made the product?

Samsung is not exactly a powerhouse of innovation, but they're part of a competitive ecosystem that we prefer to think drives innovation. Smaller companies come along with breakthroughs that bigger companies integrate. Said smaller companies need to continue to innovate and grow to be competitive; no one gets to just make one great invention and sit back laughing at the market.

And isn't this exactly Apple's success story? Their last decade has been an unchecked rampage from market to market in the consumer electronics sphere, quickly toppling incumbents before moving on to another focus when it's clear there's no more low hanging fruit to extract from the markets dominated by sluggish competitors like Sony.

But right now we've seen a series of reversals in the tablet and phone spaces as several other companies band together to try and compete directly. It's sort of amazing that Apple could only be matched in their current target by a massive federation stitched together by another of the most brilliant companies of the last decade, but it's sort of unsurprising that if EVERYONE else gangs up and tries to counter Apple, they might not be able to iPodify this particular market.
"3. Gross generalization, but $150 shoes last more than twice as long as $75 shoes. Hit up somewhere like Nordstrom Rack for good shoes. Same principal applies to belts."

In particular, I'd recommend cole haan shoes with the nike air stuff built into them. They're amazingly comfortable.

"5. Don't feel compelled to use those little plastic collar points."
The metal ones are quite nice and can help keep up a shirt's appearance over time.

"If you wear a tie, strongly consider a jacket."
I disagree. Shirt and tie is just fine. Jacket can absolutely make it better as can vest or sweater; however, no biggie if not.
First, this is a message to middle school kids. It is a solid message: Determine what you love to do and give it all you have.
It is true that what you achieve in that pursuit will be mitigated by your actual talent for it, life circumstances, responsibilities and resources, not to mention luck. But even if you can't make a living at it or even get to it very often, doing what you love for its own sake will make your life more satisfying than not.

True?
I don't know why I resisted this initially (likely the hassle), but now alterations are Step 2 of buying work clothing.

Looking forward to trying out some custom fit stuff eventually, but for now alterations are essential.
I'd suggest ben sherman or ted baker. In general, UK labels will tend to do a better job for skinny dudes.
Computers On Board The Apollo Spacecraft
We are only discussing stupid patents in the software industry. I don't see any car maker suing the hell out of one another because their cars "have doors that open just like ours" or "their wheels move steady at 100km/h like ours".

This is all stupid, boring and sad. The IT world feels like a big bad joke.
to me, design patterns are how a team designs on the general way of doing a certain activity, and avoid doing it wrong.

maybe unneeded if you are solo, and I agree that "you should know why the best practice is best" but I strongly feel these are very helpful not only for teams, but for learning.
Radical new flat lens may dramatically improve cellphone cameras
I can't link to quite what I want. See all of chapter 2, but the meat of it starts with:

http://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch2-5.html
Sexism affects robots