skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's all about context and single page apps definitely have their place.

In my case for example (photo portfolio websites) it makes a lot of sense to have a single page app for the user backend and plain server rendered html (with a bit of js sugar) for the frontend.
This looks like more hardware than a contemporary Macintosh, so I have to ask: inexpensive compared to what? A VAX?
Critically: the prosecution of a fraud case must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused acted with the intent to deceive another party in order to gain something of value.
The last time Linux on the desktop looked and felt good was when Enlightenment DR16 came out. When I installed Ubuntu last year I felt like I was using something for children.
I'd consider it unlikely most reasonably sane people would actually want to pump random data out their speakers for any significant amount of time.
> Sure, they weren't, but it's not like Linux in general has given us much innovative things in the desktop space.

O.o

Two off the top of my head: workspaces, app stores.
I don't get all that OSX "awesome UI" everyone talks about. With my previous experience on Windows/Linux, everything seems wrong and backwards, and there is no way to configure or change it. Also the shell looks like a crippled version of unix.
could you go into why tag aware sharding is a "HELL YES" for you? I was kindof already of the opinion that mongo sharding is much too complicated (http://i.imgur.com/c3Dpq.jpg), this seems to compound that. Is it something you've needed/wanted so bad that its worth it?
1. If this is true, and it seems right to me, maybe some of the massive effort put into designing new GUIs for Gnome/KDE/etc should be put into hacking the look and feel of the OS X desktop?

Unsanity ShapeShifter hasn't worked since OS 10.4

and I know about

http://magnifique.en.softonic.com/mac - 10.5 only

http://www.marsthemes.com/crystalclear/ 10.7 support claimed, but it's not very radical. I'd love xfce's window look controls or a Stardock windowblinds.

I know Apple don't want anybody to do this. I know they will deliberately introduce changes that break hacks. But as I said, how can it be more effort than Linux?

-----

2. To try to prevent OSx86 hacks, DSMOS.kext uses crypto to prevent the system running essential UI elements like Finder, SystemUIServer, etc. Can't we build our own versions of those parts?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93Intel_architectur...

-----

3. Is this true?:

Linux desktop - dying, dead

Windows 8 - trying so hard to copy OSX/iPad/Springboard/Launchpad that everybody is gonna hate its TWO UI's! (dying?)

Mac - winning, won (by default?)
Link doesn't seem to work anymore, here is the same video (I assume) and a the original paper describing the Blit:

http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/blit/
So in that light, I think the idea that the Linux desktop got "killed" is sort of missing the point. It's no more moribund now than it was before.

I strongly disagree. It is losing exactly the sort of person that the author is: developers who, all else equal, would rather use Linux. But who eventually get tired of the BS and just want something that works and you can actually get software for. I have a lot of sympathy for that.

I write this from a Linux laptop, but that's more out of mulish stubbornness and 15 years of accumulated irritation with Steve Jobs and his dickish business practices.

The last time I got a new laptop I knew I didn't have time to screw around for days with X configuration files. And so I paid a vendor several hundred dollars over list to give me a laptop that JFW. And despite that the sound is still way too quiet. After a few time-boxed 2-hour excursions into whatever sound system they're using this week, I still can't fix it. I've given up.

The only legitimate reason I have for staying on desktop Linux is that I code for Linux servers, and I think it's impossible to really understand system performance if you're not running the same OS. But even that seems shaky to me; hardware keeps getting cheaper and developers keep getting more expensive, so it just doesn't matter as much.

One day some bright Linux spark is going to "innovate" again in a way that I'm expected to put up with their rough edges for 6 months (hello, Unity!) and I'm going to say fuck it and buy a Mac because I just don't have time to screw around right then. Or maybe I'll just want to watch a Netflix movie without hassle, or play the video game my pals are all talking about. And maybe by then it will be a fancy dock for my 8-core Android phone.

Overall, I agree with his point, except that I don't think Linux on the desktop is so much dying as cutting its own throat.
It's a little hard to take the example seriously when you've clearly padding the Ember version with code you don't have (but would need) in the ko version.
Maybe collaborative development is incapable of producing something as complex and difficult as a clean, well-designed desktop environment and API? Forking, competing spinoffs, factionalism are all useful things in some ways, but they're death to this kind of project.

The Rails community seems to manage.
> Oh, this is so wrong. Did you like Avatar? Then you like math. Avatar is one long, beautiful mathematical expression, from beginning to end.

Can you elaborate? To me, the interesting part of mathematics is the process of manipulating expressions, not the expressions themselves. For example, the number pi would be pretty boring if it weren't for the theorems related to it.
There are many problems with patents in drug development as well, as Derek Lowe discusses in these essays, http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/patents_and_ip/ . It may be time to try to develop something new, maybe based on patent law, maybe not, even for pharma.

ADDED: One problem pharma shares with software is "patent thickets" where there are many applicable patents, applying to different layers of technology, that the current development relies on.
I do the same thing, but the extent of my "legend" is simply the following:

"->" (random points)

"o" (random points)

"[ ]" (thing I need to do)

"[/]" (thing I need to do, in progress)

"[?]" (I don't know what to do, might revisit)

"[-]" (Not going to do this one, maybe it became redundant)

This helps me a lot to line up my thoughts and know where I am. However, I really like the legend as described by OP, so I might change mine towards that approach.
Most Forked GitHub Repositories - Infographic
I have a Linux desktop at work and one at home. I actually see the modern Linux desktop as absolutely amazing compared to where it was a decade ago.

I also have a Mountain Lion MBP, but AFAICT, I will be leaving the Apple cart after it dies and I'll be 100% Linux.
That would work if food were equally calorie dense. My stomach can hold about 3 cups of food most days. I can eat 3 cups of mashed potatoes (640 calories) or 3 cups of sugar (2326 calories) to feel full.

We didn't have processed cane sugar and refined vegetable oils during all those years of evolution.
Ingo Molnar has some interesting thoughts on this subject: https://plus.google.com/109922199462633401279/posts/HgdeFDfR...
I'm skeptical because I don't see how visual programming models are even possible for the type of development I routinely perform (my day job is writing a high-performance distributed, parallel implementation of the well-known 'make' tool). Even if it is theoretically possible, for some parts of my project, I imagine it would take nearly as long to create the visual programming environment, and I'm not sure it would be particularly reusable.

I loved Bret Victor's talk. And this recursive drawing thing is neat too. But both of those are dealing with programs that are primarily visual in their own output. I can't help but think, "That's neat, but not broadly applicable." Honestly, how many people are there out there dying to write programs to make fractal-like pictures?

Perhaps I'm just not visionary enough to see the potential, but I don't believe these techniques will really "democratize programming." Whether or not doing so is desirable in the first place is another debate altogether.
Define that.

Because surely all a patent troll would need to do is implement a product that demonstrates a single patent in their pool.

Or are you suggesting that every patent must be implemented as a product for it to be enforced?

And if so, as an example of similar things, the UCI (cycling body) state that all Olympic track bikes must be available to the public, and this is true of Team GB equipment that you can order, for a price in the region of GBP 100k per bike.

So would it be enough for a patent troll to offer an implementation of a smart phone for USD 5m?
For testing, you just need a tiny piece, but there are multiple tissues to simulate organs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ-on-a-chip#Organs
$13.24 for a pen. Seriously I want one, but I'd chain mine up to my desk, because people tend to grab any pen they see!
There are cases, when I can imagine walking out: when the candidate is already decided upon, but there is a need for legal-theatre, and you wind up being a decoy candidate in a mock candidate selection process. It happens quite often actually.

The moment you understand your situation, it is fair game to treat them in equal manner.
Hear hear. This is a +1 for padmapper, even though they might have technically lost the war.

If there's one thing that's been constant over the last 5 or so years, it's that craigslist doesn't change. They don't add a lot of features or functionality, and displaying maps is like scifi tech to them.

It's obviously a complex situation, but this could be viewed as a determined individual causing a behemoth to move. Sometimes you can effect change without making millions of dollars.
> In my opinion, the problem with Linux on the Desktop is rooted in the developer culture that was created around it.

This developer culture DEFINES Linux. A fruit is either an apple or an orange. I couldn't have an OS with wonderful package management, developer tools, endless configurability AND a desktop Miguel de Icaza dreams of.
Google is not "playing the game" they are abusing the system far more than Apple does.

They sued Apple for FRAND patents that, not only did they make promises on to get in to the standard, but that the license for was already aquired by Apple via Qualcomm which made the chips that used the inventions and which had a license.

So, they are abusing both the FRAND standards and trying to double dip on exhausted patents.

You can't accuse Apple of doing anything that abusive. Apple has been defending patents for inventions copied by people without a license and which are not standard essential.

Basically it seems that to a lot of people since Google needed to rip off the iPhone for android, in order to compete, therefore patents are suddenly bad.
I completely endorse this, and wish I could hit the "up" arrow hundreds of times over. It's also refreshing to see a comment like this that isn't immediately shot down. It's hard to overstate the importance of actually having things written by someone with at least a sense of what it takes to make an intuitive and pleasant-to-use interface.

The problem that linux seems to have, is that everyone wants everything and so everything gets thrown in with configuration options to change absolutely everything.

I don't think, however, that lack of good design - or even seeing the need for it, is isolated to linux - in a very real sense, I think most of the population is usually oblivious to it - they just know whether something is easy to use or not.
This book, despite its clear agenda, includes a fair amount of quantitative analysis.

http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfi...

Chapter 3 has interesting historical case studies, including, for example, the patent-free flurry of innovation that increased the efficiency of the steam engine by 5x in the 25 years immediately following expiration of Watt's patent, in contrast to the efficiency plateau that occurred while Watt's patent was enforced. Chapter 8 has a modern macroeconomic analysis.
I would think so, but OS X has had several great or important applications within it's ecosystem, that break UI conventions.

Twitter clients used to be a playground for new UI concepts, none of which came from Apple. The Sparrow mail client was a good example of something probably more influenced by Tweetie than anything else.

Even Apple doesn't have a ton of consistency. iTunes continues to baffle me with random changes things like what resize does. The App Store app shifted the window management buttons.

So I don't buy that the OS X ecosystem is a "cathedral" at all, just a bazaar with better taste.

What's interesting is that I noticed the standards of design for Mac apps were significantly better than Windows apps when I "made the switch" several years ago; and these are for apps that were not coming out of Apple. I could never entirely figure out why; the ecosystem was just more attuned to details.

I posit that Apple was helped by having the right people excited long enough to get a great ecosystem going.

Linux didn't die because it's a bazaar; every modern app ecosystem (OS X, iOS, Android, the web) functions like a bazaar. Linux just made it absolutely painful to set up shop.
I thought your prior response (linked to by the comment that started this digression; "453 days ago") was sensible and sufficient. But thanks for chiming in again and definitively.
I'm typing this on my work laptop running a linux desktop (Ubuntu FWIIW). Our engineering servers at work run linux and, as a convenience, have the desktop installed. As many of my co-workers run linux desktops as OS-X desktops (and the engineers running OS-X or Windows have VMs running linux... desktops).

When I go home, I'll be using my personal laptop running linux. My wife and kids run a netbook with a linux desktop.

The linux desktop may be dead to Miguel, but it works just fine for me, a lot of other people in my life, and a lot of people in the world.

<shrug>
This is a reason for poor design, not an excuse
That small business is financially more successful

Sure. But they're not trying to build the same thing. I think it's mainly a midwestern attitude vs. Californian. Fried just wanted to build a business. Startup founders want to build companies.
As far as I can tell, the services in question didn't lose access to Twitter authentication, they just lost the ability to take the users' social graph out of Twitter
It's obviously against the guidelines.

There are about 7,200,000 teachers in United States. If we assume that teachers are nearly perfect creatures who (on average) exercise seriously flawed judgement once every ten years, then we should have about 2,000 examples per day. Reading about every uncaught exception is not intellectually stimulating, it's horrendously BORING.

Please don't redefine terms to pretend otherwise. It's dishonest, disrespectful and degrading both to yourself and HN as a whole.
Intellectual property law isn't nonsense. It evolved over hundreds of years (and continues to do so) from other areas of property law in the common law system.
Dave Pell's Next Draft is the best place to find interesting news. It's a newsletter: http://nextdraft.com/
Samsung Strikes Back With Its Galaxy Note 2 'Phablet'
They didn't sue PadMapper over the feature. The sued PadMapper because Craigslist didn't want a pseudo-competitor using their data.

This article is confusing the issue by playing on the anti-patent/intellectual property vibe of most developers.
Clever (YC S12) is hiring a full-stack engineer to hack education
Clever (YC S12) is hiring a full-stack engineer to hack education

Steve Jobs described education as one of the final frontiers still untouched by modern technology. Clever (https://getclever.com) is building the data platform needed to for great software to make its way into the classroom. Just like Stripe has made it simple for developers to build payment processing into their apps, Clever has made it easy for developers to build applications for schools using student data.

We're a small team of highly technical hackers with deep experience in education. Since releasing the Clever APIs in June, we've signed up the most innovative education companies as partners and deployed our platform to over 1,000 schools. Clever moves data for over 350,000 students every day, and that number is growing rapidly.

Our growth has created some exciting problems around scalable systems, innovative APIs, and big data sets. We're looking to add a versitile engineer to the team to take on a wide range of technical challenges.

Things we're looking for:

+ Experience with consuming and/or creating RESTful Hypermedia APIs

+ Experience with a variety of languages (we use the best tool for the job, everything from Node.js to bash scripts)

+ Experience scaling up systems on AWS

+ Passion for changing education

What Clever offers:

+ Competitive salary + significant equity stake in well-funded company

+ A chance to revolutionize education

+ Flat & close-knit engineering team with lots of peer code review & pair programming

+ Great benefits - healthcare, dental, beautiful office

To apply, email us at jobs+n@getclever.com, where n is the number of students in the Clever sandbox API data set with a last name that begins with the letter 'V'.

Send us one or more things from [resume, github profile, recent side projects, linkedin URL, Stack Overflow profile, etc], and let us know how you solved our 'puzzle.'

This job is located in San Francisco, CA. You must be local or willing to relocate.
This flame ignites periodically, and I'm always left wondering when exactly the Linux desktop died? Some have noted similar aspects already, but here's my 2 cents:

I'm on Linux now (GNU/Linux, maybe lump BSD in there too, I'm using "Linux"). I know plenty of users on Linux. I know plenty of users of Windows and OS X who run virtual Linux Desktop distributions for testing/development/security. I'm sure some of HN are running Linux.

Does Linux have the potential to enter the market as a third core option for desktop usage - not really. But why does it matter?

The problem with Linux is that there are too many choices. People who like technical choices and options trend toward Linux (needs citation).

John Q. ComputerUser isn't going to use Linux unless his geeky son or nephew installs it for him AND provides support. He can't get support anywhere else - because there are too many possibilities for it to be fiscally effective.

If/When something gets confusing or broken on Windows/OS X, you call JoeBob's SuperDuperPuter, and say it's broken. JoeBob asks, "What Windows version?" While he might need to poke and pry a bit to get the user to tell him he's running Millenium edition, once he gets that data, it's a pretty straightforward troubleshooting effort and fix.

If you call some mythical Computer Service group that actually supports Linux, and say your machine is broken, they would need to know a LOT more about your system just to figure what they need to do to start.

Distribution? Parent Distribution? Shell? Window Manager? Hardware? ...

I find generic computer service companies to be extremely expensive. To be able to provide even basic service for Linux in general, your techs need to be very familiar with more operating systems (emerge, apt, yum, zypper, pacman), and more core applications. Each service effort inherently takes longer. These factors pile up and everything becomes necessarily more expensive. It's downright impractical to support Linux generically. The support costs for one or two issues on Linux would far outweigh the cost of an upfront OS license and cheaper support for the end user.

Linux has (and will likely continue to have) a comfortable hold on the technically-capable DIY market. It may not be on track to step beyond that market in the desktop arena - but that certainly doesn't indicate it's time for a toe tag.
Move to a simpler distribution that won't bother you. I've been on Arch for the last few years because once I set it up, new updates won't add new "functionality". It isn't perfect, but I can keep the entire system in my head. Nothing opaque, nothing inscrutable -- the design philosophy is KISS. It won't hold your hand, but it also won't get in your way.
I'm not convinced that a point-and-shoot camera can be considered "pro". Thumbs-up for manual exposure settings and the inclusion of Android, but a single f/2.8-5.9 lens is not going to be suitable in a lot of situations. I also don't see a flash (or flash mount) anywhere, which would make it annoying to take photos in a dark bar or restaurant.

Alternatively, I think it would be neat to apply some of these features to Nikon/Canon's existing DSLR lineups, eg. having wifi/4G connectivity on a DSLR that didn't require an $800 attachment.
Why do so many titles say X "quietly" does Y?
Companies who treat people poorly develop a reputation, same as anyone else. You ignore reputation damage at your own peril.
Look East, Young Man
AMA with Barack Obama
If that poor Indian woman sits in prison as a consequence for having kids just to make herself a living, she may not end up with as many children and others may be deterred from following her example. A food shortage needn't mean more babies then. That may seem harsh but the alternative is worse: when you extend your example to its inevitable conclusion there will be millions of Indians dying young, when the amount of free food can no longer grow along with the exponentially growing population.
This is my first product, I'd be really interested to hear what the community thinks about it.

We built this because as web developers we're always asked to implement an in app context sensitive help system, but maintaining that help system and keeping it up to date really calls for a crm like functionality. FAQ pages and knowledge bases are rarely visited and users shouldn't need to context switch to find out if there's an answer posted on some subsite.
I should have been more specific, sorry:

Is this a per company default setting? Can company admins set the defaults for all company users? Or is it an individual user setting?
Are you sure? Just because the condition of her fellow students isn't blatant slavery doesn't mean it isn't effectively a form of it.

She did not call the teachers "slave owners". She is saying people of color who are effectively locked in their situation, with no way out, and therefor stuck on the bottom rungs of society and forced to do the lowest jobs for the lowest pay are effectively in bondage. There is a reason indentured servitude is illegal even if you got yourself into the predicament "fair and square"; it equates to slavery.

Geolibertarianism and Georgism (look at this list before you dismiss: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism#Notable_people_influen...) make a similar argument about the effective consequence of private land ownership, that in the end people without land are effectively slaves to those who own all the land, because you have to stand and live somewhere, and grow food somewhere, and the only way to pay rent for the land is to take whatever work the landlords give you (They are not called landlords for nothing). It is a less blatant form of feudalism, which most people today would equate to slavery.
Many of the problems people have with Linux have nothing to do with Linux itself.

When I first tried to use Linux about 7 years ago, wireless drivers were a huge problem. Manufacturers didn't provide assistance--not much Linux distros could do about it at the time.

These problems are simply inherent to Linux being a minority platform.
The Hidden Cost of Compiler Bugs
I would argue that the point of a low-calorie diet isn't to live longer, but to look "better" (this, I guess depends on just how low the calorie count is).

A lot of the things we do "look healthy" doesn't make us live longer.