skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Such drones have existed for some time now. They are colloquially known as "surface to air missiles".
The html5 assertion is bunk: there are things that can not even be expressed in html5/js which are ubiquitous in native apps. An example is true honest to god no bs no excuses no hand waving thread spawn. As in truly concurrent threads, as comcurrent as the os allows, not some interstitial vm allows, not js worker threads. The j2se JVM gets that right but Ruby and Python do not, but there are no shortages of excuses as to why.
I thought his light critiques in this piece might be a sign that he's trying to gain some cred back.
You're right but you gave the wrong example. A good example would be the Xperia P. There are other phones as well with a metal shell.
His piece definitely said "none" when first published, but it has since been corrected:

There’s also a marketing advantage: few[1] of the competing phones on the market are made of metal.

[1: http://www.htc.com/www/smartphones/htc-radar/]
Well if I pick one thing it might seem a little silly - if I was apple I'd want to have implemented something and found it to have worked and be ready to go with it. But I think speed to access is a big deal, so maybe wake on swipe and or voice. Perhaps an api for lock screen apps - not so much a hardware thing, but I don't think Apple should care about that.
As an iOS developer I was really looking forward to iOS 6. Both iOS 4 & 5 seemed like house-cleaning updates that improved the plumbing and developer experience to set the stage for more daring and forward thinking changes in 6.

It was actually when I first saw the new feature list for 6 that I began to worry that Apple had lost its momentum and the lackluster iPhone 5 only reinforces that feeling.
Please god no. Xcode is miserably slow on a 2011 Macbook Air. I don't even want to think about running it on something with a small fraction of that horsepower.
What do you do in vietnam?
You have to pay $1 to get a steam key.
It's not that CSS and CSS3 are entirely different. CSS3 brings in some new features in addition to existing features of older CSS versions. However, keep in mind that not all browsers fully supports CSS3 at the moment. If you are developing a web application for a target audience that may be using older browsers like IE 6/7/8 you must check that the new CSS3 features works for them or not, so that you don't lose users. So, learn CSS3 but make sure the CSS3 feature you are using works in browser of your target audience. If not, make sure it degrades gracefully for users with old browsers.
NFC is nearly useless at this point and there is a possibility it will never become ubiquitous. I don't see NFC being a huge selling point outside of the techies fpr quite some time.
You don't appear to be right about your facts on Energy Star, good sir:

http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?fuseaction=find_a_produc...

It seems to me, you just bought a crappy appliance. Go buy a better one. That will solve your problem; inaccurate ranting about energy efficiency efforts will not.
Yes. And not only that but the tools for handling this are much less powerful than Android's. Add to this the fact that you have to duplicate the entire xib/storyboard for each internationalization and suddenly you've got a shitload of drudge work on your hands.
Maps now Google tracker ap
Freelance mobile development. For the last 18 months iOS and now Android.
No, I'd rather we didn't all voluntarily self censor to benefit Apple's paranoid secretive marketing.
Filtering for Tiny
Adam Cadre's calendar blog, solely due to the inline footnotes and asides (example: http://adamcadre.ac/calendar/13/13956.html). It's a convenience even Gruber and PG don't utilize.
I dont know how you can expect people to pay 1 euro ($1.30 dollars!) by just showing them a signup form with NO information about what it is. Not sure if this is a joke or a scam.
If neither, how about creating a simple free-tier plan like 1 or 2 show notifications and then charge for more?
The problem is that each patent, by definition, is unique in its coverage. Hundreds of thousands of patents is worthless if a troll has valid patent claims that read on your business. Also, massive amounts of legal firepower don't always help, as others have pointed out -- trolls are experts in exploiting moral hazard, compartmentalizing their business venture down to the single patent, such that if they find themselves on the losing end of a legal battle, they just fold up shop and move on to the next.

There is a stereotype that all patent trolls use a flimsy set of claims to coax hapless defendants into settling, rather than face years in court. Not true -- sometimes trolls have shockingly applicable claims, and go after the big game head on -- Apple, Microsoft, Google.
God forbid you click the article link and read 3 sentences.

But then you wouldn't have time to make snarky comments, right?
I meant until a particular theory in theoretical physics is found practical, or at least verifiable, it's more fantasy than reality as far as most people are concerned. I never meant to imply that the entire field of theoretical physics is impractical or irrelevant, or that it hasn't yielded any results. At that point, I might expect the physics to fall less in the domain of the theoretical however, and more in applied.
An NFC chip. Apple already has Passbook - imagine if that were NFC-enabled. I want to be able to use my phone to enter my home and workplace, to board transportation systems, and to pay for everything. And it isn't as if I would have purchased an iPhone if they had included NFC, but more that Apple has such a widespread and mainstream user base and such collaborations with Passbook-supporting businesses that "NFC everywhere" might stop being a dream.
For Social Companies, a Battle to Own Photography
I've been using Maps for many months as part of the developer program.

They are not "terrible" but they are significantly worse than Google Maps. Let me count the ways:

1) "International" support is actually terrible. Whereas Google Maps has just about every road in Bastia (Corsica, France) accurately labeled, Apple Maps had almost none.

2) Search is not as reliable and sometimes comes up with obscure unrelated responses.

3) Several times I've been lead to the wrong spot in remote areas, either because of inaccurate addressing or slightly off road maps.

4) Public transit is not built in. I've pretty much stopped taking the bus. Hopefully third party providers will fill this gap.

This is a great article on why Apple will have a hard time competing with Google Maps:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/how-go....

Unfortunately, Google Maps on iPhone Safari is barely usable.

On the plus side, Siri integration with spoken turn-by-turn directions is a huge improvement, and the lock screen has a nice heads-up nav display. Yelp integration is also a nice touch.
This review could be the poster boy for the more and more idiotic consumerism that is the plague of our age.
This is not the Onion either, though it's easy to be mistaken.

http://www.tuaw.com/2011/05/17/bbc-loving-apple-looks-like-a...
It's been almost a year since this guy promised to deliver a working prototype of his supposed "low energy nuclear reaction" device, but of course, he's actually just a scammer.
On Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 operating systems, the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 must be installed for EMET to work. There are no other special requirements for any other supported version of Windows.

And in order to have it one needs to install .NET which comes with bunch of its requirements.
Well, if only NFC had a big backer and became much more popular.. then maybe merchants would use it. A backer like, you know Apple?
I suspect it has more to do with applications for the newest class being due soon.

When pg gave a talk while I was at MIT, it was in early October (of 2006 - yikes I'm old), about 2 weeks before apps were due (I didn't get in.)

Apps for this season are due six weeks from now...so I'm guessing the purpose is still to drum up applications, and they're just more on top of their game than they were six years ago.

That said, no one is going to not hand their resume to Google because they spoke to Y Combinator that same week - if anything, it's sort of poor timing, because they're now competing against the companies for attention (who are somewhat restricted as to when they can come to MIT.)
> Why shouldn't I be able to place it in a folder

For all intents and purposes, Newsstand is a folder. You can't put folders in folders.

Whether or not you agree with that is an argument of opinion, but that's the fact.
I've been in the ecosystem since the original iPhone. Switching would involve a significant time and money outlay as I figure out what apps I should replace my current apps with and outlay the money to do so. It would easily wind up costing me as much as the phone.
Trying, certainly, but Gruber's criticisms always seem to be of the "if I don't put at least one critical thing in this review, they'll know for certain that I'm a fanboy!" flavor. He spends paragraphs spinning "the device has a bigger screen" into something negative, for example.
Scrape 2012 MLB Player Data with Node.js
Much awaited International Packaging Expo 2013 - Come and Join
"I was also a little taken aback by how anti-AT&T he went"

Everybody I know felt that AT&T was being absolutely deceptive when they started marketing their (barely 3G in the bay area) data plan as "4G" one day on the iPhone. It was laughable - the iPhone _frequently_ came to a crawl, and now, all of a sudden, AT&T is claiming 4G.

In comparison, Verizon LTE on my iPad screams from Redwood City through to Foster City, and I find a lot of places where it's superior to WiFi, so don't even bother switching over. Good for Gruber for calling AT&T on their crap.
I'm a FP gamer, if some of these were FP I'd love to buy them.
You mean 1500 Instagram clones...
Know how powerful the Pack Expo 2012 is...
my english failed me, is he DEAD or ALIVE?
I consider the unclear result(to me) is a bug in his article
I remain skeptical that fusion will ever be an economical or even viable source of energy. The major problems are that:

1. The Sun, by comparison, produces less energy (per volume) than compost [1];

2. Heavier isotopes of hydrogen, used because they provide a faster reaction, emit more neutrons, which tend to have a devastating effect on the container. Thus you have two conditions at odd: speed of the reaction vs viability of containment;

3. The Sun solves the problem of containing the reaction with gravity. Magnetism has yet to yet to be shown as viable of effective in energy terms; and

4. People focus too much on the fuel cost, which is near-zero and supply is effectively unlimited. But that's H1. Deuterium is relatively plentiful [2] but tritium is one of the most expensive substances (by mass) on Earth. Helium-3 is an alternative but is also incredibly expensive [3] such that recovering it from the Moon may actually be economically viable relative to cost (that should tell you something about how rare/expensive it is). D-D reaction research I think is currently far behind anything involving Tritium or He-3.

Fuel costs aside, that's only one input into the cost equation. Even if the fuel is free the power plant will cost $X to produce, will require $Y in maintenance per year for Z years and produce W MW of power. Plug all those numbers together and that power still has cost even with "free" fuel.

For automobiles at least, petrochemicals have some incredible advantages. They are relatively stable, cheap and the machinery for turning them into usable energy is cheap and mass-produced. Of course it has two major problems:

1. Emissions; and

2. It is a limited resource.

I tend to think at some point in the next few centuries genetic engineering will allow us to solve (2) by sustainably "growing" more fuel with something like algae or (to borrow an idea from Anathem) "fuel trees". Of course something must be consumed to produce this energy.

Battery technology will have to improve by an order of magnitude at least to be a viable alternative to fuels that are easily transported and don't require the infrastructure that charging stations otherwise would.

For fixed power generation I'm really not sure what the future holds. If we're not careful we'll simply exhaust a number of readily available fuels and the population problem will "correct" (as it often does) with war.

[1]: http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/04/17/3478276.ht...

[2]: http://www.ccfe.ac.uk/FAQ.aspx#Depletion

[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3#Fusion_reactions
So Gruber is some kind of paid blogger for Apple? His stuff always ends up on the front page of HN. What's up with that?
It's been live since last weekend, the announcement seemed to be late. It's very good so far (I've watched the first week's lectures). Steve is even better as a speaker/teacher than as a writer.
I consider this curious excuses.

>Gruber describes the jewelry or fine watch-like quality very well. But I don't wear jewelry or fine watches.

Being like jewelry isn't jewelry. The reference is to the build quality.

>but there's something about old original Motorola Droids that are at this point beaten up and worn that have a really nice aged, aesthetic weight to them.

No tech device is resistant to get beaten up. This is why there is a very healthy iPhone case market.

>Maybe it's more that I don't want to feel that precious about these objects.

These are phones. They are supposed to serve your purpose and not the other way around.
Awesome, and congrats Brian!
More features != better:
http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2010/02/if-your-product-is-...

That being said, I'm content with my 4s, although I will probably buy my wife a Nokia 920 so I can get a taste of the other side.
iOS 6 better let me turn off LTE with less than 6 taps

I wouldn't count on that. It wouldn't even surprise me if they didn't provide a setting to do that at all, after all, there is no way to turn of 3G in the settings.

You might have to jailbreak to get that capability.
I was replying to the "having the computing power of MacBook Pro on an iPhone" comment.
I'm sorry to be so blunt, but that has to be the most useless short description field I've ever read of an app on the App Store (and there are some really bad ones on there). I realize your title is pretty descriptive ("Border Delay"), but take advantage of the description field! That's valuable marketing space!

"Border Delay is the most useful utility for frequent travellers on the App Store. It has all the information you need, and none of the junk you don't. Check it out and see for yourself."

This does not qualify as a description! That said, I wish I had this 10 years ago when I was going back and forth on the border by car.
Pm me a portfolio and your rates please :)
> would take infinite time (from the target's perspective).

this doesn't sound right - the shell does arrive, and arrives exactly X light years after being launched, as measured by the alien. Its just that from the perspective of the people in the shell, heaps of time has passed on the outside.

But my knowledge of relativity is cursory at best, so im not sure if i m right.
Expected story of a nerd who rose to level of shodan in the game of go, oh well.
I have no idea why a phone made out of glass and metal would be desirable in the least. Window frames are made out of glass and metal; should I desire one of those too?

It makes me feel uncomfortably odd, but the iPhone elicits zero desire from me. If someone gave one to me for free, it would gather dust on my shelf.
That's like blaming accountants for income tax. Too many (bad) regulations spoil the economy. They lawyers are the symptom, not the cause.
Bad habit that loses entrepreneurs' money.
The logistics of aerial domination are pretty much the same whether you're talking drones or piloted craft. If you are the attacker you use ECM and missile/bomb bombardment to take out the radar/SAM stations. Meanwhile, you try to destroy as much of the enemy's airplanes on the ground as possible. If you have superiority in the air you take advantage of it, destroying every enemy thing that flies whether it is piloted by a crew or not.

The biggest advantage that drones have is a tactical one. And perhaps a manufacturing/logistical one if they can be produced in greater numbers, though at present that is not the case. Tactics only apply if there is a logistical balance sufficient to allow for a roughly even battlefield.
iOS 6 is not unique to the iPhone 5, so it wouldn't make sense for Gruber to review the latest version of the OS as a "feature" of the new phone. It makes sense to distinguish the hardware from the software.
Generals in charge of software projects. I worked at Microsoft, I know how well non-technical overseers manage projects.

> "We're gonna find things that we didn't know about and are gonna have to deal with them, but at least this scheduleis laid out to accommodate unexpected problems."

Bullshit- they played schedule chicken and got caught. It'll happen again.
Even with the letterboxing centered, it would still make more sense to always have the keyboard on the bottom -- then even old apps would benefit from a little more space when the keyboard is up.
I get really nervous running something with sudo that writes to my hosts file.

This is a really nice idea and I'd love to see it in another implementation.
The iPhone's battery takes up a gargantuan amount of its internal space already. Multiplying the battery size by 7 would end up doubling or tripling the device size easily. See the iFixit teardown of the 4: http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone-4-Teardown/3130/1

It's truly just an incredibly hard problem to solve.
Starting one's own company is a valid career path; since students are now considering careers, this is probably the right time to talk to them about this possibility.

It's certainly better than talking to them about it after they've accepted full-time jobs.
I'm a pornstar looking to partner with hackers, hustlers
I am specifically looking to build a product for smartphones that connects pornstars to fans in an ubiquitous way and allows microtransactions that performers can specify, like 5 dollars to make initial contact, 25cents for each message after that, 5 bucks for a custom pic, 50 bucks for a custom video, 100 for a ten minute live show, all from within the app. I'd use this app for my own career going foward and am confident tons of performers would be on board. Anybody interested?
It depends on whether you are looking for its usage in startups or in enterprise.

In the startup world very few are using Java for web development. They are using either Ruby, PHP, Python or Node.js. Java is mainly being used to develop Android applications. However, some companies like Twitter shifted to Scala after starting with Ruby. From wikipedia - Scala is a multi-paradigm programming language designed as a "better Java" — building on top of the Java virtual machine (JVM) and maintaining strong interoperability with Java, while at the same time integrating functional programming along with Java's object-oriented programming model. Here is a related article - http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/07/twitter-java-scala....

When it comes to enterprise, Java and .Net are still most used technology platforms.

If you want to start your own startup or if you want to work in a startup think about learning web development using HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript and any one of Python/Django/Flask, Ruby/Rails or PHP/CodeIgniter/Symfony. I would suggest to go with python/django. If you want to get into mobile application development learn Objective-C/ios for apple devices and Java/Android for Android based devices.

If it is all about getting a job in high profile software companies that makes softwares for big banks go for .Net or Java.
I'm glad he spent a long time on the feel. My primary criticism of my 4S echoed Edward Tufte's words here:

Last year in Cupertino, I yelled at some people about touchscreens that paid precise attention to finger touches from the user but not to how the device in turn touches the hands of the user (and produces divot edge-lines in the flesh).

Those creases between the antenna bands and the glass back combined with the 4S's weight were very noticeable the first time I held the 4S for more than 5 minutes and through the first week I had it. It faded completely fairly quickly and I laugh about it now but I have to think one of their major goals with this iteration was to erase that defect.

People seem disappointed every time Apple doesn't come out with a total redesign but total redesigns are basically admissions that what you were shipping last week was totally wrong. I have to think that a unibody metal frame is what they've been shooting for all along. They couldn't work the antennae properly so they settled on a lot of plastic and then glass and finally they got their unibody aluminum chassis. I wouldn't be surprised if by next year they completely remove the glass inlays on the back and move to liquidmetal alloys.
You clearly have no understanding of Apple's obsessive degree of supply-chain control.

The 4S is likely to be still for sale for two more YEARS. You think Apple just accidentally made a two-year surplus of the 4S, and now they are stuck with them, so they have to keep selling them? The actual figure is probably more like two days than two years.
I keep buying these and never seem to have time to actually play all of the games :(.
> Then do that. You don't have to handle errors, you can ignore them just like you would ignore an exception.

No, if I ignore an exception it bubbles up the stack and will either stop the program or find somebody handling it. If I ignore a return value, the program gets into a completely undefined state and will crash later in a completely different place.

Unless there's a way for go to do the same thing as the Erlang pattern:

{ok, Value} = call(SomeArg, SomeOtherArg).

is there?
"Chief scientist" is absolutely a real job. Why would you think it's not?
How I Ended Up Enjoying JavaScript
Thanks for the lead!

I've found bing login for casperjs, but otherwise most example out there assume anonymous access. I wouldn't use my cookie files, especially because it limits automation.

It is so stunning that nobody tried to solve this before / nobody published the scripts.
This guy is actually an engineer by training.
Totally understood. I started out writing a DNS server. Turns out, DNS is flipping complicated. I do make backups to the hosts file before every write. For me, I don't have anything complex in my hosts file, except the stuff Randall adds. The rest is just the default 4 lines.
Thanks. I'm more computer-sciencie myself. Or maybe more data-science. I think I'll go through a tutorial for both and see what happens.
> So the question is, if a 4-inch 16:9 display is better than a 3.5-inch 3:2 display, why hasn’t the iPhone been using 4-inch 16:9 displays from the start?

How about: Apple got this wrong?

To be fair to Apple, if they came out with a 4" or 4.5" back in 2007 it would have strangely large compared to everything else on the market (not to mention having the properties Gruber also mentions). The 3.5" screen made perfect sense then. However, what Apple didn't do was foresee that most consumers would prefer larger screens, and this doesn't fit with the Apple ideal of One True Resolution. (Yes, now there are two resolutions for iPhones, but only the vertical resolution has changed.)
Hey CG, thanks for checking it out. There's actually a pretty well fleshed-out description. Unfortunately, the app store hides all but the first few sentences by default.