skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apple definitely puts a lot of money into research and development to create the software and manufacturing techniques. This estimate is more about marginal profit. To make it a bit clearer, if Apple sold zero iPhones, the R&D costs you talk about would still be incurred (and in the same amount). If Apple sells a billion iPhones, the R&D costs you talk about would be the same amount.

One could imagine a company that does $1M in R&D, has a price per unit of $650, and a cost per unit of $500. Similarly, a company could do $100M in R&D, have a price of $650, and a cost per unit of $200. At some number of units (and I'm just being lazy here since I don't want to do the math), the second company makes more money.

A statement like this isn't meant to sound like Apple isn't offering customers a good value, but rather that the cost to supply 1 additional iPhone is small compared to the revenue gained by selling 1 additional iPhone - basically, that a lot of Apple's costs are R&D, not component costs. When evaluating a company for investment, it's nice to see that they aren't running thin margins on supplying marginal units and so the more they succeed, the more the R&D costs are spread out.
This is a tangent but that article makes some weird arguments. What is the relevance that the judge is or was a "Facebook addict" to this case? Who cares that he used MySpace? It just seems like the author is attempting to make the judge look incompetent (which his use of hashtags in the ruling already has accomplished).
In every sentence I've seen this week that contained Apple and Foxconn the sentence becomes so much better and fairer when you replace Apple with 'Foxconn customers (Microsoft, HP, Dell, Apple, Samsung and others)'.
Nintendo's New Wii Has TV Ambitions
Amazon begins collecting sales tax in California on September 15th
Those are IDEs. The most popular text editors (at least on HN) are Sublime Text 2, Textmate, vim, and emacs.
(this raises and expands on similar ideas to a blog post I wrote a while ago -- http://blog.tapin.tv/take-time-to-develop-fast.html)
How did you get a /48?
It seems to me that the appeal is already a form of contest.
I think as many developers have been waiting for dtrace on Linux, which imho is a lot nicer.

It is mostly a question of what you're used to. To some extent the raw dtrace interface is a lot more powerful than Instruments though, so unfortunately you have to learn it before you can take advantage of most of the power of dtrace.
It depends on what you want to do. If you want to make sure your little brother isn't spying on what you're saying, any of the IM platforms from established players is likely "good enough" (gtalk, skype, facebook chat, etc). If you're a dissident in the middle-east, your requirements may be difficult to meet.
imo.im is a web service, not a raw XMPP client.
This was more of a technical challenge, whereas, implementing international payments is beyond just technical and likely includes many legal hurdles and navigating many different policies. It has to be extremely difficult, otherwise, Stripe would have done it already.
Source: http://www.ciozone.com/index.php/Editorial-Research/Top-50-T...

They're at number 15, but I don't see any of their competitors in the smartphone manufacturing business above them. Now, do they spend more on PR? Yes, in fact, 3x as much. But look at the numbers yourself, they don't lie. Another article: http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/columnist/krantz/story/2...
I admit that I have only thought about this for a minute or two but I am thinking of something a little more complex than a hard coded image.

More like: Hit submit when a picture of a dog is shown in the slideshow, if its a cat, your comment will be denied. And these images of dogs and cats would be picked randomly by the server from a google image search (...or something). The vulnerability so far is that a bot could just keep trying until it got in but I'm sure a crafty programmer could come up with an attempt limiter.

Still a half-baked idea, but the tech does offer some interesting possibilities. I particularly like that this may work when AJAX/JS is disabled or otherwise not an option.
Pretty neat super hero inspired design.
BostonRB - What to expect in Rails 4.0
The competition is making FAR less profit per smartphone sold than Apple, largely because of the volume per model sold, and also because of vertical integration. In fact, outside of Samsung, most competitors are probably losing money.

Apple only sells one model of iPhone per year, in about 10 very similar configurations, which gives them huge economies in assembly and strong negotiating power on components (they're buying 100 million of a certain type of display, instead of 5 million of 10 different kinds of displays). Furthermore, the supply chain economics are much better, with lower inventory costs (if you are trying to keep 10 items in stock with variable demand, you'll need to have more inventory on hand than if you have only one item).

The second big profit driver for Apple is vertical integration -- they sell a good chunk of iPhones, especially in the US, themselves, whether online or at Apple Stores. This means they get to keep the entire profit instead of handing over some of it to a retailer.
BostonRB - Dissecting Ruby Blocks
I've asked this question before to folks who I know use ClojureScript. The answer is: you don't need a framework like Backbonejs if you're using ClojureScript. Why? The ability to work in a functional language means you are able to express equivalent concepts without the need for alot of plumbing/framework.
While I agree with you in general, Apple charges the carriers much more than other manufacturers, to the extent that carriers' margins are knocked down really low, and Sprint was expecting to be profitable on the iPhone only a few years after launching it.

In fact, the lower the sales of the iPhone, the higher the margin of the carrier(assuming same number of handsets).

http://money.cnn.com/2012/07/24/technology/att-verizon-iphon...

The carriers are rumored to be pushing back on the iPhone prices, but they know they need it or the competition will lap up the sales for the expensive data plans.
You can set up your own private XMPP server and use gibberbot, beem or yaxim on android (or any other XMPP client on the platform of your choice). This is the only way to ensure that your communication is really private.
Yes, but if something was briefly posted by mistake, not archived, and retracted, I think people have a right to keep it private.
Even If You're All-Powerful, It's Hard To Fix The Economy
Assuming you mean the American national debt, not really. That's only $480 billion/year. That wouldn't even plug our current deficit, let alone start paying off the debt.
Don't presume that "peer review" means anything. It really doesn't. It doesn't mean the peers have reproduced the results, and it doesn't mean the peers are even up to speed specifically enough to be able to authoritatively say the results are correct.

I know what peer review means, and I know that it's none of those things. But getting a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal means you passed a sniff test, which is better than being written up in your Alma Mater's pop-news magazine.
Just to point out something on the bit about installing GNURadio, Homebrew (http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/) is really a great alternative for MacPorts and someone has already made a Homebrew Package for GNURadio (https://github.com/titanous/homebrew-gnuradio) which uses 3.6.1 (3.6.2 is the latest version but i'm sure you can update it easily)
Preview of an inauguration
I never bother. I find it much easier and much less hassle to use VMs. With Fusion, you can create snapshots, try something out and revert back if it doesn't work out.

This way my primary OS stays as clean as possible (text editor, browser, fusion) and my VMs can be my messy playground.

Don't get me wrong, brew and ports are great but their very existence makes we wary of venturing too far down the rabbit hole of development directly on OSX.
It’s universal. Everybody has to go.
The security history of WhatsApp is so horrible, it does not seem to make any sense to talk to them. Alone the fact that their app is sending your contact list to their server, without asking you, on every app start, disqualifies the service. Their previous security track record just puts it over the edge.
Viber [1] may be a good alternative. It s free on all ecosystems - iOS, Android, WP, Blackberry, Nokia and Bada.

[1] http://www.viber.com/
The 2002 ISMM paper on MPS says that there is a global pause. As usual, it may be fine for small heaps and allocation rates, but eventually it will become a problem.
I didn't say anything of the sort.

I simply made an amusing (to me) observation. I had earlier thought Pinterest seemed like MacGyver for people into crafts (at least that's the kind of thing my wife kept getting excited about). That's not to disparage HN or Pinterest or MacGyver for that matter.
Please take the time to read through my comment, and you'll see that I address this - 'underemployment' is a misleading term that not only conflates several distinct concepts but also implies a connection with something that it's not.

It's like using the term 'intellectual property' when discussing the Pirate Party vs. MPAA. Aside from the fact that patents and copyrights are completely different legal concepts, the word 'property' already implies a right to ownership[1] that one side asserts doesn't exist to begin with.

[1] '...inalienable rights... Life, Liberty, and Property' - Declaration of Independence (first draft).
This is an excellent point. Fixing a design flaw this inherent is going to take more than a weekend of frantic dev time. It could conceivably take weeks to implement an overhaul to their framework, all the while the users are vulnerable.
It's predictable that every Stripe-related post will have non-Americans asking when Stripe is coming to their country.

Less common or nonexistent are the comments where someone posts a link to the beta Stripe clone they are building to launch in their country. Do it, at worst you'll be acquisition bait.
You make a reasonable claim. Lets consider the evidence though.

" there are many more people on facebook than networks like myspace ever had. This makes a transition much, much harder."

Have you considered the cost to move a single community? Facebook has a lot of users but it also has a lot of communities. So the durability will be determined in part by how interconnected those communities are. So for example if everyone in your school is on Facebook, great but who else is on Facebook that you share with? If its nobody then the 'school' community is independent of the greater Facebook user base for you, it could move en masse to another service and the members would continue to be well served. Now do you have college friends and church friends and work friends? If so then you've got a more complex social web and moving to a different service for your college friends means you now check two services instead of one in order to keep up, that is a 'negative' on your part and if enough people in a community have this same constraint then the community is more tightly bound to Facebook.

Because of that reasoning I'd claim that it does not matter how many people currently use Facebook, rather it depends on how difficult it is for an arbitrary community to move to a new service. If movement is easy (or becomes desirable) then you could see mass migrations.

"facebook is not only used for facebook, but for many third-party apps as well. People will keep their facebook accounts so that they can log in to external services."

This is clearly a 'stickyness' mechanism that Facebook has implemented for the reason you state. If you log into a bunch of places using your Facebook account then having a Facebook account is important, and leaving Facebook is 'hard'. Clearly this is in the interest of Facebook and the reason they offer the account connecting APIs that they do.

There are two potential problems with this however, one is that Facebook is less willing to reciprocate with data access to web sites that use their APIs (see the Google / Facebook problems as exhibit A) which makes that linkage less desirable to the third party. If it is a big enough problem they will drop it.

The second problem continues to be the profiling problem which is that Facebook knows a lot about you and this simply adds to their knowledge. As people become uncomfortable with that they may choose not to use Facebook login even if it is available for just that reason.

It will be interesting to see how durable these defenses are against defection. I don't doubt for a minute that Facebook will die at some point. The question though is will it be be 10 years from now, or 20, or 5. If you look at companies that have spanned several generations there is a more fundamental value proposition at work than 'friends.'
Zumper is looking for a lead iOS engineer
We're Zumper (www.zumper.com) and we're working to make apartment rental better. If you caught any of Techcrunch Disrupt this week, you might remember us - we launched our beta site on Tuesday (http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/11/zumper-disrupt12/) and came back for the final round on Wednesday.

We hope our beta search experience is useful, but there's lots still to build. We've big plans to improve the rental process for tenants, and make life easier for landlords too. A big part of this will be building a best-in-class mobile/tablet app, and we're looking for a lead iOS engineer to help us do that. You'll have a polished app or two in the App Store, a passion for great UX, and love the idea of solving a real problem from a clean sheet.

We're a close-knit team of ex-Google engineers and real estate professionals. We're lucky to have the backing of stellar investors, great industry connections and cool office space in SOMA, San Francisco. Drop us a line on jobs@zumper.com to find out out more - we'd love to see what you've built and hear about what you like to work on.

(p.s. We're here for any questions/comments on the product or Disrupt experience too!)
There's no point in adding Straight Talk at this time because official word (via their Twitter) is that they do not have nano SIMs and they have no (announce-able) plans to sell nano SIMs at this time.

Micro-SIMs cannot be cut down to nano-SIM dimensions and be used.
Show HN: Chronos - Track where you spend your time and who you spend it with
If we're talking about advertisable blocks, the Germany scenario doesn't happen. For the time being, there can't be a liquid market for /32's, at least not one that works acros multiple ISPs.

I agree with you strongly that the 128 bit IP address is a huge design mistake, one that has unnecessarily retarded the deployment of IPv6 (I personally believe fatally so). Even in the '90s, a 64 bit number was still a scalar on most platforms you'd care about. And even in 2012, 128 bit numbers aren't. I think people drastically underestimate the amount of work it's going to take to upgrade the huge amount of software built on the assumption that you can store an IP address in a scalar.
I wonder if you could get a similar effect by just doing a transparent overlay on the page.

Don't ask me how you'd handle click events, though.
How Your Wireless Carrier Overcharges You
Thanks to DWM (the compositor) in Vista, if you had decent enough graphics card, it was way faster than XP. Most of the UI issues were either that the GFX card was crap or the classic theme was enabled.

Vista was from a technical point of view, like going from MacOS9 to OSX...

They introduced a new kernel transaction manager, entirely new audio subsystem, new scheduler, new network stack, SxS, UAC, new display driver model, entirely new graphics stack, new power management stack, new crypto API, a whole load of new fonts and a proper stable 64-bit environment.
e-mail account is different, as it gives you an address that others will use exclusively to communicate with you. On the other hand, Facebook friends will use your name and the search field to look up for you, unique address is not that critical in such infrastructure.
Red Hat: using the GPL against a patent lawsuit
"Looking at this solely as a geek and not taking into account the legal issues, any information that has been publicly available on the net at any point should be considered permanently public."

I believe this to be true, although without regard for the details of this case, because I look at it from the point of view of censorship. When taken to the extreme, in a world where there is no censorship of any kind, a person cannot even censor themselves, given that nothing ever made public could be permanently deleted.
Yes, they're nice to look at, but unlike, say, emeralds, they're not very rare -- they're simply controlled by a monopoly supplier. Manufactured diamonds will bring back a competitive supply which would exist if there was a healthy assortment of companies in the diamond mining industry today.

I do question your judgment in wanting to cover yourself head to toe in diamonds :) Do you also want to drive this car? http://www.diamondvues.com/2007/04/check_out_this_diamond_st...
Have you tried using 99designs to get some graphic design gigs?
Yes, it's insecure by the standards we would normally apply to software. But let's be honest - this is competing against SMS, not XMPP, Skype, et al. How hard do you think it is for someone to sniff an SMS?
I've never had to pay for the Android app - it seems to autorenew.
TL;DR OS X isn't Linux.

Just so you know, people that have developed on Unix systems for decades have the same complaints about Linux.
yes, although I'd include an AND condition, like "If your site has googleable content AND you engage your users in a meaningful way..."
Quora entered the soccer mom phase summer of 2011. The quality has plummeted since then.
This could be a biggie. IE8 is the last version that works on XP, which I'm sure a great many corporates are running.

That said, if you're using Google Apps, you're probably not so averse to installing Chrome for your users.
Then my point is that most hotel cleaning staff is paid more than minimum wage, so the scenario of the minimum wage staff is the uncommon scenario.

I don't think wages affect honesty to any great extent, no. I think bad working conditions affect honesty a lot more.

If you believe this to be true, do you ask the hotel how much they pay their cleaning staff, and choose the one with higher base pay? How much more are you willing to pay to be in a hotel which pays their employees a higher wage?

Higher wages mean other things than those two. It could mean that it's harder to get staff because there is better employment elsewhere, so there's less risk to being fired for suspicion of theft because it's not hard to find a new job. It could be because the union is strong and able to negotiate better than management, while management actively wants to break the union by treating their cleaning staff poorly in the hopes that the staff will steal, so management has reason to fire them and blame the union for protecting thieves.

(Yes, the latter sound much less likely than the former.)
I'm not sure how much I buy this. With no discussion of the model it's hard to say what assumptions he did or did not make in terms of how all these factors respond to each other.
I've always thought of that, but never an animated gif. It seems brilliant!
On the topic of 1ms touchscreen response, I'd be interested in seeing how the pixel integrated touch electrodes affect response time.
It's not nostalgia. It's the software industry; and Apple. If they do not keep writing needless code and mindlessly adding features and then _forcing_ you to use their software (you are not given a choice; hello Apple), they become less important. The focus then (properly) becomes Moore's Law.

And your machine gets more and more powerful. That comes from the hardware. Software does not add more power. It drains power.

But you will not likely see much of the gains from Moore's Law as a home user; you only see "new" software. The software industry will be the ones who get the benefit of hardware advances. They will promptly usurp all the gains for themselves to make their bloated software capable of running. Writing power hungry programs is perfectly acceptable (I love writing code) BUT _forcing_ people to use it is not cool. Users are not often given a choice to keep using "yesterday's" software (even if it still works). Even if it would let them see the gains from Moore's Law. That is a travesty. Keep staring at the beachball. Life is good.

We've had decades to observe software development and it's clear that software does not have an equivalent to Moore's Law.

Let us buy the Apple hardware without the Apple software. Let us install our own software if we so choose. Now, behold as people try to argue against this. But they are only arguing against options and choice. What is the harm in giving people the option to install their own OS? If anything without the Apple brand is so terrible then surely no one would opt for it. So no harm done. You never know, they might actually be able to sell lots of hardware this way. "Average consumers" are not the only ones who spend lots of money on hardware.

Apple has taken a decent system (free UNIX) and ruined it. They have made it unusuable for anyone who has any idea of how fast computers SHOULD be.
"Social networks are extremely risky investments, no matter what." ?
I ported my number to Google Voice and dropped my cell phone plan, for good…
Your Friend Network? Ask Wolfram Alpha for your Facebook report
I don't mean to jump the gun with the profanity here, but this is fucking ridiculous. Anyone who still uses XP but cannot install a third party browser (hint: most of the corporate world) will be 'unsupported' by Google Apps.
I mean the actual weights of the neural network. After the first iteration, each worker starts with the same weights but performs SGD updates on different subsets of the data. After each epoch, you re-seed the workers with the best weights.
How well does printing work when PDF.js handles the rendering?
Compared to sniffing data over public wifi, pretty hard.
We should all start using our regular XMPP accounts now! Most of us already have one. If you have a Gmail, Fastmail, Lavabit, GMX, Ovi.com, Yandex email address, you are ready to go. All that's left to do: Install Xabber or IM+ on your smartphone! Btw, both support OTR end2end encryption!

If you also want to instant message on your laptop: The latest Thunderbird comes with XMPP support! Or give Jitsi, which supports end2end encryption, or one of the many alternatives a try! Enjoy!
Even if I were using a Linux or Mac development machine, I would still have/want to develop everything remotely by mounting a network share, but that's just my situation/preference. Either way, I don't see it as a big deal. In fact, I think it's better to test the code on a remote staging server that matches your live environment than it is to use a local Linux/Mac setup that might differ from the live environment.

And yes, the remote files are directly edited. There's a volume (i.e., Z:\) on my laptop that is the remote directory I've mounted. I use Samba, but you can also use NFS by installing the necessary client software from Add/Remove Programs, if that's what you prefer.

I don't know anything about the GitHub client, so I can't help you there.
I'm not bashing against Haml, all that I'm saying is that is not necessary. Lately Slim also has become quite popular, so that would involve also having the Slim version. And in the future it will be something different, but as long as HTML remains as the lingua franca of the web, then there's no really need.

I used Haml in the past, and I understand it's popular nowadays mostly because of Rails, but I hardly think it's widely-used. Just to name a few that use HTML or a template engine of their own: Blogspot, Tumblr and Wordpress, and these are much more widely-used than Haml.