skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm asking you to think critically about the tech industry and discuss it with me in a place where people who think critically about the tech industry discuss it.

So let's try again! Perhaps 4 out of 10 iPhones sold today are sold into the American market, where the 30-pin dock platform dominates. It's not a non-factor: compatibility with this platform was a key feature of the original iPhone.

Now we're in 2012 and Apple's gone with a similar but incompatible proprietary adapter for charging and media instead of an evolving global standard that has clear consumer benefits. "Why?" is an interesting question. "Because they're greedy gobshites" is an uninteresting answer.

Do you, ktizo, have some light to share?
I have 120,000 messages in Mail with 5 accounts going back about 6 years and about 20+ smart mailboxes.

Mail was one part of OSX I never actually had any problems with.
>However Intel said Clover Trail "is a Windows 8 chip" and that "the chip cannot run Linux".

This will merely be seen as a challenge by the Linux community.

Edit: Also it's not that it won't run, it simply won't be supported. Which shouldn't be new to any Linux user by now.
He actually needs to switch to Kanji several times a day as he says clearly "I must turn my texts and emails into Kanji ten times a day." The gripe is with the layout of the Kanji keyboard which, looking at that screenshot, is indeed pretty ridiculous.
Yup you nailed it. I've been doing online communities since 1990 in one shape or another. This pattern happens in them all. It is hard for owners / managers of such communities to avoid this.
You state that Nootropics work, or else they wouldn't be available/approved. However drugs that would generally be considered psychoactive aren't approved as nootropics, they are approved as part of the food and beverage industry/anti depressant/anti-narcolepsy/anti-ADD aids (Modafinil, Adderall, nicotine, caffeine).
Their use as nootropics is secondary to their licensed use and their current popularity is, I believe, mostly to the technological sophistication of society, with a quest for constant improvement and productivity metrics.

>|They're designed for a purpose. They must be efficacious for that purpose.

Why? That is fallacious. They aren't designed for the purpose they are touted for, and as you correctly point out later, the article that these comments all relate to primarily refer to supplements rather than drugs per se .

>| Where do you think heroin came from?

What are you talking about? The military had nothing to do with Heroin.

Now, I use caffeine, nicotine and modafinil regularly. But that does not legitimise all drugs/supplements that have had the label 'nootropic' added to them by passionate advocates for human mental advancement and improvement, and the comment that is currently the first post in this thread I believe correctly points out what is required in order to establish evidence around the efficacy of these drugs.

We should not be too rapid in our praise of miracle cures and treatments, history shows that most of them are a load of shit.

ps. try asterisks for italics
I hope Firefox pulls this off - native app programming is a complete pain in the ass (especially with multiple platforms). You'd have thought us programmers would've figured this out years ago - seeing as all languages are turing complete and in turn should all run everywhere, all the time, at equivalent speeds (it's all assembly/machine code in the end).

Can anyone try out:

http://anirudhjoshi.github.com/fluid_table_tennis/ on the Firefox OS and tell me its performance?
My iPhoto Library grew rapidly over the years. As in: it doubled its size, even though I did not add many photos. Thus, after a few years, I ended up with an iPhoto Library of 60 gigs that contained 30 gigs worth of photos.

And apparently, I am not the only one with this problem. And there seems to be no way to fix this. At all.

Luckily, at some point I found some 3rd party software that can rebuild an iPhoto library by basically simulating the user dragging all his images there manually and re-applying all the tags and stuff by hand. Honestly, what they are doing is quite an achievement in the face of an utterly defective piece of software.

Edit:

For the record, I used this tool to salvage my library: http://www.fatcatsoftware.com/iplm/
The search actually has the largest touch area of all the letters, because it extends to the top of the pane.

There are a lot of ways to get there:
* Tap the status bar, which takes you to the to of most scrollable areas.
* Be conservative, if you accidentally hit A, scroll up.
* Hold your finger down on the letters to activate scrubbing mode, then slide your finger to the top.

I'm not saying they're all perfect usability wise, but picking out search as a small touch target seems a little odd to me. But then I've probably spent a lot longer than most obsessing over every pixel and touch target of the UI.

To me it seems like a trade off. Is searching contacts important enough to have a big button for? Where would you put it without completely overhauling the iOS UI? Is it of more or equal importance than any of the current elements? Admittedly annecdotal, but I see far more people scrubbing to the first letter of the contact and flicking through the list, because typing takes time (though a 'hard to find/activate' search feature might contribute to that). It seems to me putting it where it is allows for a good cross-platform solution to an unobtrusive search function.
I use this a lot, and it really does work. It renders everything, and renders it well. The one thing that doesn't work is maps – just too many vectors, and Javascript/Canvas/etc just can't keep up. Otherwise I'm very happy and don't feel nearly as much resentment towards PDFs as I used to.
This is great.. but there is an international shortage of hydrogen, and unfortunately, I think MRI scanners should have first dibs. Having said this, it will be great when nuclear fusion is cracked and there is an abundance of the stuff.
This is fascinating, thank you. I haven't heard of this standard.

CEC, video, audio, DRM, and power over a single cable, with two physically and electrically compatible micro-USB implementations. Hrm.... I am intrigued. I'll have to think on this.
Kinda. In some ways, it's worse because it conveys a false sense of security to people who trust those measures to protect them, too.
Great insight; nice to see something that's not just Gruber-bashing.

I think we can expect Apple to do unsafe things in the future, but outside the realm of iPhone. The iPod (classic) was in a fairly safe place when Apple started disrupting with iPhone. The iPhone and iPad are coupled tighter than the iPod and the iPhone, but there's a hint of the same thing here; the iPhone is refined, and the newer iPad disrupts.

I think iPad, not iPhone, is where we should look for unsafe. Or perhaps something else altogether.
Who called it corruption? Those are your words, not mine.

The democrats buy votes by making concessions to unions and those on entitlement programs. Because that is a huge portion of their voters they have no choice but to keep shoveling money at them.

Republicans, on the other hand, shovel their bullshit at the religious majority, among others.

The rich? How many votes do they represent?

No, elections are driven by the masses, and each group has no choice but to buy their votes in different ways. Once you start down that path it is hard to turn around. Just like foreign aid: Once you start buying friends you can't stop because you'll loose your "friends".

Then there are those of us who are willing to consider actual facts and can't be bought. We vote not based on tribalism or blind allegiance to a party or ideology but rather on an attempt to be rational and choose what might be best for all rather than mindless organized tribal groups. And, no, we don't have a monopoly on making the right decision. A great example of that is that some of us today regret having supported Obama.

All I am saying is, watch what happens in countries like Argentina because that same tune is being played here in the US. It's different. The players are different. The methods and tactics are different. The visibility is different. However, the outcome is likely to be exactly the same: The slow and steady destruction of a once prosperous nation.

This, as an entrepreneur, should keep you up at night because almost nothing can affect the outcome of your endeavors to the extent that bad national and international political forces can. Just ask those of us who saw our businesses grind to a halt during 2008~2009 if being a great entrepreneur in that environment was enough to keep the boat afloat.

Ideology is great until reality smacks you in the face and sits you on your butt. The lessons of Argentina should not be ignored because they are very relevant to all of us.
I'd go with "That's because any version of Firefox below 15 is unsupported".
I'm really excited for this for http://www.sharelatex.com and other similar sites that are actually generating a PDF for you. With native PDF viewers there is no way to interact with the viewer via javascript and even just having the viewer stay on the same page when your reload a document (with minor changes) is impossible. Pdf.js means that we'll be able to do this easily, as well as other cool things like letting letting the user sync between the PDF and source.
If I, a tech savvy developer at a startup, don't find the idea of Quora particularly interesting, why would Average Joe be interested in joining the community?

Have some reasons :-)

* Many people like helping people and answering there questions. Techie folk have hackernews and stackexchange and perlmonks and whatever. This is a place for everybody else.

* It's not subject-specific which makes it more attractive and useful to people who have expertise in multiple areas

* The combination of the multiple-areas-of-expertise and the social-network stuff means that I can very easily come across fun/interesting stuff

* It's fairly open and friendly compared to some Q&A communities. My impression has been that, because it's not subject specific folk, seem to give greater leeway on "dumb" questions that would be given on a narrow "expert" forum.

* <motivation class="selfish">I have had work via Quora. Because it covers all areas of expertise, and gives some kind of levelling information on expertise, it is a market to some extent. Folk who need - for example - expertise if folk who do agile/ux transitions and integrations it's pretty easy to find the people who answer questions around that topic. And hire 'em.</motivation>

I've no idea if they have a sane business model. The hiding answers thang is icky. You may be better served by other communities for the stuff that you're interested in. But I do think there are lots of reasons for folk to use the current site, and those people aren't well served by any other Q&A service that I've played with.
Pretty sure it's not a troll. He's pretty well known for his writings on search engines. It's a sign of the times when longtime Mac users are complaining. That's how bad things have gotten.

I've watched people struggle like he's describing. Too many upgrades. Too many authorizations. Too many restrictions. They are jumping through hoop after hoop just to do basic stuff. If they are young they probably don't know any better. But for anyone who has been around, this has gotten to be a joke.

If you have stuck with Apple over the long haul, then you remember what it was like before OSX. When OSX was first introduced you had to upgrade your Mac hardware just to run it or it would be dog slow. Then it got better over time as we all upgraded but it has gradually become more and more annoying. How many people are staring at a spinning beachball at this very moment? Trying to appeal to PC users, all the Mac vs PC nonsense. Then trying to lock down people's music and other files and make them "subscribers", like they are some sort of media licensing company. Apple is no longer an alternative to the typical computer hassles. They have become a primary source of them!

But only if you have been using Macs for many years can you see this. Noobs and fanboys are not going to notice. They will wait minutes for their Mac to boot and stare endlessly at the beachball and accept that this is "fast, start-of-the-art computing".

While noobs suffer through iPhoto staring at beachballs, I will boot in seconds and process my photos, running in a background process, in half the time, using a more traditional UNIX without the Cocoa cruft. No hassles.
Taylor Rain's Bacon number is 4
Not to discount the benefit of education in promoting economic growth –especially in developing countries, but I don’t think you can say it is the driving force. There are so many other factors.

Particularly for Singapore, its economic growth is probably better attributed to very low tax rates attracting overseas business and investment, low cost foreign workers to exploit due to little to no labour laws, and (unlike most of south-east Asia) extremely low crime and corruption.

But I’m not an economist.
Most hotels have the a) long skinny security latches (i.e. http://www.shutterstock.com/pic.mhtml?id=16874026) - those are specifically used so they can be opened by hotel staff using a special tool (http://www.nathosp.com/product/sl2/hotel_room_door_locks_and...) the deadbolt is typically controlled by the electronic lock and can be overridden.
While it can lower server load (though I doubt significantly in most cases) and bandwidth use (in some cases, where more data is present than the template chooses to display, it can increase bandwidth needed - but that is usually a design/tradeoff issue elsewhere), the main reason for pushing more to the client is UI responsiveness.

A lot of stuff is being pushed to the client now to reduce the amount of crosstalk between client and server, so things feel snappier for the user, with the goal to be to talk to the server when absolutely required (i.e. to save data or application state, to request new data or check the data the client has is up-to-date, or when some of your business logic needs to make a decision the client-side can't be trusted with).

If you are making display decisions client-side then your template engine probably needs to be client-side.
Here's is my ONE issue with adblock.

We have a clothing recommendation engine that helps people discover clothes and we wanted to provide the service ad free. We chose a platform called viglink which affiliates the existing outbound links to the clothing vendors and if the user ends up purchasing something we are given a commission.

I think this is a fair model where we are compensated for our service and the user is 100% unaware and not bothered.

However, in the past month adblock has decided to block this despite the fact it provided zero nuisance to the end user. We managed to create work arounds but it's a frustrating issue.
I presume this is some sort of deal to keep Android off it, as manufacturers will want supported chips.
If you run into something like that, look inside the bundle with OmniDiskSweeper and see what's using up space.

(For instance you might have switched your camera to RAW unintentionally, or told iPhoto to save pictures as 16-bit raw TIFF)
The true answer doesn't have to be the interesting one, this is basic Design in the Commercial World stuff. If the change in dock connector for the new phone wasn't coupled to restrictions on 3rd party suppliers and an increase in basic costs across the board, including internally at Apple as it has been suffering from labour shortages, partly because of this decision to bring the cables in house, then I wouldn't necessarily put it down to pure profiteering. But from where I am sitting, there is no clear technical advantage to this behaviour, but there is a clear financial one over time.

[edit] Also, if I wanted to predict where this is headed, if all cable production can be brought in house, then why not go the whole hog and chip the cables [edit - I just looked up the spec, given that thunderbolt is an active cable, this has to be the direction they are headed], with some introduced functionality to sweeten the deal on the consumer side and then you can get total lock-in on peripherals, if you like.
This is like saying that my car is not easy to use as a bus for carrying 50 people. (In Africa you see cars with 15 people onboard).

If you have 10.000 photos and thousands of contacts you are not a normal user anymore, you are a pro and you need pro tools. I have tens of times more big photos in my computers, and huge videos but I don't use Iphoto, this would be so non sense, Iphoto would make a local copy of everything it touches, like iTunes.

Apple is selling this thing called iPads like hotcakes because the intended audience is normal people, people that can't use a pc, like my father, who are much much more than those that can.
I am still using OSX, and modestly enjoying it. But I feel the same way the author does. (Here is my list of complaints: http://bastibe.de/how-apple-is-failing-me.html )

Still, I find that OSX is a fine environment to run Unix software. Most of my computer interaction these days revolves around Emacs, a terminal and a web browser. Which is fine. It is a nice system. But really, I used to feel that OSX had a certain elegance to it that other OSes lacked. And that feeling is fading. Thus, I doubt that my next computer will come with an Apple logo. And incidentally, neither will my next smartphone or tablet.

Sad.
Did not know about Ghostery (I am a lazy user) and decided to install it. Thanks for the article ;-).
Crappy comparison. Glass is installed for aesthetics, not security. Locks are installed specifically to keep people out. Windows are a known and accepted security hole that often have additional security measures attached to them.
They wanted ponies too
I think Firefox has been shipping with this for awhile to view PDFs. It may be an about:config value you have to turn on though.
Because it and iTunes do not handle id3 tags correctly and consistently.

I switched to windows 7.
(I assume you are you mentally comparing pdf.js to Adobe Reader.)

Have we reached the point where Adobe Reader is so resource-guzzling that people prefer a JavaScript (gasp!) PDF interpreter to Reader? Wow.
If you're feeling up for a safari (har), go to your iPhoto Library, right-click -> Show Package Contents, and check out the sizes of each folder inside of here.

(the terminal command 'du' or the freeware GrandPerspective.app works well)

Pay close attention to the "iPod Photo Cache". Any sync to an iOS device that requires a down-res means a huge volume of quasi-thumbnails get stuffed here, one set for each target resolution.
Neat! Please add Haml as an output format for your HTML snippets.
Sure. I thoroughly look forward to you trying out Ubuntu 12.04 and Windows 8 and seeing how they compare.

I think you will find that both are orders of magnitude worse than OSX. Why ? Because from a UI perspective both are complete rewrites and are reminiscent of 10.0 beta. Lot of potential but a lot of polish required as well.
Those tools fall down when you connect them to external services - particularly exchange. Mail.App, in particular, was flawed in how it read from exchange servers from 10.7 through 10.7.3 - It's gotten somewhat better in 10.7.4, and I hear most of my remaining bugs have been resolved in ML. Calendar and Address book are fine as standalone tools, but never really (and still don't) cut it as "Enterprise workflow" tools. Microsoft Exchange + Outlook own the calendar work in the enterprise.

The point I was really trying to make was that Apple's recent failings have been their attempt to work with others - they don't understand how to design/deploy/develop internet services. And they don't play (very) well with others.

They succeed best when you stick to their walled garden, with perhaps the one exception that proves the rule being their web browser - which is pretty spiffy on both the mobile and OS X platform.
I can think of at least 7 Steve Jobs keynotes that had the exact same "showroom trickery", starting from 1983 (the Macintosh) and the next time he announced a new product for apple (the iMac) in 1998. Other times include cinema displays, PowerBooks, power Macs, iBooks, MacBook, MacBook Air, and i think one iPod.

If you want to compare something with some other thing, make sure you know what the second thing is.
The demo looks really impressive, well done. Adding this to my toolbox! :)
I used to use PDF.js for a while (on Linux), until I switched to KParts because it was having difficulty rendering certain kinds of PDF documents. KParts uses the same underlying engine that powers Okular (KDE's default PDF reader.) It renders everything properly and is much faster than PDF.js. It reminded me of Foxit on Windows. KParts might be only available on Linux though...
A simple helper function makes DOM manipulation non-painful as well. One example is https://gist.github.com/1532562 or my fork https://gist.github.com/3524145

It's used like this:

el ( tagName, properties, children )

Working with data structures is easy, children is just an array which can be the results of something like data.map() turning the data into elements.
I think the reason why your photos are doubling is because I believe you are importing them into iPhoto and then back into the iPhone. You will get two copies of all your photos on your iPhone because they get imported into iPhoto and then back out. It's super annoying, so I shut iPhoto completely off.
> Your curt reply...struck me as a sign that you were looking only for confirmation of your existing belief, rather than for new evidence....I felt (and feel) that if you had a true interest in the subject, they would be of use to you. You declared they were not. I was reminded of the cartoon of the angry mother shouting "But he was wearing a hat" to the fireman who rescued her drowning son. No, you'll have to research and read, but that's about the best you can hope for when asking for citations from strangers.

Wow. That wasn't a very civil or constructive response, either. I'm going to go ahead and take this discussion to email since I doubt anyone else is getting anything out of this anymore.
Really nice, and some great snips already added. Would love to see additional login snippets.
Don't know the current state, but for a while it was a lot faster to just replace the HTML source (innerHTML I think?) than to manipulate the DOM. Just the way the browsers were implemented. No idea if the situation has improved by now.
Take a look at Rigol scopes.
I think he meant "I must" in the incredulous sense, like it must happen to him that frequently as it is driving him nuts.
First off, good on you for sharing your feelings, it's very hard for many.

Look it is your life, as much as people will say exercise, take anti-depressants, see a doctor, etc... remember that you have control of your own life and should live it how you want. You don't have to work at a boring job or be in a horrible city with nobody you know. Go somewhere where you will be happy; work somewhere where you will be happy; take yoga classes and meditation classes; if you can code, build amazing things, if not it is a great thing to learn; go to various meetups; pick up new hobbies, choose the life you want to live and relax.

Life is beautiful, life is gracious, you just have to go and find what it is that makes you happy.

Don't conform, do what you love and love what you do. I suggest reading The Art of Non-Conformity by Chris Guillebeau

Stay Strong.
When you brought this up with the Adblock folks, what did they answer?
"there is no unique music composition :)