skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> 1st-gen, new technology

When the MacBook Air was introduced, it suffered from many early issues, including issues with the hinge. Now it's a solid device. We'll see where Retina computers are a few years down the road.

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2948
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_Air#Early_issues
Over the top startup perks
So, a lot of time, the only reason the private sector does it better is that we've hamstrung the government to the point where they can't develop the skills in-house. If I can't pay my civil engineers competitive wages (because NIH you see), how am I supposed to retain talent? Moreover, how am I supposed to stack up against hotshot private engineering firms?

In opposition to your town hall example: The first (first!) thing I'd expect the free market to do would be to charge a premium to the government to lease to them. After all, where else are they going to go? It's a small enough market that you can cartel the ever-living shit out of it--assuming they can even pay amounts enough to push out other tenants, say a law firm or something.

In fact, it makes even more sense for the government to get a "deal" with the landlord, and maybe help contracts for their other tenants go through faster. Priority lane for occupancy permits and whatnot, sure. This is not a good idea.

If you want to have non-corrupt government, you need to make sure it can function decently without being overly influenced by the greed and selfishness characteristic of modern capitalism.
Work and Study Programs in Europe
Oh for Christ's sake, this is what passes for the "top story" on Hacker News these days?
None of this is unique to social networks or new. Giving people a new way to communicate with each other doesn't change what they want to communicate. Most people want to impress other people.

Why would communication with friends through the internet would be any more meaningful than communication with friends through other means? Why was it better that people in the 90s showed off their new toys face to face instead of face to face and on Facebook?

Maybe "look at how much more sophisticated I am than the 'normal' people" is the insecure-hacker version of "look at what a cool lunch I had."
I'm working on a GUI app in Qt where we use X11 in several places. The main usage is to open multiple connections to the X server for GL widgets, so that we can refresh their time-sensitive contents even when the main Qt event loop is blocked. Another is to query the current X11 virtual desktop as soon as possible after app startup, so we can display subsequent Qt windows there by default even if you switch away to browse the web while our levianthanic app loads. There are a number of less interesting examples, like setting X11-specific attributes on windows, and papering over minutiae that varies between e.g. X11 and OSX. Despite these few things, Qt has served us fantastically well.
I've noticed that scrolling in Chrome is pretty bad on my retina Macbook, but in Safari it's super smooth.
I'm not an expert on South African carrier economics but decent to good Android phones do exist in the 70-100 dollar range on prepaid carriers like MetroPCS and Cricket. I'm pretty sure that means a $50 USD android/other smart phone (maybe Firefox OS) wouldn't be too hard to produce. I'm under the assumption that these carriers do provide a small subsidy (even though they're contract free) which may or may not make sense for your country's carriers.
Only one of his 5 points were "not something that disturbs your normal workflow."
Relative resolutions. "By default, the new MacBook Pro ships in a pixel-doubled configuration, meaning you actually get an equivalent to a 1440-by-900-pixel resolution. This offers no actual increase in desktop space over that of the current standard non-retina MacBook Pro, but the increased pixel density means that items onscreen can appear much sharper than they did before." [1]

The point of having the pixels is so that stuff looks sharper. 1680x1050 is a lot more screen real estate = more job for the windowing system to display everything nicely. Same thing for running it at full 2880x1800 resolution.

[1] http://www.techhive.com/article/257796/run_a_retina_macbook_...
In Chicago the Metra (suburban radial rail line) conductors still manually collect fares and make change on the train while trying to catch fare-dodgers. I've personally been on Metra rides where it was so busy, the single conductor never got to punch my ticket before I disembarked.

Meanwhile the authority is asking the public to help identify people not paying their fares, because they're hurting for revenue.

Who should I look to for an answer to this problem?
1680x1050, 1080p and etc, are unacceptable for graphical work. You can notice blurring. Only 1440x900 or the native 2880x1800 are, in my opinion.

I run the native 2880x1800 at work and an external 1080p screen at home. I've noticed none of these issues so far. Maybe I'm one of the lucky ones.
How is it petty? He stated multiple valid reasons why he decided to switch laptops on his personal blog. Nothing petty about them either, I can imagine jittery scrolling being very annoying/disruptive to some people.
Honestly to me, burn in seems completely unacceptable for a computer so expensive.
I had the image persistence ("burn-in") problem with my first-gen iPad. I took it to the Apple store, they replaced it, and the replacement suffered from it as well. Upon my second return, I was informed such behavior was within performance specifications for the panel and it would not be replaced.

I'm going to guess you get a similar one-chance swap-out with the Retina MBP as well.
I don't think any self-respecting chef WOULD participate in 99 chefs, at least, not for the money. But a better analogy would be the American tip: do you leave her 15%, 20%, or 25%? I literally have to break out a calculator to ensure I'm leaving a 20% tip, I would feel guilty otherwise, and I also don't want to overpay. I hate going to the states because of that.

Again, no self-respecting GOOD designer is going to participate in 99 designers, not with the effort needed to come up with good choices for their clients. At least everything must start with a good faith contract, and then maybe contracts get cancelled sometime for non-performance (but really, the designer might avoid that at all costs even if it means working off clock). Now how would 99 designers change that and make it better?

I'm not a designer, but I work with many (and my partner is one).
I learned that the threshold was actually simply poverty level which would be significantly under 70k
Is it 1, or 4? If it's 3 or more, I think Apple will replace it for you (for free).
Take that thought and think it all the way through. Where will your friend hear it? Iwhat you're suggesting is that we get our news in the form of Chinese whispers. A handful of first hand accounts that become second third and fourth hand accounts. All the people spreading the news don't have the full details, time and resources to follow up. When you go to those parties and socialize it turns into a bunch of uninformed fools basically spreading rumors based on hearsay and conjecture because there wasn't a trusted source (like a journalist) who could get all the facts straight and filter some of the bullshit before it led people to missing the point.

Even if we assume that people spreading news on their own can all be trusted and reliable that still severely limits the news you can get. People who want to spread a certain message will make sure you hear about it but the real news is often something people will actively try to keep from becoming public. Without journalists working for media outlets we won't get that kind of news. Stories of corruption and scandal are easily hidden in the scenario you describe and the world ends up talking about stories that would show up in People magazine because the average person doesn't care about what's up in Lybia, they care about what's happening with the Real Housewives of Bullshit City USA.
Of course, but if you have the capital and needs, why not just take care of it yourself rather than letting someone make a profit on you? Unless you're more concerned with libertarian ideology than saving the gov't money, of course.
You should give the full quote. "Started noticing some of the well known problems" implies that he did know about them, just didn't notice the negatives of them himself the first couple of days.

Lots of hate on HN for this article...
The issue for GBs is value to the consumer, not cost of components.

It's Apple's form of price discrimination. Everyone else does get away with price discrimination in one form or another. Apple uses a simple and straightforward type which I think is a positive thing, even though it ends up connecting significant price changes to small component changes.

Also if you look at the % more you pay over 2 years for more GBs, it isn't that bad since the contract price is way higher than the phone or GB upgrade prices. (Even looking at the unsubsidized phone prices, the increased cost for more GBs is a lower %. Subsidizing each phone model for the same approx $450 in the US makes the GB upgrade price differences seem larger).
Well then why are we spending all this time and effort to 'gift' these glorious tools and platforms to 'normal' people. It's certainly not for their benefit.

Or maybe we're all (aka any app ever made) just projecting how people should behave. If you think this is about food, then I think you're missing the point.
Startup Thinks Real Sex Can Sell
Blossom[1] works around the scrolling issues by drawing everything in the UI to canvas elements, including "infinite" lists of the kind Facebook and Twitter favor.

Because the canvas element in lists are a fixed size, we never, ever hit against resource limits and it always stays snappy.

That's allowed us to use native scrolling (plus an async JavaScript helper) that works correctly on all supported mobile platforms (Safari, Chrome, Windows 8).

[1] https://github.com/erichocean/blossom
While elite schools like Princeton have very attractive financial aid packages, even if they didn't, the connections you'll make as an undergrad there are well worth the price of admission. It's not just the education you're paying for.

If you replace Princeton with another expensive private school that's not a feeder system for America's upper class, I completely agree with your point.
Don't sleep in, sleep early to catch up.
> If you are young 20 something, have asian friends, and on any sort of social network

Absent supporting data, the bit about asian friends seems a bit prejudiced.
Chrome Frame supports exactly the same admin mechanisms as Chrome and can be blocked the same way using Google Update group policy settings.
How the Web Transformed Prostitution
Don't have a business plan?
He presumably returned it, getting his money back. It's not silly, maybe he just felt it wasn't worth the premium.
This topic actually piqued my interest and sent me on a little wiki-stroll:

"Money correlates with happiness, but the rate diminishes with more money. In 2010, Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton found that higher earners generally reported better life satisfaction, but people's day-to-day emotional well-being only rose with earnings until a threshold annual income of $75,000."

This entire article is sweet, by the way. Definitely recommended reading for anyone that finds this type of stuff interesting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happiness_economics#Individual_...
PlanGrid Brings Construction Blueprints To The iPhone
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZKzkEu2dKw
Oracle. In addition they make their own Storage, Servers, virtualization, OS, Compilers, Database, Middleware and Applications.

- Storage: Storagetek

- Virtualization: LDOM, Xen (OracleVM), VirtualBox

- OS: Solaris, EOL Linux, and also Jrockit (Java running on top of Xen)

- Compilers: Java, Pl/SQL (Compiles to ADA bytecode), C

- Database: Oracle, MySQL, BerkeleyDB

- Middleware: SOA Suite

- Applications: Fusion Apps (EBS, PeopleSoft JDEdwards)

In Addition, Oracle has their own Appliances: Exalogix, Exadata, etc.
how would you compare your service to http://www.monitor.us/website-monitoring (which I'm happily using for a few years)
(1) The effort it takes to click a mute switch is little different from that to turn over my phone (and probably less).

(2) Phones turn over accidentally. Having other effects like the ability to hear incoming calls/messages tied to that might not be universally viewed as a "great feature".
The author never talks about this "meaningful content" he wants to see on social networks.

Why can't people just impulsively think that their food is photogenic and cool and take pictures of it? The author has no right to determine what is meaningful because that is the point of the social NETWORK. The rest of the population determines what they think is meaningful, and they shove it down everyone's throats. It's not a status symbol. It's just how people talk on the internet nowadays.
i was looking at some petroglyphs at zion's national park a few months ago when i realized that they were drawing pictures of the same things we take pictures of today.

the only difference is we take pics of our food after it's prepared while they drew pics of their food in it's pre-prepared state.
Another thing I really miss for single page web apps (mobile or not) is iOS style memory warings. It's an event that is emitted when you reach memory limits, and in it you should clear out everything that the user doesn't currently see (read: clear out as much as possible). This allows you to keep DOM subtrees in memory when you navigate the app, in order to make navigating back to previously seen sections of your app very snappy. At the same time you don't have to worry about infinite memory growth as the cached in memory DOM subtress will get nuked when the memory warning emits.
The Retina is a fascinating and revolutionary laptop. But it's the first generation, and most companies' (including Apple) almost always mess up their first generation products in substantial ways. Everyone I know with a Retina is mostly happy with theirs, but I am going to hold off until the Retina grows into its high price. Meanwhile, a 13" macbook air and a 27" cinema display costs the same and is more compelling to me.
Touch events on the mobile web are unfinished
I noticed this too, you can make it better by going to chrome://flags and enabling GPU composition on all pages (leave threaded compositing off though, seems like a good idea but it has some implementation problems with back and forward gestures). It's not perfect, but it does make a marked improvement to stock settings.
That argument can go both ways. Some people, on a steady diet of noise, are even less able to discern sense from nonsense. Anchoring and all that.

When the national news was 30 minutes every night, maybe there was time between that and the next 'cast to assimilate and critically consider what you heard. Nowadays, if you're thinking about the news, you're less than a click away from the next iteration of someone else's marginally considered opinion, presented with gravitas and authority. Heck, why think?

Turn it off. Check in every week or two -- they'll still be talking about all of the same things, there's nothing to miss.
Given that cancer research gets $5B/year in the US government funding alone and we still have cancer, I am skeptical of that price tag claim.

also see: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1371037/
Lots of homegrown dbs look like this. They started life as a doc, then a spreadsheet, got sucked into Access, and now are living in SQL Server or Oracle dbs. I have seen this a bunch in research environments where the tech is a "one-off" to support the science. I usually do a little data cleaning and maybe try some data warehouse-style restructuring so that you can report on the existing data.

You might have luck replacing your current table mess with views (with the same name as the tables) while you fix the structure to a more normalized schema. But you might be better starting from scratch and migrating to a new "version" of the app while moving the data along to the new version.

As to your self-organizing data idea, I have wondered if something kind of cool could come out of probabilistic graphical models, but haven't dug into the theory of that (and there is the free cousera course I think) enough to say.

I am going to guess that what is going to get you in trouble with self-organizing data is that contextual relationships in the data that are currently interpreted by your end-users (and are important/critical to the user) will get lost in any algorithmic attempt to clean the data.

You might also want to investigate the social sciences data scene - those folks do lots of statistical/data hacking on qualitative data that involve weirdness about coding "grey area text answers" into quantitatively tractable code numbers. It looks and sounds like hell to me . . .
When I first arrived I thought that Android would be the dominant upcoming phone. But for reasons I do not understand, the devices are marked up. An iPhone 4 in South Africa will cost $800. I would like to see more android phones in the developing world, because developing for Nokia is a pain.
1) Food is an easy subject to photograph. It doesn't move, it's attractive (chefs try to present good looking food), it's close-up (so you don't need a big lens to get bokeh / blur; and you don't need to zoom so it's steadier).

2) Food is fun to look at. Mmm, foood.

3) It hits the lowest common denominator. Everybody eats.

Yes, it looks a bit boring and shallow. It's broadcast, so it has to be. I bet the OP has some really interesting IM conversations with real friends, but anything in the newsfeed is going to be crap.
### What's missing? ###

Mainly, dev tools on the device and/or easily accessible remotely.

Things we'd want to know more about as we develop:

#### Down memory lane ####

- Heap size,
- Object count,
- GC cycles,
- GPU buffer size,
- resource limits.

Arene't people just loading their mobile site in Chrome desktop, and profiling there? I guess I don't understand this one (although WebKit does have a remote debugging protocol now). If the site has bad numbers on the desktop, they're going to still be bad in other browsers (it's the same page/code after all).

Anyway, although I'm in hearty agreement that I'd like all of the things mentioned to improve, I'm not in agreement that it would have prevented me from making Facebook's HTML5 mobile site nice and zippy. :)
Thanks everyone for your thoughts on my VCs and UX post. I'd love it if you shared your perspectives in the comments on my blog as well as there's an interesting discussion developing there. Thank you!
Smartphone Ads and Their Drawbacks
You really have to define your customers! I'm going to assume that a designer wouldn't use your service, nor probably higher-end presenters; too much is riding on their presentations to leave them to an outside service. Your target is more likely business folks who give presentations sometimes, its not a primary aspect of their job, and sometimes these presentations mean a lot and they want design help.

But what does design help mean? Layouts, fonts, and colors? Assets, structure, and story telling? If the former, the client could easily game you by having a few slides done and repeating the style; these aren't posters after all! The latter is much less gameable, but also much more involved, I don't see how that could work at all without a tight feedback loop between the designer and client.

I dislike "name your own price" models personally. You might get the occasional sociopath who pays little, and everyone else will agonize over coming up with the right price to pay. Sometimes its easier to just set some kind of price, you might put slides into different buckets based on their complexity/work needed and compute a price dynamically (use per-word, per-graphic, speaking time specified by the user, etc...). But good design changes might cause reorganizations in the entire deck. In that case, I would go with something like "intended length of presentation."
+1, and this would also be very useful on the desktop too!
The problem is that 'safe driving speed' is completely dependent on road conditions(weather, traffic, pavement quality, time of day, day of the week(lots of drunk drivers on weekend nights), traffic makeup, etc.). Metal boxes with seat belts and airbags are far safer than motorcycles, but it's not appropriate to go 80 when motorcycles are nearby.
How's the MacBook air for dev? Was debating if it was powerful enough or if I should get a pro.
Samsung being a conglomerate, isn't the chip division of Samsung operating independently of it's phone/electronics division? If so then I see no reason why Samsung Fab would deny a certain type of chip design to a customer like Apple.
Sure, but "most" of them are fellow HNers (or programmers, in general). And although they're a vocal minority, they're minority nevertheless. Not a huge market.
People have been shallow since the beginning of time. This pointless rant is a useless as the photos it rails against. Everyone who upvoted it should be ashamed.
Zynga confirms it hired real-money gambling chief
Yes (if by installation you mean settings and files and apps).

Since Win98 I think.
Food has become a trending social topic. Is it a bad thing? Not necessarily. If you observe the cultures around the world, food has always brought people together. In the age of connectivity, it's still bringing people together although at a much larger scale but unfortunately sometimes a bit narcissistic.

I think if you look around you'll still see plenty of people who very much enjoy food without feeling the need to snap pics, even if they Asian ;).
Joke:

Overheard at a Usenix conference, around that time:

Person A: "... well, I think that Mach is the best example of intellectual fraud that I've seen here this year."

Person B: "What about X Windows?"

Person A: "I said _intellectual_ fraud."

I was never a fan. X was just too far removed from the actual frame buffer to make this video-game writer happy. At. All.

(Probably didn't help that I tried to bring up one of the first versions of X on our Vax, and thought that their design decisions were just jaw-droppingly awful. I don't remember many details -- the frame-buffer layout was pretty strange, though they changed it later -- I just remember shaking my head a lot).
iOS-style development in the browser is exactly what Blossom[1] provides, and specifically for the reasons you mention.

[1] https://github.com/erichocean/blossom
You don't trust the New York Times because Glenn Greenwald wrote a piece for Salon calling them Nixonian?

That piece is too inflammatory for me to take seriously. The New York Times wrote a hit piece on someone? A scurrilous hit piece filled with every possible rumor? Really? Every one of them, you say?

When you write something like that, you'd better be able to back it up with something more than moral support from Daniel Ellsberg.

You can't say you're a serious consumer of the news if you select the publications you trust based on whether they support your pet causes.
Full image of Samsung ad: http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/5054b1bdecad04ba780...

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/samsung-galaxy-s-iii-anti-iph...