skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"99.9% of the Windows reliability problems are related to buying trash hardware. Just pay some more."

Yes, because windows xp, windows vista, windows 7 and windows 8 are all equal to each other, and no matter what software is installed, as long as it is microsoft certified you will only have a 0.1% chance of windows crashing on you and losing data (blue screen, screen freeze, app crashes, take your pick).

Me talking crap? :-)
Interesting, do you know who the owner of the specs is?
What does 'more restrictive' even mean? What are you comparing this to? Is there some specific feature that is in demand that Apple has failed to deliver on due to their massive size?
Accessing the DOM is always slow in relative terms. In might not be applicable to everyone, but if you're accessing the DOM for view template purposes - I'd recommend using require.js with the text plugin instead.

And in all other cases, cache the jQuery object as early as possible in your module (i.e. assign `this.$targetEl = ...` in any init function you have ... so by the time you need to actually access/move/etc. that element, its already waiting for you.
People throwing screen size into the mix with battery life and NFC are confusing 2 very separate things anyway. Screen size isn't a feature. If we all want big screens, then I guess iPad wins at the the mobile phone market (obvious failings aside, like, it's not actually a phone).
And yes, wasn't the whole point of the iPhone (in the 2007 keynote no less) that it didn't use a stylus?
Well, without getting into an argument about what exactly made the iPhone revolutionary in terms of features and design, I think the evidence is clear: average people didn't buy smartphones before the iPhone came out, they did after it came out. Now every phone looks like an iPhone. Sounds revolutionary to me, in every sense of the word.
Here's an article which references a handful of papers that present the opposite point of view: http://www.spiked-online.com/Printable/0000000CA640.htm

I'll quote a few relevant snippets from the article, for anyone who doesn't want to read the whole thing.

Challenging the conventional view, there is actually a striking global correspondence between the world economic slowdown since 1973 and ever-increasing levels of educational spending. Comparisons between countries also confound the idea that more education translates into more growth. For example, South Korea is often given as an example of a country that made education a priority since the 1960s and saw significant economic growth. But as Professor Alison Wolf from King's College London points out, Egypt has also prioritised investing in education, but its growth record has been poor (4). Between 1970 and 1998 Egypt's primary enrolment rates grew to more than 90 per cent, secondary schooling levels went from 32 per cent to 75 per cent, and university education doubled - yet over the same period Egypt moved from being the world's forty-seventh poorest country to being the forty-eighth.

A retort might be that education isn't the sole determinant of growth - other factors may offset its positive economic role - but it remains a necessary one. But this argument doesn't stand up either. The rapid growth of Hong Kong, another of the East Asian tigers, wasn't accompanied by substantial investment in education. Its expansion of secondary and university education came later, as more prosperous Hong Kong parents used some of their newfound wealth to give their children a better education than they had had.

A study for the World Bank came to similar conclusions. In a paper called 'Where has all the education gone?', public policy academic Lant Pritchett couldn't find the positive correlation between education and productivity that underpins so much current international development thinking (5). Economist William Easterly summarised the study:

'African countries with rapid growth in human capital [the fashionable term for people's work abilities, especially levels of education] over the 1960 to 1987 period - countries like Angola, Mozambique, Ghana, Zambia, Madagascar, Sudan, and Senegal - were nevertheless growth disasters. Countries like Japan, with modest growth in human capital, were growth miracles. Other East Asian miracles like Singapore, Korea, China, and Indonesia did have rapid growth in human capital, but equal to or less than that of the African growth disasters. To take one comparison, Zambia had slightly faster expansion in human capital than Korea, but Zambia's growth rate was seven percentage points lower.
I never understood why binary literals weren't included in the language.

Other nice extensions `x ? : y` => `x ? x : y`, vector extensions, C++ support for `__restrict__`, all those attributes (deprecated, format, warning, pure, etc.)

Regarding Assembler the `-Wa,-ahl` flag to get the C code interleaved.

And regarding warnings (especially for C++) the world doesn't stop with -Wall -Wextra. There are a bunch of nice warning options like `-Weffc++ -Wfloat-equal -Wdouble-promotion` and so on.
A 5km run that turned into a 41km run – a story about a startup
O'reilly Discount comes to an end
This article should really be re-written and titled "iOS6 opens the door for Microsoft and Google". On the hardware front we are reaching a point where only incremental changes are necessary/possible, and even things like wireless charging or using the phone with gloves on, aren't that revolutionary and are mostly gimmicks.

iOS6, on the other hand, seems like a very incremental step on the software side, a major step backwards on others (like Maps). Seems like the perfect opportunity for Android (and possibly Windows Phone) given they aren't constrained by the "only 1 major iOS update a year" rule that Apple appears to be tied to.
Worse, it's a losing strategy. People in developing countries might not afford fashionable smartphones today, but they are well aware of them, and once prices drop after 12 to 18 months (which they inevitably do), they rush to "finally" snap them up. For proof of this, look at how quickly Nokia's profits fell once iPhone and Android devices became affordable.
A man walks into a bank
Apple is one company. Android devices are made by a wide array of companies. So in terms of marketshare per company, yes, Apple has dominated (although I think they were recently surpassed by Samsung?).
Sure, for this guy, who is supposedly a tech guy. But if we consider the 'mass market' we're at the point where we have millions of 'dumb' smartphone users. The people who are used to feature phones are migrating to smartphones, and it's this 'mass' demographic that usability issues need to address.
Caine's Arcade 2: The Global Cardboard Challenge
I agree. Are there any numbers available with this phone vs phone type analysis?
This will be interesting to watch. There is a whole generation of users that do not use Windows as their primary OS. The brand power that it once had is disappearing. Users can now pick between Linux and iOS for most of their computing needs. The failure of Windows Phone to compete on that market shows that there is a significant amount of mindshare being lost. My guess is that MS is trying to lock people into using the OS again, but this time it won't happen. There are too many options right now. Users are so much more educated than before. Every kid out there can root their Android and upload a custom ROM. When they see their smartphone (or pocket PC) being locked down, they will just get something that doesnt lock them. All of that and Apples marketing power. MS lacks it.
"Unix BSD based IOS"

When I read this, I realized that the author was supporting a preconceived conclusion. Apple uses ARM, in no small part because they bought a fan not long ago; and, of course, iOS is not out in the wild to be installed on hardware from OEM's such as Acer or HP.
On linux, anything is better than that crappy 32-bit only propietary plugin that hangs the browser for a second every time I want to open a pdf file.
Indeed, it was nothing new, brought out by a company that knew nothing about phones. No wonder it bombed so badly. Nearly destroyed Apple - they sure won't make that mistake again.
You Should Use ri To Read Ruby Documentation
The Pacific free trade deal that's anything but free
I think the downvotes are because you're missing the critical point of the argument.

The question isn't _whether_ students have any skin in the game, it's _why_ does an education cost X in the first place.
Yet another article written from a mac-only user point of view. Most desktop monitors are still around 100 dpi, far from "retina" standards.
We may not all want big screens, but the trend with Android high end phones has been that each generation has pushed the screen size higher within limit. Presumably for a reason: People buy those models. Even the Galaxy Note, which was ridiculed, went on to sell many million.

As for the stylus: It's a selling point to not need a stylus for regular use, but for some types of use a stylus is far superior. Your fingers are no good for making precise drawings, for example, or for scribbling hand written notes. They simply don't have small enough tips.

And even the name of the Galaxy Note makes the point that it is aiming for a niche of users that want to be able to replace paper note books while still getting all the benefits of a modern smartphone, including being able to not use the stylus when it's not needed.
I do remember those days, and 9x to XP was a big upgrade so I'm sure they fixed some of the issues however It was not until Vista that Microsoft finally fixed the memory management architecture that was a large source of the blue screens of death messages in XP.

I'm not sure how similar the architecture was in this respect between 9x and XP, so I'm not sure exactly what was and wasn't fixed during this upgrade.

I do know that in my own experiences across dozens and dozens of windows xp powered machines across many different companies who unfortunately still use XP, blue screens of death still run rampant, and if not a blue screen of death, then the screen randomly freezing or apps randomly crashing and taking your data with you.
Thanks for pointing out that this differs from the specification.

I found this quite thought-provoking about different error handling techniques, so thought it worth submitting.
One piece of advice I've heard is to benchmark your app under -Os compared to -O2 or higher.

The idea is that in these days, cache misses are king, so smaller code means fewer misses.

Of course, you need a real-world load, test on correct CPU architecture for your problem etc.
Restrictive in the sense that the company now has so many devices out in the market that making more radical changes in the software (in this case the operating system) or by introducing not backward-compatible new hardware can affect millions of users with older hardware negatively. Apple still wants to support all the older iPhones so that they can get money from the app store, if an app would need to have a separate version for older devices it would change their app market in a negative way.
It was the first iPod with mobile Safari that worked really well as a browser (it also made phonecalls).

It was fucking revolutionary and the numbers speak for themselves.
When you first get a device or a new program, you play with it. You turn things on and off and poke around in the preferences, right? Because you don't know exactly how it's "supposed" to look by default, it might not be obvious to you that you've changed something fundamental about the interface or your preferences. I'm not sure that this happened to him, but it might well have; it's happened to me more than once (not just with Apple products).

For example, because I had a checkbox ticked that said something like "move imported MP3s into my iTunes library"[1], iTunes destroyed my music library organization when I moved from Gentoo to OS X. Since my music still played on random without issues, I didn't even notice until I no longer had a backup of the old names. This made me hate iTunes so much that I still refuse to use it, but ultimately it came down to the same problem I think this fellow has with his keyboard: he messed around to see what options did what and later didn't remember that it wasn't like that by default, so he doesn't even know he can turn it off.

[1] this was 2003; I don't remember the exact wording
Got any specific examples? I'm having trouble actually caring about any potential backlash. I'd possibly welcome it.
I'm not familiar with Go.

If my code performs several operations in a row, any of which could return an error, do I have to check the returned error value after each one?

For example if performing file or network I/O?
Some people just like to make their devices a little bit more personal. My case has a picture of my kids; it obviously pleases my eyes, and people love it -- conversation starter etc etc.
> there's really just not much more a smartphone can, or really should do

Really? What about:

* haptic feedback as a 2d surface? http://senseg.com/
* replacing all the cards you carry in your wallet (NFC)
* going a week on a charge
* predictive modeling where your phone preloads webpages/directions/music that it thinks you're going to need

I suspect your comment will seem obviously wrong in five years.
But it's only for IntelliJ 10/11, and 12 is coming by end of this year (usually).
God and Other Necessary Beings
I think it's becoming clear that Android is winning over the majority of feature phone upgrades, which is great for raw numbers but I wonder if it will take a while for those people to buy into the eco-system. Is the existing wedge going to be less and less profitable?

A lot of people had feature phones that had Java ME or BREW, but aside from telephony and texting, many only ever played Snake on it. If the phone manufacturers aren't making much money off of the hardware bought by feature phone upgraders, how much will Google or other ecosystem vendors make much off of the software side?
Composing functionality in actors
LOL. I'm not sure why tech publications are so anxious to see people choose phones other than Apple. It almost seems like they have a vested interest in seeing apple "lose".
That's nice. I don't like to scroll. Surely there's someone else in the world like me.

From the article you linked:
"[P]eople used the scrollbar on 76% of the pages,
with 22% being scrolled all the way to the bottom

That's a low enough conversion rate for certain page types that it may not always be worth the effort. If I want something, I'm happy to scroll, but if I'm browsing, there had better be a good value proposition in doing so.

"Another eye-tracking study conducted by CX Partners
confirms that people do scroll if certain design
guidelines are followed"

... So, the article says (several times) people scroll, but only under certain design conditions. Is a long form article worth scrolling for? Usually; it's better than ad-ridden pagination, I think we'll both agree. Where the OP went wrong, I think, was that the scrolling was a design gimmick, not a content opportunity. It came across, to me, like the purpose of scrolling was to be
"artsy" and "design-minded", rather than to convey content. Perhaps what I'm attributing to the scrolling design was really a lack of editing for length.

Jakob Neilsen (who was mentioned in the article you linked) also comments on why scrolling might be less of a good idea [1]:

"scrolling ... can be difficult for users with motor skill impairments."
"Low-literacy users can't easily reacquire their position in the text
after it moves.
"Elderly users often have trouble getting to the right spot in scrolling
menus and other small scrolling items.

Not everything you read on the Internet is wholly true.

1: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20050711.html
I played on VR's "corps diplomatique" for a while, and I can attest to it being a difficult problem.

In that situation, you have several tools at your disposal. If you are friendly with the corp (they are in your alliance, or allied in some way), you can offer repayment or replacement of the object. You can promise punishment of the perpetrator. You can allow the other corp to seek out revenge on the perpetrator (although this can escalate quickly and be bad). You can say "Tough shit, be quiet or we boot you from the alliance".

If it happened to a neutral corp/alliance, you can use the weight of Goonfleet as leverage. Goonfleet is huge, with a lot of friends, so not many people want to start a war.
The Salton Sea: Death and Politics in the Great American Water Wars
Sorry about that – the point of the article definitely wasn't to exclude non-Retina users, it was just to document what I was encountering when I came to creating a favicon for the site.
So, you do agree that in the Google Play store there should be this kind of trash lying around?
Yes, this is what they would do if they understood UX. But that’s not what VCs are for.

What VCs really would do if they understood UX the way the OP implies is build a firm that tries to invest in slowly growing, sustainable companies, with extremely long term outlook and real, sometimes un-measurable value to all stakeholders. Arguably the underlying mantra “small is beautiful” is not one for the VC industry. Also, these will not be companies that can be sold easily or timely (much less at crazy valuations due to cancerous growth), so the VCs themselves would not be very successful.

There’s a conundrum for an investor in building these kinds of companies: in comparison to their peers, they would most likely make less money (given the same kind of investment process, style, mechanism). That’s why bootstrapped companies with little to no outside funding can stay more focused, more consumer and employee friendly, and thus, more “integer”.

What the VC needs is a longer time horizon, lower exit expectations, and more leeway for the entrepreneurs they back in several categories. Now, the good news is some firms are thinking more and more like that, and also the general industry shifts allow more companies to be bootstrapped to work without or with only little outside capital.

Firms that seem to operate this way are the likes of Betaworks, OATV, and a few angel funds, mostly in New York and SF.

Industry shifts that help are the ease of develop&deploy of today’s technology, developer led companies that can build their own product without much capital, and the very easily accessible, and scalable, international market of app stores, webapps, and creative business models.

If you don’t like VCs, you can build your company without them. If you want to keep working on your own terms, you can. If you talk about disrupting, don’t just disrupt the industry your product serves, also take advantages of the disruption in the industry serves you.

Disclaimer: I do not think VCs are that bad, and I certainly know tons of awesome VCs that understand UX. Like, for real.
Imagination Technologies, the GPU is a PowerVR one.
Out of interest, what language will you write it in?
I was really disappointed when Apple started making their IPod's into touch screens. When I'm going for a run or walking around with my ipod in my pocket, theres nothing i despise more than pulling out my ipod, having to tap the specific spots of the screen 3 times just so i can skip to the next song. The click wheel used to be very easy to use. I could skip songs without taking it out of my pocket.
Likely Imagination Technologies (PowerVR http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerVR)

Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_%28system_on_chip%29

See also http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1N... which talks about Intel's plans to drop PowerVR and go back to an internal (Intel) design:

The future SoC that's expected to introduce the new graphics is "Silvermont" and expected availability by early 2013. Before the exciting Silvermont there is expected to be the "Clover Trail" Atoms released this calendar year, but it doesn't sound like that SoC will bear new graphics capabilities. I hope to have some more details soon and am very excited to see Intel do away with the PowerVR graphics and its horrific driver support.
GroupDocs currently provide an app for online annotation and collaboration, including accessing your files from different cloud storage providers, currently Azure & Amazon S3 are supported http://groupdocs.com/apps/annotation/try-it-now
I also have large mail accounts with Mail and haven't had any problems either. iPhoto is the big one I have a beef with, but Mail was always good to me (except with Exchange integration, but DavMail fixed that up).
So you were extremely frequently placing posts from your personal blog on HN, and ignored it while it warned you you were getting spammy.

Then you reached out directly to Paul Graham, and he eventually stopped responding.

Now you're asking the public?

Sounds like you had a lot of warnings, bro. I mean, I hope this gets fixed for you, but, you had to know this was coming, because you're telling us about all the red flags you got.
Anyone have thoughts on using coffeekup?
I don't see that matter. To the extent that I am invested in a mobile platform, it's Android I'm invested in. My next phone will probably run Android so I can carry along my familiarity and my app purchases. It's only likely to be a Samsung specifically if they have the right combination of hardware features and price at that time.
"on a laptop you'd certainly expect to be able to run linux."

The fraction of end users to whom it would occur to consider Linux on their laptop is tiny. The fraction of consumers who would consider it is even smaller. The fraction of consumers who would expect their new laptop to support Linux is negligible. The expectations of the HN community are atypicle.
That code is for drawing to a pdf.
Thank you for the reply. Didn't expect such an emotional reply at HN :)

I know what you mean by driving fast and accident - I'm glad that the accident never happened. I also totally understand when you say if I decided to take my own life, as would my mother - I've aged parents that depend on me, that's the biggest reason why I haven't harmed myself so far. Frankly though, unlike most people I'm not afraid of dying. I just want to live meaningfully and more importantly, happily, as long as I am around. All this office politics, hypocrisy etc is just tiring. One way is to just give up this made up life and go work for a non profit (volunteering is one of those few things that really makes me happy).

Shyness - this has become a big problem for me. Sometimes it is painful to see people go far plainly on talk - get that awesome job, date that nice girl and generally be very popular. This is even more true in the west, where being an extrovert is valued almost as much as any other skill. I don't know if there is a support group or something, that I can get help from.

But those are all external reasons. I still don't know why one day I am so happy, and minutes later I fall into deep depression.

If you don't mind me asking, did you do anything specific that improved your situation?
Tiny Trojan Targets Turks
Microsoft suggests 24x24: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc849094(VS.85).aspx...
With a BOM of $167 for iPhone 5, while selling it for $650 at retail, I think Apple is just being cheap lately. They're all about lowering cost to increase their profit, and less about introducing new type of hardware inside the phone.

http://www.eetasia.com/ART_8800674648_480700_NT_eff210e8.HTM...

And sure, I realize that's not the whole cost for selling an iPhone, but if I remember correctly, a "new" iPhone's BOM used to be somewhere around $250-$300. I'm certainly seeing a trend downwards in cost. I think they mention the iPhone 4S BOM is cheaper "now", but I think it was more than $167 when it first launched, even though they barely changed anything. The iPhone 4's BOM was certainly higher.
The Saleae Logic is a beautiful device. I can't believe I tried to analyze digital traffic with my old scope before this.