skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the problem is that the post author assumes data tracking isn't too big a deal. E.g. he says, "If company X puts a cookie on the New York Times and MSNBC site, and you browse to both those and Wikipedia, it only knows about the two upon on which it was placed" but the more likely scenario is that company X puts a cookie in a dozen more sites, and then keeps that information on their servers for however long.

What they do do with it, how long they keep it for, whether its anonymous or not is all unknown. I'd rather use ghostery and not worry about all that.

I actually wrote how pervasive the tracking is a while back, http://steadierfooting.com/2012/03/25/how-to-minimize-tracki...
Failed Project: When to call it?
Could someone please explain to me how such conditions could be present on the surface of mars or the deserts here on planet earth to trigger the same results as the lab results?
Pdf.js: PDF Reader in JavaScript
Drawing Pixels is Hard AKA why HTML5 games probably suck
It's definitely a win-win scenario (maybe win-win-win):
1. Every employee will implicitly/explicitly become an evangelist for Microsoft products. I'm not talking only about the Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 but all the services and apps that support the platforms and ecosystem. The marketing power and reach won't be as wide as Microsoft's actual marketing effort (there is a reason why Microsoft has a whole division of marketing), but this will certainly do a good job of sparking the excitement for the community.
2. Employee morale will definitely go up. Employees will feel that they are being cared. Employees will feel that they are getting treated well. This would essentially lower the retention rate of the company. If less people are leaving the company because they are unhappy, the less money Microsoft has to throw out to replace those people.
3. (maybe) People outside of Microsoft would start to think that Microsoft is a good place to be. People would start thinking that working for Microsoft is not a bad idea, after all. This kind of decision shows the cult of the company. I think Microsoft has a lot of wrong perceptions. They might have been correct a few years ago, but things have started to change since Windows 7. Then, I keep hearing more changes and more good stuff from Microsoft lately. Definitely, this is going to help making the Microsoft brand better.
title adapted from this tweet, that is also how I found the article.
https://twitter.com/_AndrewRussell/status/246500090217377792
That really is the only pro you need. The rest is just handwaving and shyster talk.
> What makes me angry about the AdBlock plugin is that the author – while happy to destroy our revenue stream – (...) asking for PayPal donations when the plugin is installed.

So put a button asking for Paypal donations on your blog then?

> Not only do you drag webpages 10 years into the past, but you prevent essential modern page components from loading

Actually I didn't mind the internet 10 years that much. There is quite a bit of content out there that I consume that looks pretty good as static content without js running.

> users enjoying our content, without creating revenue.

So? Stop posting content then.

This sounds a bit like appeal of the horse buggy maker when cars started to be popular. "Please keep us and our families in mind everytime you think of buying one of those new self-propelled buggies made by Ford..."
Enterprise: http://rcpmag.com/articles/2012/04/25/enterprise-ipad-sales-...
/r/startups /r/entrepreneur among others are excellent as well.
> In the future, this will not be the case. So many capable people will eschew a traditional college education that alternative signaling methods will arise.

As long as 99% of employers depend on the traditional signaling methods, very few capable people will eschew a traditional college education. Only in certain segments of software engineering does the idea even have any traction.

> For instance, Y Combinator is a more powerful signal than Stanford is. (Stanford graduates don't automatically receive $150k in convertible debt for their endeavors once they graduate.)

Not really, outside a very specific niche of people doing a very specific type of startup work. If you want to build a web app, yeah, Y Combinator is a valuable signal. If you want to work for Lockheed-Martin or Goldman Sachs, not so much. As for $150k in convertible debt... you can earn that much in bonuses working on Wall Street for a couple of years, with far less risk and far more predictability.
Ordinary magnetic platter HDs slow down with age too, though I'm not sure why.
What iOs6 changes for app developers
Plus, if they like it, they might buy a few for their family and friends for the upcoming holiday season!
You need hardware to test and also motivate your work. You wouldn't build an iPad app without an iPad neh?

Hardware discounts are hard when you aren't producing the hardware. You are basically subsidizing cost, and...you could imagine how much trouble that is! Better to just give it away; besides, if it was Microsoft campus store only, it would be only good for the folks in Redmond.

Attrition happens, but honestly losing an employee costs more than a phone and a tablet!
Networking Budgets are Leveling Off. Where is the Money Going?
What the ‘iYawn 5′ reveals about the dire state of tech journalism
Perfect. If you're in Japan, come and do the HN Japan tour!
Intel says Clover Trail will not work with Linux
It seems like everything we see "could be proof of life on Mars". It's great there's excitement, but it would be even better if the media didn't cry wolf every time.
Having grown up in Michigan, this isn't anything particularly new. Kalamazoo has been at this for a while (perhaps the donor), and although it's phenomenal, I'm surprised it's at the top of HN.
Ah! Did they do a reasonable time delay for each market? Some of us need to sleep.
Correct, rocket science is easy. Satisfying the needs of a quarter billion customers is hard.

Micro-USB is used universally for charging and photo transfer, and in some platforms it's used for block-storage and/or file-transfer. On Apple's gear it's just used for the first two. So it's not as valuable for iOS customers.

Furthermore, Apple is in the unique position of also owning a dominant ecosystem of media devices that have nothing to do with USB, micro-USB, or any variant thereof. They have to service -that- platform too.
"(But geologists have shown that the more a guess is repeated, the more it’s apt to be called a fact.)"

Heh.

Anyway, the blueberries have come up again the last couple of weeks as Opportunity has just run into new rocks with similar little round things in abundance. Maybe not exactly the same things, but similar.

You can see some of the new ones on the rocks here:
http://marsrover.nasa.gov/gallery/all/opportunity_p3062.html

Microscopic Imager of some of them here:
http://marsrover.nasa.gov/gallery/all/opportunity_m3064.html
No I didn't. I understand the post. I support anyone, anywhere who wants to learn programming and show an interest, especially young women who are under-represented in the industry. I just think that they're promoting Madison Ruby because the piece is highly structured to display a very specific keyword density, and that's typical for promotional work. So my vote is that they're not being honest about the origins of this article. Just an opinion though.
So, your device hit an edge case bug. Why aren't you talking to Apple? They'll have a fix for it, get you to bring it in or send it in.

Worst case scenario your edge case cost you some data loss.

That certainly doesn't mean their products are no longer easy to use.
Yup - "How do you juggle your numbers?" - the SiteSwap notation in action, with the "jugglometer".
IPad Sketchbook Crowdfunding Campaign
Microsoft thought so too ten years ago. Success can be a dangerous thing.
Yes. I have a SG2 and couple of people in my office has SG3. Let me tell you revolutionary features which my phone (SG2) does not have - eye following tech (staying awake when you are looking at phone), pick to call , automatic photo tagging (face recognition), wireless charging, NFC, techtiles, bigger better screen, bigger battery, best photo (taking 15-20 photos in burst and telling me the best one), pop up play (playing video in small area of screen while I keep using my phone), smart alerts (telling me that if I had existing alert from person I am trying to contact)
I'm in the current cohort building Edcanvas (http://www.edcanvas.com) and the program has been super helpful in getting us to where we are today. Our team was in a special position where we had to scrap our initial company before coming in but the partners were super helpful/supportive along the way.

If you want to solve hard problems that really matter, edtech is the place to be.
What are the author's thoughts on Dremel?
Welcome to Microsoft's world in the early/mid nineties - turns out software isn't as simple as we thought, and when you become really popular the 0.01% of turns out to be a lot of actual disaffected customers.
> Worst case scenario your edge case cost you some data loss.

How is this __ever__ acceptable?
Bashttpd is a basic web server written in bash
Like Microsoft before them Apple is a victim of its own success. But it's very dangerous to shift your focus from inventing new markets to protecting those you already control.

Apple doesn't seem to have any qualms about making big breaking changes in OS X though.
"I restored my phone" => "I lost all my apps and data": Did you not back it up? Did you not restore that backup? iTunes warns you that it will erase your phone and reset it to factory settings.

"I can't hit the tiny search button": Have you tried scrolling to the top of the list? The index bar's magnifying class is a mnemonic identifying that "the search is at the top of the list." When you scroll up there, in fact, it's shown at the top of the list.

You can disable keyboards you don't want. You can disable any keyboard you want save for the one tied to your phone's language. Why is Kanji even enabled if you don't want it there? Keyboards do not just turn themselves on (except when the phone's language has changed, but we do not see herein a rant about the phone suddenly displaying everything in Japanese.)

The other concerns outlined are honestly valid, these simply stuck out to me as being more than a little absurd. It wouldn't be a rant if it didn't involve every problem, no matter how insignificant, of which you could possibly think (and that's not necessarily a bad thing.)
I co-founded LearnSprout (ImagineK12, W12) with jobowoo. This was my first time doing a startup, going through the program at ImagineK12 was an incredible learning experience. What makes IK12 stand apart from other incubators is its understanding of the education market and grounding you to the realities of product distribution in edtech. Starting an edtech company is unlike any consumer idea you may have, IK12 helps you check your assumptions at the door.

You can expect:
1) First Day – get your ass kicked and assumptions checked on your product and vision
2) Educator Day – make your pitch to enthusiastic early adopter edtech enthusiasts and investors from the community
3) Weekly lunch/dinner speakers
4) Demo Day – self explanatory
5) accessible partners (Tim, Geoff, Alan) in person or via Skype whenever you need help

With edtech, it's incredibly rewarding to know that our late night coding sessions and long work weeks at LearnSprout translate into something of tangible social value: principals, teachers and students getting their software headaches out of the way and focusing on teaching + learning. ImagineK12 will help you focus on finding a real need within education that you ought to be solving with your team and talents.

We believe in the vision that software will eat the world, and it's only a matter of time that all classrooms will be immersed in new learning methods driven by and aided by technology. This sweeping change is begging for hacker-entrepreneurs to step up and build that vision. If that's you, ImagineK12 is the place to get started.
Uhm, they're named after a tree.
I'm puzzled by the critics as well. It's thinner, lighter and faster. It has a better camera, a better display, a better cable, better speakers, better mics and better software. What's not to like?
I'd agree. This is the sort of stuff that lead to me dumping my MacBook in 2009.

I found that most of OS X worked pretty well and the UI looked good, but when it came down to actually being consistent and productive, it fell over pretty quickly. There were a lot of nuances and rather basic problems which got in the way of literally everything I did from my iPod not playing certain mp3s (very frustrating!) to import and export problems in iWork, automator deadlocking, iCal losing data, Mail sending emtpy messages.

I had some hardware problems as well (not charging and cable fraying after about a month) and while they dealt with them instantly, they shouldn't have occured.

Not a great experience. I've switched to Lenovo and Windows and everything pretty much just works.
Become a porn star
That is a completely valueless comment. Away you go! :)
rake -T One second for me running Ruby 1.9.3p125 with Rails 3.2.8.
a) Apple won't fix anything if you tell them from experience.

b) No data loss is acceptable. Any data loss is simply "product doesn't work".
Use DB views to workaround django ORM limitations
Are you going to buy an iPhone 5 or wait?
The advice is for startups. No startup could have released the iPhone as its first product. Imagine the dev cost!

Apple's first product - the Apple I - was an assembled circuit board. Basically a motherboard. Very targeted audience, very narrow scope of value for the first release. They layered on functionality from there. The iPhone came almost 30 years later.
I've read the article front to back twice. Carefully - and I'm still not 100% certain whether it's a troll, or for real.

The interesting thing is, many of this persons problems come from Apple trying to support multiple platforms, instead of locking the person into a single unified environment.

Others (like iPhoto starting to suck after 10,000 pictures) were an issue in the first couple releases - but it's not uncommon for people to have north of 100,000 photos, and get reasonable performance in recent releases.

The difficulty hitting the search magnifying glass was interesting - I wasn't even aware that magnifying glass existed. You normally just scroll to the top - now I can do it faster. But - it makes sense - what's just one above the letter "A" - the search icon.

All in all - I'm believing it's an article whose genesis was a user who got hit by an edgecase/bug on their iPhone, and then turned it into a generic rant about all things Apple.

But the problems this person are having do seem to make it clear to me why, if anything, the OS X platform / iPhone are too flexible. There are lots (lots!) of users out there who would trade some of that flexibility for more predictable performance/ease of use.

And thus, Sandboxing.
Apple is in the unique position of also owning a dominant ecosystem of media devices that have nothing to do with USB, micro-USB, or any variant thereof.

Umm... globally it doesn't, and most of it's market is outside the US, where it is forced to play ball to a degree by providing converters for those markets.

And if you think that consumer electronics companies have it harder than the space industry, then you are completely delusional.
Is it not possible to make backups of your iPhone ? (I do not own one).
Several of the article's points really resonate, specifically the ones concerning iPhoto, the Internationalization 'feature' of iOS and iChat/iMessage.
It does seem, to me, that Apple has begun to sacrifice usability at the altar of aesthetics, or worse, are unable to engineer stable and resilient applications.
I understand the authors experiences and how that may have tarnished his thoughts on Apple products.

Under normal operating conditions however which applies to the majority of iOS users out there, iOS is just as easy to use as it was when it first came out, it really hasn't changed that much from a UX point of view at all.

In regards to his gripes with OSX, well.... It is silly to expect any OS to be magical, even an Apple one. From a UX point of view it is better than every other OS, but from a package management point of view, Debian/Ubuntu is far superior to OSX and from a hardware support point of view, Windows beats both of them.

It seems the author wants the perfect OS, where problems never happen, unfortunately it doesn't exist yet, and it may never exist!

In the meantime, if you specifically want "ease of use", regardless of the authors troubles, your best bet for the meantime is the Apple ecosystem.
Can Windows 8 developers be ‘the new rock stars’?
> Have you ever done a search in your iPhone contacts? You need the fingers of a poorly fed six-year-old to activate that search function. No, really, I must waste four or five minutes a day trying to make that damn thing work.

> Seriously, how can an adult finger ever touch that little search icon without either hitting the “A” or the “+”????

You're not supposed to touch the minuscule magnifying button; you're supposed to drag the content down to display the search button. This is standard in iOS (almost all system apps do this, and thanks to the "rubber banding" effect it must be pretty damn easy to discover.

But I think the fact that the OP hasn't discovered such a basic thing proves his point that maybe apple products aren't so easy to use anymore! (Though I personally disagree wholeheartedly. It's anecdotal so I don't get into that)
I believe, that this is the view of a lot of persons/companies, that make money of the web. And I have to disagree, because of my experience with a lot of "not so savvy"-users.

For them, they like good information (or entertainment) and they really like the personal touch to things. If the information is interesting, they like to know more about the individual behind these pages. and a lot of these people like the handcrafted touch of "older" websites, that do not look all alike (wp, svbtle, octopress, et al).

So maybe the product is interesting for some of the people, who are not skilled in designing individual pages, but want non the less to publish on the web.

Just my experience with the 99% of people, that are not hackers, professional bloggers or net-savvy-people. Me, I'm going to stay with nanoc [http://nanoc.stoneship.org/] and jekyll [https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll] and for the time being (until redesigns are finished) wordpress.
I really wonder why don't we see any new PC platforms coming to the market. Where are all the startups taking on Microsoft and Apple?

And by new I don't mean Linux.
Natural gas has single digits percentages of Helium. It's still a finite resource on sensible timescales (yes radioactive decay replenishes supply eventually). It has many important uses. There are good reasons to object to it being squandered in children's party balloons.
thanks for the feedback. I drew an arrow to the video and changed the copy on the button.
Only if I can collect a different commemorative stamp at each event!
While I can undestand (not share) his opinion about AdBlock, I have a more difficult time understanding his grudge against Ghostery.

Ghostery makes it very easy to block all social buttons and analytics (like google-analytics, that fails to load 1 time out of 10), that make my browsing slow, or even stall.

Moreover, tracking on the internet and advertisement tracking is not the same as the one on TV, which is just grouping ads with shows of the relevant category. On TV, even if noone was watching it, those ads would be put together. Not on the Net.
I suspect that in the author's situation, with "thousands of contacts" in his list, scrolling to the top might be a rather time consuming enterprise.
And of course you can disable keyboards you don't want, but the author seems to be questioning the purpose of having the Internationalization button in a prime (and extremely accidental-touch prone location) on the keyboard at all.
"you’ll need to restore your iPhone to reclaim the space occupied by Other."

I can't get the picture out of my mind, of some mysterious entity creeping up on our iPhones like cancer. Soon they will all sync up with each other and then initiate the battle for world domination.

Come to think about it, the iPhones of the world might make for a pretty good attack vector for alien aggressors. A lot of earth's elite is bound to carry one around. If you can disable all of them at once, the rest of the battle might a walk in the garden.
A backup is automatically made every time you sync your iPhone to your computer. (You can also set it up to backup to iCloud instead of to your computer.) In theory, at least, it should be simple for the OP to restore his phone from backup.
In that case it was extremely well matched with the one which preceded it.

But if you are going to make ridiculous demands in lieu of argument, then you shouldn't really expect much of value in return.
Hacker News Kansai Meetup – September 28th, Kyoto
The thing is, you are beginning to 'blame the user' because they 'don't get it'. Isn't the purpose is that there isn't anything to get? It should 'just work' with minimal thinking, with no frustration. It doesn;t matter that Kanji is enabled... maybe it was enabled by accident? But it doesn;t resolve his problem? Maybe he doesn;t know how to easily enable/disable languages because he finds it hard to configure? If anything, this is useful data for Apple (and any UX designers) to look at to resolve potential usability problems.
In the past I've run into iTunes doing a backup and everything seems fine, but when I go to restore my device it turns out the backup is actually empty. This happened to me after the iOS 5 upgrade actually. Maybe the author ran into this situation?
HackerFollow
My problem with ads and social networking buttons is the latency they introduce in to browsing.

If a page load hangs, most of the time it turns out to be waiting for a response from a third party web site, which has no relevance to the content I want to see.

Since I installed Ghostery I find my browsing experience is much faster.

For ads, I use Adblock but I start with an empty URL list. I add servers that host obnoxious ads (animated or over-laying content) to the list as I go about my browsing. As long as a site uses a well-behaving ad network the ads will display.
I really hope Valve takes them on in some shape or form, even if it's their own flavor of Linux. Then Windows will be good for just Microsoft Office. And that's it.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/07/steams-newell-windows-...