skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You pop up in so many threads to defend Apple that I recognize your username by now. Do you work for Apple's PR department or something? If so, I sure hope they're paying you overtime for being here on a Friday night. Well, here we go...

> thinner

Yeah, by 1.2 mm. If you're wearing skinny hipster jeans like your average Apple fanboi, it makes a difference, but for the rest of us, that's insignificant.

> lighter

Again, 21 g. Not a big deal.

> higher quality construction

Right, that's why so many people are reporting chips and scratches on the aluminum back the day that they get the phone. It looks like Apple didn't learn anything from the glass back disaster with the iPhone 4/4S.

> better battery life

Both phones can easily last a full day of intense usage. The iPhone's slightly longer battery life is a result of its puny screen.

And don't forget that the Galaxy S3's battery is user-removable and replaceable. You can carry an additional battery with you and swap it in as needed, or you can get an extended battery - for just $30 on Amazon, you can get an extended battery with 4200 mAh, double the standard 2100 mAh battery and nearly three times the iPhone 5's 1440 mAh battery.

> better cpu

Uhh, no. Just no. The iPhone 5 has a 1.3 GHz dual-core processor, whereas the Galaxy S3 has a 1.4 GHz quad-core processor. Next time, please try to extricate yourself from the reality distortion field before making statements related to Apple or its products.

> superior display quality

Ignoring the fact that display quality is inherently subjective, that the iPhone has a better display is far from a foregone conclusion: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57524291-37/color-me-prett...

> better ecosystem, better apps

Are you kidding me? Let me know when there are functional Gmail, Google Talk, and Google Voice apps for the iPhone, and when I can use the default mapping software (which can't be replaced) without ending up in the middle of a river. And let's not even get started on the inability to install 3rd party browsers on the iPhone or use apps like Locale and Tasker without jailbreaking.

> will be regularly updated for years

I'd rather not have updates than have them break core functionality, like mapping.

> better customer service

This is probably the only thing Apple does better. That said, I've never actually needed customer service on my Android phones, unlike my friends with iPhones, who've taken their phones in to have the broken glass backs replaced with alarming frequency.

Go back to Daring Fireball kid.
Ask HN: How to prevent spamming on JavaScript frontend logging API?
Hello HN,

We are design an analytics logging API for our JS application. What bothers us is spamming prevention. I can't come up with a better way than rate limiting to prevent someone else use a fake client and spam the API. Is there something I missed here? What are some best practices on this? What do generic services, say Google Analytics, solve the problem?

Thank you.
Fantastic ... You are truly an inspiration.
Useless? The software running the computer you are typing on is full of void*.
I think your willingness to accept this as the truth is more telling of your own disposition than any of ours. Of course we have the choice.

I don't participate in Facebook, but I've yet to see any indication that I've "opted out of society offline". I have plenty of friends and regularly get invited to events (via, you know, my phone). If anything, I think opting out of social networking has only increased my value since my day-to-day activities haven't saturated the market.

And the people I go out to dinner with don't take photographs of their food or talk about what they "liked" on Facebook. Do you work for Facebook or something? Your life sounds like a commercial for it.
Sure you have a choice. I deleted my Facebook account years ago, I have a perfectly functioning social life. Some things are slightly more inconvenient but there's really not many of them. I saw a large reduction in the amount of useless crap I read online and didn't notice any reduction in the quality of any of my meaningful relationships, since let's face it - who develops or maintains meaningful relationships on Facebook? At best it's a means to find people in the real world to do that with.

To characterize it as a choice only legitimizes this thing as something we have control over and have opted into, rather than something that has happened to us.

You're right that it's something that has happened to us, but it has happened by choice and you can still choose if you want to.
Done. If not already, I'd recommend asking your friends n family to donate too.
I'd go one step farther and just disable plugins. I have run without plugins for years and it really is a non-issue 95% of the time. If I absolutely need a plugin I will enable it for the time I need it and then disable it again.
I want headlines to provide me with a concise summary of what I can expect to find within an article, so I can decide whether it's worth my time.

But headlines don't always do this very well; sometimes they promise more than the article delivers, and sometimes they're just poorly written and miss the point.

The tl;dr convention exists, and thrives even on HN, because we recognize the value of our own and others' time and attention. As you say, it's a valuable way to find out if the story is actually interesting or worthwhile.
Huh?

How do any of your analogies work?
I think the Vista effect needs to be considered here. The bad feelings toward Vista would have driven many people to upgrade to 7 which was seen as a saviour at the time.

Now, 7 is still a great operating system, and with 8, people are being asked to make a fairly significant adjustment to what they are used to.

I upgraded my 7 machine to 8 last week, and absolutely love it! I suspect as positive reviews come out, and people become more comfortable with the idea of touch on their laptop screen, adoption of windows 8 will be strong. But I suspect a tepid response will last for another month or so.
every time these statistics come up, i will post the last 2 weeks from my own server. pretty much 100% US/CA audience. site category is home remodeling, DIY, contractors.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AgXFz9xLvI4UdHp...
Well done, Congrats!
FF is slower than Chrome

This isn't the case for me when I have a couple of hundred tabs open, which I usually do.
Absolutely. It is a disease -- one I suffered from and cured myself of.

It took being abandoned by a close friend to realize that there was a problem.
Soothsayr - Get the power of predictive analytics for your app
Summaries are nice. But when the content is deep or technical, sometimes it's useful to include the long-form data or explanation as well.
Being a former fortran rogrammer (fortran II at first) I am intrigued what concepts in the oo world came from fortran?
IPad Mini launch fails to impress Wall Street
You're awesome.

If you aren't, the nicest gift you can give yourself in 10 years is a blog, even if it's private and you write all the crazy stuff you're learning and doing and how scary it felt at first and how great it felt after.

Some things I had someone said to me and I hope you'll say to someone at 14 one day:

As you get older you'll meet so many subtle doubt worshippers that spread their doubts because they can't get over their own self-doubt.

Be a man of action and launching. Haters and doubters are busy doing nothing.

Don't ever let anyone poison this ability to build, and launch.

Don't ever let anyone tell you you can't figure out anything and build something.

Do laugh, while you launch and ship often while everyones busy optimizing their stack.
"What portion of the smartphone market did they have 3 years ago?"

Around 17%.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2009/11/apple-grabs-17-of-smart...

"What % is that today?"

Somewhere between 14% (most recent quarter, this thread's article) and 24% (last year's launch quarter).

http://www.totaltele.com/view.aspx?ID=470976

"What happens when the pie stops growing in 3 years?"

The whole point is that Apple's pie has a lot more than 3 years of growth left. We are talking about this arbitrary thing called "the smartphone market" but Apple doesn't really compete in "the smartphone market". Apple competes in a tiny corner of "the smartphone market" called "the $450+ smartphone market".

I remember when Apple competed in a space called "the $300+ music player market". And how it "felt pretty much like PC vs Mac again" when cheap mp3 players were taking market share. And then Apple brought out a $250 music player and then a $200 music player and then a $100 music player etc. Now Apple found a bigger market to play in then music players but I'm saying that I doubt there's a bigger market to play in then pocket computers with wireless broadband [1]. And Apple can keep having amazing success in that market by doing both (1) what they did in 2007 (make a much better pocket computer with wireless internet than what was currently in stores), and (2) what they did in the portable music player market (by continually addressing a larger share of that pie).

What's called the iphone in 5-10 years may look radically different, maybe it's Siri on steroids, maybe it's brain control, maybe it's holograms and haptics, maybe it's Kinect, maybe it's aug reality ala Glass, maybe it's smellovision... But what's essential about that product is that it will replace the functions of the current smartphone.

If you're asking me if Apple can keep growing at it's current rate the answer is clearly that they can't long term (law of large numbers). I do think Apple will enter other markets -- luxury watches, tv/console gaming, search and cloud services are the obvious areas. I don't think they will make as much money in all of those put together as they will in the pocket computers with wireless broadband category though.

[1] There are bigger markets of course (cars, houses, health care, education, etc) and there will be bigger new markets (girl robots lol?) but none of them play to Apple's strengths.
the same thing happened to me (getting suck in the fence), and pressing escape to try and turn the colors back on.
Use your words. Why do you think that?

This is a professor at a university. I'd like to see him reprimanded or fired if he presents anything close to this article to his students as fact. It is one of the most out of touch articles I've seen in a long time, and it's not just some kid in his/her parents' basement; It's a damned professor of software engineering. Unbelievable.
Windows 8 (thumb down review)
I spent 2 hours checking out Windows 8. As a developer, the conclusion is to stick with Windows 7. my observations are:

1. work and play don't mix.
metro is for play, desktop is for work. they don't mix. I am consistently thinking about where things are. should I switch to metro or desktop for what I want to do.

2. desktop become handicapped.
Removing the "start" button is a mistake in my mind. I understand Microsoft want to emphasize the new "starting place" for windows is the new metro, but taking away start button means that I have to switch to metro and search for "control panel" to access it. To access visual studio.net? I have to switch to metro and search for "visual studio" and click the icon which switches me right back to desktop. I'd perfect happy to spend all my time on desktop had they kept that start button.

3. Things looks different between IE9 and IE10
and there is no quick fix if you are really aiming for pixel-perfect. It is a nightmare for me.

For a non-developer: a Metro only windows 8 would be very appealing
For a developer: a desktop only windows 8 is at least as good as windows 7 which is really good thing.

but mixing metro and desktop, I am afraid that it is just gonna slow me down.

What do you think of windows 8?
RubyConf Roundup: Day One
That sounds like an awful idea.
How can you possibly say IE's F9 Developer Tools are anything more than barely workable? Ugh.
"It is important to know what is going on in the world around you. But to know every detail, every update, every little thing that happens? No."

tl;dr Says there is a problem with tl;dr, arguments reveal why we need tl;dr more than ever.
Seeking Freelancer - Remote

Build the following http://bit.ly/YqqE3n in either Java Play, Angular JS or Python.

Email in profile.
That's why I submitted it. The new thing is robots but the mainstream still thinks web is the new tech. As people shift to mobile, the ad revenue won't be there, google's already experiencing this. The smart money's going to robotics, as it should. There's way more money and societal value in disrupting the physical world.
Seeking work: USER INTERFACE DESIGNER (Remote)

I'm a senior UI designer based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I've been working for a long time with entrepreneurs from HN from all over the world.

I have a vast experience designing mobile and web interfaces.

Please check out my work at http://www.heynico.com or http://www.dribbble.com/nicogarcia. My contact info is in my profile.
Man builds 60ft-long World War I Trench in his back garden
If you haven't read it, consider reading The War of Art http://www.amazon.com/The-War-Art-Through-Creative/dp/044669... What you describe is precisely what this book is all about.
> "who develops or maintains meaningful relationships on Facebook?"

I've done both. I've also formed and maintained meaningful relationships on other websites.

There's a definite cost-benefit tradeoff. It can be a huge time sink. It can bury you in games that aren't even remotely fun. It can lead to ideological arguments that destroy friendships. But it can also help you keep up with friends and relatives, reconnect with old friends, and even discover new friends-of-friends who you'd never have the opportunity to meet in person.

It's really a matter of how you and your friends use it.
But couldn't the language's runtime (or the GC library, or whatever) register for these notifications?
>refrigerators, freezers

That's easy. My (old) fridge/freezer used about 80 watts when averaged over time (peak is 300W when self-defrosting). There are Energy Star refrigerators that use only 34 watts averaged.[1]

>air conditioning units

This is certainly true for now. Over the long term, low power passive cooling can be surprisingly effective. Taking advantage of evaporation, diurnal temperature changes, "wind chill", thermal mass, phase changes, passive geothermal, and solar gain reduction have the potential to provide comparable comfort for a lot less energy.

A small personal anecdote: in college I had no AC, so I would circulate night air through my apartment ($15 fan + $5 timer). It reliably kept it 5-10 degrees cooler than it was outside, but doing nothing it was 5 degrees hotter. It cost $6/month, drawing 60 watts on average, even with a very inefficient motor.

[1] http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?startNum=1&resultspe...
Thanks Jeremy, Shan and Mike. I'm continually blown away by the data journalism you're doing over at nytimes on the election. It's truly an inspiration.
23MM Wide Wheels Sale
Hey..what about my compute cluster in the basement.
Great job! Parlay those skills into some lucrative consulting gigs. Earn early, and earn often. Compound interest, especially at your age, is the most powerful force in the universe.
To really do this right, check out ham radio publications such as http://www.arrl.org/shop/Emergency-Power-for-Radio-Communica....

There is much more to it than the article might imply to you.
Unfortunately places like Korea still require ActiveX support because it's used by all online shopping, government, etc pages (and is required by law in many cases)... http://www.koreaittimes.com/story/21504/internet-powerhouse-...
My understanding is not that promises weren't valued, but that there were conflicting opinions on how to implement them, so promises were left in user land, in hopes that the community would vet a better solution than could be prescribed by the node team.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/nodejs/jaufClrXU9U/ov5...

q seems to be a popular choice.
https://github.com/kriskowal/q
Language wars bore me. I've got pretty decent proficiency in C, C++, Java, Python and Javascript and I honestly like them all.

I use C to really get what happens on the metal. I use C++ to leverage C and C++ libraries for perf critical applications quickly. I use Java like C++ where it makes more sense - Android, or availability of libraries etc. I use Python to prototype and quickly express complex ideas and determine their perf characteristics. I use Javascript for frontend web dev which communicates with json back-end APIs that are language/platform independent services that scale out horizontalty.

I have 2 main rules.

If the question is to learn one important thing or another - I learn both. Then when I come across a new problem I solve it with a combination of the tools at my disposal.

Hence this is why I am currently learning Emacs, lisp, clojure, Scala and Haskell to round out my languages with maybe a little Ruby thrown in. This will take me a few years.

In the end programming is just about getting things to screen quickly and correctly. Seen from that viewpoint most languages are very similar at heart.
Anyone that's had to submit an app will be impressed that you went through that process successfully, let alone made a cool little game for the iphone. Good job.
Seriously though, this post is full of confusion.

"However, the focus on speed and efficiency is not a good interim approach until we solve that problem better. News is an endless consumable; there’s always more to be read, endlessly produced. Making it more efficent solves a problem on the wrong side of the equation: how can the journalists get readers more information, more quickly?"

"tl;dr" is the opposite of speed and efficiency. It's about getting less information so that we don't always have to be speedy and efficient readers. It doesn't get you "more information more quickly" it simply gets you _less information_ when you don't need to have it all.

"the question really boils down to: where can I read content that interests me, the reader, and avoid the cruft?"

Well that's where 'tl;dr' type summaries help you. you can just read the tl;dr, summary or headline and avoid the cruft by not reading the rest if it doesn't appeal to you.

I believe the tl;dr should actually precede the detailed version as a headline or abstract that helps guide readers and let them choose whether to read further. However I realise this can sometimes result in spoilage.
WatFIV is so long ago that I can't even make a illuminating joke about this. Maybe he meant Smalltalk.
I think this is a great way to explain to someone who's not intimately familiar with electoral politics why people think Obama is going to win despite razor thing polls. Predictions mean nothing of course but:

If Obama wins Florida, Romney has exactly 1 path to victory: winning every other swing state. If Obama wins Ohio, Romney has only 11 ways to win. If Obama loses Florida, Virginia, NC, and Ohio he could still potentially win if he wins the rest of the swing states, all of which he's slightly ahead in in recent polling.

Election day will be interesting, but that's what makes it hard to pundits to predict a Romney victory.
Paying for Google Apps is a crazy idea
I read their support agreement for paying customers, and it states they are not obligated to give you support for non-core Google services. This means you trying to get support for anything other than Gmail, Calendar, Groups, Talk, Docs/Drive, Sites, Video, and Contacts you may be SOL.

http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/tssg.html

One thing I remembered were users recommending the author of this submission to get Google Apps for support.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4676854

However, Google Voice is explicitly one of the services they list in their "additional services" that is not included in the support agreement.

I was planning to pay for Google Apps just for the support, but it just seems like a crazy idea.
> "People had small groups of tight-nit friends with whom they shared REAL experiences."

And yet, they still do.

One thing I heavily dislike about the Facebook narrative is how it's portrayed as two mutually exclusive choices. Either you have hundreds of people who poke at each other in superficial ways or you have tight-knit circles.

The reality is that people have both, and have always had both. Facebook has improved our connection to the extended-acquaintances circle, it hasn't taken away our close friends.
Those people also know enough (or know too little) to ignore advice on the internet. For everyone else, disclaimers are good.
Red Cross shelter page iPhone only
Theoretical Computer Science on Stack Exchange
Also, I cannot seem to get the full site to load on my Android device. Works fine on my laptop, of course.
Know How To Keep Weight Off Before You Lose It
Kinda OT, but out of interest, why do you use 'slogin' instead of 'ssh'? Just old habits dieing hard from 'rlogin'?
I was curious about CouchBase myself. I know it's hard to run tests on every variation of the NoSQL fad, but CouchBase (IMHO) is a pretty sizable player.
I've been subscribed to your HTML 5 and JS newsletters for a couple months now. The content has been great overall. Enough so that I'm asking you where I can signup for the other two newsletters. :)
This guy is wrong, for the record. The default behavior of malloc on linux involves kernel magic to decide whether to allocate the memory. Since he wasn't actually writing any data to any of his ram, it didn't fail until he ran out of address space. If he'd actually used the memory, it would have failed sooner.

The other, bigger problem is his assumption that all linux installations work like this. Frequently vm.overcommit_memory is set to disable malloc calls for more than the available amount of memory, which means the oom-killer never gets inolved. He's making a ton of dangerous assumptions based on tooling around with code instead of reading the documentation on the matter (i.e. malloc(3)).

malloc can fail, and you should deal with it well: http://ewontfix.com/3/
Open windows won't save you from CO out of a generator. A local family was in the hospital from CO poisioning after Sandy because they ran a generator in their garage. The gararge door was open, but the generator was near the house door. That was enough to allow CO to enter their house.
Are you sure that it is the referrer headers? PP clearly stated there were no outgoing links on the secret page. I think there's a much more mundane explanation: javascript stuff downloaded from Googles CDN.
People nowadays are so used to just plopping jQuery etc. into their web pages that they forget that this stuff has to come from somewhere. If it's from Google, I'm quite certain that their CDN loader phones home right before it gives up any of the good stuff.

EDIT: Confirmed, though I was wrong in that there's no loader, requesting jQuery from ajax.googleapis.com gives them a nice fresh Referer header pointing at your secret site for their spiders to crawl. Be mindful!
Damn! marshallp, I didn't realize your intent! What can I say? You are absolutely right, in bucketloads!
The five ways to tie are the most freaky and stressful.

The only problem with this nifty tree is that it must be followed in order to determine the outcome.

Oh wait, I didn't realize the boxes at the top were selectable. I guess that allows out-of-order traversal.

Only thing I'd like to see added to this is using url hash to bookmark the result set so I can share it.
That doesn't apply until they start actually releasing out of band updates for very, very nasty flash/reader vulnerabilities.