skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> You seem to think that 'allows customisation' and 'defaults that work well' are mutually exclusive for some reason.

Well often they are, especially in a complex piece of software like a phone OS. Customizability requires trade-offs which may affect usability or performance. More often than not, software that allows skinning looks butt-ugly in the default setting and integrates poorly with the rest of the system (think Java desktop applications etc).

Anyway, you still seem to assume I hate customization just because I have no need for it, while my original comment was about one thing, and one thing only: that customization isn't actually a very strong argument to compare mobile OS'es on, primarily because better defaults always beat customizability (and IMO, looking past the homescreen, taking all aspects of the OS and ecosystem into account, iOS is still miles ahead of Android in that regard), but also because it isn't all that interesting to (I assume) most smartphone users.

>> I've also never really understood the toddler argument for 'well-designed'. 'Simple', sure, but not 'well-designed'.

I'd say 'simple' is almost the penultimate goal of UI design, especially when you are talking about something as complex as a mobile phone. Today everyone takes for granted that even your granny can use a smartphone, but you only have to go back to Windows Mobile to appreciate how much the iPhone has done for smartphone usability. Android users can only be thankful for that because they are profiting from these advancements just as well.

>> We don't consider this for any other thing we do - board games aren't considered poorly designed if a toddler can't play them [..]

I think this is a bit silly, because most board games are intended to be hard, otherwise there wouldn't be any point in playing and winning them. I fail to see the relevance of the other examples. My impression is that you are thinking about 'well-designed' in terms of aesthetics, while I'm thinking about usability and ergonomics. In that context, well-designed is almost a synonym of 'simple' and 'easy to use'. Kids can now operate a smartphone and do things that my parents would have been dumbfounded if they had to do them on a regular PC, yet my mom is perfectly able to find, install and run applications on her iPad, and use it for everything she previously hated to use her PC for. To me, that means we've made progress in terms of usability.

>> I also don't really understand your last paragraph - again, you see to be arguing against customisation because you don't enjoy it

That's a strange way of reading what I wrote, because I what I was saying is that I actually used to enjoy customization until I lost interest in it and found out it almost always makes things worse, not better.
You don't think that's contestable? It's one of the most absurd things to say. It's impossible for a device to be perfectly ergonomic for everyone.

I have big hands. I loved the original Xbox controller before they shrank it. I love bigger phones. I find the iPhone 4 and earlier too damn small for me.

The Apple commercials with someone hand showing that it is "perfect size" are simply laughable. Lets have someone with small, medium, and large hands film that commercial and you will see how ridiculous the concept of "perfect size" is.
Deleting a photo in iPhoto really deletes it from Facebook?
After googling, IRC is the first place I go to, to ask a question regarding some tool/framework/language/design. Long live Freenode.
Maybe they were stingy with the invites because they couldn't scale up the servers?
You can use `dd` to make a clone of your drive - see http://serverfault.com/questions/4906/using-dd-for-disk-clon...

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=32M
Felix - a fast scripting language
Some Advice for New University Graduates: Dreams of Developing Software
I do see a lot of iPhones with smashed screens but I've only ever seen two or three Androids with smashed screens (and no blackberries). So this probably means that either the androids don't smash easily; that android users don't drop their phones on hard surfaces (unlikely - these are humans we're talking about); or that the iPhone screen is so good it keeps working when smashed and the Android ones don't.

Sample size: public transport users and eatery-goers...
>> Finally, from a philosophical standpoint, it is absolutely absurd that I should ever have to break something I have paid for to take full ownership of it.

Actually, if you buy a phone on contract, you didn't pay the full price and aren't entitled to the same rights as someone who paid the full $650+tax sticker price and gets it SIM-unlocked.
What bullshit. Does requiring users to agree to GPL or LGPL license make a software non-free?
At least I'm having problems accessing the site. Page from Google Cache:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:LPBhLpm...
Commercial Joomla Extension Business Review (2010, 2011, and 2012)
Some people have larger hands than others. Android gives you the whole range from an Xperia tipo to the Note. On the iPhone, unless you want to compromise performance, you have one phone.
Dear Huffington Post: It’s time to grow up
reShared as a link here
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5007681
so if you build something based on Android and want to expose some functionality to that system but customize it, you can't do it on top of the Android SDK?
Nearly 50% Android devices are still running a two year old operating system
The security implications vary, but generally private keys should be readable only by the processes that need them, to whatever degree is practical, and entropy that is used to generate a key should be considered roughly equivalent to the key itself.

This is not to say that leaving a private key world-readable is necessarily a horrible idea; it can certainly ease deployment, and there are always tradeoffs. But it does mean that this key is only as secure as your most vulnerable user account - including unprivileged user accounts running riskier services (unless they are genuinely sandboxed).

Making it readable only by a certain group is going to be better, security-wise, and shouldn't be too much more difficult, and so may generally be a better idea, but my key objection was that it sounded like a statement of policy: "we're only deriving keys from this, so we don't need to be careful with it" - which is bad policy without considering the protection the needed by the specific keys. The article does talk about this some later on but not (IMO) clearly or generally enough.
She deleted local files? But that caused files at FB to be deleted? And she's now trying to recover the files from FB?

1) Stop writing anything to that disc.

2a) Send the disc to a commercial recovery service.

2b) Remove the disc. Find a trusted friend. Buy recovery software, or use a Linux recovery disc. (I don't know what OS she's using, or what filesystem she's using. I liked GetDataBackforNTFS, but there are others.)

3) Investigate sensible backup plans. Not trying to be snarky; I do realise just how painful data loss is. But a few scripts and an external drive can save a lot of heartache.

The iPhoto meta data (auto-recognised names etc) is probably gone forever. Someone making a tool to back up or export that data could probably earn a bit of cash.
CVE-2012-5664: Sql Injection on Rails... again
Something like that is probably possible with NFC tags. My phone doesn't support them so I can't give details, but I'm fairly certain it's doable.
Don’t Delay Your First Startup to Get an MBA Degree
Groopic - even the photographer is in the group picture
Users of GPL/LGPL don't have to agree to anything. Only distributors of GPL/LGPL software do.
Testing Backbone.js with mocha
Basic economists' definition: opportunity cost. If the government spends a dollar and gets a worse result than the dollar would have gotten if it stayed in the private sector, then the economy is worse off. (That includes what the dollar would have bought, and any damage to incentives to work/save/innovate/invest/buy capital/take risks/etc that came from collecting that dollar from its previous owner.)

Of course, if you want to reinvigorate the economy, you'd do better to do something about the bureaucracy first - you know, the bureaucracy that requested stool samples from the guy who wanted to run a (bottled-)olive-oil export website.
It's important to note that many of the holders of US debt are US-based, i.e. it is not all external debt like it would be in a household.
The best part of political discussions is when people say "no serious person disagrees with me".

I would qualify and expound upon my statement in defense, but hey, why bother. Clearly only people who already agree with you are serious.
No benefits to making an app in HTML5? This is a joke.

The biggest one for me is choice for the consumer.

They can use any device so long as it's browser conforms to HTML5 standards.
The Series A Crunch is the Entrepreneur's Fiscal Cliff
the author:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyd_Blankenship
Does not seem to be GPL, here's just one clause:

3.4 You agree that you will not take any actions that may cause or result in the fragmentation of Android, including but not limited to distributing, participating in the creation of, or promoting in any way a software development kit derived from the SDK.

You end up making quite broad promises (IMHO) by just clicking through to download the SDK.
Show HN: First startup, first app: Kwixer
Greetings !
https://www.kwixer.com

We’re two freshly graduated students and we’ve developed our first smartphone app called Kwixer with 0 funds!

Kwixer enables you to share and review what you do like what movies you’ve watched, what songs you’ve listened to, what books you’ve read, what video games you’ve played and which restaurants you went to.

Kwixer is unique because of its social recommendation engine, let’s say you’ve watched “Skyfall” and loved it; Kwixer will not only recommend you other James Bond movies or other action movies your friends loved but will also recommend theme songs from the movie like the song “Skyfall” from Adele.
We cross reference a lot of data so you’d discover the things you’re about to love.

This is our first app and first version; we’ve developed on iOS and windows phone and working on the android app, we know we need to do a lot of UX improvements to make it simpler, please give us a lot of feedback and let us know what you think!
Our data comes mostly from Freebase, iTunes and Foursquare. Both our apps are native, we built our own transitions we wanted to feel different so let us know ;)...And finally our backend is developed with .net.
Phrack, even after the official crew gave up contributing to it, is an exceptional archive of deep and highly technical programming techniques (and more). I highly recommend to everyone to just go through some of the issues and read some papers.
wait, isn't iPhoto non-destructive? Thus, you delete an image from iPhoto and it's not deleted, it just doesn't show in iPhoto? Even emptying the trashcan in iPhoto means the images should still be in her Pictures folder.
SparkleShare - Self hosted, secure file sync
lol. i initially read this as, how to blind people, use Instagram.
Thanks for the note. I've not really looked into how one would do that with R (doing it in Python seems more clear), but am checking it out now. If anyone else is looking I'm finding this PDF helpful: http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/wiki/pub/Main/SvetlanaEdenR...
No.. it was just stated instead of not.
Steve Jobs movie starring Ashton Kutcher to hit theaters in April
You don't think this kind of open-ended language makes it pretty non-free:

"You agree that you will not take any actions that may cause or result in the fragmentation of Android, including but not limited to distributing, participating in the creation of, or promoting in any way a software development kit derived from the SDK."

Any action? Promoting? Does this mean that I can't write a blog post about developing for Kindle Fire? Hell, can I even buy a Kindle Fire and not break these terms (or install Cyanogenmod) seeing that it is just "including but not limited to" the SDK itself?
I was close to the Google+ launch. Nothing has made me more confident in Facebook's future.
Why it took me so long to find MeetUp?
The public defenders' office doesn't have the power to seize anyone's assets.
Loved when this was quoted in the Hackers movie. Loved.
At first I thought this is hyperbole, but there's an anti-forking clause in the license agreement:

> "3.4 You agree that you will not take any actions that may cause or result in the fragmentation of Android, including but not limited to distributing, participating in the creation of, or promoting in any way a software development kit derived from the SDK."

IANAL, but this seems to be designed to prevent projects like the Kindle Fire from building their own ecosystem on Google's code. Good for Google I guess, but no longer in the spirit of open source.
Agree. I used KHTML (later known as Konqueror) as my primary browser (as a webdev!) since early days of KDE until I switched to Mac in 2006. Konqueror always felt right on KDE, just like Safari feels right on OS X (native feel, integration, etc).

A little feature I still miss was that you could navigate up in URL hierarchy by alt+up, just like in file-browsing mode (not sure if it's still supported by today's Konqueror).
Americans Never Give Up Your Guns
Storing our digital DNA
I use Backblaze too, at $4/month nothing can beat that feeling of safety for something like photo's.

I really feel for this friend of the OP.
What's funny is that this feature gets often pointed out as one of the cool Android exclusives, but iOS has it too: you just need to turn on Automatic Downloads in the store settings, it works for apps as well as media and books purchased from the store.

It's more limited, in that it will download all purchases made on any other device (or iTunes) connected to the same account, but it seems like very few people are aware of it.
Are there any examples of accessibility features that actually make usage more efficient? Not for Instagram, I mean in general.
Man, hadn't seen that in a while--brings me back. Wonder what the modern equivalent is, if any.
I wonder if that's why we're seeing stories like this? http://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/2013/01/03/samsung-con...

Samsung has amassed quite a history, in a very short amount of time, of heavily customizing Android for their devices. That might at least partially explain why they seem willing to gamble on their own in-house OS rather than continue with Android.
I would also like this, and maybe the ability to choose 960 and/or Blueprint overlays to help align the elements.
"Blogspam" (blame the submitter, not the blog) for http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1e7ZCKQfMA

tl;dw: iOS has a mode for vision impaired users where buttons are spoken when touched and a double touch activates them. The instagram app supports that. The video is fun, though it reeks of "viral" ad.
Actually, GHC Haskell compiler = The Glorious Glasgow Haskell Compilation System Haskell compiler[0]

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasgow_Haskell_Compiler
There is an amazing port of Mega Man 2 for iOS. It autosaves however, so there is no way to enter the code. I play it all the time. My record for beating it is under 20 minutes on normal. Greatest NES game of all time, and also the greatest 8-bit music. I still get the airman theme stuck in my head sometimes.
"Google's code" is a little vague, though. You can use the code for Android (which the Fire indeed does), you just can't use Google's first-party apps.
What does such a clause might mean to projects like Cyanogenmod?
The discussion had nothing to do with being SIM unlocked or not, but rather constraints that remain whether you paid full price up front or not.

However the "on a contract" bit is frequently misrepresented I think: when you get a device on contract, in most cases you are being loaned the cost of the device. You have zero recourse to simply return the device when you decide you don't want it any more. There is little to no difference between buying a phone "outright" on a credit card, or getting it "on contract" with your carrier.
This is interesting, but the home page is the most coherent and readable on the site. Better resources look to be:

The Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/groups/243958412369802/

And google group:
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/felix-lan...
I browsed the web for some time without ad blocker. I kept clicking on ads, because they featured a big green right arrow, that looked just like a "next page" button. These ads were clearly designed to mislead me, rather than inform me. This falls pretty much under what I consider a malicious ad.

The ad was served by Google.
Airman theme has been my ringtone for the last year. :)
> I think that you should first exhaust all regular avenues.

Good job jumping to conclusions. I'm sure OP appreciates the scolding and will now realize HN is a sacred place not to be disturbed by his frivolous technical dilemmas.
If they were in control of their own (fiat) currency, like the pre-Euro drachma, they could simply print more money.

(FYI, I'm not saying I think this is a good idea; I'm trying to explain what they could, theoretically, do.)
Excellent article. I've seen a lot of my friends get disheartened by the idea of spending the time and effort to do a PhD and instead hoping to make it big by trying a variation of the "chain of clinics". While this is strictly their personal choice to make, I think their intelligence would have served better learning the field more thoroughly; after which they would have probably been an invaluable asset...

A lot of them feel that getting a PhD would make them overqualified to work in the industry.
Pay attention to power law distributions
I'd say 'simple' is almost the penultimate goal of UI design

I've run out of time for big swathes, sorry, but I had to comment on this. 'simple' is not the ideal goal of UI design. 'appropriate' is. You want a UI that is best appropriate for the situation. Sometimes this will indeed be simple. Other times it will not be. As an extreme example, could you imagine a cockpit with a single hardware button and a small grid of soft dials?

A more moderate example is that to do serious business work, people still need desktop environments - tablets do not cut it. Mobile OSs are too simple for most serious business work - they don't have an appropriate UI.
Oh ok. I misinterpreted.
Methods for Modifying Objects in OOCSS (Extends: A Fool’s Gold)
> I'll never understand how people can suppose that a government solution,... is by any definition or stretch of the imagination "more efficient" than private litigation.

You mean private litigation which employs gov't judges to adjudicate and the gov't police to enforce? If so, you have a confusing definition of private.

The only private litigation I'm aware of is the mob, which has a self-contained judgement and enforcement arm. I would agree with you: They're damn efficient.
Android SDK != Android. Not saying whether this move by Google is good or bad, just pointing out an important difference. You can still fork the Android source code to your heart's content, you just have to write your own toolchain for building and developing with it.
From the terms and conditions:

3.3 You may not use the SDK for any purpose not expressly permitted by this License Agreement. Except to the extent required by applicable third party licenses, you may not: (a) copy (except for backup purposes), modify, adapt, redistribute, decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, or create derivative works of the SDK or any part of the SDK; or (b) load any part of the SDK onto a mobile handset or any other hardware device except a personal computer, combine any part of the SDK with other software, or distribute any software or device incorporating a part of the SDK.

3.4 You agree that you will not take any actions that may cause or result in the fragmentation of Android, including but not limited to distributing, participating in the creation of, or promoting in any way a software development kit derived from the SDK.

3.5 Use, reproduction and distribution of components of the SDK licensed under an open source software license are governed solely by the terms of that open source software license and not this License Agreement.
and express is 2 fucking days in the UK, I'd call that a cultural faux pas, as 2 day shipping here is the crappy option. I've had amazon get things to my door in less than 14 hours given the right conditions.
For podcasts, I use Instacast and that definitely downloads in the background, but I believe the app just can't be in suspend state. As long as a bunch of apps have not been opened after instacast, it should download everything fone.

The trade-off is to have background downloading on all the time, which is something I hated about android in the 4 years I used it. Background processes were always killing my battery and it was never obvious what was running.

I think the sane compromise that I wish apple would make is to allow for more permanent background tasks to run, but only when externally powered.
I'm building an HTML 5 app as a side project right now, and I intend to target mobile with it, in addition to browsers. I'm a professional web developer, so it makes sense for me.

There are a few wrappers that will translate HTML 5 calls to native calls when run on a mobile phone. The one I'm working with, CocoonJS, actually provides pretty good performance. Granted, you need to be building your app as an HTML 5 canvas, but if you're doing a game, you're likely to be using one anyway.

As far as missing capabilities go, CocoonJS is getting pretty all-encompassing. For example, I can access the camera of the phone. I can do in-app purchases, and use native ad platforms. I can access the accelerometer and detect orientation changes.

Perhaps missing the "real" UI of the phone does make it feel a little foreign, but in my case, I'm not particularly worried. Most games I've played on my Android phone don't use them either, even when they're fully native.

I would say if you have the resources, or you need to use every drop of performance you can get, go native. In my case, that's not necessary and saves me from having three codebases.

Use the right tool for the job. That tool will change based on your audience and needs.
Ok that makes a lot more sense.

As the guy said HTC don't do a good job of communicating these features, the advert shows a guy falling asleep and as he shuts his eyes the phone locks...

I have never actually had this problem though generally I can read a screen full of text before the phone locks. My scrolling will reset the lock timeout. Videos and games stop the phone from locking.
I agree. For something where your competition is a million other startups trying to do photo sharing, you need to go native to compete in the user experience. But if you are doing specialized mobile apps for a delivery company or something, html5 may be more pragmatic.
MOOCs are a fundamental misperception of how teaching works
Out of curiosity what OS do you use? And do you make your own custom AMIs for various workloads?
Newspapers are seeking to outlaw the free exchange of ideas
Hmm... Apparently so. From that Apple support link:

"Important: If you delete photos and albums from iPhoto, they’re deleted from your Facebook page, along with any posted comments. You can’t undo this action. To delete photos and albums from iPhoto without deleting them from Facebook, first remove the Facebook account from iPhoto. Choose iPhoto > Preferences, and then click Accounts. Click to select the Facebook account (below the Accounts subhead on the left), and then click the Delete (-) button in the lower-left corner of the Accounts pane."