skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the answer is pretty simple and has nothing to do with a philosophy about simplicity and quality. The reason is money. People tend to forget how Gruber makes his money and how that affects his blog. It requires companies with products that can profit after spending over $8000 on one ad to an audience of less than a million. Apple is a very popular brand, but the people who seek out daily information about Apple are the rich. Some may dispute that, saying that Apple makes products comparable to similar products from other companies/it is worth the money it saves in the long term. That is rich people thinking. Look around any major city and compare where you see the iPhone ads and where you see the Boost Mobile/Cricket ads. That should give you some idea of the differences in audiences.

Android has a philosophy, but the reason there isn't an Android Gruber is there isn't room in Android news/punditry for a writer exclusively for the rich. You aren't part of a special group for owning an Android. They give away Androids with haircuts and don't sell 'em with fancy ads about how it was designed by pretty people in California. The app market for Android trends towards free with ads without the Instapaper/Loren Brichter niche of paid apps. A guy like Gruber is useless in the Android world for multiple reasons. There is very little mystique about Android, so the Kremlinology Gruber provides is pointless. You don't need an unaffiliated spokesperson when Google+ is essentially a public discussion forum for those working on Android. It is hard to get excited about an insider when anyone who cares can know nearly everything of interest. The philosophy of Android does have a whiff of open source about it so by nature means the culture will be diffused and fractured into separate camps that won't appoint a figurehead like Gruber. Most importantly, Gruber's audience is too small for the smurfberry/ad funded apps and not large enough to justify dropping four figures for the low conversion Android would have on paid apps.
The entire 15-part series - "The Secret History of Silicon Valley" - can be found here, along with a a video presentation and a lot of background material:

http://steveblank.com/secret-history

It's the story of how Silicon Valley got its start doing government contracting during WWII and the Cold War.
What does hacking ON Emacs lisp mean? Does it mean working on Emacs's lisp interpreter's source? Or on some project written in Emacs lisp?
People commenting are in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
What is your plan to hold companies to task then? Especially when you can't confirm that your suspicions are correct?

Responsible disclosure? Say that you disclose your concerns to them. How does that play out?

1. They respond to you. They say that it is not a security flaw. You just have to trust them that there is not security flaw.

2. They respond to you, and tell you that they will not fix it. You tell them that if they won't then you'll disclose it to the public. They try to claim that you are extorting them.

3. They don't respond to you. You disclose it to the public. Turns out that it wasn't a security flaw. You are sued for defamation/libel/etc.

4. They don't respond to you. You disclose it to the public. The company has egg on their face and fixes it.

I think that the biggest flaw in the system is that companies are not held to task for their security flaws. I realize that if all software had to be perfect it would cripple the industry, but at the same time there has to be some idea of criminal (or at least civilly liable) negligence for people/companies that don't at least follow best practices.
I think that's fair. AT&T should be reprimanded for a serious lack of security — how much they should be reprimanded would be another topic for debate.

But it doesn't take away from weev's crime (both this one and his previous harassments.)
Sidenote: It looks like the sms link routes through a linksynergy url. Is that a reliable monetization scheme for free apps? Does apple provide affiliate revenue if I end up buying a paid app after clicking on the link?
It's not enough to just be deep into a given platform. You also have to be an excellent writer.

I find much of the content Gruber writes about to be pandering to Apple.

But. I still read everything he writes because he's obviously thoughtful and an excellent writer.

In fact, take out Gruber and I don't see the Apple tech writers/bloggers to be any better than anyone else.

Siracusa doesn't write much (unfortunately). Marco Arment is flame-batey with his opinions. Is there anyone out there at the level of Gruber in terms of writing skills?
thoughts on the creative career
Yahoo, Alibaba And Why Mayer Can Keep Buying Whatever She Wants
The wisdom of using a homegrown sha-3 based algorithm for key generation is separate from what "sha-3 key generation" means.
Just playing devil's advocate here. My opinion is neither for / against Linus's approach yet.

Why is the language unacceptable?
He criticizes the work / logic that has been implemented, not the person, albeit in a expletive manner but is that not a method of expressing emotion through email?
Trying to define "talking to your friends about how you're going to sell stolen information" as being equivalent to "daydream" is the tortuous logic I was responding to. Please read the entire thread and not just comments you don't agree with.
Was this him?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6094088

Also: It appears to be down.
Reliable mocks with Bogus
Any SaaS B2B company with network effects does this easily because the revenue from each customer is a function of the value they derive from the software, which increases with the square of the number of customers.

Think Excel (network effects derived from its communication properties), CoreLogic (derived from having all the data), Addepar, etc.

These companies also typically have high fixed costs across all of their customers once they are at scale.
Are you the "slow and steady" or "fast and furious" entrepreneur?
Those are really great suggestions. Thanks for posting, I'll try to include those updates soon.

And I'll look into those!
Just getting a message that says, "Welcome to nginx!"
What happens when people in Pakistan start taking MIT classes
This is somewhat reasonable, since people need to actually come onto your property to access the book. It's probably unreasonable to say that someone was trespassing because they walked up to your door.
How funny antics drive game loyalty
No, please. It is unbelievably sad when people let the brand of their phone/videogame/car/clothes become part of their identity. The last thing we need is to have yet another force pushing for division of people into camps.

Android is doing fine as it is, and it doesn't need to win any kind of war. Having a John Gruber or a Marco Arment could be great for marketing, but it does not bring actual progress/improvements to the product. They are great tools for Apple, but it's nothing more than marketing, and let's not forget that the very essence of marketing is to fabricate demand. Nothing else. John Gruber may be great for the tech hipsters that need to find some fuel to validate their consumer habits, but the others don't really care. They will buy Apple if it suits them, or Android, or whatever.
Only as far as your 'freedom' consists of violating any of the rights which GPL bestows upon end users.

GPL exists to preserve rights for end users, and since one of those rights is that of recieving the source code it is incompatible with proprietary projects. As such you can say that GPL is open source code for open source.
Online upgrades in Go
Is it really great news?

Android is definitely the bazaar, different OEMs try just about everything under the sun. There is lots of choice.

But that doesn't mean there can't be someone out there clearly advocating for their view of Android's future direction. Not everyone needs to (or possibly should) follow it, but it does seem odd to me that there doesn't seem to be a person with some consensus around them trying to influence the platform.

It seems like a gap in the blog market.
Asian startup creates same email analytics tool as MIT
I'll put an example in techie-English:

Say the government has a giant No-Bus-list of suspected naughty people that shouldn't be allowed to ride busses. The complete list is highly secret, because we wouldn't want people improperly listed challenging it in court. Ahem I mean we wouldn't want terrorists to change their strategy to evade.

A Bus operator needs to query passengers against the list, but doesn't want to tell the government the names of all their passengers (Because they know the government will leak the data to their competition. What? You thought they cared about privacy? Give me a break).

So what the government does is computes a digital signature for each national ID number in the naughty list using a private key known only to the government and puts the digital signature instead of the name in a bloom filter. They send the whole bloom filter to the Bus operator. (The bloom filter is much smaller than the list— which is good because the list is gigantic) The bus operator learns nothing about the list except an approximate upper bound on its size.

Then when a passenger shows up the bus operator encrypts the passengers ID number and sends it to the government— imagine the encryption as a sealed envelope. The government can't read it because it's encrypted. The government performs a blind signing operation— sort of like signing a piece of carbon paper inside an envelope without opening it (this requires the encryption and signing methods be a kind that allows for this) and sends back the blind-signed passenger name.

The Bus operator decrypts to obtain the signature and checks it against the bloomfilter. If they get a hit on the filter they redirect the passenger to Guantanamo for enhanced interrogation.

(A bloom filter, of course, has no false negatives: exactly the property we need to keep America safe from Terrorism)
I love this game--it's totally addictive. I agree with some of the other posts about wanting the game to be more responsive, but overall this is a well done app.
Maybe I'll just stick with Gittip.
Buying Cheap Property In Detroit
Unfortunately, "reasonable person" varies with the times. In Nazi Germany, a "reasonable person" would have understood that the reason they lost WW1 was due to the Jews. /godwin

[I also take issue with usage of the term 'common sense' because it is so nebulous.]
Microsoft to shut down Exchange, Hotmail, Sharepoint, and Windows Server
The original mspaint.exe has survived all these years by running hassle-free on Wine and on new editions of Windows. But I wouldn't say MS abandoned Paint: Win8's "Fresh Paint" is one of the coolest touch-based apps out there: http://blogs.technet.com/b/next/archive/2012/11/15/behind-th...
Internet Activists Rally Support to Defund NSA Phone Surveillance
This is mostly news because of RMS' photo without a beard :D
"This is an utterly ridiculous idea and I'm amazed it works at all..."
Yes, reminds me of the people that like to run NES emulators, inside of Dreamcast emulators, inside of their virtual PC running on a Mac. Yes it's impressive, but as the author admits running a VM inside of a VM results in a "two orders of magnitude" loss of performance.
Again, its a slippery slope. Making the user hover over for some more time over his/her decision is not very far from a dark pattern. In case you need a feedback the best you should be going for are optional fields.

We're seeing 'one-click unsubscribe' link in many emails these days. I think that is one good indication for a spam filter to let through. This is a proof that only the right approach prevail eventually.
I thought I was stumped at level 23, but I feel like I got smarter and figured it out. I love that it challenges me, but if I focus I can solve the puzzles. The artwork is really cute and I like the way the penguin slides on its belly.
Ask HN: Best Wireless Router for a Hacker Home?
Long time lurker. I need to buy a new wireless router for my new apartment.

We have Meraki's at my office and they are pretty awesome. But, to my knowledge, they don't have one at a low enough price to make it worth it for home use.

Is there a cool wireless router for home use that I should know about?

Thanks!
There are many ways to use an encrypted bloomfilter. My thesis (shamelss plug) uses an encrypted bloomfilter to share an optical fibre channel securely among up to 128 users - http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=6...
Is it not fair to judge a piece of art without its context?

In my opinion it isn't.
Yeah, this. Android hasn't been around long enough for people to develop the sort of attachment that some have with Apple. Nobody's grown up with Android (yet), nobody's gone through their spotty-faced advocacy phase shouting about it, nobody's had to see something they for whatever reason love on the brink of extinction.

Apple has a pretty rich narrative for people to build personae around.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I work at Apple, and have been an Apple fan and user since before the original Macintosh.
this man is inspiring, what a beautiful story

i love MS Paint - I work in a large marketing firm and use it everyday sometimes on advertisements that a million people see
Using GitHub as a repository for machine-readable scholarly articles
Hey thanks. I've been procrastinating while trying to start a blog for ages.

Do you think I'd have to stick to just Android? I've been meaning to make a post (or several) out of [1] this comment.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6037640
What are the interesting applications for these boards, considering the slow interfaces (USB and Ethernet)?
Detroit: Why Don't We Own This?
> A very strong circumstantial case shouldn't be dismissed just because we can't think of a mechanism.

On the other hand, if a convincing causal chain can't be identified, it shouldn't be assumed true either. It should go into the (very large) pool of interesting possibilities that may or may not be substantiated if someone wants to invest in the time and energy to research.
Ubuntu forum defaced, breached by hackers
Quick heads-up: Dan Shapiro's HN handle is this: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=danshapiro

We just happen to have the same three first letters on our first names. Dan is actually active on HN.
If those users don't want to use code that isn't released liberally, they don't have to. So what are you actually securing for them? It's not freedom, they already have the freedom to not use proprietary software.
This had me laughing, crying, fearful, among a whole host of emotions. Amazing. Bravo.
Yes, most people I know that play the game find that as they play longer they get better. There are patterns in different levels and users learn how to see the solutions more quickly.
RPG Teams Picking Up Mobile Development Skills
I live in China and regularly paint car owners as rich jerks in my head, considering that they are very expensive and most people don't own one. Then they drive like they own the road, don't yield at all, run pedestrians off the street, drive on the side of the freeway when there's traffic (I look on from a taxi)...

Give me an electric powered tri (trash) cycle anyday.
By "build" if you meant RMS stopped coding ages ago then you are wrong. He still contributes quite a lot to Emacs (https://github.com/mirrors/emacs/commits/master)

I am pretty sure I can dig up other projects he is still coding in. but RMS hasn't stopped coding.
Fixing MySQL2 gem issue for Ruby on Rails 4 on OS X
Amazon Riverboat
I don't know the original study in detail, but given my time on github I see a ton of 'projects' which are just small scraps of test code, heck even dot files.

I can certainly see why people don't bother putting a licence on these types of 'projects'.

However on all projects I've come across which are actually something substantial there has been a licence declared, so I'm wondering if this 'lack of licencing' is a 'real' problem or if it's just the result of github becoming a convenient dumping ground/backup for tons of small snippets/settings etc which used to just sit on people's harddrives.
Priority Inbox didn't work for you?
Those rights are already secured in pepetuity. Your code, once released as opensource, is always opensource.

If users don't want to use code that contains proprietary modifications to your code, nobody is forcing them to -- your opensource code hasn't disappeared.
I opted to use CloudFlare almost as soon as they launched and they indeed had some uptime issues in the beginning. But I stuck with them and I haven't had any issues for a long while now even at 180M page views / month.

There was one time where I had just upgraded a server at a host and load averages just spiked. Host techs were clueless as well as the server admin I hired to diagnose the issue. They surmised that it was a DDoS attack and to turn off CloudFlare because it might be a cause (what?). Well I'm not a server admin so what do I know and I asked CloudFlare about it. They said there were no problems on their end. After a month of stressful, intermittent downtimes, I decided to just switch to Softlayer, and lo and behold, the issues went away. Turned out that one of the SSDs in the RAID array was dying but the techs at the other host just never bothered to look at it.

If you ever do figure out the issues, try giving them another shot. Their features are excellent and I hate to say it but my applications are now so dependent on them to the point where important parts will break if I even try to move to a competitor (and there are none).
If you had looked further into the subject, you would know that the LibreCAD developers attitude of 'it's ugly' includes 'it breaks a lot of stuff'.
They can't justify the workload of adding a module that would otherwise not exist because of licensing issues.
And the FSF is supposed to be a champion of, well, free software, and I find it highly hypocritical of them to leave a project out to dry like this, especially if LibreDWG was released a few years before and released under the GPLv2.
The White House statement on the amendment is really something to behold.

"... We look forward to continuing to discuss these critical issues with the American people and the Congress.

However, we oppose the current effort in the House to hastily dismantle one of our Intelligence Community’s counterterrorism tools. This blunt approach is not the product of an informed, open, or deliberative process. ..."

Not the product of an informed process - and whose fault is that?

More...
http://pastebin.com/RF5U59N0
I think this is in response to Yahoo removing adult tags and search results from Tumblr[1]. Is this searching a hand curated list of blogs?

1. http://technorati.com/social-media/article/tumblr-effectivel...
My gut feeling is that there are more suitable approaches, such as the recently submitted PG story.

http://brandonb.cc/no-filter-the-meanest-thing-paul-graham-s...
The license grants rights and imposes limitations. One of those limitations prevents users from mixing code freely.

Users already had the right to not use proprietary products; what the GPL has actually done is to take away their right to use your code with a proprietary product.

As such, you've granted users fewer rights as compared to liberal open source licenses, not more.
Annoying conversation with Apple Developer support
I emailed apple developer support and asked (naively) if they can make the WWDC2013 videos available through other means, now that the developer website is down and you cannot login to watch or download the videos, basically the person replying the developer support email, does not even knew these videos exist, they told me go search iTunes with this keyword WWDC, I thought what a fool I've been they must have done this in the past days, I tried and not surprisingly WWDC videos are not available through iTunes search I emailed back with a screen shot of the iTune searching for WWDC and this is what they wrote back:

Hello _____,

This is _______ with Apple developer Program Support, thank you for sending in a screen shot of the search results.

The key word searches WWDC video or WWDC, are the 2 keywords that i searched to populate WWDC videos with this type of content.

If these 2 searches do not populate exactly the content you are searching for, the content may not be available at this time due to system maintenance.

I hope this information has helped. However, if this does not resolve your issue or you have any additional questions, please feel free to contact us at:

Apple Developer Support
1-800-633-2152
Monday-Friday 9am-7pm (CST)

Worldwide Developer Support Phone Numbers
http://developer.apple.com/contact/phone.html
This is absurd. If there's no access controls, but it's still a crime, we're going to have to determine if we can legally access all web addresses beforehand. But that's what 403 status codes are for.
> I hate that there's still no Bluetooth LE support.

I believe tomorrow's expected 4.3 announcement adds Bluetooth LE (and all around improved Bluetooth).
I've always wondered why Google, seeing the problem of manufacturers diluting the "pure" Android experience and turning it into 50 shades of grey, doesn't clamp down on the terms of usage and force the phone mfgs to provide a single user experience, like Apple excels in.

They are ultimately holding all the cards. Don't like our terms of service? Go license Nokia's OS.
Replace "Apple" with "Any company that makes cameras/phones/etc." and the same point would be made. Sucks to be the big dog, I guess.
I did read the whole thread and I just read the published transcripts.

He does not say that he is going to sell stolen information.

He does remark on irc that the information is valuable and could be sold or used for a phishing operation, but that is an observation of reality, and can not be taken as a statement of intent without some other evidence showing that he was likely to pursue that course of action, and given that he then handed the list to gawker it would seem that this was not his intent, though the possibility had obviously crossed his mind.

To consider the possibility of indulging in criminal behaviour is not the same as planning to do so.
Actually it's by a PhD linguist, who developed his own modified version of PageRank that incorporates sentiment analysis combining Markov chains and multidimensional vector spaces as his thesis. This is just showing off in a potentially profitable way.
Texas man charged with running $60M Bitcoin Ponzi scheme
No they don't, the door opens onto a public street and the book is nailed to the front of it. This hypothetical book can be read while standing on the sidewalk. Sorry for not being more clear.
There are a couple of things here. First, Apple isn't a unique company. It's modeled on car companies like Porsche and BMW and watch companies like Rolex. It provides luxury items and is ridiculously protective of its brand. I think a better question would be: are there similar characters for those brands? And if no, why not? And if so, there's no story.

The second thing is that comments here are mostly missing the main reason that Gruber has so many readers. It's not because he's a ridiculous Apple zealot and blind Apple fanbois are love suckling from his gushing Apple teat. It's the same reason that Marco Arment has so many readers: Because he's a good writer, and his predictions and analyses are almost always spot on. Most of his writing is little tidbits or links to other people's writing. But his long articles are usually excellent; well-written and well-thought-out and as I said before, typically right on point.