skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The author mentions "you can have control or compatibility, but not both". That's basically another way or saying "you can fragment the platform all you want, or choose compatibility (i.e. let Google control the platform across OEMs)". Remember when people were yelling from the rooftops "Android is so fragmented, and why it's always behind iOS! Google, give us standardization already!!"?

Linux' biggest problem has been that Microsoft moved much faster to get Windows on as many PCs as possible through certain corporate deals, but in terms of gaining market share, the Linux ecosystem has also worked against itself, but allowing everyone to fork it into hundreds of different distributions, all doing different stuff, and with barely even a weak app store across several distributions.

Linux is "everywhere", because everyone can fork it, and Android has certainly benefited from this strategy in the early years, too, but that seems to be an antithesis to an "ecosystem". As we can observe, even though "Linux is everywhere" in all sorts of devices, there's no significant "ecosystem".

Google wants to keep and evolve the Android ecosystem, because that makes it much easier for users, and also developers to develop on top of a well standardized ecosystem of devices and OS images. I guess for an proper ecosystem to thrive, it needs to be controlled and standardized as much as possible, with restrictions for OEMs and carriers.

The only alternative for the others, if they really want to start from the Android base, will be to form their own ecosystem, but that's very hard, unless we get to the point where only the web matters on mobile devices, too.
I wish there was an instantclick link to this website..

OK, here it is: http://instantclick.io
I live a few minutes away from nothing but cornfields. Also, the IE6 thing was my attempt at humor. :)
It is more than often not.
Google mail is one example.

But i do concur.
> There's nothing wrong with that in principle

There kind of is. It's making the assumption that an "illegal operation" is a binary thing deserving of absolute condemnation. It isn't saying that you can't, for example, sell a counterfeiter a money press, but rather that you can't provide him (or any other "criminal") with a loaf of bread, or a tank of gas, or a room for the night in winter, or a phone, etc. It's practically a death sentence without even a trial, and on top of that it makes no allowance for the proportionality of the sanctions to the alleged offense. Sorry, you're a known litterbug, no one may sell you insulin for your diabetes.

And so it is with domain names. You turn off somebody's domain name, you're taking away their forum to inform the public of your error in wrongly accusing them of misconduct. You're turning off their email and disabling their ongoing correspondence with their attorneys and their community. It's blanket censorship. You're not turning off their infringing operation, you're turning off their existence in the communications network. And to the extent that you aren't, the sanctions will be ineffective at preventing the alleged misconduct. As a policy it makes no sense.
India's Greatest Scientist
A Tribute to Jagadis Chandra Bose should spark a new vision for India.
Meta: your comment finally solidified the proper meaning and usage of "begs the question". I'd sort of understood it, but hadn't seen it used in modern text like that.
I really wish I could see how many upvotes and downvotes other comments and my comments have. It'd be really interesting to see some kind of statistics on the general HN community's stance on disagreements like this.
Design Systems: Building for the Future
Agreed, although that track record stopped pretty much after IE and XBox.
>People see software projects like this, and they develop impressions that software programmers are not professional.

Who other than programmers do you think is going to see the readme?
It's not a poor idea at all. The main example used to be Amazon, but now it's China. China are going to be the source of a lot of Google headaches, thanks to their inability to operate there leading to a majority of Android devices shipped there not including their services at all, giving a critical mass to the market for applications without their components.

Hugo Barra ended up at a Chinese company (Xiaomi) and Google just invested in Lenovo, but unless there's a big policy change on the way the Android/China beast will get further and further out of control.

MS absolutely should weigh in with a privacy hardened Android with great Exchange and Active Directory support (and Nokia Maps). It would be huge, and it would force Apple and Google right on to the defensive.
Would it be worth blacklisting logout by default?

Maybe blacklist any links with the words logout, delete, etc anywhere inside the a tag or in the attributes?
Annoying people is easy, I don't know why he would go out of his way to do it. It's certainly not something to be proud of.
Love it! Will it only work on html5 sites?
Is there a demo page? I want to see what it feels like.
>It's also functional so now LISP hackers can pretend they're both JavaScript Oakland Living Node.js gangsters and high class San Franciscans with their functionality snobbery.

Oh Zed. Don't ever change, our industry needs people like you.
Many companies produce Android devices without google maps, gmail, play store... It solves a lot of privacy issues.

In 5 years smartphones will be cheap commodity and there will be also good opensource community fork. I can see Debian on Android.
The website it is.
Wikipedia says that the manuscript has been dated to the early 15th century.

Is carbon dating sufficiently imprecise?
It works with every websites.
And as another data point, I, too, left to be a consultant for exactly that reason. My happiness skyrocketed once I could concentrate on doing the job as well as I could, and forget all the other stuff.
Oh, then you won't mind that Zed's swearing is his attempt at humor too.
Microsoft could build a fully functional Mono-based Windows Phone experience on top of the AOSP core minus the Dalvik VM.

The only question would be "what for"? They'd gain nothing from it. They already have a more or less portable kernel upon which they can build phones.
I'm guessing zed was bored - or just felt like trolling?

The library isn't "functional", does very little of use, and horribly pollutes the global name space.

Maybe he just felt like venting about jQuery overuse and snobby programmers.
Done that -- the best career decision I ever made. Left for a startup after several years in a corporate research lab.

Think of this transition as going back to school (because that is exactly what it is!). If anything, this will increase your employability, so your job-insecurity issues are unfounded.
I own an Amazon Kindle Fire. It sucks. Out of the box it can do almost nothing that normal android devices can. I had to root it in a very frustrating and glitchy process to be able to install google app store software and even of that many don't install or don't work.

What amazon has successfully done is build a kindle based on linux as opposed to whatever is on the original kindles. It's a very limited thing and nothing more than a kiosk to amazon purchases.

The only reason people buy it is because of brand loyalty to the kindle device series they knew before.
Sure there is, in the top left there is a link for "<your name>'s Amazon", click that, then in the toolbar in the middle click "Improve your recommendations". You'll get a list of all your purchases with a checkbox by each one to disregard it.
>NSA is collecting less than 30 percent of U.S. call data, officials say

Or 50%. Or 120%. Even 1% would be too much.
No, my philosophy is to not do anything that could get into one’s way. And that’s a false sense of security.

If one is worried about preloading links that triggers an action, there is a whitelist mode to enable links as you review them.
Of course not. It's not like I get any tangible reward if my comments shows up on top anyway.
Amazon is a special case. They don't care about compatibility, since they're building a very focused, special-purpose platform of their own. Like the original iPhone, the Kindle is attractive enough that people will buy it without any apps. Android was just a way for them to cut their time-to-market.

Microsoft has a different set of problems. Windows Phone is already shipping, so adopting Android would actually delay the next release. What they need is a stronger ecosystem—more apps to bring users and more users to bring developers. Adopting Android might help them achieve that, but at the cost of ceding control to Google. At the end of the day, why would anyone buy Android from Microsoft instead of Google?

If they can't make a success of Windows Phone, MS would be better off to just can it and provide apps and services to both iOS and Android.
It's still happening, Azure is being iterated and improved a lot.
So how is it "more functional"?
This is really annoying. While traveling in Europe last fall I couldn't download movies from Google Play on my device for the flight back, even though I had purchased them before leaving the US!

Really bad user experience.
So you're saying that you shouldn't criticize others just because they're giving it away for free?

If you question that others shouldn't complain about other things then we quickly end up in a world where movie critics can't criticize a movie since they didn't pay for them. Where I can't criticize google since their services are for free.

You should always speak up and voice your opinion. But your argument "don't complain, take it or leave it; it's for free" can't be applied anywhere IMO. In fact, the author should be thankful for any critique he's getting. Not getting any feedback means that nobody cares about your work or doesn't care about you failing.
Another idea: take into account the movement of the mouse to define a directional cone in the general direction of the movement, which would enable you to preload your pages even before the hover state occurs.
I'd like to see some example content or something to see if it's right for me.
Persona is an awesome way to verify email address ownership, but that's only part of what Sync and the Firefox Marketplace need. For instance, Sync needs a user-memorable password for client-side encryption, and Marketplace needs the ability to force users to re-authenticate before a purchase, which is only feasible in a centralized system. Then there are COPPA concerns: We don't want to build an age gate into Persona, but we need one on Sync and Marketplace. Firefox Accounts lets us do that once, up front, and be on our merry way.

Nevertheless, I'm hopeful that we'll integrate Persona into the Firefox Accounts workflow, but that's still only part of the problem that Firefox Accounts is trying to solve. :)

(Why wasn't it there at first? We were still working out protocol / data format details, and sticking with a known username/password system reduced the number of variables while reinventing Sync.)
This is why I think some more work into client (or active) honeypots may be beneficial. If we can get an easy to install, auto updating honeypot that fights back, we may have a better offensive capability.

This may just end, like nuclear warfare, in MAD... But it would be great fun to watch!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client_honeypot

http://books.google.com.au/books?id=YQmWtsqlvfMC&dq=active+h...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction
Look I completely agree with you that the creationists are irrationally clinging to a fairly small nitpick and using it to bury their heads in the sand.

BUT that doesn't mean that the small point that they raise with regards to repeatedly observing in the now versus observing the record of the past isn't valid.

>one should strive to find an interpretation that has the highest probability of being true given all the evidence at a given moment

Agreed but until the matter is settled via direct observation by multiple people in multiple experiments you have to kind of play Schrodinger's cat with the evidence. Just because you think you've found the highest probability explanation doesn't make it true, and thus alternative explanations aren't "false" but merely "less likely" Others might disagree with your level of certainty and at this point we're all basically spouting opinions, not facts.
Very nice. It would be great if the JQuery Mobile folks would integrate this.
But that's kind of the point isn't it: project management, and especially agile, is about making work predictable. There's an undeniable business logic to this that I wouldn't refute.

Yet works of greatness are almost never predictable. You can't reign it into story points or whatever. There's too many false starts, or sudden insights. It certainly takes process and discipline, but not necessarily the kind that can be measured and reported.

That's probably fine for most business, because your inventory control program doesn't need any individual brilliance; but I think it can be frustrating for really good programmers because they do want to create a work of greatness.
Playing around with Chromecast – Part 1
After looking at the source, one thought I have is that since you are dealing with such small timescales you should use the high resolution window.performance.now function (or the Date.now function for higher compatibility) as a timer instead of using the Date object as you do.
Very cool write-up of non-critical bugs that can be used together to inflict some serious damage. Great work @homakov!
My smart far-away and very old relative once said during the dot com boom: "computers are just tools, nothing else, people seem to see something magical in computers that is just not there". She was a very clever old lady. Still I love their logical magic and hope computers will never cease to amaze me.
I don't get the "can't" part. Surely you can load it as an image or iframe?
The original Kindles, afaik, were based on Linux, with I guess a custom stack on top.
Kinda overkill. ;) I may explore this idea later, but I don’t have great hope for it.
>jQuery API is nothing like the DOM API.

That's the whole point of making a wrapper around an API. That it doesn't look like the API you're wrapping.
I've always been extremely bad at things like this. Working quickly is one thing I cannot seem to do. Which makes this extremely good practice of course!

Last week I cleaned up a lot my room and went through stuff from primary school. Speedruns, where we had a sheet of sums that we had to solve as quickly as possible, always showed I was within the bottom half of the class (I don't remember the exact number), while mostly other tests' scores were in the top 85% or something. "Slowly but steadily," I guess?

Oddly my typing speed is faster than everyone else I know, including in a class full of coders. I'm not slowest in everything at least.
Yep. It's one thing to simply have a "Save as..." dialog that only lists .xcf--then I have to figure out to use export instead and all is well.

But, to have that dialog box somehow actually say "Aha, we knew you were looking for those other formats, go here instead!" pretty much shows that the developers know what the user wants to do and are maliciously putting a roadblock in their way. It's smug and overbearing and quite annoying.
Another fork of Android that makes sense is Firefox OS. They take the Android kernel and drivers to get hardware compatibility, and layer a new set of APIs and apps on top of it. They don't care about compatibility, because they're interested in promoting web technologies rather than selling hardware, promoting services or making money from licensing.
>Not exactly, jquery offers it's own API

Yes, that's the definition of a wrapper: it offers it's own API.
Thanks for your comment. To don't repeat my answer, please take a look at my replay to @highCs below, so you can see what you can expect. We'll update the page with some example content soon.
Well, it's a good theory. Being a manuscript from Mexico, it wouldn't be surprising if it had eluded many researchers, who often have an European-centric background. In Brazil there are also manuscripts in the native's, non-written language (tupi) codified by catholic priests dating back to XVI, but those are better understood because the language was kept alive up to the late XIX. If it weren't that, it would be undecipherable by now, maybe called a hoax too.
The script record bug[1] was entered into bugzilla on 2001-03-09. Reading the discussion is painful. This is targeted for 3.6, which one of the devs admits is most likely 4-8 years away.

[1]: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51937
Using Paper and Pencil Before Coding
Weird I thought about this last night and wondered if browser pruned the dom/layers based on input device deltas.
I believe the carbon dating is based on the fabric, which can cause some imprecision (the fabric can be dated as significantly older).
I agree... How much could you have sold that exploit for on the black market?

http://krebsonsecurity.com/tag/0day/
The Kindle Fire is actually quite compatible, though. The launcher/core experience is very different, but the app selection is basically identical. GMS has some nice APIs, but the truth is that most apps (by download count, or by revenue) either don't use them or can configure them out.

The kindle isn't successful because Amazon was able to eject compatibility concerns, it's successful because Amazon was (unlike basically all the other variant Android customizations) able to bring elements to the platform that customers actually wanted, and that these outweighed their desire for interoperability with the Google GMS ecosystem.
The transmitters and receivers that were designed and built in the '70s required lots of discrete components. The up-converters, amplifiers and matching networks will still need to be discrete components, but I'm estimating that the other 80% of the radio equipment can be implemented as a software-defined-radio (SDR - see http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/hands-on/a-40-softwaredef... for an example).

I'll be reaching out to a friend and former colleague who specializes in this type of hardware/software.

I have no expectation that we can replicate even a tiny portion of the DSN, but I'm talking with people that already have big dishes and tracking capabilities. Remember that we don't have to talk to this spacecraft continuously. I think even downloading the last of its collected data would be a win but positioning it to do more science, then collecting data from it again in several months/years would be really cool.
What about synchronization? Folks are terrified of threads because synchronizing is so hard. But a thread model can be the simplest especially in message models.
Then you build yourself a not licenced for the road race car - just like so many other people who race. You don't even have to be close to rich to do that.
I think it's outgrown the university though. It's practically impossible to get into the developer rooms unless you arrive early and camp there all day.
You forget "Embrace, extend . . "

The other mobile ecosystems are now so far in front they have no viable option other than the embracing and extending. Android happens to be flexible enough at the software layer (not just licensing) to make such a thing remarkably easy to do, given the resources.
> Performance reviews should be given in the context of preset goals. Without defined goals, a review is pointless.

The last time I worked as a permanent employee, yearly appraisals were built out of three factors:

a) Performance against defined goals.

b) Helping the company meet its social programme.

c) Moving the company forward.

... with the last two undefined. People could go into their appraisal with all their defined goals met, only to be told they'd only got 1/3 of what was needed.

Just before I left they changed it again to stress they wanted everyone to go above and beyond, so simply meeting your objectives would in future get a "progressing" result, which was below average. There was, literally, no way to guarantee a favourable result without playing politics.

That said, however, I don't think I'd like the solution where the system just works better. My ideal solution would be to have no annual goals or targets at all (which is the position I'm in currently as a contractor).

I don't think it's an understatement to say that my opinion is that metrics are amongst the most evil things ever invented in the corporate world, and frequently the root of all trouble.

In case that seems a hyperbolic statement, I'm thinking for example of the sub-prime issues which almost brought down the world financial systems and was in my opinion caused by the needs of some managers to put sales figures above ethics to make their yearly targets.
Thanks, I’ll look into it.
Because gearing that will let you go 100mph will also let you go 70mph at lower RPMs, leading to better gas milage and lower carbon emissions.
I have no idea what his children are named. But does relativity make me (or the species) much fitter for survival? Not at this point I might argue.

The biggest practical application of relativity at this point (that I'm aware of) seems to be GPS. One can argue about whether GPS makes us better or worse as a species but it's not a huge deal wrt evolution.

If there's a better practical application of relativity I'd love to know. This is just what I was able to come up with off the top of my head. We're all intellectually indebted to Einstein for relativity.
FoxyProxy directs your DNS requests over the proxy.

I use it to access machines on my home network when I'm abroad.
I thought Gonk took bits from Android, but was not a direct copy of the kernel.
XMosaic-1.2 (1993) – Running Native under X-Windows on Mac OS/X
Excellent example.

I think it this case you did it right with a letter to customer service.

When the "expectation" is a 4/5 star rating, then the average is generally 4.6-4.7 stars and there's no way to distinguish "normal, good service" from truly "above and beyond".

Additionally, if the "above and beyond" just gains a 5 star review, that doesn't really give the feedback needed for extraordinary service.
This piece seems to imply that only full source compatibility with Android (including Play Services) would be valuable to the Windows Phone platform. I don't think that's the case. I think getting 80% of the way, combined with the Microsoft brand plus quality devices Nokia would be enough to entice plenty of developers to the platform.

I think a more interesting question is whether Microsoft should fork AOSP as a whole, or place an Android compatibility layer atop Windows Phone, a la BlackBerry 10.
It's no different than a single page app eagerly fetching data...
Sure, I meant “preload” in the InstantClick sense: getting it ready to replace the DOM.
That's, hmm, interesting from a competitive and privacy advocate perspective. It means that whilst Prism Break and similar websites are advocating it, the key parts which report back to Google are still in place, since they aren't the bits being replaced.
Cool work done by Dr. Charles Severance at the University of Michigan.