skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apple has no dominant position in smartphones, so you may at best argue they have a dominant position specifically in their own iPhones.... But if Apple making design decisions for their iPhone product line constitutes an "abuse of dominant position" where do we draw the line exactly?

- Should Apple be forced to open all internal APIs to third party developers?

- Should Apple be offering iPhones with alternative operating systems?

- Should there be an open standard so people can build compatible iPhone clones?

No. iPhone is Apple's product, and they decide how far they will go in opening up their platform.

Third party developers are not fully trusted to do the right thing, and as you can see with Android's malware situation, it's a good thing Apple is not letting random developers do whatever they want.

Since Apple is held responsible by both developers and users to have a reliable product, when they decide to make an API public this is a huge commitment.

Apple has to guarantee said API will be supported in a reasonable way in future OS releases, it has to guarantee to users that calling said API won't result in poor UX or security vulnerabilities.

The situation is much different for Apple's own apps, as Apple can then make the personal guarantee it won't be abusing its own APIs to create poor UX and implement malware.
Wow, what happened between paragraphs 1 and 2? You went from making a good point to insulting a whole class of people. I’m no fan of PHP, but I could hardly bring myself to insult everyone who uses it...
Obesity and the health problems caused by onesity are treated by healthcare. The lack of affordable healthcare has an impact on treating those problems. Diabetes kills people (eg diabetic foot) so giving people access to healthcare means they are more able to control these chronic illnesses and more able to avoid mortality associated with those problems.

I'd agree the Canadian system sucks.

But if being a destination country for "health tourism" is a good thing then England appears to be a great system.
New Portfolio for Review: Mobile Apps and Games
Never. People don't care of this level of privacy (except a very small minority). And frankly, thanks to the sophisticated data mining/statistical algorithms just using VPN only makes tracking/profiling harder, not impossible.
Crazy plan to cover the nation's roads with solar panels raises $1 million
https://maps.google.com/locationhistory

right now google already knows where we have been; with the car they will know where we are going to;

The car as a tracking device, pure genius.
I much prefer facing backwards, because I know in the rare case of crash that I am going to be much safer.

This is also true of aircraft and cars and buses and coaches. Sadly, most people do feel uncomfortable facing backwards and so the risky forwards-facing seating is used.
> Perhaps I'm missing something due to having read through the article too quickly. Please educate me.

The point I got out of this fine article is that we are under/misusing types.

Types encode logical propositions. The compiler, besides producing binary code, is also a proof checker. We should let it help us reason about the program instead of trying to do everything informally in our heads.
> The cute design minimizes fear about the risks of self-driving vehicles

I'm sorry but no cute design can repair the damage done by this episode of Silicon Valley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eAONrlcfJg

Sorry Mr. Car
S&P Rates Tesla Debt as 'Junk' – Update
see also: S&P Assigns 'B-' Rating to Tesla (TSLA); Notes 'Vulnerable' Business Risk Profile

http://www.streetinsider.com/Credit+Ratings/S%26P+Assigns+B-+Rating+to+Tesla+%28TSLA%29%3B+Notes+Vulnerable+Business+Risk+Profile/9525763.html
This isn't an issue of privacy, it's an issue of deception. Privacy (or the control of privacy) is being insinuated, but it's only smoke and mirrors. It's a lie.
"The rating, four levels below investment grade, is unsolicited because Palo Alto, Calif.-based Tesla doesn't have a rating agreement with the S&P to rate its debt, but S&P said there was sufficient investor interest to go forward with the rating. According to S&P, Tesla has liability for $2.9 billion in convertible bonds."

This clears up the muddled articulation in the earlier Bloomber Article.

(1) Below investment grade is typical for high-growth companies;

(2) TSLA stock is up 40% in the past year

(3) S&P issued a 'sell' TSLA equity rating in 10/2013 (read that how you will)

Details on the notes are available (see also):

S&P Assigns 'B-' Rating to Tesla (TSLA); Notes 'Vulnerable' Business Risk Profile

http://www.streetinsider.com/Credit+Ratings/S%26P+Assigns+B-...

We also assigned our unsolicited 'B-' issue-level and '4' unsolicited recovery ratings to the company's $920 million 0.25% unsecured convertible notes due 2019, $1.38 billion 1.25% unsecured convertible notes due 2021, and $660 million unsecured convertible due 2018. The '4' recovery rating indicates our expectation for average recovery (30%-50%) for the noteholders in the event of a payment default.

Note that these are convertible in TSLA stock--they are not plain vanilla debt instruments. Again, this is consistent with high-growth/high volatility growth company profile of TSLA.
What is the ANCAP rating for these? Cute they might be but they look to be quite flimsy in construction. Maybe that's one of the reasons why they are so slow, not just to avoid the risks of high speed impact but also so that they don't have to be tested right alongside the output of the rest of the automobile industry. That gives google time to perfect the software in a real world traffic without all the costs and competition with regular car manufacturers.

It is reminiscent of the Aixam line (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aixam) of microcars.
To the person that down voted me: why? I believe I made two good points that add to the discussion. Down voting should be used on comments that do not add to the discussion, not just comments you disagree with. If you disagree with a comment ignore it and move on or reply.

Side note: What has happened to edit buttons on HN? This is the second time I've had a comment I'd like add an update to and the edit button isn't available.
> someone finds a zero day for Otis equipment that lets you turn an elevator...

I'm reminded of the EE-vs-CS joke about how to design a toaster[1]. Engineering-major rivalries aside, I've always liked it for its caution against over-engineering. For some things - such as elevators - we hit "good enough" a long time ago.

I wonder if "non-programmability" will become a popular feature in the future, specifically to avoid these risks. Using non-Turing Complete "Little Languages"[2] or hardware that's fixed to a single circuit could help. Unfortunately, it's probably too late; we spent the last few decades putting CPUs into everything, and now we get to slowly find out how many security holes that additional complexity left us with.

[1] http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/ktoast.html

[2] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LittleLanguage
Even if the pedal is physically connected to the brake cylinder ABS can do whatever it wishes to: ABS can apply and unapply brakes at any time, also asymetrically.
Agreed, and that enormous thing on the roof just shouldn't be there.
"Google plans to build 100 to 200 of these prototypes, and work towards safety approval by the end of the year. The future’s coming a lot faster than we thought."

If this is the future I hope there will be time travel, so I can go back.
You can try to combat a part of this by installing Ghostery. It will block a lot of these third-party requests. As a website owner you could link to the share page, instead of loading the widgets, or load the widgets only after the user requests them.

As for those server logs, I understand they record my movements, but I don't think it is my right to stop them from doing that. The one who owns the server/web property should be allowed to analyze requests to that server. This can get icky though in the case of major CDN's.

You could choose not to keep server logs as a search engine (forgoing DOS protection), but then what happens when a user clicks on an advertisement? Privacy seems only as strong as the weakest chain.
They must have hired a PR person to join the team :D there's some noticeable features missing. I would have loved to see a giant LCD screen showing me whatever I might want to know... but I think that would make people insinuate that google's going to use it to bombard them with ads.
...so?

That one is a nice case where not only is the number clean and simple, but we have a solid theoretical basis for why it's 2 and not some other number.
Dual SIM is hugely popular in non western countries and I would expect any phone to be able to wipe and restore it's OS.
Seriously, your big problem with self driving cars is you think a giant laser on top is ugly?
At a guess, never. In fact, it will likely be the opposite, you'll be accessing the web through a device (mobile phone, tablet, thin client (aka ultrabook)) that you have bought at a steep discount from some provider in exchange for a large chunk of your privacy.

People (as in, the general public and a surprisingly large fraction of those that should know better) simply do not care.
I disabled the history to make the attack surface smaller.
Even if Google retains that data forever, if someone gains access to my account she won't be able to check my browsing history.
How far were these groups spaced apart?
That's a lot of work for a feature that probably wouldn't excite most consumers.
That's a good point. Google has been doing a decent job at that so far, though, and I suspect if such a change in terminology were ever to become mainstream, it will be a gradual process, and generally specific to 'newer' systems.
Private API is not the same as API permissions. If there is a private API, it means only "selected" can give best experience to the users. IMHO It's not fair and work against Apple in long term.
Okay, you win HN, I created an account because the anti-captcha crowd is missing the point.

There's a current bug in Recaptcha.

IPs that successfully solve too many captchas get given progressively more difficult challenges, which is fine, but currently Recaptcha is using the IP of the web servers, not the client. This means that the difficulty ramps up for all users quite quickly. It seems the iframe Recaptcha is permanently affected, if you use AJAX its fine after the first reload (I wrote a simple JS hack that makes it reload the first time, see www.mPoll.me)

Only noticed it because I was previously proxying Recaptcha through the server and it run its successful solutions up too high, so when the new bug came in it was immediately obvious what had happened when the first challenge is "wthdyjikhgfyijv" and on reload its "fluffy bunny 18".

On my website I'm currently overwriting the Recaptcha callbacks to allow multiple captchas, just put in a simple check to reload it the first time:

var reloaded = false;

function reloadCaptcha(challenge) {
$(':input[name=recaptcha_response_field]').val('');
$('img.recaptcha').attr('src', '//www.google.com/recaptcha/api/image?c='+challenge);
$(':input.recaptcha').val(challenge);

if(!reloaded)
{
reloaded = true;
Recaptcha.reload();
}
}

Recaptcha.finish_reload = function(challenge,b,c){
reloadCaptcha(challenge);
}

Recaptcha.challenge_callback = function(){
reloadCaptcha(RecaptchaState.challenge);
}

Recaptcha.create(recaptchaKey);
Wow, "little boys"? "Butthurt"? Sounds like you are really biased on the matter, and I'd suggest you don't flaunt it as anything remotely resembling "logical".
The Electro-Optic Camera – The World's First DSLR
This surprised me and I ended up at this nicely informative page:

http://eocamera.jemcgarvey.com/

By way of these:

http://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/4382994

http://www.digicamhistory.com/1988.html
The comments here are rather disappointing. It doesn't have manual controls? Well thats the point! I want to leave my crap in it and paint it some ugly color? Get with the times, young people already opt to not own cars. I can't double park in the city? Why are you imposing your steel box on people living in cities, many of which do not own cars and want walkable streets?

I mean, this is the news website for a startup accelerator. If you are on here, have some appreciation for new ways of doing things. To disrupt the status quo is the very goal. If you ask for perfection from day one, we will never get anywhere.

These cars have the potential to massively reduce traffic fatalities (one of the biggest remaining killers) and make cities useful again to the people that actually live in them.
Where in NYC did you work? Are you in finance?

One of the reasons I'm bearish about NYC's future as a tech hub is that, although Manhattan cost of living is extremely high, engineer salaries still seem to have the $150k ceiling, except in finance. Which means you'll have plenty of under-30 talent but few long-term, highly experienced engineers.
to get out safely avoiding incoming traffic once parked.
The poor ethical state of affairs in the technology field is precisely what is slowing down humanity. Let's just run out of time and do the universe a favor, and rid it of our stupidity.
I'm in Ireland, and while I don't use Uber (too expensive) I keep telling this story to explain why I use Hailo a lot:
Around 3am one Saturday after a family party my parents were worried about getting a taxi, because they had heard lots of horror stories of driver stealing things etc, but were prepared to catch one from the taxi rank across the road. I pulled up Hailo, was able to book (and know the driver's name a face), and have the taxi arrive before they could cross the road (in a suburban town). And since I was paying for it by card they just got in and went home and I didn't have to worry about a thing. These things sold me completely on the system.
Do you actually believe that an 'incognito window' makes you invisible/untrackable or something like that?
Exactly. I rather suspect that there are some parts of UIPopoverController that have problems with the different screen sizes on say an iPhone 4S and an iPhone 5S. Apple trust themselves not to call the parts that don't work, but have not yet ironed out all of the bugs for third-party use.

Unless I've missed something about UIPopoverController, it's implemented using public APIs, so I'm curious as to what the author thinks Apple's motivation is for holding back this API - it's not like you can't create the same functionality yourself using existing APIs, it's just a bit more work. My guess would be that maybe they don't want to see people using popover controllers all over the place on the phone, so they made the bar higher for implementing such functionality.
By ecosystem, you mean venus flytrap?
EU likely to investigate Facebook-WhatsApp deal ... at Facebook's request
Your NSA quote is a little out of context. The article you link to states that German is the fourth-hardest language from a list of five comparatively easy languages.

> Among Vietnamese, German, French, Italian and Spanish, Vietnamese may be the most difficult... Next to Vietnamese, German may be the most difficult

This doesn't amount to being significantly harder, particularly in light of the statement (that you quoted) that there is just one feature that makes it harder than the other three.

Speaking from personal experience (native English speaker, no prior difference in exposure to the two languages, simultaneous study of the two, similar teacher quality and curriculum), I found French harder than German. Although my single anecdote doesn't prove German to be easier, surely it suggests that the one I found easier couldn't be significantly harder.
One word: BBSs
They did give a P value, it's the final column labelled Pr (>|t|). The findings are significant.

They also gave the standard error, which you can use to compute your own confidence interval (95% would be about 2x, or ranging from no effect to a 20% reduction)
That's a huge and important point. We all love to see the contributions
from the people associated with the stories (well, I should only speak
for myself, but it's seriously one of the best parts of HN).

Using an eventual required donation in conjunction with an initially
usable account (e.g. allowing "X" days/comments/submissions before
requiring a donation) might be able compensate, but it would not solve
the underlying CAPTCHA, drive-by trolling, or spam problems.

It seems safe to assume the increased friction of requiring a tiny $1-5
donation (micro-payment) to a good cause will reduce the desired and
beneficial contributions from people associated with a submission.

The tough question is, "By how much?"

It would be difficult to measure when associated people show up to add
their contributions to relevant submissions. It would take just about
all of the data on HN, and some very elegant code. The results would
still be imperfect, but the results might still be useful. Even if
actual measuring proves to be too difficult, a rough guess (opinion) of
better/worse for before/after could still be useful. (Heck, removing
per-comment karma scores "worked" to reduce hostility/competition even
though we don't have any solid measurement data to prove it)

And the tougher question is, "Are we sure?"

Contentious comments (dumb/mean) have always been a problem in open
discussion systems, and similar is true for abusive manipulation (spam,
ring-vote, ring-flag, etc.). Having a gate of an act of altruism could
also both assure intent/interest and improve quality enough to actively
encourage associated people to consider commenting to be even more
worthwhile than it currently is.

In other words, there's also a second less obvious safe assumption;
we're far more inclined to join a good discussion on a topic of interest
than a bad discussion on the same topic.

Without testing, we just won't know if the added friction of a required
donation would be overall harmful, or overall helpful, or roughly even.
Prior to Stripe/CoinBase/Watsi/... the idea of requiring a tiny donation
just wasn't feasible, but now, it might be an experiment worth running.

But the toughest question is, "How much will it hurt to try?"

If it really did kill off contributions from associated people, then it
would certainly need to stop, but other than the possible temporary
reduction of associated contributions (which could be reversed), I'm
unable to see any other real or lasting harm. Even if requiring a tiny
donation turned out to be a totally failed experiment in forum design,
it would still do some good in the world.

You might be totally right and it might fail in practice, but until we
run the minor risks of actually testing it, we'll never really know.
Curso Para Quadros Superiores de Vias de Comunicação 2014 em Birmingham
They've recently removed the ability to claim capital equipment. My experience, which is probably less than yours, is that the R&D requirement is real and omnipresent - anything that's spent on production or that will go into production can't be claimed. Furthermore I've been asked for lab notebooks and experiment designs to justify the materials I used that I claimed were for R&D purposes.
Not necessarily. This concept of HTML snapshots is actually suggested by Google as a solution.

See this: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/...

We comply with Google's guidelines thing (https://snapsearch.io/documentation)
When Microsoft did the same thing in Windows it was grounds for anti-trust lawsuits to be brought against them:

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/101947/microsoft-used-undocument...

The idea here is that if you are supplying both the operating system and the applications that your applications should not benefit from being made by the same company as the OS, in other words, that it should be a level playing ground without you having an unfair advantage.
News flash!! Strong typing has benefits!
Wow. Really cool. The Silicon Valley essentially started as a defence supplier network during the cold war centered on Stanford.
Why can't we launch something like blobs of clay. Let objects stuck in it, and then it would deorbit on its own.
It is strange that Apple allows this API on iPad but not iPhone. What if you want to write an iPad/iPhone universal app? Although there are many 3rd party replacement, I prefer a native API anyway.

As for this popover API, I don't think it's a trick of anti-competive, It matters not so much. But there are no official explanation at all, the same as many other questions about Apple. It will be better if Apple becomes more open-----not nessesary open source, but be open to these questions to avoid guesses.
Dynamic constructions of sitemaps is surprisingly difficult. We would need to poll every single page you have, just to check if you potentially have a new link to a new page in your site. And everytime you add a new page, that's a whole another page to scrape and analyse.
I take you're point and those other well made points about line continuations below -- but you're over egging it here as

cut -d, -f1 2010.csv | grep ILLINOIS

works just fine for this data. I emphasise again - I take your overall point though.
Goldman Sachs World Cup Odds
Might be time for the Apple PR machine to crank up some more stories about developers making millions writing apps. As every casino in Vegas knows, watching some guy hit it big is a great way to take your mind off how many resources you're losing.

I wonder, though, if there's going to be an end-game to this walled-garden nonsense. On one hand, people (tech-minded people) seem to be slowly getting it.

On the other hand, industry has somehow set up this insane legal system where the product you buy? You don't actually own it. So I go to the store and buy an iPhone. I give them money and I leave. This process is the same as if I bought a regular, land-line phone. Only with the iPhone, I don't own the box, the software, the O/S, or control what the phone does. Carrier wants me to have new software? It pushes it out and I have it. Apple wants to get rid of a favorite app I use? Poof, it's gone. They seem to be doing this without any major push-back from the user community.

I am prone to think both the "educated tech user" community and the "Joe Sixpack" community are going to meet up at some point, but I'm not sure. Maybe the strategy with this and all the other dystopian bullshit we're seeing is to try to run out the clock; keep things the way they are long enough so that the argument can then be made "but it was always like this!"

It's weird. I keep reading these articles about how various services suck, but it only seems like tech people know/care about it. That can't go on. Something's gotta give somewhere.
Java on iPhone,Android,Win,RIM and Desktop
HangFire – Reliable and transparent background job processing for ASP.NET
Facebook is going to listen to our conversations through our own phones’ mic
What is it that you think makes handling snow and ice more difficult? Feedback control systems can respond an order of magnitude quicker to loss of traction/unexpected behaviour than people can. Icy conditions are different, but not necessarily more complex than "ideal" road conditions. From the point of view of a driving control system it just requires a slightly different control law. Certainly there will be testing required, but I'd be surprised if it presents a major issue. Adverse conditions are one of the more obvious applications of driverless cars.
Microsoft had a monopoly position at that time, and Apple does not.
Their new windows client (and therefore I imagine the others too) appears to be Qt and Webkit. Most of it still seems to be their web app wrapped in native...
really a Great job with a fun idea!
That's an implementation defined limit in practice. rsyslog for example defaults to 2K (apparently to be compatible with upcoming RFCs), but it's configurable to higher values. If you want to be compatible with other software though, it may need to stay at 1K.