Niten

Great app, I really like the way it deals with nested comments. Just a couple suggestions:

* Maybe you could visually distinguish the "headline" item in any given view from the items under it? E.g. when you're looking at a story and its comments, they're all displayed like visually identical items in a single list. Maybe the story (or the top comment, if you're reading a thread) could be made to stand out somehow?

* An icon to jump directly to stories from the home page?

* You could register the app with an intent filter for urls under http://news.ycombinator.com/ (like e.g. Reddit Is Fun does for their app – see the app manifest in their GitHub repo for details)

DynDNS

Heck, even their Expression Blend and Visual Studio WPF and Silverlight designers assume you'll want to edit XAML by hand. Microsoft's current generation of development tools emphatically are not in the business of hiding markup language away from the developer.

I really happy to see the option to disable auto-saving contacts. Now what about fixed-width fonts in plaintext messages? :-)

Huh? As far as "native" goes, the Android browser is just as fast as, or faster than, the iPhone's. And Adobe has already confirmed Flash for Windows Phone 7.

I'm comparing to Firefox 3.6; Firefox 4.0 isn't released yet. But everything I've read indicates that Firefox 4.0 will still have a single-process, non-low-integrity process model, with all the security and reliability implications that go with it.

Hopefully Firefox 4 will catch up to the likes of Chrome and Safari (and IE 9) in terms of JavaScript performance, judging by benchmarks on the release candidate, but I haven't seen any indication that it addresses Firefox 3's fundamental design weaknesses. Of course, feel free to correct me if I've missed something in the release notes somewhere...

For one thing, IE 8 is arguably a more secure browser than Firefox due to its use of low-integrity process isolation on Windows Vista and 7. It's also more stable than Firefox in my experience, probably because of the way it isolates browser windows into separate processes.

And now IE 9 has a rendering engine that's at least equal to Firefox's. It lags behind Firefox's user interface in some respects (customization, built-in spell check), but it feels much faster, and it doesn't bog down over a long browsing session like Firefox does (again thanks to isolated browser processes – now one for each tab, just like Chrome).

For my part, I still think Chrome is superior to both IE and Firefox for general web browsing, but these days I certainly wouldn't look at someone funny for choosing IE. It may just take a little while for the folk knowledge that "IE suxors!" to catch up to the new reality.

But read the article. This specifically affects web apps run launched as fullscreen applications from the iPhone home screen, as opposed to other applications making use of UIWebView.

And what point are you trying to make?

Their game is getting 12-13k downloads per day and has made best-of lists on Mashable and MSNBC; clearly they are well known, even if you are not personally aware of them.

> if it covers everything on the HD and does so automatically, that's pretty awesome.

It doesn't. "*Available with apps that have been developed to work with Lion."

> To be clear, we believe you have every right to push forward such a policy. In our view, it’s your hardware and your channel and you can put forth any policy you like.

It isn't Apple's hardware; let us not forget the hardware belongs to the people buying the iPhones and iPads out there. Apple's enforcement of what can and can not run on these devices is not some fundamental property right, but an artificial construct.

Not at all. Because unlike Apple, Google isn't forcing people to play by their rules; they're just holding this out as an option for those developers who choose to use it.

> Finally, laypeople will benefit from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) mad scientist projects

Yeah, because that whole Internet thing and GPS didn't really count for much...

Well I've been running my personal email server (Postfix on a FreeBSD VPS) for four or five years now, and spam just hasn't been an issue for me. Between the Spamhaus ZEN DNSBL, greylisting, and SpamAssassin, I just don't get any appreciable amount of spam in my inbox. (Less than I used to get in my Gmail account.) And as far as I know, I've never missed a message I was supposed to receive.

I don't have trouble with outbound mail getting rejected, either... you have to make sure you have a "clean" IP address (didn't end up on a blacklist because of some previous server at that address), you need a valid reverse DNS PTR record, and it's a good idea to have an SPF record and do DKIM signing as well.

Now sure, this is more work and more expensive than just using Google Apps. But it does work if you do it right, and it's not "unnecessary administration" if you care at all about the privacy and security of your email, or if you need things like full procmail filtering capabilities that aren't available with Google Apps.

I'm surprised there was no mention of WebSharper in here, it's almost exactly what the author is asking for. And it's implemented in a functional programming language too...

Now that I've actually seen the ad -- no, it didn't insult you any more than the Mac vs. PC ads "insult" the PC user. If you take knocks on Apple products as some sort of personal insult, you might want to step back and take a couple deep breaths.

So you know what's funny? For some reason the image failed to load when I first visited the page, and I was left wondering what the fuss is all about. Hence the parent comment.

But now that I actually see it, I think it's a good ad. Normal iPad users like my sister are painfully aware of their device's limitations, and this speaks to them, if a little cheekily.

You say this based on what, exactly? It sounds to me like they just need to finish working on their web site, and one can't really take more from it than that without inserting one's own personal biases.

I use JavaScript obfuscation: a tiny WordPress plugin I wrote that essentially embeds the email address on the web page in scrambled form, and then transforms it to a clickable `mailto:` link client-side in the user's web browser. A message describing how to contact me is seen if the visitor has JavaScript disabled.

In theory an address harvester could easily work around such simple obfuscation, but in practice this seems to raise the bar just enough to make it not worthwhile for them. Email addresses I've posted in plaintext receive much more spam than the one I have obfuscated on my web page. (But greylisting plus SpamAssassin seems to take care of that spam quite well, so it's not as though the obfuscation itself is my only line of defense.)

Chance this arbitrary statistic matters to real world Android users? 0.4% Chance

No, they explicitly stated that their demonstration did not consist of virtualized or emulated x86 Windows. That doesn't at all rule out a dynamic translation layer for x86 apps.

I just hope that, from the end user's perspective, they pull this off as smoothly as Apple managed the PowerPC to Intel transition. I'm taking it for granted that most .NET applications will work on Windows ARM out of the box, but that won't be nearly enough.

If people can't run existing native x86 Windows apps on this, it won't be thought of as "real Windows". Legacy x86-only Windows binaries will be around for a long, long time given the enormous size of the Windows ecosystem.

I think it's a good idea to strip read receipt request headers from mailing list messages; they just don't make any sense in that context.

But more generally, MDNs and DSNs do serve a useful purpose when used conscientiously, and I don't think it makes sense to block them for all messages. The real problem isn't the notification requests themselves, but email clients that implement the notifications badly.

Having used Outlook with Exchange myself, I agree that it has some wonderful functionality. But if Outlook will do something as sloppy as sending a batch of read receipts when it makes absolutely no sense to do so, that doesn't instill a lot of confidence in the software in general.

In practice you do run into cross-device issues, though. For instance, the ConnectBot SSH client has a glitch that makes it impossible to type the pipe character with the custom Sense virtual keyboard on the HTC Incredible. But it works fine on stock Android.

I would hope you're right, except:

1. If all they're after is an assertion that you've used Gmail in that time frame... well, that's already implied by the fact that you've received a notification of the class action and are replying to it.

2. The notice is written colloquially, not in lawyer speak, and the audience is the general public, so it seems more reasonable to take "proof" to mean "evidence" here.

I'm going to opt out because I object to these lawyers claiming they're acting on my behalf in suing Google without my consent. I understand that this is considered legally acceptable for class actions in the United States, but I don't think it is reasonable or ethical. You should need explicit authorization to claim to represent any competent adult.

And for what it's worth, I never got my feathers too ruffled by the Buzz thing anyway.

EDIT: And the notice document says you'll need to snail mail all of the following to our intrepid lawyers in order to opt out: "your full name, address, reason why you want out of the Settlement" -- best of all, a nebulous "proof that you used Gmail at some point after February 9, 2010" -- plus "your signature, and the date." What exactly will be accepted as proof? Convenient how they don't bother to tell us. I'm assuming they won't accept OAuth tokens...

This isn't an OS X specific feature, it's a feature from the FreeBSD userland that Apple borrowed into OS X.

PHP will bite you, common sense or not. The language has serious misfeatures – platform-dependent integer sizes, or cgi.fix_pathinfo=1 by default allowing the interpreter to execute files without a .php extension, just off the top of my head – that require knowledge and action well above and beyond "common sense" to work around.

And all of these faults in the language, even the minor ones, just contribute to the unnecessary cognitive load of using the language. So the way I see it, if I'm starting a new project then why not just pick a sane language like Perl or Ruby or Python instead and save myself all the headaches? It's not 2004 any more, we're no longer constrained to languages that have good Apache modules, and with that constraint gone there are very few reasons to pick PHP over the competition.

> Are you willing to go up to 40 middle class families and demand that each of them pay $1000 to have a more refined waiter who vaguely remembers some Proust after partying for 4 years?

This is a foolish comment, even beyond your arbitrary splitting up the cost of a degree between 40 "middle class families", or the insinuation that one can actually earn a degree by simply "partying for 4 years."

The value of education goes beyond landing one a job. Simply having well-educated citizens is of value to society -- especially in a representative democracy, where our level of education has a direct impact on how wisely we choose our own leaders. In fact, that education for its own sake is of great value to society is the core assumption behind public education.

Besides which, how exactly would you propose to "fix" the "problem" of well-educated people choosing overqualified jobs? With a state-controlled labor market, dictating what kind of people are allowed to work what kind of jobs?