primatology

Sure, it's not a gorgeous next-gen startupesque web design, but I think it's more than visually appealing enough.

BMW is a for-profit business. MIT is a non-profit educational institution.

I'll agree that copyright in the digital era is a mess, but the line in this case is fairly clear. Yes, fair use (regarding parodies/satires) is convoluted, but the general rule makes intuitive sense to me: unless your parody is blatantly for-profit/self-advancement, you're covered.

Very sorry to hear this. Wikipedia informs me Crispin was born in 1956, which would put him at 55 or 56 years old. Far too young.

Ah, that just got updated.

Agreed, it's a terribly ambiguous name. Rather than "Google Free-Zone" (which is read as "Google-Free Zone"), it should be a "Free Google Zone."

There is a better alternative: surveying students. Standardized tests attempt to assign one number to teacher performance by quantifying student performance on one three-hour test. The survey examines dozens of metrics while allowing students to capture their over 100 hours of experience in the classroom watching their teacher.

We're discarding some of our most valuable data. In most schools, student evaluations of teachers aren't even administered, let alone analyzed and weighted in teacher assessment. Skeptical? See the research below. Properly-constructed surveys yield very accurate results; students are surprisingly honest in their responses, and students truly value a hard, fair teacher who actually teaches his students over an "easy A" teacher.

Take a look at Ronald Ferguson's work and the MET Project [1]. I can't find the original article, but this New York Times article [2] is a decent summary.

[1] http://www.metproject.org/downloads/met-framing-paper.pdf [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/11/education/11education.html

"Its founder and CEO Jeffrey Bezos is a computer whiz-kid from Bankers Trust, not a bookseller."

Might've been a negative in '97, but no investor today wishes Bezos were a diehard bookseller.

You can also click the black areas to the left and right of the slide.

The idea is that much of the code from Tapbot's mature Twitter client (Tweetbot) was reused.

There are several. Cheeaun's is fantastic: http://cheeaun.github.com/hnmobile/landing/

Commits are by no means an accurate measure of developer contribution.

ripley's lead is probably undeniable, but the differences in commits between the next four could be developer preference of code per commit.

Increasing the accessibility of Git isn't treason. Quite the opposite: Git is now used by far more developers. That's a win for the "Git way of life."

And the original, "expert" workflow is still available for those who want it.

Agreed. I finally bit the bullet and upgraded my 4GB MBP to 16GB of memory. Officially unsupported, but it works like a charm.

From the FAQ:

> What are the maximum benefits under the program? > Amazon will pay up to 95% of the tuition, textbook and associated fees up to a maximum of $2,000 per year for four years.

Tuition for an associates degree is usually upwards of $5000. I was impressed at first; now I'm deeply disappointed and see this as little more than a PR stunt.

Just in from Twitter (@mtdevans): "Chatting with a #Tesco insider, looks like they do store any discounts in a local db which is wiped every morning ~3am. #phew"

Quite the opposite: GitHub would love if you signed up.

You probably won't log out, and chances are you'll end up on GitHub again sometime soon. You'll discover the wonders of social coding now that you have an account, and soon enough, you're a paying customer.

And then 30% of all tips go to Apple. As much as I and others would love the convenience, I strongly object.

Yes, but you're far more proficient. Those who plug away happily at 30WPM will not share your definition of quality.

I'll take a beautiful product that sacrifices minor functionality (in my case) for aesthetics. My point is not that a MacBook is right for you, but that Apple seems to have rightly assumed that most people don't care about the function keys, and spared the ugly buttons.

In any case, you're probably saving a grand every time you buy a laptop, so maybe the joke's on us.

What if he were writing straight CSS, though? No possibility for variables there. (Not yet, at least.)

Not every screen needs a back button. You can't hide a hardware back button.

I'm with Apple on this one. The back-arrow button in the toolbar reminds me I'm in a hierarchal app, and the label reminds me what the prior screen was. It's just the opposite for me: every time I use an Android I hunt around the screen for the software back button.

Fair enough. Upon investigation, I've discovered there are a fair few OS X official system shortcuts which utilize function keys.

But I think you're an edge case. Apple targets hard the average consumer, and there are plenty (my parents) who don't understand an arbitrary mapping of a number to a function. The self-explanatory icons (the speaker with lots of sound vs no sound, the universal play triangle, etc.) are far more understandable. So why not save space?

The only time I've ever used a function key (F1, F2) in a Mac application was in Photoshop. Most Mac applications use Cmd+? shortcuts. So in effect, the volume/brightness controls have their own dedicated keys.

You can never stop the determined. But the courts could certainly pull the app from the Android store.

I claim there is no original thought. We're too shaped by our experiences.

I think you'll find most "original thoughts" are a) reversals of commonly accepted arguments for the sake of being contrary or b) bad ideas. Hence why most of us tend to held unoriginal thoughts—because the common beliefs are [often] the least-bad. Only occasionally does someone strike gold.

Then again, increasing the attempts at original thoughts should increase the quantity of good original thoughts, if not the proportion. I'm rather intrigued.

Fair, but shorter posts are far more relevant in the politics game than the developer community. I think it's a content length issue, not an ecosystem issue. Most of those developers were/are on Facebook before they adopted G+, and we never saw wall posts linked to on HN.

Oh, it works if you don't have "Show Dashboard as a space" checked.

It exists for most directly-controllable animations. Show dashboard super slowly? Shift+12. Show desktop super slowly? Shift + F11. Show Mission Control super slowly? Shift + Mission Control Shortcut.

:/

> Second, perhaps cool URIs don't change, but it seems like http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html is kind of an unfortunate URI. What's "Provider"? Why are "Provider" and "Style" uppercase?

Take a look at w3.org/Provider and w3.org/Provider/Style. It's actually a well-constructed URL. It appears to be a "Style guide" for "web content Providers."

That's his point. Political categorizations seem arbitrary from a scientific perspective.

I think your reasoning suggests that brick-and-mortar stores will never be fully obsolete.

As a manufacturer, I don't see how shutting down my online presence would benefit me. Simplified, there are three types of customers. The first shop in traditional stores, find what they like, and purchase it. The second browse and purchase online, without ever seeing the physical merchandise. The third browse traditional "showrooms," then proceed to buy from a cheaper online retailer.

With an online and traditional presence, manufacturers capture all three types of customers. If you limit yourself to traditional stores, you force the third type of customer to purchase in-store, because there is no cheaper online alternative. But those customers would buy online anyway, so you gain nothing. And you've completely lost the second type of customer, who only shops online. A simplified model, perhaps, but the principle stands.

I'm honestly not too worried. I like going to the mall. My mother practically lives at Target and Wal-Mart. Many of us like the physical act of shopping, enough to sustain physical retail outlets. Profits may shrink, but that's the free market. You've got to keep innovating to stay in business.