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I most certainly did read the OP submission. Perhaps you meant to address the parent?

Just because a developer utilizes the JVM doesn't mean they're writing in Java. As I recall Twitter uses and is a big proponent of Scala, which sits on top of the JVM.

I stand corrected. The use of the word in this context feels colloquial though.

"Invite" is a verb, and "invitation" is a noun. Journalists should know better.

Probably because the data transformations and storage required to complete a transaction need to be handled by a coherent version of their code. Processing payments with a half-updated stack sounds painful and error-prone.

Separation of concerns and flexibility for the future are probably what drove this design decision.

Has there been a formal announcement from Microsoft on what the IE release schedule will be going forward? It seems the competition from the likes of Firefox and Chrome has accelerated IE's roadmap.

My reading of folklore.org jives with what you're saying. The Mac as originally imagined by Raskin was not the Mac that eventually shipped (for better or worse).

Considering Raskin's ideas about user interaction as "out there" is a matter of perspective. Touch screen interfaces that are now common today were once considered "out there". His love affair with the Canon Cat wasn't just a personal obsession. He made (what I considered to be) a group of well reasoned arguments about why it was so good based on the concepts it brought into reality. Off the top of my head I can recall automatic file saving (with no consideration to the file system) being one such argument. This feature will be shipping in the next release of OS X (Lion). If Raskin's ideas in the Humane Interface were "out there", then I take that phrase to be synonymous with "avant garde".

The zoom UI he talks about in another chapter (and what the OS X app Raskin has attempted to implement) seems like a strong candidate for a general data exploration and discovery UI. What he put forth in the book was conceptual, and no one has yet made a commercially or critically appealing implementation. That doesn't mean it won't happen. It just mean it hasn't happened.

As it could so easily be seen as bashing/trolling I need to preface this question by saying that I'm asking in complete seriousness.

How does one accidentally set the failure mode of any piece of authentication code to escalate privileges instead of denying them? Even when I was first learning to code web apps I never found myself accidentally accepting any password.

It's shocking (to me, at least) because it seems like such a beginner mistake.

If such code even exists why would it require them to enter a password?

Agreed. I believe the concept was taken out of Raskin's book "The Humane Interface" (great read, but it's been a while since I took it all in). After using it for a bit I have to say it's a nice experiment, but in no way useful for the day to day.

Something about how you interact with it all just doesn't feel right. I might be able to say more after I used it for a bit, but I just don't want to. The UI doesn't invite the user into interaction so much as it does gawking.

Maybe. Do you (or anyone else) have a preference?

Stay classy Skype.

I wish there was an alternative that matched Skype's previous good qualities (or better). The obfuscation of the OS X Skype client UI, plus the fact that they're now owned by Microsoft has cast a shadow on what used to be a great service (to me at least). Surely there is room in the market for a serious competitor.

I tend to agree with you, but it's important to remember that you should never say never.

Stranger (and more asinine) things have happened.

Lets say for a moment that this isn't made up. The questions that struck me immediately are as follows:

1. What was the motivation for creating this function? Was it (hopefully) to show off how "smart" he was? Was the company he worked for doing any kind of calculations related to (dear god no) financial or medical data that he thought he could improve?

2. How does anyone in this world escape grade school without knowing that one cannot divide by zero?

3. Someone thought dividing by zero should be a recoverable error?

Can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. :)

Aside from the whole function being asinine the only way to know "why" would be to ask him. The answer would probably also qualify as asinine.

After all the talk about delta updates in the keynote I had hoped that Time Machine would be doing file deltas now. A read through the Lion features page doesn't turn anything up. Anyone know?

Sorry to be slightly off-topic, but I love your site's design. Very well done, and very tasteful.

Encryption was mentioned a few times, and there will no doubt be more technical specifications coming to light as it gets closer to launch. Perhaps you're correct and there isn't sufficient security in place. In that case opt out.

I'd be surprised if part of the Lion install process didn't involve creating recovery media on a CD/DVD/flash drive.

Probably because if you are in to that kind of thing you already know where to find it. Just in case:

http://live.thisismynext.com/Event/Live_from_WWDC_2011

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/06/liveblog-wwdc-2011...

His sense of humor might be a little immature, but creepy seems a bit much. Are Dianetics books mostly pictures? That would make a lot of sense given the subject matter.

sixtofour's response is dead on. No offense, but how many companies have you worked at? Developer's ideas (good and bad) get shot down all the time for incredibly trite and/or stupid reasons.

Until the people in decision making positions take notice nothing is going to change.

You would be very surprised at the number of people in management positions at any size company that think this is OK.

At the jobs (consulting and otherwise) I've held in the last few years 75% of the companies stored passwords in plaintext. I'm not justifying it in any way shape or form, but Sony shouldn't be singled out. Until there is an immediate and clear financial incentive to use proper security companies are going to continue to ignore it.

Just for curiosity's sake, how is this dataset populated? Is ThriftDB just scraping HN? Is there some kind of back-end DB feed?

Good point. In your home yes, but not everywhere.

I'm talking about how it keeps happening to Sony.

Given how much bad publicity and legal exposure costs a corporation of Sony's size I'd say that getting their affairs in order across the board should have been a bigger priority. As it is wildly unreasonable not to have taken a good hard look at every piece of infrastructure after the fist major breach I'd say absurd describes this situation pretty well.

At first it was embarrassing, now it's just absurd.

Agreed. If it's getting excessive to the point of astro-turfing or making the front page less diverse then we should just start flagging them.