skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apple, at least, claims they don't make much money there. Per their latest quarterly call: "iTunes and App Store are still running 'a bit over break-even.' We’re investing a lot in these stores – that’s where the revenue is going." http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/25/apple-q1-2010-results/
Running heel first is definitely easier in your typical modern training shoe with a giant heel lift. But when you put on a pair of lightweight shoes with minimal heel lift, mid-to-forefoot striking seems much more natural. Heel striking in racing flats is very awkward, and I certainly wouldn't consider it easier.

I definitely agree that moving away from heel striking can be very difficult after many years of doing it. I've slowly worked my way down from bulky trainers to lightweight trainers to minimal flats, and my achilles tendons gave me hell throughout the entire process.
Except the iPad simulator in the SDK Beta doesn't ship with Safari. You can sort of fake it with S4, but only sort of. Just like you can sort of fake a native app with HTML5, but only sort of.

I've commented before how this is a disaster, and will be even more so as we become even more mobile. The precedent has been set and it's only going to get bigger and more ubiquitous.

That said, I'll still be getting an iPad. But mostly because I write apps for myself and the iPad is something I've been waiting for to fulfill a specific purpose that the iPhone only sort of takes care of.
For HN, I suspect the reason was that it was fast and easy to code. The main disadvantage in this case is that there's no actual guarantee that the request made it to the server, so if the request fails for any reason, it fails silently.

There are other advantages and disadvantages to image beacons depending on how you use them.

In the case of a search engine using them to track clicks, a major advantage is that the performance cost (to the user) of an image beacon is much lower than the performance cost of using redirect-based tracking. The tradeoff is that beacons are less reliable than redirect tracking, since users may not have JS enabled.

Also, with click beaconing, there's a race between the beacon request and the navigation event; you fire the beacon when the user clicks, but there's no guarantee that the request will finish before the browser switches navigation contexts, unloads the current page, and cancels all pending requests. An image beacon is more likely to succeed in this case than an Ajax request, since there's more overhead associated with Ajax requests.

All the major search engines use image beacons for tracking to some extent, but Google and Bing use them more than Yahoo! currently does.
What the iPad means for startups
Probably why a lot of the world doesn't like the game, I don't mind it every once in a while but certainly don't follow it.

Random question, they can pass more than once right? If so why don't they?
As a FSF member, I can tell you that their entire (print!) newsletter has the tone of a DPRK press release. Interestingly, the last actual piece that I read by RMS was considerably more reasonable -- it concerned the licensing of Javascript AJAX code running on your local machine.
On the spot!
I'm interested in using Vibrams as everyday shoes. Can anyone comment on their durability longer-term?
Am I the only one who was expecting a killer feature that they don't seem to have? The calendar looks like it'd work well, and iBook would be decent at the right price, but much of the rest is basically "like a big iPhone."

I was expecting them to dominate the textbook market with live-updates to etextbooks at an affordable price, annotations, social annotations, digital bookmarks, etc. If tertiary students are having to spring $100ish/book and buying x books/year, then blowing $500 on something to cart around campus might be an easier decision.

No real play at sketching or note taking either? Might not be as easy as it should be (always gave up on handwriting recognition with an old Dell handheld) but they could've included it I'm sure.

And after seeing a proof of concept of a multimedia version of Sports Illustrated, I was positive that Apple would take a crack at magazines and newspapers with an app-type store that handled subscriptions, editions, upgrades, premium/sealed sections, easy sales and links direct from magazines, etc.

The price is good and I actually could make use of this (replacing my iPhone for basically browsing the net at home on the couch or in bed, playing Freecell, etc) but I am very surprised that there's not more to it.
Previously submitted:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1036509
But who is doing the selling here? The salesman or the iPad?
Heel running is easier if it's what you're used to, due to muscle memory and different conditioning of muscle groups. Your leg adapts to the stride it's used to, so you could just as easily say that heel-runners have atrophied lower legs as that toe-runners have strong ones. I would say heel-running is more intuitive for a longer stride and a vertical posture, and less so for a short sprint. Whether heel-running easier in a vacuum is not "undeniable," mostly due to the lack of such vacuums (vacua?).
Pro: You aren't subject to the same-origin policy that XHR has.

Con: You can't manipulate the Request (GET only, can't touch headers), and you can't even see the Response -- when you vote on HN it just increments the number it already had instead of getting the new number in the response from the server.
I'm sure there will be money in it... but a tablet is in no way anywhere close to the 'necessity' that a phone is.

Everyone has a phone, and most people use their phone for a good majority of the day. It's easy for anyone from a teen to a grandparent justify buying an iPhone. I don't see this tablet having nearly as much of a market share... phones are simply much more a part of our lives (and central to even our style and personality) than a tablet.
I am boycotting the iPhone/iPad (I have the open N900), but I don't have any illusions that it will change anything. In a world where 1% of the people create all the innovation, boycotts by innovators are pointless. For the past ~20 years the masses have been effectively subsidizing tinkerers/hackers/developers by buying open PCs even though they didn't really need them; now that has come to an end and it looks painful to those former beneficiaries.
"And the iPhone OS will only run software that they specifically approve. No Flash or other alternate runtimes, no one-off apps or open source customizations. Just total control by Apple. It’s a frightening future.

I don’t know why they’re doing it."

I'll tell you why. because Apple's number one priority is the user experience. You need that kind of control if you want the best possible user experience. And it works for them and their users. 99.999% doesn't give a shit about your concerns.

That's the reason why iPhone sales trumps Nexus One/Droid/etc.
> [...] computers aren't intrinsically linked to their credit cards. Phones are, and it would be completely trivial (and very tempting) to make a dialer.exe type program that surreptitiously makes $9.95/min calls to Nigeria. List it as some kind of a raunchy sex line and try pleading innocence to your telco about that one.

What makes Apple's approach that much more secure? They don't inspect the source code of an App. There could be hidden 'call home' features that are waiting for a switch to be flipped to execute the malicious code that's wrapped up in a pink and fuzzy package. Sure Apple can hit a 'kill switch' on an App, but they need to know that the App is a threat before they do so. What happens when an App does your 'dialer.exe' example and calls Nigeria? Does this immediately alert Apple to 'suspicious goings-on' and they make a dramatic leap to hit the big red button?
Google proposing DNS extension for improved server locality
You cannot take the "it's not evil, it's just capitalism" argument all the way to its logical conclusion. Even a basic Economics 100 class will teach you that it's more complicated than that. Some levels of "good" and "evil" may have slippery and relative definitions, but it should be obvious that evil, as well as good, can exist in capitalism.

If you disagree with what is being called "evil", than you could be more specific. I don't think free bus passes for employees justifies a company to engage in anti-competitive behavior. Remember, legal != good.
I'd love to see how many fingerprints they've collected.
EDIT: absolutely agree user experience is Apple's no. 1 priority.
Do you mean antitrust scrutiny? It seems like Apple's cream-skimming strategy allows them to be really profitable without ever getting large market share.
We don't have temperature data measured by a thermometer at fixed locations for 50 years. There are many other sources of temperature data.
I don't think so. One of the things you have to prove in a UDRP is that the domain had been registered in bad faith. Since it was registered in 1997, I don't think Apple would have much luck here.
I suppose Highlightcam for football and baseball games would be sacrilege.
They need a monopoly... which they are nowhere near having. Even then an AppStore isn't anti-competitive (if anything, it embraces and thrives on competition).
In the iPad specs page you linked, footnote #4 states:

"Testing conducted by Apple in January 2010 using preproduction iPad units and software. Testing consisted of full battery discharge while performing each of the following tasks: video playback, audio playback, and Internet browsing using Wi-Fi. Video content was a repeated 2-hour 23-minute movie purchased from the iTunes Store. Audio content was a playlist of 358 unique songs, consisting of a combination of songs imported from CDs using iTunes (128-Kbps AAC encoding) and songs purchased from the iTunes Store (256-Kbps AAC encoding). Internet over Wi-Fi tests were conducted using a closed network and dedicated web and mail servers, browsing snapshot versions of 20 popular web pages, and receiving mail once an hour. All settings were default except: Wi-Fi was associated with a network; the Wi-Fi feature Ask to Join Networks and Auto-Brightness were turned off. Battery life depends on device settings, usage, and many other factors. Battery tests are conducted using specific iPad units; actual results may vary."
If you're in a boardroom meeting, it will be far too small, surely? The main opportunity would be for roving sales which aren't all that corporate and usually more about hawkers pestering local businesses off the street.
So about that. It's the INTERNET. We're all here, sharing access to it, ya know. Yes, I love YC because people here are much more mature, but the fact is that we all like a good bit of humor now and again.

My wife came home today and said, "hey, what's the gizmo from Apple called?". I told her and she made a face and said, "that's stupid". I have to agree, and also agree with people making jokes about it.
My issue is the iPad* is very close to being a good general purpose computer. For a certain class of consumer, it could be there only computer. However, it is crippled by the lack of ports. How are they going to hook up their printer or webcam? It is so close, especially with the keyboard dock. If only they where a little more open with the platform, and had some open ports this thing would be a great computer.

* (terrible name btw, i was sitting with three girls over lunch and looking at the engadget coverage while we ate, when i told them it was called the iPad they cracked up. One said, it must have been a male only committee that picked that name).
Mainly because I'm sick of people expecting me to fix their new computer problems. "I dont know how to do X anymore, my old laptop had a program that did it." Have fun!
Hopefully one would also weigh moral costs in some way. As FiveThirtyEight[1] demonstrates trivial changes to global economies can mask tremendous changes to human populations.

[1] http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/06/how-to-destroy-almost...
Good illustration here of running with heel strike vs forefoot.

http://www.newtonrunning.com/run-better/optimal-running-form

I use Newtons and like them a lot. Haven't tried the Vibrams yet.
Exactly. Project is just an operator that takes a table and gives you a table with a different number of attributes. All the relational operations take and return table values (aka relation values), which is what makes the algebra closed under operations.

SQL select actually combines project and map (with select...as) by letting you define maps for the individual attributes of the table. That's fine since you can't break the table structure. You just can't map on tables or table rows.
Steve, I suspect your users are very similar to my users. Sometimes they're not quite ready to accept something, but if you pitch it to them the right way, they'll warm up to it really quick.

For example, you and I know that you can geolocate my ISP to Nagoya with an API call that won't take a milisecond. How about, instead, doing some JQuery magic:

"Asking Google for your location..." (2 seconds)

"Searching for apartments around you..." (2 seconds)

"Picking best apartments..." (2 seconds)

$("precalculated-results").show();
I don't doubt the quality of your final model, I just think you might have found it easier to get there with a better method.
I know you're joking but it's worth saying: pick your friends because they are decent and kind people, not because they have the sane interests as you.
Call me crazy, but I think that the normal and correct way for transactions to occur in a modern, civilized, capitalist economy calls for the producer of the good to set the price -- without fear that his product can be appropriated unlawfully.

My main problem with this ideal (and I suspect one of the key things that needs to be addressed for the digital economy overall to flourish) is "the price". It's all well and good to set a single price for physical goods, where marginal costs are nonzero, but the fact is, it costs nothing to distribute one more copy of a digital good, so any time a consumer is willing to pay even a single penny for a song/album/movie/etc. but can't do so because the producer's price is too high, the producer loses.

I don't have anything useful to say on the morality of any of this, because piracy is not going away no matter what anyone does - it's clearly "wrong", but the important question is what we should do about it, and I have yet to see any practical solutions other than accepting it as a cost of business and trying to maximize revenues anyways. DRM schemes are fine in theory, and I'd have no problem if a good one came around, but in practice they have all really sucked because they punish legit consumers with all sorts of annoyances, and they still end up getting cracked, so pirates continue to pirate. DRM is by definition an impossible technical problem to solve, so we can't expect it to be a silver bullet.

I've yet to see any mass exodus from any of the artistic fields that are affected by piracy, so can't believe that it's is killing anything, or that it will in the future. If I had to guess, more than anything else it's increasing the number of people that obtain a product, most of whom would never have bothered to buy it in the first place. At worst it's a few percentage point hit to the industries, but IMO those percentage points could be more than reclaimed by adopting a more creative pricing structure (I realize this is not something an individual artist could do, as it would require a lot of data to predict what someone would be willing to pay).

Beyond any of this, I don't think the small guys are hurting at all due to piracy, as they never had any sales to speak of to begin with. Taking music as an example (I've both been a musician and worked at a record company), before the Internet, things looked almost exactly as they did now: big musicians made a lot of money off of albums and selling their fame in other ways, whereas small musicians had trouble making rent and made most of their money from gigs and lessons. The only difference these days is that small musicians can actually sell a little bit of their music on the net to people that aren't physically at their shows - back when I was playing, a band without a major record deal was lucky if it sold any CDs at all, and worse, they had to pay for large numbers of them to get pressed up front. I knew very few, if any, unsigned artists that were able to recoup even the physical production costs of their CDs pre-2000, so I'd say things are slightly better for the small guy now, if anything.
i'd love to see a vmware/parallels app for the iPad. imagine being able to run os x/windows/linux on this thing.
I'm torn on this article. I'm very appreciative of a real-world example of using clojure to manipulate data but at the same time it treats a trivial and entirely unscientific analysis of one data set as a complete, concrete and comprehensive summary of an entire field of science.
The iPad as a Magazine and Newspaper device
$10 for an app is a lot better than the $1-3 iPhone apps typically go for, and not too far from the $20-30 that desktop apps tend to go for. I think that Apple's trying to lead by example with their iWork pricing. Certainly some apps will undercut that, but I think the truly innovative apps that really do things that can't be done with an iPhone and would be inconvenient on a desktop will be able to command a $10 price tag.
Apple Special Event January 2010 - iPad keynote
Making it accessible is key.
I've been using Freshbooks for quite some time and have recommended it to many people now. It is easy, simple to use, free for up to 3 clients. They keep on making it better over time which is quite nice too. I've made a lot more $ by having a system that tracks invoices, payments and all that (rather than the 'doing it by hand using Word' method I used to use). It also supports recurring billing which I've found to be great for automatically generating ongoing web hosting invoices. Creating a new invoices is very simple and intuitive.

Here's a link (referral) to check it out: http://www.freshbooks.com/?ref=e8ba201056138-1
This comes as no surprise to anyone who's attended an NFL game, especially a playoff game.
The app store money is a huge deal, no doubt.

This control gives them veto power over every piece of software on the iPad lets them create a seamless user experience. People are used to computers crashing and being impossible to use. I think people will pay a lot of money for a computer that doesn't require a CS degree to operate. I'm sure Apple does too.
I never got the impression from his writings that communism was the alternative he was advocating.
That's what I thought... but it doesn't seem very likely from a US company?
Internet Explorer is a reason for some of us to care.
> selling a package that includes the dock and keyboard

I think many of those who are fine with it being their main computer will be fine without a keyboard. Also, it wouldn't be Apple's style. It reminds me of how the MacBook Air doesn't come with an optical drive.
Apple gives us great default choices. But when you want to change them, what do you do? Nothing, because you can't.
If it weren't for Apple, Adobe wouldn't EXIST. Considering what Photoshop was first developed for and solely for Macs for several years. And the only reason Adobe even still bothers to develop for Mac is because of the very high percentage of the design community who are married to their Macs and won't use anything else. If I recall correctly, something like 40% of Photoshop installs are on Macs, which considering the general desktop userbases percentages is fairly dramatic.
No Warrant Necessary to Seize Your Laptop
So if there's 11 minutes of action total, the defense might play 5 minutes, the offense 5 minutes, and special teams 1 minute. So star quarterbacks play 5 minutes per game. With 16 games, that's 80 minutes of action per season. Add three more games for Super Bowl bound teams and you've got 95 minutes. The Colts pay Peyton Manning $14 million per year. Assuming that he is paid for his actions on the field, he is making a wage of $8.85 million per hour.
It's not 'coming to an end.' Business users will still use laptops. No one is going to be writing novels or creating complex spreadsheets on an iPad. 'The masses' will need a computer that can do those other things well (for school or such), and they don't have the budget to buy a general-purpose PC/Mac + an iPad + an iPhone.
In related news, marathons have a minimum of ~2 hours of action.

It would seem that length and/or amount of action does not necessarily correlate with average spectator enthusiasm/excitement.

Who knew?
I disagree; I think Apple's alignment is more Lawful Evil.
Why don't Flash or video tag invent something like video-only mode?

Oh wait, is this something like DirectShow?
The restriction on passing is that if you have moved the ball past your own line of scrimmage, you cannot throw the ball forward relative to the field, only sideways or backwards. It is not often tactically advantageous to do this, although it does happen on occasion[1]. Since getting 10 yards in 4 downs suffices to retain possession, it's not worth the risk of turnover unless there's 4 seconds left on the clock and you're down by one point (as in [1]).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_play
Our lives are full of devices that could be general purpose, but were made more specialized for ease of use, maintenance, battery life, or w/e.

I don't understand why so many people are getting their panties in a knot because somebody is selling another non-general-use device with a processor.

And I know that hyperbolic rhetoric is fun, but let's be realistic. This is not undermining constructivist education, free culture, decentralized power or open systems in any meaningful way. If you really think it's accomplishing all that, go take your medication.
Any time there are ideological stakes and interests there are bound to be "evil" plans to preserve them. In the end it's going to be consumer choice and as long as Apple keeps their customers comfortably numb I don't think they are going to change their ways to be friendlier to the developer community.
There are a couple of what are called "gadget plays" that include what you might call multiple passes, such as the "flea flicker" but they are not frequently used because of the extreme danger of turnovers. Even the professional quarterbacks don't always manage to throw a pass without turning the ball over. At the pro level, the defenses are so athletic and so good that you just don't want to risk losing the ball, so it's only done in circumstances predicted to take advantage of its unexpectedness. There are also rules-based reasons why you cannot make multiple passes downfield, but I might as well try explaining the infield fly rule to someone who's never heard of baseball - it gets complicated fast.
Wouldn't "W're investing a lot in these stores" translate into "lots of fixed costs are being spent building ourselves a platform to profit off of this?"
For years, I've thought it was under 5 minutes. oh, well.
I wonder what the implications of IPV6 would be on this proposed approach. I see that Comcast is opening up the ability to get on their early list of IPV6 users.
Football fans should really check out the sport of Rugby.

If you want to see an all encompassing video of the sport, watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRpPf6rCyW4

Rugby, 80 minutes of prowess and determination. The camaraderie is unparalleled in any other team sport I have played, that includes soccer, hockey and baseball. The game is definitely underrated in North America.
I was joking, but we are speaking about taste, not interest. Since you usually make friends in the social circles you inhabit, it would be likely that your friends share similar if not the same interests.

On the flip side, not every one who is kind and decent will be a good friend to you.