skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The iPad is not a solution to the question of: whats a better computer or whats a better phone. Just as the iPhone wasn't a better Razor.

The iPad is a consumer device in the truest sense of the word. It's a device that was built to make it as easy as possible for the user to consume media whether it's the Web, movies, music, photos, etc. Plain and simple.

Oh, and comparing the iPhone to the Razr is a bit of a strawman. There have been plenty of PDA-phones in the past: WindowsMobile phones, Palm PDA-phones, etc. They just never did provided a good enough interface to the user to really take off. So yes. The iPhone was an evolutionary leap instead of a revolutionary leap.

> At times force is needed to cut through layers of of mental resistance. New ideas that we don't understand scare us. We fear what we don't understand.

At the end of the day, the iPad is a consumer electronic device not a solution to world hunger. Please get some perspective. Writing a blog post praising the iPad when everyone else is disappointed with it is not some sort of 'shining moment' for journalism that will be recognized by generations to come as a turning point when the tide of Apple-haters was stemmed, ushering in the new Golden Era of Apple.

> 99.9999999% don't get "it"

I'd say that 98% of people don't even know that Apple had a keynote today.

> If they did we would have more companies that could compete with apple not just copy apple.

Most other companies are not in Apple's business. They are making hardware with some software thrown on to push the hardware, or they are selling some software for some hardware. Most companies don't have the attention to detail that Apple does. Yea, sometimes they screw things up (sometimes badly), but OS X doesn't have parts of OS7 hanging around in it the way that Windows Vista still had some little-used apps with icons from the Windows 3.1 days. Most other companies are just pushing their product out the door to turn a profit, but Apple prides itself on projecting an image of quality they way that a high-end car-maker does.

I also really don't like it when people get all uppity about 'copying.' "Who copied who" is a tired game in the software/hardware industry. The real issue is when someone copies something and claims it as their own, not when someone copies something. People adopting the techniques and methods of others is how progress is made.

If you want to play that game, then Apple copied the entire idea for the gui/mouse interface from Xerox. Apple also copied the functionality of Time Machine from countless other utilities that were mostly relegated to the realm of system admins (or 'power users' in the case of Linux/BSD + rsync/rdiff). You might say 'but they copied it better.' But if you want to start talking like that then you better suffix 'everyone copies Apple' with 'poorly' lest you imply that 'copying' at all is a bad thing (and there should be a stigma attached to it).
Don't you get the feeling that Apple is trying to phase our their OS X model towards a more iphone-like ecosphere where they can own everything? I do.
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Your article is pretty good, but it just gets annoying when every article on HN is about how the iPad is going to solve world hunger with its super-shiny screen. It wasn't you personally that I was reacting to, but rather the onslaught of similarly-themed articles whenever Apple releases a new product. (The jizz reference reflects well on your writing ability, but not so much on Apple. The fact that your article exists proves the points your article makes. Excellent. :)

As an entrepreneurial advertising major who enjoys industrial design, I think it's safe to say I've got a good excuse Apple.

And I think it's safe to say, that as someone who makes a living from writing software, that I am not going to like devices that restrict users from running my software... even if it has a really pretty case. (I have eyes. I know Apple's stuff is beautiful.)

FWIW, I was a long-time Apple fanboi, diligently lining up to buy whatever new product they had the first day it was available. But then one night, I was debugging some software, and some debugging functionality didn't work because Apple specifically broke it to prevent someone from reverse-engineering iTunes. (Google "PT_DENY_ATTACH".) I formatted my Powerbook that night, switched to Linux, and never looked back.

Apple's not going to win me back with a nice screen or great marketing. When they stop selling music and videos with Restrictions Management and when anyone can run any code on any of their devices, Apple will be my favorite company too. But I doubt that will ever happen.
Does just the word "fan" even exist in tech circles anymore? According to my definition Gruber is by no means an Apple fanboy. Why? Because he is not scared to criticize Apple and most of his theses are objectively credible. Just because he likes Apple and often writes rebuttals to pundits who just don't get Apple (or more likely are trolling for hits) doesn't make him a fanboy.

There's no doubt that the Apple fanboys all read him, but to call the man himself a fanboy is to drain the word of its whole connotation.
Man Peter Norvig. When I cracked open his Intro. to AI ed. 2 I was floored. I had (and continue to have) so much fun with his book. Also, his website had this awesome article about implementing abstract classes in python in 0 lines of code.

I wish I could shake his hand.
Pretty much. I almost never do actual coding at a conference; I do my talks, I take notes in other sessions, I read interesting links and occasionally pop in to IRC. I don't need a laptop for that, but since the laptop's the only thing I have which does all those things I end up taking it.

Plus the iPad would probably be a nicer device to have with me on the plane...
I just want to note that I am listed as co-creator of this app for a reason, and marketing was an afterthought with Classics after creating a really great reading experience.

That having been said, I sympathize with your disbelief. Yeah, what we did was obviously a direct port of reading real books. But you have no idea how much crap we took for doing exactly that – what I considered the obvious. To a lot of people apparently things like a page flip port seemed completely idiotic. To me it was an integral part of the enjoyment of reading books that had been lacking in most ereader experiences.

We did reap the rewards too, so ultimately I can't really complain, and we always joked that Apple would eventually rip off the page flip since it just makes sense. All those TV ads Apple featured Classics in now seem strange in retrospect though, presuming iBooks was designed and under developed before our app's release.
There is a 30pin -> USB connector accessory with iPad by default. That will help with the interface, but how will you get data out of it ?
Yep! We've gotten into a lot of these discussions before. (I hope you took my comment lightheartedly, and not as a personal insult — it's more my way of saying we'll agree to disagree here.)

Usually I'm not a fan of the slew of Apple articles. This time I thought it warranted some, but even so it's very over-the-top. For whatever reason we've all decided to hate the shiny thing with the terrible name. I thought it might be fun to chip in with my opinion, which I'd written as a private blog entry a bit earlier.

I'm satisfied with the compromise Apple and independent developers have reached with the iPhone. If I can jailbreak at any time and get more freedom for my machine, then I'm fine with ceding it for the time being. Maybe some point in the future I'll turncoat and go after something more open, but I'm moderately retarded as a programmer at the moment and I've been slow to develop.

This is an aside, but, based on your last comment: Does Apple sell music with DRM anymore? Now they sell their files as unlocked m4ps with an option to convert to aac. That stopped me from downloading mp3 copies of all those albums, so I was satisfied; is there a restriction still there that I somehow missed?
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Traders are just like programmers, in that they often wish there was a 'Do What I Mean' instruction.

If you look for duplicated orders and request confirmation, the traders get mad that there are extra clicks keeping them from doing what they asked.

If you don't do it, the traders get mad when they make a mistake and it is dutifully executed.

If you do it only over a certain threshold, the traders get mad when they make a mistake that is large, but not over the threshold.

That said, I'm sure this sort of error has cost banks far more than a single $150k fine. The losses on a bad trade can easily outstrip that wrist-slap.
Yeah, Gruber's never criticized anything Apple's done.

For example, he wouldn't dream of criticizing the App Store or its policies the way this guy did ("Rules you don’t know about are scary"? "To act fairly would be to follow the rules. To act capriciously is to be the rules"? Nobody who's been in the Reality Distortion Field would write that!):

http://daringfireball.net/2008/10/the_fear

http://daringfireball.net/2009/05/diary_of_an_app_store_revi...

http://daringfireball.net/2009/08/ninjawords

http://daringfireball.net/2009/08/phil_schiller_app_store

http://daringfireball.net/2009/08/wikipedia_app_age_ratings

http://daringfireball.net/2008/09/app_store_exclusion
This all comes down to where the developer can make the most money, a native app or a web app.

Someone also mentioned the infrastructure and resources needed to support a web app to support thousands/millions of users. as opposed to basically nothing for a native app.
> To insist on appending an angry, trashy review on the day the man died is especially graceless.

I'm glad the commentor did, because this will likely be the first and last discussion of Howard Zinn on Hacker News, and the review had some important points.
George Will famously said "Football incorporates the two worst elements of American society: violence punctuated by committee meetings."
Optional DRM, you mean. And I can't imagine that booksellers have yet reached the same degree of enlightenment that the music vendors have lately been reaching.
Personally, I don't have a problem with iPad being closed. I have problem with a lack of an open alternative (or several). I'm using an iPhone, but I'm sure as hell glad there is the Android.
We don't. Looks like the big gap in the featureset to me.
It's completely harmless. Go ahead and curl -v it. Doesn't get any plainer than that.
You're a bit off there. He joined Apple in 2005.
iPhone is a bigger market than iPad, and iPhone apps will work on iPads.

I'm sure that most of the #100 iPhone apps will make a special iPad-enhanced version, but that's not going to be a killer feature.

I guess some apps can only ever work on an iPad (due to size / CPU / RAM) constraints, but those will be a niche.

I'd just say that the iPad is a larger incentive to target the iPhone. Some apps will be a big deal on the tablet, but mostly they will be better targeting the iPhone first.
"The designer who designed the bookshelf UI at Delicious Monster was poached by Apple to work on the iPad team."

If you're referring to Mike Matas, the co-founder of Delicious Monster, he left DM to join Apple back in 2005. While I imagine he's probably working on the iPad, he wasn't poached specifically to work on the device.
Screenshot, for the posterity: http://imgur.com/LvMAj.jpg
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Wow, how wrong that picture is. There are lots of free applications for Mac and iPhone (and now iPad).

iTunes has a nice way to share your library, and you can basically drag and drop music from other computer onto yours.

"Remotely disable your apps and media" — did that happen to anyone?

In other words: FUD.
Not too difficult to hack. His password was "12345"
They also used to be a major player in the PowerPC line.
Didn't it take until iPhone 3G for the iPhone to really fly off the shelves?
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I kind of agree with you, basically the best way to know what the market wants is to give the market the option to show you. In two three next months we will see if there is a justification for such a device.
I'm still looking :(
This contradition between ease of use and keeping particular basic freedoms is a complete red herring. I don't see how it makes the iPhone easier to use if Apple censors dictionaries.
Indeed, this is the first thing I thought of when I read about McGraw chirping up:

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/00/07/19/apple_turns_co...

Etc.
But it is a story, isn't it? It's a significant hack imho.
a couple of years ago, there were a group of trolls who had gotten hold of one of the potter books a few days before release, and went around trying to spoil it for everyone, by revealing how one character murders another one in the end. not surprisingly, the author and many of her readers were upset over it. so no, it does NOT only matter if you are a "legendary obsessive control freak."
> It's not hardware, it's software that matters, it's design.

Well, we are discussing the Daring Fireball post, and Gruber does mention in multiple places 'setting the software aside.' So bringing the software into the discussion is kind of side-stepping a discussion of the actual article. If anything you should be calling Gruber out for ignoring the software, rather than jumping all over the parent poster.
Ask HN: Do all the iPad articles really add something valuable?
I was wondering how much of the front page would be crowded with iPad today... most of it I guess is the answer. Do all these articles really add any value beyond perhaps the first or maybe second? I feel like there are huge diminishing returns on these types of articles. Am I missing something?
I don't feel safe with Apple. They deleted all my music from my iPod without asking just because I inserted it into the wrong Mac. I guess Apple fans will be able to explain to me how this is really an ease of use feature.
> 3. Safari

What is significantly better about Safari than Chrome/Chromium? (Please don't say something about multi-touch interface b/c that's a different issue; a multi-touch interface is a global operating system/hardware issue, not an issue with a particular piece of software)
(I hope you took my comment lightheartedly, and not as a personal insult — it's more my way of saying we'll agree to disagree here.)

Indeed I did :)

Does Apple sell music with DRM anymore?

As far as I know, many songs are non-DRM'd, but not all of them. But really, DRM didn't work out for the music industry, and it is gradually going away. It's videos/software/books that I am worried about now. For example, I would love to be able to buy TV episodes instead of pirating them. But they won't play on any computers I own, so I can't. DRM goes away, the content industry gets my cash. (But it's not good for Apple if I can watch the videos on non-Apple hardware, so I can't.)
A lot of MS software design has been historically clueless about network latency, I'll grant you that. I sometimes joke about imagining a world where the web is built on top of DCOM, where the view in your browser is rendered via object-oriented RPC calls from the server, etc.

Apple are a much more insidious threat, though, in my opinion. One of the reasons I first got into programming was because one of the first computers I got didn't have any I/O other than the keyboard, the monitor and speakers - the tape drive was broken. A flashing BASIC prompt (ultimately MS licensed) greeted me at every power-on. The only way I could do anything with the machine was to write the program myself; and I could keep nothing of what I wrote, and had to write it all again if I wanted it again. Every night I wrote an alarm-clock program to wake me up in time for school the next morning.

Now if I were that age again today, and had an iPhone or iPod touch in my pocket, or god forbid an iPad in my bag, I couldn't even write a program on it, much less save it on the local file system. Apple is almost intrinsically hostile to software engineers, as I see it. Developers are like rodents to be trapped by promises of a slice of market willing (and hopefully forced) to pay for software; but the trap is far tighter than anything MS has ever lain.
Making it a self post with the url unlinked in the description, with a warning might have been better. Suppose the site had been hacked and loaded with malware and readers assumed you were just linking a report about the hack, rather than the compromised site itself.
Not all people are equally important in this context. I influence buying decisions of quite a number of people as the go-to computer person and as an entrepreneur. I am a developer making platform decisions for mobile apps.

As a business owner I'm not going to let an all powerful middleman get in between me and my customers. And as a freedom loving person, I'm not going to let anyone censor my dictionary.
The Apple iPad - Anand's Analysis
This dude is crazy. Crazy wrong.
Sorry. I'm new here. I shall study the guidelines some more. Thanks for the scolding. :^)
There are many examples of very precious resources being squandered because of profit motives, our stewardship of the planet could be much better, I doubt it could be much worse.

In less than 300 years, basically since the time that we started to industrialize we have remade face of the planet.

Point me to all those efforts at sustained management that ought to be a counterexample to those examples of wanton destruction of habitats and ecosystems for profit.

Everywhere that money is brought in to the equation sooner or later the ecology will have to suffer. Running an ecology as a business is simply not an option.

I know it has been tried many times and I know that there are plenty of people that probably have the best interest of their environment at heart, but from what I've seen to date the best thing we have done is to simply not mess with a large enough area and hope that it will recover.

Any attempt at large scale intervention, even from a positive viewpoint has sooner or later become a game of seeing how to use that resource within the letter of the law for maximum profit.

Rainforests, the Canadian forest management, wildlife preserves, the artic and the oceans.

The list really is endless.

Calling the people in charge bean counters is doing them a service, it means they're not actively involved in destruction on a planetwide scale that they are aware of.

I even leave open room for 'best intentions', but that doesn't mean their effects are positve. Not by a long shot.

Right now those places that are doing best in terms of species diversity and other parameters indicating relatively healthy ecosystems are those that we haven't gotten around to yet and those that we have utterly abandoned.

Environmental economics is a complete contradiction, you can not manage a tract of rainforest or a volume of ocean in a way that is at the same time good for the environment and ecologically sound.

We have basically taken out an environmental mortgage and have spent that mortgage on stuff that harms the environment, it will be a long long time before we are in a position to pay it back.

I realize this is not a happy picture, but sometimes it is better to open your eyes to what's really going on than to put on your rosy sunglasses and to hope that it will all go away.

There are lots of very uncomfortable conclusions that we may one day have to draw, there is a small chance that we will be in a position to guide those decisions if we start acting long enough in advance.
AppStore isn't useful just because you get native stuff, it's essential because you need somebody to handle the actual payment from users.

Sure, it's easy to move some free apps towards the web, but what if you want to make some money ?
Thoora's model (if i've understood it correctly) is to license their tech to other news sites rather than become a source themselves. I believe that the feedback from publishers was that they could use this service to get an edge on where they should be focusing their resources, so I think there are multiple revenue streams.

They're canadian, and us canadians don't often get the word out as well as US companies, which might be why you are not familiar with them. The tech is pretty amazing though.
I think freedom-to-tinker and freedom of expression are connected.

If freedom-to-tinker on the iPad is restricted, it makes me worried about freedom of expression.
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On students, the elderly, the iPad, and the plateauing of hardware
Ask HN: Where does iPad leave Chrome Netbook? It is Safari + 140k apps
Whereas the Chrome OS comes only with a browser, the iPad has 140k and counting apps, and Safari.
Firefox runs on Linux, it is just as good as Safari. Setup shouldn't be an issue as I'd expect it to be pre-installed on a Linux tablet. Don't know the devices you are talking about, though.
"He also said that when you consider MacBooks as “mobile” devices, Apple generates more revenue from mobile hardware than any other company in the world" hits the bullshit alarm.

Well, when you consider BMW cars as "mobile" devices, BMW generates more revenue from mobile hardware than any other company in the world. C'mon, MacBooks as mobile devices? And only comparing with real mobile-only sales?

Also, the tone of the article sounds even a bit religious: "This is something they want us to notice". Looks like one of those apocalypse cults after their expected end-of-the-world day blew off: a bit disappointed but they keep looking for a sign, because there must be one.
Because I don't carry both around at once :)
The only time I can read is at home (since I never use public transportation and never have a free moment at work).
You're right. Why are people always ragging on Microsoft?
Hyperbole is the best thing ever!

This made me laugh: "and so the only thing you need to make a beautiful program is a beautiful graphic designer"
Why the iPad doesn’t have a camera: Apple doesn’t want you to look fat
Claiming they have the best CPU after a couple of minutes testing the device as an end user seems way over the top. It's also not likely that the same CPU could simply be put into a phone.
The article is a bit sloppy, the filing linked at the bottom explains it much more accurately. NYSE didn't really 'choke' but the trading of some securities was affected. The root cause wasn't really a click or the flood of cancel orders themselves - it sounds like if the Credit Suisse system had actually managed to place all of its orders, the respective cancels would have been handled as well. What happened though is that CS<->NYSE got into an endless loop of spewing messages at each other because the CS end was simply ignoring the NYSE system's error messages and the NYSE system had no facility to detect a clearly abnormal rate of identical errors being generated by the same client. Bug met inadequately robust design and the whole thing imploded.
Not sure about baseball, but pretty much every sports channel showing cricket in India has a 'highlights package' at the end of the day which does just this.
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