skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> All she knows is, "Wouldn't it be cool if my iPad had ... ?" or "Wow, I wish I could ... " And the tool she has not only gives her no ability to explore those possibilities, it looks like it's designed to actively impede her from exploring them.

While I understand this argument has no right or wrong answers, I can't say I agree to the above statement. Just by the virtue of having a well-designed piece of hardware in her hand, she can start asking these questions. If it was an open platform, it would most likely have been of lower quality, not as ground-breaking, and she wouldn't have had it in her hands in the first place (I'd love to be wrong here, but I'm afraid I can't find the evidence to prove myself wrong). The fact that it has "apps", written by real people can actually guide her to search online what it takes to create these apps, from which she can then find out about open platforms, programming languages, (even FPGAs!) and development in general.

I understand that talking about our curious, hypothetical protagonist we can prove anything we agree with, but without an extremely approachable, polished device it would simply not appeal to as many people. Most of these people will just be users, but some will be curious, and those are the ones we're talking about. Since hobbyist platforms are ubiquitous, you don't need to create yet another hackable platform, you need to get them interested.

I'm purposefully holding back anything specific to the iPad. Nor I, nor the majority of HN readers have even held the device, but knowing Apple, I think it can vastly increase the ubiquity of general purpose computing even more, and make good UI and design be expected. And that's a win for everyone.
And I'm pretty sure that plenty of those youngsters who would have loved to tinker got nothing more powerful than a pocket calculator in the 80's because computers were very expensive and hard to come by. I would argue that these calculators were not very tinker-friendly.

I think you underestimate the curiosity of kids and their ability to find things to tinker with if they have that inclination.
The Ticketmaster-Live Nation merger: A union of pariahs
Google throws down the gauntlet on IE6; you and I get a free ride
Here's a better one (taken from http://code.activestate.com/recipes/67668/#c7 ):

f= lambda n: [[[j for j in (j*i,)][0] for i in range(2,n+1)][-1] for j in (1,)][0]
Even IE6's support for HTTP 1.1 is broken. Sometimes it doesn't send host headers with redirects; there are several different scenarios in which it doesn't treat cache directives correctly; etc. Same with HTML 4.

There's just no excuse for using IE6 or 7 in 2010.
This is tautological. The recommended bandings are based on death rates and now they're saying, based on new evidence, that the bandings were wrong for certain ages. But the headline always claims being "overweight" is good for you.

It's like a doctor telling you to take 1 pill a day but you secretly take 4. When science decides that taking 4 a day is the correct dose it doesn't mean overdosing is good for you, it means the old dose guideline was wrong.
My guess then is that the DB isn't actually purged, but is currently not displaying entries dated before the 24th.
I don't get it. The iPad has a web browser, and a good one. Doesn't this undermine his entire argument? Is this more about Facebook or about Apple?
The issue is: If one customer has an iPhone and an iPad, do they have to buy two copies of an app or can they buy one copy and install it twice? Do app developers have any choice about this?

IIRC in the past Apple retroactively changed the terms on music after it had been sold (usually for the better, so customers didn't complain).
I offer this link in jest: http://vigilantcitizen.com/?p=1676

Edited to add: "fnord" .
Good way to put it in perspective, thanks.
I believe this Gist is being updated as the thread unfolds.

ahem.
Hackers don't tinker because they got invited
Just curious...how did you find this story on HN so quickly?
I've never understood the mindset of labor laws. Employment is a two way agreement - if either party is unhappy at any time, for any reason, they should be able to terminate the agreement. In most cases the employee and employer share risk equally if the other one doesn't work out - and if they don't share risk equally they can always work out their own agreement (like options vesting over time) in a private agreement - no reason to get government involved in that.

Just like if you are upset with a local restaurant you can choose to stop going, and if they are upset with you they can refuse you service.

What am I missing about labor laws?
I agree, it's not a "must." But if you do it, I think you'll find it has deeper benefits than just fame and career advancement. My own blogging is about fun hacks that are educational for me but unrelated for my work. Blogging helps me learn better, because:

- Explaining things forces me to understand them better.

- Wanting to share what I've done motivates me to finish it.

- Comments from others teach me things I didn't know to look for myself.
Isn't the ultimate purpose to protect (the natural rights) of citizens, period?

I.e. protect citizens against the mob (government), other individuals, and other legal entities?

If not, then why would the constitution delegate certain powers to the Federal Government?
The deal has always been the iTunes store APP runs on all devices synced to the iTunes account. So a single user can already be running it on a flotilla of iPhones and iPod Touches.
Based on my experience with the iPhone and Apple, both as a developer and a customer, I'd bet a lot of money that a person who has bought an app for their iPhone will also be able to run it on their iPad without paying for it again.

Right now, I'm paying for two iPhones on one AT&T account, one for me, one for a friend. If I buy an app from the app store, it will run on both phones without me having to pay for it twice.
Correlation != causation.

Old people in the process of checking out lose a lot of weight.
As much as a part of me would like to see that happen, that'd really be an odd precedent -- not just not going out of their way to continue making something work on an older buggy browser but actively blocking it from working when, presumably, it otherwise would. I'd be happy for them to pull any extra hacks/workarounds though and make the IE6 experience worse.
View Source -> Copy at will
Very true--my old phone was essentially Kirk's communicator, and the iPhone surpassed it.

http://images2.fanpop.com/external/860814
The thing that people don't seem to grasp here is that a single Trident missile is capable of carrying 10 warheads and is capable of striking 13,000 km away. This means that with a full compliment of missiles, a Vanguard submarine surfacing in Anchorage Alaska would be capable of striking any location in the US (and I believe possibly even Puerto Rico).

A false launch would essentially be capable of ending the world. It was estimated that a small-scale nuclear war of ~50 'Little Boy' air-bursts would have serious global complications. Being that a single warhead on the Trident can detonate at 500KT (25 times a 'little boy'), a single missile launch is equivalent to 5 megatons, all of which could be ground-burst and force more dust into the atmosphere. At 160 warheads and 80 megatons of destruction, the world is essentially over (as we know it) long before a retaliation has ever been launched.

People's response to this never grabs the situation. It always seems to be that people think a false launch could destroy a city like New York, when in reality a false launch from a ballistic missile submarine could easily end the world.

I realize the risks inherent in a lack of safeguards in the Trident program. However, being from the UK and knowing full well that in the event of a nuclear war, my entire homeland will be a nuclear wasteland (too many primary targets in a small area, I know for a fact I lived in between 3 primaries when I was growing up: major harbor, major RAF base, Army training base). So the UK has little chance to approve a nuclear launch after the attack, unless the authorization can be approved by a UK overseas base, fail-safes are just failures in the face of an attack. Fail-safes are intended to prevent unauthorized launches, however for the UK they're also going to prevent authorized launches.

I'm unsure what troubles me more, a poor ability to safeguard the system or the inability for justice if some psycho warlord decides to destroy my homeland.

The UK isn't in the US's situation where a nuclear launch can mean authorization can be granted by a chief of staff or high ranking general before everyone has been obliterated. The US would take potentially hours for a complete destruction, the UK on the other hand can easily be nuked into non-existence inside of a half-hour. A surprise attack doesn't leave much reaction time for the UK like it does the US.
People had these computers for reasons other than to tinker. The example given in TFS is about a dad using a machine as a wordprocessor. I have an arduino board because I grew up tinkering and the arduino lets me relive the late nights spent up learning, but they are not something that anybody who isn't already a tinkerer will buy.
But, 3 vans and 2 cars isn't the only valid solution, unless you assume every vehicle has to be full. Four vans and 1 car works, and a previous poster gave the example of 5 vans, which also works. The fact that there are multiple valid solutions when you remove the constraint that each vehicle should be as full as possible makes me think this is a lousy example for illustrating systems of equations. It is, however, a great problem for teaching combinatorics, since, for each solution, you can count the number of ways to fill the vehicles, and thus the total number of distinct ways to transport the 31 people.
A tragically comedic example of how Linux fails the 'normal' user.
My IP can track me to within the city I live in, I think it does 100 times better than any A/S/L answer ever did.
Combine this with p0f (http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/p0f.shtml), some basic machine learning and you're all doomed.

By the way, browsers are generally scary thing. What about using the browser's cache for tracking? http://joshduck.com/blog/2010/01/29/abusing-the-cache-tracki...

It's an interesting idea how to get a truly anonymous browsing, though.
I think the difference is that while there have been some smaller, less obvious things that you have been locked out of (gaming consoles, for instance) Apple has come out with what will be the future of computing, and they have blatantly said "This is ours, don't touch it. If you do, we will sue."
It's not curiosity or inclination I'm doubting. It's availability of tools. As far as we know, to develop for the platform she's using, she'll also need a "real" computer. And a (paid!) membership in Apple's developer program. And, and, and. That's the wall she needs to scale here -- not merely, "How do I ... "

How many people does that wall turn away, who might otherwise have discovered a new passion or talent? How much does it take from the rest of us, having all those potential hackers and tinkerers turned away before they could even discover they wanted to tinker and hack? What incredible ways might they have changed the world, if only they'd had the opportunity to discover that they could?
I was one of those poor bastards in a corporate IT department six or eight years ago arguing passionately that the standards were in the RFCs and not in "the way Microsoft does things" and we shouldn't design the intranet nor buy expensive products dependent on IE 6 nor rely on postback for GET requests nor etc., etc., and I was pretty consistently shouted down. Any schadenfreude I might enjoy now at the results of one or two particular projects I worked on are overshadowed by regret at missing what we could have done.
I've been going laptops-only for several years now. They're nice in a lot of ways - small form factor, simplicity - but also a bit frustrating because I inevitably take them out somewhere, get them a little bit bashed up, and eventually start seeing intermittent video issues, DVD drive failure, etc. That is, the "wear+tear" factor is going to be higher simply because I allow it to be.

Recently I had a change in direction and stopped taking my laptops out unless it was for a specific trip. Instead, I enjoy myself when I'm out. If I get a cool idea, I have a little pocket notebook to write the idea in. (I might start taking a netbook along someday, but at present the netbook that I have - EEE900 - is just too underpowered for the work I'm doing. So it's a web-browsing box only, which I don't need for work. I think I need to get rid of that thing altogether.)

So instead, I focused on improving the home environment. I got a monitor(HP2009M 20") a few weeks ago and added a USB keyboard and trackball and figured that I would have a dual-monitor setup with that and the laptop monitor. Except that it hasn't worked out that way; Win7 makes it pretty easy to tile things two or three across if necessary with the Win+(Arrow key) shortcuts and the 20" has ample resolution for that. And my work style has transitioned towards "one thing at a time, no distractions." I haven't used an IM client in months. IRC rarely. So the laptop screen sits empty most of the time, like right now, and I have unused space on the main monitor too! (That would change quickly if I were to go back to having stuff I check impulsively every two seconds again, but it's probably better not to...)

The main improvement to what I have, I guess, would simply be a more powerful box, possibly with multiple drives so I can keep clean, separate OS installs without even having to dig into partitioning...which leads me towards thinking about a desktop again...
Particularly funny moments:

"Thank you for your bug report. That's alright known upstream", "But this has been known on GNOME bugzilla since 2001-03-30. That is 7 years, they're hopeless."

"2009 this hasn't been fixed"

"Stagnated, status returned from In Progress → Confirmed"

I just found it nice relevant tale in light of all the recent argument about the iPad and it's restrictions versus what 'normal' people are looking for. That last comment was 5 months ago and the upstream Gnome bug is still present. This is in the most 'User Friendly' distro (Ubuntu), as a bug report in a project dedicated to finding 100 small 'paper cut' minor annoyance problems in Ubuntu, as well so it can't be argued as 'too trivial'.
I think the Constitution defines, beyond the definitions of the core institutions of power, the bounds of power over its citizens.

Laws, passed by Congress, define the rights of individuals with respect to each other, employers, etc...as well as the government.

I'm not claiming large authority here -- just recalling civics and government as I was taught.
>|Answer this: You have somehow given a completely unlocked iPad to a child that will run any unsigned executable.

>|How are they going to figure out that they can hack its guts?

I have no idae, I think the point is that they can't.

>|Now answer this: You have given a child a personal computer running Windows 7 or OS X 10.6.

>|How are they going to figure out that they can hack its guts?

http://www.python.org/download/

http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/where.xml

http://openbsd.org/ftp.html

http://gcc.gnu.org/

http://docs.python.org/tutorial/

http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/tutorial/

The list goes on and on and on and on and on and on of things that I can do on my PC that I will not be able to do on an iPad. If the iPad philosophy becomes the norm (which it probably will) we're boned.

Apple has set a precedent here. They have said "It's okay to release a PC, then totally limit what software can even be installed on it. It's ours, you're just licensing it and that is fine.". Other manufacturers are going to take note.
Great job. I have a friend who has a similar program (based in Stanford). Every year, they take a group of American and Japanese college students and then visit countries in South East Asia (Thailand, Burma, etc). Most of the students stated that the trip has totally changed their lives.
Tesla Is Going Public
I taught high school level algebra for two years, so I have a moderate familiarity with this subject.

I, too, dislike these types of problems, and I refer to them as "math book" problems, because that's the only place you'll ever see them. I mean, if Luigi can paint 1/2 of a room in 3 hours and Mario can paint 1/4 of a room in 2 hours, the way you find out in the real world how fast they can paint the room together is to throw them in the freaking room with two sets of painting equipment and let them go to it. If it's not going fast enough for you, then you go find Mario's friend Bowser and hire him to help them.

But, I don't think lack of realism is the worst thing about these types of problems. I think lack of fun is. I have a graduate degree in mathematics, and I frequently work on problems that have little connection to anything (so far as I know) in the real world, just because it's fun for me to do so. To me, the real problem with high school algebra textbooks is they're so goddamn boring -- and I'm saying this as someone who really, really likes math.

If I had my way, there wouldn't be such a thing as "algebra 1", "algebra 2," "trigonometry," etc. as high school math courses. I'd teach "Year 1 math," "year 2 math," and so on, and put the focus on problem solving rather than any one particular corner of math. If the problems are interesting, the students will do the work and love it. I've seen it happen. I can't imagine that such a problem-solving based course would prepare students for either college or the real world any worse than what we're currently doing.
I think there are more solutions than just open or closed. I just recently tried my hand at Blackberry development. It runs 2 type of code. Signed and unsigned. Accessing certain API's requires signed code.
Oh my -- "optimization" is a very poor choice of word here!
IE6 is slowly heading to hell. This is my personal wish.
It's not really about all those enterprise-y intranet sites that "only" work on IE6. It's likely that the amount of effort necessary to make those sites work on IE8 is, on average, not that great. The problem is more the environment those sites were created in. Hidebound, fear-based bureaucracy combined with very little development talent.

Most such sites are burdened by crushing change-control processes. Those change-control processes exist as a somewhat reasonable bulwark against the very real harm that an unskilled, talentless development team (which, sorry to say, is the norm in the enterprise) lead by unsophisticated, incompetent management can do. This creates a double-whammy for corporations who want to move away from IE6. In principle the work may not be that difficult or extensive, but the dev. team may be too incompetent to even be aware of what the right work is or what the risks are, and the testing process alone would be extremely costly and time consuming. Not to mention the tricky cross-coordination between multiple teams that may be required. It's a perfect storm of just the sorts of things that can halt enterprise-y organizations in their tracks.

Note that the even bigger problem of updating all of the sites on the web so they worked in more modern browsers (even back in the day a multi-billion dollar problem) has already largely been solved. Because site owners knew they had no choice so they rationally invested enough effort into keeping up with the times as was necessary. It's not the size of the problem, it's the capability of the people and organizations tasked with solving it that's the problem.
Who knows how much it would hurt Google's earnings. These aren't people who are out buying new computers, who says they're clicking on ads?

I'm sure that some are clicking, but I don't know that IE6 users are necessarily as lucrative to Google as users of other browsers.
The iPad has really brought out a lot of old, crochety "well in my day" engineers that are now to the point where its embarassing.

The iPad will draw more people towards software engineering, because for the first time we will have a general purpose computer that doesn't suck horribly for normal people. It will be cool. It will be fun.

Passion for software has little to do with how much you can "hack" down to the hardware. It has to do with curiousity, drive, and interest. The iPad is going to increase these. Any lack of hackability out of the box that is really interesting will be overcome by these kids, I think people posting about this are thinking these darn youngins will never figure out how to jailbreak their iPads. Odds are though, they just won't care, because being able to root the filesystem is pretty boring compared to what you can do for a $99 dev kit.

The development environment for the iPhone is perfect for learning. None of the bullshit, all of the good stuff so you can get results quickly. Apple should simply make it so you can get a dev license as a student for free, or really cheap ($99 is arguably already pretty cheap considering it includes the App Store services.)

Kids will be able to write apps for the iPad and get them into the App Store. Now their non-tech savvy friends, and everyone in the world, will be able to get them in one tap. This will be absolutely phenomenal for re-kindling the fire of curiosity and passion for building more stuff. When I was learning, I was lucky if a few dozen local nerds on BBSes tried out my programs. Now a clever teenager could conceivably become a millionaire.

Now, what if they want to go deeper? What if they want to use "undocumented APIs"? They can, of course, but can't share their work through the App Store. (They can share it with friends via Ad Hoc) What if they want to really hack the thing beyond what they can do in an app's sandbox? They can, of course, jailbreak.

This is a much better world for getting young kids excited about engineering. I personally think Apple could not pull off the computer revolution they are poised to do with an open system. Just look at the Jailbroken iPhone ecosystem for an idea of what that would look like. It's great if you're a hacker, but it would have destroyed the platform.

Instead of complaining about not being able to root your iPad, complain about the fact Apple is not talking about how they're going to use the iPad to get kids excited about programming.
Is your app 1.6+ or just not in the Android Market? I searched for it and can't find it. (stuck on 1.5.x)