skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have to wonder if it is perhaps due to the resolution of the iPhone. As I understand it, most iPhone apps are hardcoded to the iPhone screen size, so if Apple wanted to reuse iPhone apps on the iPad, it would either need to use an itty-bitty screen or resize the display.

1024x768 is the smallest standard 4:3 resolution to fit a doubled iPhone screen, which is 320x480, doubled to 640x960. Hardware support for pixel doubling could be faster and use less power than scaling a textured 3D quad. But regardless of how the scaling is performed, an integer multiple will probably look better than scaling to an arbitrary size.

One undesirable artifact of doubling the iPhone screen on a 1024x768 screen is that it would have borders all around the edges. And this is precisely what we see on their demo page. http://www.apple.com/ipad/app-store/
Huh, I like it. Especially the universal back button; it provides a much better flow than the iPhone where you have to go back to the home screen and relaunch the app you were in when you got a text message.
That just means a device for people who have very few technical skills will need a near-constant and perfectly working internet connection to be passably useful.
The thing is, without an open platform, the new, innovative ways of working with this machine will never be invented.

This is about far more than running your own Ruby scripts. It's about the fact that true innovation cannot exist in such an environment. And the problem is, you will not see what you're missing; people won't bother developing new technologies that have no platform they can legally run on.

Would the Web exist if Microsoft had been able to ban Netscape from running on Windows? What new, groundbreaking technologies are we missing out on because it's not worth the time and effort to create something new if the platform vendor can simply forbid you from publishing it?
Reading this now makes me think this might be a set up by apple.... yeaaah, maybe they just incited those guys over at Fusion Garage to screw the project.
Cool. Thanks for the code.

What's the advantage of doing it this way as suppose to using an ajax call?
Poll: Ask HN: Did you want to see a Verizon Iphone today?
Was I the only one begging to hear about a Verizon Iphone today?
1. YES! Please give me an option for a Verizon iPhone so I can finally have reliable phone/data usage!
2. If iPhone doesn't have Verizon service by this summer, given the app store debacle, I'm seriously considering switching to a Google nexus phone or android phone with more service options.
3. AT&T isn't that great, but it does the job - no need to change.
2. What? AT&T is just great, why change?
It would be nice to see somebody run similar benchmarks for non-Windows operating systems.
Motorola CLIQ to get Radio Function working soon.
I really like the form factor and I'm tempted, but based on what I've seen it's not exactly what I want. Unless it blows me away in ways I'm not expecting when I see it hands on, it will probably be a No. I want a tablet with this form factor and I have $500, hopefully this will kick start other companies to get similar devices out the door.
I guess their 1984 ad campaign was more precient than Steve could have imagined. The surprise is that he is the old guy on the screen. Now, who's the woman throwing the hammer?
Oh oh, I think the NDA is back in effect. Which is still dumb.
I was kind of interested in the keyboard dock at first glance. Here's a way to turn an iPad into a simple computer that my kid can use for school tasks or email without trashing my desktop computer setup.

But on second glance: how do you drive the UI from the keyboard? Can you use a mouse? Are you going to have to lift your arms and gesture all over the place to open a file, change apps, etc?

If they have an answer to the second problem, watch this thing get pushed heavily at the education market in the fall.
"Processor is always a harder to produce part and there is only handful of suppliers."

That's how ARM started. The designers of the Archimedes computer looked round for a powerful but cheap CPU and couldn't find one, so they decided to build their own. They had a very small team, so by necessity it was a simple design - but that ended up being its strength.
Maybe they wanted it to sound more mature than it really is :)
I feel really cheated when some bits of the documentation which can't (easily) be munged aren't on erldocs and I have to go back to the cheezy old frames version...

I used to like the frames one 'cos it was so proper telco engineering, hell-mend-ye, but not any more ;)
To be honest, I think this is one of the few areas where Joel is off the mark.

In my experience, the "tester" is a useless position that usually only exists because of a deficiency in one of two areas.

The first reason you need testers is that your programmers can't - for whatever reason - turn out code that works. Either they don't sufficiently understand the problem scope, they're overworked, or they're just lazy and don't bother running through enough of their own quality controls before releasing changes.

The second area is that you aren't getting the right feedback from customers. Joel uses an example in his article:

With long-cycle shrinkwrap software, it can take a year or more to hear feedback from customers.

The problem is the cycle is too long. Fix that.

I find mostly this is due to more basic things, like separating client service from programming (hello feedback!), allowing salesmen to mollycoddle their clients, or not even bothering to ask or listen.

The "tester" is the response to the existence of either one of both of the symptom above. By their very existence, they are a sign that you are either working in a company that has placed itself in a less than ideal market (selling enterprise software, for example), is poorly led, or has leadership that doesn't listen.

All this thinking hearkens back to computer engineering as building a house; and analogy so flawed that even PG saw fit to write a book with a more apt one.

This has been my experience and I have yet to see a situation where it isn't true.
When will the LCARS interface be out for it?
Is there any way to develop for the iphone/ipad without a Mac?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_caus...

The numbers here are too small and the data too limited to make that claim. Also search engine changes aren't instantaneous -- I've seen it takes days or weeks for changes found in a crawl of a small site to percolate through Google. Did Google even crawl the pages in question on the day Survey IO went live?
Vulcan never gets any love.
It's not going to support arbitrary USB devices, no.
I don't believe that survey.io would have had that type of effect on your website traffic. We've been using it on http://technews.am for quite some time with no impact on visitor numbers.
I recommend you read this if you want a reminder about what the personal computer revolution is all about: http://www.newmediareader.com/book_samples/nmr-26-kay.pdf. The point is to get to the point where people actually give a damn about computers.

As much as I love esoteric computer languages and UNIX, I don't consider those to be the paragons of the promise of computers.
To put it in a different context, a lot of people (myself included, and I'm a hardcore techy) prefer to play video games on consoles rather than PCs so as to avoid dealing with all these headaches. You want to just put the game in, press play, and it works, without dealing with device drivers and hardware incompatibilities and software version conflicts.

The fact that the model is now being extended to things like web browsing and e-mail isn't necessarily a bad thing for 90%+ of the population who just want a device that always works (and always works the same way). It's turning functions formerly reserved for a computer proper and moving into the closed-off-but-much-more-straightforward consumer electronics space.
No; I keep dreaming of a 'wearable' computer with a heads-up display that could replace my desktop - we get closer and closer, but never actually there.
Macs are wide open. Apple creates the default user experience, but you're free to develop and run any software you want without begging for permission. Apple's total control over the iPhone/iPod/iPad platform is a change for the worse.
If I were Adobe, I'd be furious. Exclusion of Flash from this platform is a slap in the face, despite Jobs' perspective of how it would break his App Store model. If it weren't for Adobe focusing their Creative Suite development on Jobs' platforms, Apple wouldn't have had the design community's support that it had for so many years. Apple owes Adobe.
But it wouldn't be the most bureaucratic thing done by a multinational corporation.
The 1886 and 1822 quotes look like they are talking about using the whole plant, not just feeding animals the ears or grain.

Not really related to your comment, but corn is actually a grass (grasses are a taxonomic group within the plants), so it would be technically accurate (albeit misleading) to say that a cow fed nothing but corn is also "grass fed."
I understand what you're saying, but the key is enabling. This device enables some things at the cost to many others.

Mind you, I'm not saying it won't be cool, and I'm not saying it won't sell many units, (although I have my doubts). I'm just saying this isn't the logical conclusion to the personal computer revolution. A personal computer is, by definition, a general purpose computing device, which this most assuredly is not.

Edit, reply to following comment: How is "it does what I tell it" a narrower definition of enable than "it does what it's allowed to do by the people I bought it from"?

I'm not trying to be flip; I think it looks very sexy. However, it's just a narrow tool, not the end-all of computers.
And does anyone who is actually going to buy the iPad care? Of course not.
Useful Ruby One-Liners
survey.io widget is site wide, so it was showing up on all pages on the site. Google crawls the site every day, so changes are more or less instantaneous.

A lot of times, it takes like 7 minutes from the moment a question is posted, to the moment it shows in Google.

But yeah I'm just as baffled as you, as to why it had such a big impact
I know of no other company that can charge $100 for 16GB of flash memory. Differentiating on real features like 3G is good and expected. Differentiating on commodity hardware like memory is unfair.

Ahem: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/01/blu-ray-maker-re-boxe...
> Yes: don't until you're asked.

I think the question was asked by quite a few people.

> iPod demos and tech specs pages on Apple's website don't advertise what formats it doesn't play.

Usually a format list is complete, if a format is not there, you know it is not supported. But I do not think that it makes sense for the iPad to list all web technologies, as in, it supports html, css, xhtml, txt, javascript, flash, ... . Flash is not just a format.

> An iPhone demo wouldn't show dropped calls, at least not if it were easily preventable.

Now this is a tough point. Of course they would not show a misfeauture in the demo. Perhaps they were making a point that missing Flash is not a misfeature after all, and that web pages should be written without a Flash dependency.

But in the end, I might be completely wrong and it might have been a slip up after all, I wouldn't know.
http://www.apple.com/ipad/specs/
Apple iPad and Sociology
Wow, if that inclusion is the reason then it's uncanny. On Monday I pushed a minor update to one of my websites that included the survey.io code and watched traffic coming from Google tank.

Just rolled back that inclusion... we'll see if that was the reason for the traffic drop.

Edit: quick clarification... the survey.io code was the only change that would be showing up to spiders. The other updates included in the change were all within areas that require authentication
Yeah, there's s surprise. It's odd how VMWare has a very good VMWare workstation for Windows, and a firaly medicore Fusion for Mac. Makes me sad I paid for Fusion couple of years back.
Excellent read! Does anyone know of any study that extrapolates global temperatures from Landsat images?
I've not looked into the details of Steve Job's letter on DRM and the eventual droping of DRM from iTunes but this quote, "John Sullivan said, "Our Defective by Design campaign has a successful history of targeting Apple over its DRM policies. We organized actions and protests targeting iTunes music DRM outside Apple stores, and under the pressure Steve Jobs dropped DRM on music." seems like they are over stating their impact on the issue.
Bluetooth doesn't have the bandwidth, and while Apple has a program for approving attached accessories, only a handful have made it to the public: Apple strangled a lot of products in their cribs.
It's not the no option.

For example, if you asked me this question about the iPod (which I own) or the mac mini (which I own) clearly I'd be lying if I said I wasn't going to buy either of those pieces at all.

I probably will buy one of these. But I'll give it a year or two first.
I'd like to see that fight.
The average is ~14 days now. I'll look around for the source on that and edit this when I have it.
It would kinda have to be to run random pre-existing iPhone apps.
I'm using Fedora 11 right now, I despise it. IT put it there and I don't want to go through the Linux wireless dance again.
Comet with node.js and V8
Yes. The entire flight he was referring to was from San Francisco to Tokyo. http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/27/live-from-the-apple-table... search the page for "hours"
This is alarmist nonsense.

The App store and the iPhone have fostered a colossal amount of innovation, and made a lot of normal non-techy people very, very happy. And a bunch of techies too.

And in the end I hope it doesn't come down to open source advocates getting their way so they can install vim, but it being about my Mum being able to use it without having to phone me saying that it's all gone wrong again and can I talk through 3 hours of trying to fix the damn thing.
Recent Trends in Melting Glaciers
Yes. This is like a chicken processor who also owns a feed mill saying that he controls the supply chain. In actuality, he delivers a load of feed to somebody else's chicken farm and then picks up the chickens a few weeks later.
It's crass.
The 3G unit has the same sort of GPS that the iPhone has. Whether or not that's "real" to you, it's good enough for me. I hope that someone produces a car dock because that would make it pretty much the best navigation unit available.
I'm confused. How does skill level factor into it? And what is wrong with assuming that internet connections are usually available?
Organizing the protest, Free Software Foundation (FSF) operations manager John Sullivan said, "Our Defective by Design campaign has a successful history of targeting Apple over its DRM policies. We organized actions and protests targeting iTunes music DRM outside Apple stores, and under the pressure Steve Jobs dropped DRM on music..."

Yeah, I'm sure that's why they dropped DRM from the iTunes store.

edit: formatting.
Um... antibiotics don't treat the "side effects of too much corn" (?!). They're given to animals to prevent (or sometimes treat, but usually just to prevent) bacterial infections that are spread between animals being kept in otherwise infection-prone environments.

It's true that in modern farms "grass fed" is usually synomymous with "pasture-kept", where the animals spend time wandering with lots of space instead of crushed against each other at feeding troughs. So to some extent corn-feeding probably correlates with infection rates, I guess.

But just to be clear: eating corn doesn't make you sick. It's not true for people and it's not true for cows. :)
Sure, why not? At only $499 I feel like it's worth having just to use in my house. I plan to dock it at my computer desk and use it in conjunction with my desktop for music playback, video, etc. I can undock it and go read a book or browse the internet. I certainly could use a laptop for that but this is smaller, cheaper, has a nicer display, and is going to have huge third party support. The iWork demo really shows the potential of doing desktop quality applications on the iPad. I'm sold. The low price tag actually makes me wonder if I should buy two. I wouldn't mind docking one of these into my car. (I was going to spend $400 on a nice in-dash player with good iPod integration anyway, what's another $99?)
The dog analogy is a bit off. Programmers are not like dogs. We can remember mistakes we made a year ago and still learn from them. You want a short feedback cycle, not because it's the only way your programmers will learn anything, but because you can only improve so much each cycle. The only way to improve the necessary amount is to go through a lot of cycles, preferably in the shortest possible time.

Feedback from testers is great, but I've found a bigger reason why I love our QA team. For whatever reason, it's hard to implement something and test it at the same time. It's just hard to make my brain think in both modes at once. It's also hard to test something that I've implemented, because my brain is biased by the thought processes it used during implementation. Trying to think in both modes (implementation and testing) means I'll probably end up doing neither effectively. If you have a great QA team, you don't have to think in both modes. It's great.

That hints at his point about letting incompetent programmers do QA. I completely agree with him. A tester thinks differently than a programmer. Hire great testers. So many companies make that mistake.

I'm glad to see Joel take a public stand on automated tests, too. Automated tests have their place and their value, but his criticisms of them are completely valid. No amount of automated testing can obviate the need for good human QA. For some applications, automated testing can be such a pain to get right and maintain, that it's often more work than it's worth.
I believe Apple's success stems from its portable devices, mainly the iPod and the iPhone. Both of those devices could take full advantage of Apple's closed door policy. The iPod and the iPhone are extremely well built because Apple had complete control over all the parts. All the other phones on the market just felt like cheaper plastic knockoffs. Furthermore, Apple is somewhat lucky that the functionality you'd want from these portable devices is very limited and so Apple didn't miss any of the market by providing such limited functionality.

However, devices bigger than iPhone - in the netbook/iPad range - need significantly more functionality. I believe Apple missed the boat with the iPad, especially if it really is targeting grandpa and grandma. People are becoming more tech savvy and they will be less and less willing to shell out money for an inflexible device that only serves a rigid set of predefined functions.

The iPad, I'm sure, is constructed extremely well. However, taking it to the bathroom, to bed and around the house in general isn't the same thing as taking it everywhere you go. Apple's success is in building beautiful durable portable hardware. The iPad just isn't portable enough or flexible enough for people to want it.
http://www.ifixit.com/

I'm typing this on a Macbook that no longer has its original RAM, hard drive, or keyboard/trackpad. The RAM and hard drive upgrades didn't break any sort of warranty and were rather trivial.

The Mac Pro is certainly not the only apple computer to modify. It is only the easiest to upgrade. Just because an upgrade isn't easy or encouraged doesn't mean you can't do it.
Couldn't agree more. I definitely like Australia over Canada because their government seems much more conservative in its spending habits (as indicated on the graph in the article) and their physical proximity to China and India give them a cost advantage in transporting commodities to fuel the growth.
The kindle will have apps too in the near future.
Hi, This is Hiten from KISSmetrics / Survey.io - We do not know what is going on with this and have not heard of this issue before. We're taking a look at this issue right now. At the moment, we think it might have to do with the Google Analytics code on the survey.io embeds, so we will be removing the GA code from them shortly. If anyone has any feedback or ideas please feel free to shoot me an email: hshah at kissmetrics.com
God bless Richard Stallman!
Netbooks, which are basically the same price or cheaper, can do the same as the above and are much less locked in. More immediately, they also have Flash support, multitasking, and USB ports.

People still need more heavy-duty computers to do those other things as well as for non-leisure stuff. The advantage of an iPhone was that it was extremely portable and you could just pull it out on the bus to pass the time.

The iPad is barely more portable than a laptop, and much less functional. I guess reliability of the machine is greater since it's so stripped down. Other than that, I don't see what's so special.
Because most of the other major developed world sources of government debt are probably in worse shape than we are.
What I'd really like is to reduce the noise. Yes, it's iPad day (now), but I fail to see why 1/3 of the 30 links are Apple related. I don't need to know about the new SDK being available, I don't need to see an old Paul Graham essay, I don't need to see the FSF's reaction, and I don't need to see a poll on whether or not people are going to get one.
It connects you to the internet.
It plays music.

My 3 year old daughter has a $100 piece of plastic that does both of those functions.
Elements of Software Construction, Course 6.005 at MIT
My first thought upon seeing the title to the post:

Q: What's the difference between Global Warming and Clojure?

A: Clojure is real.
I don't get this title. (In "1 line" of plain text) ;-)

[edit] jokes aside, its actually a good read.
My Mum wanted to copy music onto her multi-gigabyte Sony Walkman mp3 player. I simply showed her every single step to get the job done, and she wrote it all down, and all she has to do now is consult her notes. This is a Windows machine - I was just showing her how to rip a CD without installing iTunes (I think we used Windows Media Player).

My point is that anyone can learn a complex system if taught right. Reading the manual is no small luxury, and without the ability to learn a system, you are helpless to the bad guys who want to keep you in the dark.
To be fair to CmdrTaco, I wouldn't have wanted a 1st-gen iPod either. Did you ever use the old ones? They really had a lot of kinks to work out and in my opinion were not the best mp3 players on the market.
The iPhone's got a real GPS unit, augmented with cell-tower data and some fast-almanac-acquire tricks. AGPS.
Yes, but will that segment shell out that much money for it - $630 is a lot for Mom to shell out for something to surf websites on - especially when they already have a computer in the house that surfs the web just fine.

I don't think you'll see real adoption until the price comes down a lot (say $300 or less) and I doubt Apple will do that, although others might.

In the end I suspect that it'll be a pretty niche market for the people who already buy everything Apple.

Now, I could be wrong and I'm sure Apple did at least some homework on it's marketability, but still, seems this way to me.
This course seems to be newly shared at MIT's OpenCourseWare; the calendar and its lecture notes are particularly interesting for new to mid-level developers:

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Compute...