skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
True, but the word has been reclaimed more than I thought it would be when I first read some screed (ESR?) on the difference between the two. Remember the breathless news reports in the late 90s showing green on black websites of "hacker groups"? It's only natural that the word Hacker has these connotations since the first crackers were hackers. Now people talk about this or that hack without worrying that they'll be arrested or kicked out of school.
During the keynote, they presented the iPad as "magical and revolutionary". Of course, this is marketing, but I was thinking about it to try to see what could be so magical and revolutionary about it.

For the magical part, sure it's a wild hyperbole. But I suppose you could say that, in that it feels like it's the real beginning of the kind of interfaces that have been imagined and dreamt of for many years on TV, in movies… and considering the size of it, it is pretty amazing.

As far as revolutionary, my first impression was "how is that revolutionary since everything it does an iPod Touch has been doing for a couple of years on a smaller screen?". But I came to a similar conclusion as Joe Hewitt, in that it's revolutionary (though it's also hyperbolic) because it shifts the paradigms of computing and the way we think about computers. Yes, the iPhone/iPod Touch are similar technically but the apps were still apps for an advanced mobile phone and the size of the screen was in fact very limiting.

In a way, I feel that the iPad is what computers should have been from the start if it had been possible at the time. For example, take the mouse. It was a great invention to interact "directly" with what's on the screen, but if it had been possible to have touchscreens then, I doubt mice would have been used. Applications have always been a bunch of files in the filesystem and we got used to that, but really that's something we don't really need to know and something that Apple has been removing for quite some time on the Mac even, with app bundles.

So, of course, we'll see what happens. But I think it's an interesting step.

PS: yes, I think I drank too much kool-aid
Open Source Ad Stats - Stack Overflow
The Lost World, Now in Color (determining dinosaur coloration)
Didn't palm have pretty much the same UI metaphor before any of the iPhone UI came up? It might be the windows 95 to the current windows 7 in terms of sophistication, and replaced styluses with fingers (many applications don't really take advantage of multi-touch), but many of the same items are there.
Interesting. This is completely different from the hyped up CAHSRA plan about 6 months ago that was saying "high speed raiL" when what they really meant was "catching up on existing track maintenance"
On non-hacker sites it has yes. But here on HN we can use it properly.
Agreed. The touch interface on the iPhone/iPod version of Google Earth is a great illustration of the potential.
Have you ever used final cut? I really don't want to live in a world where I can fix my logic by re-aligning things to a pixel grid.

The reason programmers use text is that you can input text much faster than you can drag and drop things together, it's easy to massage with simple scripts, and if the vendor-du-jour's IDE is broken, incomplete, or unsatisfactory we can go outside of it without having to deal with some arbitrary binary file format.

Seriously, you need to make a better case that a visual language would be an improvement instead of another reason to become a park ranger.
I'd make that years not months.
As a developer for Android devices, i must say this article makes me really sad. How can a developer be satisfied with limitations and just put the "but it's how it is to be more secure" stamp on it.

Let's see those 2 sentences that make really no sense:
"it can't just read and write willy-nilly to the file system, access hardware, or interfere with other apps. In my mind, this is one of the best features of the OS."
and:
"As a developer, it's a bit sad losing the ability to come up with crazy plugins and daemons and system-level utilities, but I believe it's a tradeoff worth making."

I've now owned Android devices since the G1 (the first), now switching to the Nexus One. The nerd i am i probably installed hundreds of those apps, that are not approved by someone. Not one of them did somehow brick my phone! The worst thing that happens is that apps don't do what i want, some even crash (but that's surprisingly rare). But still, they can run in the background, communicate with each other, etc.

So, why am i telling this:
If smart engineers can think about what a smartphone OS should be like, it will support save mechanisms for multitasking, for daemons and plugins. Behind Androids Interface are a lot of very neat concepts working.(intents/broadcasts, man, i love that concept!)

From what i can tell:

- iPhone OS is some stripped down Mac OS version, which probably has its deficits in some areas. I believe that Apple just doesn't give us multitasking because it has heavy impact on batterylife or security (because the OS wasn't made for mobiles, in the beginning).

- When chosing between a _free_ development platform on Java, with Eclipse on every major platform and a subscription based development only with Mac OSX and a language that is basically used nowhere else (Obj-C)... well, the choice is clear for me.
Google did a pretty good job with the Eclipse integration and it's toolchain.
>The rule is, "data in motion should be secured with TLS, data at rest should be secured with PGP".

No. The rule is, "ask people who know about security and cryptography to help you solve your problem".

That's what we do, and I can tell you that our guidelines are much more complex than simply using TLS or PGP. Actually I think we don't really have guidelines.

It's very easy to use TLS and PGP the wrong way.
house != pack of beer

tax deductions, appreciation, equity, income(it's a duplex and I rent 1/2), plus all sorts of small things such as reduced auto insurance as it's rolled into home owners insurance
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My 1st job in the valley was working for SGI. Seeing our one-time rival become a forgotten memory makes me a little sad all over again.

Some of the best OS Kernel engineers that ever walked, walked the hallways of those two companies.
I think by "Western nations" you mean North American nations. Even in the UK (probably the most "US-ized" country in Europe" make-from-scratch food is common.

In much of Europe you will find that instant foods make up only a slightly larger part of a grocery than make-from-scratch does in the US. Very minimal.
129 min trip includes several stops, Fresno, Bakersfield, Palmdale, etc. The actual hardware will support speeds of ~200 MPH.

[1] http://www.railway-technology.com/projects/california/
Whatever the opposite of spinning in one's grave is, Gerald Bull would be doing that right about now. This is just Project HARP recapitulated -- and I'd be willing to bet that a significant amount of the data behind this came from the Iraqi superguns Bull designed.

It's not detailed in the report, but I wonder if they've considered the "watermelon seed squeeze" method (wherein the projectile flies through a combustible gas mixture in a weakly-sealed barrel tube, compressing the mixture with its nose cone, creating a combustion zone about two-thirds of the way along a "spitzer" type projectile, thus applying the expansive force inward against the tail cone). That would either create one hell of a high-speed projectile, significantly reduce the barrel length required -- or even allow tolerable accelleration from, say, a linear electric motor's initial shove by simply stratifying different gas mixtures along the launch tube to control the combustion velocity. (Cheap 1-mil poly film would maintain the separation of gasses well enough and fail safely.)

Man, I has to go into rocket surgery. Or maybe double-nought spying.
wouldn't you have to conclude that one who makes such a choice is in some way mentally ill? Excepting terminal illness, I can't see how it makes sense otherwise.

Please don't take this the wrong way, I'm legitimately curious. I have friends who struggle with depression, some of whom clearly have contemplated this terrible 'solution'.
> I've taken to using a pickled python object in a text field in every model.

That's basically what App Engine does right there. It stores by an id, then the value is your object serialized as a protocol buffer.

The App Engine datastore allows you to look up by other properties than id because it indexes every field of your object in the background without you having to deal with it. You can query by pair-wise or more-wise indexes too, but you have to create those manually.
Best line: "No word on whether Canada's Coconut Grove Pads [selling iPad bras] will enter the trademark battle, but since its products are substantially different from Fujitsu's, Magtek's, or Apple's, we believe that any such effort would be a bust."
A Simple Pattern for Ruby's inject method
Storing pickled python objects is fine as long as you don't care about relational data. But if you aren't careful, data integrity will probably suffer over time as the complexity of your application increases. And that is not good. Anyway I'm sure a lot of people here know this stuff already. Just do your research and make sure the route you go makes sense for your application and your scaling requirements.
Log map of the universe
This is beautiful man. I was really sad when I came home after talking to you about this last weekend - I hadn't known. But reading this brought a different kind of tears to my eyes. You're an inspiration.
I'm glad to see him acknowledge that simply making new code and trying to enforce it---especially now---is not the solution. I wonder if he has any ideas as to what the 'cartoonish' booklet would contain? How much can you distill the most basic principles of engineering? I'd love to see the booklet, actually!
Meat-space bandwidth is currently unbeatable.

Telecommuting works for some people, in some jobs.

If eye contact, body language, serendipitous personal interaction, and shared experiences are not important to the social and communicative aspects of a job, then maybe staying home works well.
No opinions?
That's right.

--- sent from my iPad(tm)
I disagree on the Mars assertion. Commodity space travel, such as taking satellites and people to LEO, makes perfect sense as a commercial enterprise. Even the Moon is within reach for commercial spaceflight. However, the amount of work and innovation required to put the first man on Mars, an endeavor with no commercial prospects in any reasonable timeframe, seems far beyond the financial reach of anything but a government.
Actually the meaning hasn't really changed at all. The original "hackers" broke into computers and networks to play pranks on their collegues in the AI lab. Later "hackers" hacked the phone system to make free long distance calls. I find Paul Buchheit's definition of "hacking" the most accurate: find and exploit differences between the perceived rules and the real underlying mechanisms of a complex system. This can be perfectly legal in some cases, and illegal in others. It is all hacking nevertheless.
Is NASA even relevant anymore? Build a business model that makes space travel profitable. Don't rely on the government to do it, because they'll do an incompetent job of it at 10,000x the cost that private enterprise can do it for.
See my above comment. I think it is used properly here and "cracker" is superfluous ...
Bootup Demo Days and the Seed Accelerator
Truecredit
An informative and detailed review of the truecredit credit report and monitoring system.
These things are not high off the ground, building miniature on ramps would only be something like $20 per house. Hell they might be low enough for them just to roll over it like a speed bump.
It does 95% of the things people usually do with their computer with 5% of the headaches. Shouldn't be a problem.

Not to mention 75M people already know exactly how to operate it.
Rmd440
I liked this example. Like Blue's Clues it progressed and built nicely. Unlike so many other lisp blog posts and some of the comments right here, this post was missing the pompous, elitest attitude about how LISP is superior to all other programming languages.
Finally a robust CDN fallback for jQuery is possible
The Oracle Social Media Participation Policy
I remember your post, and thought this might have been a dupe; however, it sounds the same, with the same lack of details. Did anyone receive responses to their offers of technical help?
The evaluation version is fully functional in the simulator, but you can't get it onto a real device. $399 for the cheapest version. If they halved the price I'd buy it, I'm sure many more would too.
Thank you for this. I am starting and hopefully this'll give me a solid foundation.
Perhaps I should rather have said "The word hacker will never be fully reclaimed".
http://www.pehub.com/62168/glasshouse-files-for-75-million-i...
Ubuntu 8.04.4 Hardy Heron LTS
An Open Letter to Rackspace Cloud Hosting
Apple iPad chip is ARM based
Sort of off-topic: The train is a convenient socially acceptable excuse to leave work: "I'm sorry guys, but I have to catch the last train." This gets me a whole 15 hours a week of leisure time for reading or sleeping which I would not otherwise have.

After I separate from my day job (two more months, hopefully) I'll discuss societal insanity and its relationship to being a Japanese salaryman at length.
favors benefit to the end-user rather than the developer or other vendors

I think Apple's current approach favors benefit to apple rather than developers or end-users.

Sometimes Apple's interests line up with those of the user, but often they don't. I hope it hurts their sales and benefits more open platforms (probably Android) - that may be because I'm from the old world.

I like the dreams embodied by the Lisp machines and by OLPC. The idea that every part of the system can be easily inspected and manipulated resonates strongly with me. The freedom to tinker with a device can and does lead to new and amazing things the original creators never imagined. College kids playing with iPads will never invent Multifinder, and that's sad.
I wish that blog post was a joke, as well as some of the comments there.
I actually really hope that Apple loses this battle, partly because the name is horrible, but mostly because they're wrong. I see absolutely no reason that they should be able to wrest away control of a name being actively used for another mobile technology product, especially when the other company has already filed for trademark protection.
H.264 Licencing and Free Software
Apple did the same thing with the iPhone, which Cisco owned:
http://blogs.cisco.com/news/comments/update_on_ciscos_iphone...

They were obviously aware that iPad was trademarked, so if they went ahead with the name, they must feel confident enough that they'll a reach settlement of some sorts with Fujitsu et al.
But the iPad is not for powerusers. It is marketed to the general user. And for the average user, good enough is good enough.
Image rotation in 8 lines using the Java Advanced Imaging API
Really don't like the sound of that, pickling allows you to serialize any python code, and consequently deserialize it. Presumably you are placing user submitted data into this pickle and therefore without careful sanity checking wouldn't this potentially allow the user to inject code which may be run on deserialization?

Someone else may be able to shed more light on this and correct me (please do!) but thats my concern and would love to hear if it was a valid one or not.
The point is that you still can pop the hood and make modifications. (Though a lot of manufacturers have tried to prevent some of this with locked-down computers under the hood)
Not really. A lot of the hacks that are used to jailbreak the phone are actually security holes. So they can and do get patched, leaving you 'out in the cold.'
High-speed rail is for persons, not for goods. With high-speed train you can travel from A to B (with A and B being in the 'right' range of course) cleaner and faster than with the highway. And it may actually create a demand for more travel. In France, Marseille had a big housing price increase as the high-speed train brought Marseille 3 hours from Paris (http://bit.ly/9qPHlM).
Did it use UnionFS?

On a tangent, why aren't more Linux installs (outside of 'live' distros) making use of UnionFS? That makes it easy to 'lock down' the base install because all of the writing goes to a separate partition that could be completely removed to restore the original state. Are their performance issues with UnionFS (performance in a desktop-sense, not in a server-sense)?
Funny, I just started thinking along similar lines.

I was underwhelmed initially by the iPad as well. Then I remembered this painting program I wrote back in the '90s for my Mac IIsi, and how cool it was (geometrical forms with palette animation) -- and then I started thinking about a touch-based version of this program -- maybe with networking -- and then I turned to my wife, and said, "You know that new thing Apple just came out with?"
I don't know how it is in the US but in Germany taxe revenues can't be bound to their sources, that means the government can (well, have to) spend the oil tax on whatever he wants.
Who says it has to be officially supported? Look at the Linksys WRT54GL. It is basically made to be hacked even though it will function correctly without loading a different firmware to it.
Not true. Apple requires you to sign your application before the iPhone OS will allow it to be installed. Also, the check is on the device itself, not in iTunes.

There's only two ways to get the apps installed: 1) Pay $100. 2) Crack the device.

Reference and instruction via networkpx: http://networkpx.blogspot.com/2009/09/compiling-iphoneos-31-...
Additionally, since we're talking about web pages, the markup tags will still be composed of ASCII characters, for which UTF-8 has an advantage.
First, I take this and other no-more-ipad stories a little tongue-in-cheek and guess others do the same. In fact I'm reading both the linked articles and the comments of most submissions. I'd even buy one of those things if I could.

That said, I do question the quality of the stories, specially the misguided arguments and the tone that they're delivered with. A lot of the writers seems to think that the critics are saying that the iPad won't sell or that nobody will like the device. And they think that's because critics are asocial geeks that have no clue on how the real world works, and should be educated to dismiss such superfluous luxury as freedom to install programs, connect to a printer or download movies, luxuries that normal people doesn't want or care about.

That's annoying and the most annoying thing is saying that a system like the app store is actually good and "revolutionary" and that whoever doesn't like it is because he doesn't "get it".

All right, I believe that this device could sell very well and be a big hit among very diverse people, with technical background or otherwise, mainly because the well designed multitouch interface. But that doesn't make the whole thing desirable or needed,

The device seems great. It sucks that it's so closed.
Another point I would add to this list is to not be afraid of reading the Django Source code. While the docs cover a lot, you can find a lot of hidden gems simply going through the source code - it is highly readable and most stuff is where you would expect it to be.

Of-course, be careful while doing so though 'cause the stuff that isn't documented can change at anytime, and may break your code.
> While its going to be hard to get any kind of interpreter on the device, I'm sure someone will succeed eventually - and then we could well have a generation of kids who grow up programming because of the device.

Yes, someone will eventually succeed. There will be a jailbreak for this device which will turn it into a more interesting platform for students and technical users.

The complaint is that it should have been this way from the start, and we're betting on a flaw in Apple's design in order to get the most of their product.
So who else built a fake iPad last night?
It's a shame indy developers can't get their hands on the real thing. The interaction patterns on this device will be completely different & will require a different kind of UI design. So in order to get a 'feel' for what the iPad is like in real-world use I built a (very crappy) FakePad with plexiglass & duct-tape.

Anyone else has built something like this? Anyone else want to share their paper/cardboard mockups?
Watching video from online (iPlayer etc.) would be my ideal application for this - an iPhone is too small, a laptop is too clunky and uncomfortable and I hate watching video sitting at a desk.

Another thing that might be a hit is multiplayer games. I was playing an air hockey game with my son on his iPod Touch and it was surprisingly good. With a bigger screen that could really be an interesting thing to watch.

Lots of board games might work pretty well on something like the iPad as people could sit round it.
Ghost Whisperer DVD Boxset - Free-Press-Release.com
I don't know how anyone can be productive coding at a coffee shop with an uncomfortable chair and a laptop keyboard and screen. Sounds like hell on earth to me. Give me a door and some widescreens anyday.
I love that quote; the more I read it the more I'm touched by it. For the record, my girlfriend recommended it for inclusion.
That would work on the ipad too, wouldn't it?

But I too, think that the missing multitasking is a problem for this device. I think this is something Apple will change soon. They will not change their app store policy. This is the main reason for me not buying an ipad.

But what bothers me the most is that they could close also the Mac-Platform. Then I would have to leave it. And that makes me sad.
I'm not quite sure why there's this hard line drawn. Surely Android, for example, falls somewhere in between, with sandboxed apps and all the rest, but not quite the same draconian closed-ness?
> Whats truly amazing is that this is always how desktop development has always been done, except on Linux and Mac OS X. Pay your money, get your compiler, write your software, run your software. The Linux and Mac OS X crowd is up in arms because they have had GCC for at least 9 years, and $99 seems like a lot compared to free.

This how it's always been done? Really?

GCC: Initial release May 23, 1987
Commodore64: Release date August 1982
IPad Name Conjures Up More Than Intended
I'm so glad it touched you and that you got something out of it; that's the best compliment my inner writer can receive :)
I believe that is the motivation for the rumored change, to get more bang for the buck. NASA does some great things with planetary probes, etc., but their manned launch systems have always consumed prodigious amounts of money.

For example, the money SpaceX has spent to almost complete the development of their new NASA-funded launch system is approximately 1/20 of the projected cost overrun of the internal manned launch system NASA has been working on (the Aries I).
It is possible to build a poisonous pickle which, on depickling, calls arbitrary standard library functions, so accepting pickles from untrusted source is a No.

One may think that if only the internal model of the user input is pickled, and the user only gets to update this internal model through web requests in defined ways, thus never getting to upload pickles or construct arbitrary complicated python objects, it should be relatively safe.

However, what remains is that if someone manages to blindly inject SQL, he can inject executable code into your application, instead of just injecting data.
Palm's Project Ares may be a sign of the future. Perhaps in the future development will be hosted in the cloud rather than on the programmers unit itself.

http://ares.palm.com/Ares/about.html