skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, I get what you mean. At first this was a real let-down event for me. I was hoping, stupid and irrational as it would be, for Apple to unveil a completely new OS, completely new functionality and technology, and instead all they did was take their already-successful technology and reemploy it.

What excited me after I saw the keynote: Speed and apps. The fact that this thing is blisteringly fast is exciting in and of itself. No load times for anything? Pretty neat. And then they did some of the demo apps, the NY Times one in particular, and basically showed off then and there how the newspaper industry could save itself, and I was struck by the fact that given a screen of this size and a processor of this speed (whatever that actual speed is), you're capable of making a lot of very powerful things.

iPhone apps right now are some of the best programs ever made. In terms of build and ease-of-use and aesthetic quality, there're some things there that blow away and Windows/Mac app I've ever used. The fact that now developers have even more room to make their content means to me that we're going to see some applications that are cool to a degree that we've never seen before. If hearing birdcalls on your phone is magical already, I want to see what those same creative minds are capable of given ten inches of real estate.

So, not exciting on the surface, but the implications make me really giddy. I'm sure when we get closer to launch date Apple will reveal ads that say all that but more smoothly. I'm actually excited to see what the ads will be like.
Which is a conclusion with some pretty far-reaching consequences. Most environmental legislation in industrialized countries for the past decade, if not two, might have been based on flawed science.

Considering the egos of the people who would need to go out and say "when the facts change, I change my mind" to clean up this mess, it could take decades. We're hearing a lot about market failure these years, how's this for government failure?
These are the articles I love on Hacker News. However, I have to wonder what technique is going to win out. We can continue to obfuscate our email addresses, but is there a point where the spam filters we use just take over?

In a few years, it will be fun to see where we are with spam email...

@Redmage, I love your technique!
Yeah, screw the science, I know I'm right.
The CrunchPad is dead: I used past-tense.

But no, the iPad is going to bury itself because it's locked-down and feature-anemic. Any competitor can beat this, and many are coming.
Daytum.com: collect, categorize and communicate your everyday data
As far as I know, many songs are non-DRM'd, but not all of them.

Hm. I thought that their big announcement last year was that they'd converted the entire store to DRM-free, but I could be mistaken.

It's videos/software/books that I am worried about now.

Yeah, I agree about this one. Right now, I try and treat each thing on a case-by-case basis. I never buy digital video, but I'll buy my games off Steam and I buy the occasional Kindle book because Valve and Amazon have done such a job of winning my trust. (Even when Amazon messes up, like with the 1984 thing, they're very good at realizing they were dumb and sounding convincing in their apology.) I also feel like books and games are so easily pirated that if something bad happens, I can get myself a copy anyway.

Now, video rental is something different. I'm completely fine with the idea of paying for temporary access if I'm watching a TV show or a movie. DRM doesn't matter if it'll be gone a few hours from now anyway.
Actually, if you read his post, he's just asking if that happened or not.
In all seriousness, how does one start with setting up and learning how to program a CL web app?
How Apple hides the iPad’s dirty little secret with an optical illusion
I think you can do that - although I'm not entirely certain how much overhead a struct (defstruct) has. Array allocation has no overhead, to the best of my knowledge (if you specify the element-type, etc).

I usually don't code at that low level, but you might want to check out www.lrde.epita.fr/~didier/research/verna.06.imecs.pdf
Your iPad app ideas?
I thought a bit about what kind of new things iPad makes possible. Real-Time Strategy games will be fun with two people sharing the screen (others suggested this same idea). You could even use the iPad the replace menus in a high class restaurant. What are your ideas?
Any guesses as to why the Java implementation is relatively slow? JNI boundary crossings for floating point arithmetic, or lack of use of the math coprocessor?
I'm glad you asked ;-) http://blog.postabon.com/a-simple-lisp-webapp-for-beginners
I like the Lisp approach to optimize the program by adding hints to the runtime about types and the ability to tune the optimizer's aggressiveness from the code. It really makes possible to write the correct algorithms first, then later add appropriate optimizations simply by changing the optimized and unoptimized functions.

That said I think these kinds of benchmarks (and article titles) are misleading, because one who has deep knowledge in one language does not necessarily write good code in other languages. Even the article notes that "they are all just literal line-by-line translations of each other".
No, it can't, but it really doesn't matter that it can't. Most applications save your place in them, so the only cost of switching is that you have to wait a second for it to relaunch. If you've got a powerful enough processor, then relaunching applications is simply like switching. And because we've got a single-process tablet, there's no slowdown over time, no gucking up as things run dry.

I'd like Apple to figure out a policy that lets Pandora stream in the background, or Last.FM. Those are the only two I care about. Using push notifications for IM works perfectly for me: I see the messages as they happen, which is all I care about.
I see the idea, but you can take everything too far. To the entire company and to all investors? Every day? Really? That's borderline fascist surveillance regime.
I don't know, but it's much slower than I expected.
It's the latest Java installable by apt on Debian (all these tests are run in Debian running under VMWare).

$ java -version
java version "1.6.0_0"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_0-b11)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 1.6.0_0-b11, mixed mode)
Would also be a good word. It taps a different area of maths for its metaphor.
Apple: This Is What All The Mac Fanboys Wanted
I ran the Python script through Shedskin, a partial Python implementation that compiles Python to machine code via an intermediate layer of C++. I did not have to declare any types for any variables, or add declarations for speed/safety; Shedskin automatically determined the types.

The finished program went down in runtime from 533.7s on my machine, to 24.42 seconds. If we adjust for machine speed (since the author's Python ran the python code in 474s), the comparative optimized result would be 21.7 seconds compared to author's hand-optimized lisp code at 30.2.

Note that this is probably an ideal case for Shedskin (which is a relatively new product: a 1-man job that's just a few years old compared to, I guess, hundreds if not thousands of man-years of research that have gone in LISP implementations).

Still, an interesting result.
So in short, Adobe have capitulated trying to push the Flash plugin on the iPhone platform, and instead have decided to at least take a sliver of the application authoring tools market. Surprisingly smart move for them.
Actually, there is a solution that takes 0.52 seconds: http://www.spoj.pl/ranks/PRIME1/lang=LISP%20sbcl
I also wonder why your java benchmark is slow. Java seems to be around 2-3x slower than C on average, this would make your optimized CL to be around 1.5x faster than C.
The Neuroscience of Jazz
> I am wondering what led you to expect that the ipad would be something different; was it apple's history of making non-locked-down devices? its tendency to produce metric truckloads of insanely popular consumer devices?

I don't think I ever thought it would be open and hackable, however one can always hope!

In reality though, some piece of me always believed that the iPhone was so locked down for reasons of getting it on cellular networks who seem not be so keen on the idea of letting folks do as they please with their devices. I've heard that in years past, getting a developers kit for something like the motorola RAZR was impossible, though that was word of mouth.

And of course the iPad will have GSM support, so that may still remain true.

> I am thinking of a general answer to posts of this sort: If you don't like it, don't buy it.

I won't.

> And further, given the nature of this board, if you see a need (e. g., something people want), build it. Apple has seen a need, and it is building something that people want. You are seeing a need for something else, and it is possible that other people want it too, so why not go build it?

In this specific case, I don't know if there's a want for it aside from my own. It's my Pony. The biggest reason to not go build it is the threat of patents. But, that aside, I don't have the resources or know-how (easily obtained myself, or by partnering with someone who does of course).
"Opened at 180 degres"

Millions of dollars go into designing and manufacturing a product, then some jackass misspells something on the front page.
Well chosen response. Guess I deserve the down mods of the grey t-shirt and commie star brigade!
I'm actually a mathematician by training ;-)

I ran all tests 5 times each, and averaged the results. Each of the results for each of the tests were within 2% of each other, and the machine wasn't used for anything else while the tests were running.

I know it's not perfect, but I don't see any obvious sources of error ... I did provide all the source, so you're welcome to verify my results.
Dohhhhh don't use OpenJDK :)

Get the sun version, it's probably faster.

Although it may not be much faster, found this unfixed bug report:
http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=5005861
In every field of art, you see the biggest innovations when the technical barriers to doing things are taken away. Make film equipment cheaper and a lot of brilliant people without much money hit the scene. Make synthesizers cheaper and you have the 80s.

Something very similar is happening here. If I have an idea for a great hardware product, now I have the option of using this existing hardware, which is beautiful and has a beautiful method of interacting. Certain of the UI specs have already been handled for me. So there's less of a gap between my having an idea and my launching it than there was, say, five years ago.

I'm hoping for further similar breakthroughs. It would be nice if making a program was simply a matter of sketching out the user interface and seeing it realized.
Private Company Valuations: Silver Spring Networks, Inc.
Ability to play a lot more games with 2 players on a single screen is good. Plus, it would be good for strategy games by linking more than 1 iPad.
"...most mobile PC makers did not think to themselves "how on earth are we going to go up against this""

What I've been hoping ever since yesterday is that someone should release an "iPad" with a heavily customized open source OS on it. Add some Amazon integration (ala iTunes for books/music), customize the main apps to suite the form factor and a semi-open repository/app store for extra apps.

I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
Oh, and comparing the iPhone to the Razr is a bit of a strawman.

The Razr, first time around, captured people's imaginations because it suddenly offered the deep, unheard of cultural need to have the world in your pocket and have it be so small and sleek that you forget what that means. The iPhone is very comparable, except when Apple did it they redefined world.

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

But when the commercials come out, 75% of people will drool.

If you look at it from a cultural perspective, Apple is once again selling us the future. It was already here, sure, but now it'll be at your doorstep, charged, as soon as you like.
They’re Microsoft and Intel rolled into one when it comes to mobile computing. In the pre-taped video Apple showed, Bob Mansfield said of the iPad, “No one else could do it.” Only Apple.

The Windows XP tablets really were quite impressive after about the 3rd iteration of the software. I have an old tc1100, and it's very nicely designed. Surfing, I must say is a pleasure on the thing. They also had Zinio magazines pacakged with the install. Of course the whole Windows software catalog is quite usable on the thing. But Windows Tablets went the way of the Amiga and a bunch of things by Atari. It's one thing to make great technology. It's another thing to market it. Apple can do both. Or rather, they can do 5 things very well:

- Hardware
- Software
- Human Interface Design
- Marketing
- User/Developer Ecosystem

If they weren't able to do all 5 of these very well, it wouldn't matter how great the devices are. Other companies do the hardware & the software. Some are even pretty good at the marketing. Very few companies do all 5 of these things as well as Apple does.

(You can think of the success of both Firefox and Ubuntu as the introduction of good HID polish and Marketing to communities that already had the Software and a good User/Developer ecosystem.)
Very impressive! I haven't used Shedskin before, but I hope it continues to grow and improve.
And then those few bought RPN calculators.
In more depth : the sun JDK probably does a lot better job of JIT compilation, it's the difference between running interpreted bytecode and compiled native code.

On the Hadoop project, checksumming was a major CPU constraint, because you have to assume every file everywhere is possibly on faulty hardware, and checksum everything. They found that it was actually faster to implement CRC32 in pure Java and let the JIT compilation do it's magic than it was to make native calls to zlibc.

But that may not apply to floating point if the Java implementation is bad enough.
The average consumer is so clueless. Contract cancellation fees are some of the most abused tactics that typically come in the fine print.

As consumers, we want switching costs to be as low as possible. Which they should be. Two years is an insane amount of time to be chained to a particular provider. They should be worried. Verizon tried to get away with something similar, and the FCC pretty much said "no dice"

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870352350457460...

From the PDF release by the FCC:
“I was pleased to see the Commission’s Wireless Bureau pose a series of important
questions in early December to Verizon Wireless regarding the company’s recently increased
early termination fees (ETFs) and related issues. I was surprised, as many people were, to see
that Verizon elected to raise its early termination fees for certain ‘advanced devices.’
“Late Friday, Verizon Wireless responded to the Bureau’s queries. The company’s
answers, however, are unsatisfying and, in some cases, troubling. In particular, I am concerned
about what appears to be a shifting and tenuous rationale for ETFs. No longer is the claim that
ETFs are tied solely to the true cost of the wireless device; rather, they are now also used to foot
the bill for ‘advertising costs, commissions for sales personnel, and store costs.’ Consumers
already pay high monthly fees for voice and data designed to cover the costs of doing business.
So when they are assessed excessive penalties, especially when they are near the end of their
contract term, it is hard for me to believe that the public interest is being well served.
What is .58 bits?
Please tell me about the difference. As far as I know climate change is the more general term while global warming can be used to refer to the current climate change. Both terms are equally valid, even if global warming might fall a bit short in describing all the effects of climate change. (It will get warmer, but there will likely be other effects that are often less well understood.)

There is hardly any harm done in using both terms interchangably.

(Edited out ocean acidification - I guess that one is strictly speaking neither an effect of climate change nor of gloabal warming. It's rather just caused by the same thing that also causes the current climate change.)
Great stuff thanks!

$Weekend--;
3 pounds. Eek. Netbook elbow.
Steve Blank: Balloon Wars
I would buy one if(any of these):

1) I didnt own an iPhone

2) I didnt own a MacBook Pro

3) It had at least 1 camera

4) It was hackable or could run any OS X app

5) I could use it for general purpose storage

Maybe iPad 2.0 will have some of these, as someone posted above... I think this is just a first step and future versions might have some of the above.
If You Printed Twitter. . .
People were hoping for a Macbook without a keyboard, as far as I can tell.
Good article, and some excellent comments at the end including a discussion of AMQP v.s. 0MQ v.s. RestMS from someone who has been involved in the design of all three.
This seems to be becoming a meme and as far as I can tell it's based on total ignorance.

It's just an ARM chip or SOC. They're everywhere and have been for a while, and they're getting better and faster all the time. This is all documented in multiple companies roadmaps.

Check out this demo (or any of the others from CES on the same site, including multiple touchscreen tablets).

http://armdevices.net/2010/01/18/marvell-slim-desktop-soluti...

The Sheeva Plug one is good too.

http://armdevices.net/2010/01/19/sheeva-plug-2-0-and-plug-co...
Sun and Oracle: Overview and FAQ for the Developer Community
What's clear that this tampering should not be fodder for a flippant response about being the "new swine flu". If we can't trust scientist to do their job without "fudging" the numbers, then who are we to trust? I want my tax money going to more research, but now I am not so sure and thats the real tragedy.
> Other companies are selling computers. Apple’s selling magic. Which one would you rather have?

I'd rather have a computer, which is why I don't like Apple products. However, I understand why this puts me in the minority.
Really, I've certainly never seen a sub $500 10" Linux based Arm powered tablet in any of the computer or electronic stores I've ever visited. Links?
multi-core is also easier to scale on power efficiency -- turning off cores when speed isn't needed.
Tell HN: The iPad is open to hacking
I don't get the hate.

Pay your $99 to become a developer, and, once the NDA is lifted, share your code freely with others on github or some other public venue.

Think of the $99 as the cost of the SDK. (Even though the SDK & associated tools are freely downloadable.)

If you're really interested in sharing arbitrary code with people, this is even perhaps the best way to do it. They download the code, and build & go in Xcode.

You're running on a Mach/BSD Unix-based system, so go hog-wild. Port terminal programs, or write your own. Yes, it's true that apps are sandboxed, but now you've got inter-app file sharing (oops, is that under NDA?).

Apple has zero interest in what you do with the iPad that doesn't go through the App Store.

Think of the App Store as the public roads for the iPad--the state has a vested interest in making sure that drivers are minimally competent, so they have a gatekeeping function in the form of a license. On the private roads, or roads you make yourself, go crazy.
My understanding is that you have to rewrite your code to take advantage of NumPy. Unfortunately, I've never used NumPy before, so I don't know how to do so.

However, if you'd like to modify my code to do so I'd be happy to rerun the test and publish the results.
I wonder where the weight comes from. I imagine it's mostly from the batteries since there are 2, one in the keyboard base and the other in the tablet screen.
I bought the beta version of this and let me just say...DO NOT BUY IT. I know what I got was in beta, but its hard to improving to the point where its actually something desirable. Its slow, heavy, and the touch screen is just quite poor.
The proof is in the pudding. Is Kayak keeping their customers happy. Are the investors happy and of course are the employees happy?
If the answer is yes, then the approach works. Fascism is a strong word for a novel approach to customer service. If this approach stops working then they will try something else.
This is not an ideology, you know.
"How much easier it is to distrust, to doubt, to fold the arms and say “Not impressed”. I’m not advocating dumb gullibility, but it is has always amused me that those who instinctively dislike Apple for being apparently cool, trendy, design fixated and so on are the ones who are actually so damned cool and so damned sensitive to stylistic nuance that they can’t bear to celebrate or recognise obvious class, beauty and desire. The fact is that Apple users like me are the uncoolest people on earth: we salivate, dribble, coo, sigh, grin and bubble with delight."

I'm not as big an Apple fan as Fry, but I sympathize with him here. Enthusiasm != stupidity; enthusiasm == joie de vivre!
I always thought that global warming was a subset of climate change. The fact that the title of the article included climate change made me puzzled as to why global warming was used.
I am glad this is breaking out slowly but surely and the C02 saga will probably be the greatest scientific scandal of our time. I have been following the story for as far as I remember as I had an interest in Ice Ages. This article http://www.warwickhughes.com/icecore/zjmar07.pdf is very good at debunking some of the myths. You can play with a model online with this http://cs.clark.edu/~mac/physlets/GEBM/ebm.htm#tiptop and you can download a more sophisticated program http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/modelE/ from Goddard, or you can write your own Clojure one, like the one we had yesterday here at HN.

There is no doubt that an increase in CO2 will increase temperatures. However, this is only part of a model. C02 can get absorbed by the Oceans and other earth mechanisms and balance out. If you follow the Palaeoclimate literature (ice cores in Antartica) the rise in temperature gave a rise to C02 and not the other way round.

You can look how the famous hockey stick curve looks if plotted against historical times (it looks more like a series of hills).

Serious variations in temperature (on a global level) are caused mostly by sunspot activity. I am sure other HN posters can add 100's more argument to these.

However, as humans there is no doubt that we are destroying our environment. As such I am very much for better policies in this respect but certainly NOT for trading carbon credits and fattening fat cats further.
Can you elaborate on what the Difference is ?. And why you think this finding doesn't impact the climeate change findings?
It's slow (watch the video) and ugly. The guy demonstrating it even had to use a stylus, which is a sure sign of failure.
That's not hunger, its the feeling of getting pretty.
User Analytics: How to visualize information
After watching the videos it basically looks like a great idea poorly executed. The device itself is so thick and bulky.

If Apple had decided to make basically the same device but with the typical Apple finish, now that would've been a product worth buying.
I agree with your assessment of Apple's tablet, but I think you underestimate their position. The vast majority of consumers simply don't have the awareness of such issues to even care. To a degree, the same criticism applies to the iPhone and it's been an overwhelming success. Competing with Apple is no small task. Features aren't enough when they have market share, mind share, are able to set trends and have a marketing department that has convinced the world they are the only company able to do the things they do.
Minnesota Song-Sharing Case Heads for Third Trial