skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ok is there anyone who honestly though it would be more than an over sized Ipod Touch?...

Considering that, and all the restrictions, this is probably the saddest piece of hardware/software that I've seen in a while.

"Hey look! I just bought a 500$ picture frame"
Half of the technologies that they themselves use and tout as great would not exist.

Except the ones you listed do exist and are open for anybody else to go use and build their own great products, even using the work that Apple put into them.
As a sysadmin who wishes he'd discovered this book earlier, I have no problem with recommending "The Practice of System and Network Administration" as a great resource: http://everythingsysadmin.com/aboutbook.html

It's definitely an OS-agnostic book, so if you're looking for "how do we do task/process/design A with OS B?", it's not the right fit. It'd still be worth it if you're expecting to have to do anything except the very shortest-term systems administration.
To me, your experience sounds an awful lot like not having much experience in a production environment.

In my experience, context-switching between programming and testing gets quite cumbersome with difficult problems, and can lead to overlooking smaller issues. If I'm busy testing every single edge case I can think of, who's doing the development? With separate testers, you get the benefit of concurrency (the software can continue being tested while issues from the previous version are fixed), and subsequently more software developed.

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

How so? What if I'm developing a new product that has a full specification and design document, and is expected to meet customer acceptance goals? I don't see a deficiency in the development cycle if I need someone else to help test my software in a manner that I simply don't have time for.

Does your assertion mean that any software that contains bugs is caused by lack of programmer skill? I, too, would like to learn the secret to writing completely issue-free code if you're willing to share it.

Now, please don't take what I say to mean programmers shouldn't test their own creations. If you hand something that crashes 100% of the time to a tester, you're being lazy. The purpose of testers goes far beyond simply checking to see if it's "code that works."
Something's wrong with the node.js vs Tornado benchmark: "total transfered" byte count is more than 2x bigger for Tornado. This should be headers as "HTML transfered" is about the same.
It most certainly is. Everyone here is working, and environment's important to work. Being on a boat is quite the change.
The author frames the question as to whether iPad native apps or web apps will win, but obviously the much bigger question is: how many people will buy iPads?

The iPhone app rush is predicated on the enormous popularity of the iPhone itself, which was already a given when the App Store was introduced. With the iPad, it's a very open question whether a gap in the market exists for a form factor between a phone and a laptop -- and whether it is better than the current contender for that space, Netbooks.
It's quite common to easily know when the answers you're getting are good without understanding the problem domain at all (or at least without needing to use that understanding to create a model).

For example, you could know that some sounds emitted from a computer speaker sound good or bad, without knowing the first thing about music theory. And evolutionary algorithms (EA) can be used to evolve these sounds to sound better and better, without having been given any sort of explicit model of what "good" or "bad" music is. The solutions evolve merely on the principles of natural selection, by randomly combining solutions and testing them for how "good" or "bad" they are. This has been done. Just search google for: evolving music genetic

The above problem is actually a little difficult for EA's to solve, as you need humans to manually evaluate each solution. This slows the EA down a lot, and it takes a lot longer for optimum solutions to evolve.

Fortunately, the solutions to many other problems can be evaluated algorithmically, by the computer itself. As a very general example, a solution that's trying to minimize some function can be evaluated via a mathematical comparison that a computer can handle just fine on its own.

For some more specific examples, see "36 Human-Competitive Results Produced by Genetic Programming": http://www.genetic-programming.com/humancompetitive.html

I'm sure you could find thousands more examples by searching for the results produced by other "model-free methods" like other EA's (genetic algorithms, for example), neural networks, ant and swarm optimization, etc.
This sounds incredibly snarky, but I always feel conflicted on this sort of thing. I like free software a lot and identify philosophically with the movement, but I also like high-quality software that actually works and is designed for real people.
The DL guy noted on Twitter that everyone who'd worked on DL bar himself now works for Apple.
Where is the information coming from that it's ARM? I didn't see that information on any of the live-blogging sites. Did someone mention it in the Apple presentation?

I find it odd that Apple bought PA Semi who were apparently working on a variant of the Power architecture and had them stop what they were doing and switch to implementing an ARM.
http://i.imgur.com/nUtZK.jpg
I'm actually quite shocked people are saying the iPad isn't affordable. This is probably the most affordable overly hyped product Apple has ever released. I was expecting $1,000 just like Steve Jobs said and was blown away when it was as low as it was, and even more blown away by the pay as you go unlimited 3G for $30 a month.
he answered a quite similar question here: "what do you feel the modern relevance of Lisp and Prolog are in AI".

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943633
Interesting. This is almost like becoming a collective brain when searching for stuff.
I wonder if you can identify people using habitual patterns of mouse moving and pauses between keys when typing.
e-ink's appeal is in the fact that it is beautiful to read off of. I do however agree that its not the right display tech for this device.
I wasn't referring specifically to the Nexus, which I have not tried. However, I tried the Droid, and was just upset that these companies just don't get it. I want to leave Apple and use something else, but they aren't putting in the time and effort to polish and make the experience awesome.

That said, I do not regularly use Mac computers, so I don't think everything they do is awesome.
Does anyone know if there's an easy way to get something like this to play with? It might be fun to start thinking about iPad killers.
There was a very interesting article along similar lines recently, entitled "You Walk Wrong: It took 4 million years of evolution to perfect the human foot. But we’re wrecking it with every step we take.":

http://nymag.com/health/features/46213/
Right, especially since it's looking like a large part of the iPad's market will be technophobes who don't want to deal with the "complex" features of normal computers. How many apps are those users actually going to buy, as opposed to just using it for web browsing and email?
Ask HN: what new market opportunities do you see for the iPad?
Excluding those that already exist and will be dominated by existing institutional players (3d gaming) by porting.<p>One big one I see is repackaging content and adding interactivity. Its a new form factor, will and can be used in certain situations where a laptop is not appropriate, and an iPhone is a bit small and annoying. No flash means existing niche websites with rich content will not work.<p>Some examples:<p>in the kitchen - a cooking database / assistant with interactive cooking videos<p>yoga/pilates/excercise video instructors
NFL Games Have 11 Minutes of Action
A better question would be whether Apple's increasingly laughable control freakery puts any potential buyers off. I know it does because I am such a potential buyer.
No, actually genetic algorithms are parametric models (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parametric_model). They cannot get results than is permitted by their model class. And they are relatively poor optimization methods for exploring their parameter space. I cannot think of a single genetic algorithm work published recently in a top-notch machine learning conference (NIPS, ICML, etc.)
How is walking/standing on concrete in these? I find my feet will start hurting if I even simply stand barefoot on a hard surface for any length of time.
Ah, yes. I misread the wikipedia page. similar to A8, not A8.
The "Effective Mass at Impact" between heel listed ~ http://www.barefootrunning.fas.harvard.edu/4BiomechanicsofFo... is interesting. 6.8%/1.7% of total body mass and forefoot means the later has reduced vertical momentum. Small efficiencies make for less wear and tear on joints, especially the knees. I tried running on my forefoot (with runners) and noticed it works easily uphill, very hard down hill and difficult on the flat. It's really hard on the top half of the calf and quads. There is no chance I'd be wearing the flimsy runners they suggest. The terrain is rough, hot and covered in rocks, dry grass and the chance of snakes.

I'd like to see how this technique would work with running and rotating sports like (basketball, tennis, football) which have high levels of knee injuries. The 5% efficiency might give an improvement in running life though canceled out in jumping sports such as basketball. Useless for running over rough terrain with heavy weights.
When I was in college, I went through a string of used cars. So I actually did the math: continuous minor to moderate repairs and parts cost, plus needing to buy another used car approximately every 2 years when inevitably something would go wrong that cost more to fix than the car was worth, divided by the number of months this had been going on, came out to approximately $333/mo. So I bought a new Hyundai for $10K and paid $235/mo. for it. It will be 5 years old this March and I hope to drive it at least another 5 years after that.
Among developers as whole I agree that Windows as huge percentage of the market share and that that probably won't change. But among open source developers I think it's different. For various historical reasons most open source development targets Unix and Unix like systems as a primary platform and OS X is currently the most popular unix like platform.
Yes, but not for ME. I can see my father using it to show holiday pictures or my girlfriend for surfing the web in the sofa. We're not the target market on the customer side.

However, we ARE the target market on the developer side. The success of this device hinges on the quality of the apps WE are going to build for it. My bet is that there will be a lot of innovative apps for this device.

The SDK is dead easy for the devs who already put out 100K iPhone apps, multi-gesture will allow some interesting gameplay, CoreText may allow you to build gorgeous text-based apps. The device packs some real CPU power.

Sure, the limits (DRM, AppStore, API-limts, Single-App) kinda suck. But with the $$$ luring an established developer-base I expect lots of apps to be available soon. And it's the quality of these entertainment/fun apps that is going to drive the success of this device.

So maybe we should rephrase the poll: Who is going to develop for the iPad? (How do I create a poll?)
"But at least with HTML5 video tag data, I can download the video and play it offline using a dedicated player."

Try to keep up here. That's not the problem that Flash Player is chartered to solve (same goes for HTML5 video). I know you're smart enough to download videos and watch them offline, but try to think on a macro level.

Not the most useful tone to take when trying to explain your technology and win people over...
I am Canadian and am wary of investing in the stock market in Canada because the behaviour of our government is simply to follow in the footsteps of the previous Bush administration in the United States. The government deficit has recently gone back up to levels it was at in the 80's and 90's. The domestic economy is skewed toward scamming investors into buying resources that may or may not be accessible. Following the US lead, housing prices somewhat collapsed and are mostly flat now. Unemployment numbers are unreliable as the numbers do not really reflect the numbers of people out of work. The city of Vancouver for instance has about 1200 homeless people but homeless people are not counted amongst the unemployed.

Our banking system is similar to the United States where the government borrows money as debt. In Canada, the government borrows debt money from private Canadian chartered banks that create the money virtually out of thin air. With the beauty of compound interest the government has paid out over $1.5 trillion dollars in interest alone. Most of our deficit and spending goes towards merely making payments on the interest to the private banks. Every government in the world could pay off their debt in an instant by creating debt free money out of thin air. The Bank of Canada has this power, but the Canadian government chooses to create money as debt.
Ask HN: What do you use to invoice people?
Any answer would be good, but I am looking for something super simple. I don't plan to send many invoices.

I think I'm personally looking for an MS Word template intended for billing software development contracting. Anyone seen one of those? Or, if you have one, can you email it to andrewljohnson@gmail.com
Ask HN: Relative sizes of home v.s. business computer markets?
I have found some reports on number of PCs sold by quarter (example: http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS22161710 ) - but I haven't been able to find breakdowns between home and business sales. Any pointers to free sources of such data? Any other breakdowns (laptops, desktops, server, OS types) would also be interesting.
I'd say it's a pretty reasonable demand. Android is also looking to fill that gap, which is good.
Maybe, but not necessarily. Each new type of communication device threatens old revenue streams of Telcos. Broadband/skype threatens long distance, 3g threatens voice minute/SMS, but...

Overall, I think the total amount we spend on communication is going up like mad. 10 years ago a sophisticated 5 person household had a landline phone, a mobile phone and a dial up account or maybe a DSL. Today they have the phone, 5 mobiles(some of them expensive ones including lots of 3g acess), a home broadband connection (network) and now they're looking at adding some other device/plan package (Tablet, netbook, etc.).

As a rule, they don't really care that much about providing cheap additional services. They care about cannibalising other stuff. This isn't likely to replace anything. Apple is a good partner for avoiding skype-over-3G, tethering or some other antisocial behaviour.
I'd say it may pay to develop a game which works really well with the iPad size. May cash in on the initial rush when everyone gets one and wants a good app to see the advantages of the bigger screen.
I have a project based on the Global Historical Climatology Network data, going back 300 years. This is based upon readings from actual thermometers on ground based weather stations, rather than tree rings or ice cores which are far more difficult to decypher.

http://code.google.com/p/tempgraph/

You can graph the data in various ways, all the way down to individual weather stations.
And you can get comparable (minus the patented touch wheel thingie) mp3 players for 50 bucks.
There are USB and SD card reader dongles for the dock connector, but no word on what kind of access third-party apps are going to have to them.
The gas-powered truck killed magazines, not the Web
Hey, I wanted to meet up with you in Boulder (Qualcomm interview guy). I couldn't find your email, so I'm spamming all your comments, which is probably against the law. Please email me at ebisumaru@gmail.com, or read my longer comment:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1078343
Hey, I wanted to meet up with you in Boulder (Qualcomm interview guy). I couldn't find your email, so I'm spamming all your comments, which is probably against the law. Please email me at ebisumaru@gmail.com, or read my longer comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1078343
The article he's commenting on: http://motherjones.com/media/2010/01/death-of-literary-ficti...
I see the iPad as a communal home machine that floats around the house. It replaces newspapers, books, magazines, remotes (for music and hopefully TV), picture frames, and for some video game consoles. Eventually it will control your oven, door entry system etc. To me it's a "home computer."
All computers are insecure. Do I need to repeat that? ALL COMPUTERS ARE INSECURE. OK. Good.
I'm not sure if that's really true. The problem with the first Mac was that it launched a couple of years after the IBM PC, and the hardware was underpowered for a GUI OS. By the time the Mac became useful and suitable for businesses, MS had already built too much of a lead for Apple to catch up.
Do they really need it? If I search for "ipad" in Google or Bing, information about the iPad comes up, not this site.

I think we're past buying every single domain name that might be relevant.
Apple unveils the iPad: Steve Jobs and the iPad of hope
Does the dmg include ipsw files? Or are we looking at developing for the Simulator only for a few weeks/months?
I saw it coming and upgraded ahead of time. :-)
Some of us might argue that installing Vim is the sine qua non for a (truly) usable system. (For what it's worth, I just love me some Vim. Overall, I'm on the "this device is perfect for most people" side of this actual argument.)
You could call it the iClam, maybe.
Games, games, and more games. Take advantage of the multitouch features.

As a side note, I'm developing a pretty awesome concept for a game in time for the iPad release, and could sure use some artists to partner with... Give me a shout if you are interested.
Yes -- much more reliably.

The testers on my team save me so much time. My code runs on six platforms. Every time I switch platforms it takes a lot of time and energy to switch physical and mental contexts. I have no hope of thoroughly testing all the platforms for each little change I make. So I usually just compile the code on two or three platforms, test on one, and check it in. The incremental build servers will tell me if I broke the build within a few minutes, and the testers will tell me if I made some platform-specific breakage the next day.

Furthermore, for each bug, the tester has narrowed it to specific repro steps, including what DOESN'T work, and usually has a screenshot of the problem and what's expected. Usually by reading the report, I immediately have a good idea of what's broken and that saves me tons of time too (as opposed to a vague "the xyz component is broken, fix plz" which I have seen in lots of shops where non-testers write bug reports).

I love our testers.
They're just going to go through the ICANN arbitration process and take it. They've done it to countless domains in the past.
Details about the iPad OS
You could create a hackintosh, or install mac-osx in a VM. None of these are officially endorsed solutions and I have no idea how stable these hacks are.
How to Create a Marketing Brochure Online
Top user-generated comments about the Apple iPad
As a circuit designer, I find it really surprising that Apple has rolled their own processor for the iPad. We finally confirm why Apple bought PA Semi. But it also says a lot about Apple and the processor industry:

* Apple predicts that sales will be high enough to justify building an iPad-specific processor. I assume nobody outside of Apple will get to use the A4 or derivative chips.

* Apple feels that there was no external vendor that could cost-effectively get the exact power-performance trade-off they wanted for the suite of applications that they want to optimize.

* Tempering the previous point, this may be a net loss in the case of the iPad alone in terms of pure costs versus going with an external vendor, BUT they now have much better negotiating power for all their other processor purchases from Intel, Samsung, ARM, etc. They can always threaten to roll their own. So even if they lose some money on the A4, they may be in a better position overall

* EDIT: Let me also add that despite what some people are claiming this is likely NOT an ARM, but based on PA Semi's power-efficient flavor of the Power architecture. I believe the Power architecture is in the same family as the Motorola PowerPCs that Apple formerly used and dumped for Intel because of the PowerPC's lower power-efficiency.
It would also last longer than 10 hours. The display only eats power when you change the screen. That said, its refresh rate isn't great.
He argued that true luxury was the freedom from choice. Now in a political context, this is Orwellian and terrifying. But in the context of a meal, it made a lot of sense to me. Let a great chef do his or her magic, and I will try any damn thing they put in front of me and thank them for the privilege.

Sometimes even Apple doesn't get that. There was a great example of this principle in one of the slides the Engadget blogger took during Jobs's presentation (http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/27/live-from-the-apple-table...), where the 10:57AM slide shows the iBooks application allowing the user to "change the font (to) whatever you want."

Um, thanks but no thanks, Steve. Book publishers hire type designers to come up with appropriate fonts, and they hire other skilled designers to select and use them. Leaving this choice up to the reader is not a feature, but an aesthetic regression at best and a dereliction of duty at worst. It's like bundling fine art with a paint-by-numbers set.

This is exactly how MS Office ends up with 30 different selectable toolbars that nobody knows how to use. It was a splash of cold water to the face to see Apple making the same sort of mistake.
(plus Amazon now actually owns Stanza).
1. Web apps are an order of magnitude easier to develop than iPad apps.

I'm not sure I agree with that. Applications with limited UI are easier as webapps if you forget all the other browsers you might want to be compatible with. Native apps live in a wonderfully deterministic world, albeit with a target market of one to three-ish devices.

Personally I'm looking forward to counting how many "flashlight" applications there are on release day! Currently there 240 apps that return for "flashlight", almost all of which are competing for the ever lucrative I want more light than my wallpaper lets through market.
Not surprising given that fonts tend to come in groups---did you remove all your nonstandard fonts? If five people out of a million install the same unusual font pack, and one removes all but one font from the pack, that one will be a unique even though the configuration is "more like" a common one.
I do NOT want my social circle to have influence in my search decisions. It's only going to encourage more of the groupthink/clanning crap we already have so bad on the net.
Why didn't he just call the phone number on the bill? Banks buy and sell pieces of each other all the time. Calling "the bank" and hoping to find someone who knows something about your account is incredibly naive. I guess he needed that kind of naivety to create Dilbert. Maybe guys like this are able to point out the weird things we've adapted to because they aren't able to adapt themselves. Seriously, it takes a kind of mad genius to think that a randomly chosen customer service person in MegaCorpBank would have the means to access his account information or even figure out which piece of MegaCorpBank he has an account with.
Yup, the device is designed to have "no particular orientation", so the dock connector can be on top. I wouldn't be surprised to see a dock-connector iSight at some point.