skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not - but geeks fight the wrong battles regardless. Instead of realizing and building what our users want, we constantly tread water and waste our time on issues (important to us, and us only) like opening our code. This has no tangible benefit (nor harm, to be fair), yet it's something we fight about instead of spending this time building slick, efficient UIs.

For example, I just read a most interesting exchange on a board, where one guy was going on about how the video experience sucks because there's no DVD drive - it's completely missing the forest for the trees, getting hung up about a single insignificant detail that's at the very best a nice-to-have. This sort of tunnel vision prevents the broad view required to execute this sort of device.
Yeah, according to this twitter post http://twitter.com/mike_matas/status/8292208676 he also worked on the Photos app.
Yeah, finally a 4chan-compatible device! =))
Apple has zero restrictions about open source code running on iPhone - the poster is incorrect. Also, music sharing is entirely possible, just don't expect it to be supported as part of the first-party pipeline... the dev license itself doesn't prevent you (unless your purpose is to illegally share).
I guess I associate Comet solely with long-polling. Don't disagree at all re: the future of web apps; the reason why WebSockets are exciting is that real-time communication is becoming a first-class citizen in the browser, rather than an (admittedly cool) hack.
Not much honestly. But then again, there wasn't anything interesting on the front page anyways. I would think some sort of flooding/filtering might help with these types of issues. I am all for the latest and greatest, but, I don't come here to get same information 15 times, it detracts from the experience and I think HN can do better.
Altruism on Amazon Mechanical Turk
The thing is that when you look at the data at the lowest level (individual stations) what you're getting is small snippets of temperature information. Some stations have been around for as long as 100 years, but I don't think that there are any single stations which span the full 300 years.
This explains why Apple bought Quattro Wireless. Many developers are going to make the move to web-based apps (for portability, convenience, etc) and my guess is Apple's ensuring it doesn't lose much cash in the process.
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Had this model of computing existed before the web browser was invented, we may have never gotten a web browser.

That's a really weird thing to say because it did. Atari 2600 anyone?

But Apple have never even pretended the iPhone et al were "open" computing devices. Contrast that to the just-as-limited ChromeOS.
Out of 8, I feel the following 2 as let downs.
No Multitasking
No Cameras

These two would have been nice to have.
No HDMI Out
No UsB Port

the other 4, No problem.
The iPad and other closed systems (PS3, Xbox) don't magically make Windows PCs, Macs, Linux or the Web go away.

As developers we have more choices than we have had in a very long time in terms of picking the platforms we want to develop for. Every platform has its pros and cons, as a developer you get to choose what's important to you when picking a platform to target.

People who want to write software will always pick open systems. People who aren't techies or creatives just want technology to serve a purpose (users of information appliances), and just want things to work with the minimal amount of fuss. Locking things down simplifies a lot of things for end users.

The panic over every platform that gets released that isn't suitably open, just makes me think of this Alan Kay quote:

"In fact, let’s not even worry about Java. Let’s not complain about Microsoft. Let’s not worry about them because we know how to program computers, too, and in fact we know how to do it in a meta-way. We can set up an alternative point of view, and we’re not the only ones who do this, as you’re well aware."

Source: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523
Why should they have paid Konfabulator for Dashboard? They invented Desk Accessories back in System 1.0
Well, they would if we stopped using functions. Functions are relatively new as mathematics goes, and mathematicians would complain if they had to read Newton's original formulation of calculus.
The 50 most "innovative" mobile apps in the world
Types of programmer, or “why can’t we be friends?”
You don't have to set it up so they have to wait for the result to be returned. Remember, the point of this "guess my location" button has nothing to do with a technical limitation; it's just a way of giving the user a sense of ease. You could easily automatically figure out their location when they come to the site, but just keep it hidden until they click the button.
Top Free iPhone Games You Can Download For Fun
IP geolocation can be annoying

Or, rather, web application developers who suck at implementing geolocation well can be annoying.
I bet it does. Any large organization is really many smaller fiefdoms. Think 1000 cats rather than one elephant.
Well, except for the music streaming services. Which are as DRM infected as ever.
What I'm trying to say is that just because you dont see the action, that its not there.

Every football fan knows the average length of a football play is 6 seconds or less. But within those 6 seconds there is soooo much:
1. Offensive - Defensive line play
2. Offiensive coordinator versus the defensive coordinator in play calling, formations... (tactical)
3. The safety verus the quarterback.
4. The corners versus the wideouts.
5. Coach strategy. (strategic)
6. Specific Matchups ...
7. QB versus defensive coordinator.

Its all in there ... You have to be able to see it. I was going to write a document on understanding all this from the position and number of players at the line of scrimmage - ie what they show on TV during the play ... but I've not yet had time :( ...

The thing is in a team sport you can either be long on action and short on strategy or vice versa. The main tradeoff is the amount of communication required between players.

I love American Football more than any sport because of the amount of strategy + the great quality of players that you get over here.
IPad: Giant Meh
How do I flag spam here? I'm new to this.
> 'I will give you this magical thing that can do anything'
Well, it will not open to applications at the same time.
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> 1 point by bilalxperts 1 hour ago | 3 comments | unflag
> -------------------------------------------------^^^^^^

Click on the "flag" link.
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At first I was let down with it being closed system. But after a night to sleep on it, I'm starting to warm to the idea.

I'll never use the iPad for work, and in the same way I can't bring myself round to using a Mac Mini as my media centre, I don't want the hassle of a full OS over a purposely built OS for the task(s) in hand. All I'd want to do on the iPad is browse the web, read, watch videos, and perhaps play some games.

Overall as long as this isn't Apples future strategy for the Mac platform (which would be suicide), I think it's a nice product, which by the looks of it, will do the job it's made for brilliantly.
Right, they didn't lie to me about the iPhone and they didn't lie abot the iPad, which is why I won't be buying one.
Android iPads and the end of native apps
Those fingerprints are mostly based on information that your browser gives out voluntarily for no good reason (the server doesn't need to know your fonts, screen resolution, plugins or user-agent).

Thus an easy workaround would be to use a plugin that randomizes all this, which turns your one unique identity into many unique identities.
Why Apple wants to control apps
The Myth of the Genius Programmer [video]
How to Make mailto Safe Again
Yeah if you dont walk around barefoot much then the way to ease your feet into Vibrams would be to wear nike frees for a while. It'll help your feet adjust to the feeling.
It requires a very fine balance, however.

When building a big system you need uninterrupted hacking time to make sure you can keep all that state in your head. That won't happen if there's a loud ringing phone or your CEO bouncing around having loud conversations in the office. That's why Joel has private offices, and pg differentiates a maker's schedule with that of a manager.
The iPad/iPhone helps with one aspect of the problem: There is only one platform to handle. No need to support broken old browsers.

[by the way - I haven't seen any statistics but it seems Apple users are more likely to update their OS/Apps to their latest version. So supporting old versions is less of an issue]
That's a very interesting study.

Preachers have known this for years of course, which is why any request to donate is always preceded by a healthy reminder on the benefits of altruism.
NoScript & FlashBlock together help quite a bit, but other items can still leak a surprising amount of information.
Adjustable stools information
South African Police reveal Apple tablet photos
Have only read the first page, but it seems rather far stretched. Playing for time is an age old strategy, why should it have come from a video game?
> So to say it's unethical to create a device like the iPad you'd have to argue that people who don't buy the iPad are directly harmed by it somehow

There is a not so far-fetched way to argue this: the device is ultra-closed. If its concept become successful enough, people which want to use open system may be denied the possibility. Not directly because of the success of closed platforms but because this success may allow regulation to happen without too many people complaining.

I have an actual example: how web mail harms me, even when I am not using it. Web mail is pervasive. The direct result was that many ISPs felt they could block the outgoing SMTP port (to stop evil spam). "Everyone" is using web mail or the mail of their ISP, so not too many people complain. Now, I can't set up SMTP server at home. Depending on the workaround, either my privacy or my wallet is harmed.
Semi-relatedly: the more I do engineering management, the more I feel like I've gone back to playing WoW.
Radio browser (shoutcast / icecast) plugin per Rhythmbox 1.8 su Ubuntu
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I'm not a football fan, but it seems singular to me that an amateur at the sport would react instantly to an unexpected situation, sprint down the the length of the field, and then with the deafening roar of the crowd in his ears and the lights exploding in his face and the goal line mere inches in front of him and unseen defenders nipping at his heels and visions of being the hero dancing around in his head would suddenly remember "I'm in this for the game, not the touchdown: pivot right and get them to waste six seconds." except due to heavy, heavy operant conditioning.
You could also keep the builtin hard drive pristine, booting & wrking off of an easily-removable compact flash card, to keep in a pocket as your clear customs.
The iPad - a social computer?
You have never used a Nokia N70/N73. I press a button and then go for a coffee break.
iPad: Nothing Creative
Kindle will get the head (heavy readers), iPad will get the long tail (casual readers). There's room for both.
IPad thoughts
As the Android's apps market clearly shows open not necessarily means better, it might just mean messier :)

Yes, open is more 'powerful' and yes, it allows 'more things' to be done, and yes it doesn't piss developers off, but for an average user that just wants to do everyday things Apple's approach might be just better overall user experience.

iPod is not the mp3 player with the most features, its the most polished experience. same for iphone and for almost any of their products.

so .. I'm not at all sure there would be more buyers if it was open then it will be now with its closed nature.

They know what they are doing :)
I must have missed the part where it says the guy was an amateur at the sport? The article describes him as "(team xyz)'s Quarterback...", so I assume he played a lot and had a lot of training? But even at school sports, we were habitually playing for time. It's just what you do if you are in the lead and the end is near.

Also, I am sorry, but catching a ball in football can hardly be an unexpected event.
More on the dbd protest:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/27/defective_by_design/
I think one element is probably that as a social signal, shoelessness is a big sign over your head that says "I'm poor." That's unpleasant, obviously, so people buy shoes.
I influence buying decisions of quite a number of people as the go-to computer person and as an entrepreneur.

Let's turn your statements on their heads and see what falls out:

So what you're saying is that having a middleman make your technology decisions for you is a bad thing, and that you'll use your position as a middleman who makes technology decisions for others to try to prevent Apple from doing that?
They provide other people with the information that not everyone here wants to discuss the hype of the day. For me, this was valuable, since (coincidentally?) yesterday was the first day that I couldn't find any submission that I was even remotely interested in.

Meta posts have their place, if they are used in moderation.
user-agent is most definitely needed. My server gives different content depending on which kind of client accesses the page and I certainly don't want to do that in javascript.
I wouldn't want to be Wacom right now, though. I could imagine the tablet beats traditional digitizer tablets for graphics design.
The [non-existance of the] Camera is a let down to be sure, but multitasking? What do you need multitasking for? Doing some action at a specific time and doing async operations right? If the OS provides this then I don't think multitasking is needed (and it adds a huge amount of complexity/stability issues).
I may be an unusual case of convergence, but I find both the iPad AND what the FSF say relevant.

I really like the ease of use of something like an iPad whilst getting concerned about the long term consequences for my data.
Bah, I don't know. I've always used mailto with my default e-mail address on websites and I've also always used that same (non-scrambled) address in Usenet postings.

Spam has gotten less and less of an issue for me during the last decade due to improved techniques of battling it. It basically comes down to using a good ISP or webmail service that uses said techniques.
I could only stomach the first 10 pages, and quit. But that little peak certainly made me think of socialism.

10 pages is enough to link the guy to socialism? really?

The rhetoric about helping the little guy is just what monsters like Lenin and Mao find it easiest to use to hoodwink the masses.

Monsters use any rhetoric they think will fit at their historic moment. This is just a red shirted example of Godwin's law.
I think the level of sheer irrational panic displayed in light of the recent iPad announcement is deserving of everybody calming the hell down for a minute and actually using their brains. I realize this isn't the trendy thing to do when one can instead start screaming and pointing at alarmist rants, but I do think we'd all be better off for some rational thought here and there.
> I think we can all agree that the browser was probably one of the most important developments in not just computer history, but human history

I really don't agree with that. In computer history, it had been preceded by generations of dumb terminals hooked up to networks, so as such it wasn't all that new. The HTTP protocol underlying it and the URL arguably are much more important developments, the browser is just a presentation layer on top of those.

As for human history, the wheel, the control of fire, penicillin, communications satellites, space travel and hundreds of other inventions were both done earlier and have had a much bigger impact on how we live than the browser ever will.

The mobile phone, maybe. The browser ? No way.
I guess there's nothing much stopping Microsoft from developing a MS office for iPhone OS.

Not approving it will cause a lot of mayhem and maybe even antitrust issues for Apple so they will need to allow it.

Also don't forget google docs and upcoming office web apps.
No voice calls is the big one for me. I can see they were thinking if we enable voice calls people might choose for an ipad instead of an iphone, but we want to sell them both.

The same happened when they crippled the newton so it wouldn't compete with the mac.
Hm, a link to localhost. Sorry it appears to be borked
> I couldn't even write a program on it, much less save it on the local file system.

Can you not save text files on the iPad?

That's pretty much the only thing you need for a js application that runs in safari (which these days has a wicket fast js interpreter and supports the canvas, webgl, audio & video tags).
Since we've seen pg talk quite a few times, don't you think it will be more interesting to see rtm interviewed about his experience with Viaweb and YC?
Firefox is significantly slower than chrome and safari in my experience.
PubCasts: subscribe to publications through RSS
Multitasking doesn't need to add complexity and stability issues, if ubuntu can do it then so can apple.

It does add more power consumption.

Multitasking is useful because humans are multitasking.

For instance, a navigator that guides someone to their destination could run in parallel to lots of other applications and be very useful that way.

Single tasking computers are pretty much done for, multi tasking is the norm, not the exception. By choosing for a single tasking environment a decision has been made that is going to be relatively hard to undo. All sorts of assumptions have now become embedded in places where they probably shouldn't be, such as dealing with screen input (focus).

I can see why though, it is possibly much harder to get a user interface up and running on a multi-touch display without a mouse if you have multiple applications active.
I keep wondering, how long before spambots do full text regex matching on everything that comes from a server? It would literally be two lines of code changed for most.
The losses on a bad trade can easily outstrip that wrist-slap

$340 million (eventually reduced to a bit north of $200 million) in one incident at Mizuho Securities in Japan back in 2006.

Word to the wise: There is a big difference between selling one share at 610,000 yen ($6000) and selling 610,000 shares at one yen.

Word to the wise, part #2: Nobody at the Tokyo Stock Exchange feels that they have the authority to cancel an order from Mizuho, even if Mizuho tries to sell a multiple of the market cap of a company in a single transaction. (This got regulators mighty pissed off, incidentally.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism
I find it hard to believe that with today's dualcore-multi-GHZ CPUs there can be significant speed differences in rendering a web page.
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McGraw-Hill Axed from iPad Launch After CEO Harold McGraw III Leaks on CNBC
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Right... because drawing with your finger on a small screen of a tablet without a half decent graphic application is going to overnight destroy the market for high end computers running photoshop, autocad or some other graphics program hooked up to digitizer tablets with extremely high resolution and analog sensors in the tip registering the down force to modify effects.

No way these are even remotely in the same space.
> If this sort of model were ever to win, it would be hard to go back, users don't necessarily understand the argument of "openness".

But they do understand "that particular very useful software won't run on this machine".

> So unless you are implying that its impossible for there only ever to be closed systems (which I wouldn't be so sure of), then we agree.

That is what I'm saying. Some large fraction of software development is done in-house; closed platforms wouldn't allow this, and it's expensive enough that if it wasn't important it probably wouldn't be done now. In the past, sufficiently useful software has come with a bundled computer; if this had to be done regularly, someone would see an opportunity to sell an open computer that could run more than one kind of software.
I can print wirelessly on my MacBook, I don't see any reason why you wouldn't be able to on an iPad.
The best tool for the job is not always the one that fetches the highest market price
The question is--how do you lock down this device so people aren't surfing the web or playing games on them? I work on EDC devices for pharma, and this is the single biggest issue for us when choosing hardware--we need the ability to put the device into kiosk mode.

That said, if Apple opened this particular bit of functionality up for the enterprise, we would be all over this device, particularly the 3G version.
The Real Disappointment
I use a combination of reCAPTCHA Mailhide [1] and Javascript.

By default I use the link to my "mailhidden" email. Then, some Javascript code [2] replaces that link with a mailto link. The email is saved in the js file after being ROT13'd and encoded as HTML ASCII entities.

If the user has JS active, he/she sees a regular mailto link. Otherwise, he/she sees an http link to recaptcha and,
as long as the user's browser can display images, he/she can solve the captcha and see my email address.

You can see an example of this working in my personal site. [3]

Until spambots can run javascript or solve recaptchas, I'm safe. :)

[1] http://mailhide.recaptcha.net/

[2] http://ricardomartins.cc/js/email.js

[3] http://ricardomartins.cc
Googles Social Search Results
Hm, put like that, you are probably right :-) Although Wacom has low end stuff, too (or used to have).

Are fingers the only way to use the iPad. Perhaps you could still use some kind of pointy device to draw?
The little gem in the middle is fantastic: using a data set of newbie errors to train the parser with friendly error messages. This step is done after the parser is generated, but before it's distributed.
An algorithm that solves any problem as quickly as the fastest algorithm
Quieting the lizard brain
Chrome is perceptibly faster than Safari which is perceptibly faster than Firefox which is ridiculously faster than Internet Explorer. But there we are.
> But, this isn't about giving the users freedom from choice; with 140,000 options in the App Store, that's a lot of choices.

Fair enough, but isn't the point that some applications (ones central to the device like the browser, email, maybe calendar now?, book app?) can't be duplicated? You can't write Firefox for the iPad or submit Opera mobile. Or, I suppose you can, but Apple won't accept such items, will they?

So in that sense, the mere number of apps is irrelevant. My point was that the experience is very, very heavily controlled and that many people turn out not to mind that when it comes to such devices.