skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm looking forward to meeting more people interested in start-ups.
How does that differ from using Eclipse with Java?

(Interesting sidebar: Eclipse is a descends directly from Smalltalk)
Perhaps the iPad signals an end to the hacker era of digital history

I disagree. We're in a time of change now -- very soon we won't be getting any of media in the same old ways. TV will be replaced with digital streaming. Music, for the younger generation, is already almost entirely digital. It's even becoming perfectly reasonable to read books on digital devices now.

However, this digital future is not open to everyone. My parents have a hell of time operating a computer and don't benefit from the latest streaming media technologies. They get their music on CD's. They read books on paper. The general purpose computer has failed them. Why shouldn't Apple fill this gap between the TV and the computer?

I'm sure Apple fans will lament the loss of general purpose computing devices from Apple. But it doesn't mean that the hacker era is dead. It just means that most hackers may have to look somewhere else to find a product that suits them.
Without naming names it's hard to know what you're talking about. If it's public marketing material why not provide a link?
There's no way around the symbols being filtered out? I run into this all the time to, always assumed there would be a way around but never bothered to look into it.
First Round Capital launches Entrepreneur Exchange Fund
The future of personal computing that the iPad shows us is both seductive and dystopian.

Upon reading that, I was immediately reminded of this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8

minus the sledge.
RPOPLPUSH does about half of what's needed and BLPOP does the other half, but neither does the whole job.

It's not interesting to discuss what you can use to hack a queue together. Lots and lots of really badly thought out queue services exist today built on top of memcached or a relational database or other things that appear to work in normal cases, but can go horribly wrong and start losing data when bad things happen.
Or maybe we are. That's what Jobs/Apple are betting.

Apple thinks that people have tired of dealing with anti-virus and task managers and package installers and folders and system updates.

Perhaps they're right, there is definitely a segment of the market that just wants a web browser and some rich media. They don't care about multi-tasking or customization.

If the iPad takes off, you can bet that locked down versions of OSX won't be far behind.

Google is headed in a similar direction with ChromeOS.

Apple's vision: "We'll give you an awesome experience, but you're going to pay us a little bit at a time for all of it."

Google's vision: "We'll give you an awesome experience for free, but you're going to tell us everything about you."
It's about time. IPv6 talk has been around for years, it's nice to see a major ISP actually seriously testing it.
"Manual computers, like the Mac and Windows PCs, will slowly shift from the standard to the niche, something of interest only to experts and enthusiasts and developers."

It's interesting because I imagine that many of us would likely not be enthusiasts, experts, and developers had it not been for our "manual computers".
True story. In my teens I got a hold of the BBC Micro assembly programming manual; 6502, in all its 8-bit glory. I didn't understand much English, and I haven't had much 1-on-1 time with a computer in my life (paper hacking) so when I got that book, I was completely dumbfounded and confused by the zero with a strike through. I have never seen this symbol before in my life, and now I don't see it anywhere on the keyboard. sigh.

Good news though. A few months later I was programming in Forth, learning from a self-xeroxed copy of Starting Forth, and it had the zero-slash everywhere. I am not sure when did I realize that Ø == 0. (It looks like the empty set, aka "phi" Φ)

[Edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%98_%28disambiguation%29 ]
Sounds like campaign promises.

I'm going to miss Sun.
Where are the specs that say it is a single core?
"Perhaps the iPad signals an end to the hacker era of digital history"

Perhaps the microwave signals an end to the chef era of cooking history.
Ustream Gives Your Live Broadcasts A Professional Feel With Desktop Client
If there is a way, I haven't found it. Enclosing the search terms in quotes sometimes seems to help a little.
People didn't switch to the Mac in droves when XCode came out, or when Apple switched to OS X. It took a closed platform - a perfectly cultured, strictly defined environment that was the iPod to start building the halo (and with that, peoples' trust) towards the desktop/laptop Mac.

The iPhone didn't get the buzz or the acclaim because of the App Store - it became thought of as a gift from the heavens! Steve has blessed us with this new way to add our value to the closed product. Watch this happen in a different extent with the iPad - something new will come up that will open it up ever so slightly, adding new features where Apple doesn't have the creative or physical capacity to develop.
I know this is possible. But I'm having trouble to imagine a web app design (or other network server) based on that idea. In order to use a lot of data in memory I would have to have a single Python process that gets called by nginx or apache. So that would be a bottleneck even before I get a chance to call my extension. And later there wouldn't be much code left that executes in the Python interpreter, which kind of defeats the purpose.

But I have to admit that I haven't fully thought this possibility through. Maybe you're right that it can be made to work.
OK, I suppose the keyword there is "general". In that context I cannot argue with the idea.
"The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today."

I simply do not buy this. A tinkerer is born a tinkerer. I had a Mac in the late 80s and throughout the 90s and the only way to program the damn thing was to beg my folks to shell a couple hundred bucks for CodeWarrior and another couple hundred bucks for Apple Reference books.

The dev tools today for the iPad cost $99, the reference is free with the tools. If I was a father right now and I had a ten year-old-tinkerer I'd buy one, give it to my kid, get them a dev account and say, "Hack the shit out of this thing."

EDIT: "A tinkerer is born a tinkerer + some parental encouragement". When my parents (who at the time had little money, father was in the Army) bought our first Apple IIgs, he said "You should learn how to write your own programs for it". I didn't even know what programming was. But this was enough to make me hunt school libraries for books on BASIC.
30% of 0.99 - credit card fees - bandwidth cost

credit card fees on small amounts are heinous
That might be my favorite iPad analogy yet.

Will people please stop calling this the end of computing? If not for me, do it for CoCo [http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/1/23/44346/3789]
I agree, and I'm not even trying to broach the politics of it being a closed system.

I'm just wondering why lots of very tech savvy people have never minded their ipods, cellphones, gaming consoles, etc, etc, etc being closed.

Maybe we should have been protesting those all along? Otherwise how do you reconcile accepting all of those but rejecting this device?
I half agree with the sentiment here, except... This thing is Gaol Bait if I've ever seen it, I give it a week after launch before arbitrary code execution is possible. Voila, now you can write your own software/tweak away till your heart's content.

Seems an uncool thing to say, but you know what? I'm waiting in that line! I think it looks great.
The videos are largely an experiment. Our blog (ideasonideas) gets a fair bit of traffic, but it's more centered around the design community. As such, we wanted to try another venue to present the ideas in the book.

I've gone into more detail on the marketing of the book (if you're interested) in this post: http://www.ideasonideas.com/2009/12/my-money-where-my-mouth-.... It's really a big test: put out a good product, share it, and explore what methods resonate (and adapt when things don't work). I suppose it's like "agile" marketing. ;-)

Although the videos aren't wildly "different," I believe the message of the book largely is. In my opinion, many of the marketing texts and resources out there are big on promises but perhaps deliver more checklists than methods. This book is really more concentrated on looking at how small operations can really market themselves--and how things like social media can make that easier.

I realize that I've typed a fair bit here, and I'm not sure if I've answered your question. Does the above make sense?
How do you know that "these cases of bad science are few compared to the good"?

Seriously, whenever money or prestige is involved, the bad science has a much better chance.
It is important, but I don't see anywhere in the article that confuses unicode with its encodings.
Why the entitlement? We exist at the whim of the consumer - that is who we serve, after all.
Most smalltalks ship with method and class-level versioning with browsers. Full discussion of this is here: http://objectmix.com/smalltalk/16421-version-control-systems...

Eclipse is an effort to bring the advancements of smalltalk to java programmers, as the smalltalk community got absorbed by the java borg (see also: hotspot vm history.)
Java sin and cos might not be using the machine hardware.

Plain vanilla use of Math.sin and Math.cos = 9.15s
Constrain to the range +45 to -45 degrees = 4.88s

As demonstrated 20 months ago http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/program.php?test=parti...
Eclipse attempts to bolt-on features external to the runtime to make it appear integrated. The smalltalk implementations offer exactly the kinds of changes you are asking for in your post. see my comment above.
There's no idea that a single class might have two versions and that some bits of the program depend on the old version and some on the new. Why not? Why isn't live, running code versioned and transactioned so that we can release a patch of a few classes into a running server without taking it down? It should be possible for the old code to handle all of the existing requests and then get garbage collected when it has no further dependencies.

Isn't this also something that Smalltalk can do?
If you write software for a living you have to write for whichever platform the market dictates.
Apple's goal is to sell the iPad to people who already have a desktop, but don't feel like they need a full-blown laptop.

For people who want a full-blown laptop, Apple still sells those. If they made a $800 iPad fully capable of replacing a $1200 MacBook, they'd be in trouble.
>> sqrt, sin and tan for small values are just as fast as their C equivalents <<

So always use small values?

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/program.php?test=parti...
BUT... I do those things too and don't mind buying a general purpose device to achieve them... Doesn't mean I need to give up my laptop, desktop, server, phone, abacus. You're allowed to have more than one gadget, in fact, do you know what? It's positively encouraged. I honestly don't get all the hate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse

:)
I'd rather just use a chrome OS tablet, at least I don't have to connect it to a computer in order to update/sync/install stuff. And all the apps are web based so even if I need to use a regular computer I still have access to all my apps and data.
Erlang has the ability to keep two versions of a compiled module in memory at once (but only two, not three or more), making it possible to do hot code updates and achieve zero downtime upgrades. The message passing architecture makes this possible by swapping the old code out at a message processing boundary (letting the current cycle complete before loading the new code in). This can be seen as a limited implementation of a version-aware runtime.
It's not about needing a simpler computer. It's about wanting one. Not all people; not even all mothers or grandmothers. And not all the time.

The iPad has, in a sense, already made it. It, despite some people's protestations, is just a big iPod touch. Whether this form factor works or not, people have responded extremely well to its abstractions and simplifications, despite the limitations.
This book:

http://www.amazon.com/Difference-Between-God-Larry-Ellison/d...

...told me everything I needed to know about Larry Ellison, and the history of Oracle...
I don't entirely disagree with you. I'm not quick to reach for Buckley's (which is of course the point of the marketing), but my suspicion is that a lot of people do. Additionally, many people talk about them, which is a harder thing to achieve than most believe.

The thing that I think we have to take away from Buckley's marketing is that without that approach, they'd have a bad tasting cough medicine. Admitting that it tastes bad, on the other hand, leads us to ask, "how good does it have to be, in order for them to admit that?"

On the other hand, there are dozens of other brands of cough medicine out there, and I'm hard pressed to remember the names (or stories behind) any of them.
Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop
In a very real way, it did. Fifty or sixty years ago, people prepared food largely from scratch. Now, a large proportion of the population of Western nations prepares food by poking a hole in the plastic cover, closing the door, and hitting "Express".

Similarly, one possible future prompted by the iPad is one where "chefs" (hackers) do food preparation, but most people hit the power button.

Al3x is asserting that this is bad because there's not really much of a path from 'here' to 'there'. You can't get started by running scripts in a shell, or writing AppleScript, or whatever — you get apps from the App Store and that's it.
This is also wrong. Classes aren't global in Ruby. Classes are just Objects. Constants have weird scoping issues. you can get into some really weird conditions when you start doing interesting metaprogramming. For instance, try .dup'ing a Class object whose implementation refers to another class via its name. You will get an error that the constant can't be resolved.
Reddit Programming subreddit FAQs
True, but I believe the point is still valid. Given knowledge of cryptographic hashes, and ignorance of HMAC, it is a perfectly reasonable assumption to use a hash in this way. I think that's a rather common situation, and outcome.

And, blindingly obvious in hindsight (I have definitely heard of HMAC before, at least) but new to me too.
Why does MySQL still default to latin1? (Or am I mistaken?)
Funding profile I was meaning more like: your revenue level and growth rate, what industry you are in and dynamics of, the business model, strength of team, etc.

if you want to discuss send me your email address to: peripatetic@suremail.info and I will drop you a line.
Interesting.

Although for Ruby (the case he cites) I would argue his "awesome" reason, community, actually springs partially from one of his wrong reasons, namely "readability, expressiveness and an awesome standard library".
X11 supports that type of scrolling on my Eee running Arch (I don't remember if it was there by default or if I had to turn it on, though), albeit only vertically. Note that the Eee's trackpad doesn't have multitouch; thus, I see no reason that this couldn't manage it. Of course, I don't use it much, because the trackpad is a bit too small for it to be useful, but still.
Wow, upvotes on this? You're trying to compare local tribal warfare to continent spanning state-condoned genocide. Did you actually read any Zinn?
I don't see how you're inferring language share within UTF-8. Being a unicode encoding, it can be used to represent text in all popular scripts; that's kind of the point.
Abstraction isn't just a matter of degree. It turns out that abstracting away the transmission in a car works fairly well. But no car I've ever seen abstracts away the brakes. In fact, most cars sold today have hydraulically assisted brakes, to give the user even more control over them. Apple just seems, IMHO, to be abstracting away a few things I'd like control over.
there's something to be said for buying property
That is interesting, what was the former game involving an inflated pigs bladder that involved horseback? Some sort of version of handball?

Plus you should forward your source to OED as they remain unclear as to whether your etymology or that of kicking the ball is the origin.

Clearly football has referred to different games hence the need for the modifier Rugby [football] to be applied to the game of that same name to differentiate it.
A Tech Novice Goes to the Apple Store -- Very Funny Article
The first generation is meaningless. Of course the first-gen iPad is lacking "obvious" features competitors have. Same thing with the iPhone on Day 1. But in 9-12 months, when iPad 2.0 comes out, and a year after than when iPad 3 hits the shelves, those feature gaps will be closed, like they were with the iPhone.

Apple doesn't win by cramming in all the features on the first go. They win by polishing the heck out of things and executing features well. Then they expand those features in follow-up revisions.
No, actually! Because that makes the little down arrow the "I disagree" button, and that sort of behavior is no good for discussion.
A pretty mind boggling video on the same theme: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17jymDn0W6U
There is no generalist developer in the world that will come up with HMAC when given the "secure hash algorithm" tool and the knowledge that you can "sign" or "protect" a message concatenating it with a key. HMAC is surprisingly intricate.

That there is no simple, intuitive alternative to HMAC is a strong reason not to allow developers to work at the "picking algorithms and constructions" level of cryptography.

The rule is, "data in motion should be secured with TLS, data at rest should be secured with PGP".

What worried me about posts like this is that they communicate the idea that, if you just know a couple more things (like, "HMAC"), you can get crypto right. No. For instance, this article doesn't explain how to safely compare HMACs. The intuitive way to compare securely is drastically insecure. The correct way to do it is surprisingly intricate.

If you're typing the letters H-M-A-C into your code, you're doing it wrong.
A fun way to assure quality of your website
http://www.google.com/codesearch is literal, and even supports regular expressions!

The kind of massive indexes needed to support it must be insanely unprofitable given its tiny userbase in a tiny market.
That's why my kids are growing up with those clunky ugly computers that the Mac loathes running a completely open operating system with every imaginable programming language at their finger tips.

It won't be pretty, but neither was the Timex Sinclair 1000 that was the first computer that I programmed with BASIC.
No more iPad Stories
It might be for your mom, it might not be. Let's revisit the topic when the first sales numbers come out.
I can tell you from experience of having 7 siblings that if you gave them a iPad and gave them the dev tools, they (95% of people) wouldn't bother.

But is this really different? Ten years ago, did more than 5% of people feel the need to tinker with their computer under the hood?
"trying for decades at this point to make a computer that's open, easy to use for everyone, never crashes, etc."

The last Mac I bought ran Tiger. Given reasonable maintenance, and good net hygiene, I had one software crash that I know of. It was the hardware that failed repeatedly ... screen, drive.

I've also been using Vista for a year. No significant events (I'm not pushing the envelope all that hard, do PM, net hygiene.)

I'm just saying that they've gotten pretty close to "never crashes" to be quitting now. But to give -many more- consumers the -stability- they need, and to protect them from the darkside of the net, there needs to be a degree of closedness.

There used to be a lot of wide-open platforms before mainstreaming boiled down options for most to PC/Mac. It was a chaotic period, and the narrowing down arguably made widespread adoption and economy of scale possible. If there were still 20 platforms ... well I don't even want to think about it. The complexity and cost, I suspect, would be an order of magnitude higher. So -we gained- from the mainstreaming.

I don't really grok the sense of anxiety here. The App store won't sell apps that aren't approved? But anyone who wants to can. Most people seem to want decisions made for them, because they're busy with the rest of their life. (See: US Congress.) Yes, you give up freedoms when other people are making choices for you. So long as I'm still free to choose for myself, what's the problem? I'm not going to roll my own OS ... so that decision's already in someone else's hands.
I don't think that's really an apt comparison. Shakespeare's comedies haven't really aged well (it's a bit like watching comedy from the 1970s - you miss all the context). The tragedies age much better.

And concerning "getting published and selling today" - Sarah Palin gets published. That doesn't mean that what she writes is anything other than trash.
It took a closed platform - a perfectly cultured, strictly defined environment that was the iPod to start building the halo (and with that, peoples' trust) towards the desktop/laptop Mac.

There are many plausible interpretations of history. Mine is that Mac market share took off around the same time as the ascendancy of laptops, when screens and mobile CPUs got to the point where they were no longer hugely inferior to desktops. Mac laptop sales exploded because they're both more aesthetically appealing (which matters more for laptops since other people see them) and more functional (e.g. sleep and wireless actually work reliably).

I also think early alpha geek adoption of OS X helped to a lesser extent, both in terms of the software they created and in recommendations to friends and family. The iPhone/iPad may become like Windows in the 90s: what developers write for during the day to pay the bills, while they do their hacking on platforms that don't frustrate their desires.
That's kinda the same point: the people who just want to browse the web and look at photos are the people who want to live in cookie-cutter gated communities, burdened by CCRs.

The iPhone and the iPad are gated communities with a HOA. Your neighbor can't park a clunker across the street from your house for six months... but neither can a friend of yours stay in an RV in your driveway for a week.

"Most desirable" is a relative term.

I want to have freedom, even at the cost of a more difficult life. I'm house hunting right now, and I'm actively avoiding the kinds of places you describe.
Actually, 95% of all REEs are not in China -- 95% of REE production is in China.

And the reason for this is that mining and processing REE causes a lot of pollution whose cleanup costs shut down mines elsewhere in the world while in China it was all just dumped to the nearest river.
I liked their logo as well. I used to work there and I was the lead on a long dead product called sparc cluster I. The logo we created for that was a play on the Sun logo and the product itself.

Hand written postscript (jesus, I'm old) here: http://bitmover.com/lm/sun-clust.sh

and the logo here: http://bitmover.com/lm/sun-clust.gif

A little cheesy but I always liked that logo.
The cynic in me says that the problem they were attempting to address was the lack of money in their pocket, and the solution they came up with was to release a platform ostensibly about displaying PDF files for the web (which is ridiculous to start with, but whatever), so they could get users to steal other people's content for them, and then run ads against that content. Huzzah!