skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One expects to read clear, honest disagreement in regard to a leftist activist on a news site devoted ,at least partially, to startup culture, but that review is a complete joke. This isn't an obligatory challenging, its an ideological hit piece masquerading as a book review. If this sounds like an over the top response to the above comment, this is the bio blurb at the top of the review;
"Mr. Flynn is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia and author of the newly released, Why the Left Hates America: Exposing the Lies That Have Obscured Our Nation’s Greatness."
Does "Why the left hates america" sound like an unbiased, historically accurate take on anything?
The below response is also dead on, this was completely graceless.
Definitely getting one to develop apps on, and for reading books, and touch screen painting (a Cintiq is far far more expensive). But very up in the air about which version.
Article: ~"Apple is taking computing away from the focus on tech specs and focusing on the whole package. They've made their own CPU, they've put deep thought into the software, and it shows, this thing is fast".

You: ~"Hold on, we don't know anything about the processor's specs. It can't feel fast to use for the end user until we can benchmark the CPU against an Intel CPU".

Me: While knowing about the processor might be interesting, if Apple have combined software and hardware to make a fast to use device, what the numbers show the raw hardware is capable of is rather irrelevant - even if they were extra bad, that would just show the software was extra carefully tuned.
The studio execs behind hulu.com bought into this:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashmediaserver/articles/digita...

If you're going to stream Hollywood content, you'll need Flash. You'll find that Hollywood content on YouTube is delivered in rtmpe:// only, while all other content is MP4 downloaded via http. Hulu is pure rtmpe.

And you'll need adaptive streaming.

Here's a good proposal Apple put out:

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/Netw...

Now someone convince Hollywood this is secure and incorporate into HTML 5, and you'll kill Flash.
Wow! I was sure he would finally have something fair, balanced, or even perhaps negative to say about Apple! I am totally shocked that he found some obscure point about the iPad to harp on about rather than mentioning the many obvious negatives.
Editors to staff: iPad is hot, write something

The Kindle is for book lovers, and the iPad is not.

- Book lovers love books and the iPad lets them buy books... And if I am going to blow several hundred bucks buying one that looks nicer and also does lots of other stuff.

Amazon will continue to improve on the Kindle.

- So will Apple...

The Kindle store will continue to thrive.

- This has nothing to do with how well the Kindle will do. iPad also wont kill Amazon.com while we are at it.
Agreed. But I wrote about them because I thought people would like to learn about them. They are pretty under the radar and maybe like it that way - nice way to have fewer competitors all rushing into an area you pioneered (see e.g. GroupOn)
Looking at the big picture the thing that really stands out to me is the iWork demo. The built-in apps were a bit ho-hum because they are very basic applications like most of Apple's other bundled apps on other platforms but the iWork demo... You've got basically a near desktop quality application here. Look at all the new UI widgets, toolbars, drop down font selectors, a general purpose file-insertion tool using media browsers, a windowing system, context sensitive keyboards, etc. I can imagine we're going to see a lot of iPad applications that are near desktop quality. The first generation of powerful multi-touch software. This is where the people saying "it's just a big iPod Touch" are totally missing the point. iPad applications are going to be serious, nearly fully featured, applications.
Dear Mr. Jobs, You have just announced the most restricted personal computing platform ever! evil, even with a slick look remains evil

http://twitter.com/tzury/status/8312812934
I agree that in the short term, not having Flash will wall off large sections of web content.

However, if the iPad takes off we will have to either provide alternate content or abandon flash on our heaviest flash sites. The web design company I work for will probably switch to standards-based Javascript animation and HTML5 video with the usual fallbacks for IE6. We already use JS for many things that used to be flash, like menus, slideshows, galleries, and animations.

When it was just the iPhone/iPod touch, with their relatively small browsing traffic, it was easy to shrug it off when a site didn't work properly. Expectations will be different with this device. My clients will be asking why their site is broken on their iPads.

The big video sites will implement an HTML5-powered player for the iPad because it allows them to go around the iTunes / App store model. Smaller video players will probably make the switch sooner.

Apple may be doing the developer community a favor by giving us a reason to leave flash behind. The runtime is fine on Windows but sluggish on OSX and slow and buggy on Linux; it's frequently using more CPU time than anything else on my system and often has terrible video playback performance.
I was replying to your question about why it is sometimes better to have a native app, even though you may not need direct access to hardware - user experience is another factor.

Do understand that such a kind of experience may be deliverable today, with PastryKit or whatever someone else develops, but Apple can break this compatibility (which it cant do with its native SDK).

A new business model may exist where developers make advertising money off free iphone webapps. It is extremely naiive to believe that Apple will allow you to deliver the same user experience by bypassing the App Store.
I think you're going a bit over the top by saying they've killed every photo frame company on the planet. People aren't going to buy five iPads and put them up around their house.
Lots of people are trying. Only Apple actually seems to be making forwards-edge progress? In order to compete with Apple, people need to try less and succeed more, otherwise Apple's superior user experience is going to steamroll any ideological benefits.
Microsoft Sues Prominent BitTorrent Tracker For $43m
If Amazon does two things, a) drops price and b) continues to rapidly improve their product I think the Kindle could continue to have a very comfortable niche and could in the end either split the book market with Apple or control most of it.

Nintendo's massively underpowered Gameboy famously defeated waves upon waves of highly advanced competitors by understanding what the market really wanted (great games and great battery life) and doing that better than the competition. It's much, much too early to say how the battle between the Kindle and the iPad for the book market will play out, but I think if there is indeed a clear differentiator in quality between the Kindle and iPad screen, and the Kindle is truly better for reading, then there might be an opportunity for Amazon to put their foot in the door and show that they have the better product. For folks who are interested in an eBook Reader but already have an iPhone and a Macbook a cheaper Kindle could be the better option than the iPad.

At this point I do feel that Amazon may need to get some retail partners and to set up Kindle Kiosks in electronics and drug stores across the world. It doesn't matter if your screen is better if no one can see it first hand, and they're dazzled by the iPad they see in their local Apple store.

The other issue that Amazon faces is while they may be able to lower their price and keep a nice spacing between them and the iPad, eventually the price of the iPad will come down and the Kindle will less attractive. Amazon will need to continue to innovate on their technology and seek out relationships to build content that Apple won't be able to get. The announcement of the Kindle SDK is a good first start.
I was referring to the digital frames. Maybe I'm missing something (entirely possible!) but I don't know what any other "display photos in a digital box" hardware has to offer that this doesn't.

Upvoted, among other things, for making me imagine a waterfall of iPads displaying upon them photographs of waterfalls. Unrelated imagery. Thanks!
Quad Core dedicated servers
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I was just inspired to go download the (free) instance of Classics. It had an odd page-turning automation graphic (both pulling up too much of the screen, distracting, as well as not being very controllable - hard to turn a page a bit without moving it all the way).

For the _life_ of me I couldn't figure out where to find the options on how to change the font size - obviously it's there some place (nobody makes an ereader without the ability to change font size ) - but no amount of clicking, checking in settings, or otherwise scanning could reveal it.

Regardless, I feel reassured in my $9.99 investment in Eucalyptus - which has all of the above (page turning, font size) nailed - better than the Kindle App, actually.
Same here... running noscript in Firefox makes me non-unique.

It's probably Flash that ruins it for people. Allowing a per-machine cookie and identifying itself as such.
Other "display photos in a digital box" hardware has a sub $100 pricetag, which means you can leave them around your house doing nothing but display photos without feeling guilty (or stupid).
With an iPod-like restricted OS? No, thank you.
Lack of camera/video chat was surprising. You would think this would be a fun video ichat device.
I'm not sure if this will pan out to be true and anyways they did the opposite of what this guy is doing. They took a usable site and made it unusable :)
AI scientist Jürgen Schmidhuber & 'Artificial Curiosity'
Touche! So the digital photos won't disappear instantly. I'd bet, though, that they'll take something of a hit from this, and certainly as this thing lowers in prices they'll be hurt even further.
The iPhone 3GS has very fast javascript performance.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/24/iphone-3gs-javascript-p...

I don't think I'm making a big leap to speculate that this means the iPhone runs javascript comparably to the consumer-level (read: cheap Best Buy) desktop running some version of IE that most people have.

Considering the iPad's processor is significantly faster, I see no reason why web apps wouldn't run perfectly well on it.
That leak would have sounded like: "Wow, I just got done with the new Harry Potter book. It is amazing -- it has, like, magic and stuff, and there are these three kids, and they keep saving the world. We're so happy to have it on the iPad -- it is going to sell a whole lot of copies."

i.e. it only matters if you're a legendarily obsessive control freak.
Really brilliant article
"If I'm busy testing every single edge case I can think of, who's doing the development?"

The edge cases are the development. In my experience, the core functionality takes less than 10% of the time. A good programmer should be able to crank out an algorithm in a couple days; the problem comes when that algorithm meets end users and they request features that are completely insane from an engineering perspective, yet necessary for user acceptance.
shrug

Let's see how well it actually does before we go on about how brilliant Apple's marketing guys are.

Yes, the iPad has potential. It doesn't make sense to dismiss it offhand just because some of us might not have a use for it.

No, not every single Apple product has changed the world, even though they're all introduced as revolutionary. It doesn't make sense to accept their marketing copy as gospel. Lots of companies pay lots of money for sentences like that, it doesn't mean they're all successful.

Ultimately, the market will decide this one. Yes, it MIGHT change the world, but it really is too early to tell one way or another.
Don't be mean.
Google Chrome's Content Filtering - paving the way for REAL ad-blocking?
Book online safely at Villa Chitdara - Luang Prabang
I agree with the author of this article, and I get where Apple is coming from with the iPad. I don't know what to say to the people who are disappointed it's not an OSX tablet computer - I don't know why you thought it would be. I don't think an OSX tablet would be a good thing either, but that's beside the point, Apple could still do that if they wanted.

I think huge segment of peoples computing needs could be met by a device like this. I think there is a whole segment of computing uses now that have left the keyboard and screen formfactor behind. Rather than this device needing a niche, I think it may end up that portable computers with keyboards are a niche.

Having said all that, I was disappointed by the release. The bezel is ugly and I'm not convinced that it's necessary for holding. The aspect ratio seems wrong and ugly. The screen is much lower ppi than the ipod/iphone. Half an inch seems too thick as well. All in all its not the sleek futuristic machine it should be. Hopefully version 2 will fix some of these things.
Whether you're a multimedia programmer, a musician, a filmmaker, a newspaper editor, or a novelist... you're unlikely to find the iPad more useful than a MacBook in any way.

Of course, I'm not an art student, so correct me if I'm wrong :)
How a stray mouse click choked the NYSE & cost a bank $150K
I agree. Its like "we got to write about the iPad, what do you got? Everyone is saying it'll kill the Kindle, so lets say it won't... brilliant!" :)

I don't thin it'll kill the Kindle, I think it'll bring about a price drop, and more innovation from Kindle. But this article is just sensationalism.
Twitter Reach 75 Million Users But Only 17% Active
Privacy 2.0: What’s missing from Google’s new privacy principles?
Certainly marketing can lie. The "funnest iPod ever" didn't make the iPod touch into a brilliant gaming console. (Casual gaming, maybe, come to think of it, but that's beyond my knowledge. Anybody else know about this?) However, it's good at indicating what somebody wants you to think. Droid's ad wanted you to think: "iPhone sucks, Droid rules." Apple's ad wants you to think: "This thing was made by a wizard." Relevant to today's discussions because a lot of people seem to be wondering what Apple's thinking, when I think Apple's been pretty obvious.

I actually wouldn't call this revolutionary. That's why we're not reacting gleefully. It's evolutionary. It just happens to have evolved in a way that gives it a potential radical significance.

Semirelated: Studying advertisements is a brilliant way to study history. It lets you in on all society's biases and wants and needs and fears. Modern advertisement is as insightful to the human condition as modern poetry, though it goes at it a bit ass-backwards and rarely as tactfully.
State of the Union – Twitter Audience Reaction
You will never get that specification. Most people don't know what they need until you show it to them.

Specification-driven development is a great way to write software that gets you paid, gets some purchasing manager a bonus, and yet pisses off every end user who comes in contact with it.
Though it was a dumb gaff on his part it's not like he is the only CEO type to do this, the executive editor at the NYT did something similar did he not? http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2009/10/26/itablet-leak-assumpt...
Obama: Eliminate Cap Gains on Small Business Investment
Apple may tout the appstore now, but they only reluctantly released it. The first iteration of the iphone only supported web applications. People disliked them because they were slower and not nearly as cohesive as the core, native apps.
Well... yes and no. Certainly there are certain things that artists need that the iPad won't be instantly equipped to handle. However, in terms of sales newspaper people and novelists will thrive with this, and I suspect this product will increase movie sales and rentals immensely. Meanwhile, I cannot emphasize how wonderful it is to have a product adhering to modern web standards. Makes me want to give up yelling at Firefox 3 and pursuing a career as iPad evangelist.

There's another way the iPad appeals to vain, picky art types, and that's how fringeless it is. Even OS X bothers me in small, subtle ways that my iPod touch avoided with its utterly simplistic design. Taking that design and building a computer out of it means I might actually finally appreciate a piece of hardware. Simplicity means losing hardcore technique, but I enjoy the thought of being able to doodle digital images with my hands.
But why is everyone making so important issue the need for Flash?

Two reasons:

1. It's Apple, everything is supposed to just work. As a web developer, I not a huge Flash fan. But if I'm on my iPhone or iPad and I get the "missing plugin" brick, I'm pissed: I'm missing out on content. Steve Jobs wasn't telling the whole truth when he said it was the "real internet".

and 2. Flash was introduced almost 15 years ago. The fact that Apple is today announcing a magical device with a touchscreen and a blazing fast mobile processor, but one that cannot run a plugin that my grey Gateway 2000 Pentium I desktop had no trouble with just seems backwards. I don't know if it's an Apple problem or an Adobe problem, but it's what you get when you mix two companies with closed software standards.
My suggestion for making money in this space is not to build a CMS and sell it, but rather to build add-ons for existing systems. I use ExpressionEngine and I have seen popular add-ons sell for as much as the CMS itself (personal license.) That way you have left the hard part to the developers of the CMS (growing a community, attracting developers and building a customer base.)
That's how I feel, too. The bezel I'm uncertain about, the aspect ratio is certainly different if nothing else. I'm curious how it'll feel when held. Perhaps the radical screen change will prove to feel surprisingly natural.

I think the huge (relatively) screen will make up for the ppi. As for half an inch, I suspect that with something this big anything thinner might even seem fragile. But we'll find out on launch, and whatever we hate Apple will fix and sell to us again.
You say that the entire world wants an iPad. I disagree. I think this will appeal to a specific (but fairly common) kind of computer user. Namely, the sort of person who really doesn't know what they're doing on a computer, and only uses their PC for very basic tasks. This kind of person will be able to replace their laptop (or even their desktop) with an iPad, and I think it will be a fantastic solution for them.

The problem, though, is that this "magical screen" probably won't be very efficient for getting work done. Which means most people won't be able to replace their computers. And I think it's going to be hard to convince these people that they need a so-called "middle device".

EDIT: I should also add that I think the appeal will be much broader once publishers make digital books and textbooks that are actually superior to their paper counterparts. But that might take years.
Arrest Blair
Kayak.com Makes Developers Do Customer Support
Not sure you read the same article I read. Some exact quote:

"But: everyone I spoke to in the press room was raving first and foremost about the speed. None of us could shut up about it. It feels impossibly fast. (And our next thought: What happens if Apple has figured out a way to make a CPU like A4 that fits in an iPhone? If they pull that off for this year’s new iPhone, look out.)"

"Apple doesn’t just own and control a mobile CPU, they own and control the hands-down best mobile CPU in the world. Software aside (which is a huge thing to put aside), it may well be that no other company could make a device today matching the price, size, and performance of the iPad. They’re not getting into the CPU business for kicks, they’re getting into it to kick ass."

Now that i reread the whole thing, the author sounds extremely delusional and I am tempted to question his tech knowledge and what he knows about the hardware besides being a raging apple fan boy.
Tuyển nhân viên sửa chữa. cài đặt máy tính
FWIW, I work on Google Search, possibly the largest software system on the planet, and Google is famous for being tester-light and automation-heavy. We rely much more on code reviews and on having good engineers who aren't rushed than on testers.

The reason is just as you state: beyond a certain point, the number of states in the system becomes so great that you simply can't test them all. Replacing developers with testers doesn't change that. So you're better off understanding what you're doing than trying to avoid all the possible ways that you could go wrong.
Not to make an issue out of something so trivial, but honestly, it didn't come across as hyperbole. The general tone of the article is pretty direct and in-your-face, so it looks more like an actual attempt at estimation rather than humor, for consistency's sake.
Hyperbole.
Exactly. I doubt adding n over the iPhone's g did much to increase the browser's speed because the iPhone couldn't even consume all of g's throughput.
Direct and in-your-face, perhaps, but this is also an article that says the iPad is magic, and we all know it's not literally magic. I refuse to believe we're that incapable of discerning not-so-subtleties.
World news: EU to assess piracy detection software
Sure. http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/01/22/canvas
Great find, thanks! My favorite quote from this was:

"If you make the engineers answer e-mails and phone calls from the customers, the second or third time they get the same question, they'll actually stop what they're doing and fix the code. Then we don't have those questions anymore."
Computer Science In Javascript
Jason —

I think it'll appeal to more people than just that. I suspect it'll make headway into the e-reader territory — some people will pass up e-paper for flexibility. It'll also be considered by anybody enthusiastic about newspapers or magazines, and I think there might be more of them than we currently see. Certainly that's what my neighbor was excited about when he dropped by to talk.

It's going to be absolutely enormous for students. Anybody who uses their laptop for casual notetaking will want this. I use my iPod and I want it also, though for me it would be a gratuitous purchase. People that want a Macbook but can't drop a thousand dollars will consider paying half that for a tablet.

As for getting work done: I can see myself using this as a primary writing tool. I'd prefer that to a Macbook, actually, because of the flexibility. (I don't mind touch-typing.) I can also see a lot of powerful applications being made around this. Could you replicate Coda as an iPad app? I think it's possible. Could you make a powerful image editor? Perhaps not in the iPad's current state (though maybe?), but as it becomes more powerful I think there's easily enough space to create a gorgeous editing interface. I can already run Final Cut Pro on my laptop with no problem, and using flash memory means things move even more quickly; we won't see professional-class applications by the end of this year, but by 2012 I suspect we'll start to see them.

Within my immediate family one purchase has been decided (my mother wants an ebook computer and a music program) and I suspect several more are on the way. When one thing can do so many things at once, it appeals to lots and lots of people. I doubt people who already have two Apple products will need this third one, but people with only one or the other or people looking to make a switch suddenly have a brilliant bridge.
How the iPad will destroy Microsoft.  Quietly.
"Namely, the sort of person who really doesn't know what they're doing on a computer, and only uses their PC for very basic tasks."

From my personal experience of being "that computer guy" for countless friends, relatives, and random people on the street, that statement accurately describes over 90% of the home computer market (i.e. everything but business/professional use).