skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Eric Brewer (CAP Theorem) Joins Basho Board of Directors
If HN ever wanted to make some money, I would be glad to pay to not have to see articles like this one.

Seriously though, the article is pretty good -- I can feel the stickiness of the jizz on his keyboard.
The point of a digital photo frame is to display photos. The point of the iPad is to do magical fun stuff. Displaying photos is just one thing it can do. I don't think it's going to do anything to the digital frame industry. A computer can also display photos, so whatever damage that has been done has already been done.
I agree wholeheartedly about the need for lower pricing - Kindle seems like something that should cost much, much less than it does. If it was priced at $99, it would go from being an overpriced toy for well-off adults to being something that every parent buys for their children. Not sure how easy that is to make jibe with the prepaid cell data plan, though.

Also agree that seeing helps the Kindle a lot, as it does for most electronics, but especially something as display-centric as the Kindle.

Disagree about the SDK, though. The Kindle screen is godawful slow at refreshing, and I've not been impressed by the user interface - I can't imagine wanting to develop on it. What do you see it being useful for besides being able to say "We have an SDK!"?
I'll second Freshbooks. I have been using them since 2006 to send out monthly invoices. Most of my clients still pay by check even though they can pay with a credit card online. Freshbooks is super cheap for what they do and I don't have to worry about getting bills out every month.
wow. im surprised that theres so many "no"s in this poll. I figured this device wouldnt be for the masses but i thought it would have better reception on HN.
The article was published on Jan 4th 2010. According to the article, they were suppose to demo it during the CES which has already come and gone and since I didn't see any headlines regarding the $199 tablet from Freescale, I would assume they have already pushed their release dates to much later (or may have abandoned the plans).
"The Web is the most hostile software engineering environment imaginable." - Douglas Crockford
Oh, jrockway. Here's to our upcoming 2-year anniversary of you being a fucker and my calling you a fucker. You've been with me since the start!

I think it's all right for me to call Apple my favorite company. If we want to be douchesnobs, they've earned their pedigree. More red dot design awards than any other company in history, more black pencils, an impressive list of advertising trophies, and business sales that shock and awe us all. As an entrepreneurial advertising major who enjoys industrial design, I think it's safe to say I've got a good excuse for liking Apple.
Apple has become the prime example of closed computing. It has its benefits: the iPhone is painfully easy to use, has very few viruses, and works pretty much all the time (except when AT&T drops, but that's a separate worry).

Google is trying to take the opposite pole: you can do pretty much anything on an Android phone, but that includes buggy software with bad UI design.

There will always be both positions. Both have benefits to different people. To a HackerNews audience, the open system will almost always seem better -- HackerNews types enjoy tinkering and will tend to be advanced users. But not everyone shares the HN love of tinkering.
I don't see how this would increase movie sales. Most people already have TVs, and TVs have much bigger screens than the iPad. So unless the iPad makes it much easier to deliver those HD movies on to your TV, I doubt it will do much. But even if it does do that, it'd be encroaching on the Apple TV's space.
80 minutes, both ways, with two hookers. It's the game they play in heaven.

(And lest that be interpreted as me being facetious - that's a core rugby union slogan http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=the+game+they+pl... )
I think it's going to come down to how consumers perceive the iPad. If they see it as a simplified computer, then you're absolutely right. If, however, they start treating it like a household appliance, one that simply cuts many more specialized tools out of the picture, then I think digital photo frames might be among the ones to do. When you can call up your photos in a slideshow at any time on a machine that makes doing so feel intuitive, you might not like the programmable frame.

But, as I said, I could be wrong. My own apathy for the product certainly isn't anybody else's.
Agreed on textbook/student note taking angle. But I really think you're in the minority as far as not minding touchtyping on a glass screen — I think that would get old fast for writing anything longer than a paragraph.

I'm eager to see how this works as an eReader. I still think that reading a book on a backlit display sort of stinks. I'm wondering if people will spring for the iPad as an eBook reader because it has so much else to offer, and then realize a few days later that they just can't ignore the eye strain.
I disagree that it's just "potential" radical significance. I think the advertising claims are quite verifiable by looking at the specs and comparing with the iPhone's success, and thus it's a slam dunk. I think you made a strong argument that those who say it's not going to be a big deal because it lacks GPS and a camera aren't representative of the target audience.
I think you're missing the point. I have friends that are nurses, mechanics and fishermen - and they don't even have a computer. They don't get work done on their computers, they don't use their computers for basic tasks. They don't want a computer. It's easy to forget that these people exist when you're a hacker, but out there in the real world they're the majority. And for them this product is a perfect match.
If I were writing this article, it would have read: "1: E-Ink. 2: E-Ink. 3: E. Ink."

Seriously though, you can't compare a device with two weeks of battery life and an e-ink screen with a large iPod. They are completely different devices for completely different purposes.

Sure, you can read books on your iPad... but I doubt that is why people will be buying them.
Most people don't buy movies on their computer. It's more logical to buy a DVD set, which plays on both TV and computers, than it is to buy a digital movie that can't be moved back easily. Computers don't offer much of a movie-watching advantage, so the computer-movie market is floundering.

The iPhone lets me buy movies on the fly, which gives me a great convenience. But it's small. The iPad, on the other hand, lets me buy from anywhere, but it's large enough to make movies enjoyable. If I'm about to get on an 8-hour flight, maybe I buy a book and rent a movie. The fact that I can pay a small amount of money, get something to watch on the plane, and never have to worry with physical packaging, that's nice.

Certainly that encroaches on Apple TV. But Apple TV is a bastard son anyway.
Really? No one in that 90% does something like build a resume in Word/OOWriter?
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I don't think it would be long before somebody is able to root the device and install a version of linux or android on the device. The nook was rooted within days and the iPad would be definitely more tempting to hackers to tinker with.
Indeed! But all sorts of things can happen to stop it from becoming truly radically huge. Certainly it'll sell well at first — so did the Kindle. I wouldn't call the Kindle radical, though, even if it is pretty big (and a damn good product at that). By "radical" I mean "so big every family has two". I can imagine that happening, but I wouldn't take it as a given.
And you can't make a resume in iWork? I think that part of Apple's announcement was more significant to a certain crowd than we're giving it credit for.
The problem with computers and "feeling fast" though is that it tends to wear off.
And give them to your employees as gifts. It seems like these things were just invented to be giftable.
That's why I'm really interested in seeing what this keyboard dock is like. Certainly it works well stationary, but for people on the move and wanting a keyboard is it a solution? I'm guessing it's not; it looks fairly bulky. Perhaps bluetooth keyboards will become a hot accessory.

The ereader angle will be interesting also. I find that I don't mind reading books on lowlit screens, but I still vastly prefer the Kindle. I'd also like to know if reading certain types of writing works better without e-paper. Perhaps reading glossy magazines feels better when your screen's glowing at you.
Except that the iPad uses ePub - the standard, open, DRM-free eBook format.
I mostly agree with you, but: developers are people too.
Not exactly. It's leaking a secret. "Harry Potter has wizards in it" wasn't a secret.
"Bad artists copy. Great artists steal" - Pablo Picasso
> When you can call up your photos in a slideshow at any time on a machine that makes doing so feel intuitive, you might not like the programmable frame.

I thought that point of photo frames (digital or not) was to display your photos, not to have an iPad sitting on the coffee table that has all of your photos on it ready to sift through. This is like saying that putting a photo album on your coffee table makes photos in frames obsolete.

Unless you're claiming that people will buy iPads with iPad-holsters and set them up on tables/shelves to constantly display a stream of their photos, then you haven't proved that the digital photo frame is "on it's way out."
What does Oracle plan for Netbeans IDE?
The iPhone has the feel of a device where they care about responsiveness but the hardware isn't up to it. Every Windows mobile phone I've seen has the feel that the software is built badly and nothing the hardware can do will help.

Wintel very much isn't "slow as ever"

You are right, I'm spoiled by fast hardware, compared to the machines of yesteryear my desktop is a joy. But a processor capable of tens of billions of operations per second compared to my human senses - nothing should take long enough that I can notice it.

When using Visio and accidentally mousing over the My Shapes menu the whole program locks up for about 10 seconds while it finds zero shapes from a network drive and then doesn't cache the result. While using VMWare vSphere client, almost every click, view change, menu popup, any action at all takes a blinking and a flickering and a delay. Explorer happily does slow folder and drive refreshes and ignores right click popup menu requests on many occasions. IE 8 opening a new tab is a laggy occasion. SQL Server Management Studio 2008 is a blinkenflicker fest all over.

Here and there, slow calls are in UI threads, network requests are blocking, network requests are slow out of all proportion with the amount of data that needs to be transferred due to odd protocols and many layers, crunching data is not offloaded onto other cores, frequent results aren't cached, the spinny circle cursor and the "program is not responding whoops it's back now" affair happen all too often.

I can see two reasons. A) it's hard. B) It's not a priority. I can forgive the iPhone because it mostly works well. I can forgive small companies writing desktop software. I can't forgive the likes of Microsoft and VMWare, because they have masses of cash and eat hard problems for breakfast, so the only conclusion is that they don't care that I get a twinge of reluctance to use their software, a frowny lemon eating face when I wade through it, when I'm drumming my fingers and using the free time to grumble about their software to my colleagues.

Fast responsive small simple software is a joy to use, I am cheered by PuTTY, Paint.NET, 7-zip, VirtualBox, VLC, AnyClient, Vim. Even Adobe deserve praise for the improvements in startup time from Adobe Reader 6 and the plugin fiasco.

VMWare vSphere client, as it fires up the coal boilers and defrosts the Java VM, whips at the tired donkey graph drawing libraries and runs all it's server queries through a dialup connection simulator, oh no. No no no.

If Apple are going to focus on speed, I'm going to focus on giving them my cash. I can feel my mental liking of the iPad converging, decision weightings on it's faults are weakening and it's pros are strengthening, a preliminary RDF field is forming to buffer my perception of the change in my bank account, the justifications are coming more and more easily to the fore.

I will only end up disappointed, apps will chug, serious web pages will lag and layout will take ages, iPhoto will arbitrarily slow while scrolling ... but by then it will be far far too late. :/
Multi-core processors are plenty useful in a non-multitasking environment. A single process with many threads is sped up by having multiple cores. Apple is definitely interested in multi-core processors, look at Grand Central on OS X. I would argue that it is one of the most interesting approaches to multi threaded/multi core programs in recent OS history.
The problem is that I never really got picture frames. I think it's weird having photos of people just randomly hanging around. Especially if it's a small screen giving me a crappy cycling photo. I'd rather have a device upon which all my family memories are stored.

But I'm the odd man out, I guess. I'd always thought digital photo frames were dead anyway; from the opposition that line got here, I guess I'm wrong! Apologies.
Rep Baird site hacked
And you thought the TechCrunch hack was impressive.
Don't worry. Most people can.
Chess? Well, you're making the wrong comparison. Football is like war. War is two things: Extended, pointless boredom, and short bursts of energy and terror and injury, all of which is encompassed by years of unseen strategic, economic, logistical, and tactical planning.

Chess is some freak memorizing combinations of opening moves from past games.
Doc Searls on Steve Jobs [1997]
There's a difference between a human coming up with a model of the problem domain and having an algorithm do it for you. GA's and other EA's fall in to the latter category.
He's a blogger.
1) You've attacked "general-purpose" computers that are turned into controlled platforms.

Without moving from my chair, I can see the following "general-purpose" computers that have been turned into controlled platforms.

A Directv HD DVR. A Sony Playstation. A Nintendo Wii. A TomTom GPS. A Samsung Television. A Treadmill. A BlackBerry. An iPod Touch. A Logitech Remote Control.

Precisely when should I be outraged that a device's capabilities aren't as general-purpose as you'd prefer? Heck, some of those devices (the television, GPS, and treadmill) even run Linux, yet are "crippled" by their manufacturers.

2) I'm not ok with them actively trying to stop you from removing those limitations on your own device,

Every trade has two sides. If a seller says "I will sell this to you for X if you agree not to do Y", that's a trade that you can either accept or reject. I fail to see why you, as a buyer, should have a right to demand that all rights transfer for a particular price if the seller doesn't want to transfer them all for that price.

So long as it's reasonably clear, and disclosed, I fail to see the problem.

3) "calling you a criminal" ... "easier to enforce user-hostile laws like CBDTPA"

Blaming a specific, unreleased non-general computer for laws you don't like is almost comic. I say 'almost' because it's really kind of annoying that you want to strip the rights of innovators to make what they want, in the name of 'freedom'.

If I want to wrap a processor, input method and display up in a manner that precludes using it for general purpose computing, as a means to solve a problem, I should have every right to do it and sell it. And you can buy it or not buy it.

But claiming it's responsible for every law you don't like, that it's an assault on property rights, and that it's an attack on constructivist education, free culture or decentralized power is utter and complete rubbish.
These days, having JavaScript disabled is itself a good uniqueness contributor.
I really like some of the points of your blog post, namely:

- Apple does marketing really well.

- Apple does ridiculously awesome UIs

- Complaining about the fact that it's not particularly technically impressive is irrelevant, most people buy Apple products because of the magic rather than tech specs.

However, thinking about it some more I can see a few problems for the iPad in general:

- Two of the previous 'magical things' Apple produced - namely the iPod and iPhone, had a clear application to get people in the door. In the iPod case it was n-thousand songs in your pocket, in the iPhone case it was 'look, it's an iPod you can make calls with'. People were already sold on portable music players and phones beforehand, Apple just took that need and made a much more awesome device.

- The iPad on the other hand does not have such a clear application. All of the cool stuff like maps/music/games and things can already be done on the iPhone (which most people will be carrying around anyway). The other side - normal web surfing, applications, writing, graphics, etc. - is handled quite nicely by Apple's laptops. I'm not sure why someone would buy an iPad instead of an iPhone, and then, once they have an iPhone, I'm not sure what the iPad offers that makes it worth the extra $500.

- Apple have had beautiful, well marketed things in the past that haven't conquered the universe (the G4 cube, for instance, which was lovely). Marketing isn't always enough.

Still, I have to love Steve Jobs if only for his ability to (apparently) congruently gush that as a tablet the iPad is much better than either phones or laptops, both of which his company sells lots of.
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Does schools cause depression in kids?
The highlighting stuff in Keynote (telestrator mode!) looks seriously awesome.

Imagine you're in a VC meeting and you're doing financial projections. You could all stare at a big screen, or you could put one of these down in the middle of the table, say "here, let's work on it together!" and you're away.

It's all about the form-factor and the utter reliability. This is a great replacement for a road-warrior meeting laptop - what the MacBook Air was trying to be - and it's the ideal computer to buy for your granny or your kid brother who wants to check their email and write the odd letter.

(Much less use if what you do on the move is program, but that's OK. It's not aimed at you.)
Web applications on the iPad
That's not a very reasoned approach to contradictory conclusions.
I think so, too. If you think about what is making Android devices run so slow, it's almost always some misbehaving background services. Unless there isn't some smarter way controlling the scheduling of foreground applications, there won't be multitasking and fast speed at the same time with a comparable CPU.
8 Things That Suck About iPad
Is this hack live? Use caution when visiting.
Each football team has three units - Offense, defense, and special teams (kickoff, punting, field goals, etc). When teams are required to shift units (turnover, score, kickoff) there's a short official break for them to switch units and get onto the field.
That's my favorite part about Apple: When they introduce a product that makes other products of theirs look obsolete. I used to love my laptop's multitouch until I tried a Magic Mouse; now my scrolling all feel stodgy.

I agree that the iPod and iPhone were much easier sells. But I suspect that the iPad will be seen as a superior product. I mean, the one thing Apple does not corner the market in is standard computing. OS X machines lose out to the Windows market. If anything, this is an entry into that market, same as netbooks were; if you look at this as a cheap, simplistic laptop that just happens not to be a clamshell, then it makes more sense. People looking for a good deal can buy this, and it handles basic computer-y things for them, and it turns out that they don't need all the cruft modern computers bring with them.

But actually in this case I've got some perspective, because last month my mother began asking me about the tablet. She owns an iPhone but no laptop; she likes my laptop but doesn't want to drop that much money for something she won't use much. Her questions were things like: Can I watch a movie on one? Can I check my email? Can I read books? For somebody who needs to do basic computer things like email and Internet, but who doesn't need anything specialized, there's nothing you need that the iPad can't do. (I'm curious as to how many people in the US own laptops. I've never thought about it before.)

As for the G4 cube comparison (though that made me think for a second!), I think there's one huge difference: The OS. This is easily the best operating system ever made in terms of usability. There's almost no abstraction. No mouse, no doubleclicking, no app folder, no dock, no task bar... you push a button and it launches something, and that thing is usually designed so that it makes perfect sense without instructions.

I didn't get why that was a big deal until I saw the streaming keynote and actually looked at the applications. I'd bet that Youtube on an iPad is simpler and funner than Youtube on a Macbook, because there're fewer steps to going about doing anything. The simplicity of the OS allows for far more elegant app design, to the point where I think people will notice and be sold on that design alone.
I think Amazon should decouple those two prices. Like "Buy a Kindle for $99 and get 3G Access form $10/month".

If Apple priced the iPad bundled with the cost of the data plan into it may be $1,000 with 1 year of "free" 3G.
I agree. And why does TechCrunch allow webless trolls to post comments? If you don't have a blog or website, your opinion is irrelevant.
If you can hook up a printer, this does everything my sister (she's a social worker) needs to do with a computer, cheaper and more reliably.
Or, since no one here was likely to have visited Baird's site otherwise, just don't submit it as a story.
So do you contend that there are other companies that could build a device comparable to the iPad?

Who are they? Why aren't we hearing about their competitive offerings?
Ah, I see. I didn't realize you were speaking proper English rather than Internet English, and thus "radical" actually meant something far removed from the ordinary. I've been spending too much time on twitter where "awesome" often means "not bad".
Over the next couple decades, quite possibly [counting its evolutionary descendants].
(That actually gets me thinking — do we know anything about the iPad's printer compatibility? Did I miss some announcement about that?)
Heh, when I saw this Erlang post, I thought it was a reaction to all the iPad stories. Part of me wishes it was, cool as the iPad is, most of the stories are about it :P
> We don't know how it will compare against a similar range intel processor...

Who cares? The consumers certainly don't. Hell, I don't. There are people out there who have used the device that say it's tremendously fast, not laggy. I don't care if it's using a 68000, or the latest from intel, or trained dust mites--it's the sizzle, not the steak.
Well I'm a kindle fanboy, but I don't really think 250$ is that much for a kindle
.

An ipod costs the same amount

I agree with the kiosk idea though, once you've tried out a kindle you would never consider reading a book on a non-e-ink screen.