skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I recently switched to the Vibram Fivefingers Trek, which is somewhere between a sock and a sandal. It encourages the barefoot running style while protecting your feet from sharp objects.

http://www.vibramfivefingers.com/products/products_kso_trek_...

I can attest that there is an adjustment period to strengthen your ankles and calf muscles. As an experiment it's going well so far. It totally changed my gait.

Barefoot running techniques are becoming very popular. The recent book _Born to Run_ is partly responsible for this phenomenon.

But within the running community, there is not yet a consensus on the barefoot style (or the related Chi Running style), mostly due to the lack of data. Hopefully this study and others will finally shed some light on comparative injury rates.

The basic idea is this: The arch in your foot is quite strong and flexible, and it is all the cushion you really need when running or walking. Running barefoot forces you to use this natural springiness of your foot by landing on your mid- or fore-foot. Running in shoes, on the other hand, encourages you to lengthen your stride and land on your heel. The heel-strike is the source of much injury (plantar fasciitis, knee problems, etc) according to the barefoot advocates. It's simply impossible to run barefoot and land on your heel-- it hurts too much.

In the book _Born to Run_, the author goes to a gait analysis lab. They compared the impact of him running on a force plate in shoes and while barefoot. To his surprise, there was less impact while barefoot than while in his Nike running shoes; the theory was the massive heel cushioning takes the edge off an impact that would otherwise cause sharp foot pain but doesn't lessen the total impact on your ankles, shins and knees.

There was change in the air at the Zombie Runner store in Palo Alto where I bought the Vibrams last week. They could barely keep any of these models in stock. Born to Run was on display in front of the shoe wall as if it were now required reading before buying a shoe.
Yes, but if something slips by their QA team and they want to push a patch out, they don't have to wait a week. And if they want the new version of iWork to come out the second Steve Jobs takes the stage, they can make that happen.

The App Store takes a lot of things completely out of developers' control. In the end, Apple is still in total control with iWork on the App Store.
The problem in what you're saying is that it wouldn't have been THAT hard to do a product that does both : Add an usb port and add the ability to install custom software, even if hidden in the bottom of the OS where your grandma doesn't even notices it, and you have a device that pleases everyone. I still don't really get why they wouldn't do such a thing.

EDIT: I'm kind of getting sick of this. Basically all the posts on this thread sum up to this:

Some guy say "Yeah but my grandma can use it !". And gets tremendously upvoted, so ok guys we get the point.

And some other guy says "Yeah ok, but what prevents this slick grandma-friendly platform to be open at the same time", and the guy get less upvoted, like the very point of this Ipad is that it be user friendly, like we hackers don't care at all about openness, denying the very point of this article, wich IS :

"Why can't we have a platform that is BOTH user friendly and slick, and open"
Ah I see, thanks for the correction.
I actually tweeted about this exact thing after catching up to the announcement:

Despite iPad propriety, higher res + HTML5 make web apps
much more relevant and far cheaper/faster to develop & iterate.

I think this is absolutely awesome for web apps. The only thing that's missing is the ability to sell "icons" on the app store that merely subscribe one to a web app and stick the link on their home screen. This would meld the ease of development and deployment of web apps with the ease of payment processing the app store provides. I don't see this ever happening because Apple couldn't control the ability to review subsequent changes before they were live, but it's a nice dream.
Ask HN: Does the iPad name inspire?
I know it's supposed to be a play on 'iPod' but does anyone else think the new tablet's name is kind of lame?
Once again the main problem with iPhone OS web apps is that they can't take advantage of many of the truly unique features of Apple products: multi touch, motion sensors, etc.

If you want to make something truly interesting you have to actually write an native app.
No market is ever permanent.

Native apps will usually reign in the beginning life on a device. In addition, in the current environment, wireless is still not everywhere and fast. Because of that, web apps still are at a distinct disadvantage for free roaming devices. But I think that will change in the near future.
There was a guy a while back who would put up torrents of NFL games with all the non game stuff cut out. I seem to recall them weighing in at around 20-25 minutes. I though they where great, and I love watching football.
Panopticlick
Yes. Their public product before Apple bought them was a 12" Powerbook that had its keyboard replaced with an enourmous multitouch input pad.
That was my thought as well. A bigger screen means more complex applications and potentially a bigger price tag. I will be interested to see how much iWork costs. I think Apple will set the trend with their own application pricing.
I remember reading "A People's History" during high school and having my mind completely blown. As I got older, I realized my life experiences led me to disagree more and more with Zinn, but I was always thankful that his book had pushed me to see the world through such a different (and easily neglected) point of view. RIP.
There are multi touch events in mobile safari.
Thanks. What's the distinction here: "but you're only allowed to request information, not gather it"?
Actually, it's a long-established usage in SF fandom.
Tech Startups: Apple iPad Good for Gaming, Bad for E-Books, Family Use
Since it's a reference design I'm guessing they're only sold in batches of 10000 or so to companies who want to slap their own brand name on them. Perhaps if you can call them out and sound like you have the money lined up and are really seriously interested in putting in a 50000 unit order, they might send you a few samples for free.
I used to be more extroverted. Recent years have left scars that have turned me more gun shy. I am still trying to find a balance. My innate wiring is to just be warm and friendly to everyone. But I have found that there are often unexpected and harsh consequences to doing so. It's rather counter-intuitive.
Really? I use a Touch daily and Skype doesn't push. Of all applications, I think they would if they could.
Terra plana is also coming out with the "Evo":
http://www.terraplana.com/the-evo
I'll probably buy a netbook running ChromeOS, especially if they get some halfway-decent hardware made with solid keyboards + cases.

Definitely if someone releases one with a fast ARM processor, 2gb+ of RAM, and a PixelQi screen.
And Apple says my iPhone has 12 days of standby time. Ha. I'll wait for the reviews to believe anything about the battery life (as I do for all CE devices).
This is something I've wondered about for a long time and glad to see it being implemented. The current iteration seems to have lots of random people listed as first order connections though.
Is Apple Evil?
But there's not a conflict about the trademark. Fujitsu's TM is only for retail purposes. They certainly could have trademarked other uses if they wanted to. The iPad is pretty much everything but retail (i.e., search the "Apple" link for any mention of retail use cases).

EDIT: I thought those were permalinks. Sorry. If you go to the USPTO and search for iPad among the Live uses you'll soon see the Fujitsu one and one with many, many markets (along with one for bras, one for a medical device, etc). Though, check out iSlate. Similar filing info as the iPad but not as broad. Seems like if they were worried at all about Fujitsu they could have just used iSlate.
I've long compared an NFL game to a game of chess - it's much more about incremental position playing than, say, soccer where a freak move can swing a game rapidly.

This analysis seems to bear out my comparison - watch a grand master chess game, and there's a lot more time between moves than actually moving. Maybe we need a speed version of the NFL?
> I don't think geeks still get why Apple is successful

No they don't, that's probably why everyone on this thread is saying the same thing as you ..

> the constant spec-based wankery

The way you actually transform platform openness into spec-based wankery is beyond me.
"I do not want to see computing head this direction."

I don't understand the tendency towards these Patrick Henry-esque statements (of which this is but one example.) The Apple ecosystem functions harmoniously, making my life simpler and more productive. To pull that off, that they necessarily have to erect barriers preventing everyone from coming in and screwing it up. Why is this viewed as such a terrible thing?

The assumption that all forms of freedom are equally important deserves a second look. The freedoms to speak my mind, criticize the government, (not) practice any religion I choose, and pursue happiness, are essential me as a human being. The freedom to install Firefox plugins, not so much. I mean really, who gives a hoot? If it works for you, use it; if not, don't. Either way, spare us the ominous, brooding prognostications...
Wow! I am quite surprised. I use a Macbook running Snow Leopard, fully up-to-date software, with Safari. I don't (yet) have any after market fonts installed. And yet "Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 47,390 tested so far." That is creepy.

Who is using this type of profiling as an alternative to cookies and other techniques? I would love to see some examples.
It's somewhat difficult to read the numbers in the middle of the page.
A lot of women are laughing at the name, having other associations for the word "pad." One of my Facebook friends asks, "Max-IPad?"
Given the scorn heaped upon him from us internet assholes, I think it's appropriate for him to reply with some gentle snark. We'd think worse of him if he didn't -- he'd sound like a suit.
I also wonder why more people haven't mentioned the A4. Intel seriously needs their asses kicked. The A4 isn't going to be open tech by any measure, but the fact that it was possible may mean we will get more attention/innovation in that area-- not open by a direct technical standpoint, but openness in terms of market options/competition.
They don't. See http://www.appletv.com/.
If it meant getting a car that was better than anything else on the market, many people would make that tradeoff. I value simplicity, design and functionality way more than the ability to run Flash, and I'm willing to pay slightly extra for it.
Yep I definitely have considered that as well. Especially the possibility of RTS board games of some sort, as opposed to turn-based. I'm sure the Parker Bros would be well advised to make a Monopoly app.
Other than being physically larger, I really prefer the old iPods to the new ones. Sure, they didn't have video/photo/games/whatever, but they did one thing and did it very well.

The iPad, by contrast, seems to do lots of things, but does none of them very well. It's a device that's too big to fit in your pocket, but too small to be comfortable using for long stretches at a time. I guess it's about the right size for an eBook reader, but who wants to read books off an LCD?
Corn-fed cows develop acidosis, which causes ulcers in their rumen. The cows are then open to a host of infections. Antibiotics treat that side effect of too much corn.
The whole 'i' thing is wearing on me. I expected to see a new angle.
iWork apps are $9.99 each ($30 for all three), so it seems like software will be racing to the bottom here too.

Source: http://i.gizmodo.com/5458327/iwork-2010-apple-brings-multito...
After reading about this and similar research, instead of going out and buying an expensive new "barefoot-style" running shoe, I just pulled out my old, completely worn out running shoes out of the back of the closet and started wearing them running. They've lost almost all cushioning and are as flat as can be -- but 4-5 months later, I feel great.

I think like people have mentioned, the trick is really to just to land on the front/midsole of your foot not your heal. Then whatever crappy shoe you have will be fine.
Technically Apple says playing video, surfing the web or listening to music. It sounds like 10 hours of use to me, probably some of each. It has a 25 watt-hour battery. Nothing huge, for comparison the MacBook Air has a 40 watt-hour battery. They don't break out what the iPhone/iPod Touch have.

http://www.apple.com/ipad/specs/
Sure, playing Theora from <video> takes about half the CPU that the Linux Flash plugin playing h264 does. His point is that they both have to do similar YUV-RGB and rich compositing bullshit within the rendering runtime -- and they're within the same order of magnitude of performance.

mplayer takes a 1/20th the CPU cycles on the same normal desktop machine without even using hardware decoding optimizations. I wouldn't be surprised if its CPU usage was nearly optimal for the amount of data copying that needs to take place.
A computer user basically uses a computer to do the following:
1) Surf the web,
2) Check email,
3) IM chat,
4) Download/purchase digital media files,
5) Manage/share your digital photos,
6) Watch movies,
7) Play games, and
8) Author documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

Anyone who does more with their computer than the above and isn't afraid to tinker with the operating system or install/remove programs usually considers themselves a "power user". One thing I just realized is that all the things a "Power User" does in a Windows or Linux environment as compared to a regular user is trivially easy to do in Mac OS X, to the point where the distinction is meaningless.
Let's not forget that Apple is revolutionizing the world. Even if their products are bad for consumers in that they restrict with DRM, have higher costs, use proprietary technology, etc... they are sparking a huge huge change in the world of technology. Android is a great example of this.

This is the good ol' military industrial complex but in a consumer electronics sense. Companies are competing and innovating, and we have to thank Apple for much of that. In the end we are the people who will benefit, with lower cost devies and better software. Even the carriers are attacking each other now on prices for the best 3G network (VZW & ATT).
I'd be interested to see a similar breakdown of a baseball game. If you count from the pitcher's release to the end of a play (basically, when the ball is in motion), I bet the total would clock in somewhere around 15 minutes.

Edit: 15 minutes on average. Of course baseball isn't timeboxed like most other sports.
What happens when this device becomes ubiquitous and Apple decides to support the features in HTML5 "they" want and not others, or to stop supporting it altogether. Will you switch to another browser on your IPod/Pad/Phone?
Thanks I made the text darker so it stands out more clearly.
At what point do they run into the restrictions that came up in the Microsoft / IE situation? Do they need to be more dominant first?
I don’t know why they’re doing it. It’s hard to see how it makes them more money. (Curating all those apps must be expensive, not to mention the lost sales from the unapproved ones.)

It seems like a 30% cut of any app sold for your operating system would far outweigh the cost of approving those sales.
When Science Asks, "What If?"
> Either they don't sufficiently understand the problem scope, they're overworked, or they're just lazy and don't bother running through enough of their own quality controls before releasing changes.

The number of possible system states in larger systems can be enormous. I feel like to have this opinion, perhaps you have worked mainly on smaller systems? In larger systems, there can be so many possibilities that it would take several times longer to test than to code, and without reading spec docs, it is very difficult to tell what correct even is. For example, a student loan system I worked on fit this bill. The glib answer would be to say it was so complex because of poor programming, but that's not true. The legal reality it was modeling was complex and so the software could not be less complex than the underlying system's rules. I have worked on several such systems in different industries.

Now, you could argue that all programmers should become programming/QA people, but that would be self-defeating as programmer time is generally more expensive per-hour than QA time. Further, the type of person who is good at running through 400 steps of detail-oriented rote testing is not always the same person that you would like doing high-level design. Specialization makes life more efficient. Even if they did happen to be the same person, if they enjoyed one task more, why wouldn't they go to a job where they could focus on that type of task?
I had to edit the listing so the new url is:

http://bit.ly/MyKindle
I whole heartedly agree with what Yehuda is saying here. If you're not writing a game and don't need direct access to the hardware (i.e. camera support on the iPhone/iTouch) I find it very hard to understand why you would _want_ to write anything other than a highly optimized HTML5 app. Wanting aside, I totally understand why people _do_ write native apps, both for reasons of integration-feel and for speed, but I'd like to think most app developers would rather have a highly optimized Safari and a robust / optimized Javascript API to write their apps with instead.
I recommend listening to 'A People's History' as an audiobook.

Howard Zinn sets out with the stated objective of narrating a dissident's history. With this, he absolves himself from narrating a completely objective history, which I suspect he sees as an impossible task. You may not agree with many of his assumptions (I don't), but you will gain from the experience.
I vehemently disagreed with Zinn when I tried reading "A People's History" a few years ago, but I was much more naive then. I have realized that corruption is the norm, and that when people fight back, through organized labor or through revolution, there's usually a good reason for it.

I'm even more skeptical that communism would magically fix the wrongs Zinn railed against, for the same reasons democracy hasn't fixed it. But I do have to say, that I am glad someone like Zinn wrote prolifically to stand up for the little guy, for us. RIP.
That grind work can be done much cheaper (and probably more reliably) by a dedicated tester.

I won't dispute that, as that is a major reason why companies love testers.

The problem is that while the testing is done cheaper and perhaps better, that's not really the goal of the whole process now, is it?

The goal of the process is to match the product to the customers expectation/need. I submit that the best possible way to do this is to have programmers that are also managing that need, even if it is more expensive and/or less efficient when view specifically.
I think people are confusing corporations succeeding in a capitalist market with "evil". This is AMERICA, where we compete for everything and anyone can do anything, as long as they can do it better than someone else. Apple is not evil. They're a company that likes to make money, and likes to make devices that people blow their loads over.

I worked at apple for a while... they gave me some cool things like a free bus pas ($50 in Hawaii) every month to encourage use of public transit. They're certainly not evil, not any more evil than Google, Microsoft, HP, IBM, the list goes on...

They're just the most successful. And it always sucks at the top, because everyone is trying to bring you down. Imagine all the companies that are trying to get at Apple's trade secrets, it's no wonder they have such intense security.
A very unfortunate choice. Completely tone-deaf. Apple product line now reads Macs - iPads. Yikes!

Also plays into the "Pink Malibu Stacy iPhone" problem.
Yes. Apple makes it impossible for me to do things that I'd like to do and should be able to do with their hardware using DRM and other treacherous computing technologies. I had an iPhone for a while and I just got rid of it because:

1. I had to use iTunes to put music on it. Very inconvenient for me, being an Ubuntu user.
2. As a developer and super user, I was limited in what I can install on my phone. That's a phone I bought, for a lot of money, and belongs to me, and yet I couldn't decide what I put on it - everything had to go through Apple's shop.

Do you know many other companies that poo-poo like that on their customers? The very same people who pay them huge amounts of money?
I feel like to have this opinion, perhaps you have worked mainly on smaller systems?

No, I've got a good mix, and I agree with you that this is a product of large systems more than simple web apps and the like.

The complexity of large systems being required is what's the problem though; not that I have an immediate solution.

That and too many programmers that simply aren't able to do anything but program.
Weren't similar things said about the iPhone pre-App Store? (that mobile safari supported HTML/CSS/JS/etc)

Still, I don't think there were any groundbreaking iPhone web apps that didn't eventually become iPhone Apps.
I've made a few "bigger" flash applications (for fortune 500s and the like) and in general I don't see the benefit of this versus Google Analytics[1], which provides a Flash tracking API[2]. All your points you note on the left side I've done in one way or another via Google Analytics.

I admit that the google analytics flash API only allows you to track "events" and sometimes pass a numeric value with an event which analytics will mean for you, but in practice, I've found that that is often all that was requested by my employers. e.g. "We want to know when people go from A => C => B, vs. A => B => C." Easily done! "We want to know the average time a user spends on this panel" Done!

So could you explain to me some features you have that google analytics doesn't have? And justify their benefit enough such that a company would sacrifice a single analytics account to view all their web analytics for two sites to view their page and SWF analytics separately?

[1]: http://www.google.com/analytics/

[2]: http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/flashTra...
On my machine playing the same videos in mplayer or vlc is very close to the CPU used playing in the browser using the video tag.

I did read the article, which continued from the bit I quoted as:

As of this writing, browsers that support the video tag are likely to use a tremendous amount of CPU in order to play video. Why? It's likely because they have to deal with the exact same performance penalties that Flash does; specifically, that YUV video data needs to be transformed into RGB data to be plopped in the browser window.

The implication was that the video tag will be just as bad as Flash, which just isn't my experience.
"We have triumphed over the unprincipled dissemination of facts.

We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology, where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. "

OT, but wow that sure sounds a lot like China's current fumbling for a justification for censorship.
I'm sure if they really wanted it Apple could make a massive donation to cancer research in return for the domain. That would be a win/win.

That said I don't think it's really all that important. That's the beauty of brand names like Apple or Google - you can have /groups and /mail instead of needing to own all of these domains.
MLB.com features condensed games that do exactly this. And you're right about the time. But I found it less surprising since there isn't an active clock in baseball.