skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To be fair, it's also fun listening to people predict how successful the iPad will be, and mentally replacing every mention of "iPod" or "iPhone" with "Macbook Air" or "Apple TV."
"Anyone who has an iPhone, Android, or WebOS phone will tell you that web surfing on it is somewhat painful. Far less so than on the Treo 650 we had previously, but still no picnic. There’s all this pinching and swiping. It’s kludgey. Even the sites and apps designed for it entail fat-fingered misclicks and slow page loads."

I don't know if he owns an iPhone but he's wrong about web surfing. I often wish I could navigate on my desktop they way I do on the iPhone. Double tap to zoom is a killer app.
I think this is the right idea to have. Take the design of the modern laptop. Apple was the first to pioneer the idea that you could put a touchpad at the bottom of the keyboard and give the user a place to rest his/her hands in the process. Now everyone does it because it's such a head-slappingly good design idea you would be crazy to do anything else. I'd venture to guess most average computer users have no idea Apple is the origin of this design. But I'm sure it irks Jobs a little bit now and again when he sees cheapo netbooks using it.
On the contrary, it is extremely likely that the A4 will be in the next iPhone. The CPU architecture is the same (ARM) and the peripherals are the same (video, etc.). It is an Apple ARM-SoC[1] rather than a Samsung/PortalPlayer/TI/whoever ARM-SoC[2]. The functionality is a perfect match, the physical size is likely to be a close match, the speed is much better, and the power efficiency appears to be similar or better (the iPad undoubtedly has a much larger battery).

Look at the heritage: PA-Semi created a remarkably fast, remarkably low power PowerPC architecture SoC. They are very, very good. Apple bought them so that they could use that power, speed, and efficiency knowledge to create the A4. Reports are that they used the fast ARM Cortex A9 core and did their magic on the peripheral parts of the SoC. That is exactly what all the other ARM licensees are doing, except the others (arguably) don't have the same talent level as the PA-Semi engineers.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System-on-a-chip

[2] http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/consumer_electronics/i...
Good stuff Martin. AppEngine needs more of this.
With iPad Tablet, Apple Blurs the Lines Between Devices
Global warming is the new swine flu.
Adobe flash's official blog on ipad
Cola is the big one for me. When I start feeling a bit pudgy, it's the first to go. I drink a good deal of coffee and tea, but when I worked out the calorie math, it's actually pretty insane how much sugar is in cola:

- 250 ml (about 8 oz) of cola has 120 calories
- 350 ml (about 12 oz) of tea or coffee gets 2-3 sugar cubes
- 2 sugar cubes is 24 calories
- Cola has 10x the calories/volume as sweetened coffee or tea
- I drink 1-2 liters of coffee + tea + cola daily.

So even switching from cola to sweetened tea is a big cut back. Other than that, I just do restraint at the grocery store. Usually I'll allow one chocolate bar every couple weeks.

One thing that I learned when we were out in California for the summer is that the portion sizes in the US can really get you. I shot up 15 pounds (175 -> 190) in 3 months without noticeably altering my diet. After 4 months back in Germany it was gone again, without any intentional intervention.
I meant to imply "USB and cameras are easy to integrate into the device."

I'm not sure I'm going to get a first gen iPad either unless I find five hundred dollars on the ground. But, I see the potential for getting one in the future. It's perfect, though, for my daughter to use for school work.
In the same way stock car racing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_car_racing is just taking stock cars and turning them into race cars.
Those two products don't have the i prefix, you dummy ;-)
I'm sure all the missing functionality he mentions (access to camera, microphone etc) could be exposed by a development framework on top of WebKit. You can expose Objective C functions to JS - I'm sure if it hasn't already been build, it will be.
You'd still have to go through the App Store approval process, but at least you could build your apps in HTML/JS, and have low level access.
"Either way, it’s a concrete lesson in just how far removed the publishing industry can be from reality"

I'm sorry but this is an example of how far-removed the Silicon Valley echo chamber can be from reality. When you're dealing with people far removed from the tech field, they have a very different set of ideas about what is important.
IPad name draws feminine hygiene jokes
The article talks about climate change. You might want to learn the difference between climate change and global warming before you dismiss it with a one-liner.
How so? I'm looking at the JooJoo tech specs:
https://thejoojoo.com/sites/specification
compared to the iPad tech specs:
http://www.apple.com/ipad/specs/
...and I'm not seeing "vastly superior in every way", or "cheaper". Both are $499, JooJoo has an edge on screen size and resolution, USB port, plus a camera that the iPad lacks. But the iPad has a 16GB hard drive compared to the JooJoo's 4GB, a battery life that's twice as long and is nearly one pound lighter.

That's just going from the listed tech specs. I sincerely doubt the JooJoo is faster or easier to use than the iPad, nor do I think they will develop anything close to the App Store.
I'd love to be able to jot down quick notes & sketches. Perhaps Apple think this is more of a business user requirement, and the ipad is more a leisure device.

Plus the stylus would need to be a conductor or carry some sort of a charge to work on the capacitive screen.
Embrace, extend, ???
There's something that already does this -- phonegap. write an app in js/html and have access to native calls. It produces a native app so you'd have to go through the approval process like you mention.
>Multitasking doesn't need to add complexity and stability issues, if ubuntu can do it then so can apple.

That it can be done doesn't mean it isn't complex. It is.

And by "stability" I didn't mean the phone/tablet constantly crashing, I meant having inconsistent performance. Once you get into multitasking, everyone and their brother is going to have some really "good" reason they need a service. Some of these will always perform well, some wont.

>Multitasking is useful because humans are multitasking.

Humans are incredibly awful at multitasking.

>Single tasking computers are pretty much done for, multi tasking is the norm, not the exception.

Computers sure. But this is an instant-on consumer device. I think the use cases for such a device are different enough to warrant at least consideration for a different kind of OS for them.
> However, if you want to roll all that on your own, go right ahead

You can't do that with native apps. You really don't have that choice, and while the browser is really capable, it means some precious functionality is out of reach ... like being able to handle the web-cam.

> Apple is the biggest driving force behind open web standards and their implementation in WebKit.

Oh, please. They took KHTML and invested some resources into it. Then it became a defacto standard for mobiles, because it remained LGPL, because KHTML was LGPL.

Surely Apple is doing his part, but to call it "the biggest driving force behind open web standards" ... Jesus!

Speaking of that, I guess you're not using Linux and have never encountered a page filled with Quicktime screencasts. And on Windows you have to buy a license to get full-screen? WTF is that? Sorry for the expression ... but driving force, my ass ;)
One interesting source of data is www.spoj.pl, since they keep records of the runtime of submissions to their site.

For example, take a look at the solutions to PRIME 1; the task is to generate a list of prime numbers: http://www.spoj.pl/ranks/PRIME1/

The top 20 C solutions all take less than 0.05 seconds. The top 20 Java solutions all take less than 0.5 second. Python has several solutions that took 0.55 seconds. But for Lisp, only one user was able to get it to less than 1 second, and then only barely.

There's not enough data to draw any real conclusions, but it does make me skeptical of claims that Lisp is near in speed to Java or C (any Lisp gurus who want to prove me wrong, feel free to code up a fast solution and submit it)
Accept headers are going to tell me what CSS bugs are present?
Wow, it's true, and you're right (just checked the back of a package).

The one I just checked has 600 mg of Sodium per serving (25% of the recommended daily value). No wonder they are tasty.

Still, they did help me get through hungry spells :)
I am wondering what led you to expect that the ipad would be something different; was it apple's history of making non-locked-down devices? its tendency to produce metric truckloads of insanely popular consumer devices?

I am thinking of a general answer to posts of this sort: If you don't like it, don't buy it. And further, given the nature of this board, if you see a need (e. g., something people want), build it. Apple has seen a need, and it is building something that people want. You are seeing a need for something else, and it is possible that other people want it too, so why not go build it?
"fundamental cultural seriousness"? Does "serious" == "solemn"?
I've heard Crockford use that quote in a few Yahoo! talks (when I used to work there). It's probably on one of his slides from either: "Javascript: The Good Bits" or one around the same time.
From the post: It’s no more convenient than a laptop. You can use it pretty much only when and where you could use a laptop.

A bit hasty there. This is something that you can actually carry around like it was a Frommer's guidebook. Put a camera on this form factor, and you have the potential for some really kick-ass Augmented Reality. That's not something you can do with a Laptop. (Unless you're willing to look very dorky. http://amzn.com/B001G713NO )

With such a light form factor and a freaking month of standby, you can treat this thing like a journal or a sketchpad. At $15 a month, college and high school students can actually afford to connect this through 3G. (If Apple is smart, they'll student discount this thing like mad!) You can basically replace your phone use with Skype IMs for paging and do your heavy voice communications when you get to a cafe with WiFi. Not something that I would want to do. But my broke-ass violinist bandmate working at a technical bookstore? Yes, he'd do that in a heartbeat.

If Apple can take a cue from Facebook and co-opt the College crowd, the High School crowd will follow, then everyone else. We'll have angsty teens writing on Facebook walls from cafes, posting their Brushes sketches, Skype calling their girlfriends.
Capacitive touchscreens tend to require electrical contact with the body to activate. This avoids accidental clicks due to non-body objects pressing the screen and provides slightly better accuracy than resistive touchscreen technology, but it also means that a nonconductive stylus will not work. a conductive one would need to distort the electric fieldof the touchscreen in much the same way as a finger, and this is tricky to do with a small point. This is one reason I prefer resistive touchscreens (built one into my Eee).
Yes, and what bothers me with this scenario is that things can always go around ... what do people think it will happen when Apple is the one dominating?

I can tell you one thing ... the Microsoft era will seem something like a golden-age.
Regardless of the verbal purity and political correctness the point from the OP is: someone was trying to force the conclusion than the climate is warming more than it is.

Isn't that clear?
I don't think you need full multitasking for this. If the OS handles that situation (e.g. one app is allowed to access the screen, one the speaker) then that's enough and it avoids the complexity of having full threading.
Review: Apple's iPad has potential
First picture of the iPad
Apple tonight unveiled the new generation device dubbed by some gadget aficionados as the 'Jesus Tablet' and named it the...iPad.
Libertarianism opposes the initiation of force.

Libertarian socialists, like regular socialists, favor the use of force. They differ from socialists only on exactly who should be empowered to use it (the state vs smaller agencies).
Synopsis for those without an hour to burn?
Start Charging Users When They are Successful
True, they do tend to keep the price and add features. IPhone was an exception to this rule though.
Promote Firefox Email Signature signature creator Extension | @ WiseStamp
The View from There
Good summary. As I finished working through his algorithm description, I wondered at the sentence in the summary that motivated me to read closely: 'An algorithm M is described that solves any well-defined problem p as quickly as the fastest algorithm computing a solution to p, save for a factor of 5 and low-order additive terms.' "Low-order additive terms"? Come on.
What We Learned About Apple Yesterday
> All the benchmarks were run 5x each on the same Debian machine

I refer the honourable gentlman to Zed Shaw's "Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All"

http://www.zedshaw.com/essays/programmer_stats.html
The democracy index does not measure democracy. It measures a weighted average of electoral process/pluralism, civil liberties, functioning of government, political participation and political culture.

A true measure of how democratic a nation is would exclude civil liberties, functioning of government and political culture.
Verbal purity? They are two totally different concepts. This isn't about making sure you use the right term, it's making sure you understand the difference between the two.

And yes it was clear. I think anyone reading the article should come to that conclusion. Your comparison was shallow and silly and I called you on it.
Apple opens up VoIP via 3G on iPhone, and maybe even iPad
Thanks, that's interesting. My own main optimization problem is always reducing the memory usage of large in memory data sets. I found that languages like Java and Python, which don't support structured value types and use references/pointers everywhere, are basically unusable for my my purposes.

Now, I wonder whether I could use Lisp for what I do. One basic necessity would be to have a way to define a structure like this

struct s {
int32_t x;
int32_t y;
};

and then create an array of that type as struct s a[size], which uses exactly size * sizeof(s) bytes in memory. A further requirement would be to have a library of data structures (balanced trees, lists, hash tables) that support storing such structs directly without using pointers everywhere.

Do you have any idea whether that could work with SBCL?
Should Americans get more vacation?
The size and shape does strongly suggest writing with a stylus.
There's no reason why Apple can't come out with higher priced "professional" versions which have an open sandbox, or which are totally unlocked. Alternatively, they can create an alternative site where devs can post unsigned apps, to be downloaded by others who have some sort of SDK-installed sandbox.

So long as they can keep such things separate from their walled garden of an App Store, they can maintain the seamless user experience for the end-user consumers.

A virtualized "sandbox" could have a bandwidth-rate cap built into it, so the concern about "protecting the mobile network" could also be satisfied.
There was an HN discussion recently on what you understand and know and assume, and extending that expertise out into areas where You Have No Clue, and how that goes badly wrong for smart people.

iPad isn't aiming for us members of the nerd herds that are using laptops and netbooks and for whatever reason we're hauling them around; it's not a laptop replacement. Duh.

It's an eFrame for your desk that you can do stuff with.

It's a data entry device for the back of an ambulance or in an ER.

It's a device that can replace a rack-n-stack LCD console in a server room, or that can sit on an operator's or guard's desk or maître de's podium, showing status.

It's a device your mom can use for pictures of the kids, and for hosting cookbooks and recipes in the kitchen.

Add a cash drawer via that dock connector and...

Its an instant and portable Point-of-Sale device; the Apple folks will have these all over the Apple Stores just as soon as they can.

It's a dorm TV.

It's for a bunch of tasks we haven't even yet thought of.

Most of us nerds suck at this non-nerd UI stuff. And we can assume that what we want and what we understand and what we need is what everybody wants. And that isn't necessarily reality.

Whether Apple hit their target markets here remains to be seen. But I can see use.
Every victory for AGW denial is a long term loss for all mankind.
How social media has a snowball effect on e-commerce (scribd)
I've spoken briefly to Hutter about this, but the description is simply not correct. Though you'd have to read the paper to notice; Hutter makes the same mistake.

It is an algorithm that solves with the same limiting O(n) behavior as the fastest algorithm that provably solves a problem, relative to the proof system. This is a very large difference, never mind additive or multiplicative constants! For example, if my proof system is Peano arithmetic, and I try to compute the limiting behavior of Goodstein sequences, the answer is always "0" but there exists no proof (in that proof system) that the algorithm which always returns 0 is accurate and faster than the algorithm which computes it out in detail.

I'm afraid that the descriptions by Marcus Hutter (or Juergen Schmidhuber) of what their algorithms do cannot be taken at face value. You have to read through the paper and apply your own skepticism if you want to know. They're interesting algorithms, but there seems to have been some kind of race or academic incentive to gloss over as many limitations as possible.
Sounds like it's meant to be an I/O device for your real computer. Also sounds like a great idea for an App.
Only a small fraction of them do, and this is not one of them. One can understand the excitement, however. I would imagine this will tail off over the next day.
I've never seen a way to do so from a Kindle. I'd imagine it would be risky for them to offer that service: What's there to stop you from printing your own book?
How about benchmarking the python code with NumPy?
The very first signs of "feeling" hungry usually means you're thirsty for water, not hungry for food. A lot of people eat instead of drink (or drink something with calories), and that helps increase their calorie consumption leading to weight gain.

I've found keeping a bottle of water on me at all times works well. Whenever I start to feel my mouth go dry I drink some. I catch thirst this way before I even begin to feel thirsty. It's like lubrication for your body. If you don't drink enough of it, things seize up (you'll feel tired, get headaches, hampers athletic performance, etc...).

CamelBak makes some very nice bottles. Sports Authority/Dick's Sporting Goods usually carry them: http://www.amazon.com/CamelBak-BPA-Free-Choose-Re-Use-Better...

Nathan also makes a good one: http://www.amazon.com/Nathan-500-ml-Bottle-Straw-Royal/dp/B0...

Buy like two or three of them. Fill them up in the morning and put them in a fridge. Keep one by your side at all times. Once it's empty, grab another from your fridge, drink as needed, repeat.

Keeping the water "ice cold" is important too. It's so much easier to drink cool water than warm. Probably something derived from evolution where humans had better luck drinking cold water from a running stream than warm water from a sitting puddle from a rain storm. I always throw a few ice cubes in once I pull a bottle out of the fridge.
Use PuTTY with Cygwin to access localhost on Windows
He was only against Indian-killing when white people did it. He described Indians as "innocent" before white people came to America. I guess Indian-killing is ok when other Indians do it.
Bacteria Make Diesel from Biomass
The Touch Book
The iPad's five worst surprises
In a previous post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1066987 I recommended PuTTYcyg and was going to leave it at that. It turns out that PuTTYcyg doesn't play well with PuTTY Connection Manager, a tabbed PuTTY wrapper. So I wrote up how to get sshd and PuTTY working together on Cygwin, along with a little key management.
A similarly misleading statement in the abstract: "the most efficient program computing some function f is also among the shortest programs provably computing f."

If this were actually true, it would reveal an extremely deep principle about efficiency.

But this is not the actual "most efficient" program that is short, it is Hutter's asymptotically efficient program, which out of some strange reason Hutter has taken to calling "the fastest program", which it is not. It is never the most efficient program (it makes use of a program more efficient than itself). It is "among the shortest" such programs in the sense that it can be specified using a fixed framework plus the shortest program such that other programs which solve the problem can be proven equivalent to it, relative to the proof system.

I was pretty disappointed when I worked that out - from the abstract's statement that the most efficient algorithm is always among the shortest, I was expecting to discover some deep principle about skipping unnecessary steps, or some such.
Stephen Fry is known to be a massive Apple fan, he doesn't deny it. Douglas Adams and he were the first people in the UK to get Macs.

The BBC have an interesting write up [1].

"The most enthusiastic person I came across in this room full of analysts, industry watchers, bloggers, journos and geeks was the actor and comedian Stephen Fry."

Noting that he was "chaperoned by Apple design guru Jonathan Ive".

So he didn't get the normal press treatment.

I think this is more of his honest opinion. He's done gadget write ups for other (non Apple) products saying what a delight they are to use.

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/maggieshiels/2010/01...
Power Grab: Bank for International Settlements
The distance the swallow flies doesn't seem very interesting for many cases, where the terrain forces you to take a much longer route due to bridges, train track crossings, etc. Wouldn't you be better of using the Google maps API to return the length of an actual route to the target?
You're confusing what I'm saying. The Crunchpad is a dead project. What I meant to say was that a year ago we thought they would be competing and that Apple's tablet would be the superior albeit pricier.

The irony I'm mentioning here is that if the Crunchpad had launched, the iPad would be inferior in every way: feature set, pricing, etc.
Agreed - I thought this was pretty damn impressive. I wonder how they're handling the file system behind the scenes. What will be the interface to save and open files? Some new file manager in itunes? A new hybrid interface pulling in elements of OS X?