skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While there may be a bit to be made in that $99, I really don't think it's much. Every replacement battery Apple sells for their current line of portables is $129. The iPad battery most definitely has a lower capacity and thus costs less, but there is labor involved in refurbishing as well.
I see no evidence to support your hypothesis, definitely not enough to justify the design decision.

While it's never been my "day job" or primary function, I've had a fair amount of industrial design experience. Both with formal ID firms, and as general product development (most of my startup experience is with companies that produced some sort of hardware).

To make the battery removable you need to make a "pocket" for the battery to sit in that is separated from the rest of the electronics. You also need to make the battery pack itself thicker than it would need to be if it was just an internal device (plastic casing, etc.). You also need to add some contacts for the battery and other odds and ends.

This probably adds about $3-$5 to the BOM for a device like the iPad. This may sound small, but it is a significant number by the time you factor in the end-user price. It also adds additional weight and design considerations, plus additional thickness to the overall product.

Yes, plenty of devices have removable batteries. And in several cases (like the Droid I just got) the battery cover is a flimsy piece of crap that detracts from the products integrity.

I suppose you don't include every laptop ever made as examples of replaceable batteries in practice.

Yes, I'm quite aware that most other laptops have had replaceable batteries. I've owned dozens of them, and hadn't needed to replace a laptop battery since about 2002. They died of general system failures or complete obsolescence before they needed new batteries. The vast majority of laptops with replaceable batteries have also not been designed for the portability, sleekness, and usage style that the iPad has. Comparing the industrial design of the iPad and its battery to legacy laptops is not an apples-to-apples comparison (pun intended).

I really don't think that when it comes to Apple this is "designed obsolescence" as much as it is recognition that we've been Doing It Wrong for many years.

I also find it ironically humorous that you cite your electronic razor among arguments of designed obsolescence and environmental/sustainable life style arguments. I use a Merkur Futur razor. I replace only the single blade about once a week. The razor handle will last forever, and it does not have replacement cartridges that are grossly over-priced items. My razor also does not have other environmentally unfriendly items like batteries, and motors and other elements that will eventually wear out and be unreplaceable.

Everyone chooses a slightly different way to manage their impact on the world and product choices.

Regarding environmental concerns, the way I read this is that if your battery dies Apple will give you a refurbished unit with a new battery for a little more than what a replacement battery would likely cost. It seems like this would encourage users to keep devices LONGER, if they can get a freshened up unit along with a new battery. It's not like it has ever been stated that if the battery fails you must immediately plant your iPad in a landfill.
I think there is a huge opportunity in chatrroulette if we can just solve the "penis problem".

I've used chatroulette a few times over the past week and if you find someone "normal" to talk to it can be a lot of fun. That said, you spend most of your time "nexting" perverts.

I've been toying with eye-tracking using computer vision for assisting individuals who find themselves paralyzed after a car accident, stroke etc. But I'm not (yet) a CV expert, so I have a long road ahead of me. Part of my desire in this field is to have the computer boot and automatically detect the face and specific facial features from the webcam, with no calibration.

There is a lot of existing work in this area and it seems to me if we can detect a mouth on a face in a video stream we could use the same methods to detect someone jerking off.

I think the hardest part in the process would be finding an army of labelers that would put up with labeling the disturbing imagery. (Can you even submit this kind of material to mechanical turk? I'm not sure.)
This hypothesis doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Apple charges US$129 for a replacement battery for a Macbook Pro. It is clearly less trouble to them to sell batteries through their distribution channels and have customers do the service than it is to deal with the logistics of fooling around with refurbished units. Amongst other things, when they get a unit in they have to test it thoroughly to make sure they aren't passing a lemon on to the next customer.

So if they are able to make a tidy bit of money selling Macbook Pro batteries directly to end users for $129, I infer that if they could, they would sell iPad batteries for $99 or even $129 to end users. It doesn't make any sense to charge $30 less and absorb the logistics headaches in the name of making money from service.

Clearly there is some other constraint that makes refurbishing the units the least inefficient choice for Apple.
Yeah, we definitely had to trim down how much info we were storing. Obviously that was a sacrifice, but the upside was a lower barrier to entering a new feature or bug. We really do just treat it like a digital whiteboard (even to the point of posting pictures of our actual whiteboard until we can transcribe them). And the realtime collaborative editing kills a traditional wiki.
From Wikipedia (a pretty neutral source):

"The 2010 OAS report also found concerns with freedom of expression, human rights abuses, authoritarianism, press freedom, threats to democracy,[55] political intimidation, and "the existence of a pattern of impunity in cases of violence",[56] as well as erosion of separation of powers, the economic infrastructure, and "chronic problems including power blackouts, soaring crime, and a perceived lack of investment in crucial sectors".[57] The report discusses decreasing rights of those in opposition to the government and "goes into heavy detail" about control of the judiciary. It says elections are free, but the state has increasing control over media and state resources used during election campaigns, and interference with opposition elected officials.[58] According to The Washington Post, the report shows that "Chávez holds tremendous influence over other branches of government, particularly the judiciary";[55] "

edit: To make my position clear, I'm not sure if I would call Chavez a dictator right now. That depends ENTIRELY on how we define "dictator". I think he would be under some definitions, not under others.

But if we look at the direction in which he's moving, he could very well soon be a dictator under all definitions, and I certainly am glad not to be living in Venezuela right now (or that our politicians here in Canada aren't like him, despite all their faults).
You can tune Riak to have whichever your qualities you need with its NRW values. N is the number of replicas of your data which can be specified per-bucket. R is the number of nodes that have to successfully respond to a read operation before it's considered to succeed overall, and W is the number of nodes that must respond to a write. R and W are specified with each read and write operation which is quite flexible.

If you want consistency you push R and W closer to N. If you need availability and partition tolerance then you lower R and W. You get to choose the mix of CAP that you need, for each bucket and each request.

I'm a Riak noob but this is my understanding of the system so far.
http://quotes.burntelectrons.org/683 comes to mind. :)
I'm not going to argue the political theory of this, although I have a lot to say.

Instead I'll just say that I continue to feel sorry for my brother human beings in Venezuela. They deserve better than this.
If I get an iPad I'll just do what I did with my first gen iPhone. Use it for 2-3 years until the battery isn't as good as it should be, sell (or give) it to a family member who has wanted your device from day one and is more than happy to pay to get a new battery (if they deem it necessary), next go buy a new device slightly subsidized from selling the old one, finally write a run-on sentence describing this process in vague detail.
Notes on Leadership: Be Like Steve Jobs, . . . And Bill Campbell, And Andy Grove
As opposed to what? Thinking their batteries will last forever?
Okay, I'm not really sure what you're asking for, then. If your plausibility test for a model of human behavior revolves around whether it's rationally self-interested, you're probably set up for a disappointment, and I still think it's more fruitful to look for direct evidence for a pattern of behavior than to look for a plausible story to tell about how that pattern of behavior is adaptive.
Personally, I'm far more cavalier about downvoting +10 comments than I am about downvoting +1 comments.
indeed. very pretty
True, but it has many subtle and less subtle references to PKD: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Days_of_Perky_Pat
FWIW, I'm sure the case will be the same with the iPad as it is with the iPhone/iPod ( http://bit.ly/bwIh23). I have no problem paying 1/5th the Apple price to replace my own battery.
On a mildly unrelated note, I've completely stopped using Apple for anything that can be fixed at home at all. Their prices for replacement parts are obnoxious.
Love it, idea added. Thanks.
"Visually stunning" is the wrong criterion to use when selecting graphics trying to convey information.
+1 for Unfuddle. Has the simplest, most intuitive UI of any bug tracker that I've used...

FogBugz is good, but almost certainly heavy for what you need.

Bugzilla's UI makes me want to claw my eyes out - pay the 9 bucks for an interface that wasn't designed by a programmer.

Jira's probably on the heavier side for what you need, too.
Craig Barrett Takes On Vivek Wadhwa In The Tech Education Debate
I know I'm not alone when I say that Ryan Bates' railscasts.com has saved me countless hours of frustration, and expanded my vision of what Rails is capable of doing. Few presenters can match Ryan's clear, pleasant style. In terms of free offerings, there isn't likely to be anything more comprehensive and professional.
they have officially-recognized bars, certifications, and boards to ensure they are paid what they are actually worth.

Or to put it another way, to artificially erect barriers to entry that ensure they get paid more than they would in a freer market.
Here's why this is disgusting:

Reviewing their Second Avenue Subway promises, one thinks of the solemn and almost-always-broken treaties made with Native Americans, or what historian Helen Hunt called "The Shame of a Nation." The Second Avenue Subway could be called "The Shame of a City" — and of its political class across generations.

Compare the genocide of a continent of indigenous Americans to an overcrowded commute? Really?
What's wrong with the regular subversion releases?
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I did not see anywhere in the guideline that say political stories are prohibited, just that they have to be gratifying hackers' intellectual curiosity.

Does these submissions that made the front page sound uninteresting to you?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1187459

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1172670

So maybe I am responsible for a series of deadly interesting mises.org submission, but I still fail to see why it should be banned.
This "ew, people keep asking me for help" genre has been around for a long time, and I greatly dislike it. It's perfectly natural for people to turn to someone they know who knows about a topic. My father-in-law has answered my questions about cars for years. If there's something he can help with, he does; otherwise he tells me where I need to take it. Maybe I sometimes ask him for help that's actually a lot of work: that's not me being importunate, that's me not knowing about cars. Somehow he's never had any trouble helping me when he can and explaining when he can't. And when someone asks me about computers -- which they do all the time -- I'm delighted to return the favour. It's just not very hard to be a nice person who helps others.

What can sometimes be hard is setting boundaries in the relatively rare case of someone insisting that you help them to an inappropriate degree. Many of us admittedly need to learn how to do that better. But, a hint: whining in public about others' failure to respect the professional glory of your web designerness is no way to work on it. (Not picking on web designers here; programmers are worse.)

Edit: in fairness, the OP does offer some sensible hints (amid much self-centered snark) about polite ways to handle situations.
Inspired by the recent submission from cdixon (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1190710) regarding developing new startup ideas and being the "opposite of secret", I thought we could put the theory into practice.

Feel free to add your own ideas and leave feedback on the others. If you see something you like, get in contact and make it happen!
http://www.railstutorial.org/

This is a book teaches you how to build a Twitter like applications. According to the site it will eventually be accompanied by screencasts.

I do like screencast though. I say go for it but teach folks how to build a different application than the one in Rails Tutorial.
Happy PI day with Clojure
Let me say that I am not interested in converting anyone into anything. I am a libertarian myself and I would at least love to spread the knowledge of libertarian philosophy and make people aware about the dangers of large government. I would also like people to know that politicians have not arrived from heaven, they are regular people like you and me, they care about their own self interest first (staying in power) and it's dangerous to think of them as saviors or messiah.
> I've completely stopped using Apple for anything that can be fixed at home at all. Their prices for replacement parts are obnoxious.

Have you ever tried to purchase a car part from an authorized dealer? The spread between original parts and aftermarket parts for automobiles puts the computer business to shame.
Crowdsourced startups anyone? ;)
It's consistent with the iPad's central concept: it's about simple, zero-hassle access to media, online or stored. It has to be much more hassle-free than a laptop, to justify its purchase and create the niche netbooks tried and failed to create and occupy (1).

Zero config, zero user-serviceable hardware, dramatic restrictions on applications' ability to behave puzzlingly, almost-zero connectors: it's just a "magic" window on your media, marketed for the 80% of non-geeks who just wish to forget the hardware.

(1) netbooks might have been a success, but not in the niche they originally targeted.
Just put off the procrastination until tomorrow, it's really not that fun anyhow. :)

Seriously. Why are distractions enticing? Why is the stuff that needs doing scary/boring? Find a way to cast your work as an interesting problem to solve (like the WoW example upthread) and the distractions as just more of the same old boring stuff you always do. Also if you're really stuck try to procrastinate with an eye towards integrating whatever you learn with what you already know, particularly in areas that are tangentially related to the problem you're stuck on.

It's like that study with the children not eating the marshmallows, willpower is really about convincing yourself "but why would I even want to do that" rather than purely mental resolve.
Worlds Fastest iPhone typist?
In fact, I'm almost positive of it, because to show me "relevant" ads, they have to read my spreadsheet.

Its an algorithm that scans through the text to pick up keywords in order to target advertising. There isn't a person literally reading over your content.

Aside from your paranoia, why do you think your ideas are worth stealing anyway? I could care less if someone came across a document of my unpursued ideas. If they can execute them or germinate them better than I can, they deserve to have them.
You can still hope that she hates her job.
Vectors that lead to web app adoption
Interesting idea. I'd be curious to hear if they turn out a good transcript or whether their lack of understanding of the subject material makes it garbled. I guess with enough people doing it, you can check out the most common transcriptions and go with those...
I'm frequently surprised at the high relevance of his comments about BCC. He's not doing some stupid off-topic brand-name-dropping (spammy) like too many are doing everywhere all the time.
Availability and partition tolerance explained and diagrammed
I haven't really been screwed over, but I also become cautious and alert when my name is used (outside of a couple people). My typical name and names for my friends are: Hey, Yo, Dude. Oddly, for members of the opposite sex, I tend to use pet names and or say their name in a melodic tone (ex: Amanda -> Adamanana)
I wonder if it is possible to open the iPad? With care, experience, and a little luck you can open an iPhone without leaving a mark, but the smaller perimeter/area ratio of the iPad makes it more difficult to achieve a torsion box effect with edge friction.

Glass faced iMacs now use whopping big magnets to hold the glass in, but there isn't room for that in an iPad and I doubt you'd get enough friction to stiffen the unit.

My two cents: If I were Apple I'd glue that front glass on with temperature operated adhesive to complete the torsion box. Opening would require a heating fixture (perhaps RF based), resealing might involve a robot to precisely apply the adhesive, since Mr. Jobs would not tolerate any oozing. It would not be a Genius Bar operation.
Submitted http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1191075 because a lot of people in this thread could use an explanation of what CAP actually means. :)
Participated :D
Assuming an average lifespan of 70, that implies that an average citizen there now has about a 10% chance of dying by murder. Gruesome.
I'm also a Mantis user, and I'm quite happy with it.

Mantis supports Git and SVN integration, if you use the Source plugin. You can find detailed information on how to add these functionalities to Mantis at the following URL: http://leetcode.net/blog/2009/01/integrating-git-svn-with-ma...

Note: Importing repositories with a couple hundred commits will take a while!

I also like FlySpray, but unfortunately, the last commit seems to be 1 year old.
Indians... dont go horny on Google
My opinion is that procrastination is a symptom not a disease. The average life span in the US is 78 years, and you're really only at your peak for about 50 of them. Ever have a year just fly by? Well that was 1/50th of the total time you have.

To fight procrastination you have to ruthlessly eliminate the things you don't want to do from your life.
I wish someone would translate Fugpaint (http://www.benfry.com/fugpaint/) to be Canvas based.
That's very close to Parkinson's Law of Triviality, aka the Bike Shed concept: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_Law_of_Triviality
Sure, but most Apple users replace their iPods and iPhones every two years or so, including myself. I've never run into a battery problem because I've always upgraded before it matters.

These products are essentially disposable computers, and that's why I like them.
It's a reasonable strategy in that it avoids the simultaneous debugging of a new architecture on a new process. This allows them to isolate process related issues and get a stable definition using a known good architecture. They are in effect selling their test chip or "pipe cleaner" and preparing for a jump to a new architecture.
Most likely that constraint is the shape of the battery. They probably did the same thing they do in the unibody mac, which is make the battery fill every possible nook and cranny, with no real compartmentalization to speak of. With that type of design, you can get more capacity and a thinner device, but user service would probably be so difficult that people would be breaking things left and right. And even though users would be breaking their own devices, they would be frustrated and take it out on Apple, tarnishing their feel-good image. A $99 replacement program is much more beneficial PR-wise.
π ≈ 62832 / 20000
from the Aryabhatiya:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryabhatiya
Agreed - most books become outdated by the time they reach the bookshelves.

I'm saying more of a book approach than a screencast approach. Most books start at the ground up, with each chapter building on the previous, while many screencasts tend to be independent of previous episodes.
> So this is just the kind of cultural disaster you could predict - it doesn't really tell us anything new.

Oh absolutely (you've pretty much described the situation spot on). It was just a related anecdote :)

(incidentally he was fairly poor in Venezuela but had distant family in the UK who managed to pay for him to make it over to university here. The girl was generally extremely naive: but in her eyes was wordly, experienced and a bit radical. You can imagine who was more interesting to hang with - Jose is one of the people that kicked off my fascination with South America)
I haven't had much sleep, so my apologies if I'm just misunderstanding, but this part:

I am a libertarian myself and I would at least love to spread the knowledge of libertarian philosophy and make people aware about the dangers of large government. I would also like people to know that politicians have not arrived from heaven, they are regular people like you and me, they care about their own self interest first (staying in power) and it's dangerous to think of them as saviors or messiah.

sounds like "I just want to inform people of my belief system and hopefully they'll start believing it too", which I feel is more or less synonymous with "I want to convert people".

I mean, if I ran across a post like:

Let me say that I am not interested in converting anyone into anything. I would at least love to spread the knowledge of Marxist philosophy and make people aware of the dangers of their corporate overlords.

I would be rather confused at the apparent contradiction between the two sentences.
And the offerings in terms of stock options are relatively good
I think cost per die relates to wafer size, moving to 300mm wafers gave them not only many more total die but many more good die per wafer. Given that they were going to completely change out the fab equipment to support the new wafer size it made sense to move to a new process at the same time.
Whao ... sharing a Google Doc with that many people is a really interesting experience ;)
And do what with the old battery?

The answer should be "recycle or properly dispose of old battery." But for most customers the answer will be "toss old battery in trash."
I'm not going to lie. I literally said "Awww, Coool!" Then looked around to see if anyone noticed because I felt like my inner child surfaced a bit too much.
Not only that, they cut straight to the chase and put the value in % of the company.

In fact, has anyone ever seen a job post like this? I know I haven't; I'd remember. It's highly unusual in its straightforwardness. I'd guess that's pretty appealing to the kind of hacker they're looking for.
As an aside (and purely for my own interest) is that because you consider that word particularly offensive - or just because of the whole tone of that p.s?

I ask because I'm noticing that while people seem to care less and less about "fuck" in conversation they are caring more about that word.

(this is a genuine interest by the way)
You can't have it both ways. Either drivers are pushing the pedal as hard as they can (which every single driver reports) or they aren't because they're scared.

Either way, your argument is based on a bad assumption. At full throttle in a non-super or turbocharged vehicle, there is still more than enough vacuum to assist in braking.