skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been using a tablet for a few months now. (HP tc1100, which many feel is on a par with Apple industrial-design wise, though of a slightly different philosophy.)

I think styluses are for geeks only. Using handwriting recognition and gestures is like writing on paper, only it's not really. It's also like using your desktop PC, but not really. Geeks like us can learn these new conventions and have fun coping with a stylus. To most people it's a terrible pain in the *ss.

Taking up a pen tablet also involves taking up the stylus. That's 100% more overhead than something like the iPad. A paper reference book can be looked at, browsed, indexed, flipped through just by putting your hands on it. Install software to allow that on a pen tablet, and you still have to pick up that stylus in addition to going to the tablet.

In short, it's more immediate. It's immediate enough to reach a mainstream audience. Pen tablets were not.
It's a lot worse than 'setting the risk value of things they had no clue about.' It was, flat out, a conflict of interest:

The AAA ratings given by the agencies proved to be wildly inaccurate and unreasonably high, according to the suit, which also said that the methods used by the rating agencies to assess these packages of securities were seriously flawed in conception and incompetently applied

The ratings agencies no longer played a passive role but would help the arrangers structure their deals so that they could rate them as highly as possible, according to the Calpers suit.

More @ http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/07/calpers-rating-agencies... (this is just but one example of Barry Ritholtz extensive coverage of this issue. McGraw Hill dropped his book b/c of his payola (acurrate) line about S&P's efforts at this in particular.
Just curious to know

Is there any specific reason for having different blogs for every individual instead of a single company blog ?
I would love to watch while a group of say fifteen people off the street (not hackers) who've been using Firefox, are asked to try out Opera. It would soon be mightily evident why Opera commands only some 2.1% of the market
I was trying to put down your argument against simplicity by poiting your argument's complexity. Hence the smart-ass downmod, I accept it.

But I still disagree with you, there isn't a simple equilibrium between power and simplicity. And this is my interpretation of the Apple philosophy, I would bet I share it with many Mac users, and it's odd to me, not with you.

The simplicity in the experience greatly determines the pleasure you take from it, and this determines the context where the "power exchange" happens. Your "power", or the value you get from a product/service is all determined in this context. Albeit being a techie, and having a special interface with these machines I can no longer stand more hurdles since I discovered that it hasn't to be like that.

And it's such a nice discovery to make.
Intel tries cash to lure developers to its app store
The audience (ipod/iphone) Apple already reaches will want to move on to the next gadget. There will be a much larger range of people(mom->geek->artist->workers) with these devices, 'new technologies,' and quite possibly a new generation of computing could spray from this somewhat cheap device.

I mean it IS cheap. The data plan IS cheap.

I had never heard of a tablet pc; until, I was browsing craigslist for a cheap Wacom solution last month. I've heard of an iPad and its not even in stores yet. It will probably be half a decade before I stop hearing about the iPad.

Perhaps we should give it a chance.
Once you've decided you're not interested in them, wouldn't it be nice to be able to hide them from the main screen and see new ones in their place that you might be interested in more?
I'm not sure tackling the problem with machine learning is necessary. It's one of those things that (so far) doesn't happen often, but when it does there seems to be a wave of stories around the same topic. One hopes it will go away, but then a week later another pops up and I'd like to just click ignore and be done with it.
I'm a huge fan of VFF. Extremely comfortable (I dislike the pressure most shoes/socks put on forcing my toes together laterally), and great for running. I've been running with these on asphalt for the past six months, and feel the best I have in years.

And I get comments/questions about them all the time on the train, welcome attention :)
Sigh, any free email provider might do similar things (now or in the future). If that is critical, admin your own email on an OpenBSD server, or something.

But even hints of that type of behavior would be bad for business; Google is much more sensitive than e.g. Microsoft with Hotmail (sadly, it is easier to replace a search engine than Windows).

It is arguably good business for Google to not be evil.
Common and therefore interesting? What's interesting about it, if it's common?
Which particular patents are in question?
International students can take Putnam if they go to school in the US, no? I could be wrong on this.

And what mathematicians are you talking about? I retract that: "sucked at proofs" is too strong a statement. There was a time when the same degree of rigor wasn't expected, so a lot of great mathematicians never or rarely wrote proofs. An example would be Ramanujan, who contributed immensely to mathematics and had amazing intuition, but who rarely wrote proofs and, when he did, Hardy usually had to fill in the holes.

On the other hand, had Ramanujan desired or needed to learn how to write rigorous proofs, there's no doubt that he would have been able to do so.

As for Putnam as a "better indicator" of intelligence than IQ tests, I'd agree, but it still only measures one kind of intelligence. The problem with IQ tests is that they aren't accurate in the upper ranges (140+) because that's not what they're designed for.
The baby boomers are retiring or dieing off ... this leaves plenty of wide open spaces to go to. There will likely be a hiring crunch in a few years.
Interview with Blair Levin, lead on national broadband initiative
Sexy Numbers: Measuring ROI in Social Media Campaigns
Hi rama, Peldi here from Balsamiq. If you look at our page here: http://www.balsamiq.com/blogs/ you'll see that each blog is about very different topics, it would be too much to have it all together, plus one of the blogs is in Italian! :)

This way each employee has a sandbox in which to be great and gather a following of their own.

HTH!
Peldi
I just updated all my browsers and did the Sunspider tests on my Win XP box. Opera smokes them all.

Opera

============================================
RESULTS (means and 95% confidence intervals)
--------------------------------------------
Total: 888.0ms +/- 10.8%
--------------------------------------------

Chrome

============================================
RESULTS (means and 95% confidence intervals)
--------------------------------------------
Total: 1187.2ms +/- 4.2%
--------------------------------------------

Safari

============================================
RESULTS (means and 95% confidence intervals)
--------------------------------------------
Total: 1282.2ms +/- 10.6%
--------------------------------------------

Firefox

============================================
RESULTS (means and 95% confidence intervals)
--------------------------------------------
Total: 2594.8ms +/- 13.9%
--------------------------------------------

IE

============================================
RESULTS (means and 95% confidence intervals)
--------------------------------------------
Total: 15011.0ms +/-12.4%
--------------------------------------------
We just need 24 hours of pure <insert obscure, fringe technology here> stories.

I think we've used Erlang in the past (no offense to the Erlangers, obviously)
nsoonhui's comment still applies. For instance, call options also have limited downside, but still the limit is 100% of your investment. And most of the time you do lose 100%.

Apparently, Burry's achievement was that he found a way to "short" something when there was no "off-the-shelf" product to do so. Even so it's not easy to separate skill from luck.
They, Xerox management, gave him a license to do so. People at PARC weren't so enthusiastic, I think.
Let me tell you, the iPhone has already changed how this "mobile worker" works.

I could be talking to a coworker, unsure of some documentation. Or I could be eating while reading news. Or I could be waiting in line for 3 minutes and reading a few paragraphs of a programming guide. Or (one of my favorites) holding my squirming two year old in one arm (holding the phone) and the hand of my four-year old in the other, showing the Wikipedia entry for the island of Capri to my seven year old.

It's a tablet! That fits in your pocket! That you can use one-handed! That has data access everywhere!

The freakin' future, folks. We're living in the freakin' future.
I just noticed that I'm instinctively using 3-4 browsers too at work and at home on a single machine.

At work I'm using Chrome for everyday browsing, Firefox/Firebug for heavy development and Opera for personal stuff (Gmail).

At home I use Safari for everyday browsing, Chromium for news/social web and Firefox for Google Reader.

i really like the fact that if the browser crashes or wants to update I don't loose everything I'm doing, only a part of it. It also allows me to focus on a task rather than a bunch of unrelated websites.

Is that a general trend ?
Indeed. It is of importance to legal processes, where an unstamped hand-delivered letter is in some sense undelivered.
I remember seeing YikeBike on here about half a year ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=810787) to fairly mixed thoughts, particularly in terms of style (kinda uncool) and safety. Honestly I wouldn't want to drive through any part of Manhattan on it; hitting any sort of pothole or crack in the street would seem to be painful.
I think there is quite a bit of merit to this. My wife and I hardly open our laptops at home anymore. The iPhone allows us to do most of what we need to do on the Internet without the dead weight and overhead of a full blown laptop.

A netbook is out of the question, as the keyboard is a pain compared to the iPhone; we have plenty of practice on the virtual keyboard from texting, and the autocorrect (for the most part) works well. The connectivity isn't bound to WiFi, and the cost is something we've built into our monthly bills. Being 'always-on' is something we take for granted, but it really makes the experience that much more immersive.
some of us have jobs where we cant wear toe shoes. be realistic.
Let me tell you, the iPhone has already changed how this "mobile worker" works.

I could be talking to a coworker, unsure of some documentation. Or I could be eating while reading news. Or I could be waiting in line for 3 minutes and reading a few paragraphs of a programming guide. Or (one of my favorites) holding my squirming two year old in one arm (holding the phone) and the hand of my four-year old in the other, showing the Wikipedia entry for the island of Capri to my seven year old.

It's a tablet! That fits in your pocket! That you can use one-handed! That has data access everywhere!

It's the freakin' future, folks. We're living in the freakin' future.
What are the disadvantages, apart from "massive callouses"?

I can't edit my comment anymore, but my dad loves to run barefoot. I mentioned callouses as an excuse to link to a blog post where he shows off his Fred Flintstone feet.

As to the disadvantages... what if you're fighting Hans Gruber and he shoots a bunch of glass windows?

I think being barefoot all the time is very different from just running barefoot. A barefoot life is rather unsanitary and unsafe (there are lots of dirty pointy things on the ground). Shoes offer protection from cold, heat, physical trauma, sunburn, moisture, and social embarrassment. They also provide better traction on many surfaces.

I'm too lazy to go searching for sources that justify my claim, but you don't have to look far to find some weaker evidence. Look at people who have the muscular strength but not the structural support necessary to walk: they use braces to help restrict motion or devices to reduce weight on their joints (walkers, crutches). Look at anatomy: ligaments don't thicken along with one's waistline. Even if they did, they wouldn't keep up with the square-cube law.

I guess a more concrete example would be this: If you had to wear a weighted vest while running, would you rather be barefoot or wearing supportive shoes? If the vest is heavy enough, your calves won't support you and you'll be forced to heel-strike. At that point, a supportive and cushioning shoe would be less stressful than barefoot running. That's basically what people with weak calves or large guts experience. And most people in that situation aren't going to train enough to get to the point where barefoot running is better for them.
Apple's success is based on its polish and attention to detail

If that's the case, why can't they drop OS X and iPhone and simply make clones, just clones with polish and attention to detail?

You want to have your cake and eat it too: You want Apple to innovate and you want everyone else to leverage their innovation freely. I understand why that's in your best interests, I can't figure out why Apple would bother if everyone else could "adopt" their innovation wholesale.

Where do you want to draw the line? Can others adopt Apple's multi-touch gestures? How about the look and feel of OS X? What about the code, can CherryPC or whatever they were called make PCs that run OS X by writing drivers for it? How about duplicating the OS X copde, can Chinese clone makers simply copy the OS X code and replace Apple's logos with their own?
Brooks called this role the "toolsmith", the only difference is that now the toolsmith creates things that are used in the production environment and may be full-on products in their own right.
Worth a look if only for the link to the reddit clone in QBASIC.
A client of mine wanted to automate her invoicing. As part of that project I used the USPS API to get the postal rate.
First of all, their documentation is just plain wrong. It will not work if you follow their documentation. After a frustrating few hours I googled it and found a site that explained everything that was wrong with it. http://www.marksanborn.net/php/calculating-usps-shipping-rat...
Secondly, my client complains that the USPS should have someone she can contact that gives her all the info she needs to use their services. But instead what she has found is some info from one person, conflicting info from another, and no one who can explain everything.
The USPS does a terrific job of delivering mail at a very reasonable rate, but they need to fix the problems outlined above if they want to compete.
Opera 10.50 Reaching RC (Several of Them)
After reading a HN linked article on barefoot running I did some research and bought my first pair of VFF about 2 months ago. Bought my second pair, Treks, two weeks ago for every day and use the first pair for running only. For me it has been a lifestyle changer. My feet and legs want to walk or run all the time. I'm frustrated by rainy days that leave me cooped up in the office. My wife says I get grumpy if I don't wear my "duck shoes".
Slighty off topic, but boy am I anxious for them to get the web version of Balsamiq out of beta...
What is he doing now? I hope he is still investing.
but here you are trying to bribe your way onto Hacker News.

Satire dude. Satire.
I assume you're talking about Nokia (since as an American, I can't be bothered to remember their CEO's name).

The Nokia situation is a little more murky than this. With Nokia, Apple tried to license their patents (which I believe are crucial to GSM), but Nokia wanted a broad cross-licensing agreement, to basically use all of the Apple display / mobile device / multitouch patents (what HTC is accused of doing). Patents involved in communication standards are supposed to be licensed on reasonable terms, so Apple cried foul. The predictable lawsuit and counter-suit then commenced.

I don't think anyone in this case is saying that HTC bothered to ask Apple to license the patents in question.
Worse. The new Television.
One new thing to me about Clojure.

Check out this one line of Clojure code:

(if-let [user (@users email)] //do stuff

And the equivalent in most other languages:

for (e in users) {
if (e.email == email_passed_in) {
user = e
}
}
if (user) { //do stuff}
I think they should put a cap on the size of a company that can hold and enforce patents. Apple et. al. do not need the protections afforded by patents. I know that in reality this would just create a lot of proxy companies but there has got to be a better way; getting rid of the patent system is not the solution as it does provide the little guy protection, from the big guys just stealing, his idea and drowning him out with cheaper copies.

But given the two choices, I am cheering for the patent trolls to just screw the whole think up to the point that the big guys clamor for it to go away.
I think the key is the merger of personal media, communications, entertainment, and home automation. Imagine that you're reading a magazine article on the iPad. This reminds you of a band. You go over to the media remote app and put an old album of theirs on. Out of curiosity, you do a search and go over to the Amazon page and order their new song. This reminds you of something else that you ordered and you check on the package tracking. You see that it will arrive when you are out of town and message your girlfriend to see if she'll drop by and pick it up off the front steps on the way home from work in a few days.

Most of that, you could do on the PC. But with the iPad, you could do all of that just sitting on the couch.

The home automation part: You call up a recipe app as you walk to the kitchen. You flip to the ingredients view and you see that you need some more ginger. You flip the ginger into a shopping cart app for Whole Foods and it gets added to your "Personal Shopper" bag for you to pick up later.
There are two kinds of people. Those who like to fiddle around with technology per se, and those who use it as a means to an end.

I used to be the first, now I consider myself more the second. You could say I'm getting older, but I like to think I'm getting smarter.

Hey--I enjoy hacking away more than ever. But if the means is getting in the way of the end, then I'm just really impatient anymore. It's like waiting for a slow computer, sort of. Or, better yet--having to figure out which slot of RAM in my desktop is having problems before I can do some development at an acceptable speed without tons of swapping. I can do this stuff. If I'm learning something from it, great--but it's still getting in the way of what I want to be doing.

Just because technology gets in the way of doing work doesn't mean that work is not technical in nature. And, of course, there are plenty of valuable, useful endeavors out there that are not inherently technical in nature. Those are not somehow lessened simply they desire to focus less on the tool and more on the result.
There's no artful way to ask this; but have you found any potential replacements for HN / Proggit yet?
It is hilarious to me that the Linux community continues to retell the "Have you ever kissed a girl?" chestnut after 14 years, and still fails to get the joke.

If you go back and read the original Usenet (not email) drama (http://www.cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html), it is Miller who sounds like an adolescent. From describing himself as "chief architect of the SparcLinux port," to the laughable wishful thinking of "Linux is light weight, Solaris is a pig," to the non-sequitur cheapshot of "Sun Quentin" (what is that supposed to mean? that Sun engineers are held against their will? that they're felons? what?), the entire post drips of the naive self-regard that, sadly, marked Linux's kernel community at the time.

I was regularly using both systems in 1996. Solaris worked. Linux did not. Miller was asking to be taken down several notches, and Cantrill did so in the fewest possible syllables.
That hasn't really solved anything in the past except making the site essentially unusable for day.
He did more than just place a bet. He carefully read the prospectus of the individual bonds he was shorting. He looked into the underlying loans that the bond was based on. He saw: no income verification, no down payments, and inflated home prices. This is something the people buying the bonds could have and should have done themselves.
QuickBasic 64
"Why should people in economically viable communities be forced to subsidize people who chose to live in remote areas?"

Game theory. The population centers voted that failure to respond to mail can subject you to severe legal penalties, including imprisonment, and there is at present no practical substitute to first class mail. Cutting off the mail would result in unfair punishment of remote peoples, which would result in secession of the remote territory, which would result in loss of EXTREMELY valuable roads, railways, pipelines, oil tank farms, air space, geographically-defended military bases, and radio spectrum.

To put it another way, the economy of scale of the Pax Americana can afford quite a bit of abuse from the postal unions.
I don't see enough benefit in passive chip implantation, like RFID: just another authentication protocol that ultimately can get hacked. While an active chip would generate heat and potentially become carcinogenic. I suppose that can be overcome.
I think Amazon would block it ASAP on the Kindle, actually. Their SDK license specifically states that you can't make a "generic reader".

In the reverse of these arguments, how about the DRM shenanigans around music only a few years ago? Apple was at the front of removing it.
I think something like this will be a mobile touch panel for everything that will have a computer in it, which will be more and more things as time goes on.
I would love to see posts like this from other companies, since I'm very interested in how people decide on what to build for their startups.
I've been using it with Aquamacs without difficulty, for whatever it's worth.
My first real programming income came from QuickBasic 4, at age 16. I had dabbled in GW-Basic up until that time, but an adult mentor introduced me to the concept of procedural program with functions and subroutines. In other words, no more line numbers, and no more Gotos and Gosubs. Also, real executables. No more interpreted code. It was one of those lightbulb moments in my life.

I still have my original QuickBasic 4.5 manuals. I just can't throw them away.

Very cool to see a project like this.
in the meantime, i'm still waiting for stevey's promised last three posts ...
Fair enough. At that point I usually recommend trying a new profile, but honestly a jump to Chrome is probably going to be more of a performance benefit at the moment.
Way to stifle innovation, Apple.
incumbents and lawyers getting what they want, fantastic system ...
Thanks peldi for clarification.
Yeah, that's kinda the point. HN stops being the place that people come to for fluffy/inflammatory stories as we've seen for the past few days.
Face Detection And Tracking On The Nokia N900
Copyright law alone doesn't incentivize the kind of work Apple does

Wasn't this the crux of the Apple/Microsoft lawsuit in the 90s? Apple claiming a copyright to the windows metaphor? So yeah, I'd say that copyright law doesn't quite cover them in this case.
He said later that he's now a big fish in a small pond (developers that read blogs) and almost completely unknown outside of that niche. That's his main reason - it's not worth the time any more.
Simple rule of writing: define acronyms with their first use in the text. Come on now, people. :-)
Not that Vanity Fair doesn't have high standards, but the author of the article(actually a chapter of his new book) was Michael Lewis, who is quite a good writer by himself. :)
>The survey, conducted by German IT industry lobby group BITKOM.