skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
'Groceries' could have easily stopped at the third iteration. Sure, it wouldn't have looked as unique or easily identifiable as a taptaptap product, but it would have looked simple and clean. Easy to scan, easy to read in a supermarket while pressed for time. Subtle, not busy textures. Personal preference I suppose.
These are both features that will come in due time, just like copy/paste on the iPhone. There are thousands of other little features that needed to be implemented before this was considered a 1.0 device. It would have never shipped had they tried to do it all from the start.
TSA sez "Don't remove iPad for x-ray. Unless screener asks you to."
To be fair, although my phone has SSH, Samba, and Transmission for torrents, it can't print until I install a third-party program (and it's still cumbersome).
That 2.5 yr old can spell already which many kinder-gardeners twice the age can't, and same toddler is _clearly_ already familiar with the interface as in swiping to scroll and hitting the home button to go back to the app menu. It was not a "new" toy, just a bigger version of a toy (s)he's already very familiar with
IANAL, but unless the hypothetical law legalizing these drugs contains clauses detailed what should happen to them, nothing will change for them. After all, even if it is decriminalized, what they did was a crime at the time they did it and they have already been sentenced. Without legislation specifically changing that, those sentences were correct at the time and would simply stand as is.
One minor point: Los Angeles is a large cosmopolitan city, Terre Haute a small, Midwestern city. Nothing against RHIT--a grandfather went there (before the Hulman)--or Terre Haute, where I have relatives. But if you are new to the US, and particularly if you are from outside of Europe, you might well find LA more congenial.
An iPad clone that has Flash, Firefox, filesharing, and a keyboard
Two extraordinarily poor examples!

Both films and music (plus songwriting too) have been explicitly enshrined by US copyright law as having separate rights for home use and public performance. Each has multiple spheres of statutory licensing organizations with special exemptions from anti-trust law.
If it had a touch screen it might be just fine. It's the mouse and keyboard which add a layer of abstraction, rather than the operating platform itself.

I do feel that such comparisons are akin to saying 'you are not a good horse breeder because I have just invented the bicycle'. Owning a horse for your transport needs is no longer a sensible choice for most people, but that hardly obviates all use cases.
I think this tells us more about education administrators than cellphones :-/
If that's what you consider "slightly nontrivial", I never want to see what you would consider a difficult type declaration.
For the longest time the mantra in good user interface design has been 'make it so a three year old can use it'. This video so proves that to be a true thing. I always try to find people that have as little exposure to computers as possible when trying out new stuff, I never actually thought of taking that literally and employing toddlers as testers, but after this video I'm 100% convinced that's the way to go.
Social Pathology (Lecture)- Economic Inequality Detrimental to 99.9%
Lest the author be considered hypocritical, the aforementioned book is freely available as a PDF:

http://mises.org/books/against.pdf
Why not ? Seems like she's proficient in using the iPad because she already was iPhone savvy, as mentioned by the blogpost.

Given some time with an Android device, I think she would do just as well sampling apps on Android as she did on iPhone OS. Her way of launching an app, playing around and then pressing the Home button would work on Android just as fine.

I also believe there's quite a difference between a 2.5 year old playing around with an OS, and adults who may not be tech-savvy using a smartphone in a meaningful way.

Or to phrase it as a question, do you think those people would have as much trouble understanding the iPhone OS as they did the Android OS ?
You think that's bad...I tried to click a hyperlink in a book the other evening. OK, it was 2am and I'd been looking up supplementary material online to complement my page reading for several hours, but still.
Try again. http://www.scrippsnews.com/node/23795
Yikes -- I don't know the specifics of your situation, but it's awfully risky to give up 50% of your potential salary if you're not a founder. If you're getting a very significant equity stake maybe, but would have to be a pretty incredible opportunity for the risk/reward ratio to make sense.
Ask HN: Which EU countries are least unfavorable for entrepreneurs?
I would like to start a business somewhere in the EU (I'm an EU citizen) but I am concerned about potential legal restrictions.

Which countries would be most favorable or least unfavorable to starting a business?
Most of the URL shorteners on twitter don't do the framing.
"And they don' have a phobia of technology so they are willing to try anything"

Heard it suggested once that the reason older people are reluctant to explore and experiment with computers is that in their day, experimenting with the machinery of the time could mean a severed finger or lost limb.
add -p is barely advanced at all. It's certainly less advanced than merging the conflicts between pointless local branches and dealing with the existence of modified files in the working copy when switching between them.

I find commit -am to be more infantile than rebase is advanced. Don't try to pretend that the index doesn't exist, since it will get dropped in your lap eventually, most likely when you least want it to (failed merge, etc).
Think I saw the erlier 'easy' round, but clicked through to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_clock (kept updated with these posts, I noticed).

Two thoughts: first, what about an application/example to DVCS problems ? Such as "Dave saw both Ben's and Cathy's derivations of Alice's drawing, but prefers Ben's with a small modification ..."

Second, when is the xkcd comic coming out ?
Microsoft's Quiet Success Story: Windows 7
Ask HN: What tools do you use?
What tools do you use for web development?

I'm not referring to languages (PHP, Ruby on Rails, etc), but to the tools, like Emacs, Basecamp, Eclipse, etc.

Personally, to develop my website (mentioned in my profile), I use bare-bones stuff:
* ssh via xterm
* Emacs for editing PHP and CSS files
* FileZilla
* Firebug for debugging
* Gimp & Paintbrush for image creation and editing
* svn

I'm wondering if there are some high-productivity tools that I am missing out on.

What do you guys use?
This isn't just a symptom of the iPad. I've always been confused when news sites build an iPhone app for people to read the same news they can read in the browser or a news aggregator. It seems the time, cost, and energy could be spent improving the site experience, making accommodations for the differences in finger and mouse inputs.

Is it just for the ability to boast that they have an iPhone or iPad app? Perhaps it's just another avenue to increase readership?

Regardless, it's their choice to build the apps and users choice to pay for and use them, so c'est la vie.
The Maneken Interactive Media Table [video]
Familiarity and learnability are not the only rubrics for UI design.

While it's good to make products understandable by two-year-olds, there are other important considerations in UI. Can it help you accomplish the task efficiently? Reliably? Happily? Vim, for example would never stand up to the two-year-old test, but is nonetheless an extraordinarily capable and efficient text editor--which qualifies it, in my opinion, for "good UI".

I don't mean to imply Android is as readily cognizable to toddlers as the iPhone. What I mean to say is that streaming quickly from activity to activity through various stateless apps, each of which can plug into each other for various intents, is a more efficient way to accomplish tasks than quitting and re-opening apps from the home screen.
I've noticed that older folk are reluctant to explore/experiment because they're afraid they'll irreparably break it, which I suppose fits in the confines of mechanical machinery. Experimenting with your car may in fact break it in very, very messy/expensive ways.

There doesn't seem to be a clear understanding that short of taking a hammer to your computer, it's almost impossible to break...

Part of this is our fault also - we've allowed decades of software with bad defaults, no-warning data deletions, etc, and now people are afraid that a single stray button click will nuke their precious work.
Can you be more specific as to the types of legal restrictions you are concerned about? Or is this just a general question on what countries are more/less supportive of start-up businesses?
Isn't the radiation dangerous for small children?

EDIT: whoa! I have been downvotted after asking if it is safe for children.

So, here are some references.

"Children have much thinner skull bones and their brains have a lot more fluid, so their brain tissues would likely absorb twice more radiation compared to an adult’s brain. But cellphone radiation standards set by the government remains the same for both groups."
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/tag/radiation/

"If the notebook is sitting on a child’s lap, that child is exposed to radio emissions comparable to that of a mobile phone. If the notebook is 20 cm away, the child is subjected to exposure of just 1% to that of a mobile phone"
http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20/2007/04/29/warning-keep...

How about that?
I wouldn't propose doing this, but would it be possible to automatically extract the entire text of a book from Google Books?

I mean, if I search for something it will give me the pages just before and just after, right? Can I then conduct searches for rare phrases found on the pages just before and just after and work my way outwards? Or have they done something to prevent this?
I actually kind of find myself often wanting the opposite, especially in the first sentence or two of a paper's abstract. If the first sentence has details about their method, I'm often still trying to figure out of it's even on the broad subject I'm looking for. Your first example would let me say, "oh ok, their goal here was improving software development, not what I was looking for", without being distracted by details about wavelets.
Wow, this sucks. With as much as the NYT and WSJ are charging, why do I have to look at any ads at all, much less intrusive Web-style popups?
Unwarnished, violation started from name itself
Very good point. IBM is a huge company. Thinking of it as a monolithic entity whose actions are all coordinated according to a master plan is tempting, but unrealistic.
Me, I'm pining for the KDE 3.x clock screensaver - that one hit my weakness for train-station-style clocks spot on. Not available under Gnome, Mac or Windows, I believe.
Indeed - I was thinking more of kernel modules using things like SSE2 or the like that I'd just take for granted now. I didn't mean to imply kernel bloat or a lack of backwards compatibility, but rather wondered if the paranoids in NK might be suspicious of current builds.
Yes, she is good :) Her accomplishments included talking herself out of four speeding tickets and from going to jail in Columbia. We'll know soon how well she's doing that magic in selling our product!
Pretty impressive the benchmarks, though they are getting close, having to re implement all the C extensions is definitely going to suck -- you can for example use twisted, but nothing that uses SSL, because twisted normally calls into pycrypto for them :(
Cool Tools Review - CreateSpace: Self-Publishing via Amazon
An interesting read, but as nearly always, the article is followed by crappy commentary (Obama and Simpsons jokes). Wired is like the Digg of tech and science publications. Comments are almost always the best part for me when I read a story online, which is perhaps why I like HN so much. I wish submitters would choose sources with more appropriate audiences for these kinds of articles.

Edit: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/57964/title/Super...
Do those shadow domains need to have anything link to them for them to be useful?
The Revolution will not be Reading Your Email
To add to this, my Dad also uses this with car sales people.

1. He picks the absolute bottom price.

2. Calls up the area dealerships within 50 miles

3. Tells them the model, price and his phone number to call back when they are ready to give him at his price

He totally shuts off any attempts by the sales people to erase my Dad's first number with their own by insisting he does not care about any extra features and other bs. His number is also terribly low(ALMOST but not totally in the you're joking category) so typically he can get the car within $500 of his quoted number. What does work for him is he communicates certainty of his decision to buy a car which is a tad easier because he is a surgeon.
I'd call the combination of using server-side continuations for form handling (rather pointlessly) and the server needing to be restarted constantly (from memory leaks?) a pretty egregious bug. Forms shouldn't become invalidated because your software is unreliable.

When replying, often I'm returned to a random page instead of the one in the whence parameter. After making this comment, I was redirected to /threads?id=pg instead of to /item?id=1243793

The markup in comment threads is extremely broken in Mobile Safari -- font sizes change randomly, sometimes some of the vote arrows will randomly be huge or teeny-tiny.

Using Image() to generate GET requests for the vote links is at the very least stupid if not a bug, you should be making a POST using XHR -- and then you could get the new vote total in the response instead of mindlessly incr/decr-ementing the number in the DOM.
The thing that confused me while I was doing this was that I'd told Google my daily spend was £7, but I wasn't able to actually spend that much. I tweaked the CPC up towards £0.60 for some keywords but it just wasn't giving me enough impressions, even when configured to try and spend the daily budget as quickly as possible.

Even with that, it does sound like that's where I need to work - the landing page wasn't in any way fiddled for common SEO factors, because I wasn't thinking about that for this.

Do you know how you can get a measure of your quality score?
I've been following PyPy for awhile. It's an incredibly ambitious project, and the fact that it is now close to being a competitive Python implementation for real-world use is amazing.

A brief summary of why the project is so cool: the actual Python interpreter is written in a subset of Python known as RPython. The actual Python interpreter can by run sandboxed within another Python process, for example (albeit slowly). That also means the actual language implementation can be clean, concise, and beautiful like a relatively high-level language allows.

They also wrote a JIT generator that takes an interpreter written in RPython and makes a JIT out of it. Right now, the JIT generated from their Python interpreter could fairly be called faster than CPython and will probably only improve.

The neatest part is that it is feasible that someone could write an interpreter for another language, like Ruby or Javascript, in RPython or a language semantically equivalent to it. Conceivably the JIT generator could then compile it down to a very fast language implementation, with little optimization work required by the language implementor.

This kind of separation of concerns is something that could produce absolutely incredibly practical value in the near future. Even if PyPy doesn't work out (it is way behind their anticipated schedule, but I think it will) the developers behind this deserve a lot of respect for breaking so much ground.
You had me thinking there for a few minutes. Why exactly do I appreciate the ease of use of a iPad but would most certainly not appreciate the ease of use of a violin where you just tap a few times on a touchscreen and which then plays for you?

I think it has something to do with abstractions. There are no abstractions when playing a violin. You move the bow which causes strings to vibrate and that’s it. User Interfaces are built on abstractions. CLIs, mouse interfaces, touch interfaces, all are abstractions because nobody would want to edit a photo without those.

Just because the iPad uses different abstractions doesn’t mean it’s the computer version of my phony easy to use violin. I honestly think there are ways to improve our abstractions and the iPad might be a step in that direction. I also see no reason why a 2.5 year old shouldn’t be able to pick up at least some of those abstractions which are also fitting for grown-ups.

(I actually think that it’s possible to build better versions of that one example you mentioned that also uses abstractions: graphing calculators. Most graphing calculator level math is certainly too hard for 2.5 year olds, but when it comes to inputting stuff many graphing calculators suck. Incidentally, there is not a single great graphing calculator available for the iPhone. I really wanted one.)
Yes, it's just a general question. I don't really know what issues I might face although I have heard for example that the EU is more restrictive than the US in general. But, again, I'm not even sure what that means in practical terms.
Net Neutrality: Toward a Stupid Internet
The bump is really just there to make the connection, you could interact in lots of different ways after the connection. And it may be that iPhone to iPad is more common than iPad to iPad. We are seeing lots of people use Bump to move photos from their iPhone to their iPad.

But Bump works pretty well on iPad. The extra weight makes the bump motion easier to detect.
There's evidence (both anecdotal and numeric) suggesting that people prefer using an apps to the "raw" web. My mom says about her iPhone, "Safari is still kind of hard for me. So I always look for an app first." I suspect her usage pattern may be somewhat typical, and if so, it may make a lot of sense for these companies to build these apps--because they're what the users want.
If only said publishers understood how much we value succinctness...
Twisted uses PyOpenSSL for SSL. Twisted Conch (the SSH server/client) uses PyCrypto. Also, the CPython C extension API is being implemented in the pypy branch cpython-extension.

Even if PyOpenSSL doesn't work right now, servers can use SSL proxies (either user-level, or in-kernel, such as OpenSolaris' KSSL)
Diggbar is dead, long live Diggbar:
"That said, we will continue to iterate on our browser extensions for Firefox, Chrome, and IE. Look for seriously revamped versions of those in a few months.”
Outrageous: Exxon Mobil Paid No Income Tax in 2009 on $45 Billion Profit
It is great on WebOS. The full swipe on the gesture area to flip through the cards is as easy as it gets.

I don't see why they couldn't do it on the apple products, they have the bezel for it.
That's a profound change of behaviour in a short time. I wonder if he has been checked out for a brain tumour or something else affecting his neurology.
True, but using Python on App Engine already requires rewriting/replacing/avoiding C extensions, so it's probably a limitation Google is okay with.
I propose a macrnews (MN) for posts like these, and all similar as new mac products are released and rumors dispersed.
1 point by josh33 5 hours ago

Apparently not.

In fact, I'm sure I'll get modded down for this, but it seems to work the other way around; if you say "I'm sure I'll get modded down for this" then you'll get modded up. Of course since I've transparently pointed it out in this case I'm sure I actually will get modded down for this.
Some of the PyPy developers have started working on a branch that will provide a bridge API, allowing CPython extension modules to be used inside of PyPy. As of today the regular expression engine from CPython can be successfully compiled and imported (though isn't totally functional). IronPython has a similar project named IronClad.
No, the iPad are maracas, that can transform themselves in a tambourine, or bongo drums, or in a scientific calculator, or in document editor, or in 500,000 other things.
The first, for a couple reasons, but that's not relevant. My point was that I see no advantage or even plausible case for having declaration syntax be different from use syntax.

If C made us declare foo using the second format you gave, we'd still have to write, e.g., ((foo[12][3])())[7] in the code where we are actually trying to use foo.

Can you look at a declaration in the second format, and compare to where the variable is used, and see quickly if the usage is correct? With the current declaration format, it's easy--because declaration and usage use the same format.
Weight is not mentioned on that comparison chart.
That's great. So what will he do next year?
I think that book publishers really DO have something to fear from piracy. Not right now, obviously- real books are hands-down a better experience than reading on a computer. But the digital means are going to get more and more compelling over the next few years, and a generation is going to grow up with a different concept of "book".

disclaimer: I've never used an ebook reader. I have read books on my computer screen.
London appears to be a fairly popular place to start a startup. A limited company can be started in the UK with 1 pound in capital, plus a few hundred in various fees. Several countries offer more favorable tax climates and there are also benefits for starting a business in specific (typically underdeveloped) regions in a number of EU countries, so you might want to check that, but it appears that the UK is the go-to jurisdiction for EU startups. Note that you can run your company from any EU country and register in any EU country (though some countries require more solid legal presence in the country to be registered there).
This doesn't bother me as much as the movie-popcorn pricing system, which seems to be rapidly spreading to everything (Cold Stone and Jamba Juice are two particularly egregious offenders). You can have the miniscule size for $5, the "medium" size for $5.75, or the insanely large size for $6.95. Of course they never even expected to sell the other two sizes, they're only there to make the medium size (which is still way more than I wanted to eat) look cheap.

While I'm on the subject, here's a fun fact: a chocolate-peanut-butter flavoured milkshake from Cold Stone, in their largest size, contains over two thousand calories.
The first post here could not have said it better:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bn8y5/kernighan...
FWIW, I get a very noticeable mood depression the day after I drink, even if I do it moderately enough that I don't have any other hangover symptoms.
iPhone OS also goes into the iPad. And what is really needed are hyphenation tables that iBooks can use. I know they wouldn't list something a user can't see, but it affects what users can see when they read.
It might also have something to do with the pride you take in (or the appreciation you have of) the skill required to paly the the violin. Plenty of people appreciate guitar hero, for instance, which is far easier to play than a guitar (has a higher layer of abstraction in the terms above, if I understand them correctly). On the other hand, true "masters" of gh love it also because anybody can do something with it, but few can do what they do.
My 1.5 year-old knows how to use the mouse (he grasps the interaction between what's in his hand and what happens on screen), spinning the wheel while the mouse is over a window makes that window move up and down, and that the "media" button on my keyboard launches Foobar 2000.

Kids are wicked smart, and learn shockingly fast. Needless to say, it's impossible to work with him in my lap.
Reverse engineering confirms Apple iPad is 'a really big iPod Touch'