skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hadn't thought of it as a replacement to paper - that's actually pretty interesting a concept. Have you seen the show Caprica on Sci-Fi? They actually use thin sheets of "something" (looks like paper) as a computer - so maybe your thought is more apt than my idea of drawing the laptop-to-tablet idea.
Then the "non-technical" user who complains about this can go fuck themselves, since the Windows machine they're supposed to be switching from does the same thing.

At first it sounds like I'm trolling, but please think this issue through. What crowd is Ubuntu trying to pander to? Are there really people out there "technical" enough to bother caring about a hard drive's size, but not technical enough to figure out that 1000 != 1024?

If you want something that the end user will really care about, ship Ubuntu with a default theme that doesn't look horrible, or include useful codecs and plugins in the default install. "Oh, but those are easy to obtain", you say? So then is it really that much more difficult to spend 5 seconds explaining that it's 1024, not 1000? Not that I care enough to create some stupid "UBUNTU + FLASH LOL" distro, since I use Arch or one of the BSDs, but it just seems stupid that they'd make a silly, superficial change like this and expect a pat on the back.
And in that; nothing is blocking apps aimed at creators from the app store. Day one will see a new version of Pages and Keynote and at least one artist/painter/sketching application.

The applications will make or break the device ultimately.
mschaecher, thank you for your elaborate reply.

The suggestions and points you have made a really useful. I am really happy.
Not everything is working 100% as I'm still working on the site, I felt stuck on the layout and design. I'm changing features constantly.

I'm thinking of inserting a small description of the site in the top part of the sidebar, or in a box above the articles.
I've been suggested to add a popup such as wefollow's one http://wefollow.com/, but I'm not sure if it's a good idea.

Thank you for pointing out the problems about the terminology I used, I haven't thought about this and you have given a great explanation on why and what you suggest me doing.

About the "tweetmeme" and "reddit" boxes, I applied the theme colours for each one. I'm thinking of maybe only displaying theme colors when a relevant container is being hovered, although this might disrupt the user's attention.

I'll also change the text contract, and level them a better.
I'm thinking the following order of importance:
- Title
- Description
- Domain, Source
- Time ago, Poster, Options

I'm a little undecided if to consider the description more important than "domain" and "source", or the other way round.

I'll add a footer asap!

Thank you mschaecher, this was top advice!
I don't think your argument makes any sense. It's not that these lands and nations are lawless and "governed" by bandits but the fact that many civilized nations profit from the chaos in terms of cheaper raw materials and drugs that are traded for guns to keep the struggle going. As soon as more developed nations stop selling them weapons and stop trading for the "cheaper" resources the whole problem goes away.
That's relatively close for why I'm buying one - I don't want a laptop replacement. I want something more portable that does "just enough" of what I need and want to do on the go.
Yup, no dice.

In the end, OS X wasn't a good OS choice for what I needed that machine for. Linux has been much more reliable.
Chinese city is world’s hacker hub
Would've been nice if this was editable.
Mario, Wii Fit — what’s next for Nintendo? Meet the man who invented Mario
"HTML" the Song (by The Hot Toddies)
To quote someone else in the thread later on: "Because no one ever held a book steady in their hand for more than 15-20 minutes without getting tired..."

I will be very interested to hear real-world feedback about the usage patterns and ergonomics of it as people really use it - and people will, including tech people, writers, bloggers, etc.
> What crowd is Ubuntu trying to pander to? Are there really people out there "technical" enough to bother caring about a hard drive's size, but not technical enough to figure out that 1000 != 1024?

They don't care about the hard drive size per se, they just care that all the numbers the computer reports are as impressive as the ones the salesman told them.

> So then is it really that much more difficult to spend 5 seconds explaining that it's 1024, not 1000?

It is when you're being yelled at in the product returns line. It sounds like an excuse and an ass-pull, and it's not something that would calm down a belligerent customer.

Remember that there are two types of people who have Ubuntu—those that got it themselves, and those who had it dropped upon them by a more technical user. For the second group, "superficial" change is the only kind of change they care about, vis. http://www.makemylogobiggercream.com/

Also, as a side-note, the cost of being widely-used by governments and public institutions, and being open-source, is that you have to obey the law, so the option to "include useful codecs and plugins in the default install" just isn't available. (You can't purchase a license for a codec when you literally don't know how many users you have.)
Lose Weight: How to Lose 10 LBS in a Week Starting at the Top
Thanks, but no thanks. Prototypal inheritance is JavaScript's strength.
That's a pretty broad area. You may want to narrow it down some.
No, he said that even if you spend that much, nobody will think "hey, that guy has a cool machine". If you want people to think that, a "cheap" iPad will do the trick.

That's his contention anyway.
Unusable for anything but reading pre-approved ebooks, light web browsing, and posting to Twitter?
Isn't Cassandra slightly more complicated than MySQL? Sure adding another column is trivial, but the access patterns & indexing need to be determined first.
Actually the vote tallies just demonstrate how wingnutty the Republican Party has become in the last few years.

The legislation at hand is, literally and without exaggeration, almost entirely Republican in nature. It's nearly identical to proposals made by Republican presidential candidates. It's nearly identical to what Mitt Romney pushed for and got in Massachusetts. It is an unexciting law that contains massive giveaways to favored Republican industries like the drug companies.

And yet, not a single Republican in 2010 could manage to vote for it. And Republican columnists and Republican think-tank members who pointed out the law is exactly what Republicans say they want... they got fired for violating Party orthodoxy. That speaks volumes about the modern Republican Party, and says very little about the healthcare law.
Where did you get that from? Both Intel and OCZ, probably the most popular makers of SSD's, use base-10 in their product advertising. HDD or SSD doesn't matter from a consumer perspective.

http://download.intel.com/design/flash/nand/mainstream/32229...

http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/solid_state_drives/ocz...
Interesting you mentioned Hong Kong, while I agree with you in general, I think Hong Kong is actually the exception to the rule.

The First Opium War directly contributed to the destabilization of the Qing government that led to the cascade of power vacuums for the next hundred years. Before the war, China, while stagnant, was quite stable and was one of the wealthiest nations in the world.
So, since HD manufacturers use inflated numbers the solution is for everyone else to change?

Does this mean we're going to stop using base 2 for things like network speeds as well? What will users think when they have lets say a photo management program, that says that their library is 495 GB (base 2) and then they try to transfer that over to a disk that has 500 gb (base 10) available, only to find 495 doesn't fit in 500. That's going to be pretty confusing.

The fact is the ONLY place I've ever seen base 10 numbers for storage has been on storage media to fool people about filesize. The programs users use have standardized on base 2, and this is just going to be confusing.
The pragmatic solution, yes. Idealistically, it might feel wrong, but idealism has never made for a better UX.
Given the last word in your sentence, I assume you didn't know about this "surface" for D&D:

http://blogs.msdn.com/surface/archive/2009/12/16/new-gamepla...

Of course, $499 versus $15k is a big difference, but this shows some of the potential of a larger touch interface here.
http://www.sproutbox.com/ is missing.
Do these meters use WiFi?
http://www.betaspring.com/ is missing.
I'm not sure this would scale to an iPad-sized surface. I also kinda like the free style GameTable allows you -- the Surface example (though very cool!) seems to take some control of the game out of you.

A D&D tool could be very nice -- just allow a DM to quickly sketch an area, add some characters and allow the players to interact. I think the killer feature would be playback of the battle/whatever, just keeping the history of where everybody moves.
It was if you liked using GDB to start your mail reader.
http://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/two-one-joke-ponies
Plinkplonk. you already have solid facts and a good position. Outrage and anger detract from the discussion.
>It is when you're being yelled at in the product returns line.

So this person is yelling about something they know nothing about? I'm sorry, but that sounds like a sever case of "stupid" to me.

>http://www.makemylogobiggercream.com/

Funny video!
Most of User Experience design is making changes that make stupid people less angry :)
Web Security Overdone?
If these things became cheap enough that everyone had one, each player could have a networked interface that had the game table in one panel/tab, the rules in another and their stats in a third. It'd almost be like an MMO UI, but operated manually.

Additionally, everyone could have a different view—the DM could be looking down a corridor that is "fog of war"-ed for the PCs. On the other hand, if everyone had a unified interface, all the iPads could be layed out together on the table to make one big surface, where scrolling one scrolled the others as well.
Jobs said there was no business case for an apple netbook, because they're too cheap for Apple-sized margins.

Though Sony's vaio is still surviving at a much higher price-point. The latest model has has 3G.
Yes, the lack of the class abstraction does add complexity to your code. That's why frameworks like this exist.
If you haven't read it yet, Piers Brendon's "The Decline and Fall of the British Empire" might be interesting for you.
Does Node.js really qualify as a web framework? Sure it comes with an HTTP lib, but it's really more 'JavaScript liberated from the browser and a CommonJS stdlib to boot'.

Very useful for writing web frameworks, sure - but not a web framework in itself.
I think Joose is a more featureful variant of this idea:

http://code.google.com/p/joose-js/
Snow Leopard uses base-10 units in some places, base-2 units in other places.

It isn't really confusing because when I go check how much free space I have on my hard-drive I'm just looking for a rough value, it can be base-10, base-2 or just "lots", "enough" or "almost out". The same happens to files and directories, I just want to know if they are "huge", "big" or "reasonable".

The problem is that the "old way" of reporting units in base-2 served the same purpose in exactly the same way. But this gratuitous change brings an heterogenous environment that causes problems when I want do do scripts or somesuch technical stuff where the exact amounts _do_ matter, and now have to worry in which base they are (and often this isn't obvious).

Consistency was dropped for nothing.

As for Ubuntu, I think this is a "me too" move that serves no purpose. But hey, I don't use Ubuntu, so I couldn't care less.
Got ya.
6 of the 10 reasons are variants of "puppet has more adoption." I got that after the first couple, thanks!
Writing, music, film. Mostly non-technical (in the traditional sense) creative endeavors.
How will this affect upstream compatibility with Debian?
The Long View...
Trying to Tame the Unknowable
I actually don't find this pragmatic at all. The current scenario is that storage numbers are consistent in software (base 2) and consistent in hardware (base 10).

The end result of this is that storage numbers will be inconsistent in software, and consistent in hardware. How is that an improvement?
I honestly didnt know Puppet had such widespread adoption. The tech buzz always seems to favor Chef which is why I have more exposure to it.

Puppet does seem to have much much better docs on their homepage. However Chef is way more reusable. The chef recipe system is very powerful, and the fact that it uses ruby means its much more reusable using standard ruby practices (inheritance, modules, etc).

Sometimes its much better to be a newer technology as you can really solve some of the core issues of the preceding technology.
Ask accounts to print out a copy of last month's statements so you can 'double check the billings'. It will waste a couple of reams but you'll get your clips by Monday.
Nearly half of disposable containers used for food in China can cause cancer
I don't know where you're getting the "consistent in software" bit. OSX already switched to base 10 seven months ago with 10.6—this is, like with the window caption buttons thing, probably where Ubuntu got the idea. Now the only one doing it differently (that non-technical users are aware of) is Windows—and I'm guessing they'll be right along in W8.
Looks pretty cool. Gratz man.
This is exactly the app that I first though of when the iPad was announced. Nice job for putting this together.

Here's what I would love to see in a version 2:

- Allow people to upload their own boards & pieces to some site. Or better yet, create a standard file format so anyone can host their own at any URL. This would allow all sorts of board games to be played without having to buy the often expensive sets of cardboard chips (fellow German boardgamers out there, you know what I'm talking about).

- Allow people to play games over the internet and save the games for later
Bummer, dude. Totally.
> Thanks to the early tablet rumors, we got a huge jump on the development on Game Table. Game Table will be available on the iTunes App Store for an introductory price of 99 cents when the Apple iPad is released on April 3rd.

Ouch. I know some developers who are going to be unhappy with this... There's been some discussion about avoiding the "race to the bottom" that occurred with the iPhone/iPod touch and this zero-day $0.99 pricing is going to help ruin that.

That said, I was toying around with making something similar. It's even suggested as a use case in Apple's documentation for iPad developers. (Not an NDA thing anymore, it seems.) A table of pieces with no rules logic, but something more open ended. Looks like no point in supporting standard playing cards as part of it, since this app likely has that part covered.

EDIT: Just noticed eob's comment; custom pieces were what I was shooting for (sort of like a card equivalent to MotionX's former Dice Plus app), though with a more practical bent.
That doesn't make any sense. You need to be using imperial volumes.

1 tablespoonbyte is approximately 36 bits (I just counted, with couscous, the universal measure), which makes a pintbyte is 1152 bytes- about a kilobyte, but also the number of pixels across on my screen.

It also gives us a gallonbyte - just shy of 10 kilobytes at 9216 bytes. That's even more convenient, because it's square root is 96.

Of course, having a hogsheadbyte at 442368- well, I think even you will find it difficult to argue the usefulness of finally being able to use a multiple of 442368.

Finally, we've got the tunbyte: 2322432. Nobody will ever need more than about 28% of a tunbyte of memory, so you see it scales out at just the most convenient point for us here.
Most ARM's will be significantly slower on non-aligned data.

Un^H^Hfortunately I'm not at work to test. :)
Originally you could only do this with Java Applets. Then Flash 10 made it possible too. And now JS. This will be awesome for audio synthesis. I actually have it on my todo list to convert this to Flash: http://chir.ag/493/water/ - Now I think I'll do it in JS too.
The topic poster makes it pretty sure that he is NOT the author/editor. So stop posting missing info! If you think data should be added, e-mail jed.christiansen@gmail.com
Sony accuses Beyonce of piracy for putting her videos on YouTube
These articles are just link-bait with no content. The 'NoSQL' buzzword is as distasteful to me as, say, 'cloud', but that doesn't mean that articles discussing them don't have value.

The flurry of 'NoSQL' articles often cover the different approaches to data stores, their implementation, their interfaces, their management, performance, scalability, etc. That interests me, but doesn't mean I'm going to go to work on Monday and kill all the non-NoSQL dbs we have running.

Hate-against-hype articles are waaaaay overrated.
Luke got a good amount of adoption early on. Chef actually only started as a response to Puppet about two years ago when Opscode's original company, HJK Solutions decided they didn't want to have to pay for Puppet support.

The main advantage to opscode I see is that Chef does a better job of marketing and hype generation.
I have emailed the author pointing him to this thread for corrections.
Clojure, Chinese, and emotional regulation in stressful contexts.
You know that you can use SQL with Django, if you have an insanely convoluted join.
MongoDB is extremely well-suited to this sort of thing. In-place increments/decrements are particularly easy to do.
Minority report?
Horribly bad article. Completely fails to note that this year, just like last year, nobody even attempted to hack Chrome. Where they too scared to try? Hardly. More like, they weren't going to waste their time on a browser with the smallest market share.

The headline might as well have been "Links leaves another hackathon unscathed." It's just as accurate.

What about Flock? Camino? Opera?
I wonder how long will it take for the simple "if you need ACID, go SQL, if you don't, you'll be fine with NoSQL" truth to sink in.

NoSQL databases have been in use since before I was born. Is anybody doing airline reservations on DB2?
I think I felt an optical illusion in the E8-inspired graph.
Interesting. I got almost that many from Arq being on the HN front page the other day!

But maybe that's because many HN readers are in the target market (online backup to S3 for the Mac).
you could, but then you would be needlessly breaking the regularity of the language. the whole point of lisp is to make stuff super ultra regular so that it is really really easy to manipulate unambiguously.
lyrics: http://lyrics.wikia.com/The_Hot_Toddies:HTML
> but I will retort that RDBMS are overused as well.

Oh boy... How many times I had to explain my clients their sites would be just fine using ZODB instead of MySQL...

Never thought it that way. Hey! I am using NoSQL databases since 2001!

Actually, I wrote a lot of Dataflex 2 code, so make it 1987 or so.
How do you write this graf:

But given Google's high profile and the fact that the Pwn2Own competitors failed to hack Chrome two years running, we imagine that Chrome has to be gaining a sort of "sword-in-the-stone"-type reputation among security researchers.

almost immediately after writing this one?

Naysayers will also point out that Google patched 11 flaws in its browser just before the competition began. But Apple patched 19 bugs in Safari the same week, and that didn't prevent Apple hacker Charlie Miller from doing evil things to it for the third year in a row.
Free Book for Learning Smalltalk
How about the massive downside of their existing outside the main GOOG infrastructure? Why is there not feature parity between my free Google account and the Apps for Domain that I pay for? RIDDLE ME THIS, GOOGLE!
Analyzing ACTA: The Copyright Tail Wagging the Internet Dog
Also, would be interested to hear if/how you prepared for the traffic level, and whether or not those preparations worked. (i.e. Did Lifehacker users visit more than just your homepage? How much did you cache?, etc)
Obama issues 15 recess appointments
Why pot growers favor pot prohibition
I'm learning Erlang/OTP, Mnesia and Nitrogen in the course of building a DNS service.
Chess and checker type board games I can see, but I'm not sure about card games. It would seem really hard to play and be able to see your hand without letting others see it and see the board if everyone has their hands on the pad. I'm interested in seeing how practical that is.
Those are amazing numbers. What kind of post was it? Was it featured with a large image, or the small thumbnail? Mine was a small thumbnail and was pushed quite a few down the list quickly.

Of my 3,500 visits the first day I converted over 20% though, so I can't complain!
On your own? MSA or a dialect? classical or modern training?

Feel free to ask me anything if you get stuck.
Doing some numbers:

When you add the acquisitions together you get $56 mill. Assuming that YC has an average stake of 7% they've made $3.9 mill from the acquisitions so far.

If you assume the expenditures to be $10.000 per startup that's $1.74 mill, since there are 174 companies in the spreadsheet. Also, since the YC guys need to get paid there's probably an overhead of $500.000 a year for five years. That's $2.5 mill. Adding the two numbers give you $4.24. mill.

So if you include a nice wage for the four YC founders they're not making a profit yet, actually they're down $340.000. Of course these numbers are wildly inaccurate, and don't include future acquisitions, etc.
Some reports suggest that Apple is having trouble sourcing touch panels.

http://www.macrumors.com/2010/03/26/apples-ipad-touch-panel-...
I forgot what we are arguing about. I suspect it is a variation of "anybody who enjoys using Linux is a nerd, therefore by definition Linux can never be usable for non-nerds".
so if I proclaim that you don't exist in my universe, then you will magically disappear and it will count as proof?

there's enough room in the world for people to like ANYTHING. Just because a minority likes something (say, eating human flesh?) it doesn't justify it as 'right', 'good' or even 'common'....
I would check out both Zazzle and Spreadshirt. We just got out shirts from Zazzle for SXSW and the quality is really good!
I'm 24 and don't have a driver's license. I have no need for one. (I live in Chicago. Fine public transit, good roads for cycling.)

I am planning on getting a pilot's license this summer, however. Unlike driving, flying is actually fun.
Wasn't this from about a year ago?
That's an amazing ratio, what do you count as conversion?
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner!

If you start using the filesystem as a datastore that requires concurrent access you open up a whole new can of worms. You need a locking mechanism - which you'll probably implement using (wrapped) native syscalls. Not only does that break cross-platform operation, you'll also have to work on and fix (but find first, of course) bugs in the locking implementation. As you spend more and more time on this and your app starts growing, you'll find yourself spending more and more time working with the limitations of the filesystem you're using (file size limits, directory size limits, access times for files in large directories). You can hack your way around all that but then you have to face other critical tasks. Say .. backup and restore procedures. Can you do partial backup/restore operations? No? Well, get ready to write code for that too. And you preferably want to be able to do those live. Remember those locking issues you solved when you started down this road to hell? Yeah, they're back with a vengeance now.

How about a full restore? Maybe you should have implemented a replay-able log system to get that full restore up to speed with the state of the db since the time of the last backup.

Or maybe this isn't exactly the right point at which to re-invent the wheel :)