skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How is the iPad any more "oppressive" to developers than the iPhone?
What rapid spread? There were far more platforms before, with far more significant differences.

In the late '80s, a popular game was commonly ported to half a dozen platforms: Amiga, Atari ST, Apple II, Commodore 64, PC+EGA, PC+VGA -- sometimes even Sinclair and MSX. Even the hardware was usually completely different between systems, e.g. the powerful custom graphics and audio chips on the Amiga.

In the '90s, a cross-platform desktop application like Netscape would have to run on a range of very different systems: Windows 3.1 (16-bit), Windows 95 (32-bit with new UI), Windows NT (32-bit with old UI), Mac OS 7 (32-bit with no memory protection), Solaris, Linux, AIX, HP/UX...

In comparison, Windows 7, Mac OS X and modern Linux are basically the same. It's easy to write cross-platform C applications using mostly UNIX APIs and deploy them on Windows using MinGW and a couple of lightweight libraries like pthread-win32. For cross-platform GUI applications, the Qt framework is available pretty much everywhere, even phones.

This is pretty amazing. Essentially everything has become "UNIX-like" nowadays -- even the smartphone stalwart Symbian has given up trying to pretend it's something else.
Excuse me?

The iPhone 3GS without contract starts at $499 today, almost 1 year after its release. The nexus was introduced at $529. A HTC Hero starts at around $345.

Wanna bet what the difference between the 3GS and nexus looks like in a year from now?

If you start looking into older models (G1 vs older generation iPhone) the difference becomes more dramatic, that's where I pulled the $99 figure from. You can already grab a G1 for around $100 on eBay. It won't be long before the new (and more worthwhile) low-end models enter that price-range.

That's when the trouble for apple starts. A G1 is obviously no competition for an iPhone of any generation, no matter the price-point. A droid or nexus in the sub-$200 range? Now that's a different story.

And yes, you can buy all phones with a 2 year contract to stretch out the cost. But that doesn't change the price difference and much less the trend that android handsets are racing for the bottom whereas the iPhone is (so far) firmly set in the premium segment.
It's very handy. Sometimes you want to have Safari start loading a slow-to-load page, put it in the background and do something else. Pandora radio is another oft cited example.
iPad jailbreak after less than 24 hours
I saw a note in the bottle docs that it's easy to set up with GAE but no further info. Any tutorials out there?
Best thing about those excuses are:

Every other mobile OS supports multitasking and all the smartphones i know have similar battery life.
Symbian, Windows, Android, all have multitasking and yet people try to convince me that it, "not needed", "not possible", "makes the device unstable", "drains battery too much" which is just not true.
My Android phone lasts at least as long as an iphone and i use multitasking all the day.
It's just that the OS was truly made for this and it does it quite well.
FTA:

Congress needs to recognize that “regulatory capture,” in
which an agency becomes a pawn of the industry it is
supposed to oversee, is real.*

I'm sure Congress does recognize that. Congress-critters experience "regulatory capture" on a regular basis as a personally enriching development.
Pachelbel's Music Box Canon
I still find it amazing that this patent holds water. It's so vague, they can apply their flow charts and finger operations to any and all multi-finger interaction with a surface. The finger detection method I know I've seen in other uses, and quite frankly if given a pressure-sensitive touchscreen it would've been the first thing I did with it.

If it's something stupendously obvious and vague, isn't it inherently unpatentable? If it weren't, we'd have a rush to patent "using a round object with an axle to move other objects more efficiently" and "causing an object to traverse a distance through the air by imparting kinetic energy".
yeah, all the pawns in Congress know exactly how they're pwned and by whom and whose asses they must kiss
There is more to this than what meets the eye. First most of these bureaucrats are underpaid by the government. They can hardly make ends meet, especially so when they have to feed a family of five or six and educate their children. Schools, colleges aren't cheap anymore in India. If you need good education you got to pay up large amounts of money. The government doesn't have any good investment plans for their employees to save for these things.

Traditionally, although this is changing with the current generation, it is only the male that works in the family. In terms of economics this just doesn't work for a family anymore in the cities.

It is extremely unlikely that these people can work a second job. In some cases the government itself has laws that would prevent them from doing so.

I am not trying to defend bribery. Fixing it is not going to be as easy as hanging bureaucrats. If that were the case most elected representatives wouldn't be alive. There is no easy solution. What the article describes is good for the newspaper but not a viable solution to the problem which ingrained very deeply in the society.
I saw it coming too. (But I only put my money in a shorting mutual fund. Didn't have the great vision, this guy did. Still, I avoided the losses most experienced.)

If I could see it, anyone could have. I'm not particularly smart or well-connected.
Natural sorting
I asked him why he only read non-fiction, and he suggested that fiction was a waste of his time — he read to learn, not for “mere” entertainment

This theory is one I always find so frustrating. It's amazing the amount of information you can pick up from a good fiction book - and I have no specific data to prove this but I believe it is easier to retain such information.

Obviously fiction does include made up stuff; but some of the best fiction is actually well researched. Some examples:

- Dan Brown novels are full of real history, geography and so forth.

- Swiss Family Robinson has lots of natural history (one of my favourite books actually)

- Tom Clancy novels will teach you an awful lot about the military and military hardware etc.

It might not be specialist information, but it's amazing what you can learn from fiction :) Avoiding fiction because you can't learn anything from it is, well, a bit short sighted.
This is correct. The XNA framework for indie XBox 360 game development has serious technical limitations that set it apart from the "professional" development kit (which I am not able to obtain the price for, as I am not already an established game production company).

Being forced to write in managed code on top of a library of entirely managed code with an uncontrollable garbage collector is one technical issue off the top of my head.
You argument is going to be you don't read, as well as you don't listen?
Yeah, that is wrong. The distinction is that damages are often a pittance unless the copyright is registered.
9 microsecond shot of an egg shot with an air rifle.
Amazing user guide for the amazing revolutionary incredible ipad
I'm not sure you've heard about Symbian, it's only 47% of the smartphone market [1]. You can develop apps for Symbian and install them on your device very easily. Unless you are doing anything hardcore they can even be self-signed (since Symbian OS 9.1 released in 2005 apps have to be signed to be installed) as long as they don't need any hardcore capabilities.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone
Good point.

I'm actually reading Count of Monte Cristo right now. (I would not recommend.) I think putting the French Revolution into context as the setting for a novel made me understand it more than I could otherwise.
INCREDIBLE IPAD DAY 2
In other news, the sun rose today.

This is an anecdotal article telling no one anything new, nor is it conveying an opinion or any sort of knowledge you wouldn't expect most HN-ers to know.

For some actually interesting reads:
http://cpirf.org/stories/352 [from 1997]

http://iospress.metapress.com/content/6c5glqvnjgmc5194/ [only if you have a subscription or your school does... but interesting nonetheless]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity

The list goes on.
Tropo also supports speech recognition (in 8 languages, even), SMS to international destinations, IM, Twitter, and does it all with a single API. No messing around with one API for voice and another for SMS. Write once, run anywhere.
Hackers Gained Full Root Code Execution of INCREDIBLE iPad
The article reiterates the authors' position that "products having no economic purpose except to achieve questionable accounting, tax or regulatory goals; or that raise serious concerns that customers will use them to issue materially misleading financial statements ... should, at a minimum, be labeled presumptively prohibited."

Instead, I think the solution to the problem is to stop relying on financial accounting and instead disclose the actual transaction terms on a disaggregated basis. Accounting principles require the use of judgements by people (accountants, regulators, bankers, controllers) whose judgements have proven to be unreliable at best. The filters that these parties represent should should be removed and we should be allowed sufficient information to make our own judgements.

By disclosing the actual details of a complex transaction on a timely basis, truly independent outsiders would be able to judge and report on the aggregate book, built from a line-by-line analysis. I like call this Real Transparency.

This analysis has become technically feasible in recent years, thanks to faster CPUs, and the cost of distributing this information has dropped dramatically, thanks to cheaper storage and faster networks. Mandating this type of disclosure would be one of the really useful things the government could do. The current proposed reforms simply give more power to the regulators who permitted Enron, Madoff and Lehman.

Complexity is not the real enemy of truth. It is people gaming a system with built-in opacity. Increase the transparency and there won't be any games left to play.
I just read this essay - it is focused on personal attacks and smears, not on an honest evaluation of Objectivist ideas.

Think about what these kinds of critics are saying, in essence: "If you read books containing these ideas, you will be reduced to some sort of miserable caricature."

To anyone that worries about this, I ask: do you think so little of yourself that you think that reading a few books is going to turn you into some kind of nutter? That your own reason and judgement is that powerless?
would anyone care to predict what the memory specs of an iphone-like will be in 5 years?
Seems to be a play on the fact that the article basically goes on to explain that these numbers have no basis in reality.
Thoughts on the AMAZING AWESOME iPad
Increased shelf life doesn't just provide a cost saving for the manufacturer. It's a direct benefit to the end purchaser. People like that they can buy food in bulk and have it stay good for a long time.
Somebody's First impressions of the REVOLUTIONARY^3 Apple  iPad
RF Culbertson just rapped about being fearless...wow RF is the man
The fact that no one went to jail or even got fired for total malfeasance suggests that both regulation and internal oversight are grossly inadequate.

Face it, the tag team of government + corporation is going to keep robbing us, until we do something about it (move money out of US, work in shadow market, vote out incumbants, etc)
I'm interested by the gender split. The man reads only non-fiction, and the woman reads only fiction; the same is true for my parents. My dad doesn't read fiction because he thinks its useless, but rather because he just doesn't enjoy it very much.

Have others found this to be the case as well?
The evidence is that they made a one-way bet with an insurance company, rather than a hedge with a derivatives trader. That's like buying fire insurance for a smoking building that somebody else owns.

They knew anybody with a few $100k could buy a AAA rating -- they were buying them themselves.
Both parents and my 2 brothers read fiction. I have not noticed that women enjoy fiction more.
Good analogy - I wouldn't buy a dishwasher from Sears if it meant that I had to buy all my futures dishes, glasses, and silverware from Sears too. (App Store)
I wouldn't buy it if I had to have a special Sears approved connecting pipe to hook it into my existing plumbing. (Dock connector)
And I wouldn't buy it if I had to bring it back to Sears whenever I ran out of soap. (Battery)
I would be more than happy with no multitasking at all with one exception: sms.

And I'm pretty sure that if I include another two apps (safari and mail) on my exception list most people would be okay without multitasking.

I don't need a window manager, I need to focus on the app I'm using and the ability to reply (or send) sms and mails and check something on the web without quitting the current app.
You're betting on a wholesale restructuring of American phone pricing. As of today, phones are purchased with contract, and iPhones are being sold at the same price as Android phones. Unlocked iPhones are being sold at the same price as unlocked Android phones.

Thus far, Apple has shown a willingness to go for a volume pricing strategy- they aren't making the same pricing mistake twice. They're playing to win.
It sure was a good thing I read this article telling me about how that fact I never knew has no basis in reality.
If this article piqued your interest, please PLEASE read The Big Short by Michael Lewis, in which he tells the entire, fascinating story of Michael Burry, the one-eyed genius with Asburger's who fought against the entire Wall Street establishment.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0393072231
I wonder if some of this confusion has to do with the way you count words; do you count duplicates or don't you?

One of the studies cited found that men and women talk about the same amount (it was a review, and some of the papers in review found that men talked more.)

However, it's fairly established that women tend to have bigger vocabularies than men; they do better on the verbal portions of the SATs and GREs, for instance.

It's possible that men talk the same amount but are more likely to duplicate words and therefore use fewer words in a day.
This post is interesting because it made me discover pandalous (which sounds awesome) moreso than I want to be well-read.
"Mr. Greenspan said that he sat through innumerable meetings at the Fed with crack economists, and not one of them warned of the problems that were to come. By Mr. Greenspan’s logic, anyone who might have foreseen the housing bubble would have been invited into the ivory tower, so if all those who were there did not hear it, then no one could have said it.

As a nation, we cannot afford to live with Mr. Greenspan’s way of thinking. The truth is, he should have seen what was coming and offered a sober, apolitical warning. Everyone would have listened; when he talked about the economy, the world hung on every single word."

Instead of expecting Greenspan to see exactly what Burry saw, wouldn't it be better if we didn't have a single point of failure? In the absence of Wall Street's reliance on the Fed, Burry's insurance plays could have further pushed up prices and signaled to everyone else that something was wrong.
This is exactly the same experience I had while getting a driver's license in 2 places - Chennai and Hyderabad. I remember thinking how much of a joke it was.
Audit the fed: http://www.auditthefed.com/

Whereas: Congress, the Federal Reserve, and the U.S. Treasury have put the American taxpayer on the hook for over $12 trillion in bailouts and loans; and

Whereas: Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke recently refused to tell Congress who has received trillions in these funds from the Federal Reserve; and

Whereas: Allowing the Fed to operate our nation's monetary system in almost complete secrecy leads to abuse, inflation, and a lower quality of life for every American
If I leave an app running in the background that keeps the net connection open on my Nexus One, the battery goes from 100 to 0 in about 5 hours.
I think the truth is far more terrifying than the article implies. I think mostly, people don't communicate with each other at all, regardless of sex. In relationships especially, it seems people often come to take each other for granted.
Sure, but under what license is it made available. If I find some source code floating around on the internet while looking for the solution to some problem I'm having, knowing what license it's under is kind of important.
The irony is this script would hide this post.
The problem is, there are always a lot of people seeing a crash coming. The difficult part is telling if they are right or just being crackpots.
Previously featured on ycombinator, with a link to an excerpt about Michael Burry from The Big Short.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1160552
Check out "Peter Schiff was right" video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I0QN-FYkpw

Now, talk about "nobody could have predicted this" (c) Obama
Of course there is the official Apple solution.

http://technologyexpert.blogspot.com/2010/03/wozniak-carries...
How to Make a Bulletproof T-shirt
Thanks, I appreciate it. First post for me after being a longtime reader so it's nice to know it was helpful to some.
Behold OSX on iPad With Flash
I suppose you're being voted down because a lot of people don't like Atlas Shrugged. Personally, I think it's fair to say that if your aim is to be well-read, you should probably pick up Ayn Rand at some point just because her novels are likely to be common ground with other folks you're dealing with.

That said, the actual quality of writing in Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead is frankly god-awful. If you're making a canon full of books that exemplify the craft of written storytelling, Atlas Shrugged would be sitting somewhere behind the Twilight novels.
Am sad to have seen this fulfilled.

Original headline was "Facebook does evil to innocent data compiler".
"In the physical world, you never flick a real switch on a panel and then it actually moves a second or two later!"

I know some old lights which do that.
Related:
http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2010/04/wall-str...
I debated not even reading HN for the next week, because I actually had a dream about an iPad last night. Apple, that's just crossing the line :)
The only time Greenspan could have meaningfully intervened was back in 2002 or earlier, and even then intervention would have caused enough pain to have the media deem it a "crisis" in itself.

Notably he did speak up about Fannie and Freddie in the early 2000s but was silenced by the GOP's drive to make war -- nobody wanted the economy cooled at all when gas prices were already creeping up.

So what's the man to do now? He could admit all that about the war and cast serious doubt on the Fed's independence and the US financial system, or he could insist that the boom/bust was a complete and total mystery.

In his last book he goes to great pains to marvel at seemingly impossible "risk adjusted rates of return" throughout a variety of markets, but concludes that in the case of housing it's still "froth" and not a bubble. Since the bubble hadn't become obvious at the time of the book's publication, what else would he say?

But more practically, we should all realize that if housing prices had dipped about 1-2% less than they did, most of the damage would not have occurred. Our institutions (banks, etc.) were calibrated to handle some amount of systemic risk, but not as much as it turned out they should have.

Hindsight is 20/20 and Burry may have been extra prescient, but like any bettor he could have been wrong. Since he had no additional information than the rest of the market, we can conclude that the rest were all sheep (or idiots) or that there was actually some -- gasp -- chance going on.

The difference is that the majority of people, institutions, etc., misjudged just how much calamity would be caused by price deviations that they calculated to be highly improbable.
I don't know. I'm reading The E-myth Revisited at the moment, and it claims that salespeople sell 10-15% more when they're dressed in blue than when they're dressed in brown. The OP seems to assume that most purchasing decisions are based on rational assessments of experience with the products under consideration, but results like the blue/brown experiment suggest that there is a lot more going on, and seemingly irrational factors can have a huge impact on customer decisions. If that's the case, the "froofy" aspects of design rejected by the OP can have a significant business impact and should not be ignored.

But it does make sense to subject those aspects to rigorous testing rather than just spend weeks talking about them, as described in the OP.
Is Symbian to Nokia what XNA is to the X360?
There's an old saying: Academic economists have successfully predicted nine of the last five major recessions.

That is: One possible answer to the question in the title is: "Because actually the available information didn't make it clear what would happen and when; you thought it did, but actually you just got lucky."

Whether that's actually the case here is of course difficult to tell. On the one hand, hindsight bias (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias) makes it likely that it won't feel like it is, even if it is. On the other hand, uh, it does indeed feel like the crisis was pretty predictable. (But I bet that most people who are now saying "well, that was hardly surprising" failed, just as FWIW I failed, to short the market heavily or anything. Not-being-surprised is cheap.)
Saving the state of an application and terminating it isn't multitasking... you can already do that on the iPhone, and indeed well written iPhone apps will be restored to exactly the state you left them.

I care about multitasking for things which actually need to do stuff in the background, like Pandora or IM clients.
I agree with what you're trying to say, but your example of Dan Brown bothers the hell out of me. Partially because he's a hack writer, but mostly because his books are full of bullshit.
"Everybody missed it. Academia, the Federal Reserve, all regulators." - Alan Greenspan

That is complete bullshit. Try telling that to Paulson, who made billions on the crash. I saw the signs myself, but did not understand them, not believing that people like Greenspan would allow something so stupid to take place. When studies show that Americans trust their government less than ever, mark me down as a statistic.

When a bank official told me that "jobless, bankrupt, illegal immigrant, it doesn't matter," they can get somone a home loan, I should have known what that meant, and so should the Fed.

Greenspan should just shut up and accept his legacy.
I agree with this. Every time I finish a classic I feel like I've just been amazingly enlightened, and I find myself recommending the book to my friends non stop for a few months. The problem is I don't give myself time to read them very often if ever.
Can you write a more general version that excludes ALL relevant and topical submissions?
How often does that happen really? I can't recall the last time I saw source code where you couldn't tell:

1. What license it's released under.
2. Who you can contact to get permission to use it.

If there's really no way to tell who the author is or what license it's under, then I'd say not to use it. It's probably better in the long run that way anyhow.
Reducing the dimensions of integrated circuits is a relatively straight-forward extension of a 50 year-old technology. It doesn't mean that the underlying science is advancing at an exponential rate.
Electric cars give power back to grid
Batteries (erm, cells) have a fundamental internal resistance... so no.