skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you are absolutely right. The success of the ipod is all about very clever advertising. At the time that it came out, there were dozens of other mp3 players that were cheaper and just as good (there still are dozens of mp3 players that are cheaper and just as good).

But somehow apple turned the ipod into something that wasn't an mp3 player and was an ipod.

And Apple is really good at marketing and also making their products pretty (so that they can be marketed).

Sansa or Creative, for example, don't seem to spend anywhere near the marketing money on their products as apple does, and it seems to show. (iPod is a household name, no one knows what I'm talking about when I talk about my SanDisk).
(I'm sure iTunes had something to do with it too...)

I think that too often we want to attribute the success of a product to rational causes such as technological superiority or 'innovation'...

But really, I think there is a lot more that needs to be said about clever manipulation of your consumer's thoughts/desires.

I also don't get why you are getting downvoted. Disagreement by downvote is not cool. Disagree by disagreeing, downvote when someone is being an idiot.
> That WIRED article gave us 10 - 25 years. The Seed article gives us 10 - 15 from today.

Unless I'm missing something, those estimates are consistent, both ending in 2025.
Its important to consider not only how many people follow a certain person but also how much sway he has with each his followers. In Twitter's environment to measure this one can look at how often his messages get re-twitted, in Facebook its how many replies or likes he usually gets.
If someone knew the answer to this question, the movie industry wouldn't be driving itself out of business.
JavaScript Style
You mean like http://tilestack.com/?
> the buttons are on the left

I am saddened by this. Ubuntu announces Maverick, and the highest-rated comment about Maverick on HN by a wide margin is a rehash of arguments about Lucid.
Is Apple already shipping iPads? I've seen a lot of people on Twitter talking about apps, and I have no idea how they're using them.
I like it, its simple, easy to use nice concept.

My only other comment would be, the nice thing about a list - is I can see all of the things I've put on it, its an organized way of knowing I've spelled everything out. What if I forgot a task I wanted to do with this format (that I thought I had entered)? There'd be no way to know.

The biggest problem for me, would be motivating myself to use the app consistently, even though I do certainly like it.
Because it will be better than them.
There's no real reason to correct itself until there's actual money to be made.
Do you receive small pieces of mail?

Personally, all my bills come online. If I lose my credit card, I get it via FedEx or UPS. When I order some physical goods, it's a package (so "small piece" is not relevant).

Basically, there is not much value is sending small pieces of mail anymore. I just want to order stuff from Amazon on Friday and have it on Sunday :)
Twice when I was growing up, my dad changed jobs to a new one that was an hour and a half away. He sustained that commute exactly as long as it took us to find a new house closer to work. He hated it. It took a huge toll on him, and I didn't get to see him nearly as much. I promised myself I would never have a job that has a commute like that. Today, mine is about 30 minutes, with very little traffic and some nice scenery (to downtown San Diego). I don't feel like I'm losing a significant part of my life, which is the important part to me.

Later on, he took a pretty big pay cut to get out of his industry altogether (automotive service) to take a job in-town, with a 5-minute commute, doing something he loved (food). Quality of life is important. He still made enough to support our family, and he was around more and much happier. Being able to bike to your dad's work and have lunch with him on the weekend is more important than a bigger house and some spare spending money.
If you want to see the Beethoven Hypercard thing mentioned in the article, there are some "action shots" in Douglas Adams and Tom Bakers' "Hyperland" video, about 18 minutes in. The whole video is really good, though - you should watch it if you have the time. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7190175107515525470&...
Although he doesn't say it, I assume he has suppressed warnings about plain uninitialized memory reads since his system will generate spurious warnings even for safe, constant-time comparisons.

The thing the author probably doesn't realize is that his approach only helps with the simplest of operations like his target compare loop. With an RSA implementation, all versions would be tagged as vulnerable.

This shows up at the end of his post where he flags BN_mod_exp_mont_consttime() as vulnerable. The reason this code is safer (not safe) against side-channel attacks is that it takes advantage of cache layout of x86 processors to ensure that indexed accesses do not reveal private information. His approach also won't be able to model more complex countermeasures such as blinding. It will always flag them as vulnerable.

I don't understand why this needs valgrind (dynamic analysis). You can do a fully static analysis by storing the address of your safe_compare() routine, then disassembling starting at that function until it returns. If you hit a branch instruction before, flag an error. This could be one of your pre-commit checks for the repo.

In other words, this is not useful for finding timing attacks, it's useful for detecting regression.
It just seemed so plausible!

In 9.04 every time there was a notification you had to wait for it to disappear before you could click on the buttons. In 9.10 they moved the notifications down a bit as a hack around that.

Now in 10.04 the notifications are where they were but they've introduced a social menu & moved the lock screen / switch user / shutdown menu to the top-right.

If they hadn't moved the buttons it would be very easy to accidentally close a window when you meant to use those new menus.
Uhhh, so how do I invest in Helium?
Banter - easily view conversations between users on Twitter
No, he identified that all RSA software implementations are potentially vulnerable to side channel attacks and you have to understand the microarchitectural details of your system to be more certain you aren't actually vulnerable.
I wish Apple would release a version of their Workgroup Manager, Remote Desktop, and Server Admin for the iPad. Add one the third part ssh clients, and the would make for a much nicer life,
I think my brain connected the wrong dots because I saw a blurb about the Rails 3.0 2nd beta being released today :)
To the all the people whining here and else where on the inter-webs:

Is the iPad special?

Heck yes it is. Show me a tablet computer other than the iPad that is as polished, has as much of a vibrant app store and does most of the things you'd expect from a freaking 10 inch small slate, I'll join you side.

Is the iPad revolutionary and magical?

Of course its all a joke -- never heard about marketing before?

Bonus:

""" The iPad isn't a computer. It has a cpu, but so does my toaster, it's a portable cableTV box. The point of a personal computer is that you are in charge, you create content, with an iPad you pay to download and watch other people's content. It's the difference between writing your own blog and reading the national enquirer """

The iPad is a 10 inch slate. Even if it had full blown OSX on it, I doubt it could be used for full blown "content creation." For light editing / writing work, there are apps on the app store to help you do that.

If the iPad were to be a bigger slate, thats something different. But, for a 10 inch tablet..c'mon.
Posted on April 1st, but he is, in fact, serious.
In defense of “how it looks”
This happens to me, too. I am sure I've lost important mail because it got mixed in with the crapmail. (OK, I probably don't get any important mail. But still, it worries me a little.)

I guess this isn't as bad as people that break into my building and shove their ads under my door. That really annoys me.
upvoted..
There are so many important things that dont work -

* out of the box webcam support,

* remote desktop to manage Windows Server machines,

* IPV6 support that doesnt slow down my browsing (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/lucid/+source/eglibc/+bug/...),

* something like Scrivener for linux and a bit more decent Office format support.

Along with decent H.264 support, the above are some of the things that I am willing to pay for - yet what Shuttleworth does with Ubuntu is left side buttons.
A Hypercard-like tool for Android that hides its ghastly Java underpinnings might be able to level the playing field more.
amusing that the title element is

<title>Kim Kardashian, Twitter: Why you should pay Kim Kardashian $10k for a Tweet | Media and Tech</title>
So you are backing up an accusation of future hypocrisy with your own metrics of what constitutes better? That just doesn't constitute a reason to accuse someone of hypocrisy that hasn't happened.
I have the same problem. I've noticed an alarming increase in the number of websites that implement their own textboxes / textareas in pure Javascript.

Guess what guys, I can't use your site in conkeror -- unmodified keys already do things. So I am using the competitor instead.
Requiem for the desktop
Maybe if this went through I could have home USPS delivery. The town I live in apparently adds enough new addresses to add two routes a year, but they can't hire that quickly. So half the residents have to use a PO Box for their address, and stuff shipped to their physical address gets returned.

Even one a day a week home delivery would be better for me. Stuff is rarely time sensitive, and we don't make it to the PO Box that often anyway.
It seems like the downsides of the "work computer" as he's characterizing it are the fact that it encourages multitasking behavior. On the other hand, with the iPad/iPhone/iTouch platform multitasking is severely restricted, applications appear full-screen and there's a small (time) penalty in switching from one application to another (it's not as easy as alt/cmd-tab).

It is ironically a good limitation for some situations. But, you can achieve the same thing by just doing one thing at a time. (And I think that's a lot better for a lot of work activities too.)
Thanks for trying it out!

I've only really shown it to friends and family so far, so I appreciate the feedback. Seeing all the todos you've entered so far does seem to be a common request. Of course everything with this app represents a line in the sand - once crossed, it becomes a regular (horribly underfeatured) todo app.

I've thought about making the list available, but in an intentionally inconvient format, such as comma separated and horizontally laid out, and on another page, so you will only consult it to remember what you've entered. It's all about keeping the constraints to steer you to interact with the app in a way that's actually productive.

Re: motivation, I agree. Hard to make any "productivity" tools sticky, unless they really do improve your life. I have a couple ideas though.
The quality of your wife is 40% who you are, 20% who you choose, and 80% how you conduct yourself during courtship and marriage. Overlap due to some correlations and the fact that it's easier to screw things up than get things right.

To pre-optimize a future wife, focus on being a man of character. Sacrifice for noble goals, exercise self-discipline, show love to family, especially your mother. To optimize an existing wife, continue to do those things, and also spend a lot of time together, be romantic, communicate honestly and frequently (pursue intimacy; resolve to hold no secrets), and ensure a good sex life for her--which for you means generosity and an eye toward emotion.
> There is nothing software-intensive about creating a book. The hard part is typing it in. (If you don't have a keyboard, that is.)

What about dictation?

"Even novelists, working in a form so very written, have needed to write by voice. Stendhal dictated “The Charterhouse of Parma” in seven weeks. An impoverished Dostoyevsky had just six weeks to deliver the manuscript of “The Gambler” or face complete ruin. He hired a stenographer, knocked the book out in four weeks, then married the girl."

From "How to Speak a Book",
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/07/books/review/Powers2.t.htm...

(I'm amazed by the accuracy of Dragon Dictation on the iPhone.)
the moment publishers allow Apple/Amazon to drop DRM on e-books is the day it'll happen.

Or so Steve Jobs would have us believe.
Ask HN: VC funding milestones - are they normal?
Hi - our company is in talks with a VC - we don't have a term sheet or anything, but they've mentioned milestones as part of what we could expect. I don't have details on it - but was wondering if that was normal or not?

thx.
I upvoted you but would also like to say that this comment is severely under-rated. It is very obvious to me that you know what you are talking about.
I totally agree, however it's get a bit tricky on the boundaries between an underscore and camelCased language. For example sending json between the client and server.

Should the json keys be camelCased or underscore_cased? It's a bit ambigious.
Google services on the iPad and tablet computers
"The quality of your wife is ... 20% who you choose"

doesn't make sense to me. Or does that imply that if you sacrifice for noble goals and be a man of character, you'll automatically meet a good quality wife?
> Not even close, and the imbalance between creators of content and consumers of content on the web is growing every day.

It used to be a pain to publish content on the web. Then came along Blogger. It used to be near impossible to share or embed a video in a webpage. Then came along Youtube (who solved the hard problem of converting uploaded video quickly to a shareable format - which turns out to be Flash video) It used to be unthinkable/difficult to broadcast little bits and share it with people you know or don't know (Facebook, Twitter).

I argue that we are all becoming content creators - the content isn't groundbreaking - it's just that some of us aren't reaching an audience because we're just saying "Hello, World".

And I think the network effects of Reddit/Slashdot/even News.YC allows some previously undiscovered voices to gain a bigger audience, albeit temporarily.

Also, the power of the Internet is in ability to connect. Niche sites (check out iboats.com formums). Witness savvy teenagers like Blair Fowler creating an audience in the hundreds of thousands on YouTube and (more importantly) generating thousands of comments on their videos (even the ones where they promote the product that they've been paid to do so).

And, if you doubt the power of discovery mixed with random luck:

http://twitter.com/lovelybutton

http://www.timesnews.net/article.php?id=9015331
It's surprisingly easy to opt out of a big portion of that spam.

-Stop credit card offers: https://www.optoutprescreen.com

-Stop supermarket coupon packages: Redplum (aka Valassis) by calling 888.241.6760

-Stop PennySaver: 1.714.996.8900, press 3, leave a voicemail message with your name & address, be sure to tell them you're trying to "stop".

Most of those coupon packages come from the same place. Hunt down the fine print phone number and you'll be off the list in no time.

I did this a few years ago and have been enjoying a relatively empty mailbox. I still get junk mail but very seldom.
I on the other side, have no real dev skills just started on Ruby, feel good with CSS, HTML etc. So I`m also curious how this is going to turnout.
You can argue that null references are problematic and I'll agree with you. But they're a part of Java (and a whole host of other languages, too) and that's not going to change anytime soon.

Saying that this is "a monstrosity" because nulls shouldn't exist in the first place is completely unhelpful. Whether we like them or not, we're going to be stuck with them for a long while, and attempts to make them less painful to deal with aren't a bad thing.
http://cdixon.org/2009/08/15/the-problem-with-tranched-vc-in...

Basically, it's "normal" but not really great for you.

More about downside protection for the VC, so they can cut their losses.

Also as you reach these milestones, your company should be worth more (since you created value), but by doing this the VC sets the price for the future milestone based investment tranches at the lowest price (zero milestones reached).
Checkout what RhoMobile is doing - basically a scaled-down version of Ruby and web server serving up content in native app container.

The drawbacks are that there is zero access to native UIKit controls (e.g. the flick, gravity feel)

http://rhomobile.com
The bottom of my shoe was facing them.
I don't see any gender differences in the OA that would be important. If a woman is willing to similarly watch for the best man and choose him when she meets him, she should use the same algorithm.
Clickable link: http://todoneapp.com/
Or you could open it up, replace the battery yourself, and void the (undoubtedly expired) warranty. There's nothing actually preventing that, legally or physically.
what if there was a live search to browse your incomplete to-dones, and also, you could set something on them to remind you about them (through email) in X number of days if they haven't been completed?
I was actually just thinking recently about eliminating unchecked null errors in my haXe code, went looking through the features and discussions, and came up with two "today" solutions and one "proposed for the future". In light of how little Java seems to be doing to eliminate those errors, maybe they will interest:

-Right now it's possible to use the haXe Enum to implement a form of "Maybe" type: calling some "get" function returns the Maybe, and then you do a switch statement on it. From there the compiler forces you to cover all cases.

Caveat: Enum is quite a slow feature.

-I can force the "get" function to pass in handling code for null and non-null cases as arguments.

Caveat: Requires the handlers to be full functions, not just expressions, which is bulky and inflexible. This should be doable in Java too, but without inference, you might have to fight the type system more to get it right.

-Macros are proposed: Then I can turn my "get" function into a "get" macro that forces me to always provide the null handler.

Caveat: It's a bit more involved than a Maybe type, which would do the compile checks automatically.

Overall, I'm really happy with where haXe is going. It's growing some really useful features while remaining a cross-target language. If macros get in(hotly anticipated, but probably not soon) it'll be a very exciting time for the language.
And they have started to reject cookie-cutter RSS apps, as well. By raising the bar of "quality", they will get more "quality" in the AppStore.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/07/apple-cookie-cutter-apps/
I must second this. I use Locale on my ADP1 (better known as the G1), and it's one of the most impressive things I've ever seen on a phone. I never have to worry again with my cell going off in class, as it knows when my classes are and when to turn the ringer off. This is the precise kind of thing that Apple disallows by restricting you to a set of whitelisted APIs which explicitly do not allow you to mess with system settings or run things in the background. The freedom of the Android market is one of the reasons that I find Android to be a better platform even in a strictly technical sense-- you can simply do more with it.
I suspect that the iPad will make major inroads into the market and thus be the most sensible platform for someone interested in protecting digital consumer rights to be on, so that they can effectively lobby it.

There are a lot of tablets on the market. For most of them, take the total sales of any 3 and it won't even equal the pre-order volume of the iPad. I do not think I am making any overly ambitious or unusual claims when I say that the iPad will make a fairly big dent in the tablet market for at least a year or two.
Thank you!

They have also mentioned 'redemption' and 2x preferred stock - both of which kind of ring bells.
> I argue that we are all becoming content creators - the content isn't groundbreaking - it's just that some of us aren't reaching an audience because we're just saying "Hello, World".

Enjoyed your comment. Perhaps we're saying the same thing: self-expression, democratized.

What an apt username!
The iPad is actually heavier than my subnotebook from 4 years ago, and I suppose also heavier than most present day netbooks. It's also heavier than a MB Air.

I sometimes carry my notebook along when traveling. Not so much for just going to work at a cafe, but that might be because there are no really nice cafes around where I live.
Thanks. Newbie mistake. :)
Google Might Sometimes Serve Malware, But At Least They Are Honest About It
You will necessarily meet a number of quality women in your life. Which of them you choose to pursue has some effect on the quality of your wife, but it has a much smaller effect than how you treat her.
How do SVN clients deal with "git push --force"?
I think the big concern people have is the version mismatching going on. A lot of people who bought Android phones have been burned by their carriers not keeping the hardware updated. Result: they can't run a lot of apps.

This is in sharp contrast to the iPhone store where you hit this problem incredibly rarely. So it's obviously going to be a talking point.

P.S. “hyperbola”, huh? Thank you, made my day.
I would argue that the most essential service is 'grocery delivery'. And it's not run or subsidized by Government and we seem to be doing just fine. There is no reason what so ever for USPS to exist.
My understanding is that he thinks the trend itself is dangerous, not just the device. By not purchasing an iPad, he is protesting (with his dollars) against closed-computing. The protest does need to be loud, because of this:

Most of the world does not know or care about how closed the iPad is; we all know, however, that the world should have open computers and not closed ones because that creates a better experience for consumers in the long run.

That's why he's fighting the fight.
The only iPad review you need to read
The point is the touch screen interface. Do design user interface for touch screen is a value added to traditional mouse or keyboard interface. I don't know how Bloomberg implemented touch but this is the reason for a specialized App.
UPS version of this is called UPS Basic. Don't mistake UPS Basic for UPS Ground.
Writing, video editing – please tell me why exactly the iPad cannot do that? Especially when we are talking about the kind of writing most people do and the kind of video editing most people do. You can type “Hello World!” on the crappiest of crappy keyboards. If that’s what creating means, the iPad will have no problems whatsoever.
Do you really expect a government organization with all its bureaucracy to come up a solution for 'the ability to affordability correspond with others around the country'?

Private market has already found out the solution. Email, facebook, twitter.

And if you think that USPS (or any government organization for that matter) can do a better job hosting free email than Google, Yahoo or Microsoft (they all provide free email), I have serious questions about your sanity.
How The Google Book Settlement Will Change The Future of Reading
Has he done this in the past? Why do you suppose he'd do it in this case?
F5 talks to Dan Kaminsky about DNS
Interesting; it appears that the best interface for browsing Gmail is only available on the iPad (for now).

Steve will be pleased.