skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He asked - hypothetically, thank God - whether it would be worth it to pay Kim Kardashian $10k for a tweet to her alleged 3.27 million followers. He found that targeting instead lots of people who have far fewer followers would yield “much, much higher ROI.”

Perhaps, but it'd likely a lot more expensive to boot. I have a 1000th of Kardashian's audience (3000 followers) and I wouldn't run a paid tweet for $10 (nor would I doubt most similarly endowed tweeters).. $100 would probably get the ball rolling :-) There's actually more to lose with a smaller following.
It appears that Xeni Jardin finds it awesome while Cory Doctorow feels it promotes undesirable cultural and business practices.
Gina Trapani: 'Why You Shouldn't Buy an iPad (Yet)'
Both penned by Xeni Jardin, Cory Doctorow's partner in Boing-Boing.
The date on the article is April 2nd. I did check.

Is the inclusion of this monstrosity in a standard library more evidence that null references are a misfeature? A explicit construction like Maybe<T> seems so much of a better idea.
Does this even need explaining?
I'm suprised nobody has talked about "remote desktop" possibilities on iPad
I read the other day that they've come to a compromise with the positions of the buttons. They're staying on the left, but the close button will be in the corner of the window - it'll go close, minimise, maximise.

I'm happy with that personally; it wasn't the position of the buttons as a whole that was a little annoying but the fact that "close" wasn't in the corner.

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/04/ubuntu-window-buttons-sta...
But there isn't an Eeebuntu box with multitouch input and other slick hardware features-- having open source software is a wonderful first step, but until non-Apple manufacturers start to realize that they really need to make damn good hardware in order to compete, we're stuck with a rather crappy situation.

Moreover, its a false dichotomy between vendor lock-in and a consistent user experience. What Google has shown with the HTC Dream and Nexus One handsets is that you can have something without a centralized approver deciding what apps are blessed for publication and which aren't, and yet still have a consistent user experience. Though individual carriers do in fact restrict apps to the Android Market, this is not inherent to the platform like with iPhone OS-- customers can and should complain about carriers that lock down Android handsets.

Also inexplicable is Apple's love of DRM. Time and time again, DRM has shown itself to be the bane of consumers. It doesn't make the iPad any better in any technical sense, and only serves to introduce anti-features to the platform.

In short, my opposition to the iPad is not due to a difference in opinion about design decisions so much as it is an unwillingness to participate in a platform where both developers and users are completely subservient to Apple's whims and where I don't truly own my own device.
I wouldn't be confident that a designer who can't code in HTML/CSS would understand the restrictions of the medium. I've seen a lot of great "website designs" done in Photoshop that wouldn't make terrible websites due to load speed, structure, or other unconsidered elements.

I'd say the answer somewhat depends on the specific candidates and your budget. There's rockstar designer/coders out there and there's good designers and coders.

Try hiring a front-end coder who does their mockups in Photoshop. That could narrow out serial wireframers (wireframes are good, just not when used to build a design) and help you find someone who's the best of both worlds.

Maybe you're also getting a lot of non-coders because of the location you listed the job as well. Try posting a job here on HN, asking for a referral to a good designer or a more established "design+coding" marketplace.
John Gruber likes Trapani's argument better than Doctorow's
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/04/02/trapani
Which argument is better?
why is this a monstrosity?
Why are you confused?

They are publishing opinions for and against ipad, how can that ever be a bad thing? If it was by the same author, on different posts with different opinions, I would understand.
In Canada this is called Unaddressed Admail, and it allows companies to send flyers to entire neighbourhoods without having to address the mail individually. I'm pretty sure there is a way to opt-out.
Stephen Colbert shows off iPad, takes shot at Amazon Kindle
Nah, they've had an iPhone version out for ages- the porn industry has always been fast to hop on new tech trends.
> Technology once sold as an expensive niche keyboard is now in the hands of tens of millions of people worldwide. Darn.

Why not have the best of both worlds and open up another market? There's also an opportunity cost, because smaller companies cannot use this technology and innovate. Smaller companies tend to innovate more than bigger ones (yes even Apple). So yes, darn.

> How is that innovative? When products do not differentiate, they compete on price, which drives prices down to levels incapable of sustaining any significant innovation.

Oh, but products do differentiate and technology does improve. For example, software, unencumbered by patents, has been sustaining (and increasing) significant innovation for quite a while. Also, software does not only compete on price.

Also, it's innovative because companies have to push the envelope and cannot rest on their laurels to just use their position to rake in the cash (like Microsoft and IBM did).

It comes down to simple economics. Protectionism hinders innovation.
> bust out that masculine hand sanitizer just like mommy uses.

Sounds like someone has a little germaphobia. And I don't get the whole hand sanitizer thing..."Yea, I'll clean my hands by rubbing the existing crap in there real well, and by killing all but the most serious bacteria so that it has no competition."

> It's not about just the cleanliness, it's about going out of your way to rudely put your damn feet where other people have to put their hands.

No, it's my desk. If someone wants to take their chances around it, that's their call. No different from eating at my desk, really.
I know of ladies in India who wake up at 3:30am, cook and pack lunch boxes for their families, then get onto a 3-4 hour train ride to Mumbai for work. They work until 5:30pm, then head to the vegetable market outside Dadar railway station to buy veggies for dinner and the next day's meal. They get onto the next train at Dadar and spend part of their 3-4 hour ride home cleaning the veggies so that they're ready for cooking by the time they get home.
If Doctrow sounds like a broken record, I can't hold it against him. These are points that need to be made repeatedly and loudly-- voices that oppose these kinds of closed platforms are sorely missing, by and large.
The arbitrage opportunity might well persist indefinitely, only because the people with the analytical skills to correct it don't care about winning play money on a fake stock exchange. The authors obviously found it more worthwhile to publish a research paper than to start a make-believe hedge fund.
Ask HN: any non-programming biz success stories?
We often read here about successful software companies - be it web, mobile, desktop etc. Any of you have success stories that doesn't involve programming? It could still be a website (selling content etc) or totally offline biz.
Building a Hypercard-like tool specifically for iPad would be a great idea for a start-up.
The iPad is a console for the non-gamer. We are all used to lock-in when it comes to game systems. Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony don't let you make a game without their say so. Why is Apple getting a bad rap?
Be glad that Apple is demonstrating the market potential for iPad-like devices.

How long now before Google partners their way into a Chromium/Android tablet that is to the iPad what the Nexus One is to the iPhone? I'd love to have that device, and in the meantime I'm also excited to borrow an iPad when I get a chance.
Unless they for some reason disabled it, you can move the buttons (via gconf editor, granted, but I suspect someone will make a better way to do it).

Though last time I looked at this was around 2006...
This is an article from 2005.
Unless the studios can stop it:

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/03/masking-movie-manipula...
Why I won't: first-generation Apple stuff usually kinda sucks.
How Not to Optimize your Wife: Using Calculus.

Geeks though, you gotta love them.
As someone who DID commute for 3 hours a day at one point driving, I can't recommend against it enough unless you are utterly desperate for the job and can't move. By the end of the 2.5 year stint I had come to simply hate driving, and still do ~3.5 years later. I avoid going on any drives of more than a 10-15 miles unless there's a damned good reason. Ungh.
"is part of the American culture."

Not really. I live in Michigan and sticking your feet in people's face would definitely be considered rude, and, more to the point, nobody does it.

Probably because for a very good chunk of the year, sticking your footwear on a bit of furniture is a recipe for damaging the furniture badly. Most furniture is not waterproof, and it's easy to hit things a lot harder than you meant to with your boots.
True, but if you don't think that model is fair, then don't write software for it. I agree that the AppStore model is flawed, and doesn't promote the sort of freedom that most developers (and users) are used to, but apparently many, many developers, and many, many users either think it is okay, or haven't thought about it at all. If enough developers wised up, then perhaps Apple would make changes to the model. I suspect, however, that we won't see that sort of groundswell anytime soon.
He lays out nicely written screed, but omits any inconvenient evidence and fabricates data to bolster his position. The end result is just technodemagogy. Missed opportunity.
Like Doctorow mentions, "the press has jumped all over the ipad...because journalists want a daddy figure who'll convince people to pay for content again."

So while we may know what the device represents, the media hasn't been spinning it that way. People think of it as a browser/app-like gaming device, many/most media articles I've seen mention implications for journalism/media consumption.
I'm also looking forward to the momentum from the iPad giving courage to Google's hardware partners, but I wish that just once one of them would take the lead. Google has obviously been ready for tablets for a while what with Android's early focus on extensibility and with their development of Chrome OS, but beyond a few entries like the Dell Mini 5, there's been very little talk of actually applying these platforms to the tablet market.

Oh, well. Just more time for display technology to improve first!
Maybe-- but that's a tough conclusion. While the USPS is a government agency, we still don't have enough data about the agency, or any agency's efficiency to be an accurate judge. It'd be great, for instance, if we could see what the average price per employee at the USPS was vs. UPS vs. FedEx. Sick leave comparisons, purchasing efficiencies, etc.

Lots of this data isn't available though (which is why I have my job)
My first-gen iPhone still kicks ass (for me).
Phone call recording with notification is very legal. We could very easily call the second party on the call and play a message before combining the calls that clearly points out the call is being recorded

Either way, they're not liable in the slightest for it.

All of that aside, it doesn't really matter. If you don't want to get into a call recording app, you say that at the beginning when first shown a call recording app. After you've suggested a company do 10k worth of development, then make a policy rejection on something the app has done since day one, you've screwed up.
That's a rather tall claim-- what evidence has he omitted here, or more to the point, what data did he make up?
That's cool. It's like Greasemonkey for your UI toolkit.
This isn't a "virtualization possibility" for the iPad; it's a remote desktop client. The iPad has a fast but simple single-core ARM CPU, without the ISA extensions that make virtualization reasonably fast on modern Intel and AMD desktop + server kit. Virtualization would be painfully slow, and furthermore, rather useless unless virtual machines were allowed to run in the background.
I agree with you entirely. I was more making a point about the results; thinking of them statically is a mistake. If it were for real money it wouldn't persist very long at all.
I eventually found http://www.betaversion.org/~stefano/linotype/news/169/

This is exactly what I was after - step by step instructions, decisions made for me, gotchas explained. I highly recommend it for anyone else in the same position.
You make an important point but he does not talk about the approval process. He talks about the audience.
I do have to say, I was surprised how easy it was to make passable buttons once I bought fireworks (an Adobe PNG tool ostensibly geared towards web mockups). [I'm a professional iPhone/iPad/Android developer.
> If anybody has real ideas for optimizing a wife, please post.

"Rub her feet." (http://www.angelfire.com/or/sociologyshop/lazlong.html)
How to produce fake data analysis in 3 easy steps
http://ycombinator.com/apply.html

You can also do it through friends of friends. There are probably at most 3 hops between your immediate friends and some of the people you want to reach. So just start traversing that tree, asking for intros.
Dupe.
I really dont think this deserves a repost. Was on the front page just some months ago.
Tarsnap splits data into blocks of ~64 kB which are individually compressed and encrypted before being uploaded. I use S3 for back-end storage, but need to keep track of where I put each of the blocks.

It's not that the metadata is demanding; it's just that there's a lot of it. For each $/month Tarsnap takes in, I have about 200,000 table entries.
Uhhh consistent user interface? Have you recently looked at apps on the android marketplace? You can find anything but consistent user interface. Some copy the iPhone, other have purple square buttons, others have grey Windows buttons. Some have some iPhone keyboard, others use the native keyboard. There is zero consistency in android app.
Note also that the CPI grossly under reports the devaluation of currency, in that it doesn't take into account increases in production efficiency. Cars, for example, cost more today than they did in 1970, but are vastly cheaper (in terms of resources) to produce.
Yes, let's co-opt words so we can confuse consumers.
The article doesn't say anything about the setup, and the 150k/sec is actually a max - their mean is more like 100k/sec.

> if the result of all of those queries is already in memory somewhere, we can send the page back in less than a second, whereas it would take longer than that if we had to go to the database for each query.

This is breaking news? Seriously, fetching data in memory is substantially faster than doing disk IO. It also helps to do the full query in one pass and inside the database, rather than several separate queries that keep dragging data back and forth. You can get a further speed-up by staying small enough to run inside the processor caches - J (http://jsoftware.com/) and K (http://kx.com/) are quite fast, despite being interpreted.

While Redis has somewhat different use cases than Memcached (Redis is an in-memory db, not just a cache), it's another option.
To me, the S100 bus always represented a parallel universe in personal computing. An elegant alternative to the puzzling layout of the 5150.

I'm too young/ignorant to know why or how the s100 was superior. Could you elaborate?
I believe this problem is a lot closer to the Secretary Problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
As he notes however, he does not try to choose "the very best candidate", for which the optimal solution is to pass on the first 1/e candidates. Instead, he tries to maximize the "goodness" of his wife selection.

In short : maximum likelihood soultion is to pass on (1/e)*N, minimum mean squared error solution is to pass on sqrt(N). This of course assumes you can estimate N well.
China Entrepreneurs discuss Google Pullout (podcast)
If Facebook actually gets shut down because of this, I could see that being a good way to get some meaningful patent reform in the U.S.
DOE: Water Heaters need to be up to 47% more efficient by 2015
How the Email Inbox Can Become An App Platform
Originally the chapter title was in quotes, but the link title was 81 characters long, and HN has an 80-character maximum. I axed the quote marks; maybe I should have axed "is out" instead. :-)
Article Summary:

Extreme commuters are the fastest growing group of work commuters in the country, who rarely see their homes in the daylight. People who spend a month of their lives each year commuting at least an hour and a half to work and back each day are considered extreme commuters. This is compared with the US average of 50 minutes and according to the Census Bureau their numbers have jumped 95% since 1990 to 3.4 million workers. Experts say their numbers will continue to grow.

In 1990 24% of workers left their home counties on their way to the office, and since then 50% of all new workers are doing the same. Many extreme commuters are forced to drive the long distances because the affordable housing isn’t near the good paying jobs.

Interestingly, economists say this “commuting paradox” doesn’t pay off in terms of life satisfaction. A commuter who travels one hour each way would have to make 40% more in pay to be as satisfied with his life if he were a non-commuter.

http://hnsummary.com/2010/04/02/extreme-commuting/
Thanks for the transcript. I remember back in the early 90s reading an interview of some Sci-Fi author (William Gibson I think, but I'm not 100% sure) where he derided the Internet for not being up to par with CD-ROM's.
It's hard to address throughput that way when the Throughputers are in a union.
You're absolutely right, I updated the title to "remote desktop".

Got overexcited this week playing with Wyse on my iPhone:

http://www.wyse.com/products/software/pocketcloud/index.asp

And looking forward to seeing what comes around the corner for the iPad.
I think most people would be fine if there was a 5% discount for bulk mail, however they cut it way more than that.
US peak was in 1971[1]. The timing of global peak is still a hotly contested issue.

[1]: Energy Information Administration, part of the US Department of Energy.

http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PE...
This is all well and good, but doesn't take into account that your ideal wife won't want YOU.
It still goes on today:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/22/michael-hanley-gm-a...
You seem to be implying that these same people aren't upset at the console makers for the same reasons, and therefore they are hypocrites. But a sufficient number of them are upset at the console makers for the same reason, so your accusation fails.

You are, after all, posting this implicit accusation the same week that geekdom has been raging about the PS3 locking down even tighter!

When making a complaint, people are not obligated to run through every similar complaint they have, or face accusations of hypocrisy. In fact that would be downright tedious.
Connect up a keyboard and a bigger screen, and sure, you can create a book on an iPad.

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.)
One could make the "Aren't these just libraries?" argument for the collections stuff introduced in 1.2, but this standardization served a legitimate purpose by facilitating rich inter-component/framework interoperability. While I don't dispute the benefits of using this new Objects class, provides methods used in implementations, not common API representations. So, I'd argue that the Java ecosystem isn't much better off for it. This isn't to say that I'm not happy that it's there, but I don't think it's nearly as noteworthy as new language features, underlying JVM performance improvements, etc.

As an aside, I was surprised that the article did not take advantage of static imports to rid the code of the "Objects" references. One could just say:

if (notNull(foo).equals("bar")){...}
In fact, Apple's fear of the customer (which leads to their love of DRM) runs so deep that they avoid any built-in peripherals that might allow side-loading of content and applications. The only hardware interface to the device is completely proprietary and requires a license to access.

The device is conceived from the ground up with the idea that Apple must control all aspects of it's use. Any features that might lessen that control are thrown to the side.

I have a hard time watching the evolution of computing go from relatively open platform that sparked my interest as a young person, to locked down DRM restricted devices.
Because there was never any hype about how the XBox was the future of computing. That's a non-negligible difference.
> The iphone is just a better market model.

Interesting, but the iphone should have nothing to do with this. This is simply over the multi-touch technology and whether or not other people can independently come up with similar solutions.
For an omission: in his section on Apple's DRM policies he omits that after getting the music labels on board Apple then drove them to drop DRM. How would this change the paragraph containing:

For a company whose CEO professes a hatred of DRM, Apple sure has made DRM its alpha and omega. Having gotten into business with the two industries that most believe that you shouldn't be able to modify your hardware, load your own software on it, write software for it, override instructions given to it by the mothership (the entertainment industry and the phone companies), Apple has defined its business around these principles.

Then for a fabrication:

The iPad you buy today will be e-waste in a year or two (less, if you decide not to pay to have the battery changed for you).

Read that closely. He wants you to believe iPad batteries last less than 12 months, degraded to the point that you will throw away the device if you don't buy a new battery (with installation). Look at the verbs. He isn't saying he fears this might happen. He definitively states it as fact.
Facebook + Location aware + Chatroulette-style ultra-fast and easy webcam chats = great dating site.

Structure it to favour women, i.e. woman can see the man by default, but the woman has to allow the man to see her. Then for men, you just have to let them know when they're 'live' (that is on camera) and give them something to do while they wait for a woman to say "ok, this guy can see me".
Its like expecting anything other than praise for everything apple related from John Gruber of "Daring Fireball". I knew it just by looking at the title what Doctorow had to say.
Yeah, the extent of my computing knowledge is getting the default Apache 2 page up and running. Installing MT or Wordpress from apt is way beyond me. I'm so dumb that sometimes I want to cry...
Yeah, I thought this at first too. But in my case I never came accross one that ring a bell that much to me, I thought I would share :)
The extension of this idea is that we'll eventually have a company of 600,000 employees who only do their actual job - delivering mail - one day a week.
Can Web Business Really Be ‘Frictionless’?
Lucky for people who have already accumulated tech knowledge, buying and using an iPad won't zap it out of their brains.

Though as a young person's first computer, I kind of see his point.