skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To put real numbers to this:

The iPad battery stores 25 watthours of energy.

USB 1.0,1.1, and 2.0 devices may draw a maximum of 500mA from the 5v lines of the connector, this is 2.5 watts.

USB 3.0 will up this to 900mA for 4.5 watts, but it isn't here yet.

Actual current available at a port depends on topology. If I plug my keyboard in to my USB 2.0 computer, then plug my iPad into the keyboard it will only be authorized for 400mA, because the keyboard claimed 100mA. 2 watts.

So, best case, charging an iPad from USB 2.0 will take 10 hours, if it is off. Notice this is suspiciously close to the runtime on battery, i.e. a running iPad consumes ~2.5 watts, your whole USB power allotment. Hence you can't charge while running on a stock USB port.

So, what is with the 10 watt charger? Apple, and probably others, got tired of how long it took to charge and have deviated from the USB spec to allow larger charging currents. 1A chargers are common for iPhones, and at least some Macintosh models have higher current USB ports on board.

I don't know how they negotiate the higher current, but a 10 watt charger could theoretically charge your iPad in under 3 hours.
What do you mean with "merging and splitting tabs"?
for Firefox I use the good old FireGestures https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6366
For Chrome I used Mouse Stroke https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/aeaoofnhgocdbnbe..., but I will give "Smooth Gestures" a try.

Update: "Smooth Gestures" are better than "Mouse Stroke", thanks a lot!

PS: You can not possibly make an "productivity addons" collection without Mouse gestures, they increase your browsing speed easily by 100%.
That seems harsh. This post wasn't that great, but his others were pretty good. He's certainly working at building his online persona, but there's nothing wrong with that. Though with the mention of making "30k a month", I'm beginning to worry that his story might be fabricated for the sake of publicity. Regardless, I look forward to seeing more writing from Max.
The perspective is selfish: nowhere does he ask "if I were to reveal my state of health, would the girl I'm dating care?"

Assuming the author falls in love, and the feeling is reciprocated, there are not one but two individuals that'll be involved in the decision to take it further. The author's trepidations aside, he /cannot/ know the willingness of the second party to pursue a relationship further, despite the high probability of cancer. After all, as of the status quo, that person does not yet "exist" in terms of the relationship.

As such, the level of suffering versus the level of emotional welfare that may or may not be elicited by the relationship is /entirely guesswork/. There is but the barest of frameworks to make an educated guess of it, and even that is open to many questions.

Overall, it is, in fact, in the author's benefit to pursue a happy, health, and - importantly - honest relationship. The potential drawbacks are impossible to know until such relationship is established, but the potential health benefits of being in a stable relationship /is/ known.
This has been around for quite a while:

http://www.archos.com/products/imt/archos_5it/internet.html

I guess it makes sense for Google to ride the Apple-hype wave... but it seems odd that they don't advertise Android devices more.
High power mode was added to the 2.0 spec as an addendum only about a year ago as an optional feature. As more devices require high power for charging it's going to be a very confusing situation for consumers. They could have at least bumped the spec to 2.1 to identify high power capable ports.
this has gotten much better. Also, they now let you specify what level of consistency you want, which makes writes go a lot faster if you're just putting in a bunch of data or don't need to wait to be sure it's consistent before you put in the next item.
Wouldn't your Gmail session lose its state when its browser is shut down?

If only there was some way to run two applications at once...
Here are some Haskell tutorials that do introduce the language by walking you through an actual interesting problem:

Use simulated annealing to solve a computational geometry problem: "The final program will have less than 100 lines of Haskell and will organize a mass picnic in an arbitrarily-shaped public park map and will print pretty pictures showing where everyone should sit!" http://www.lisperati.com/haskell/

"Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours" (implementing a simple parser and interpreter): http://jonathan.tang.name/files/scheme_in_48/tutorial/overvi...

Most chapters of Real World Haskell also take this form. For example, it walks you through writing a parsing library, and a barcode scanning program: http://book.realworldhaskell.org/
I think that it is easy to be led astray by anecdote. I think that PayPal is such an outlier as to be irrelevant to almost all of us.

There's the fact that this all happened a decade ago. PayPal launched at a time when the internet was effectively undergoing a Western Expansion and many claims were being staked to build essential infrastructure. Very few ecompanies really understood the internet, there were very few incumbents in the online space and huge opportunities for first movers.

I can't imagine any VC today allowing a startup to spend in the way PayPal did. As we all know, back then it just wasn't realistically possible to be properly lean because building stuff was so much more expensive. I'm sure the idea of YCombinator would seem as nonsensical to the founders of the nineties as multimillion first rounds seem to us today.

The article alluded to the fact that payment transfer is exceptional in structure. I struggle to think of other startups that required such enormous network effects to become sustainable and had such extraordinary cashflow issues.

I think that there's a strong case that a PayPal-like business could be built lean today, but I'm not sure it's relevant - I don't think any of us are trying to build those businesses and I don't think any of us would succeed in doing so. Looking at the likes of Facebook, I think it's clear that the biggest, most network-dependent businesses really can be built out of dorm rooms these days.
The most important addon for any browser: Lastpass https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/hdokiejnpimakedh...

I don't have to deal with passwords anymore it saves me at least 20 min a day, and takes away all the worries of forgetting login info. Please try it, it really is that good.
Did you e-mail the developers before posting this? I mean, it's really kind of mean to post something like this without trying to resolve your issues with the developers directly first. In this case, Jay happened to be around to respond, but you said you wouldn't want to hurt Shareaholic's reputation without being sure. Didn't everyone read Derek Sivers' piece? Screaming on the phone or sending nasty e-mails or posting accusatory blog posts is not the first line of defense; there are other humans involved.

Also, posting it to HN without the question mark in your title was totally bogus.
Thumb instructions are the same speed, but can only perform a subset of what the ARM instruction set can; each instruction takes half the space. Thumb can be faster if it eliminates cache overflows, but can also be a lot slower if faster ARM instructions have to be emulated with Thumb equivalents.
Sparc vs Intel?
Which is your desktop running?

It might be a slightly different answer at your web host!
Sadly, I think it will take just as long for the rest of the industry to really catch up to Apple's new product, at which point Apple will have moved ahead again. It took more than a year for other smartphone makers to have a serious answer to the iPod, and in my opinion more than two years (with phones like the Droid and Nexus One) to bring a product to market that surpasses the iPhone in some of its own strengths, without sacrificing too much in software or hardware polish.

Why do I think the same thing will happen with the iPad? Because Apple is still among the only companies even trying to do world-class software design and world-class hardware design, and treating the two as a single product. (Others, with varying levels of success: Nintendo, Palm, Tivo, Nokia, some divisions of Microsoft.)

Tell any other computer maker that they should introduce a new operating system, or a software maker that they need to make their own hardware, and they'll look at you like you're crazy. Sure, there's a big risk of failure, but it's the only way you'll be able to innovate as radically and successfully as Apple.

And this saddens me. I think Apple products are great - my first computer was a Macintosh SE/30 in 1989, and my first programs were written in HyperCard. My parents are still happy Mac users two decades later - but I am not. I value open platforms enough to give up the many benefits of Apple's platform for the very different benefits of open source platforms. (I'm a former Debian Developer and current Mozilla employee.)

Maybe Google will start designing and making its own Chrome OS hardware someday. (They already worked closely with HTC on the design of Android phones like the Dream and Nexus One.) Maybe a hardware maker like Intel will really go all-in on a new Linux-based product. Maybe I can convince Mozilla that we need to design our own hardware platform! But until that happens, I think many aspects of our consumer products will still be trudging along in Apple's footsteps.
Agreed. As has been said many times, code is much easier to write than it is to read (or debug), so make that sacrifice now.
"... Facebook doesn't look totally evil though. According to Warden: 'From my conversations with technical folks at Facebook, there seems to be a real commitment to figuring out safeguards around the widespread availability of this data.' ..."

Hi Pete, I've been following your threads [0] with interest seeing how the social graph can be interpreted in code. The above quote in particular stood out though. I'm not sure if the "no evil" tag applies where you can access the official Fb API and developer program then expect good to come out of it. [1], [2]

“That pulls the rug out from a whole policy &
technology perspective that the point is to give
you control over your information - because you
don’t have control over your information.”

Hal Abelson

It appears that while Fb is trying to tighten up public leaked information, at the same time they allow access to the social graph API which is just as potentially more damaging to individuals.

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1199821 & http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1106859

[1] PJF, "Dark Stalking on Facebook", http://pjf.id.au/blog/?position=590

[2] http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/09/20/...
Oh. That is true. They could get it to remember what page you were on by storing your location in the persistent key-value store whenever you navigate and then putting you back in that place when it starts up. But as it is, it even remembers your location on the page and zoom and such.
Just to add to the programming tutorials list, here's one for (/from) the Haiku project / C++: http://www.haiku-os.org/tags/tutorials - a series of blog posts.
You are quite in to ad hominem, aren't you?
"I could have loved the way news works on this thing, if the NY Times and been willing to ship a beautiful reverse-chronologic view of their whole news stream. They chickened out with a little mini-dip-into the stream. It's like sipping the news from an espresso cup when I want to be inundated by Niagara Falls."

It seems clear that big media sees this as the last chance to provide news "samples" in the hopes of rolling back the clock to 1995 and getting us to pay for the whole thing. Somehow the lesson of the web has been lost to them.

Having worked at a newspaper I know the rule back in the early nineties was - consumers pay for the cost of distribution, advertisers pay for everything else. They need to accept that the cost of distribution is heading to zero, and that's what consumers will pay.
> it also supports CFML, remember CFML is built atop Java.

And many other JVM languages, see this list:

http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine-java/web/wil...

(which I notice is missing Clojure: http://fragmental.tw/2009/04/08/clojure-on-google-app-engine... )
Thomas Friedman: Start-Ups, Not Bailouts
Funny but I think your point is wrong. :)

Here's how I back that up. Assume you have a teenage daughter. Now assume your daughter goes to a party and the host gives her either:

a Twinkie

or

some meth

As a parent, would you not mind if it was meth? Do you really think the impact on her life, her health, her state of mind, etc. would be about the same whether it's a Twinkie or meth? Or herion? Cocaine? Now how about if it was a Diet Coke? Or a glass of wine? I bet most parents wouldn't worry as much about the Diet Coke (even though it has "drugs" in it, like caffeine). And some may not mind if it was the wine -- especialy if just a small amount -- but of course even then, you would be more worried.

I think the difference is in how extreme and how fast the bad effects are, comparing a Twinkie to some meth. And while the Twinkie may not be ideal for your body, it almost assuredly won't make you go crazy essentially -- it won't mess with your mind -- like meth, cocaine, heroin, etc. would.

Now if you said, "Put down the meth and the case of 500 Twinkies," that I could agree with you on!
I think the idea that economic and political "systems" are separate is dangerous, and part of how we got into this mess in the first place.
Isn't youtube also an outlier?
65% Of Canadians Lose Sleep Worrying Over Debt
Ihnatko on iPad and Multitasking
Thanks, it pleases me so much to browse through these. The first desktop apps I wrote were on BeOS[1], and it's still the best-designed GUI toolkit (and probably the cleanest and most usable C++ API) that I've seen. Kudos to the Haiku project for keeping the flame alive.

[1]: http://www.advogato.org/person/mbrubeck/diary/101.html
Having played with my friend's iPad a bunch today I am extremely impressed. I can't wait for my 3g one to arrive.

He put it best by saying: "It's not a single big WOW thing, it's that the whole iPad feels exactly right. Everything you do just feels natural."

My take away was that the large touch screen makes interacting with the computer amazingly intuitive. I could go on about the video quality, battery life, etc... but suffice to say I really like it.
Glad you like it!

Splitting in Smooth Gestures means taking the current tab and those to the right and moving them to a separate window. Merging takes the current window's tabs and appends them to the last focused window.
The Case for the Database As Bit Bucket
How do people get into debt?
Heroku's great, but in money/performance ratio it's not really comparable to GAE. The free Heroku package doesn't get you very far as far as scaling goes (though if you're willing to pay it's a great alternative to hosting your own Ruby site)
I approve, Duncan Idaho.
The Archos 5 has been around a long time, but it was running outdated software for most of that time, and didn't have access to the Market or to Google's apps like GMail and Maps. These days the Archos is looking better and maybe worth promoting, but I can see why Google wants to concentrate its marketing on flagship devices where it has worked hard on a polished shipping product, like the Nexus One. (Which they are promoting quite heavily, at least to people with Adsense profiles like mine. I see almost nothing but Nexus One ads on every Adsense site I visit.)
"The usual fanboy rebuttal is that [the iPad] is not designed for what I do."

How does stating _a fact_ like this make one a fanboy? This re-reminds me why Dave Winer irritates me. Yes, the iPad does not offer a development environment. Yes, the iPad lacks file-system access. So what?

Dave also invokes the classic 'my mom's going to love this' line. I think my mother will too. And I cannot wait to replace her Windows XP desktop with an iPad for day-to-day computing tasks.
Nobody ever suggested that the Gnome desktop should be built on Java. Miguel was a very vocal advocate of C# as a solution to the language interop problems the early Gnome tech suffered from. The rest of your argument is an unpersuasive slippery slope argument. The software patent system is broken and you can never really be safe but there's still a difference between building something that might use some of the same methods as other patented software and implementing a full-stack clone of a core MS technology that they've alternately promoted and protected.

A big part of the reason that Mono hasn't made further inroads in the Gnome desktop beyond some disposable userland apps is because the rest of the free software movement sees it as the trojan horse it is, despite Miguel's urging over the years to make it the base of Gnome.
I wonder if a modern, practical programming language could be taught through a game where you "level up" on the basis of language knowledge.

Maybe something like a game which teaches concepts like Message Passing and concurrency using an Erlang like syntax or Metaprogramming through Clojure
On the off chance that you're serious and not just intentionally trolling...

I think you forget that he is employed by Novell, rather than Microsoft.

This article is consistent with statements I've seen in the past, and past actions. It doesn't look like a philosophy made up after the fact to rationalize actions, it looks like an existing philosophy that drove those actions. Do you have any actual, um, evidence that this is a rationalization rather than an explanation of a long-standing viewpoint?

Note that the quote comes from Steve Jobs, was he also trying to rationalize how he made a living?

I feel about the same way as is expressed in the article despite it having no financial impact on me and not being relevant to any projects I have (ie, there's nothing for me to rationalize about).
The problem is that we don't have a good metric for what a good education is. Anytime you try to come up with one and enforce it, like No Child Left Behind, someone doesn't like it.

In that Alan Greenspan book that was posted, he remarked that his father was infuriated that some of his homework involved painstakingly coloring in maps for hours, because he considered it useless. I don't know about history, but in art classes we would painstakingly spend hours making little patches of different textures. And do things like draw without looking at the page.

One person's waste of time is another person's education. We might be able to come up with the best education to get someone into med school, but it's much harder to come up with an education that is most likely to make someone "successful."
I'd question how far you can really manage to scale something before you have to start considering it a commercial project requiring investment. My experience is that the free Heroku and GAE levels are both fine at the prototype/closed beta stage, unless your "closed beta" is the size of Gmail. Both services have heavy caching infrastructure in front of them, and you get as much of that as you need at any level—you only need to worry about scaling for actual CPU-intensive tasks, which should always be handled gracefully client-side to begin with (in case of network latency &c.)
http://therealurl.net runs on on GAE and handled >1m reqs/day a few times with no problem. Billing is turned on, but limited to $1/day - Google only charge for the resources you use and you can assign X cents for bandwidth, Y for CPU etc.

I posted a screenshot of GAE quota usage on 430k reqs/day, might interest you: http://niryariv.wordpress.com/2009/11/27/google-app-engine-q...
Microsoft, Ballmer in fact, also sees iPods, iPhones, Google, Amazon AWS, IBM, Nintendo and Sony as enemies, and not only open source.

If there are some people in the community that wants to see Linux as a platform that fits everything (mobile, server, embedded appliances, etc) what is wrong if a MS executive dreams of the same happening with his company's products?

And by the way, bash sucks... zsh forever. Just kidding in this line.
If that's going to work, they're going to have to charge advertisers sufficiently high rates. Online advertising rates are a joke compared to print ad rates.

It seems absurd to me that newspapers are willing to ask individual consumers to pay for online distribution, but aren't willing to have their online ads department use the phrase "Yes, you can put your ads on some random blog for almost nothing, but we're the New York Times. We have a premium audience, and advertising with us goes for premium rates."
"When people trust you, you can pull money from their accounts at will."

Hadn't heard of Venmo before this. But yeah, that sounds like it could be pretty disruptive.
Yes. iPad is for consumption not for production. Don't know when some of these guys will realize it and stop making a big fuzz. I don't see the point of it.
I'd offer this as a rebuttal to his conclusion...

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=11653

When individual reformers can't change things you need systematic reform. That's exactly where education is right now.
I really like the last paragraph:

"I promised a verdict, so here it is. With the caveat that it's after one day and I reserve the right to change it at any time: Today's iPad, the one that I just bought, is just a demo of something that could be very nice and useful at some point in the future. Today it's something to play with, not something to use. That's the kind way to say it. The direct way: It's a toy. "

That seems spot on to me. I think it'll take a few hardware and OS revisions to really make this kind of product shine.

I'm curious to see how it'll be used in business settings, it seems like it could have a lot of potential for businesses to run internal apps on, but how could they install them?
Paleomap Project (Animations of Continental Drift)
Indeed. If they had put the effort into getting premium rates from advertisers starting the day they went online, they'd be there now. Instead recent experimentation with new insterstitial formats suggests its just beginning.
Web browsing has always worked well, however.
(I would have sent this in private, but found no contact info in the respective HN profiles.)

To Dove and lotharbot:

Thanks so much for your comments in this thread. They are extremely insightful, and resonate strongly with my own experiences of married life, which is nearing a decade in length. I always admire and am inspired when I see examples of good marriages.

<insert politically correct well-wishing here>
Most notable omission is a camera. Skype video is the killer app for this machine.
It's not spyware if it is necessary in order to supply functionality that was advertised for the program. It sounds like that is the case here.
I definitely agree that big publishers need to charge more for views for the ads. I don't think a site like the nytimes.com needs to go for cheap or even worry about pay per click. Just charge a bucketload for the views. It's the New York Times.
Don't get me wrong: it would be awesome if the iPad was just as good for production as consumption.

My girlfriend (a university professor) is in the process of finishing her first book, and would love to do the rest of her writing and revising on the iPad in Pages, but she doesn't see it as being realistic. She's still really excited about being able to watch Battlestar Galactica on the iPad. (regarding BSG: yes, I am lucky.)

I spend all of my time writing code in Ruby and Objective C. I'd love to be able to get access to MRI, the Rails gems, MySQL and TextMate on the iPad in order to do my work there, but it's just not realistic. And that's ok: because I am unbelievably excited about the web browsing experience and the games on the iPad.

Edit: I amend my comments above with a Tweet from the author of The Ghost Map and The Invention of Air: http://twitter.com/stevenbjohnson/status/11564792495
The "Enterprise" developer program includes in-house deployment capabilities.