skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem is, you equated multitasking to being done one way, and no other way. Other people did this. No multitasking was a feature. It cannot work. It's bad.

I equate it to the result, not the implementation. I don't care how it gets done, as long as it gets done without ruining the rest of the experience.

Not too long ago, we were reading iPad reviews disregarding the lack of multitasking as unneeded. Comments would fill up with mac-addicts defending the lack of multitasking suggesting things like "How can you see two windows on an iPhone" and other crazy things like that. People questioning the needed for multitasking, as well as suggesting that no multitasking was a feature, not a missing feature.

So now everyone is looking at Apple's MT and saying "WoW! It's so amazing!" and the rest of us are saying "It's MT done for the iPhone, okay." It's what we've been asking for, and what so many people were saying to us "It's bad" or "It will hurt the experience" or "MT on the iPhone is a waste."

Maybe you weren't one of those people, but I had enough respond to me saying these very things. And it's just nice to know that Apple, in the end, agreed with me and people like me.
Wolf cubs, maybe. =)
The Health Benefits of Healing Massage & Hot Tips
Well, there is also the widespread belief that "if MySQL doesn't do it, it's impossible for any RDBMS to". When people say "scalability" or "sharding" for instance, this is what they're complaining about.
It sounds like they are trying to prevent people from writing apps that are portable to other smartphones, since the obvious way to do that would be to make an intermediary layer.

Or am I misreading this? Any iPhone experts have opinions about what this means?
I'm surprised this statistic isn't brought out more in articles that call cancer, heart disease, etc. diseases of the developed world vs. the modern world, the difference being that instead of living in a pure time of organic everything, many people simply didn't live long enough to develop our modern diseases.
Sounds like they purchased the opportunity to deny Apple the talent/tech/customers/goodwill.
Sony Ericsson - Home
The Masters Golf Tournament 2010 update: Masters Golf Tournament
This is just a way of forcing people to upgrade to the latest non-jailbreakable hardware.

"Forcing" only if those users actually want multi-tasking. I'm guessing a large percentage of the user base won't covet this feature.
You do realize that there is no smartphone dominance of apple, right?
It's basically RIM (US) and Nokia(rest of the world) that are dominating.
It's a lot easier to get behind a no than a yes. As long as NoSQL is expressed as a negative, it's a very big tent. Even DBAs and relational model types have some complaints about SQL.

As soon as it turns into "we're using Project Voldemort, can you figure out how to hook a reporting tool up to it tomorrow?", you find a lot less consensus.
Apple is probably the market leader in smart phones in the US. But Nokia, as far as I know, is still the market leader in mobile phones, and have a good share of the smart phone market in other places, like Europe, that have been doing more with mobile phones longer than in the US.
Again what prevent Google from offering those types of interactive ads on webapps with HTML5 and js? you can still get creative with ads, and no one halved anyones market today.
Just can't stop playing this explosion thingy http://lab.andre-michelle.com/particle-explosion
Copy and paste works great on my blackberry. Which btw, I switched to after 3 years with the iPhone (first generation and 3G) where I hated copy and paste for the reason stated above (shows up when I don't want it to).

Also, I now love my blackberry much more than I ever did the iPhone. Apps I use are available (maps, yelp, foursquare, pandora), and the multitasking and the advanced features of the OS just keep surprising me. I can use my blackberry to connect to a VPN (it's built in). Coming from the iPhone, I feel like my handcuffs have just been taken off and I'm now free to use my phone the way I want to.
I find "data stores" much easier to understand and isnt a loaded term.
Maybe I'm biased (I work at Microsoft on gaming), but I'm shocked that this thread is all about multitasking and not about the social gaming network!

Apple has sold 50M iPhones. Microsoft has sold roughly 30M Xbox 360s. This summer, before the launch of Windows Phone 7, Apple will have the world's largest gaming network.....overnight.

How is that not a bigger deal than multi-tasking?
The most interesting part of the article in my opinion:

Then a boy pokes the android’s face.
”Yahh, don’t touch to my face,” Ishiguro yells. The kids laugh.
But what just happened was quite profound. Ishiguro says that when the kid poked the robot’s face, he felt a tingle on his cheek—even though nothing was attached to his face. For an instant, Ishiguro’s brain mistook his body for another—in Austria.
Ishiguro has experienced this many times in different settings, all with the same result: He feels as though the touch were real. He believes the phenomenon stems in part from observing the synchronization of the android’s head and lips with his own. When Ishiguro uses the Geminoid, he sees video from external cameras that show the robot’s field of view and also its face. Because he is watching the robot’s lips move as he speaks and seeing its head move when he turns his own neck, Ishiguro’s brain starts to treat the robot as an extension of his own body.
Woo hoo! 10:10 = "Happy Time"
I read that complaint as being about cost-effectiveness rather than strictly possibility.
It definitely sounds like they're trying to kill MonoTouch (C# iPhone development) and other development environments like it.

I really don't see the point of this. It just means less applications and less revenue for Apple.
I use http://toread.cc/ for the same purpose, plus I can always search in Gmail for my articles.
Ok, I'll take a stab at it:

foursquare app open to auto-checkin (or a Waze/OpenStreetMap editor recording GPS traces), IM app open to receive Skype calls, SSH connection open for quick access to top on your new widget-server.

I admit that none of those things need to be running simultaneously, but the fact that they are running is pretty nice.
Every campaign contribution state and federal since 1989. Bulk and Free.
So I shouldn't count on being able to import networkx or (heh-heh) ffnet any time soon?
I don't know what to tell you. Zealots will be zealots. Most people aren't.

And just like there were lots of people saying multitasking wasn't needed at all, there were lots of people saying they wanted multitasking even if it killed their battery life, they wanted the choice. I'm glad Apple didn't listen to either of them.
If you're looking solely at market share. Look at the profits from smartphones and Apple is dominating.
The fact that Shit My Dad Says (a twitter feed) enjoys the privilege of a wikipedia article, while many articles on open-source software projects struggle against constant requests for deletion, just boggles my mind.
put the script at the bottom of the page

I never understood why onload and all the frameworks implementing domloaded exist, script tags generally should go at the end anyway, and there is no problems with dom availability.
IBM partially backs down on Hercules patent threat
The 3G is slow enough already...
More of our biggest users came from pure web backgrounds then from Cocoa backgrounds.
Several browsers, including many versions of Firefox, had a bug relating to the status bar. The "waiting for ..." would only update after the first byte had been received from the next file. Thus, a slow resource would leave the status bar blaming www.google-analytics.com.

The bug has since been fixed in Firefox -- I don't have the url handy though.

IMO this is the main benefit of the async snippet -- random server problems won't lead inaccurate metrics.

(This is most visible with adwords campaigns -- you can see the number of clicks you paid for, but the number of visits they lead to is less. Typically due to a combination of high bounce rate plus slow loading pages.)
Of course! Everyone assumes that Bing is just a
drop-in replacement for Google, but it doesn't
come without costs: Google has a
massive brand identity. The phone with Google search has an implicit advantage over the phone with "Bing".
This is an amazingly easy illusion to experience. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/mind/note_nf6.html and http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2007/08/induced_outofbody_.htm... describe three experiments you can set up yielding similar effects.
Funny. I went there and found this:

"Sounds very handy - Lifehacker.com
This is much quicker and cleaner - Hawk Wings
I came across toread.cc and I immediately fell in love with it - Winston's Attic"

Again, totally admitting we do this too. But this is so interesting to me that instapaper gets away without having to do this, and still commands quite an audience.
Welcome to Mobile Kingdoms - mobilekingdoms.com
It's interesting to see how the animation/film industry has approached the uncanny valley not by crossing it, but by avoiding it altogether. One of the reasons I love the movie WALL-E is that Pixar has imbued WALL-E (the robot) with so many human nuances and characteristics that you empathize with him quite quickly, even though he looks nothing like a person.

There are very few animated television shows/films that I can think of that attempt to depict humans with as much realism as possible. The ones that have tried (off the top my head, Final Fantasy: Spirits Within comes to mind) still have unconvincing depictions.
Too many announcements. =)

I agree - the gaming network will be a big deal, especially since it will provide an alternative channel for developers to market their games. It gives the iPhone the social marketing aspect of Facebook games.
You mean OpenGL was slower in the sim and faster on a real device, right? That's been my observation too.
This is fine, if you're OK with missing bounces. If the page takes a long time to load, or hangs, then it's likely the user will close the window before the script runs.
I think Apple has been on a streak of releasing some great products, but I'm growing weary of Apple condescendingly telling people what they don't need (such as multitasking and copy/paste) and then turning around and touting those features as innovations later. (I don't mean to imply that the new multitasking services approach is not a good solution - I think that it is).

Now, we shouldn't need a stylus or task manager: http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/08/jobs-if-you-see-a-stylus-... The problem is, I want a stylus on something like the iPad - for some operations, writing is a more familiar metaphor than finger-painting. Likewise, their app-switcher is 90% of a task manager - all they'd need to do is add closing background apps (a feature we don't need?).

I know Apple is the master of opinionated design / "not listening to the customer" in order to provide something better than what the customer thinks they want. However, as a technical user, sometimes they outsmart me and sometimes they fail. In the next year, I'll purchase a tablet device (most likely Android-based, maybe the Notion Ink Adam... if it lives up to its hype). I don't expect for it to be as elegant as an Apple product, but it will do more of the things I want (and not insult me).
Yeah, it's too bad there aren't any free RDBMSs besides MySQL.
For the most part, open source makes the irrelevant. Not that we are going anywhere, but if we dropped off the face of the planet tomorrow, Cappuccino would go on. We already have a thriving community of contributors and users who rely on Cappuccino for their own businesses, many of whom are more than capable of continuing the frameworks development.
A watchmaker once told me that the hands in any other position have the possibility of either hiding other features (like date) and/or the brand name. 10:10 is the safest position to avoid these.
Actually, it probably means more platform specific code and more headaches for the developer.

Meaning, I doubt Apple will suffer much from developers declining to code for it.
As I suspected, iAd API's are tightly coupled with the OS and dead simple to utilize. I just wrote a sample app. Too bad Apple won't allow further discussions on the subject matter. Everyone who views the new beta API references are under NDA.
"Apps that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation ... layer or tool are prohibited."

in the new license agreement, did they just ban apps generated by flash cs5?
I have to have a Task Killer app running in the background to kill off all the random apps that wind up going

No, you don't. Just because an app shows up in a process list doesn't mean it's consuming resources. (Other than memory, and background processes are automatically killed as needed to free up RAM).
I actually think it shows a lot of promise. Though it is reasonably limited, a lot of what it does do it does well. For example, it doesn't have the extremely common problem of every piece of text being selectable, and often that selection fundamentally breaking other interactions like drag and drop.
Those characters would be more accurately called "Strawman 1" and "Strawman 2", or perhaps just "Strawman" and "elblanco".

None of the "rabid fanboys" have been claiming that multitasking will reduce battery life down to 5 minutes. Most haven't claimed that nobody uses multitasking; they just say that most normal people can get along without it.

The "normal people"/people who love to troll Apple users/you like to claim that Palm, Android, etc. have great multitasking systems, while ignoring the fact that those platforms do have noticeable UI lag, and generally worse battery life or performance. If you're trying to make a sound argument against Apple's stance of offering limited or no multitasking, you need to acknowledge the tradeoffs and then show that the stuttering, longer page loading times, or lower battery life are worth the overall productivity increase of multitasking. You can't just claim the downsides don't exist.
Erm... they rediscovered the role of the Dungeon Master? (see Dungeons & Dragons or other paper RPGs)
"Nobody clicks on them, because launching a web browser from an app is incredibly disruptive on a handheld."

Most mobile ad networks doing in-app advertising switched to a web view within the application months ago. In addtion, clickthrough rates are generally pretty high - although I blame 'butterfingers' for a lot of this. (Tracking post-click conversions is hard to do on the iPhone platform but when we've done it I haven't been horribly impressed.)
I haven't used it myself, but you may want to take a look at Mike Perham's Phat. It modifies Rails to use asynchronous I/O and several cooperating Fibers per-thread/process to speed up Rails significantly.

http://www.mikeperham.com/2010/04/03/introducing-phat-an-asy...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1240609

It
Right, and the OS itself takes up most of that. I think Apple made the right call there; multitasking is probably more trouble than it's worth when you're that memory-constrained.
That doesn't make any sense in the context of watch ads and doesn't explain why the time would be synchronized across manufacturers and watch designs. The watchmaker could easily change the time for each individual watch to avoid hiding features or brand names. As an example, look at the parents first link, first watch. One of the smaller dials is obscured by the hour hand. Wouldn't 8:20 be a better time to choose considering it wouldn't obscure any features or the brand name?
Well who knew? The iPhone really does need multitasking.
Can we please, please stop saying that things are "ultra secure" before they've been adequately beaten on? Saying that your goal is a very high level of security is fine (I do the same), but saying that directly translates to security out the gate is very deceptive. This has great potential for security, but it's not known to be secure yet; only time will give you that.
Google – you can change the game, damn it
My girlfriend has a Nokia E55. It is not even remotely close to iPhone and Androids in terms of functionality and ease of use, and still most market share studies will categorize it as a smartphone. And its OS also barely changed since 4 years ago when I had a similar device.
Well, for most of us (say, about 6 billion or so), it's NOT available in the local public libraries (yes, I know you were saying the US public libraries, but the WWW / Internet is so much more useful!).
Nobody will live to 65 in a road warrior type apocalypse.
The only issue might be privacy. Your phone book is full of people, 90+% of whom probably do not have an iPhone. On Facebook, every one of your Facebook contacts has clearly already divulged to you that they are on Facebook.

Still, I imagine if Apple made an opt-out method of automatically friending all of your email contacts who have iPhones (or at least an opt-out method of seeing them) it would be popular.
In his writting, Steve seemed painfully aware of the pass of time. Said things like... having only a handful more of 5 year blocks of life to invest wisely, or... working at Google because life's so short to waste at a day job that do not let you exploit your full potential. He is a smart guy, but somehow he seems concerned of being so far away from greatness.

My personal take is that he realized those who can, do; and the others just blog about it.
This reminds me a bit of the Bruce Sterling novel Holy Fire, in which soaring life expectancies and prolonged professional careers create a new, more severe generation gap between the "gerontocracy" and the younger generations. Sterling's speculative future didn't include a birthrate decline, though. What happens to our society when younger people become an increasingly marginalized minority?
I am also excited about this. I hope one of those APIs is to bluetooth enabled human interface devices or something so I can stick a joystick on my iPad.
I believe this means PhoneGap is still okay?
Although I believe Steve, new clauses in the iPhone Developers License Agreement seem to restrict the use of information off the phone rather dramatically - including information used for basic ad targeting. If enforced, it'll kneecap a lot of competitors.
I don't think peak oil is likely to bring that about any time soon.

Several countries seem quite well on their way to bringing about the world of Children of Men, though.
There's a reason that task manager apps are popular downloads for every phone that offers multitasking.

The reason is that intermediate users who know just enough to be dangerous think that they're necessary, when they aren't: http://droidtalk.net/should-i-install-a-task-managerkiller-o...
It probably has something to do with differences in how people think about abstract concepts like time.. Read these, really fascinating stuff actually.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=758822

http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2009/08/surprising-l...
One other alternative is the Instapaper Text bookmarklet

Look for it two thirds of the way down this page:

http://www.instapaper.com/extras
I am not agreeing with the article: eating more vegetables should mean that you eat less meat which I would argue is more likely to be carcinogenic. Way off topic, but: before a very strenuous hike early this morning (last 5 pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/mark.watson/SedonaHiking2010#) I 'carbed out' with miso soup loaded up with lots of 4 different kinds of veggies. I ate nothing else, and my energy level was great.
It's kind of out of control in Japan, but lower birth rate seems like a good thing. The world could use a little population decline, and that's the best way to go about it imho.

It will unbalance the age distribution, and as a relatively young person I don't love the idea, but it's better than other forms of population decline...

edit: Seriously? You guys think lower birthrates are bad? "world fertility has halved to just 2.6 babies per woman"... if we kept up at 5.2 the world population would almost double every 20 years. Believe it or not, that will cause problems.
That is awesome and is the kind of thing I want my daughters to do when they get older. They need to take after their geek father (sw developer/beginning entrepreneur), grandfather (hardware hacker), and great-grandfather (Apollo NASA tech).
I fear your goal will be achieved in the computer press about the same time the tabloids stop giving us headlines such as "HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR" (the New York Post on a murder in 1983).
lets go shopping!
The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst is an amazing book. It is a very easy read and very educational.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Typographic_Sty...
[This was all out of date information, so I removed it so as not to cause confusion.]

UPDATE:

Actually, the guys in the office just informed me that everything that used to be true is not anymore. Sorry, everything I wrote is probably wrong as of this morning it seems. Wow. Even more reason to just use Objective-C.
Is iAd going to compete with AdSense presented on notebooks? I don't think so.

It's not whether or not you are tethered to a desk, but what OS you run and what your relationship to your computer is. I have been using notebooks for the past 5 years and I would not call me mobile in any but the most literal sense.
Reducing the how ragged the right-hand-side is involves better spacing not justification.
> Multitouch is a different world

You are right, in a multitouch world, I have far more options for how to do this.
New restriction in iPhone 4 OS license agreement
Read the second sentence. This seems to be a means to focus developers to the platform, and away from code generators that allow developers to target multiple platforms.

3.3.1 Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).
What does "freezing state" mean?

My impression is that the kernel just suspends the process and keeps it in RAM. I'd expect there to be a notification that the app gets before it's suspended so that it can free any memory that's not necessary for preserving its state.
Wow, imagine if Jobs had taken a microbiology course. Apple computers would be able to cure cancer by now.
Agreed. Android copy and paste only works in 1 out of 10 text fields I've tried it on. Sometimes UI elements give a long-press option to copy. Seriously, copying an address from a text message to google maps should NOT be hard.
> However, eating fruits and vegetables is still necessary for proper bodily function and general health.

Tell that to (ancient) Inuit.
New Regulations Will Not Prepare the US for Cyberwar
That's all good advice, but I don't think it gets to the heart of most speakers' problem, which is simply fear. Clutching the podium, speaking too quickly, blanking - these are all side effects of nervousness. I don't think the solution is as simple as 'stop doing that', controlling unconscious behaviour under pressure is difficult.

Unfortunately I don't know the secret to great public speaking, but I suspect no. 8, practice and critique, should actually be top of the list. It is the only thing I've found which helps.
Nothing prevents you from using a 3rd party stylus (such as the Pogo stylus, which is pretty sweet) on your iPhone/iPad. In fact, I think they sell them at their retail stores. But they're not gonna ship a device with a stylus and neither will most of their competitors.

Likewise, they never said users didn't need copy/paste, they just shipped the first few versions of iPhone OS without it while they were still working on it.