skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's also the problem that the "found on a barstool" story came from the guy who sold it to Gizmodo. Gruber hints at another possibility, but let me just lay it out explicitly:

1. Powell takes the photo that he posted to Facebook, but uses the front-facing camera to do it. (Hey, field testing under real-world conditions!) 2. Seller notices this (iPhone with a front-facing camera? WTF??). 3. Seller puts two and two together ("cha-ching" noise, dollar signs roll up in their eyes, etc.). 4. Seller sticks around for a while, picks Powell's pocket at the first opportunity, and bails. 5. Seller lays low for a while to see if word gets out, thinks up a plausible story, then makes the rounds of the tech blogs. 6. Profit!

If this is what Apple believes happened, it's unlikely they'd take any action (assuming they take action at all) until after the phone is announced/released. Starting that ball rolling now would be too big a distraction from the actual launch. But after that it could get very ugly for Gizmodo very quickly.
The movie is actually very much worth watching, it does a great job of showing 'executive isolation' at work. Less and less realistic information reaches the high command and the bunker scene is where it all comes crashing down, there is no longer any way to deny reality.

Wannabe CEOs would do very well to watch it, it's a pretty good lesson in what happens when you hire people that say 'yes' to you all the time and you fail to notice they're no longer giving you the cold hard facts.
I'm surprised by the outrage in this post. This is a very common - indeed, necessary - practice in retail.

A friend of mine manages a high-end retail store in the area. He tells me that there are a number of people who match this buying profile. The products either show up on Craigslist, eBay, or are moved out of state to be sold elsewhere, often in markets the retailer is unwilling or unable to enter for a variety of reasons. Like it or not, in pretty much any retail environment, this practice is unacceptable.

He also tells me that these small groups of people will often approach customers in the parking lot as they exit their vehicle, offering them cash to enter the store, buy the goods with a few crisp hundred-dollar bills, and to keep the change. This gray market is very real.

Beyond that, the guy admits he knew of the policy and was willingly violating it. There's really not much room for outrage here.
I wonder what his definition of "Just a little bit extra" was. This seems fishy to me.
I hope they don't forget to include the "released and available for use" feature. IBM seemed to forget about this for over a year after Sun had released JDK5.
http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:2TxVRfz30WwJ:www.protoc...

Text-only cache.
Yeah, that part was completely unnecessary and unfortunate.
Programmers: Let's Be Independent Together
WTF? Track the top story for any topic with Scoopler's @WTF. (YC S08)
If it's an underestimate of demand, that seems like a very common mistake--most gaming consoles and new Apple products have this exact same problem. Either they're systemically "underestimating" demand to mitigate risk or increase the prestige of the product (by making it rare and hard to get), or the peak demand for something like an iPad or Wii within the first month is just completely beyond any reasonable manufacturing capacity.

In an idealized market, of course, manufacturing capacity would ramp up with demand, but that's because price does, too. In reality, while the market price will go up enough for scalpers to play arbitrage, the producer doesn't capture this surplus and has no incentive to increase quantity supplied.
My solution: IKEA desk with adjustable legs. I think it's the GALANT. Extend legs all the way out, and put it up on concrete blocks. Add stool.
And that's indeed exactly what happened at some point in my past, only not with online backup.

The investors in the competitor were actually very gracious about it and did a lot to make up for the damage they caused me, which they really were not obliged to do. Interesting how that played out, we still exchange Christmas cards 12 years later.

Focus on the hard stuff, let the cowboys fail and just keep plodding away and you'll be successful somehow. But they can destroy your market for you by giving the whole field a bad name and they can mess up the timing to the point that you miss out on something substantially bigger.
I love the irony--a homemade standing desk/treadmill, with an Apple Magic Mouse and Bluetooth keyboard...
"best article about the iPad"..? The article isn't really about the iPad at all. And I think you're exaggerating. It's not the first time a store or reseller puts a harsh limit on items (does the "one per household" term spring to mind at all?) It also seems as if the guy has been "ticket scalping", which I believe no reseller anywhere accepts. The entire experience the guy writes about is common practice like... everywhere.
Banning people who are obviously buying stuff for resale is extremely common in luxury goods retail. There's a book "Bringing Home the Birkin" about a guy who had an entire lifestyle based around skirting Hermes rules about buying too many Birkin bags.
Except that scalpers are also a part of the market. When a large percentage of original purchases are by scalpers, they artificially up the market value.
Will they ever get rid of the dual task bars (or panels or what they are called)?
But if the JERKER desk doesn't exist anymore, how did you copy+paste it from the website? ;)
But the funny jokes that get up-voted are generally intelligent, too (I think).
This is a really clever idea. I could see myself using this to track breaking news!

Good job guys.
> Due to the way that I pulled the voting information (I actually pulled it from the cache that we use to show you liked and disliked pages, which is in Cassandra and turns out to be cheap to query), you won't get more than 1k upvotes or downvotes per user, no matter how many votes they've made, so that so many have 2k isn't surprising.
This is really awesome. I'm going to Bangkok on Saturday so I tweeted "@wtf bangkok", and it keeps tweeting me the top stories about bangkok as they happen (like the grenade attack earlier today).

Only suggestion: let me track multiple topics!
You got it. I worked in marketing for years and was always shocked at how much personal data we could get our hands on. It makes the recent dust ups about online privacy look (almost) tame in comparison, yet these profiling companies get away with it because no one realizes what's going on.
Why would a high-end retail store care? They sell some product. They might be unwilling or unable to enter some market - and this guy does it for them. The retail store still receives the money and people who get the product are aware of the fact that they paid more than they would at the shop.

I still don't get why this practice is unacceptable. The shop doesn't seem to lose anything here.
The irony is that usually there are no asteroids headed for earth, so it is debatable how useful the astronauts and nuclear warhead constructors are.
It's common, but necessary? It's an attempt to avoid the effects of an actual free market by attempting to prevent secondary markets from emerging. An alternative would be to compete on a normal market basis, selling products to willing buyers for mutually agreed upon prices, without attempting to further restrict what they do with them after purchase.
For every noble minded person who, out of the goodness of their own heart, runs other people's errands to the Apple Store, there's probably >1 scalper, on average.
I haven't played SimCity since version 1, but in those days I thought it unrealistically penalised any city without a huge rail network.

But I think the idea of a city without roads is unrealistic, except in the case of Venice where canals take the place of roads for delivery and construction purposes.
IPhone, Gizmodo: Gruber Naive About Law
I have no problem with the iPad-limit policy. The annoying part was that the clerk was not able to volunteer any information at all about what the policy actually says. From the customer's tone it seems like he wasn't going to throw a fit, but it would be nice if Apple were slightly more forthcoming.
I doubt it matters to Google since they know they don't have to officially support it. People want it so eventually it will happen.
Isn't that a bit cocky? "We, Ubuntu, the biggest most important distro out there, are doing away with the Notification tray, so if you want our millions of users to use it, you'd better get with it." What about the other distros? Are they going to have to follow suit after all the applications rewrite their code? I can understand this coming from Gnome, perhaps, but Ubuntu doesn't own Gnome. Why not have a wrapper for the notification area that turns it into a menu, for a last resort?
> resells it at a price far above the initial cost

This is often what happens but it isn't a necessary condition to be a scalper. You can sell tickets for at or even below the initial cost and still be considered a scalper.

Indeed many scalpers often unload tickets for less than face value if they can't find a buyer at the price they want.
A grid of subway stations with a stop at every block? Sounds rather expensive.

Besides, all attempts to build "perfect" cities in real life have resulted in dull and lifeless places. A certain amount of chaos is necessary to keep cities liveable.
starring Jennifer Aniston and John Kasinski.
Can you give an example of how they are going to 'help separate you from hundreds or thousands of your dollars'?
This is total bs. The ONLY thing that can stop an astroid is Bruce Willis. And aerosmith.
Not exactly. SVG syntax describes a scene, it does not draw on screen directly.

When you animate an SVG image, you update the DOM. The browser then needs to parse the DOM (attributes) again, then clear the screen and draw each element again. This is a lot more work than just mapping the drawing primitives of Canvas to the lower-level GPU functions.

Check this presentation for the two technologies compared in terms of how much work is required for animation: http://www.slideshare.net/madrobby/i-cant-believe-its-not-fl...
Why Didn't Facebook Launch Location Features?
yes, but that is what makes a good project design, a good separation of UI from what its doing -- its why libcurl is adopted by dozens of other projects for their http library, while wget doesn't have a properly written separate library for 3rd party use, they significantly reduced the group of people who would contribute.

In addition, because curl is under a BSD/MIT/apcahe style license, you are in a better position to develop a diverse community.
I think that one was skewed by fanboyism.
How to Crowdfund your Startup
The issue is that if you OVERSHOOT, you have inventory you paid for but do not get paid for in turn.

You almost always want to undershoot.
Any decent browser should be able to block content by URL. Use your adblocker.
They still make market work the right way. Limited supply & higher demand -> price increase.

They do not up market value (they up price). It is a side effect of artificial supply limit by the original vendor.

If there is no artificial limit (tickets for example), it means that the price was too low in the first place and buyers are willing to pay more.

Scalpers are market-based correction tool.
Because they feel that shopping experience is part of their brand and people buying their "high-end" products in large quantities just to sell them elsewhere would hurt the brand on long term. Don't forget that Apple is very careful about its brand and image.

I'm not saying I agree with this practice, that's just the reason this is disallowed.
SVG is easier out of the box, but you can also use a "scene graph" JavaScript library to create an object abstraction on top of Canvas. In my experience managing the scene graph in JS turns out to be much faster than letting the browser handle it with SVG.
How do you know you are looking at the same website that he's talking about?

Plus, not sure why you think the user wouldn't need to redownload the assets that change each day.
Awesome. If I reply stop does it stop everything? I want more granular controls! Nice job though.
They settled with ThinkSecret, probably paying a ton of cash to Ciarelli, to shut it down. Don't think that's going to happen with Gizmodo...
For me, it's because upgrades are not simply "what you have now, but incrementally and linearly improved", but a mixture of "stuff you liked, now gone", "some things fixed", "some things now broken", "new cool features", and "crap you don't want but now have to live with".

For example, in FF2 all the profile stuff was text. I could easily copy cookies form one machine to another, or tweak some settings file. Now I have some sqlite db files in there that are much less easy to hack on.

I've had useful add-ons stop working in FF3 as well. And I haven't seen any real improvements in FF3 or FF2. Doesn't seem any better with memory, doesn't seem to crash less often.

I've considered making Chrome my main browser, but until recently (as far as I know) it broke some essential command line behaviour: when I start an app from the CL I want it to always open a new instance. I do not want a new tab in an existing instance. Especially if that existing instance is on some other desktop.

But Chrome is still lacking some of the add-ons I like for Firefox (though that's improving as well).

Dear LazyWeb: Is there something like Ruby Version Manager, but for browsers?
At least we can say the bar is higher than reddit where half the stories are dominated by a big 50-level-deep thread of stupid puns.
It seems the outrage is mostly about the seemingly excessive punishment. After all, he wasn't sneaky. It's up to Apple to enforce the policy for normally purchasing customers. His behavior was no different than someone who was ignorant of the policy. [edit, ok, a little, but presumably the ignorant could innocently visit different stores, too]

And then on top of that, they refuse to give further information that they obviously have. Lifetime limit? The policy says there is a limit on the number that customers can purchase, the number 2 clearly seems to mean "per customer" or "for now". Clearly the lifetime limit is not two. So what is it? Or is it just weasel words?
My local supermarket has a small “no more than 5kg per purchase” sign next to the noodles.
See http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy&section=ap...

For those who don't want to have to log in to find out:

"What your friends can share about you through applications and websites:

When your friend visits a Facebook-enhanced application or website, they may want to share certain information to make the experience more social. For example, a greeting card application may use your birthday information to prompt your friend to send a card

If your friend uses an application that you do not use, you can control what types of information the application can access. Please note that applications will always be able to access your publicly available information (Name, Profile Picture, Gender, Current City, Networks, Friend List, and Pages) and information that is visible to Everyone."

(I'm pretty sure at least current city wasn't on that list until fairly recently.)

Checkboxes for lots of other information follow.
Really, #1 (pg), #3 (Gary V.), and AVC (Fred Wilson) were the only real "titans" that influenced my decision to go off and build a startup, and they might make up only 20% of the first order influence. The rest of the people were close friends and random HN posters. The power of a community is not in the leader its in the masses.
It's dry ice not fog, essentially it's solid-state co2 that evaporates. I used to use this stuff all the time when I did techno raves and underground parties back in the 90's. It looks frikkin cool, and I would presume that's why they use it.

You can also use it for freezing fresh fish to -20 degrees celsius to kill off the parasites before using the fish for sushi :-)
Hey ricky, I'm glad you like it!.

Right now you can only track one thing at a time but we will be adding the feature to track multiple words soon. There is a hack in the mean time, just use "@wtf word1 OR word2".

--AJ.
You can always try this:

http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_ac...

Claims to "permanently" delete the account. We can hope they keep their word, though I don't trust it much.
Good luck in Thailand, and stay safe.
I was there a few months ago, and it was great, but it sounds nasty right now.
>It's no skin off Apple's back for two reasons. First, you already paid for the device; they have your money.

App store.
Hope there's no bug in it.
Agreed, simcity uses a static model. So the rules can be deduced. In reality we don't actually know what the rules are and they are much more dynamic -- i.e. the introduction of the internet, the car, the cell phone, etc. These have impacts on cities, and what people expect from them.
I would say almost anything: There are hundreds of libraries build together to improve certain life-values (education levels?) in those maps.
Dupe http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1258427
If you're worried about it, get a loyalty card and provide fictitious information on the form. I've never been asked to provide any proof of identity to get a supermarket loyalty card.

Though if you use your loyalty card and then pay with a credit card I guess they could link back to the "real" you.
City of Ontario CA vs Jeff Quon [pdf]
> I'm really not aware of any pro-global-climate-change corporations paying

Are you suggesting that corporations are the only parties that have interests?

> opinions favorable to themselves

Irrelevant.

Do you believe that NSF or the Energy Department views research likely to be critical of AGW the same way that it views research that is likely to be supportive?

I do appreciate that you're demonstrating my claim that many folks think that monetary self-interest is the only corrupting influence. Many folks don't after I point that out because they realize that it isn't, that it isn't even the big one.
maybe they are still afraid of the web 2.0 suicide machine :P
Apple's iWork Site Requires "Newer Browser"
Teenagers make $170k on Apple iPhone OS platform
Shouldn't Oracle be hyping up the new Java 7 features (coming soon at only $1999/seat)?
I've seen this presentation irl (not at Google).

The most fascinating part for me is the progress of radar equipment in just few war years. It's unfortunate that necessity is the hardest driver of innovation, one can only dream what would be achieved if this level of innovation would be sustainable.
what if the subways weren't subways we know of today, but rather conveyor belt like roads. might be feasible if in a more automated future.
they feel that shopping experience is part of their brand

You're right, but say it like you mean it. They treat your opinion of their company as their property.

That's what having a brand means.
So there is a surplus of black women. And a surplus of Chinese men eh?
Why they care: I was recently shopping for a camera. The one I wanted was supposed to retail for about $900. But it's new and popular, so it's selling for $1100 (or out of stock). I've decided that's too much, so I'm considering other options.

If the only message I got was out of stock, I'd probably wait. But upon learning that the price is actually $1100, that triggered a different psychological response, and now I'm looking for something cheaper. Something from a different manufacturer.

So sure, in the short term, they are selling all they can. But in the future, when they have more capacity, they just lost a sale.
he obviously doesn't own a mac.
Years ago, when caller ID was becoming commonplace, a company (I think it was American Express) started answering customer calls by name--- "Hello Mr. Jones, how can we help you."

This proved to be very unpopular with customers and they stopped doing it... they probably still use the caller ID but don't let you know that they are.
The load avg on that machine hasn't gone above .01 :)
Fascinating. I've always fully justified the text on the sites I work on. But I've never compared samples side-by-side as demonstrated on this site. I was immediately struck by how much easier the "ragged right" version is to read. Something about fully justified text seems to slow me down.
I'm assuming you're trolling, but on the off chance you're not - grandiose, self-congratulatory BS like your comment is exactly why articles like this get written.
Am I missing the joke here?
Whatever they did to get the @wtf account, it was worth it. Best brand name launch all year, hands down, game over, go home.
Support for Raster Graphics added in latest version of R
> Scary how his optimal city has no one over age 60.

Logan's Run or Soylent Green?
It's much more important to me to be able to change the resolution on my monitor (impossible to do anything other than 480x640 on 9.10) than what color the default theme is.
What I mean to say is that for Ubuntu to displace Windows in any measurable amount, the things that users expect to work have to work. While I am happy to edit my xorg.conf file because ubuntu doesn't recognize certain graphics card/monitor combinations, my mother would not.
My office laptop was recently upgraded from Windows XP to Windows 7. The background colors and overall theme changed. After a few days, I didn't notice it any more, nor was there a HN post about the color scheme change.
What I did notice was that offline folders worked a lot better than with XP. Those are the changes that actually make a difference to users. Users adapt to different themes and visuals pretty quickly.
Ubuntu has made huge strides in desktop linux usability, but Canonical needs to continue to focus on ironing out the last remaining kinks so it "just works."
The pricing of the product and whether or not the product is "locked down" are two totally separate issues. Even if retailers and manufacturers raised prices during supply pinches and the initial rush, that wouldn't mean the product would be any more or less locked down.

As long as sales are made, any price is "mutually agreed upon". Manufacturers just choose to agree to a lower price than they could otherwise get away with, which causes shortages and rationing.
Intelligent != Snobby, is all I'll say to that.

I have 2 pieces of advice for anyone who habitually mutters about the levels of discourse not reaching their intellectual standards:

A) You're nowhere near as smart as you think you are.
B) Relax, it's ok.
Indeed. and you make a good point about cars, that being that if one actively shows the thing off in public one is inviting scrutiny. I would have no problem at all with a story along the lines of 'Man spotted in bar photographing self with iPhone - new model must have front-facing camera'. For that matter I'd be OK with 'iPhone prototype found? Man finds functional iPhone, but exterior case looks fake (obvious exterior facts)'.

But suppose, to stick with the car example, the driver of a prototype car parked in a public lot and then dropped the keys, or was careless enough to leave them in the ignition. Would it be legitimate for someone to drive away and then sell it to a car fansite so they could pop the hood and partially disassemble it? There's a large qualitative difference between passive observation and active taking into possession. And I don't think opening the case is a proper means of evaluating a lost item, especially not when one has already ascertained the identity of the owner (by recognizing him from his facebook page, where he was easily contactable).

Thanks for taking the time to flesh out your argument. I was hoping you'd refer me to the statute for industrial espionage, by the way, because I think you might be surprised at its scope and specificity. Would you like to, or shall I?