skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been reading on the iPad since release. It's not difficult to read on at all and I have yet to suffer any eye strain. You can read just fine in natural light, direct sunlight is the only real issue...sit under a tree.

The idea that the iPad is difficult to read on has been spread mostly by.. surprise surprise... people that haven't actually read on it.

I'm sure some people may not be able to look at the screen for long. They're the same people that can't look at any computer screen for long.

Yes, you can have glare issues on rare occasion. They're usually solved by shifting the iPad slightly.

Most of us stare at screen over 8 hours a day. I can understand if you want to go home and look at something else but honestly, it has yet to bother me.

The reason so few eBooks have been sold is because the selection is weak. The books I want are almost always in the Kindle store and are rarely in iBooks. However I still use my iPad to read those Kindle books.

Additionally, that's 1.5 books a person via iBooks alone, over a 4 week period, that doesn't count the Kindle purchases. That number seems pretty good to me.
Don't look any where else other than the following books

1: Programming in Objective-C 2.0 (2nd Edition) by Stephen G. Kochan

2: Learning Cocoa with Objective-C, 2nd Edition by James Duncan Davidson
The problem for me was that the example you gave (yourself) was way too meta for the typical end user. It needs to be more obvious what the problem is. For this reason "Does this solve your problem?" is a horrible opener.

Here's the process: (1) State the problem, (2) Propose your solution, then (3) ask for feedback.

Overall: Don't make me think. You're never going to get replies otherwise. A big textbox is daunting.

I imagine this almost as a streamlined "proposal" process. Lets say you get an RFP from Widgetia, a company that creates and sells widgets. You get the RFP (problem), then you write a proposal (comprehensive or not) to address the the problem. Because this is on the web, you can use text, photos, video, whatever. Just communicate the solution as efficiently as possible.

Then your job is to ask people to identify. "Does this sound like you?" "Would this work for you?" Don't put just one textbox. Put a couple -- in strategic spots in your presentation. You'll gather better contextual feedback as well as gather analytics on when/where people are commenting to gauge how effective your presentation was.

HTH. Good luck.
Have you tried adding a function that converts between locales and ordering/indexing by that in Postgres?

Like in this thread: http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2004-09/msg0075...
"Additionally, a Windows 7 license will bring up the price of any final Slate product, and now that HP owns WebOS, the move makes sense."

"TechCrunch says also that HP is set to drop the Intel processor used in the tablet, which would completely kill off any chance of Windows 7 being used."

This gives HP more negotiating leverage over Microsoft and Intel. Now that they have their own OS they can put on new form factor devices, Microsoft will have to give HP a good deal to get Windows on those devices. Windows is tied pretty tightly to Intel, so owning WebOS gives them more flexibility in processor architecture. Negotiating over new devices could lead to lower prices from Microsoft and Intel all around.

This alone could justify the price they paid for Palm, over time.
I bought one for my wife, and ended up stealing it because of the momentum scrolling.

It's not as nice of an input device as Apple's trackpad, but it's my favorite mouse to date. (and the first Apple mouse that I actually enjoyed using.)
It's worth noting that those are books DOWNLOADED, not sold.

In addition to all the freely available titles in the Book store, everyone who downloads iBooks is also prompted to download a free Winnie the Pooh title. I expect virtually nobody selects "No" for this.

I would be very interested to know how many titles that have actually sold. I expect it's a fraction of 1.5 million.
Apple in antitrust crosshairs?
Amazon Starts Sharing What You’ve Highlighted on Your Kindle
They're not even comparable as e-readers

Everything is comparable once you own one or the other. The risk to the Kindle is not that people shopping for e-readers will choose the iPad over it for that purpose, but that people who buy iPads for any number of other reasons will be less likely to buy dedicated e-readers.
Business vertical forums [spreadsheet]
20 Powerful Time Management Tools
I have experienced the same frustration on my iPhone 3G. I can vouch that the speed is greatly improved on the iPad. The PDF viewer is now actually pleasant. (It's amazing what a little clock speed will do.)
I created this spreadsheet so anyone could contribute to the original list (http://www.querycell.com/Business_Forum_Discussion.html) posted on HN yesterday. Feel free to manage the list and keep it clean as this is my first time with Google Docs!
I agree about Google maps, but that is Google's defect to fix. I doubt they will.

The flatness doesn't bother me. I hold it in my fingers, thumb,ring,pinky on the edges, two fingers for driving.

The mighty mouse always annoyed me for the randomly sensitive side squeeze clicker. Of the various units I had some required a great effort to click and some would click if you looked at them sternly. I just disabled the functions for that clicker. Oh, and don't get me started on the eventual failure of the little top balls. Nothing quite so irritating as a top ball that will scroll down but not up.

Unfortunately I have to buy a new keyboard. They moved the control key and I can't keep my brain straight so I have to make my keyboards match.
Bit of a misleading headline. The article suggests that we are less skeptical of people we already agree with and in particular of people in positions of perceived authority.
it's funny you mention BeOS, since it's now/will be HP's with the Palm acquisition.
Isn't this just good old group commit? I'm surprised the kernel wouldn't do this optimization for you.
Will do! Rushing off to work at the moment, so I'll start implementing a lot of these changes in a few hours.
+1 If you're asking people to come back frequently, you've got to improve readability. Simple is great, but the contrast hurts my eyes.
Douglas Adams on Parrots, the Universe and Everything
Show HN: HN Recap - Daily, ranked list of articles that hit the front page
Hey guys,

I just flicked the switch on http://hnrecap.com and thought I would make a tiny announcement!

The site was created for a simple reason: There is a big rotation of articles on the front page of Hacker News every day, and unless you are on here 24/7, you are bound to miss some great content and discussions. I was tired of this and the rss feed doesn't cut it for me since it doesn't preserve ranking information over time.

On HN Recap, rankings are somewhat preserved: Every 2 minutes, I request the HN front page, update articles and attribute points in the following simple fashion: #1 gets 30 points, #2, 29 and so on...

I did notice a small bug with the display of article titles with HTML entities in them but other than that, it works as expected. Once I have about a week's worth of data, I will also add a way to view archives from previous days so it is possible to catch up if you missed a few days.

I honestly just made it to fulfil my needs, but I thought it might end up being useful for others with similar requirements, hence this post.

Enjoy!
Sounds interesting. Anything you can share?
What encoding parameters did you use?
We will reach $500/bbl eventually after the US dollar is hyper inflated away.
HN is starting to feel like Digg.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1160552
Running wxPython on top of PyPy
The comments ask whether physicists at lectures would be susceptible to the same phenomenon. I'm inclined to doubt that. It's a rare speaker indeed who makes it through even a five minute session without blistering Q&A.

"Mr. Wilson, ve at za Max Planck Institute for Kernphysic invented zis field, and you are doing it vrong! You have neglected ze contribution of higher order terms without grounds, and as results from Bergen, et al show..."

Sometimes, I wonder what a religion would be like with rapid-fire talks anyone could speak at, poster sessions, and critique for every presenter.
How many times do we need to go through this cycle?

JBehave: text

RBehave (based on JBehave): code

RSpec Story Runner (based on RBehave): code, later also text

Cucumber (based on RSpec Story Runner): text

Steak (based on Cucumber): code
Step 1) Create accounts on sites such as HN solely for the purpose of submitting your own articles.
For learning your way around Cocoa Touch, I highly recommend Erica Sadun's "The iPhone Developer's Cookbook". I reviewed the first edition last year on my blog (http://blog.ablepear.com/2009/03/book-review-iphone-develope...). She recently released a second edition, which I haven't had a chance to read through yet, but is nearly twice as big as the first edition.
Clickable link: http://hnrecap.com
2. the scrolling is too sensitive to the touch. have you tried Google maps? it's unusable.

I think that's a Safari bug. It's sending pixel-resolution scroll events to web pages (like Google Maps) instead of line-resolution scroll events.

Firefox gets it right, surprisingly.
I'm not a hacker by any means and so I didn't really want to get knee-deep in lisp/arc as I wanted to get something up quickly. Met Rust in #startups who approached me because he wanted to do some open source work and decided doing an HN-type thing would be cool. The language was entirely his choice. I just needed a working site. :P And he did a great job!
The only thing worse than being in distant second place is being in distant third place. HP is weird, their laptops aren't the best, their netbooks aren't the best, and now they are rolling out tablets with a proprietary, untested operating system. My prediction: fail.
But the electricity powering the Internet is also somewhat oil-based, depending on exactly what fuels you local plant runs.
It may not impact the individual homeowner, but the costs of the data centers and network providers will increase alongside oil prices.
There seems to be more to the study that you might find interesting--just wish there was a way for us "lay people" to access the paper without paying a huge fee for access =/

Link to study abstract "The power of charisma--perceived charisma inhibits the frontal executive network of believers in intercessory prayer"
http://scan.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2010/03/12/scan...
Get a obvious Understanding How to Write a Thesis
Thesis statement is a very important part of writing experience of every student or scientist. Doing a thesis or a dissertation one can face some difficulties. That is why planning and writing up a research leads to some stresses and worries for a great number of students.
Universal Network Cable
I went back to school with only a slightly higher math background than yours. By the time I was ready to go back, my already neglected math skills had atrophied, but it wasn't like I never attended algebra class in high school.

For me, I read a GRE prep book (it had concise reminders for basic things I should have known, and probably did at one point, but potentially forgot.) Following that I worked a college textbook for Calculus and enrolled for Calculus II at a local community college. I took all the math courses there and I'm now at a four year considering a math double major. Go figure, I thought I hated math.

I still hit embarrassing gaps from time to time, but I'm at the point that filling them in isn't such an ordeal. It is strange though to be in a 400 level class and to be the only guy that gets caught up on some basic high school thing. At this point though all that stuff seems simple once looked at.

Good luck with the mathematics. It's worth it.
If they made this opt-in, it would be great. When I read a physical book, it is a private thing and to maintain the integrity of the experience it should be opt-in.

That being said, I would be interested to see the results of what people are highlighting -- especially if they highlight and comment. I have also thought that the kindle should have a "Fire Notes" (kindle + spark notes = fire notes?) where you can download it and hook it onto the file and have the notes within the book. It would be great for classes and independent readers.
Microsoft force you to use .Net (of some form) and their APIs because that fits their business model (i.e. ties you to the XBox). They're restricting me from using my platform portable pure C code, which is their choice.

You're missing the point. Microsoft makes it technically difficult to write a game in a non-.net language, but (at least as far as anyone knows) it's not disallowed in their developer agreement. If you can get LLVM to spit out .net bytecode that works, then good on you, there's nothing keeping you from using it. There's no clause that prevents you from writing a Lisp interpreter in your game, nothing to keep you from auto-generating C# from template files, etc. The only reason people don't do these things is that they're a pain in the ass, not that they would be in violation of the developer's agreements that they signed.

Certainly attempting to achieve developer lock-in is part of good business, especially in the world of game development. But make no mistake, Apple is in uncharted territory here: rather than trying to get people locked-in by providing a smoother workflow with their toolset than they'd find elsewhere (which is what Microsoft does with .NET), they're declaring that all other tools, better or worse, are strictly prohibited.

They're making choices based on what they think is best for their platform, and letting the market chose. This is how the free market is supposed to work.

Bundling IE with Windows without any option to replace the browser is what would be best for the Windows platform. A "plato o plomo" acquisition/sued-to-death strategy employed by would-be-monopolists to kill off competition before it's big enough to compete is best for the business. Gauging prices in a market where a near monopoly exists is "best for the platform."

What you're really hinting at is a discomfort with the entire idea of anti-trust legislation, another discussion altogether. Suffice it to say that "let the market decide" would, if taken as mantra, excuse every sort of monopolistic or anti-competitive abuse that we've ever seen, which indicates to me that it's not a remotely valid argument.

In this case, Apple has, with a stroke of the pen, killed off several toolsets that compete with the one that they're trying to promote. It reads like a textbook example of tying, using control over a mobile phone application marketplace to kill off competition in the developer tools market, and it's almost entirely targeted at a single competitor (though there's plenty of collateral damage, as well, Unity et al).

I think Apple may have something to worry about here.
Both are YAGNI. Java programmers want the non-programmers to configure their application, but of course, the XML files are actually critical code, so this can't happen. Similarly, Rubyists want "anyone" to write tests, so they figure that a natural language interface will allow that.

The reality is that you are the only person working on your app, and this is all a waste of your time. Just write regular code -- it's more readable and more concise.
United Airlines & Continental Airlines agree to merge
> I've found a bunch of use cases where the iPad excels

What are those ?

edit: why would a genuine question out of curiosity be modded down? I'm really weirded out by that. The ipad is a reasonably new form factor and new form factors bring new use cases, and I'd like to know what those are.
In many ways it was a final inflation of the bubble, as profit-takers getting out from a structurally unsound housing & CDO market looked for somewhere to park their excess cash and found a delightfully under-regulated exchange on which to do so. A great number of the oil future contracts were traded on an exchange called ICE, which had managed to set itself up in such a way that both US and UK financial regulators each thought the other was supervising it, when in fact neither were. It's a rather convoluted story that hasn't really been told yet, as it was overshadowed by subsequent events. the reasons I don't think it directly caused the full-scale market collapse are that a) no big banks got massively exposed to the oil price inflation - they could see it was speculative, and it inflated and popped so quickly that they never structured their positions around it; and b) the subprime market and all the other distortions (zero down, stated income, etc.) were already looking ropey by then.

Soaring oil prices might have pushed a few consumers over the edge into mortgage default, but even if that hadn't happened I think the market would have imploded within a few months of the 2008 election anyway. Recall that Bear Stearns had to put up $3.2 bn to rescue its two hedge funds in June of 2007, and Merrill Lynch's inability to sell more than about 12% of the CDO assets it seized was the first clue (for the public at large) that the financial industry had a systemic rather than a localized problem - and this was almost a year before the oil price spike. By the time that occurred, the stock market was in decline, Bush had already administered a $145 bn stimulus (remember that $800 tax rebate in 2008?), Bear had collapsed, the NY Fed had underwriting their acquisition by JP Morgan to the tune of $25 billion. So our economy was already in poor shape by March of 08, which was when oil prices suddenly took off like a rocket. At the time, I wondered if the sudden rise was in response to the structural weaknesses in the US and European economies, which shared both enormous housing booms and huge amounts of counterparty risk: it seemed as if traders were looking at oil as a substitute currency (energy is a much better candidate for solid money than gold) and using it to impose a sort of reverse devaluation of the dollar and euro. With hindsight I don't really think so, though - it was a simple pile-in rather than the dawning of a new economic concept.

BTW thanks for that CIBC paper you linked to below - although I don't quite agree with the 'big picture' analysis it's still a great read.
government intervention is of course a euphemism for rationing. Rationing creates shortages which in turn causes steeper rationing, with the result being the economy slows to whatever pace is consistent with the limited supply of energy. For the USA that looks to be a lonnnng way down from here.
I think it depends a lot of where you are reading. I'm sure the iPad would work fine for my commute on the subway. I'm sure I'd rather have a Kindle on the beach. (though I probably wouldn't bring either to the beach since they are going to get stolen or damaged)
To put it even more starkly, if Apple were to revise the API, then the middleware pushes an update, and all those hundreds or thousand of app developers simply recompile with the new OS target. All of their apps are now feature-compatible with Shiny New Feature X, rather than those hundreds or thousands of developers all having to replicate the same work. This is Frameworks 101.

The entire point of an abstraction layer is to isolate a developer away from the underlying systems, to let him write more business logic and less systems support code. All modern software development is built on the concept of frameworks, layers of abstraction, and the like. Even Objective C itself is an abstraction away from the ARM11 instruction set on the iPhone's CPU. Do developers writing Objective C produce inherently inferior apps to those writing ARM11 assembly?

Frameworks reduce the total number of man-hours required to produce and maintain software. I will argue that a good framework produces more high quality software than a bunch of developers all rolling apps on the metal, which then have a longer lifetime, due to the fact that fewer developer hours are required per app to maintain it moving forward. (Please note that I am not making any kind of judgment here about whether or not CS5 constitutes a "good framework".)

It takes some pretty serious denial to see Jobs' case against middleware, cross-compilers, and abstraction layers as anything but an attempt to lock developers solely into the Apple ecosystem. Frameworks reduce developer hours in more than one way - they reduce the number of hours required to put your app on multiple platforms. (To put it another way, this is why we have 3D engines like Unreal and Crytek; it's why we have 3D API layers like OpenGL and DirectX. You can write a game without them, but you'll spend thousands of hours solving problems that have already been solved for no appreciable benefit.) It's abundantly clear that there is no real technical justification for the clause; Apple is attempting to increase the amount of work that developers have to do to target multiple platforms, so that they'll simply give up and pick one: Apple's.
Great, so all we need now is a library named 'Strippers'. (see: http://blog.cusec.net/2009/01/05/zed-shaw-the-acl-is-dead-cu... )
> In the iPad I can carry enough of what I need with me without having to carry multiple devices.

You'd still need to bring a phone though, as it can not do voice calls.
"But anyone who has run a marathon knows that it’s not all science. There is a huge mental component in the last six miles. Humans aren’t designed to run that far."?

I think she should visit the Tarahumara http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarahumara
The assumption this article is making is that you want to get 50k views in the first month. After getting slashdotted once, I can say that I'm not in as big a hurry to show my blog off to the masses as I was beforehand.

I'd much rather target my post to a smaller number of intelligent people who will get it than a large number of people who will bikeshed it.
Why is writing "oh hai, i want my blog to be totally teh awesome. it must have no posts initially, and then should have one post after i add a post with the text OH HAI." better than writing "my $blog = Blog->new; is $blog->post_count, 0; $blog->post("OH HAI"); is $blog->post_count, 1;"?
Small saving grace - their enterprise notebook lineup rocks. I am typing this one one. Solid aluminium body, reasonable prices, and best of all 24/7 online chat support where they help you out if you have any issue (The two times Ive had to use the support theyve been rather clueful). Also the three year next day warranty is built into the price. Sadly the elitebook isnt a well established brand.
I'm okay with this so long as there's absolutely no identifying information that goes along with it.

Having said that, if I had a kindle, I guess I'd start highlighting every obscenity.
Edit: you removed the post or what happened?

I am well aware of that, but simply claiming it's an urban myth is not the same as proving it's wrong. I have provided the links I could find, take that for what you want.

It doesn't take a hundred or even 50 years why do you think the body fall apart over time. If the body was static we wouldn't die let a lone grow up to die.

It is a fact that the human body is in flux and not stable it is also a fact that your cells most of them die out pretty fast which is why we have to eat and drink. And that is what matters. The you today isn't the same you as 7 years ago.