skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think both quotes work perfectly well. I'm not reading into the first whatever it is you think the second avoids.

"much" I personally quantify on the basis of "things a normal user does at least weekly". If half the things a normal user does weekly can't be reasonably done on the iPad, that's 'much'. If we're down to one or two things, that's not much.

"most PC users" I personally define as the people who are primarily concerned with outcomes as opposed to technologies. The kind who don't care whether a device does or doesn't 'do' Flash; they only care when a site they visit doesn't do the things they want it to do.

To approximate 'much' and 'most PC users', try this:
Suppose you're on vacation for a week. You take the iPad with you to the lounge for happy hour and leave the laptop in the room.

(You're on vacation to get away from the corporate concerns that normal users don't have. You're in the lounge to give us a threshold to determine if an outcome is realistically feasible or not.)

How many things might you want to do during a week of happy hours, where you'd rather go back to your room to use the laptop, rather than just use the iPad?

i.e. If you'd rather go up to use the laptop, then the iPad's capability is moot, because it's too onerous even if it exists. And if the better interface isn't worth the five minute walk, then the iPad 'can' do that task, even if not ideally.

Crunching that spreadsheet might be less annoying if you could browse during the process, but if the wait is only a minute or two, you'd probably just grumble about the lack of backgrounding and stay where you were.

A more serious spreadsheet might be worth the walk. But how often would those come up?

Similarly, you might want some files that are on a USB key. Now, do you just take the key upstairs, or can you get those files with an alternative workflow that is less annoying that going up to the room? (e.g. downloading the files directly to the iPad if they're on a server. Or emailing the person who gave you the key and asking them to email a zip file. or otherwise post them.)

If there's a lot of data, or if you keep important stuff on there as a matter of course, then it's probably easier to just run up to the room.

But how often are you accessing data that's only on a thumb-drive and inconvenient enough to get another way that you hop on that elevator?

etc.

The workflow problem is, in my mind, a far more serious problem than a lack of flash or usb mass storage support. It's the unavoidable barrier that prevents the iPad being remotely arguable as suitable as a primary device for any user. Until that's addressed --while still not a toy-- the iPad will forever be a secondary device.
>My netbook has to be coaxed through the day with Wi-Fi switched off in order to get more than a few hours out of the battery; my 15″ laptop only goes 2-3 hours between charges (newer models may be better, but I can’t change laptops at the drop of a hat); meanwhile, I find the iPad easy enough to type on in landscape mode, it turns on/off instantly and, after 8 hours taking notes and tweeting yesterday, it still had an indicated battery charge of 55%.

Sounds like this guy's real problem is battery life (and, to a lesser extent, slow resume from sleep), not keyboard vs. no keyboard. The iPad gets 16 hours or whatever in part because it has a 9.7 inch screen compared to his laptops 15 inches or so. My netbook with a 10.5 inch screen gets 8 real hours of battery life.

So yes, keyboardlessness is good insofar as it enables you to have a tiny screen (since a tiny screen with a usable size keyboard would be awkward). But I only use my netbook 6 or less hours a day, so for me I easily trade the difference between 8 and 16 hours for a real keyboard. As battery life gets better, that will make sense for more people, unless keyboardless entry starts making big progress (which is possible). But even then, I'd still rather have a larger screen and $200.
Nice to put a face to peoples HN handles
These guys really know a ton about search. If you want to create a new type of mashup app or are having serious issues getting your stuff to work, check 'em out.
Offerpal Media Changes Name to Tapjoy, Inc.
Cloaking device boldly delivers toxins to tumor
Pretty much every one of the attempts at editorial comedy.
People are only reading a post like that if they've been inconvenienced. Comedy is hard to pitch at an angry crowd, so unless you're really good at it, it's probably best not to try.
Some of this savings has to be from by going 10% slower? Since drag is quadratic, doesn't that mean a 20% reduction in drag alone?
Possible Cause of Bee Die-Off Is Found
Intel's SSDs don't perform worse if you don't use TRIM. They pre-erase and move blocks of data around in background so that when you go to write there is always some space to do so.

The downside is that sequential writes are bandwidth-limited compared to other SSDs, but this doesn't matter in practice with small random writes completing very quickly.
The same argument says Windows is the best desktop/laptop software. "The customers have spoken."
Fuck them up. It's the only thing these vicious freaks understand

They're wild animals.

Impose your will on them.

Teach your kid to fight back and fight smart

Fight dirty if you have to.

If you're much smaller, pick up a hard object and do it.

Show them that you'll go to self-destructive lengths to defend yourself

I agree with this. This is why I've given my kids knives. Most bullies are dumb and unarmed, so it's easy to catch them off guard with a quick shiv to the kidney. Plus if you're a minor and you aren't a non-asian minority or hillbilly you'll get off scott free and your record will be expunged when you turn 18.
O - okay that's pretty rad.
As others have noted, the key Business person skill is selling. But there's a lot more than that. That's just to get in the door. And "selling" comes in many flavors, make sure it's the right one for that business. (Big Corp people may have trouble or be trouble, if they have no entrepreneurial experience.)

Beside the selling? Marketing, writing, understanding enough of the tech side; creativity; being able to see the "big picture" of the business. There's also the finance and accounting stuff; that would normally be a separate job, but your business person can do some of that too; they must understand financials.

Someone straight out of an MBA program is probably not so great, unless they have hands-on experience.

Although your business person will start off doing all kinds of things, another skill is if they can "hand off" responsibilities as the business grows.
http://iWantMyName.com - built by 2 1/2 guys over the last two years out of frustration with the domain registrar business practices. we are not hugely profitable yet but we can live off it and work on our own project which is rewarding enough for the moment.
7 Definitive Signs He's in Love With You
Here are the 7 signs he’s in love with you. Women can generally be very communicative, but men do not speak out their minds. Though men do not speak out what is going through their minds, there are tell-tale signs to know what he feels for you.
Too true, hence the need for more businessmen/women in office. I would think a lot of cuts they're recommending could be accomplished through executive orders as a lot of them are involving federal programs and mandates. If not we could only hope both sides could come to an agreement and pass them through the houses.
Maybe you can have people donate their junk domains that they bought out of whim. I'm sure every HN reader probably have a few dozen domains that they let expire every year.
This isn't happening for the exact same reasons it's never been happening:

1. Newspapers and bloggers love this story. It generates clicks.

2. People want an iPhone on other networks. This makes them want to believe this in spite of the evidence.

3. CDMA doesn't do simultaneous voice and data. Apple is unlikely to try and explain such a difference to consumers given their focus on user experience.

4. CDMA is a dead/dying technology. Jobs summed this up In his D8 interview (when talking about Flash): Apple picks technologies in their "Spring". CDMA will be phased out in favor of LTE.

5. Most of the world uses GSM. The market for CDMA is small. People in the US forget this because of Verizon.

6. Apple tests far more products than they release. I'm sure there has been a CDMA iPhone. That doesn't mean it will be launched as a product.

7. AT&T had a five year exclusivity deal with the iPhone starting in 2007 according to court documents. While this may have changed it seems unlikely that AT&T would give this up without getting something huge in return. The only possibility realistically us that AT&T has failed to meet it's contractual requirements somehow.

8. AT&T service apparently sucks in SF and NYC, where most tech journalists and bloggers are. They are fine in most of the rest of the country. But this creates a huge sample bias in the press.

If Apple does a CDMA anything it will, in my opinion, be an iPad.
Actually, Dalvik is a register-based VM and the Java VM is stack-based -- so they don't have the same semantics.

I agree that it's not really relevant to the lawsuit, but I suspect a lot of VMs (especially the .NET CLR) contain designs covered by Oracle's patents.
The answer is to maintain a documentable trail of what went into the decision. Make sure that the details of the discussion are in meeting notes, an email thread, etc. Absolutely positively do not agree to anything on just a verbal agreement.

You might still be stuck "doing it wrong" or "doing it quick & dirty" but you've got enough CYA material not to be the scapegoat.
are they earning anything from Oracle's lawsuit?

Well Oracle would probably be granted damages if so the court finds that the patent was infringed.
How is a hyperlocal website ever going to generate any significant income without classifieds?

Who's going to pay for the guy sitting in on council meetings? Or the guy digging through seemingly trivial freedom of information requests?

Journalism has always been broken in a way, it's never paid its way, but the internet is excaberating how broken it is.

We can pretend that some upstanding citizen will do it, but they won't. We can pretend a blogger will be able to face a massive libel suit or a coordinated smear campaign, but they won't.

We were lucky in the last 50 years, classifieds paid for our journalism.

Worse still for us here in Blighty, the bbc is massively funded by tax payers, the Guardian by a trust fund, we're soon to be over-run by interest groups while main streams die a death.

It's a worrying time, we can't stop it, but any free thinker greeting the present situation for the print media with glee will be waking up with a very bad hangover in 10 years time.

In the future where will be the expert in Mozambique when a crisis hits? Or Serbia? How many dissenting critics will we actually have? Who will pay for journalists to be essentially unproductive for months or even years at a time on the off chance a major story breaks? How will a major story generate any revenue anyway?

Maybe it will all work out for the best in the end. But it is still a very uncertain time and trusting one man and his blog is very dangerous.
This used to be my sole resource for everything javascript, it is actually very good still but there's a slight catch; beware cross browser compatibility issues, especially with IE, especially especially with older versions of IE.
Research conducted worldwide shows that leadership contributes to 70% of corporate atmosphere, while corporate atmosphere contributes to 30% of corporate performance. Therefore, leadership can exert direct influence on 21% of corporate performance.

Reading only the top 4% of that article convinced me that whatever was going to follow it was 100% bullshit.
I do do that. "LastMessage" var of the tuple in the dict. It's not enough if they make multiple windows all spamming in a loop. Some of the messages get through
How quickly do you think 32kb of RAM would get eaten up by PyMite? I recently stumbled upon the Phillips LPC2138 ARM 7 IC (http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_i...).

I think it would make for a good porting experience, since I have little to-date. SparkFun provides a devboard for it as well and you can add GPS, cellular, and Bluetooth. It would make for some interesting modules in the mostly barren lib folder, even if the support would be for a single chipset and component (for now).
Python Metaclasses in Depth
> You don't really need to pin that on Sharia, when it's far more likely that it's just cultural. (emph. added)

Because cultural reasons are completely separate from religion? Religion is the only reason people like to tell others what they can and can’t do in private, especially in a democracy like Texas, where it shouldn’t be considered Constitutional to outlaw "dildos and vibrators."
I'm sure people said there were no more Google sized opportunities before Facebook too...
Patents are a creation of equity? Would have never thought!
NoCigTax.com How You Can Help Stop Cigarette Tax Increases
I thought facebook groups died years ago? This sort of brings us back to the original purpose of facebook. Collaboration and networking!
I have a vaguely similar story. A few years ago my parents found a box of Apple II books from when I was a kid. I saved a few favourites (my extremely-worn AppleSoft Basic reference manual, and a great circuit-level description of the entire Apple I system.) What to do with the rest?

I spent 4 years working at a second hand bookstore, and I knew that computer books were generally treated as unsellable. Especially old ones.

So I put the box on ebay for $1, with a full list of the books inside. Knowing that this way a wide audience would see them, and presumably I would reach a vintage computer enthusiast who would come, pick them up, and take them away. I wasn't looking to make money, I figured $10 or so would be the price - and a guarantee that the person actually wanted the books.

The box sold for close to $300. The winning bidder was after a ProDOS reference book that I barely realised I even had. I have no idea what the second bidder was after.
When Venture Capitalists Don’t Get Your Pitch – “We Turn Dog Turds Into Gold”
Additionally, do hackers really want a Facebook association such as this? I'm betting no.
Just would like to add that we're completely self-funded and proud of it... :)
Ask HN: Getting Around University/College - Hard or Easy?
As a freshman or recent transfer to your University, would say it was hard to find the classes/offices you needed?

Which university did you go to and what made it so difficult or simple and easy?

Any suggestions how to make the system better?
dupe, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1761350
The same logic begs the question "so why are they losing ground?"

Momentum takes a while to reverse.
Facebook Data Portability Takes First Step into the Light
Today’s announcement from Facebook represents the most important statement from them to-date regarding Data Portability...but...
I love that you did that. What I would love even more is a project where people just post descriptions of ideas, publicly, so that a year or two down the line, patents can be blocked. What a service to the world: force companies to only get patents on TRULY innovative, non-obvious stuff, whilst the rest of the startup scene can take these admittedly obvious features and focus on executing them damn well without the fear of patent litigation.
Turkey steps into currency warfare
http://forrst.com/ & http://carbonmade.com/ & http://gowalla.com/
How quickly do you think 32kb of RAM would get eaten up by PyMite?

I think 32kb is the p14p recommended amount, and you could do quite a bit with that (although I've only ever used p14p on 8kb avrs, actually!)

IIRC, at the moment >4kb is used just initialising the VM, which is obviously a much larger share of 8kb than it is of 32kb. Dean says his changes should bring that >4kb down to <1kb, though.
They don't put something like this together in a couple of days. Further a part of the complaint is that they're been trying to muscle Apple into licensing but Apple has been non-compliant.

Really though, who would people expect to have the deepest, most fundamental patents? Motorola invented the mobile phone, and they've been doing fairly leading stuff since, not counting the past 3 years (when they got seriously off the tracks thanks to Windows Mobile).

I doubt Motorola is shaking too hard at Microsoft's lawsuit, and I doubt they'll pay a penny to settle that. They might put out a token Windows Mobile 7 phone, or alternately cross license patents.

This should all go away, though. Nonetheless, it's good to see Apple get hit because there's this growing meme that Apple invented everything, and they're the poor victim of everyone else's theft. It's a tired, baseless bit of nonsense.
There is some truth in his point about big buttons. The idea of using a traditional keyboard+mouse interface with software designed for fingers is actually pretty appealing, just because of the ease of use constraints on the software.
It would make for some interesting modules in the mostly barren lib folder

Yes, I think that's where p14p will suddenly become very useful (like the Arduino) - big libraries of (native code) hardware support easily strung together with developer-friendly Python code.

That's what I wanted to do with the Teensy++ (flesh out the 'avr' module) but at the moment each extra function declared in a module takes RAM for code metadata, so you end up using much of your 8kb storing (unused) function metadata!
In Chinese companies, 19.1% of the managers are found to be high-performance leaders, 9.8% inspiring leaders, 13.4% leaders who create no obvious value, and 57.7% leaders who actually discourage their employees. That is to say, 70% of the managers either don't help or discourage their people.

I'm curious how American companies would fare.
I remember reading articles 1998/1999 saying that the search problem had been solved and no major new search engines would enter the market.

Google proved that wrong.

There are many 1+ billion opportunities. Think of the ideas that started Google / Facebook - Pagerank and a class hand-book. Had these ideas been explained to me as starting successful billion dollar companies, I would have laughed.

Not to say that that all laughable ideas create billion dollar companies. However, I think the laughable part is the interesting bit. Maybe we find these ideas humorous because they force us to look at the world in a different way.
Look, did this really go beyond a gentle ribbing? Ballmer is a big character, who is supposed to make these grand sweeping statements. I don't know how much we can draw from this.
Would be nice if they allowed you to download a tarball of the whole guide.
I always love developers that value their work enough to consider the Hippocratic Oath. The problem is that any oath attributed to a creative art such as programming will be subjective.

I will never name a variable horribly. -- A great mantra until everyone on your team thinks AcquiredContentLockSerializationPolicyBeanFactory is a good class name.
Totally do-able.

But again, no one's going to fund that, so you'll have to bootstrap or go the friends and family route.

Then you'll need to be technical enough to set up a Wordpress MU and figure out how to handle the caching stuff so your site stays up and responsive.

Then you'll need to go find a writer for each neighborhood who will consistently write for free/peanuts.

You might have to edit all their work too.

So that's production.

Then you have to build a list of sales contacts in each community.

You have to create a sales kit that explains who you are and why they should advertise with you. No one will have ever heard of you and that's where most sales conversations will die.

You have to take payment from them and then reroute that to your writers and so on.

In short, it's a ton of work, very hands on work. You can cut out some of these steps, but building relationships with the writers and with the Mom & Pop businesses is the tricky part and very time intensive.

Also, you'll be lucky if any one of these sites clears 1000 uniques in a day for the first two years, so national brands won't want to touch you unless you're running about 100 sites.

Again, it's totally do-able, but it's a lot of work for a small team.
Groupon daily emails and RSS feeds, a lesson in nagging and timing
http://shelfluv.com - Single hacker. just launched about a week ago but making some Amazon affiliate revenue from all the coverage it's getting.
Isn't this a great opening for a small FaceBook personal data backup startup? Just forward the email with the download link to them, and backups start happening even without signup (since it's all email-linked). If you want them to continue, pay some small monthly charge.
Sure, but presumably the 737 would not be getting its optimal fuel efficiency if it went slower (every vehicle has some sort of a target speed that it's optimized for.)
True, which I suppose is why so many new/startup websites look like http://www.fisherprice.com.
"People don't get bullied in adulthood because there is a working police and judicial entity. People get bullied as kids because there isn't one."

People do get bullied in adulthood .. there are many stories and reports involving bullying in the workplace.
The link has changed?

http://martinfowler.com/dslwip-gone.html

"Now that my book on Domain Specific Languages is published, I have taken down the online drafts from my web site"
You may take it wherever it wants to go. And, though I'd potentially be entertained if you attributed it, that is not required.
>Your mother's cousin is on Facebook. She won't be on Diaspora or (X).

All the more reason to use Diaspora or (X).
Have you read page 2 ? Because he explains exactly his 'shame' feeling in a particular story.
مسلسل العشق الممنوع الحلقة 80
Removing blur from images
I saw your comment in avr.py about saving ram by commenting out the port and ddr methods. Since any Python modules you use are "baked-in" upon compiling, perhaps something could be done to auto-comment functionality in modules that isn't used by the resulting program?
I did, too, and I still love the Droid. I do, occasionally, miss the iPhone's polish and camera but the Droid is really a great phone.
I had a rather indirect experience of this. I had a paper route as a kid and on one part of it lived a bully that would come out and harass me to the point where I would avoid the neighborhood (didn't go over well with people who missed their paper either). For some reason I never could bring myself to fight back, but at some point my Mom found out (I think I was asking my Dad how to fight or something and that clued her in that something must be going on). Anyway she came with me the next time and layed the smack down on that kid and I never had a problem after that.

Edit: I don't think she was actually physically violent but rather he got an earful that probably made him think there could be violence if he ever tried anything again.
Can I work for you?
Good article. I agree about the glass and water. But for smelling it, saying put your nose and sniff, he has it all wrong.

Try this instead and I believe you will be convinced it is the superior method.

Place nose over edge of the sherry glass. Then breath in gently through mouth, which is not above glass at all. Mouth breathing always brings a little into the nose. Rather than suck the vapors into your lungs, they are pulled through suction action into your actual tasting parts in your nose. You will really be able to detect a lot more of the subtle parts of the whiskey there. I would be very surprised if anyone tries his method and mine and doesn't find this one superior.
Good, it sounds like 32kb should be more than enough to play with! A smaller initialization footprint should make all the difference in the world if you've only got 8kb of RAM to begin with.