skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, the OpenGL API is a mess. It's not because it's an API to do a complicated task but merely because of it's 1990's legacy. Just compare the OpenGL API to the Direct3D API and you should see a clear difference.

The best (or worst) example of this is the OpenGL context, which is basically a global (actually: thread local) variable that tells which GL context and window should be drawn to. This context then stores a bunch of other global state, such as texture bindings.

The API was (probably) designed like this because in the early 1990's it was actually a major optimization to avoid pushing parameters to the stack when calling functions several times a frame. Many graphics API's of that era did the same thing. Also there usually was only one screen with one fullscreen "window", so why not make the "display" a global variable? Now 20 years later we are stuck with this shit because it became an industry standard.

OpenGL is a pain in the ass, not only for programmers but the implementors of the API. For example, take a look at OpenGL "texture completeness" rules (textures must have consistent mipmap levels, etc). Direct3D does not have an equivalent, because the API is designed so that all textures are always complete.

Unfortunately we seem to be stuck with OpenGL for a while. There's not much interest for redesigning the API and as far as I can tell (I'm a Khronos member), no ongoing effort to do so. Direct3D is a much better API but unfortunately it supports a very limited number of platforms (none of which I actually like to use).
Great perspective.

It's a topic I've thought about personally. Forget all the marketing gimmicks and terms like "third-device" or "post pc device".

For me - and this obviously is just my own perspective - tablets are absolutely fantastic for media consumption.

Watching movies with Netflix or shows with Hulu Plus. Reading news with apps like The Economist's or the New Yorker. Interacting with all of it with others like Twitter or Flipboard. Consuming books with iBooks or Kindle. Watching casual videos on YouTube. Sifting through emails, PDFs, or presentations.

Pecking away on an iPad's keyboard is torture. That's why it loses productivity for me. I don't ever see myself going for my iPad rather than my MacBook to type a document up. But in terms of media consumption, the tablet, with its battery life and form factor, is king.
Having lived abroad for a large portion of my life: I've seen lots of Scandinavians be able to communicate in some combination of their languages, be it Danes/Norwegians and Norwegians/Swedes. Fins got by by all knowing Swedish, so they all got by mostly in the middle... Interesting to always see them find a middle ground, where us Dutch people always switch to English, the minute someone doesn't know Dutch.
I agree. Extremely sorry to have left you confused. This might tell you a bit more about what we intend to do - http://webklipper.com/webengage

Also, please try the demo again - you'll get to see a short, targeted survey (a lead gen form) from the right bottom corner of the page.
The biggest problems with these devices today are ergonomic, but these will be fixed with time and the laptop with keyboard will gradually be made obscure: tablets won't be the third device.

As the thickness and weight of the iPad decrease, it will become less cumbersome and more natural. iPad2 is already a big step forward in the latter two categories: it is significantly less awkward to hold an iPad1 but still has quite a while to go.

Typing today on an iPad is slightly awkward. Good voice recognition could eliminate this in private settings.

When these physical dimensions diminish, input improves, and screen resolutions increase, the experience will converge towards that of a truly interactive notepad or piece of paper, thereby becoming much more natural.
This quote: "Autonomy — a company I’d never heard of before but which more or less sounds like a rival to SAP" tells you everything you need to know about the blogger. He knows very little about the software business, and is just making up opinions based on his gut feeling, without backing it up with knowledge or evidence.
>so we can say that obama is an authoritarian thug too?

Yes, you can say that. You can say whatever you want and when you say that in particular, I think I'll even join you.

Bringing up other rulers when someone accuses one nation's of being a tyrant is a meme that needs to die. It is logically unsound and terribly offtopic.
Which happens a lot more than you think.
Medical tourism is a biggie. Offer an assortment of the best treatments that have been approved by any government on earth. Thus, rich US tourists can take a 1-hour boat ride to get treatments they'd otherwise have to travel to Germany for and vice-versa. (Especially useful if the condition you're treating makes air travel dangerous!) More flexible immigration, licensing, and liability laws means you can use doctors and equipment from, say, India and cut the price of the procedure in half.
This is a great test of Libertarian ideology. Personally, I suspect they'll quickly find out that those 'excessive' US taxes are paying for layer upon layer of security and infrastructure that is critical to the expansion of their wealth. Perhaps, though, their superior free-market will develop compact, cost-effective means of defense.

Then again, maybe they'll just end up in a nice tax shelter and use their political/financial connections to assure protection from the United States.
I interviewed someone, and following a hunch, asked him to write FizzBuzz, and he couldn't do it within a half hour. He wasn't overthinking it; he just couldn't decompose the problem.
Benefits Of Using Acne No More
I typed in a url and didn't know what was going on. I thought the feedback prompt was for the product (which to me was nothing), not the product itself.
if this was insanely easy, url field would be filled. it maybe is easy but not "insanely easy"
Taco Bell Coupons
Frankly baffled me. Context is everything.
I didn't down vote you. And I was not talking about comparison with other presidents. Cristina's government is pressing other media and using the state's money in a biased way. The article is showing that the government is censoring many sites and you argue comparing it with other government instead of talking about facts. Do you say that blocking a complete ip in a country is not against free speech or is not authoritarian?

I'll tell you something more about Cristina. Do you know for example that they even pressed the people working on their hotels to affiliate with Cristina's party? where do you find this kind of no-sense?

The Argentinian official news agencia (Telam) removed many articles in the past talking against the government.

So, these are facts, not opinions.
JonDoFox 2.5.3 - Browser Optimized for anonymous and secure web surfing
Granted he may know little about Autonomy (although I'll argue he knows a bit about the software business), but he's pretty much right on the money when it comes to what Autonomy sounds like (in the sense that it is also an enterprise-oriented business), is he not?
Hmm, yes; it seems I did. I hope that my basic premise holds true though — in that this doesn't make Arabic inherently sexist.
i had the opposite experience. I had a a laptop and liked it OK, but I was getting sick of the screen wastage - I read a great deal of material in PDF and long article form, and I'm sick to death of web design getting in the way. On 80%+ of the websites I frequent, 30-40% of the screen is empty, with acres of blank space to each side. I was getting to the point of wanting to turn the laptop on its side so I could have something with the same aspect ratio as a printed page. There's a limit to the amount of text I can read on a smartphone without eyestrain but I can work on a tablet for hours in comfort. The keyboard works OK for me; I wouldn't want to write a novel on it but it's fine for notes and short comments like this (the on-screen keyboard, that is...I prefer a plugin one for long-form writing).

I'm so much happier reading PDF files and the like now. Web pages, not so much. Getting a tablet has made me realize just how bad many of them are, and how poorly many webmasters and bloggers use their RSS feeds. No wonder services like instapaper and readbility are doing so well. Surprise casualty: Wikipedia. Needs a lot more work to be functional on a tablet.

The other thing is the multitouch functionality. My hobbies include drawing and electronic music and having a high resolution control panel is absolutely killer for these applications, in much the same way that the mouse was a huge game changer by freeing people from the command line.
The problem with your business is that you take projects that don't have formal statements of work.

Professional consultants always work under a SOW, either as an exhibit to the standalone contract they have with their clients or, for major or longstanding clients, as the "per project" contract that accompanies a master (MSA) contract.

The whole reason you write a statement of work is so that the client can't reasonably claim that an "extra" they want is actually within the original scope of the project. If you chronically say "yes" when your contract (and good sense) says "no", then the problem isn't with how you quoted the rate; it's that you're unprofessional.

I'm sorry to be harsh about it, but the histrionic tone of your comment ("working for minimum wage") seemed to justify it. If you're even coming close to working for the rate your expected full time salary would back out to, you're doing something so wrong as to warrant shouting.
Mixed messages here. His biggest target of criticism is his own Frankenstein's monster of a Java project, but he wants the blame to go to the tools (technologies), and the fact that he wasn't allowed to use Haskell.
What is up with Noises? Sound, Frequency, and Pitch (video)
How to undelete files from ext3/ext4
Swahili is supposedly quite easy compared to Arabic or Amharic (also a Semitic language like Arabic).
The pronunciations you've listed are used in some Arabic dialects. In classical Arabic, ذ is pronounced as <i>dhel</i>, and ظ is more of a <i>dhah</i>.
The people to which you respond cannot downvote comments, although they can upvote them. Myself and others have however downvoted your comments.

I did it because you are being offtopic, unrational (comparisons to the US president (why the US president?) do not negate the accusations being made), and read like an astroturfer ("I'm not [whatever you are] but [statement suggesting you are in fact whatever you are]" is an all to common pattern that sends up serious red flags).
> Why not just spin that out with the hardware business to Compaq (which is the idea, yes?)? It seems they've devalued that unit by killing WebOS.

I'd imagine one of the biggest reasons is patents. If they spin out the business they have to sell the patents. If they're going into a new market where they don't traditionally have alot of expertise their only chance of not getting sued into oblivion is to be able to cross license patents.

Spinning off the Palm patent portfolio significantly hurts them in this regard.

With the price of patents being what it is these days, it might have been worth more to them to keep the patents and bury the project.
From BioShock, for the one or two other idiots who (like myself) never bought or played the game.
Agreed. My final decision was and is to keep it.
Remember, HP's board underwent a major shakeup once Léo came in: http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2011/01/28/hp%E2%80%99s-bo...
this is the sort of project Steve Yegge was talking about in his presentation where everyone thought he quit Google. A lot of good could come from data mining this data, but everyone's too busy sharing cat pictures
sent them this in their feedback, but I don't know how a company can seriously ask people to invest time/resources in their services with no idea of what future pricing is like. This alone is a big enough reason not to use.
One thing I've noticed is that he tends to put a little extra energy into the quality of everything - say 20% more than the minimum. And I mean Everything - from consistent naming and semantics to the visual touches (like the color of the cloud over the moon). This fractional boost to the quality of so many components really adds up.
Amazon and the future of the web « Internet « MyBroadband Tech and IT News
I have no faith in HP's leadership.

I was talking to an insider last year about how HP wanted to be a computer maker. I said, "I know them for their printers, they make awesome printers." He said, "Yeah, they're not so interested in printers these days. They think the money's in computers."

I guess it's whatever the "money's in" this week.
I cannot believe how addictive this is to watch. Really makes me feel like I am wasting my time though.
If I was writing a real review, it might look a lot like the one marked up with all the "deceptive" indicators, with the exception that I'm not a big exclamation mark user.

The grumpy old man in me wants to suggest that anyone who actually learned how to write would be marked as a fake. Is well-written English so hard to come by nowadays that it makes people suspicious when they see it online?

(Edited to add: apologies if I'm saying something that's covered in the article--couldn't get past the paywall.)
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"

"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."

"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"

"Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong
lizard might get in"
yup... Autonomy is a huge name in the enterprise biz. This blogger got it completely wrong when he said they are an SAP rival. Autonomy is Oracle's biggest threat now and will likely start making inroads on its biz.
There are several examples where something like this has gone horribly wrong. High level API's for "common use cases" tend to work only for writing one page examples for text books but are completely useless for anything more serious. One example of this is the CUDA API. They have a low level C API, which gives you a good but a little verbose programming API (because GPGPU is complicated). Then there's a high level API where you write the GPU code mixed together with the CPU C++ code. It somewhat worked for the examples in the Cuda manual but was useless for anything else.

OpenGL did have a library called GLU that did some high level things such as quadrics (for spheres, cylinders, etc) and tesselation of polygons. It was completely written on the CPU on top of OpenGL. It worked decently for some stuff. Direct3D has also some helpers, f.ex. to do some matrix math and load 3d models.

A library like OpenGL is probably best left to be a low level API for a low level task. A high level API in this case would be a 3d engine on top of OpenGL and there are plenty of those out there.
I dislike the limitations of apple products and gave away both a macbook and an iphone in the past. But i love my ipad. It has made my toilet time so much more productive. The one thing that makes it shine compared to the phone is the web: With the ipad you can actually surf the web in normal size while in bed or walking around. I don't expect to write code on the tablet. I barely use any other app than safari, but that's enough to justify my purchase.
"As the thickness and weight of the iPad decrease, it will become less cumbersome and more natural."

Try this: Hold your empty hands in a "tablet position" for ten minutes.

Even if the tablets managed to converge at zero weight (presumably helium is involved), their ergonomic problems do not go away.
Can I mention the 125 resolution, pension funds, football TV contracts, disproportionate propaganda funds spent on ridiculous newspapers, the prohibition to sell Clarin in some newstands, the public attack on journalists?
Firefox 9.0a1 (Nightly) / Linux 3.0 x64 has this problem as well. Might be problem with platform rather than browser itself.
Learn Islamic Economics online
Chapter 1 - Introduction to Islamic Economics

Chapter 2 - The Main Objectives and Role of Supervision Boards

Chapter 3 - The Main Prohibitions and the Role of Ethics in Islamic Economics

Chapter 4 - Partnerships in Islamic Economics

Chapter 5 - Law of Contracts under Islamic Economics

Chapter 6 - Forms of Business Transactions

Chapter 7 - Sales Contracts

Chapter 8 - The Sukuk Market (Islamic Bonds) and Securitization

Chapter 9 - Islamic Banking

Chapter 10 - Takaful or Islamic Insurance

Chapter 11 - Wikalah and Waqf, or power of attorney and endowments in Islamic finance

Chapter 12 - Issues facing Islamic Economics
It's way dialectical, of course, but in MSA at least 'ز' is a [z] sound, 'ث' is a [θ] (as in "three"), while 'ذ' and 'ظ' are variants of [ð] (as in "the")— with ظ being the pharyngealized version, similar to 'د‎' and 'ض'. The differences are much easier to hear than to reproduce :P
The source of my power is that I belong to no country.

-- The Count of Monte Cristo
"Do you really need..." is a horrible rhetorical device. All we really need is food, shelter, and someone to love. When making the iPad decision, my questions were more subtle:

* Will I use it?

* Will I enjoy it?

* Can I afford it?

As it turns out, all three are yes for me. The author comes across as trying to convince me that I'm not really enjoying my iPad as much as I think I am. I find that tone obnoxious.
Palm was "saved" by HP, and WebOS, but where Palm was already too little too late, I think the HP aquisition didn't speed it up yet. Palm couldn't compete, and HP with their already dead Windows Mobile line of PDAs just added to the mess...
While I'm no longer a fan of Engadget, I do find this article interesting but it's a typical response and misguided.

I agree with you that there will be such things as voice to supplement the experience but I think that the article vastly underestimates what mankind can do with a soft keyboard. While there are many that complain about the soft keyboard, younger generations will be able to adjust where today's generation cannot.
More on why Hugh MacLeod is giving up Twitter and Facebook
That is one thing that made me keep the iPad over the others. The aspect ratio is much nicer than the wide screen versions. I do as well frequently turn it to be portrait for reading.

I agree that responding to tweets, emails or forums and the like that don't require more than a few sentences is completely acceptable for me as well.

I am just saying, for me, its the one I would give up first, but I do currently choose to keep it.
I think one point has been ignored so far - this will be a really boring place to live compared to an average city. Can you imagine being stuck on a boat or a tiny island for years? That sounds like punishment to me.
Its been 20 years since I used a Mac
Also, check out this great interview with Charlie Rose:

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/5639
Have you been to Autonomy's website? Seriously... go have a look... have a look at the 'Introduction to Autonomy' page: http://www.autonomy.com/content/Autonomy/introduction/index....

"Organizations already benefiting from Autonomy technology include Avis, BAE Systems, BBC, BMW, Coca-Cola, CNN, Ericsson, Fiat, Financial Times, GlaxoSmithKline, Isabel Healthcare, KPMG, Linklaters, Lloyds TSB, NASA, Nestle, Oracle, Philips, Safeway, Schneider Electric, Shell, T-Mobile, The European Commission, The U.K. Houses of Parliament, The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission."

If Autonomy isn't enterprise software on the order of SAP (if not exactly the same business), they sure write confusing marketing copy.
Most users can read or draw on paper for more than ten minutes. The user can still place a tablet on his/her lap or desk.
I never thought of that. That's kind of staggering. We should be electing the fed.
This is the dumbest thing I've read on HN in a long time. It's dumb on so many levels (the nature of thought, the actual meaning and intent of the essay, how depression works, and the circumstances of Wallace's death) that it actually functions as a kind of marvel of dumbness.

If it wasn't concurrently and needlessly mean, I'd thank you for writing it. Instead, I'm just going to remember how dumb you appeared to be.
The TouchPad is a real disaster. 10% sell rate even after promotions? This is like ET for the Atari 2600. Best Buy was ready to just send back 245,000 out of the 270,000 it ordered because it couldn't sell them. At least HP agreed to give them away at liability cost instead of dumping them in a landfill.

Notice HP did not pull the Pre and Veer phones from the shelves or put them on fire sale.

HP's reasons for keeping the webOS lights on are probably threefold. 1) Phones are still for sale. 2) HP has a liability to show some support for webOS devices it sold or risk a class action lawsuit. 3) HP could still sell the Palm assets to someone and the company is lot more valuable if it comes with employees.
*whatever you want as long as it is greater than or equal to $5 and less than or equal to $100
The sad reality is that it is very rare for a company you to pay you what you are worth if they "got a good deal" initially. You need to move to another company. It's sucks if you like where you are but that's how it is.
"Need" is really the wrong question to ask because, apart from food, water and shelter, there aren't many things you "need" by the strictest definition. After all, in years not too long ago we managed to live just fine without cell phones or even personal computers (of any kind).

The thing that most people missed before the iPad was they didn't understand what its purpose was (myself included, although I was neutral on the device rather than negative). You pick one up though and it's simply a joy to use. There's no booting it up, battery life is great, it's sufficient for Web browsing, reading email and generally consuming various sources of information. Updates are a breeze (of both the OS and apps). The payment ecosystem is built in.

The iPad is for me the most used gadget I think I've ever bought. For the foreseeable future I think it's easily justifiable (for me, having sufficient disposable income) to buy the new model every year. Not because I need it (I have the iPad 2 and could easily have lived with the iPad 1 for another year).

But it's simply a joy to use.

Apple has a great history now of taking things that suck and making them great. Using computers, generally speaking, sucks. Updating tends to be awkward and haphazard. You end up wasting huge amounts of time solving arcane problems (on Windows and even more so on Linux).

In years passed I used to like buying PC parts, assembling a PC, installing the OS and so on. Now? I just can't be bothered. I'm happy to pay a premium to someone (which only seems to be Apple these days) to solve these problems for me. Not because I can't solve them but because I just don't care and I value my time more.
Agreed. I personally vary between delight and dislike of the soft keyboard. They can do nothing but improve and your note about young people adapting is absolutely true.
I think this might depend on the case.

I've had clients with only a vague idea of what they actually needed, meaning that we essentially needed to design the product before we could quote it. We charged a nominal fee, which was discounted from the project if the proposal was accepted.