skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Right-Click on Excel Taskbar Icon > "Microsoft Excel" > A new window opens.

Is that a windows 7 feature? It doesn't appear to work for XP. (Yeah yeah this desktop is in a govt dept that will get updated one day...)

Like the samstave this (mis)feature of Excel has been frustrating me forever.
>Yeah, but we don't say that we are in the 'post pen-and-paper era'...

Sure we do.
http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=paperless&y...
Google removed Grooveshark (who relies on DMCA just like YouTube) from the Android Market/Play due to unspecified reasons (speculated to be label pressure) but will stand in court for hotfile. While they are totally doing the right thing here, it's a bit sad that they pick and choose when to do the right thing.
Rails questions for Node.js
I use pen and paper maybe 3 times a year and I could certainly live completely without pen and paper at this point.
Board Members vs. Startups
IANAL but from reading it literally; It seems that the bill goes the other way too, in actually granting the power to take down the companies for 'misappropriation' of 'personally identifiable information'.

Since EFF claims this would 'bypass all existing laws', it looks like sovereign immunity laws won't apply. Therefore it's possible to take down the government websites, again, for 'misappropriation' of 'personally identifiable information'.
> abolishing them will not cure the foundry cause which is the desire.

No, but it makes it harder to execute when everyone thinks for themselves. If everyone was educated to think critically rather than handing over part of their brain's processing power to a mob, controlling populations would be harder. Much, much harder.
As happens all too often at HN, these comments are devolving into a pedantic argument about definitions and irrelevant technicalities.

Atwood does not say "hey throw out your PCs". In fact, he opens by stating that PCs are already ubiquitous. This article examines the idea that major innovation is currently happening in the post PC area. He posits that the new iPad display is a killer feature.

This is a much more interesting talking point than "o noes but my Linux netbook is kewler".
yeah, there's more to it.
The founder Mick Mountz was an HBS guy, he went around for awhile networking with alums to try to get the initial cash investment. Eventually connected with Ajay Agarwal of Bain and landed some seed money.
No, but clearly people are wanting Microsoft to take the bait.. This is being backed by the Desktop as a Service providers who want to be able to deploy this.

Unlike trademarks to my knowledge there is nothing that devalues their offering by NOT suing, and instead suing other providers, at least until it gets large enough. Hell they even make money on each windows 7 license they need.

On the other hand, I really don't expect Microsoft to do this. It might take them years to bother to sue, but I see them taking it on simply because they can't turn a blind eye to piracy.
I think it's interesting that a news show, that is now going open kimono (and good on them for that) to examine and explain how they were taken in by an actor presenting his poetically licensed work as "journalism," labels its news show segments "Prologue, Act 1, Act 2 and Act 3."
It's sort of weird to separate them out. Laptops were for the early adopters. They make up the first 10% of the area under the curve from zero to the adoption plateau of general purpose computing devices.

pads will constitute the renaining 90%. They are bringing a useful machine to the $500, $400... even $100 market. They, like cell phones did for cameras, are what will make the technology ubiquitous.

So, it's hard to say what is "more revolutionary". If you are more concerned with the invention of the basic concepts, the PC is. If you are more concerned with what were the last big changes required to unleash the technology in a ubiquitous way, pads are.
I have always hated how the colon is used in windows for drive letters, there have been way too many times where I would type a long path only to realize that there is a semi-colon at the beginning.
They have a tendency to make stuff up. Among other things, they publish performance data which doesn't actually measure what they claim it does.
Didn't the Nexus One ship with a notoriously poor capacitive sensor? I recall it being blamed for the N1 struggling with multi-touch compared to other phones.

EDIT:

http://androidandme.com/2010/03/news/is-multitouch-broken-on...
Addicted America – What Have We Done To Ourselves?
If you use a web-based IDE and develop web apps on an iPad then you're already living the dream.
Really? Hi-def = no more pc? What does an iPad 3 do that an iPad 2 doesn't? How did hd res change anything?

The end of the PC era may be near but it's not because of 10inch hd screens.
Why is - and -- used as a switch character if it is used in dates (and even quite common in normal text, names)

Those uses rarely have it next to whitespace, and almost never immediately after whitespace.

If someone’s named Jean-Claude, it is not customary to refer to them as -Claude for short, and if I refer to items dated 2012-03-19 and 2012-03-20, it is not customary to call one of them -20.

But that last example shows something that Unixy switches do conflict with: negative numbers.
For me, the time per day I spend on a PC has not changed since getting a tablet. However I can count on my hands the number of times I have bothered turn on TV since getting tablet. The tablet has replaced the TV for me.
I think the current "PC" paradigm needs to die because the things that we do with our computers is just so different now.

Regards the "no serviceable parts" issue, there is nothing stopping manufacturers from building systems that are more open in addition of course it may be the case that kids grow up without access to one of these. However that was probably also the case in the 80s for the most part, most of the kids I knew growing up didn't have a computer but they probably did have a SNES or Sega Genesis.

Of course what might happen is that all the geeks and hackers buy the "open" hardware and build cool things with it, once the general population sees these things then perhaps they want the open version too.

Free market economics dictate that competition will create innovation after all and there is only so much you can lock a platform down without stifling that.
I usually swap the left ctrl and the Caps lock keys, mostly out of habit from the first computer I used (An actual computer, with the Magnetic Tape spools and punch-card boot loader).

I have also dealt with crappy tiny keyboards that don't even have any keys beyond the standard chunk (So no function keys, 10-key, or arrows / browsing control)
Sometimes you have to retreat and live to fight another day. With the labels pressuring, they would have had to risk litigation to protect one specific vendor, something I'm pretty sure they weren't willing to do. With this, they have the chance to prevent a precedent of the DMCA being overruled by the lobbyist dollars; helping not just Hotfile but also themselves.

Google has to act in the best interest of its shareholders, after all.
I am unfamiliar with many of the details of US laws, but does signing a special deal to offer a new product with 1 exclusive partner mean you have to offer it to everyone?

In the physical world many companies have patented processes that they don't offer to others.

I am not a lawyer, but I think unless there is existing case law there will be enough points for the case to go on for many many many years making the point moot.
Wholesale Packers Caps
Surely that would be when the vast majority of computers are not PCs, not that the vast majority of people only have a tablet. Given the ubiquity of devices in the average home that have microprocessors, that do computing jobs that PCs can do, that aren't actually PCs, we've been there for a while.

Now if he'd said that we were in the tablet era, that's another thing.
"hell, the manual came with example BASIC programs."

I think part of the problem with people and computers is that most wouldn't even bother to read a manual no matter what was included in it.

People expect it to be so intuitive that they don't even have to figure anything out. As though this highly complex machine was purpose built for their own expectations. How far would today's typical computer user have gotten on your VIC 20 if they put a diskette in the drive and nothing happened? The incantation that seems so simple doesn't just summon itself.

So there's an entire market for highly intuitive and trouble free systems that is now being catered to. But there are tradeoffs in building these systems. They're not as flexible and can't be used for all the things that a PC can be used for.

I just bought a tablet and have been trying to figure out a use for it that justifies the price. (laying in bed watching youtube doesn't cut it) It doesn't replace my PC, and it doesn't even replace my phone. I don't see it replacing anything. It actually does the opposite. Overall it increases the ubiquity of computing devices in people's lives.
Pfft, downvoted? Cruel. It wasn't just your average meme. I giggled :)
What are the reasons to favor one specific vendor giving it a key advantage over the other? Microsoft seems to be clearly playing favorites here. What are they trying to do? Give a monopoly to their favorite vendor? Is it legal to use your monopoly to expand someone else's? Can we really call this company, with its seemingly deep and strong ties to Microsoft, a separate entity? If it's not, this is clearly something the DoJ should look into.
The title of this article is misleading. Google isn't sending their lawyers to be the defense council of hotfile, they just filed an amicus brief in support of hotfile. They have a history of filing amicus briefs in cases that have potential to set precedent that might affect them. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Peugeot Key Programmer
Could you please expand on what you mean by "Macs do not have the same power as a traditional unix"?
For writing, almost anything. For spreadsheets, unless you need Excel plugins, again, almost anything. For project management? There are a good couple tools around.

They don't need Office. They are just used to it, much like accountants are used to their 12C's
a guy that writes a blog about coding happy that the new 'era' will not allow you any coding
Dance Photo Artworks And Tutorials
See, my first thought on reading the question is that this guy was fishing for answers to the sorts of questions he's not legally allowed to ask—relationship status, family plans, and so on. This is reinforced (at least to me, unless I'm misreading) by the comment that "If I know what matters to them, I can right away tell if the same things matter to me (the hiring manager) and the organization at large."

So, aside from being manipulative, which lots of interview questions are, this one also struck me as unethical and borderline illegal.
Sorry, who is this guy, and what proof does he have that this is a system worth using or even writing about? Seems like linkbait to me.
Hello, my name is Swetal and I'm with Privly. We are working hard on ironing out all the details and making it a full fledged platform to share content privately. The most promising feature to come will be the ability for people to choose where they store their data. Along with the ability to have this content encrypted.

I'll see if I cant get one of the main developers to answer some of your questions a little bit more clearly than I can.
Shift + left-click on the taskbar icon also opens a new instance of Excel.
The rules are different if you are a monopoly. If not then you certainly can do things like that.
Not sure if you didn't read the comment fully, didn't understand its content, or are just trolling. Bravo!
I apologize in advance for the dreaded car analogy but:

I'm concerned the very reason tablets will take over the PC market will also mean that tomorrow's kids' experience is very different from, and I would argue poorer than, my experience when I got my first computer

I don't think that's any more an issue than today's car owner's have a poor experience because they don't have to worry about setting the fuel/air mixture in their carburetors like I had to with my first car. I think you are right that the closed environment is a barrier, but I live in one of the poorest cities in MA, and yet there are no shortage of computers on the curb on trash day that can happily run Linux/NetBSD/etc.

The young hacker culture will live on.

Ironically, my VIC 20 also was very user friendly. You turn it on, it's on. You put in a diskette -- well, it didn't load automatically but making it load was a very simple incantation,

"Simple" to who? You and me? Sure. Random guy on the street? Doubtful.
The author conflates 'PC' with 'desktop' and 'general purpose computer', which I take issue with. Three points:

Firstly: The iPad is a PC, a 'personal computer'

Secondly: The quotes refer to 'desktop computer' era being over (though one uses the term 'PC' in the context of 'PC wars'), so why not use 'desktop computer era is over' as the title?(more accurate though less shocking)

Thirdly: Through all this conflation, the author also tries to say that the 'general purpose computer' era is over. Personally, I believe there is a big future in 'general-purpose computer' tablets/phones/etc. (non 'desktop'), as well as in desktops and there is not a shred of evidence in the article which challenges this view...
Has anyone implemented a browser inside Internet Explorer? Download some javascript file to "install" it, the javascript implements "good" javascript and rendering on top of IE's "special" javascript and rendering.
It's not impossible to remain a creator while using an iPad (or other tablet) - at least not when it comes to development. There are certainly people who are happily developing on an iPad (albeit with a more powerful remote backend)[1]. I think we are likely to see even more of a shift in this direction as these devices become even more capable.

[1] http://yieldthought.com/post/12239282034/swapped-my-macbook-...
I've asked, "what's your favorite part of math?" for the same reason. Something open-ended, but allowing the person being interviewed to be on their home turf. Seems more fair than only focusing on a topic I happen to know backwards and forwards, but that they, through happenstance, might not.

This can get at a part of creativity that's independent from questions about, say, the last project someone worked on.

One drawback with that phrasing, which is the one I've used, is that "favorite" can cause lockup, because choosing that one thing can be hard in real-time.
I'm not sure why the author of the cnet article says preorders aren't included because Apple's press release doesn't ever say they're not.

I'm guessing he's just assuming they're not included because it was possible to preorder before Friday and Apple's release says it has sold 3 million "since its launch on Friday". But I imagine Apple is considering the preorder to turn into a sale on Friday.
It's interesting how the downvoting of comments critical to Microsoft is time-related (down trends around noon and midnight UTC, up trends shifted about 6 hours). One day I'll have to write a bot to check up/down votes and relate them to sentiment.

The demographics may prove interesting.
You just answered your own question, it works just the way you explained.

Are you asking how is the benefit created? Speed of light latency is a real issue. A metro area round trip is a few milliseconds, a coast to coast packet round trip is 75 to 100ms, and across continents can be 400ms. It takes many many round trips to serve a web page.

If they have servers located all over the globe, those servers can cache all the static elements on your pages (most of the elements like gifs and CSS) and serve those very quickly to end users, while only the dynamic components need to come down the long path from your server

Further, they can tweak window sizes when they fetch the dynamic elements from your server and therefore use fewer of the slow round trips when fetching those elements.
It's just a bad accident, I'm sure they wouldn't use it at all in ways it wasn't intended. There are americans to protect, and some of them -- the ones who have lots of money but can't be bothered to use it to learn how to make their business models viable in this century -- need extra protection. Sadly, even from other hardworking americans who have gone astray and decided their god-given position as peon best used for animal labor and cannon fodder isn't good enough anymore. It's a tough time, and those at the bottom must make sacrifices for those at the top. It's the American dream!
Computers are becoming more reliable and less user serviceable in the same way that cars did.

My dad tells me stories about how he and his father used to service the family car, replace parts etc. My father and I used to do the same thing with the family computer.

I hope my future son and I get to play with the family 3d printer.
It's not a versus, it's a peaceful cohabitation, only some evangelist and/or journalists want to push us to believe there's a war but that's really not true.

I wouldn't call it a war, but Atwood (who, by the way, is neither an evangelist nor a journalist with an agenda) makes the point that tablets are about to take over large shares of the PC market. And my point was that this way, people (non-hackers) get even further removed from the "close to the metal" experience that I and others in my generation used to have.

With all respect, I think you and dozens of other posters in this thread are missing the point by "defending" the notebook and saying it won't get fully replaced. Of course it won't, but that's not an interesting question. The interesting question, in my mind, is: how can we avoid the TV-ization of computing? How can we make sure future generations don't equate a computer with a consumption device rather than a productive device? How can we make sure they can find out that this "magical device" isn't actually driven by fairy dust? Whether or not some share of the population uses notebooks, when the default for the millions and billions of non-hackers out there is to use a tablet, doesn't matter very much at that point.

Fortunately there are initiatives like the Raspberry Pi. It's telling that one of the main initiators of that project, David Braben, is also an old-school guy who grew up with computers in the 80s. Or so I'm guessing -- at any rate, he wrote some of my favorite 80s games, Elite and later Frontier. But I fear that if you plot the Raspberry's sales curve into Atwood's graph it won't look anything like the iPad.
While we agree on the fact that using either of the three can't be a bad thing, I'd like to give my opinion on why I favor PBKDF2 over bcrypt, and probably even over scrypt, although I admit the "memory-hardness" of the latter makes it superior in principle. But still, my reasons for going with PBKDF2:

It's not just that it's endorsed by RSA, no it's actually the NIST recommendation for password hashing and I find it rather unfair that people on this thread turn that against it!

It's the same argument why we generally recommend AES over let's say Twofish or Serpent. We all agreed here that in crypto it's a good thing to be mainstream. And being recommended by NIST makes you Justin Bieber, or not? Standard algorithms may be poor, true, but being a standard has one important advantage: most of the public scrutiny goes into the standard. Much more money and fame there. So it's much more likely that the public will get to know about a flaw in the standard faster than it will get to know about flaws in non-standard algorithms. And that's why I follow standards - even if it's a crappy algorithm, I will know immediately when it's broken and I can react by replacing it right away. The time between an algorithm gets broken and the fact becoming public knowledge is potentially higher the less common an algorithm is. And the time in between being broken and being public knowledge is the most dangerous in my opinion.

I'd like to point out that bcrypt is not equal to Blowfish. It piggybacks on Blowfish's key setup. But note that it just piggybacks, on top of that it further extends the original key setup. Blowfish's key setup was probably never invented to do what bcrypt does now, and the last 30min of googling have not brought up any papers about bcrypt cryptanalysis. Compare that to HMAC. Compare that to using PBKDF2 with HMAC SHA-3 when it's out. I'm not saying that Blowfish or any of its parts are bad, but if not PBKDF2 itself, but then most certainly its building blocks have received a lot more analysis than bcrypt or scrypt. With SHA-3 on the horizon the research community knows a lot more about hash algorithms and there is a lot of research going into these topics. That's why I personally feel safer with a construction that maybe in itself has not received more research than the other two alternatives, but where its building blocks almost certainly have, unless somebody proves me wrong. And when that happens, I'll stand happily corrected and will use the next standard.
We'll take your bill, and RAM it up your BOOTDISK!

The people of this Earth will NEVER be held down by paper, and text. Not as long as we have Bandwidth, bullets, and Hex-adecimal.

FOR THE FIGHT! FOR THE RIGHT! TO PIIIIIII-RATE!

;-)
I'm curious to see how the iPad comes together with photo management. The retina display makes photos gorgeous to explore. And you've got iPhoto now.

The big problem is the workflow sucks – importing images to the iPad from an SD card can be pretty slow. And fiddly, since you need to hold onto an adaptor. Wonder if there's an iOS client for any of those WiFi-enabled SD cards. Wouldn't help with speed but maybe the ease-of-use would make up for that.
Computers of that era were very simple to use.
I never had a Vic 20 , but in Britain "BBC" computers made by Acorn were popular, especially in schools.

If you wanted to start the computer up you pressed the button on the keyboard and it was booted and ready in under a second, ditto for switching it off (no hibernate/shutdown/suspend etc).

If you wanted to run a program , you put the floppy disk in the drive and typed "RUN" then pressed enter.

I literally learnt to use one at age 6 without much trouble, so did my school peers. Even our aged school teachers could operate them.

They were pretty much impossible to screw up since the entire OS was loaded onto a ROM chip so no viruses ,config files etc.

Even BASIC was very easy to use, the shell and the basic interpreter were the same thing. I don't think there were many people who didn't know how to do:

10 PRINT "SCHOOL SUXXX"

20 GOTO 10

They were also very extensible machines, you could add joysticks, mice, modems and it even had an analog output board you could plug into the back and control robots arduino style (we were doing this at age 8!)

The idea of being "computer literate" didn't really spring up until Windows 95 (or maybe 3.1) and people suddenly had to worry about C drives and "programs" etc.

I remember moving from programming text games in basic on my BBC into trying to understand OOP and Visual Basic for Windows and thinking "why does everything have to be so complicated?". To be honest I think if I hadn't had that taste of magic from the BBC I wouldn't have had the will to carry on learning to program.
A month or two ago I migrated off Google Apps for similar reasons. I've been very impressed with Zoho for email, calander, contacts, etc. The main reason I chose them was that their paid plan provided push email through Exchange/ActiveSync accounts, which means push email on my smartphone.