skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Have I ever received an email from someone using an iPad?

I have. My father, my mother, my aunt, my best friend, one of the most skilled software engineers/architects I know, an engineering manager I work with, several members of mailing lists I'm on... Oh, and I send email from my iPad occasionally, though I'm still more attached to my laptop than most people. I've been too busy to adapt my workflow.
The day I bought my mother her iPad, she closed her Thinkpad and hasn't opened it since. That was over a year ago.
Here's another mind-boggling info:

Apple sold 3 Million iPads. That number DOES NOT include preorders of the device, which went live the day the product was announced. Why didn't Apple include the preorders?

http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-57400231-248/apple-3-milli...
The crux of the problem is that bandwidth is currently oversold since it is largely unused most of the time.

Let's compare my session here on HN with how it would be if I was streaming my web browser from somewhere else.

Currently I pull down a few KB of ascii every i load up a comment thread and then spend maybe 20-30 minutes reading it during which time no bandwidth is used.

If I was streaming this from a browser in the cloud, I would be pulling down an order of magnitude more data since scrolling down the page could easily be a few MB vs no data at all.

You could have hardware "basestations" as you suggest which would be an interesting idea.
Of course locating these geographically would be a difficult task. You might end up with rural areas where it would be impossible to do any computing at all because no basestation was in range, or you would end up with urban areas where there would be massive demand.

You would also have to account for what happens if somebody decides to have a big party or event somewhere and suddenly the local basestation computer goes from only having to service 10 - 100 clients to suddenly having to service 1000+?
Luckily you won't have this problem if it would be implemented. You can't have the cursor float in mid-air next to your screen.
I can see the value as an icebreaker - and to potentially knock an interviewee out of the sycophant zone and into a more candid state of mind.

Context is everything. Re-reading the article I think I may have been hyper-parsing the question....
You can't find a path of brutality and enslavement to Ruby enthusiasts. It's not the same thing and I think that should be pretty obvious.

I once watch a Vikings fan beat unconscious a Tampa Bay fans with a baseball bat and put him in the hospital after a game, the melee involved probably 30 men, I almost got hit just trying to defuse the situation so that someone did not die. Development is a little different given the composition of people that identify with it, but the same dogma can rear it's head. That being said, dogma and violence can crop up in any group given the right circumstances.
Or, perhaps even better, making your competition your customer.
Laptops were way more revolutionary than *pads.

"Post-pc" is just a talking point. The post-PC era will eliminate PCs like McDonalds eliminated kitchens.
Ask HN: What's the weirdest bug you've ever encountered?
Ask HN: Would you quit your six figure, promising career path to learn to code?
Looming Battle over the Cloud
Of course at that point it gets annoying to have to take your hand and reach over to the screen all the time , so you probably want to plug in some sort of pointing device..

Now it becomes a hassle to carry all of these docks and accessories around with you so you think "gee , I wish somebody could invent something that combined my screen, keyboard and mouse into one unit..."

Another point to bear in mind is that whilst people will have computers at work and at school a great many people , especially students will want to do work from home.

People do not just base their requirements on what they need 99% of the time, but rather on what they forsee their possible needs might be.

Let's take cars for example, how many people do you know that own medium to large size cars with 5 seats and a trunk where for 90% of their daily driving the car only contains the driver , possibly one passenger and an empty trunk?
Do rich people use more roads, public education, food safety?

Roads certainly, for commercial transportation. Public education and food safety, probably not. The military, definitely, to protect and procure economic assets abroad. And elements of law enforcement (I doubt that you or I could dial up the FBI to raid someone cheating us, but the MPAA and Luis Vitton can).
I don't feel like I'm ignoring the Office market.

These days the only time I need Office is when some idiot sends me a document in one of their proprietary formats. But taking your point to be the more general "word processing / spreadsheet " market (since I don't feel like the data base aspects really caught on mainstream) I observe that there are fewer and fewer documents that are 'word processed'.

What is perhaps more relevant, is that I have tools available on the iPad that are at least as functional as using a typewriter to type up something (the pre-Office world) And if I absolutely must type rapidly on the iPad there are keyboard solutions out there. But I don't think I am compelled by the argument "You can't do Office[1] therefore you can't get rid of your PC."

What I do see is people using a device for all of the things they used to use a full blown computer for, knowing that those same people never exploited half of what their computer could do. And much of that has been driven by the notion that there is "one thing" which you use to do this stuff. A wedge was driven in that notion by 'smart' phones, and a bigger wedge is being driven into that notion by tablets.

[1] "Office" here is of course a stand-in for a variety of capabilities which one might classify as 'information manufacturing'
These might replace other kinds of capacitors, but at the listed energy density, there is no way they are going up against cell phone batteries or car batteries. According to wikipedia, the lithium iron phosphate battery has an energy density of 220 mWh/cc. These are weighing in at 1.36 mWh/cc, according to the article.

And existing battery chemistries can already charge fast enough such that the limiting factor for electric car recharge times is the grid. My Nissan Leaf can charge most of the way in 25 minutes at a L3 charging station. But PG&E levies enormous fees for people who want to pull down that kind of power, so there isn't a single operable L3 station in the whole bay area.
Hi, all. I'm Hunter Blanks (hblanks@artifex.org).

Folks seem to have found a lot of implicit meaning and bugs in what was, at its grandest, a 5 minute talk at RedSnake Philly 2011. I'll just make two comments:

1) This in now up on GitHub at:
https://github.com/hblanks/talks/tree/master/2011/zen_of_pyt...

so if you feel strongly about making this better, you should send me a pull request.

2) People seem to have decided that the top (or the bottom?) of every example is the more pythonic one. I suppose I should have kept a consistent order, but, as I noted in the initial HN thread, that just wasn't necessary since this was delivered in the context of a talk.
I know very little about coding (thinking of starting with RoR), but would love to hear if anyone has "made the jump"...do you have any regrets??
Collected Personal Data Will Always Be Used Against The Citizens
Dumbass Government - A repository and search engine of government blunders
It's not a standard, but I can tell you that tech innovators do not stand around and wait for some committee to decide "Oh yea, uhh lets make HTML5 the standard now". No matter what the standards say, any respectable web browser should be making their best effort to "conform" to the latest technology.
Not really because many atheists grew up in religious families.
Steve Case’s firm backs office sharing startup Loosecubes
They aren't. They're just opposed to terminating a functioning program before we have a better one ready to go.
Email has been around (in some form) since 1965. However, I think it's a bit too early to say that we're living in a "post-mail era". Will such a thing every truly happen? I don't see that happening until we invent teleporters for all the physical items we need shipped.

By that same token, are we truly in a post-PC era, or is it simply an era where tablet use is on the rise and PC use is on the fall? Nifty charts and screen resolutions aside, I don't see any evidence that we're past the age of the PC. My parents still haven't replaced their computer with an iPad. Neither have any of my old friends from school. I use my tablet for more and more, but I just still can't avoid using my laptop for certain things. And I most certainly don't have a tablet or phone hooked up to my television. And how many offices have you seen where all the PCs have been replaced by mobile devices?

In short, while I see things moving more towards tablets and mobile devices, I'll be convinced that we're in a post-PC era when I see it. Until then, it's all arbitrary speculation.
Done is better than perfect - @Facebook
I'm curious how that chart would look taking into account US and international population growth in the last few decades. Perhaps devices per capita is a better ratio?
BusyFlow Launches Publicly At London Web Summit
BusyFlow has launched their cloud apps management solution publicly at the London Web Summit today. The Lithuania-based cloud platform has created a service to efficiently manage cloud applications in a team setting, allowing multiple users to juggle files, notes, and tasks. With the news of their launch, BusyFlow also points out they've updated the look of their platform, and has added a few tweaks, like allowing you to attach a Dropbox file directly to a wall post or a Pivitol Tracker story.
I think the OS X version is a bit confusing, to be honest. There are too many elements sliding around and resizing. The problem it aims to fix is also still partially unsolved when the screen is dragged 'too far' (http://i.imgur.com/Q4Ktw.png).

The Windows version isn't confusing at all though (in its current implementation). I think this would be a really nice feature on Windows.
Something that provides syntactic sugar that compiles down to C? You'd be looking for Vala[1]. I haven't used it so I can't vouch for it in practice, but I know it compiles to C and uses the GObject system for object-oriented programming. It's not as much of a syntax change for C, but it apparently adds quite a bit semantically. There's also a Scheme implementation called Chicken[2] that compiles to C source, and I know there are others that I'm not recalling off the top of my head.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vala_%28programming_language%2...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_%28Scheme_implementati...
In Review: The Third Generation iPad
Also the first two are nations that are culturally and ethnically pretty homogeneous which would partially explain why there is little strife. If everyone subscribes to the same belief system and are ethnically similar then they are more like one big group as opposed to what we have in other countries where there is tension between groups.
I'm talking about real wages: the ability to buy food, transportation, and shelter. A few decades ago a lot more people could do this without requiring both spouses work and take on significant debt.
Ask HN: Are we at a disadvantage?
I'm a co-founder of a startup looking to apply to YC.

I'm mainly an artist (musician, producer, sound engineer), but I've always had a strong passion for technology. In the past, I went to school for aerospace engineering before realizing music was my true passion and transferring to a different school.

Our other co-founder is also a musician, but he's much more into the whole programmer/hacker stuff.

Would we be at a disadvantage seeing as I'm not the "ideal" candidate?
It might be a foregone conclusion, but $42.

On a side note, I think current and recent generations rarely look to space with the complete awe that say, generations in the 60's and 70's did.

How can spacexy be brought back?
Why can't you learn to code after work or on weekends? There are people who've written books that way. If you're determined, you'd do it that way. Otherwise, you're just dreaming of riches -- which you already have, with a six-figure salary few do have.
I was in the process of building essentially the same app as yours, for the same reasons :) After seeing yours (which I think looks great) I have dropped dev on mine (see: http://redd.it/r47p9) and will probably use your app to hook up some notifications to some other apps of mine.

Anyway good luck with pushover :)
Microsoft (and any other company) deserve a place when they create a good browser. Simple as that.
You don't have to root or jailbreak your Android phone to sideload apps. You don't have to worry about future updates breaking your jailbreak. Just push one button in the settings and you can install apps from any source, even alternative markets like Amazon's app store. http://www.amazon.com/mobile-apps/b?ie=UTF8&node=2350149...
Kiva Systems was started with almost no money...

It's actually one of the better stories I've heard. The founder basically found various phds that were researching in related fields and convinced them to work for equity.
Open hardware to the rescue of the PC!

I think the (not-too-distant) future of home computing will have a lot in common with today's PCs. Articles like this one always seem to underestimate the amount of real creative or productive work people want to do -- something which is still a challenge on the iPads of today. Have YOU compared typing on a small screen to a big one?

With custom manufacturing becoming affordable, as traditional computers start dying, open source hardware will start replacing them. I think we are seeing the first steps in this direction with Raspberry PI, hobbyist open hardware people, 3D printing (in the future: cheap chip printing?), CryogenMod, etc.
I agree, this is more likely given their behavior with AWS. They're happy to rent their IP and infrastructure to competitors.
If you look at well-prepared documents on your display vs. on a new iPad, you will be able to see a difference (provided your eyesight is OK).

The new MBP with high-res display has around 130 PPI, significantly more than your display. The new iPad has twice that.

So now take a look at the page numbered 20 in this PDF:

http://www.math.princeton.edu/~nelson/books/bmotion.pdf

(starts with "and for each t > 0").

The difference between the MBP and the iPad is night and day. The italics, symbols, and math in the document render much more nicely on the iPad. Take a look at the parentheses and the script letters in particular. (I did this experiment.)

Incidentally, the T220 is no longer available new.
No. You should learn to code in your free time, then leverage your new skills to get a promotion and raise. Contribute to open source projects and build mvp style learning projects.

If you are still serious about changing careers, keep working the day job and save back as much money as you can while reaching out to headhunters/startups/etc. Don't quit your job until you have accepted an offer from another company and have a solid 6+ months cash reserve. Don't burn any bridges.
They should remove gmail as well. I get some crazy things via that app

And it goes direct to my notification bar. talk about direct linking
Perhaps. But so what? As a developer the buck stops with you. If something goes wrong the boss (or client) will not be impressed by an excuse of "well I just did what someone on the internet said was best practice".

However I can see the problem with such a culture if your boss happens to be a bcrypt-tard and is closed off to discussion/learning.
Thanks for the clarification. It's been mirrored on github for a long time, but it's almost always a pretty old release.

To OP, "hosted on git" and "hosted on github" are two very different things.
Got inspired and it now supports Float64Array. :)
I tend to think of this stuff from the cloudcracker.com perspective, which is all about cheap jobs rather than millions spent. I rarely do brute force because, honestly, it's rarely necessary. But the single biggest factor in cloudcracker.com support of a hash format really is its efficiency in GPU space.

For instance, right now I'm implementing support for the modern SHA-512 crypt() variation. It doesn't translate well into GPU space at all, which will end up meaning that I can only offer dictionaries that are half a trillion words smaller than formats which are fast on GPUs.

So far the data I'm seeing indicates that differences of that scale in dictionary size really do make a difference on the success rate of the job. So for what it's worth, from that perspective, it is a factor.
That's a little different though. The blood in that movie was fantasy. The nipple was real.
Just to learn how to code, rather than to branch out on your own, or to build your own thing, or to launch your tested idea? No.
I used to do small code fixes and push them back to Git with my old N900. This tablet has he capability as well, but somehow I haven't gotten into the habit. Maybe because this device is WiFi-only, so not necessarily online when I would like to clone and weak some repository...
Yup agreed, though I would like to know what the parent commenter experiences have been, since it seems hes involved with some robotics/AI research.

I previously posted the following about when will the robotic revolution will occur, to which I got some pretty good answers:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3630139
Ask HN: The hardest job you'll ever have.
This YC job posting is on the front page at the time of posting this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3726135:

The hardest job you'll ever have (YC S11)

We're a small team of dedicated hackers working long hours
on hard problems. We're using a mix of technologies (RoR,
Objective-C, Core Data, Postgres, and Node), are well-
funded, have passionate users, and truly believe in what
we're doing.

If you're one of the few that thinks this sounds
interesting we'd love to talk. Send a link to your
github/dvcs profile to: missionhackerhouse@gmail.com

Must be in SF or willing to relocate (we'll help cover any
moving expenses).

I wish you could comment on the job postings themselves and I assume there is a good reason for that in general, but I want to see what other people think about this kind of posting.

What is the class of developers that posting is aimed at? I like to think of myself as a decent developer, but it really rubs me the wrong way. I don't want a grueling-ly hard job. I want a challenging job. I don't want to work "long hours", I want to be flexible (in both directions).

The last line is really puzzling. It's as if they know how unappealing the listing is, but they're looking for those few naive, exploitable workers who just might deal with that shit:

If you're one of the few that thinks this sounds interesting
we'd love to talk.

Is there really an audience for this type of posting?
Except, historically $1 billion for tanks today meant $1+ billion for tanks for the foreseeable future.

The actual long-term costs of $1 billion military spending are far more than those of $1 billion of NASA spending (and let's not even get into the economic reward of said spending).
Partly because the traveling/effort that is required to succeed in my current job is very demanding.
You get what you paid for applies to everything including salaries.
if we could magically wipe away all trace of religion or God from the minds of every Mauritanian, the problem would continue.

One only has to ask which came first the desire to control others or the religion that justified it, I believe the answer is self evident and if it is, then religions that control are merely a symptom of human nature and abolishing them will not cure the foundry cause which is the desire.
Yep, I work close to an extremely high traffic OAuth endpoint. I think scrypt would probably "cost" a lot more in terms of actual servers required to operate it.
I'm on a Nexus One at the moment. The touch is good when it works, but it's buggy. The more quickly you tap it the more likely it is to into buggy mode where a big dead spot develops in the lower center part of the screen. It's absolutely infuriating, and it really makes me much more envious of iPhone users than any of the apps.

If the Galaxy Nexus is really on par with the iPhone (and I'm highly skeptical of that) then I might stick with Android for my next phone, but otherwise I have to go iPhone just based on touch characteristics alone.
There are business segments where this flies. In most other areas you'll be robbed blind and left for dead on the side of the street.
That might have been fluxbox (fluxbox.org), from the BlackBox family.
Hmm, that just 404s when scanned.
You could have hardware "basestations" as you suggest which would be an interesting idea. Of course locating these geographically would be a difficult task. You might end up with rural areas where it would be impossible to do any computing at all because no basestation was in range, or you would end up with urban areas where there would be massive demand.

Rural would probably fallback to mobile networks and real datacenters, possibly with degraded service. Urban would just be adjusted based on trends - places with higher demand would get more powerful boxes; the same as scaling any other servers, really.

You would also have to account for what happens if somebody decides to have a big party or event somewhere and suddenly the local basestation computer goes from only having to service 10 - 100 clients to suddenly having to service 1000+?

Assuming a decent infrastructure, you'd only need to have enough wireless bandwidth; computing resources wouldn't necessarily have to be tied to local devices. So a party would just mean that more machines from the neighborhood would help via wired connections (I'm assuming basestations in the same neighborhood could speak to each other using local routers, without having to do a round trip to the ISP datacenter).

Of course, this still means that machines shouldn't be running at 100% capacity, but that's just common sense.
> a bad wrap

This is perfect; the actual idiom is 'bad rap' but this actually makes more sense in context. ;)
Also, I should say, the tablets will probably start doubling as powerful PCs with a wireless connection to the display and keyboard and mouse. Uh-oh.
Reimplementing it would not be an option. Making WebKit the reference implementation would give Google and Apple such an enormous advantage in development cycles that any browser that didn't use it would be unable to compete. You'd be expelling everyone but Google and Apple from the W3C.

If WebKit becomes the standard, every user from now until forever will be using the same pile of C++ to browse. That may be fine to you; I personally don't think that WebKit is so good as to make it the gold standard for the Web. Imagine if that had happened with NCSA Mosaic...
Clinker - (Jenkins, Sonar, SVN, Trac/Redmine in the cloud)
Ironically, this review is almost unreadable on a third generation iPad: the layout blows the text up far too large to be readable.
IE8 is the New IE6
I'm sorry, but what's the difference between DPI and PPI? Is it just 'dots' (print) versus 'pixels' (displays)?

As for T221 - sure, we had technology 10 years ago, but that isn't really important - there's a quote in this article, that there are similar displays available today - but for thousands and thousands of dollars, not in device that costs $500. T221 was $18k when it was introduced - if there are no ~$500 displays with similar PPI, it might as well don't exist, since there will be maybe fifteen people in the world that will buy it, as opposed to 3 million people that bought new iPad during weekend.