skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's because they're exactly what a competent finance person needs for conversational analysis. Spreadsheets have their place but if you cannot talk without a keyboard you are way too deep in the numbers. And the batteries never die, at 3am on day 3 of due diligence in Toledo your phone and its finance app will be dead but that 12C will still be cranking out present values, amort schedules, target return rates and IRR. Those calculators are maybe the most fit-for-purpose white collar tool I've ever seen.

EDIT: I don't care for MSFT, I loathe Word. But Excel on Windows is a genuinely fine tool -- overused by a lot of people b/c the Windows anti-pattern keeps them from proper tools, but still a really useful piece of work. You can't do detailed modern financial analysis without it. The alternatives -- Linux, Google Docs, even Excel on Mac -- aren't even close.
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> 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?

If the deal hurts competition in a market, the deal may be illegal, yes.

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

Which may or may not harm competition in an identifiable market. Compulsory patent licensing regimes are sometimes forced upon companies in the US as a result of antitrust action, and other countries sometimes have general compulsory licensing schemes that are always in effect.

Are you confusing "harming a competitor" with "harming competition"? They're not the same thing.

> 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.

Major antitrust cases always take years. Any major litigation takes years. The first AT&T antitrust case in the late 40s/early 50s took 7 years to settle, and the second one, which broke the company up, took eight. Those didn't even go to trial.
The biggest problem is that clients WANT Microsoft Office. You can offer them something else (Apple iWork, Lotus Symphony, Open Office, LibreOffice, KOffice). It can do everything they need and they will still argue that MS Office is what they want because of a myriad of factors (training, familiarity, computability, etc).

Some people might be able to shave off some customers, but you are going to have to have some killer feature (even if it is price).
No, they come right out and say the four case study retail companies pay their employees more:
"They pay their employees more; they have more full-time workers and more salespeople on the floor; and they invest more in training them."
> Regardless of what one may think of his movies; this is bad ass.

Hmmmmm.... Aliens, Titanic, Avatar... not to mention Terminator, T2, The Abyss. Many people consider his movies to be bad ass and innovative as well. He's one of the very few directors where I can count on him setting his own bar so high that I'm going to love whatever he makes. Along with Ridley Scott and Spielberg, and more recently Nolan and Fincher joining their ranks, in my eyes.
Show HN: Read code on SO & GitHub easier: highlight variables, bracket matching
Mapping Global Friendship Ties
Jolicloud Me opens in beta, brings together shares in the cloud
This is good logic but its impossible to know who is buying all the ipads. Whenever I see real customers behind an online store of any sort, they are almost always completely different from what myself and the store owner would imagine.
It's not like the days of web app development are over. Just look at Google Docs and Gmail or Amazons Cloud Reader. With the push for HTML 5, constant JS optimization and new technologies like Dart emerging it is getting more feasible every day to develop web apps. Especially in the Post PC era because web apps are cross-platform and cross-device.
Nothing at all.

It's just that when you see comments like these -- "I noticed that" or "me too" -- you so rarely see "and then I wondered why, and here's what I found…" as a follow-up.

The conversation is poorer because "I noticed" is where it ends.
General guideline I find helpful in my posting: In discussing a topic like this, I find it's helpful to read what I've written and ask myself, "Is this more useful information or is it more outrage?" If it's the latter, I don't post, because outrage is kind of a given and doesn't add much. (I mean, sure, express outrage to your representatives, but they are not reading Hacker News.)
Sovereign immunity laws seem to have a habit of always applying. And will often rise, like zombies, despite repeated attempts to kill them off.

All it comes down to really is that sovereign immunity laws are written by the people who control the guns, to protect the people who control the guns.

So they are going to apply in as many circumstances as possible. And even when they don't, they probably still will.
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There's a difference between
"I told him, the interview was over"
and
"I told him the interview was over"
This is fixed in Office 2010. You can open up separate instances of PPT. In older versions you can, if you're feeling ambitious, set up a separate Windows user and create a shortcut that fires up ppt.exe under this new user's account (but still logged into your Windows account). This will give you two side by side PPT windows. Though copy-paste between these windows doesn't work, so it's a nearly worthless hack :)
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.

Sorry, I didn't express myself very clearly. By "poor experience" I wasn't referring to usability but to the lack of opportunities to tinker with the system and make it do things outside of what its creators intended.

"Simple" to who? You and me? Sure. Random guy on the street? Doubtful.

Surely the iPad is easier to use than the VIC-20. Then again, the VIC-20 came with a manual and it wasn't very long. I'm confident every VIC-20 owner read it and even the dumbest of us didn't have much trouble figuring out what command to type to load the disk.

Come think of it, I guess I was confusing things: I only had a disk drive later with the Commodore 64, games for the VIC-20 came on a cartridge so no typing required at all, just plug it in and turn on the power.
I wonder if you will be able to use the open one to create stuff for the closed one?

More disturbingly, I wonder if the open ones will be allowed to have a fraction of the functionality. Hollywood would love to only allow Internet access from locked down devices, and if 98% of the population ends up on appliances, things like that actually become feasible to enforce.
MacBook Pro Battery Life hacks: 10 hours projected use
Pirate Bay Wants to Put Unassailable Servers in the Sky
Maybe, but you have to ask, who will win in any power struggle? I am willing to bet that between ISPs, consumers, and the government, it is consumers. In particular here, it is consumers who are the losers here power-wise, and so.....

One of the reasons why overbroad laws are a problem is that they set up a "show me the man and I'll find you the crime" system.
Good point. I have been a long time listener and afaik they clearly mention when a segment is fictitious. That is pretty interesting though.
Not only the tactile interaction. The OS, the API, the user interface in general, the networking and communication devices, the battery, etc. The thing that is "by definition all display" is called a monitor.
I still hate writing on a touchscreen. It's slow and error-prone. It's only better than not writing at all.

Touchscreens are fundamentally limited by the size of your finger. Firstly because you have to physically press the UI element you want to interact with. Secondly because your finger obscures whatever's underneath.

Of course, you can get around this by decoupling the physical location of the UI element and the physical location of your finger. It's called a trackpad.

Touchscreens are great for some tasks. But they are not great for tasks involving high information densities (writing, spreadsheets, mostly anything that can be classified as "editing"). For those, people will continue to use keyboards and mice until they evolve cone-shaped transparent fingers.
Mike Daisy exploited a story about violations of human rights to benefit himself. This is not a greater good situation.
I prefer Marc Andreessen's reason: Companies that have a retention problem usually have a winning problem. Or rather, a "not winning" problem.

Source: http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to-big-... (original seems to be deleted from blog.pmarca.com)
Apple, CBS, Fox, Sony, Warner Bros. and 15 others hacked?
Yeah, I wasn't sure the way the question was posed either if it was n(n-1)/2 or n(n-1).

The bidirectional piece needs to be clarified in the way the question is posed.
MYLaunchPAD
Why on earth are people still allowing their referers to be sent to third party websites?

Because they don't care? You might consider it a privacy must but plenty don't. I, for one, don't have a huge problem with sites knowing where I came from.
Your accusation is useless because the PL tools don't solve this problem either. Currently the only tools we have in networks are cryptographic and social, and those are not provably secure. And the point is that what is considered "non-trivial" nowadays is actually "monstrously huge and self-serving". A computer is just a tool but people want to build a whole world in there. And after that they become addicts, leading to absurd rationalisations about how we need more to cure us.
Was I the only one who thought that $775 million seemed like quite bit of cash for a non-profit micro-lendng company...oh wait, not that one.
I used this to make a simple player for my personal audio portfolio website, and it was super easy to use and reskin. I had trouble getting multiple tracks to play, but I just started messing around with jQuery, so I think it was a factor of that learning curve. Highly recommended. Once you get multiple songs working you can make an interface for adding or removing them as well, I would love to implement this as well. I guess the point of my long rambling post is use it because it works and it is compatible and awesome.
Edit: You can also easily use the Soundcloud or Bandcamp api to stream your tracks directly to your jPlayer, which is super useful.
The Words That Are Killing Your Productivity
It's not factorial.

SPOILER (do not click): http://johnmcmanus7742.wordpress.com/2009/01/22/calculate-fu...
I don't know. What happens when you can dictate your documents? That and gestures and the occasional keyboard might go a very long way.

I don't think it will change tomorrow. But I could see the home market making the shift, gradually. Where the business market will be fifteen years from now we'll have to see.
Not yet.

My wife is not an advanced user of computers by any stretch of the imagination, but I would never buy an iPad for her.

She has a DSLR and 60k photos in iPhoto (~320G). iPads will eventually store this much in 3 years, but you will want it backed up somewhere (and in 3 years the "cloud" still won't be doing this much (personal) data at a reasonable personal cost compared to a physical device). And she will not be tolerant of doing edits or looking at photos on a 10" screen.

Not to mention that once you increase the screen size, portability goes out the window -- you will have a monitor. And guess what? Touch input doesn't really work ergonomically on a 24" monitor.

There are solutions, Airplay will obviously be involved, as will BT input devices. But it's not quite ready for prime-time yet.
The lawsuit will take years while microsoft will make sure the litigants go bankrupt.

Unfortunately there primary businesses are based on selling Microsoft Software Services, and while it would almost certainly result in Microsoft being fined eventually... I am pretty certain they will do the same thing in the 90s and just kill the vendors who are going after them. Raise a few SKU prices for that kind of market, make the companies unprofitable.
If you can see individual pixels, as you should easily be able to on typical desktop and laptop displays, then you can use higher resolutions.
Ask HN: Best approach to write an Objective-C tutorial
Hello,

I plan to write a beginner Objective-C tutorial with a friend. I'm interested in your opinion about best approach for this.

I have two possible directions in mind:

* Pure Objective-C tutorial (I will assume the reader knows C), the reader should be able to do the exercises and test his ideas from a Terminal. In principle this tutorial can be followed on a Mac with Xcode, on a Linux or Windows computer with GNUstep. The tutorial will present simple exercises that will guide the reader through all aspects of modern Objective-C.

*Objective-C on iOS, this could be a more applied tutorial than my first idea. From start I will assume that every exercise will be tested on an iPad or iPhone. As before I will suppose that the reader knows C, I will assume zero Objective-C experience.

Thanks and I look forward to your observations.
This is a bullshit question. If I heard it, I would immediately know that that place will not pay well.

I'd ask the interviewer to answer his own question. He would say something like "smart team, interesting project, ability to work on side projects". And this would be pure bullshit. Why? Because if someone offers him a billion dollars per year, he will take it under any conditions. And so would I.
Unless you're checking email headers, you just might not know if you've received emails from people using an iPad. I send dozens of emails weekly from my iPad 1, both directly through the Mail app and through online apps like Desk.com. And this is doing real work: tech support, dev communications, and more.

And TV? I think I watch video on my iPad perhaps once every couple weeks. And then its likely just a 3 min Vimeo clip. My iPad is absolutely a work device; it's in fact my full on-the-go work solution.
I hope the barrier to entry to be a producer will stay as low as it is now. I worry that as PC demand goes down, the cost to get started in programming will go up. I started to learn how to code web sites while procrastinating one afternoon during finals week; I discovered Apache on my macbook. The barrier to entry was almost accidental, because I had all this great stuff on my computer waiting for me to discover it. Those experiences will be more rare in the post-PC erra.
Sovereign Immunity only applies to tort law at least in the US, right?

In which case, I fail to see how that even applies here. It might allow ISPs to block government web sites on some suspicion. But would an ISP do so? I doubt it.
A better construction of this recommendation is to pay your employees enough to take the question of pay off the table. It's simply because people who feel even slightly underpaid become unresponsive to every other form of motivation.

However, it's just a specific example of following the classic talent-based management formula:

* Hire good people,

* Give them goals and the resources they need, and

* Get the hell out of their way.
You know, the website that's popular this week. Thats all anybody uses anymore.
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This is great. Would love them in a more accessible format. 10 mins in and I still haven't been able to find anything actually written by him… :-)
Well things will need to be produced somehow, I imagine this will still be done with some form of computer. Whether or not you keep the keyboard has little to do with the "freedom" of the device.

The question is what the difference will be between the consumption devices and the production devices.

Whether the devices for creating content become specialized pieces of equipment priced out of reach of the general market and you get to touch one for the first time when you turn 18 and start your computer science course or perhaps with increasing viability of virtual machines you simply download a program that gives you all of your power tools but inside a sandbox so if you mess it up you can just re-image and go again.

There will also be as you suggested "hacker hardware" like the Raspberry Pi, I think the key for these is to make sure the costs are low and that they are available to kids in school.

The "hacker spirit" can overcome many obstacles.
Hell in the 70s nobody had a computer at home and the original hackers used to break the law by breaking into companies computer systems via telephone lines just to play around with them.
> Mathematically-secure cryptography ... is unbreakable

To expand on sibling comments: Cryptography essentially depends on the assumption that P=NP (well, not exactly, but...). It's possible, though unlikely, that mathematical discoveries could undermine all possible conventional cryptographic schemes.

As for brute-force, that's a tricky one as well. If you allow a strengthening of Moore's law that says that operations per second per dollar increase exponentially, then you can construct the following "polynomial time" algorithm for any cryptographic problem:

Wait n*k years, where
- n is the problem size in bits, and
- k is a scaling factor to get the exponents to align
Buy a computer
Run the brute force algorithm on your new computer
You might enjoy this TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_stone_explores_the_earth_and_s...
Why do developers live by different rules than others at work?
Anatomy of a smart phone hack
The problem here you see is that people don't want to spend time learning computers if they can avoid it except for browsing.

Now most students are being trained to use Office at school.

I use to see the world from an "Open Source" programmer's point of view: "You have the choice to use OpenOffice". But then after I saw the reality for a while, things start to sink in and it becomes obvious that people don't want to be liberated the way I thought they ought to be.

People are OK with MS Office. It becomes a piece of software that, no matter how hard geeks want to argue about the Pareto Principle or not, will stood the test because people were being trained regardless its complexity.

So yeah, from "feature/functionality" perspective, there are alternative. But from skill-wise, willing-to-learn aspect, there aren't until Universities and/or schools start teaching young people to use something else.

OTOH another argument is: you don't need the other alternatives if you have Office.
Zynga is a counter example to this. They regularly copy ideas and change them a little bit.

While it's not bad to get some feedback, blabbing about your great new idea to the world might not be wise. A bigger company could easily come along and beat you to the market because they have more resources.

The idea from one of my first startups came from another startup. They had a private beta and I was able to get to market first. It didn't work out in the end (this was 10 years ago), but I would have never even had the idea if I didn't see them talking about their idea months before it was even ready for beta.

Why bring on that competition before you can even get off the ground?
We used JPlayer at the Facebook University Hackathon series this year, and while it wasn't always a joy to work with it was far faster than rolling our own. As others have said, super easy to reskin, handles cross-browser compatibility fairly well; overall a great boon to anyone looking to quickly get up and running with HTML5 a/v
Everyone's case is different of course, but it's very possible that soon, your wife will be on iPad only.

For large monitors, AirPlay to the TV works great today. I can snap a picture on my iPhone, step inside my house and the next second, show the picture on a 50" TV to all my guests. Instantaneous. I don't have to connect to a computer at all. It even works for videos.

Combine that with a card from Eye-Fi and cloud storage, and I'd say that in two years tops, you'll feel like it's a completely normal and safe way to manipulate your pictures. Use the iPad to arrange them in collections. Show them on the TV. Store them online.
Ok, granted, it seems to work but when you look at the configuration:

iPad 2 (16Gb, WiFi)

Apple wireless keyboard

Stilgut adjustable angle stand/case

iSSH

Linode 512 running Ubuntu 11.04

Apple VGA adapter

This is basically the same configuration as an iMac! I'll take an example, most of the programmers I know when doing some serious coding have 2+ monitors because it's always good to run on the side, get the result live. Or just because you need to compare two files. On such a small screen, it's close to impossible. Also for a programmer a lot of the wasted time is browsing through long files, with an ipad and, again, a small screen = nightmare.
To be fair , that one article is the only evidence I have seen thus far of anybody using an iPad as their primary development machine.

Wonder how he is getting on with it?
Here are my thoughts:

Reading your comment is a totally superior experience to reading pg's essay. You explained your viewpoint. You reasoned it out. You backed up your views. You didn't make seemingly unconnected bald statements with a single sentence and then moved on.

If pg has thought deeply on the subject, it's impossible to tell. He doesn't "show his work" at all. He doesn't explain how he came to a conclusion (unless you consider one speaker ever that he referenced), or give illustrations. He certainly doesn't try to bring you around to his way of thinking.

He also doesn't use words like "It seemed" or "I believe" or "the way I see it," or "from my perspective." Certainly there is no indication that he ever questions his own motives or beliefs.

BTW - when I wrote "references," I wasn't necessarily talking about research (except when I specifically said studies or research). I'm talking about evidence of thought process, justification, reasoning, any kind of investigation, internal or otherwise.

Public speaking didn't arise out of the late part of the 20th century, it's a tradition thousands of years old with thousands of years of opinions on it. It's extremely facile to simply declare it to be the bastard stepchild of writing (of course speaking came first), with little more value than appealing to the "mob" of the audience, without even acknowledging or disputing this history.

The whole essay is not argued at all, but a collection of bald statements (which I list above) which must be swallowed wholesale in order to continue reading.

It's "pure" exercise in a priori reasoning (although we don't see any reasoning).

But whether speaking has value or not is not something that can possibly yield to a priori.

Scott Berkun puts it more eloquently than me:

http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2012/on-writing-vs-speaking/

The thing that pisses me off isn't that I believe we're talking about facts -- although, of course, that's the way pg states things because he (mis)uses classic style -- but the sheer lack of argument. The whole essay hinges on several statements which are presumed to be true, and without which, none of the other points make sense. Begging the question in action.
Indeed, but I hate to believe taxes for the space money is well spent when the taxes for the school down the street isn't.
Smartphones and 3G did this before *Pads.
Forgetting how to Program
ck2 has 11K+ karma but a blank about section, which leads me to believe that he probably has exaggerated privacy expectations to begin with. Almost nobody outside of this vocal 'minerdity' cares about things like this.
Since I want to learn Objective-C so I can make something for my iPad, the 2nd direction sounds more appealing.
thanks for pointing this out - you can enter your zipcode now :)
The difference in that (obviously unrealistic) case is (I think?) between a cost per password of hundreds of thousands of dollars versus high tens of millions of dollars.