skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would find a way to replace the word "daddy" ASAP in your copy. There'd have to be better options out there.
It's just your Air isn't a touch-tablet.
The Compliance Officer's Dirty Little Secret
An American Gulag: Descending into Madness at Supermax
Well, something like that, but you also have an x86 version. (But the x86 is going to be more expensive than the ARM version)
I have never really understood the QR code hate. To just dismiss such a cool technology due to a dislike of how they look seems shallow at best. I also find QR codes genuinely useful, and have found myself scanning them quite regularly. I just wish iOS had it built in.
Why should I use this over MySQL Cluster?

MySQL Cluster is lock-free, distributed, HA, and has better performances:

http://mikaelronstrom.blogspot.com/2012/05/mysql-cluster-72-...

http://mikaelronstrom.blogspot.com/2012/05/mysql-cluster-727...

And MySQL Cluster has been used in mission critical apps for years.

What does MemSQL give me that MySQL Cluster doesn't?
Just noticed from the Win8Pro version, "Pen with Palm Block" a nice innovation Apple hasn't bothered with yet. Question I want to know is, "can you develop" applications for the tablet, on the tablet?
I certainly won't defend the jerky guys, but I will say that to be an effective journalist you have to be willing to be a jerk to people sometimes, or at least manipulative--regardless of gender.

In this case the sexism is obvious in the stories, but in general most PR reps believe it is their job to "manage" (manipulate) journalists. Journalists need to be ready to fight this--with anything from friendly persuasion to persistent confrontation.

The PR rep's job is to deliver a carefully crafted story to the public; the journalist's job is to tell the truth. The roles are inherently confrontational.
Very true, big companies are usually as good as their despot. At least when it comes to taking risks and "saying no". Apple could go all-in because Jobs had the clout to give marching orders to the whole company. Microsoft has Ballmer, who is more of a salesman/business guy and probably with less clout (perhaps fortunately)

I too have a bit of worry for Apple now that Jobs is gone. Ive has taste and seems to have gotten some power to go with it. However, the next time it is time to go from evolution to revolution they won't have Jobs to kick them there.
It strikes me as an entirely natural development and something that will appeal to many consumers.

I get the feeling Apple have always wanted iPad to be an extra - an extension to the desktop experience. But the divisions between phone, tablet, "ultralight laptop" and "main laptop" are arbitrary and increasingly opaque. Many people are starting to see tablets and real possible replacements: for light users, it handles 90% of their computer usage (internet browser, video and photo viewing). Even for "serious" computer users, tablets offer many advantages. They are quiet, keep cool, look good, super portable, and last a long time. People seem quite content with the lower processing power if they afforded these big pluses.

This Surface with integrated keyboard and support for regular win 8 apps could take it the extra 10% for a lot of people.
Related post on user retention/lifecycle email marketing as a service for those interested in the space: http://paulstamatiou.com/startup-user-retention-lifecycle-em... (and HN commentary on that post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3378583 )

Basically a call to action for more companies to tackle this .. and it looks like a bunch are. Exciting times for a big problem.
Only if you don't count all the important bits they've crammed into the "cover" (e.g., the accelerometer).
They demoed a working one at the press conference. I would be shocked if this didn't release the same day as Windows 8.
and the video is a youtube embed.. you'd think microsoft would bother hosting the video on its own server when this is the centerpiece of the page announcing a completely new product.
I can't believe this omits my personal favourite misconception: "Time always goes forwards."
They do this all the time and it's infuriating. I recently noticed that my contact email had been updated to an @facebook.com email address and my normal @gmail.com contact email had been set to hidden.
Thought SME was more often Small and Medium Enterprise? Is that not true where you are? (AU here.)
SoundExchange - digital performance royalties management
Ha ha - on that sheet, the cover is listed as a "VaporMg Case".

Well, at least they're honest...
I'm intensely curious how one sits on the couch and uses this with the keyboard. I'm afraid it's not going to work...
I believe the current round of e-readers actually use IR-based touch sensors. Still wouldn't compete on a phone for marketing reasons (thanks to the need for a sunken-in screen), but definitely shrinkable.
Are you suggesting this isn't newsworthy?

The company behind the most used OS by the mass market on the planet is announcing their own hardware for the next version of their OS. Their own hardware for their own OS is something they haven't done in their ~30 year history. How is this not major news?
The answer has to be yes, at least for the intel version. It runs full Windows 8 Pro on an x64 cpu. There's no reason you won't be able to fire up Visual Studio on that sucker (other than perhaps performance considerations).
Pen+touch+type seems like a great idea. It is something no other manufacturer has tried to do.

Apple Newton MessagePad, 1993. It had a stylus, handwriting recognition, you could use it with just your fingertips, and you could connect an external keyboard.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/atow/4314242537/

That was almost twenty years a go. Newton was a very expensive experiment for Apple, and they have learned the hard way that styluses are not the way to go.
Maybe in their own mind, but if I was Vizio I wouldn't trust them. Here is what Canonical provides and how much they charge: http://www.canonical.com/enterprise-services/ubuntu-advantag...

Note that they talk about "general business use" which isn't the same thing as consumers that Vizio is targetting.
Honestly... as much as this might sound interesting, I don't understand Microsoft's decision to not announce availability OR pricing.
My data is me, I am my data.

What I eat, my shoe size, where I've been, the drugs I take, where I work, my mortgage and tax payments, the movies I like.

Netflix should pay me for the honor of storing, mining, analysing, and reselling any and all information about me.

Ditto every one else peddling my data. Exploiting me (and you) for profit.

I want my cut.
When they called it Surface I thought it would have that haptic feedback screen that lets you feel different types of resistance based on what's shown on the screen. The keyboard/cover thing is pretty cool, though (although I don't know how comfortable/responsive it'll feel when typing really fast).

This seems more like a showcase of how small, powerful and efficient new chips have gotten then anything Microsoft has accomplished.
Does the color of the windows and background changes to the color of the keyboard as soon as we attach it ?
doesn't that option work the same as a file or something posted on somebody's wall
Because it's basically a tablet, but the screen cover (3mm thick), that is attached with magnets and can be detached, is a full multi-touch keyboard.
I'd expect to see at least the pro variant in the ipad-laptop price range, since it fills the role of both a laptop and a tablet.
+1

Here's another post on the topic:

http://blog.intercom.io/automated-emails-customer-respect/
Can anyone explain the timing and placement for this announcement? Why now and why outside of a major conference and on such short notice?

Is it supposed to be a hip marketing ploy or is there something else happening they wanted to announce ahead of?
It's a tough combo for sure.
They've also co-opted the five-year-old "Surface" trademark, which is now called PixelSense: http://www.pixelsense.com
I had an Archos before the iPod came out. A tiny bit bigger than the iPod would be, but a 30gb hard drive, usb 2.0, and a much better way to find music than a wheel.
I think it's just a matter of the rapid pace of innovation in the mobile space right now. The common pattern in innovation is to diverge and then converge. We're already seeing the convergence around a couple of paradigms like pull down to refresh and sidebar menus and we're going to see more of them as we slowly figure out what's the best solution to a design problem.
I've seen it, that's not a spec sheet. No CPU/GPU info. No RAM info. Not even display resolution info. It doesn't even tell you what wifi standards it supports except through reading between the lines.
Does the color of the windows and background changes to the color of the keyboard as soon as we attach it ?
reply
Why Apple Is Going "Containment" Not "Thermonuclear" Against Google In iOS 6
Ask HN: What are some good Django source code examples to learn from?
I have no idea what that diagram is trying to convey.
I saw it was 'fixed' below, but it's an annoying side-effect of everyone using "blog.*" as a blog address, and all default blog software assuming that 'home' is /

WP4 will probably have a step in the install software saying 'should we link the default home to /, or if not, where should we link to?' and everyone will praise it as innovative, and sadly, given the state of blog software, it will be. :/
The RT version is 'HD' and the Pro is 'Full HD' so I'm guessing 720 and 1080.
It's windows 8, so the software keyboard is there.

I think that the cover will be sold separately. They announced it as "Surface Cover", and coming in different colors, it makes sense to be sold separately. So, there's no other option but to also have a software keyboard. If not, the possibility of detaching the cover would be worthless.
I don't buy the complaint about CPU or RAM - featuring specs is not the way things are done anymore.
I was hoping someone would point out this issue. It's not just Egypt. Colombia suffers from the same luck. The real question is: What alternatives do non-paypal countries have?
My client has started outfitting their sales reps with ipads complete with covers that double as a stand. After a few weeks, they wanted keyboards, after keyboards they wanted a stylus.

Personally, I think MS nailed it. This could be just a tablet to some people, but it can be a whole lot more to the enterprise.

Now to see the pricing...
Are you really implying that Apple's end-to-end ownership of their product has little to do with their success?

What a funny, looking-for-an-argument response. You know what, though- I'll humour you.

Do you understand what a cargo-cult is? Are you really implying (groan) that end-to-end ownership is the precusor to success? With this transition, Microsoft is guaranteed super success, right?

But let's go back to Apple for a moment: If you want to attribute their recent success to it, you must also attribute their prior failure to it as well, as they went through well over a decade with dismal products and brutal sales. During the same time that Microsoft, who didn't have end-to-end ownership, was the darling of the tech industry with unheralded success.

I don't know why this sort of sophistry that is so common on here rubs me so raw. I think it's that so many are so desperate to try to simplify the world into clear differentiators, with a seeming blindness to the exceptions and the history behind their ridiculous claims.
On the x86 one, sure. On the ARM one, no. OEMs are not allowed to enable user key enrollment on ARM devices.
>Question I want to know is, "can you develop" applications for the tablet, on the tablet?

Yes, on the Intel version, no on the RT tablet.
Is it a high quality PC or some overrated super hyped Apple workstation ? Cause on my 3 years old PC with a new SSD I just blink and I can start typing code. If it has no SSD .. it's not high enough :D.
Ugly, bloated ??? Omg, youtube.com/watch?v=G1iaVD-B2IA
I'm not sure his shareholders would have loved it if he had of said that he thinks the MacBook Air is amazing and would love one of his own...
DOES it perform well though? And by that I mean things like native hardware video decompression without having too much impact on the battery, real-timeyness of the touch UI and overall low power consumption. These are IMO the underlying technologies where Apple innovated the most with their iOS platform and these metrics are yet to beat by others. Do we already have hands on tests with windows 8 on ARM? I at least haven't seen any.
With this project in particular, each time someone hits the main page there are 6 php scripts executed in parallel. I was hitting some limits with my VPS during those spikes.
I'm impressed. Good looking hardware, and you can do actual work on it. I hope it's priced competitively too.
Ugh, yup. This code should either be taken down, or come with a HUGE warning that it needs to be audited for security vulnerabilities.
They do! But those IR touch screens are actually different technology again from the quite literally cameras that the Surface used.

IR touch screens like the ones the Sony reader and Kindle use have been around for ages in POS machines and the like.

On the other hand the Surface (table) was using computer vision algorithms on realtime near-IR images of the table surface to recognize multiple touches and gestures.
The first ipod kinda sucked.
beaut, I see the distinction b/w RT & 8 Pro here ~ http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/18/microsoft-surface-tablets...
On the other hand, nearly ever doctor or professional I've seen using a tablet was using a Thinkpad with a pen rather than an iPad with their finger. Screwing around with iTunes and doing work are two completely separate use cases, and it seems that Microsoft is more interested in "the Enterprise" than Apple is. So with that in mind, they're trying to accommodate all use cases.

(I did have one doctor that insisted on using an iPad. It took him forever to type notes to the point of it being extremely irritating. Transcribe your notes later!)
Oh ok, what did you think of it?
Ask HN:  How would you promote a jobs board?
We recently set up a jobs board and we're having trouble getting it off the ground, we have tons of people to actually show the jobs to but finding people to post them is proving a lot harder than we thought.

Any suggestions?
Xbox Live integration is still the trojan horse on this device.
I know these two guys for a few years. They know how to hustle and the problem they are solving is huge. Its a no brainer for companies who want conversions to use their system and utilize user triggered emails.
The secret sauce is in the case. Touch + a trackpad is necessary to use both metro and the traditional desktop UI. Could be a good compromise so I can keep using legacy desktop apps until all the new metro apps are ready.
No coffeetable any more? It was a pretty weird idea, but with interesting concepts.
The lesson they may have learned was 1993 was not the right time to launch a tablet. The iPad wasn't the first swipe at a tablet, either.
How to blow $6 billion on a tech project
That's factually untrue. The iPhone launched at $499/$599 for 4gb/8gb models, and then a few months later had the 4gb discontinued and the 8gb dropped to $399, arguably due in no small part to people complaining how expensive it was.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_iPhone#U.S._rele...]
Yes, they showed it on the demo it seems.
Why oh why are they pushing Silverlight to show the video?

It's as if they decided to rip off both Apple's and Sony's philophies in one presentation.
Not just "some places" go backwards. UTC itself can jump backwards during a leap second.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second
It would be easy to provide such a thing on top of a jailbroken system, but in practice there are very few use cases for it: Apple's curation is only evil in a small handful of situations. Again: the vast and overwhelming majority of things people jailbreak to do (and even ten pay for in Cydia) are not apps and fundamentally cannot be installed as an app with an icon into a sandbox. It would likely then be a political death blow of that, as opposed to "ability to bypass the sandbox" we're all that was allowed (as explaining to people, even to developers, even to those actively at that minute using them, what substrate extensions are and how they have no similarity to the apps they modify, is sufficiently tricky that the response will just be "we already gave you the ability to side-load apps").
I suspect that's because they don't have a final model yet. Notice that this page states: Actual size and weight of the device may vary due to configuration and manufacturing process.
They announce what they know will be there in the final product.
When they have the full final spec, they will show it to us.
Hey, the logo actually looks better now. It look clean without the private beta text below it.
N. The local time offset (from UTC) will not change during office hours.

I got bitten by this once when developing a scheduling tool for project management. Since daylight-saving offset changes were always close to midnight, I assumed they would not occur while anyone was using my program (and there was no point in using it outside "office hours.")

Then a technician on a night shift used my program on the night DST kicked in, it went into an infinite loop and took down the CRM database server, disabling automatic software updates and an (unrelated) DRM system.
Apple was smart to release the iPad 2 with a design that practically "had to have" a special cover. This allowed them to legally advertise the iPad's price at one amount even though the majority of their customers would really be paying more (i.e. $549 after shelling out for a $50 cover, instead of only the base $499 amount).

Microsoft probably has the same plan here. A cover that contains a keyboard can be even more expensive (say, $100 each instead of $50) and they can use profits from covers to mask the true cost of tablets.

Then again, they've said nothing about the price...
So your client gave its its sales reps iPads when they needed laptops? :)
Conclusions From The Microsoft Surface Keynote
Ask HN:how to get iOS contract work
What's the best way to go about getting highly paid (<$150ph) iOS development work in SF?
Foursquare CEO Details Stress, Chaos of Starting Up
Waving shiny gadgets in the air without announcing price and (imminent) availabiilty is also not the way things are done anymore. And we do have Apple to thank for that.
There's no solid hinge to keep the screen at a comfortable angle. Even with the kickstand, if you move your knees, the kickstand falls out of place.
But it's still the right thing to do, and pointing this out is not victim blaming. And posting a blog to an audience that already agrees with you is not going to effect change. Confronting the perpetrators will.
That is pretty cool experience
I hope I'm wrong, but not mentioning a price says to me that they know they won't be able to match the entry-level iPad $500 price point.
This is the Macbook Pro w/ Retina Display TV ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFIHewtEuJQ&feature=relmf.... It seems like Microsoft is figuring out that heart sells harder than specs.
You do see the difference between importing local settings into settings.py and importing both of them from separate modules in a package's init so they can override (per my example), yes?

I feel like you should take a harder look at the modular settings link I included. MUCH better way to solve this problem.
The location rewriting is the Backbone router stuff that uses pushState. Pretty common HTML5 stuff, you'd have to be using a moderately old web browser. Most common one we're aware of that's guilty of not supporting this is Firefox 3. What's yours in this case?

This is how terms of use work on most websites. In our case, we're in a particularly tricky situation because the meal plans we lay out have the ability to be incredibly useful to our users, but only if they actually comply with them.

Since compliance isn't something we can ensure without a human being watching them 24/7 (including when they're asleep in case they're sleep-eaters, an actual phenomenon), we have to put in place that terms of use for that reason and others.

Others including situations like people with severe allergies. We cannot guarantee the absence of allergens in recipes/food coming from some of our third party sources. To guarantee as much would endanger the health of our users and would be irresponsible.

I'm sorry you don't feel we don't stand behind our product. We really do stand behind what we do and believe we're working on something that has the potential to help a large portion of westerners with weight issues.

The nutrition researchers and dietitians we work with feel so strongly about our product that it's being used in a weight loss case study involving many subjects that will allow us to further refine our already substantial improvement on the current state of consumer nutrition.

My email is in my profile, contact me if you'd like to discuss this further. I'd be interested to hear what you think we could do to better show we feel confident about our software.
> And now you can see why JavaScript was made a first-class language for the WinRT (not Windows RT) API - content-consumption via touch is now going to be a big feature for Win 8 and nothing serves this better than HTML5/JavaScript.

I'm not sure how you reached that conclusion. I race for a native app when it comes to content consumption, and native is also required to provide the requisite stream DRM used by Netflix, HBO GO, etc.

Heck, I wish Netflix would hire a better development team and stop trying to do their app in HTML. It's poorly designed and frustrating to use.
And it failed. I think the point is that it's nothing that anyone has tried recently, as the technology just hasn't been good enough. We're in a completely different world than the one in 1993. The question now is whether the technology today is good enough to be usable. No one else has tried it recently, meaning common understanding is that even today it's too complicated/not good enough. Until now.
Microsoft invented the iPad!
I don't know how they're going to make subpixel anti-aliasing work if you can rotate the display. I wouldn't be surprised if they just are re-using the ClearType name and it's not actually sub-pixel anti-aliased, just regular anti-aliased (like the iPad).
If its any consolation, I think you did the right thing. Who knows how long it would have taken them to look into it if it didn't hit the front page of HN?
Absolutely. Great posts from both yourself and eoghan, definitely worth a read for anyone interested in this area!
Production cost: 130 millions.
Worldwide boxoffice so far: 217 millions

That's a good "dud".
The problem is that a lot of it is hacky and somewhat specific to our site. Not necessarily generalizable.

I will say this though, I've been using Fabric for a very long time and abuse it with glee.

Are there any dev-opsy/provisioning/whatever type pain points you'd like a blog post or exposition on?

Edit: I'm the CTO. I'm open to open sourcing our stuff, but the lack of generalizability makes it less than useful. There's an abundance of magic in our stack that automates everything. Idempotence was a core design goal.

Edit2: For local development, I automate everything surrounding the python packages and the virtualenvs for the various repos we have as well. It's pretty damned handy.
Wow, look at the Microsoft “logo” in the bottom right. Is that their new wordmark? Microsoft.com is still using the gashed-O wordmark.
Hands on with Microsoft Surface
Thread.sleep(1000) sleeps for 1000 milliseconds.
Not everyone agrees. This one is rated pretty highly and apparently selling quite well: http://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-Touchscreen-Including-Mot...
1.8" HD. All of the other MP3 players on the market until then had been using 2.5", which was why the iPod seemed so much smaller at launch.
http://intercom.io

http://customer.io

Good luck.