skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Because I'm not really criticizing Maddox himself, but the people who really took that page seriously and used it as part of all their anti-iPhone pseudo analysis during the great flamewars in 2007. You didn't really need to delve further into the site because I already knew about the kind of stuff it is.

Point is, most people in 2007 were criticizing the iPhone for not having a keyboard. That funny maddox link had an opportunity to be taken seriously. Make a google search for things posted in 2007 and you'll see by yourself what people who never handled an iPhone at the time thought of the idea of a phone 100% operated with a touchscreen. How many predicted the iPhone would fail way before anyone even had the opportunity to test one ? sounds like the iPhone and what it does wasn't that obvious.
>http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine...

Off topic, but thanks for that article. Reading it made my weekend.
To play devil's advocate, you should not be able to just close your credit card account and be able to walk away from a contractual recurring payment agreement into which you entered.
>Yup. People skills matter. Programming seems like a great job for asocial people. It's actually the shittiest job imaginable if you have weak people skills, because you get staffed with the crappy maintenance projects that have no upside. (Programming probably has the most variance of any job category; the best projects are a lot of fun, and the worst grind your mind to sawdust and produce nothing.) If no one likes you, no one trusts you, and you'll never get projects where your technical intelligence really matters.
I understand the hate that technical people have for "office politics" but the only approach that works is to adapt. To figure that shit out so you can laugh (silently) at the suckers who don't get it instead of being one of them.

This is why the best programmers are in startups -- I do not believe you can be good at people and computers at the same time. And it is much more profitable to be involved in people, sadly.
> Why didn't they do more than think about it if it was that obvious at the time that capacitive touchscreen phones would dominate the future?

Because, as I said, the market wasn't ready for large capacitive touch screens.

> All the biggest competitors in the mobile space had their own operating systems that were optimized for navigation buttons/softkeys moving a cursor around, and optionally a stylus.

Because, as I said, the market wasn't ready for large capacitive touch screens.

> Something like the iPhone would probably have evolved eventually

So we basically agree.

When I first saw the iPhone I thought it was the way of the future. But I thought the current form was awful. When the G1 came out it was even worse than the iPhone. The market simply wasn't ready yet; but Apple got in there with something barely usable for a price that a few early movers could afford.

Over time, both Apple and Google refined their systems into amazing, world changing devices.

There were two obvious ways of building these phones - 1. with menus 2. with icons. That is the way all feature phones that I know of worked. Google added widgets to this, and eventually Microsoft came up with the completely new idea of tiles.

> I think it's odd to think that ... Apple only was "lucky" to have a shipping product available at exactly the right time.

I never said anything remotely like that. It was entirely intentional that they put together the iPhone and brought it to market at the exact point in time that it became viable. That's why they are the most valuable company in the world. They deserve the huge success they have had, but, again, they don't deserve a monopoly.
Ah, but doing that was what allowed them to kill IE and restart the browser wars.

Seems like Joel should retract that article.
I just found out that the monohulls are gone... I doubt I will watch any of the next America's Cup races....
The catamarans never will have the class and beauty of the real sailboats!
Just like in skiing..... I'd rather watch a downhill than a half-pipe!
The America's Cup is about sailing.... Bring back the sailboats... Please!
Yeah right.

The iPhone is so obvious that your links shows a screen with scrollbars and I presume it worked the same way as it did on my godawful POS of a LG Prada : you probably had to hit the bars to scroll.

Still I admit that Openmoko had the decency to make the scrollbars bigger and give us arrow buttons widgets, which probably made it easier to use than the 2px bar of the LG Prada.

Anyway the openmoko is not a valid comparison point when we're talking about what Samsung did to Apple when they made the Galaxy S, Touchwiz (Android on samsung is not the same as vanilla Android), copied the (look) of the dock connector, AC adapter, packaging.. Openmoko doesn't have anything of the stuff that made the iPhone feel like magic.

Remember that the first Android phone didn't even support multitouch, for god's sake. And it was a year later after the release of the first iPhone. A year later and they still couldn't do anything close to it, and people call the iPhone obvious ? have some decency, please. The iPhone 3g has been released BEFORE the first android phone and it was already the second iteration of the iPhone. And the first Android phone (HTC Dream) was so far from being like the iPhone it isn't even funny. Compared to what the Galaxy S has become.
Investors Don't Like Acqui-hires
Fair point; I was too quick to comment there. I'm curious though: are you familiar with the reasoning behind the development of design patents? I've done some light research and not turned up much. It seems that trademark and copyright already provide fairly expansive coverage for non-functional IP, so I don't quite see the intent behind the design patent laws.
Until Microsoft either discontinues support for Windows XP or releases a modern version of IE for it, libraries like jQuery are all but necessary, in my opinion.
Aren't the polyfills pretty good nowadays?
That's about 1,100 dead babies worth of funds. http://www.raikoth.net/deadchild.html
>What's next? The Mac stole from windows?

Actually Mac did borrow a few usability from Windows too.

1. Finder Sidebar: Windows Navigation pane

2. The Mac Path bar: Windows Address bar

3. Back and Forward navigation buttons in folder windows

4. Minimizing to document windows into app icon

5. Screen Sharing: Remote Desktop Connection

6. Time Machine: Backup and Restore

7. System Preferences: Control Panel

8. ActiveSync and Exchange 2007 support

9. Command-Tab: Alt-Tab

10. Terminal: Command Prompt

While most of these are so obvious and can also be called prior art, standing in Apple's shoes, its an innovation by Windows, they had it in their OS before Apple. If you find the above list funny you know that Apple tried to sue Microsoft for having a GUI. A GUI !!
SkinnyMe Bangles: Jewelry that helps women tone and strengthen their arms
Not recognising document.getElementId is pretty bad, though. It's perhaps the most basic and commonly used part of the DOM itself.
My overall argument was not about the terminology, but the claim that Apple invented touching with your fingers - so not sure why you picked this one point to disagree with me on if it's a childish semantic.

But if "touch means finger touches" in the tech world then what do you call devices designed to be used with a stylus? Not touchscreen? And in general English "touch" doesn't mean "with fingers" either.
Here's one, Building Skills in Python: http://www.itmaybeahack.com/homepage/books/python.html
Since I don't know, I thought I'd ask -- were Apple the first to create a multi-touch UI for a phone? That would seem to me to be the major innovation in touch UI if that's the case.
You don't need to crack the DRM to upload these to file-sharing sites. Pretty much all TV rips (and even Blu-ray rips) are already double-compressed, so it's not particularly important to get at the raw bitstream. That means that all you need is a "malicious" video card or something to intercept the video-out signal from your computer. (And no, HDCP does not solve anything. It's already broken and anyone willing to pay $150 for a Spartan 6 dev board with HDMI ports on it can remove it.)

Anyway, I'm pretty sure whoever made the decision to go ahead with this model knows that there's going to be piracy. You would have to be living under the world's largest rock to not consider that possibility.
Presumably they'll still be tracking which ads were downloaded by your device. So instead of directly sharing your data with advertisers, now the advertisers can simply do a bit of data mining to infer your data from the ads you download.
3D-Printed Circuit Boards, for solder-free printable electronics
100% agree. I used a touchscreen kiosk back in 1982 at EPCOT. It wasn't resistive, could have been capacitive, probably was infrared or surface-wave.
Responsive HTML5 video
It didn't take much to allow using the Palm with fingers - I used to write on it with my fingers rather than the stylus because I found it more convenient and still accurate enough.
Indeed. Though I'm sure the gym's merchant account requires them to stop charging a particular credit card if you ask them. You can then switch to paying by cash, stop paying, default on the account, and then go through the whole collections thing.

The OP did learn a valuable lesson, though: don't enter into a contract you don't agree to, expecting to have someone else get you out of it.
Yep. I've been out of school since 1991 and the last time I wrote a binary search, or balanced a tree, or even implemented a linked list, was in school.
Try a few hours...

(And a good thing too, since once again there will probably be no way for this non-American to actually buy the damn thing...)
Would you like some anecdotal encouragement?

My mom had a serious liver infection during her second trimester while carrying my older brother. He turned out autistic. After years of dressing down people about vaccines and other snake-oil causes of autism, she forwarded this article to me with one line, "This must be the reason." FWIW.

Anyway, I came two years later without complications. I also exhibited many odd behaviors that worried my parents at first, but wound up not being autistic.

Hang in there and keep your chin up. Your younger son might be fine.
Activist Challenges a Sweeping Revision in Patent Law
>I personally have always thought the iPhone was Apple taking the openmoko idea and running with it.

From the linked article,

"
Cheap, hackable Linux smartphone due soon
By Linux Devices
2006-11-07
"

Presumably that means this was 7th November 2006.

So, in exactly 2 months ( on January 9th 2007) , Apple was able to design a prototype based on this concept, write all the software and demo it onstage ?
The coming civil war over general purpose computing
A bit off-topic, procrastination vs. focus is a very different problem (imo), but try the "Strict Pomodoro" Chrome Extension, has helped me improve quite a bit.
Great point as well. But I'm not quite sure what you mean by "Freeform task management". Could you elaborate on that?
School in Belgium makes iPad mandatory
I have multiple sclerosis and acquired hookworms about 3 years ago as an attempt to prevent further relapses. HN isn't exactly the place for this, but if anyone has any questions I'd be happy to answer.
Yeah initially it wasnt made to support 3rd party apps he expected everyone to innovate on the web. That's why they concentrated so much on making Safari great. All the developers wanted native apps and eventually it brought the app store to life.
Why not just call the gym in question? I've had numerous accounts with recurring charges, but I've never dealt with them by changing account or card numbers.
> Of course touch means finger touches

I'm not sure that's true. For example, in the Tablet PC space, a touch screen could mean that a screen responded to a stylus, finger, or both, but usually, just the stylus! And even before the first iPod came out in 2001, screens in PDAs were referred to as touch-screens.

Handspring Edge, 2001:
"THIS WARRANTY DOES NOT COVER PHYSICAL DAMAGE TO
THE SURFACE OF THE PRODUCT, INCLUDING CRACKS OR SCRATCHES ON
THE LCD TOUCHSCREEN OR OUTSIDE CASING."

Treo 650, released in 2004:
"Fully integrated phone and PDA with digital video and camera capabilities
Integrated Bluetooth technology
Vibrant 320 x 320 touchscreen display"
http://www.amazon.com/Palm-Treo-650-PDA-Phone/dp/B0007NP8PW

A review of Treo 650 suggests the finger worked on large areas, 3 years before the iPhone was released, but the UI buttons in the PalmOS were unchanged from small ones created 10 years earlier for stylus-access only. (In this light, Apple's innovation was to require action buttons to be at least 40x40 pixels with enough spacing from each other in their new iPhone OS, now called iOS.)
http://www.mobiledia.com/phones/palm/treo-650.html
"Extensive use of touch screen allows finger access but you will need the built-in touch pen for pulling down menus and making selections."

One could argue that Apple should not be allowed to sell a phone without a keyboard since they're improving on the Treo 650's design, just like Samsung should not be allowed to sell a phone with a larger screen and multiple physical buttons since they're improving on the iPhone design.
The email "problem" is what Facebook fixed.

Email is broken for a lot of reasons. Managing your contacts, finding lost contacts, finding the email of that person you met last night, party planning, birthday reminders, attachments, sharing photos with groups of people.... There are a lot of things that are extremely difficult to do with email, but are very easy to do on Facebook. So I consider Facebook to be simply a better email client for communicating with your friends and family.

A next-generation email/facebook/social system will have to take things to the next level, and integrated with your phone, and perhaps even replace the conventional cell phone carriers completely.
Pandora and Spotify may rake in the money, but they never actually created the content. It would be like me starting a business that resells Microsoft software and complaining that it's too difficult to make a profit because I have to pay Microsoft for the content.

I would be much more impressed if they signed their own artists and made a huge profit.
Does anyone else find the code examples absolutely damning?

Aside from not being cross-platform, VanillaJS is just plain ugly.
When My Business Failed
I still enjoy my Playbook tablet and though i plan on getting a Windows Phone 8 i can't wait to see what RIM brings out.
Actually, function.js is vastly superior as readers of "JavaScript: The Good Parts" will know: https://github.com/TazeTSchnitzel/function.js
Where's the math behind the 50 years estimate? That would be of more interest that the number-talk at the beginning of the article.
One thing people fail to realize, any information not submitted as evidence during the trial, may not be considered by the jury in their deliberations. This includes prior knowledge or experiences of any given juror.

So if these PDA's were not submitted as evidence by Samsung, they could not be taken into account when the jury decided their verdict.
The first book listed on the "Books" link is: JavaScript & jQuery: The Missing Manual

Heh.
Yes, but using all of them needed for full HTML5 support in, say, IE6, probably takes up more bandwidth than downloading a new browser.
Learn Python The Hard Way (by zed shaw) http://learnpythonthehardway.org/

The online HTML version is free
That's a very dreadful prospect of a future... And yes, I think it's a pretty bad thing.

On a related note, the book "Childhood's End" covers this topic quite well from my point of view. In the end, no one had to move a finger for anything. And it was damn boring and counter-evolutionary...
But is it the bank's responsibility to enforce the contract?

I would rather have a civil court be the recourse for a broken contract than for a third non-governmental party to handle it.

I suppose if it was written into the contract that the bank would perform this role prior to the card being obtained and this being made abundantly clear to both sides things would be a little different. Still, ideally I would have the bank as the holder and mover of funds at the will of the cardholder, not someone outside of the contract between the bank and cardholder.
Not sure why Vanilla JS doesn't require <script> tags, whereas jQuery apparently does.
What I stated above was an interpretation of the statement you cited. In essence, I (and many others) would posit that if you can't measure it, then you can never know it exists. So, the smallest length any object can have is the Planck length. And then I believe, that since you can't measure sub Planck lengths, everything you measure must be an integral number of Planck lengths. Obviously, one is free to disagree with this interpretation.
What is Ultrabook and how is it different from a laptop
You can never do enough to save everyone or serve everything. This is something you're going to have to understand. In fact, when people argue that, it seems like the source often isn't "you could have given that money to the poor/destitute" so much as it is "I don't like that you're doing [x] instead of [y]"; or, "I don't like that this money can be saved up for cause [x] and not for cause [y]". It's as selfish or more selfish than the use of funds for ones self.

What kind of car does a person that argues this drive? Is it new? Used? Does it have more horsepower than necessary for that person to live? Well, if it does, then perhaps you could have given the excess money you paid to save another child. How about your house? Too much space? Are you renting out that excess space to someone that can't afford it? Are you giving all of your income with the exception of the little you need to save for retirement and the little you need to survive to help starving kids in this country or the next? Well, you're wasting money and that money could have been spent to save another person or bring another person you've never met through college. You selfish. arrogant. bastard.

Give as much as you wish to help those in need. Save money to help your family in their time of need; but above all, don't tell other people what to do with the money they've rightfully earned or rightfully given to causes they, at that moment, felt were more important. If a person chooses to support something another person doesn't care for, that's that person's perrogative. if they choose to pamper themselves and buy nice cars or nice houses or furniture, or choose expensive hobbies that's entirely their choice.

[/rant. bring on the downvotes]

edit: that wasn't entirely directed at my parent post. I've heard these sorts of arguments before about "that money could have gone to new-big-important-cause or old-important-cause" and I'm quite annoyed at them. Should people give money to those in need? Sure. Do they have to give everything? Not my call, not my money. Do I have a right to say where money that isn't mine should go? Not even a little. When I don't give money to those in need, am I killing them? Most likely not. There are other things that have fallen together in the world that have made their life terrible. Do I feel sorry for them? Yes.

Oh, and another thing. You know how else to help others? By consuming and by giving them jobs, even on frivolous things. Yeah, I know it sounds weird; but, when you order food from a restaurant, your meal is helping to pay the cook's wages and the waitress's wages and the table cleaner's wages and the dish washer's wages and the greeter's wages. This museum? It'll have employees that might otherwise not have jobs. Now they can acquire income and will no longer need money from others, then they can help the impoverished as well.
Where Have The Users Gone?
"Sending a registered letter" sounds like a "getting ready to sue" legal last resort. You don't have to do things like that to cancel subscriptions with most any other business.

Unfortunately that's actually the only way to cancel membership in writing at most major gym chains in the US. They all outsource membership billing to the same company, ABC Financial. ABC has their customers (the gyms) require member cancellations be sent by certified mail. Any cancellation request by phone or mail that isn't sent certified is simply thrown out. If you cancel your credit card, they'll just send you immediately to their collections agency.

This is how they guarantee "more revenue from more members than with anyone else". It's such a scummy business.

http://www.abcfinancial.com/

A Google search for "ABC Financial scam" (in quotes, exact phrase) has over 13,000 results.
Sites where js performance of this kind is worth the substantial increase in engineering effort and decrease in maintainability are 1 in 1000.

This guy reminds me of the people who used to say they just wanted a phone when talking about smartphones or who just wanted a command line on Linux when talking about DEs.
I find it very bizarre that "commercial success" can be sufficient evidence for upholding a patent -- isn't the point of a patent to aid in commercial success by allowing a temporary monopoly?
From what I remember there's a heavy xml processing bias, the python isn't that idiomatic (partially due to new features being introduced since its publishing date) and the libraries used for particular tasks aren't the best. Most of its problems stem from it being dated. I think Mark Pilgrim is a good author and teacher though, and even now this might make up for its faults to a degree.
I have Aspergers, and I feel the same way that Autism might be incurable for those who already have it. This research may help future generations, but I'm not hopeful that it will help me.

I am probably going to get downvoted for being realistic about it, but if you don't have autism you really don't know what its like. I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy, and I would do anything for a possible cure, but I can't allow myself to be filled with a false hope that someday I can live a normal life.
> If the iPhone wasn't revolutionary, how did Apple go from selling no phones to the selling the most popular phone in just a few years?

People were just enamored with the iPod, it was a good device and people paid to see if Apple would make a good phone as well, which it did.
I respectfully disagree. My thought process was
1. Passcode (alpha or numeric)
2. If I don't want a passcode, I need something else, and a single button won't do. Ok, drag something.

The conclusion is obvious. You could argue that I am biased, and it would be impossible for me to counter. However, IMHO, sliding something was the obvious answer.