skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know if AMD has anyone to blame but themselves. Over the past few years, I kept listening to the statements of their CEO's, and I got the impression that they "don't get it", and aren't very visionary.

When they were supposed to do something about the mobile market, they said they will "wait and see". That was even after Nvidia did the right move and created Tegra. Nvidia was clearly a more visionary company than AMD, and Nvidia will survive because of this. It might even out-survive Intel because of their move to ARM. AMD won't. They'll be crushed by both Intel and ARM chip makers.
> Why does it cost more than the Kindle Fire HD but has way worse specs?

Can you enumerate these "worse specs?"
I was convinced the iPad Mini was for me, until I just looked up the Paperwhite. However, I read a lot of articles and rely on Reader or Pocket. Does the Paperwhite support any such functionality?
It's not just the books, but the reader.

This is straight Stallman: if you don't fundamentally control your computing environment, you don't own it, and you have no freedoms within it save those granted by the entity that does control that environment.

A Lessig might modify that slightly and say that your freedoms are actually balanced between four influences: Law, Norms, Market, Architecture. In the case of DRMd works on proprietary hardware, law and architecture are both opposed to the rights of the individual. Presumably Amazon responded to social norms and market pressures.

I prefer having more power on my side. It's a key reason I've avoided the e-reader game to date, despite some interest in going there.
Well that sounds about right, the essence of nature is that everything dies.
Take a look at some videos of the Kindle. That hardware is clearly not going towards the UX because that thing is so laggy.
I think another point to mention with the popularity of social media, deals could be offered directly once a sustainable customer base was built using the initial audience from groupon. Cut out the middle man.
I feel the same way whenever I see large developer layoffs in my city.

I also feel unnerved when I see unsustainable companies go on unsustainable hiring binges. It's like the first scene in a horror movie. Are you crazy? Don't go in there! He'll kill you!
I'm not aware of anything you need my permission or inclusion as a precondition to agreeing to.
Yea those days are gone thanks to highly developed malware and easily downloadable exploit packs. Once updates get released people quickly reverse them and use the new exploits before people get around to wait 15 seconds so their computer can reboot. Comparing rebooting to install updates to a system crash is ridiculous.
Smartphone versus tablet is not really a fair comparison.

The pixel density for the new iPad mini sits between the iPad 2 and iPad 3 with Retina display. As far as I'm aware, no one was complaining about the iPad 2 display.

In any case, I suspect the choice of resolution was driven more by compatibility concerns (i.e. it can run iPad 2 apps unscaled), and this paves the way for a 'Retina display' iPad mini at some point in the future.
Is the iPad mini Right-priced for Education?
There is no obvious reason this product isn't going to sell in huge quantities.

Less conceptually fragile, less expensive, more portable, same software stack, same media stack, same OS, same UX, same premium experience, same monstrous manufacturing and distribution reach, same monstrous advertising and product awareness engine.

Every single one of the children you see in restaurants working an iPad so mommy and daddy can eat in peace will have one of these by January.

Schools will buy in by the hundreds of thousands, regardless of actual utility or how successful digital textbooks eventually become.

This is the new travel iPad. This is the status gift for the developing world. This is the throwaway iPad if you're rich or the first one you look at if you're less so.

It's priced to make Apple the margins they want while still inviting comparisons with less expensive and similarly sized tablets. It's going to suck the oxygen out of the $300-$500 price range for anything with a screen.

And it's cheap enough to substantially distinguish itself from the main iPad line, which is selling millions a week. That's all it had to do, pricing-wise.

I don't want or need this, and I don't think it was particularly necessary for the health of the iPad line, but they dotted all the Is and crossed all the Ts when designing this product.
Terrible title, other discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4688798
It used to be, but now you can simply use the automated installer: http://getgitorious.com/installer
A better way to shed water
No, the discussion was whether they would replace HDDs. From the initial comment:

> It's fascinating that tape drives are making a comeback, but to suggest that they can replace HDDs is just a fantasy

Tape + RAID vs. HDD with no optimizations is a useless comparison. Why would anyone even care about that?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4683962
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4683980
Post a link to the most mainstream tool please. Someone might try to change that world.
They could've offered this at $250 and still make a profit. I doubt the profit is much smaller than the regular iPad. All its internals are 1.5 years old.
Not the "right price point" for me....
> many people just leave ssh sessions hanging open forever, and their desktops don't auto-lock the screensaver

Not "many people" use ssh to begin with.
As far as I'm aware Chromium has never supported H.264.
Agree.

I have an iPad 3. I found it too damn heavy for comfortable reading. So I bought a Google Nexus 7. Which is exactly the right size, and a delight ... except that most (not all) Android apps look like they were beaten with the ugly stick. The aesthetics are terrible. I read on the thing for 4-20 hours a week and it's just increasingly grating.

I'll be buying an iPad Mini. I won't be ditching the Nexus 7 -- if nothing else, there are some apps that, frustratingly, can't appear in the iOS Store -- but I expect to be doing 90% of my tablet use on the iPad Mini (and may well end up off-loading the iPad 3, aka not-so-new-any-more iPad).

((Stuff the Nexus is good for: (a) Firefox, (b) TextMaker, (c) being able to fire up a command line and run vim and busybox. No, seriously. I get antsy if I don't have a shell prompt to hand ...))
AMD’s FX-8350 analyzed: Does Piledriver deliver where Bulldozer fell short?
Interview with Brad Feld on Maker Mode and Living Well
Twitter sells access to its raw firehose. You may not be willing to pay for it, but many large companies are.
I view Zynga roughly the same way I'd view a casino where nobody ever booked a win. The parallels are strong, right down to Hosts for Whales who blow $10k+ while playing.

I'm happy to see them fail because I firmly believe they violate the tenet that entities should create more value than they capture.
From what we've seen on HN it didn't sound like Zynga was a place with great work conditions or interesting work. To the extent people went to work there hoping to get rich one day by dumping their shares on a greater sucker, it's hard to really feel bad for them.
Thanks for that. BTW our new official home page can be found at http://getgitorious.com :)
He was "unfired"? What a joke. Arrington is overrated and the tech equivalent of Paris Hilton; famous for no good reason.

Though, the article TechCrunch wouldn't publish is actually halfway decent.
This Entrepreneur Paid for This TV Ad Himself - Impressive
>real hw innovation is out of reach of startups, you need chip fab plants

That's a bit hyperbolic. Even Apple doesn't fab their own silicon.
Jailbreaking a set top box with the remote
There's really only one underlying truth here: snake oil salesmen have been around since the day commerce began. The internet just broadened their methods and customer base.
I had less experience then than I do now, despite that, still had a better run of it.

Maybe I was just better at picking my work when I was a consultant. Hard to tell.
ZendCon 2012: Cool Little Features of PHP 5.4
Why would Google be delighted? Because they have the "low end" wrapped up and make little profit margin?
You can configure InstaPaper to email your cuttings file to your Kindle account's email address whenever you add a new article to it. This works with any Kindle device (including the Kindle app on iOS or Android).
> If they have such a low opinion of their customers, who is to say they won't have the same sentiment towards their employees.

Anyone remember this from almost a year ago? http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-57322150-17/zynga-to-emplo...

I get the distinct impression Zynga only has a high opinion of money.
Well yeah, that's exactly what I mean. Right now, there's no actual way to directly to boot there.

So the best quasi-hack I do is move the desktop tile to the top-most position. When the computer has just booted up, this allows me to simply press "Enter" and go to the desktop since I'm too lazy to use the mouse.
So, the private key is encrypted on the client side, which requires that the user type their key-password in, so that the client can send the private key in order to authenticate?

I generally use ssh keys so that I dont have to type my password in 50 times a day. Can this be done with a key-password, or does this defeat the entire purpose of having a key-password?
Yeah, but customers don't know that. "iPad" is the Kleenex of tablets.

The only reason the Galaxy Note gets a pass is because it's still mentally categorized as a big telephone.
The wrong choice is Flash.

H.264 vs. WebM is a far more nuanced tradeoff – widespread support and higher-quality implementations versus [hopefully] freedom from patents. Either way, the web wins if there's more <video> and less <embed> depending on an opaque binary blob from a single vendor with a track record of platform neglect.
Oh, hey... that's my uncle.
I have the nexus 7 and will be getting the new iPad 4thgen to replace my 1st gen. I love the Nexus but the mini looks great. The only worry I would have is that the bezels on the vertical sides look almost look to thin. Even when reading with the nexus I sometimes inadvertently change pages and I think this could be a greater problem on the mini. So for reading I would need to try it first.
RedHat porting OpenJDK to ARM64
If any of the Zynga engineers are reading this article, we are looking for a few good engineers where I work. We develop with Unity3d and Obj-c for the front end, and Scala for the back end. We also are willing to consider remote for great candidates.

careers@bentoboxinteractive.com
Another paid post from TC about a copy cat company.
Do those options help you when you find yourself unexpectedly facing a 15 minute to reboot deadline?

Microsoft gets a lot of UI policy stuff wrong, but the way the updates worked in Vista and 7 were just about ideal. It's so good, I wish the Vista/7 Windows Update mechanism could roll in updates for non-MS products as well, because the MS update works so much more seamlessly than (for example) the Adobe updater, the Mozilla updater, the Google updater, the Garmin updater, etc. And it would be far less irritating and confusing to have one update system running than five.

I don't understand how this "no-postponement is possible" scenario is an improvement.
Approval Voting vs Instant Runoff Voting
> as long as it's freely distributed
I think the main problem is that "the cloud"'s primary audience are developers, not sysadmins. Many developers simply don't appreciate that what you're getting is a [much] easier path to automating your server provisioning and management but you're still in exactly the same position as before regarding any bit of infrastructure's ability to fail at the least convenient moment.
Both parties are unhappy for opposite sides of the same reason. Too restrictive says one side, not restrictive enough says the other.

Which means that it's the right amount of compromise! Good on the government here.

The focus on past offenders is fixing (replanting), not punishment, which bothers environmentalists. I don't care. I'd rather see progress than "justice" (revenge).

From here I imagine Brazil's biggest environmental benefits will come from increased and efficient mechanization, not flat policies. This policy seems to be as good as we're going to get in a world where a lot of involved parties want everything.
Please turn in your 40 hour work week, 2 day weekend, paid vacation, overtime, paid holidays, medical benefits, prohibitions against child labor, minimum wage, and unemployment insurance.

http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/03/05/148930/top-five...

Thank you.
> The user did authorize it by having automatic updates turned on.

That is a tenuous description of "authorization." The user is asked once when they set up their computer whether automatic updates should be enabled and the downsides are not outlined. It is strongly "recommended."

On the plus side, Windows 8 is handling it much better.
There are certainly no server platforms that "make more sense" on a power/performance metric "right now". There are a few startups hawking their upcoming wares out there, but nothing I can buy with a credit card. And in any case at the very high end power/performance is still owned by Intel boxes (check the current record holders on Joulesort, for example).
Sure, the only "security" that "hiding" a Facebook user's information provides is to ... Facebook. They are secure from users switching services and emailing all their friends about it.
I totally agree with you in theory, but in practice, most companies are valued as if they would generate profit for a long time.

At its core it's a failure of the investors.
Because Apple's mentioning their product in the same breath as iPad. It strongly argues that Apple is financially/strategically concerned enough with that form factor to risk mentioning the existence of competition.

I'm not sure why, given the sales of the "mini" form factor. I kind of suspect they're more concerned with positioning themselves against jumbo phones, which -are- selling in volume and have already invited a major design change in the iPhone line.
The Healing Power of Poop
man that's nothing. You should see what I am able to get for free. although I did pay $15 for a list of 100m emails, most of which have phone numbers, names, addresses attached to them.
Instant technical compatibility, definitely, but a 20% reduction in physical size on everything has some potentially nasty usability implications. A 44px-high button that is 0.333" high on an iPad is 0.27" high on an iPad Mini, for example.

iOS apps are laid out in pixels, while Android apps are laid out with physical units (in, mm) or density-independent pixels, which means that a screen size change doesn't necessarily mean a usability change on Android. Two totally different layout mechanisms, and while this means that Android apps are less precise in their layouts, I'll argue that it improves usability across a range of devices.
You can add it to ssh-agent, and it will be kept open for new connections to use.( and, even allow you to extend the keyed login to the next hop) Some desktops will do this automatically, Some are setup to ask for the password each time.
Unfortunately Firefox still lags behind WebKit for CSS 3D transforms in performance and rendering quality (antialiasing). There's a fix for the latter issue, but it involves an even greater performance hit in my experience.

I wrote another library that relies heavily on 3D transforms to do folding effects (http://oridomi.com) and it's frustrating seeing the same issues you see in Makisu in Firefox.

Mozilla's been iterating quickly, so hopefully it's just a matter of time.
If you don't use passwords on your keys, then any one who can access the key files on your local system, could access the remote server. Not using passwords removes an important layer of security.

That said, often you need to have password-less keys in order for systems to automatically communicate. For example, I setup backup servers without passwords.
Lots of video will be played on mobile devices, so any codecs without hardware support is very likely to affect user experience in a noticeable way.
sweet. thx.
And this is why hacker news is terrible.
This is a good comment, and sheds more light on the subject. The long lead time is a question of agility. This is subtly but importantly different that path-dependency (considered more of a lock-in to an existing technology). The link is that the ways of making the company more agile (investing in specialized manufacturing/prototyping and/or inventory) tend to create a more path-dependent trajectory (or opportunity set). So, perhaps this is better said that HW has 'interial' dependency on initial trajectory if not true path dependency per-se. Even provided that the startup is low-capital/outsourcing model. I hope this does some justice to incorporating your point.
The fact that other organizations also make dick moves does not negate this dick move.
What about the ones who were acquired into Zynga?
Building a Pseudo-Infinite Tweet Scroller with jQuery and Masonry
Yes they are a bit different. I love the swipe from edges on Windows 8. Hope it comes to Windows phone someday.
Well, a train is the most likely place to learn about the combination of electrical and mechanical engineering that is found on rails. The Arduino isn't a bad place to expose new people to electronics though.
That's the default, but the telco will happily sell you a non-Internet wire that you can connect to the Internet yourself. (Or rather, pay some other company to do. Speakeasy used to work this way: they were the ISP and the telco owned the copper.)
I have to admit a similar sentiment, I'm pretty Apple based for most uses, but had to get a Nexus 7 for some dev work and its quickly become my main reader for its size and weight.

Still like the Nexus 7 price point too. At $200 I'm cool travelling with it and if it got away from me it wouldn't be the end of the world.

(just finished The Fuller Memorandum on it btw...)
1. Apple releases new product

2. Critics yawn, criticize etc.

3. AAPL goes down

4. Many speculate as to what Jobs would or would not have done, joke about rolling in grave, call for Tim Cook to be fired etc.

5. Apple makes a mint's worth of money, AAPL hits new high.

It's been happening for 5 years. It's not just unsurprising, it's predictable.
Agreed - don't these soft rubber coatings wear away after a while?
It's interesting that they also released an iPad 4 but hardly anyone is talking about that. I presume that this is to address the complaints some people had about the iPad 3 performing less well because of the additional overhead from the retina display?
The Boston office did the Adventure World game. I tried it out and found it pretty frustrating - you can only do a few things before you run out of energy and need to harrass your friends or wait 24 hours. It's not a mechanic that works well with an adventure - nobody wants to chop through a few bushes and then wait to enter the temple. Plus there's this gratuitous Indiana Jones thing which is just glommed on.
pg, do you have a quantified list of hardware startup business models that you can share? For example, as a startup, what are the realistic sales & distribution channels that we can model, financially?

What we're worried about is designing the wrong product at the wrong price for what seems like a limited set of distribution channels with some rather onerous fixed costs and low margins -- certainly compared to software/SaaS sales. How do you wade through that swamp?
By deferring to system codecs, they manage to defer some licensing questions, too.

It's a nice compromise, and it still encourages using royalty free codecs (since those are the only ones with a chance of guaranteed deployment, even if Apple is still acting funny these days)
Few years ago Apple decided that it will be easier to create pixel perfect apps with simple, fixed layouts. With all screen elements positions hard coded. Yes, GPU accelerated animations are still the best. However fixed layout apps mean that they can only double resolution, divide by 2, etc.

The result is iPhone 5 with additional row of icons. And iPad Mini with disappointing ppi. This is classic technical debt.
What did she say when you showed her the Nexus 7 a few months ago?

(I'm only asking this because you wrote "... never before shown the slightest interest in an Apple offering.")
Possible 'Patch' For Policy On Protecting Government Agency Systems
As a counter-argument: http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Cold_fusion/Theory#Widom-Lars... (the theory in question)
Dropwizard - A damn simple library for building RESTful web services
I have severe misgivings about HSMs for this reason: too often, they're simply making an API promise which can't be kept. The vendors have an incentive to low-ball the expensive spinning disk component of an HSM to maximize the apparent cost savings but without extensive application suppor that will be a disaster.
Schlep was originally a Yiddish word but has passed
into general use in the US. It means a tedious,
unpleasant task.

Interesting linguistic tangent. I'm curious where you encountered schlep as a noun. My experience and various dictionaries define it as a verb ("to schlep"). E.g. "Oy vey. Do we really have to schlep over at this hour?"

Maybe it was just artistic license.
It's possible to criticize Apple without hating them. And "underwhelming" is not a synonym for "terrible".
All games can be boiled down to a one-phrase description. If you talk about real games, you can categorize them as "trick-taking" or "deck-building" and so on. The details are what make the games fun, not the basic mechanics.

(Therefore, "increment a number" games could theoretically be fun. Though I personally find them more boring than watching paint dry. At least the paint eventually dries and you can move on to something else.)
My reaction: I imagine Google/Amazon/B&N must be very happy with this. I am sure Apple will sell a boatload and possibly even own a clear majority of the space, but Apple just threw a huge wave of interest into a market where they are being very clearly undercut on price and not offering that much differentation.
They're the Nintendo of the personal device market. Ignoring everyone else and doing their own thing since XXXX.
> Actually it does work that way.

And then you go on to provide an example completely opposite of what he was saying.
I love my Kindle DX because it's huge screen means PDF's read very nicely without cropping or pan and zoom.
snooze.
Matching People to Gifts Sucked, So I Started Matching People to… Other People
I'm surprised competitors haven't attacked the $129 3G upcharge more directly. That seems like about $100 of profit right there.
Hardware control has basically nothing to do with it. Far fewer people have been motivated to create two (phone/tablet) versions of Android apps than iOS apps. Its almost certainly a volume issue.
The dangerous culture of comfort
The size of the normal iPad is perfect for me. I don't see me ever using this product. On the other hand, I think some people will like this more or this will fit their needs/price range better. Not a very exciting announcement by Apple but not an awful one.

I'm more excited about the new iMacs. They look great.