A Woman's Rights - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/28/opinion/pregnancy-women-pro-life-abortion.html <comment><USER2> From the perspective of traditional family values, in Ancient Rome you had 8 days after the child was born to decide whether to keep them or to leave them on a mountain to die from exposure and get eaten by vultures. But you couldn't, say, abuse the child during the first 8 days regardless of whether you were going to keep them or not.

I think the NYT is conflating the idea of personhood and equal rights here.

There is no logical reason why other rights shouldn't kick in before the right to life, in the same way that, say, the rights to drive or vote kick in afterwards.

Even if the Supreme Court rules in favor of fetus personhood, I don't see any reason why that should change current abortion policy or somehow grant a fetus equal rights, whatever that would mean.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't see anything. Is there a non subscription way to read about this?

<comment><USER4> Incognito mode works pretty well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if anti-choicers have really thought through the implications of their position, or if they just feel that it will never apply to them and thus don't care? Even if we take as granted that a fetus is a full human at conception, fundamentally anti-choice is about having the government use its effective monopoly on physical force to compel one human to suffer pain, risk of death, and have their bodily fluids harvested to save another against their will. It's true that anti-choicers want to restrict this to just a certain class of humans (women), but the logic can certainly apply to far more then that. There are objectively often significant shortages of organs and critical fluids (including both blood and plasma), and the lack results in suffering and death amongst humans (including children). This could be reduced if the government could just forcefully harvest from any person under their jurisdiction at will. Even if we restrict it to only cases where risk of death would be the same or less then pregnancy, that still leaves a lot on the table. I can't speak for anyone else, but that would be a scenario I'd deeply oppose. I have donated blood before, I have my organ donor card filled out and with me when I drive, and I honor those who volunteer to take on risk and pain for others in general. But that doesn't mean I would be comfortable with it being forced rather then volunteered, not even given the clear fact that it would surely save some children's lives.

Pro-choice doesn't mean pro-abortion, just that someone doesn't support the government using violence for forceful body harvesting [1]. In fact I strongly suspect that most pro-choice people are anti-abortion, either for moral reasons or even simply because they view it (I do) as an unfortunate scenario brought on by bad luck, limitations of our current medical technology and societal choices. For example, ideally we'd have invested all the money spent on this debate into trying to develop far better birth control methods for both men and women and then made that available for free to everyone. If we imagine something based on stents and implantable long lasting induction powered valve systems then perhaps something like a reversible-on-demand vasectomy/tubal ligation would become possible, or something else we haven't even considered. If constantly involuntarily active near perfect birth control was ubiquitous that would likely significantly reduce the incidence of abortions. If our medical technology was more advanced we could cover a wider class of in-utero conditions that current present tough choices for mothers. If we had better universal healthcare and UBI that might save some people from certain life critical financial choices too. Etc etc. Heck, maybe someday we'll have full on synthetic womb technology at a level where someone who doesn't wish to carry to term can just not even in the first week yet have development happen anyway.

There are lots of potential constructive avenues for those who truly wish there to be fewer abortions. I find it hard to see how it's justified to bring shooting women/doctors/whomever into the picture frankly, and the whole spectre of forcefully harvesting one human for another should be more then a little off putting even for men.

\----

1: That's not hyperbole, that's just what it means for something to be "illegal", there are of course lots and lots of intermediate steps and pressures government will generally apply first, but at the foundation of the whole endeavor is force. And I think "make it illegal" is treated far too casually in modern society.

<comment><USER6> Pro-choice or pro-life are both about framing the question.

Pro-life side of the argument is about framing the issue into what right and responsibilities a person has. They want universal rules that can be applied.

Pro-choice side of the argument talk about the result, and the choice (exclusively by women) to decide if they want to raise a child or not. A planned parenthood by women for women.

Synthetic womb technology won't resolve the issue. This year a group of prenatal and midwife medical council here in Sweden made a decision if nurses were to be allowed to do life-saving care to aborted children when the abortion has been delayed to the point where the child life could in theory be viable after the abortion, and the decision was no. They decided that the woman choice to not raise a child needed to be respected, even if the child could be kept alive outside the womans body.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just thinking about the first anecdote in the article - you can't have a fetus be a life when you want and just some tissue mass when you don't want.

If a drunk driver runs into my pregnant wife and only minorly injures her but kills the nearly-born baby, what should the punishment be? I think it would need to be similar to if a drunk driver runs into a woman and injures herself and kills her nearly-born baby.

</comment><comment><USER8> The whole "debate" is a classic divide-and-conquer campaign.

People in the one reality tunnel [0] believe one thing, while people with an incompatible reality tunnel have different beliefs. Both sides have their valid points. Both sides are confused about other aspects of the situation.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_tunnel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_tunnel)

One of my more memorable taxi driving experiences [1] started with a woman trying to leave her sober living facility, and her friends saying, "You'll never get your baby back, if you leave..." Her newborn had been taken by CPS at birth two weeks before, on account of her already having a child in the state's custody.

This woman hadn't had a miscarriage/stillbirth/aborted her baby, but she was nonetheless traumatized by losing the child she'd delivered. Most children do better when they're not raised by the state: parents/adoptive parents > foster care. I don't think many pro-life activists dedicate themselves to raising other peoples' children.

[1] [http://www.taxiwars.org/2016/02/the-difference-between- boys-...](http://www.taxiwars.org/2016/02/the-difference-between-boys- girls.html)

A simple reframe of the issue could end the effectiveness of this divide-and- conquer campaign. Both sides need to acknowledge that it's better to not need an abortion, that women throughout history have developed not-very-safe methods of dealing with inconvenient pregnancies [2][3], and that the post-Roe v. Wade divide-and-conquer campaign actually amplifies the number of abortions/miscarriages/stillbirths/hurt women.

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self- induced_abortion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-induced_abortion)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide#In_ancient_history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide#In_ancient_history) \- Greece and Rome:

      "[...] These babies would not be directly killed,
      but put in a clay pot or jar and deserted outside
      the front door or on the roadway. In ancient
      Greek religion, this practice took the
      responsibility away from the parents because
      the child would die of natural causes, for example
      hunger, asphyxiation or exposure to the elements."

Maybe conservatives will realize the futility of their efforts to put the technology-genie back in the bottle, and shift to supporting pregnant women who have no support (thereby giving women who might otherwise abort an option).

Maybe liberals will find non-medical ways to help women manage their menstrual cycles without doctors. Some progress was being made by feminists in the mid-20th century, but this line of investigation/development shut down when "the pill" was approved... My friend called me in a panic once when she missed her period, but she got it to come back by herself.

</comment><comment><USER9> I wish liberals and conservatives could reconcile the intellectual dishonesty around their views on vaccines and abortion. They are on opposite sides of both issues. Either a person's body is their own or it isn't. I know I would prefer my personal rights be recognized and if letting others have abortions and decline vaccines is necessary to protect my rights then so be it.</comment>


App Engine 1.4.2 SDK - API Updates and Additions Edition - <AUTHOR> http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2011/02/app-engine-142-sdk-api-updates-and.html <comment><USER2> See also: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2207972>

<comment><AUTHOR> Zut alors. Thanks for the heads up.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> tl;dr version: improved XMPP & queue APIs</comment>


Software has bugs. This is normal - <AUTHOR> https://m.signalvnoise.com/software-has-bugs-this-is-normal-f64761a262ca#.qtmuea74j <comment><USER2> A more interesting/relevant article for HN would be _how_ to explain this to customers. I usually sit there in sales meetings belabouring that there will be bugs, more than you expect, more than you could dream of, there will be bugs - yet when we hit UAT there's always indignant outrage that when you click X, then Y, then worship the moon on a thursday while sacrificing a goat and singing kum-bay-ya, this one figure that nobody sees is out by a tenth of a penny, and the feature that we didn't mention or even think of until Just This Moment doesn't exist.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's scary how true this is. And then there are small bugs that come up when you do a series of steps in a certain order which no user will possibly do that are required to be given high priority for fixing.

As for relevancy, I think I'm going to just point people to this article every time one of those issues is raised.

<comment><USER3> People are very proud of them selves when they find a bug. It makes them feel extremely good about themselves. While gloating they will say things like "these Muppets don't even know how to write software". So when they find this bug, it becomes the most important thing in the world and it needs to be fixed asap. This is where you need a good project/product manager.

I once witnessed a tester running into the room with his hands waiving above his head holding some papers, screaming over and over again "I found a bug! I found a bug" before he then ran out the room again...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are different types of bugs. Some bugs crash the system while other bugs corrupt data while still other bugs just are annoying.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm not sure anyone reading Hacker News will find anything written here revelatory, but it might be good for a general audience.</comment>


The Overwhelming Bias of the Mainstream Media - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/dialogue-and-discourse/the-overwhelming-bias-of-the-mainstream-media-5eeec64439e1 <comment><USER2> "Funnily enough, the over-coverage of Trump by the media actually gave him an edge when it came to the election. Despite the fact that negative news on Trump were the norm, they only gave Trump more publicity. A prime example that, the lower the media sinks, the more it backfires on them."

THAT is the only part of the article that rings true. Trump deserves all the negative media coverage in the world, but the media's lack of tact and professionalism ends up helping him and reinforcing his narrative.

</comment><comment><USER3> Divide and conquer, let's split the media up into mainstream, alternative, right and left wing. Once everyone chooses sides we can pick them off one by one? I'm so sick of this crap, I used to like watching fox news and CNN, late night talk shows, even SNL but now I guess I'm suffering from fatigue, I don't know if it's the media's fault, Trumps fault or both but it is all depressingly constant negativity from both sides. Sorry I know this isn't the place for that rant but neither is the place for this article.

<comment><USER4> _" Depressingly constant negativity"_

Outrage is a media-bankable commodity of unlimited supply.</comment></comment>


Coding Horror - Welcome to the Post PC Era - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/03/welcome-to-the-post-pc-era.html <comment><USER3> Ok folks, let me know when you throw out your computers. I mean, seriously. I don't want to hear the 100th story about how ipad changed your life unless you literally get rid of your computer. If the number of people who _replaced_ a computer with a tablet exceeds the number of people who _still have_ one, we can talk about that post-pc mumbo-jumbo. So, how's gonna be?

<comment><USER4> +1.

They're still just expensive toys. And I really, really mean that.

Have I ever received an email from someone using an iPad?

Nope. Not once.

Has anything I've looked at online in the last week been created on an iPad?

Nope.

Post-PC? Try post- _TV_.

<comment><USER5> I write all my email on the iPad. I'm not really sure how you would know whether someone wrote you an email with an iPad or not.

(This comment was written on an iPad while relaxing on a comfy chair. You can tell because I'm not using typographically correct apostrophes.)

<comment><USER6> (If you hold down on the apostrophe key, you can make curly ones.)

<comment><USER5> (I know. I do that sometimes, but usually it's too much work for me.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think Atwood is right, PCs are on their way out simply because with tablets there is so much less that can go wrong. He mentions tech support in the article: THAT is why they will win, regardless of whether or not they will fully replace PCs, or whether or not they are better suited to writing emails. Millions of people who can't be bothered with anti-virus updates and the like will just find it a much more pleasant experience: "it just works" indeed.

(I'm a Mac user and I find myself spending a lot less time on tech support type issues than back in the day when I was using Linux and Windows, still it's hard to deny that iPads are currently the epitome of simplicity, compared to their power.)

And that's what I'm worried about: "No user serviceable parts inside". I'm concerned the very reason tablets will take over the PC market will also mean that tomorrow's kids' experience is very different from, and I would argue poorer than, my experience when I got my first computer, a Commodore VIC 20.

Ironically, my VIC 20 also was very user friendly. You turn it on, it's on. You put in a diskette -- well, it didn't load automatically but making it load was a very simple incantation, and once the game started, it was started. Things were simple and worked, for the most part, quite well. No tech support needed. But the BASIC shell was there right at your fingertips -- hell, the manual came with example BASIC programs.

Quibbling over the merits of BASIC aside, it was a simple experience but it was also tremendously open.

Things got much more complicated since then; network connectivity in particular introduced previously unknown threats to users, so of course this is a simplified comparison. Still, I wonder, is giving up the freedom to tinker with the system really the price tomorrow's consumers will have to pay in order to buy simplicity?

And if you're thinking about replying with links to IDEs running on the iPad: no, something that runs in the cloud and has no direct access whatsoever to the internals of the machine does not qualify as a modern-day replacement for this experience, no matter how sophisticated.

<comment><USER8> I think the whole question Tablet vs Computer is pretty dumb in the first place. It's not a versus, it's a peaceful cohabitation, only some evangelist and/or journalists want to push us to believe there's a war but that's really not true.

Tablet and PC simply correspond to two totally different use of media. A tablet is consumption centered whereas the PC is able to produce complex goods and services than then can be consumed by a tablet. Will the tablet push away PC usage to very low level in some areas? Probably! Will it replace a PC for every usage ? Are you kidding me: Development, 3D Effect, Advanced Audio Processing, Advanced Photo processing. That's just as stupid as saying that photoshop is dead because Instagram can do sepia...

PS: I will absolutely never buy a tablet, I fight every day to stay on the creator side of society, with a tablet I would just give up!

<comment><USER7> _It's not a versus, it's a peaceful cohabitation, only some evangelist and/or journalists want to push us to believe there's a war but that's really not true._

I wouldn't call it a war, but Atwood (who, by the way, is neither an evangelist nor a journalist with an agenda) makes the point that tablets are about to take over large shares of the PC market. And my point was that this way, people (non-hackers) get even further removed from the "close to the metal" experience that I and others in my generation used to have.

With all respect, I think you and dozens of other posters in this thread are missing the point by "defending" the notebook and saying it won't get fully replaced. Of course it won't, but that's not an interesting question. The interesting question, in my mind, is: how can we avoid the TV-ization of computing? How can we make sure future generations don't equate a computer with a consumption device rather than a productive device? How can we make sure they can find out that this "magical device" isn't actually driven by fairy dust? Whether or not some share of the population uses notebooks, when the default for the millions and billions of non-hackers out there is to use a tablet, doesn't matter very much at that point.

Fortunately there are initiatives like the Raspberry Pi. It's telling that one of the main initiators of that project, David Braben, is also an old-school guy who grew up with computers in the 80s. Or so I'm guessing -- at any rate, he wrote some of my favorite 80s games, Elite and later Frontier. But I fear that if you plot the Raspberry's sales curve into Atwood's graph it won't look anything like the iPad.

<comment><USER8> Don't worry, you're full of respect ;).

It's maybe a philosophical question but who _doesn't_ have an agenda? I mean when you buy a device, don't you want to convince the other that you haven't bought a stupid toy or a useless object? Everybody has an agenda, even someone just buy an iPad he has incentives to convince that his device is great, the only ones who don't have an agenda are the ones who genuinely don't care.

I have an agenda, I am trying to push people to see computers as something else that a tool to consume media/ slack around. But from the current design of tablets, especially Apple's iOs Devices it's getting really hard to see something else than a "pure-consumption" product.

To continue on the philosophical level, I think humans deep down aspire to do very little while receiving a lot of pleasure. The most productive of us have managed to channel this desire towards building systems that, when they will be working, will provide us with a lot of rewards with little additional work (the startup!). In a way the self-driven programmers have achieved a Post- Slacker era in their mind and god knows how hard it is to keep that up. The iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch/Android Phones are enabler of the slacktivist part in everyone of us, and that's one of the big reasons of their success.

Sure Raspberry Pi is great but, again, it's in the realm of post-slacktivism and thus it will probably NEVER be popular. It doesn't mean it won't be successful.

I hope this comment will find interested minds!

<comment><USER9> I think tablets will replace "PC's". But I think it won't be as bad as you think, You'll still have you dev environment, you mouse, keyboard, and touchpad all working in harmony. Here's a snippet from another post I made (discussing mobile vs desktop OS's, hope it provides some alternative viewpoint:

"I'm pretty sure this is the direction all OS's we will be using are going to end up in the coming years. Some people will cry and yell and holler that there is no way something can be made for both keyboard, mouse, and touch screen. I see this as simply a failure of vision. That's absolutely the way things are going to be going, and it's coming sooner rather than later. (I actually think the OSX launchpad is pretty close to allowing this implementation) Devices are getting smaller and smaller. I use a Mackbook air. but guess how it gets hooked up at home? That's right, wireless keyboard and mouse, nice big monitor, I never see the actual computer. It's only a matter of time before my laptop gets replaced by a tablet that has comparable hardware specs. The OS allow for my normal desktop interfaces, along with a nice touch screen interface. I'll use it to pick out movies to play on my TV, from my couch. I"ll use the same device to write code at my desk (with big monitor and keyboard). My kids will use it to play video games, both mobile, and on the TV. I'll use it to send email in the backseat of a car moving at 65mph. (As a wireless comms guy, I fully appreciate the technology it takes to perform that last action.) But the bottom line is, It's going to happen. Sooner rather than later."

I guess my point is, mobile and desktop can blend perfectly. Those that don't need a monitor or keyboard won't get one, devs and graphics guys will. Technology will keep the size of processing power shrinking. Could you ever imagine something as small as an MBA being a full on computer.

Last bit, and my only reservation of this whole "movement", is that, I hope they keep it more open, more like OSX, vs overly walled garden a-la IOS. But the signs are there, I think it can be done, and done very well, it's only a matter of time.

edit: It seems you biggest problem address the issue that these devices are built for consumption rather than creation. And I'll agree, that's my biggest reservation about the mobile concept. I guess I could have been more clear about that. I'd like my iPad (not that I actually have one) to be more like OSX, where I can hook up a monitor and keyboard, and go to town on my OS. While being able to switch into the "launch pad" mode while mobile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Atwood's thesis is that the new iPad improved on those things that make tablets useful.

I agree with him that the updated display is the killer feature. But you have to give props to a high performance wireless network architecture too.

That being said, two tablets with identical specs, I prefer an Android tablet and a more accessible ecosystem, the problem for Android right now is the R&D and supply chain investment competition. Ten manufacturers each investing 10 million in their tablet design is not nearly as efficient as one person investing 100 million in their tablet design.

I keep hoping Google will address that issue by providing hardware/manufacturing R&D but it isn't one of their core competencies. When I worked there folks would call me to get in introduction to the folks designing the next Android phone, I'd chuckle and explain they had to go talk to Motorola or HTC. Perhaps now with their Motorola acquisition they will be in a place to make that investment, time will tell.

</comment><comment><USER11> "But until the iPhone and iPad, near as I can tell, nobody else was even trying to improve resolution on computer displays"

The original Droid came out in Nov '09 and had a 265ppi screen (same as the new iPad). When I upgraded from my 1st gen iPhone to the Nexus One shortly after that and put the two side-by-side, I simply could not stop admiring how incredible the screen was.

Sorry, but it really was just simple economics and we would've gotten high-DPI displays regardless.

<comment><USER12> I don't think it's about iPhone vs Droid bs Nexus: it's about phones and tablets versus desktops and laptops. Most laptops today aren't sold with a 200+ DPI screen. I think I'd have a hard time finding any. And yet, most phones (and tablets, with the new iPad) do have these high-density, _better_ , screens. Jeff's point is that the switch to phones and tablets is what enabled that improvement to occur.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I disagree with the post.

"""The slope of this graph is the whole story. The complicated general purpose computers are at the bottom, and the simpler specialized computers are at the top."""

This is a terrible graph. The Mac has always been a premium niche computer. 28 years ago computing was in its infancy and computers were expensive, unnetworked with limited benefit to the average household.

Compare this the iPad / iPod Touch and iPhone. These are main stream devices that achieved immediate traction. It is unrealistic to compare Mac sales with those of main stream devices.

You then have the desktop market as a whole. If you compare any single company or brand of desktop against iPad sales, desktop sales would look in trouble. However, if you compare desktop sales to tablet sales it is clear that tablets are still only in their infancy.

BUT TABLETS ARE SELLING FASTER THAN DESKTOPS!

I don't know if this true but it doesn't matter and it doesn't say much about the state of desktops. Everyone has a computer, the market is saturated. No one has a tablet. It makes sense that tablet sales would rocket.

Buying tablets also make a lot of sense for people who just consume content. The fact is though that the iPad isn't great for productivity. It is far better for consuming content. This is what most people do.

However if you want to program, edit images, write a novel, maintain spreadsheets, make movies etc a desktop / laptop is what you need.

The PC isn't dead and it isn't dying. It has reached a point where people only buy replacements. Now yes, some people may switch perminantly to a tablet. Thats fine. For the forseeable future though there will be a large market of business and consumers who require more than a tablet can provide.

\</comment><comment>

The article also touches on how great the new iPad screen is. I don't think its all that. I walked past the demo of 'the new iPad' twice before asking a sales guy to point to which one was 'the new iPad'. Yes, if you put the screen close to your face you see less pixelation on icons. For general web surfing though I saw no perceived difference. Hell, I don't really see any pixelation on my iPad2. Perhaps I am not holding it close enough to my face...

<comment><USER14> As has been pointed out in the replies about 30 times already, PostPC doesn't mean the PC is dead, it only means that the PC market is mature and innovation slows way down as everyone focuses on newer more dynamic markets. The fact that people feel no need to upgrade their PCs anymore yet they are still rushing out to buy the new iPad is symptomatic of that. Surely I'll buy a new PC in the future to replace my old one, but I don't expect my sister or dad to do the same.

I once had a workmate in 1999 whose sentiment was similar to your post, just focusing on a different device. We got into an argument about whether the desktop PC market was over or not. He didn't really believe that laptops were really more than niche devices, they were too slow, displays were too small, that most people would use desktop PCs for decades to come. That you could never do more than surf the web on it, you couldn't hack serious code with it.

That tablets are for consumption only...really? Diagramming (e.g., OmniGraffle), vector graphic production, sketching, mixing and producing music, editing images, updating a spreadsheet...why not? Many are using tablets for production already. Every year someone says iPad can't do X, the next year someone releases something that does X and it actually doesn't suck.

I often use my iPad 2 in bed (~1 foot distance), the screen is really close and I can see the pixels. The new iPad is absolutely frigging amazing, I'll never look at my crappy DELL/HP monitors at work in a positive way again (yes, I can see the pixels!). Why have we been stuck at the same crappy 1920x1200 pixel resolution for at least 5 years now? Could it be that no one care about innovating in the PC market because they can't make any money? That a 10" iPad has a higher resolution than my 24" PC monitor is totally Post PC.

<comment><USER15> Simply wait ;-) probably with age your sight will decrease and at one point you simply will stop to see difference. I guess that 70% or more of people in theirs 30's will have problem with seeing difference (except brighter colors). Of course in one or two years everything will have screens with more pixels, but from some point it will be always only marketing thing.

As for now if you look on 22 cm long screen with resolution 1280 pixels for width, and you keep screen in 0.5 m distance it means that one pixel have size of 1.17 minute, so some, and maybe even most of people aren't able to distinguish single pixels.

Some people are using tablets for work, some are doing the same on phones, but for many computers are much more comfortable. It is very personal thing, for me tablet is cool for playing in some addictive games like Cut the Rope or Where's my water? but I will kill anybody who will propose to change my computer which I'm using for development for any tablet. The same, after reading several books on tablet I much more like reading on Kindle, it hasn't this ugly glossy screen when I can see me instead of text ;-)

<comment><USER14> Higher PPI is more important, not less, as your eyesight degrades. Turns out pixelation is bad for your eyes. The advantage to having a higher PPI is that things are clearer, not smaller as some windows aficionados have come to expect.

Nobody is significantly investing in desktop pc display technology right now as far as I know, not samsung or LG, it's very stagnate. That's the point, PC R&D seems as good as dead. It's a big shame, I would really love a decent display for my workstation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The day I can code an iPad app on the iPad is the day I enter the post-pc era.

Or code, test & deploy web apps from an iPad.

Or design & layout web pages on an iPad.

We live in a post-mainframe era even though mainframes are still alive an kicking. But a mainframe isn't required create, test and deploy PC software. Once PCs are no longer required to create, test and deploy code for mobile devices we'll be in a post-PC era - that is, once PCs are no longer a required part of the general purpose computing ecosystem.

<comment><USER17> In that way, I think of the iPad a lot like I think of game consoles. They're not self-hosting (or whatever you want to call it), and they're not designed to be anytime soon. They're designed to be a software/content distribution channel for a hardware manufacturer who takes a royalty of that in addition to selling the device.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> _But Steve Jobs certainly saw the Post PC era looming as far back as 1996:

The desktop computer industry is dead. Innovation has virtually ceased. Microsoft dominates with very little innovation. That's over. Apple lost. The desktop market has entered the dark ages, and it's going to be in the dark ages for the next 10 years, or certainly for the rest of this decade.

If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it's worth – and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago._

The fact that Steve jobs could see this coming from back in 1996 is incredible. Add to that, that Steve also knew all through the Tablet PC initiatives of the early 2000's that it was too soon, technology wasn't able to properly support the post-PC form factors yet, and that styluses were a loser proposition. Bill Gates also saw the same forces at play, but he responded in the early 2000's with a failed attempt to move the PC into the next era. I guess that's a natural reaction for the winner of the PC era -- to try and carry it on.

You can see the same forces at play in the audio industry. Audio has gone beyond the early DIY tinkerer days, through a period of standardization and ubiquity, through an era where big, complicated, elaborate machinery was a status display, to a time of maturity where convenience and design prevails and the technology fades into the background.

The problem with audio, is that it doesn't let us extrapolate to the future. What's next? I can see a period where feature-phones increase in capability to the point where they're like the 1st generation smartphones, but with networks that are 1000X more capable -- just in time for widespread adoption by the developing world.

Will the developing world leapfrog the developed world in much the same way that it skipped over the era of hardwired networks straight to mobile? Will they be coming to economic power just as the digital realm has obsoleted many forms of material wealth?

<comment><USER19> I agree the quote from Steve Jobs was impressive, but it also fits the well known quote that goes "the best way to predict the future, is to invent it"

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> As happens all too often at HN, these comments are devolving into a pedantic argument about definitions and irrelevant technicalities.

Atwood does not say "hey throw out your PCs". In fact, he opens by stating that _PCs are already ubiquitous_. This article examines the idea that major innovation is currently happening in the post PC area. He posits that the new iPad display is a killer feature.

This is a much more interesting talking point than "o noes but my Linux netbook is kewler".

</comment><comment><USER21> Laptops were way more revolutionary than *pads.

"Post-pc" is just a talking point. The post-PC era will eliminate PCs like McDonalds eliminated kitchens.

<comment><USER22> Unconvinced.

It might seem like laptops are revolutionary, or were, but useful ones have been around for 20 years, and to what end? They've become progressively more useful in terms of screen quality and battery life, but they have consistently failed to produce any kind of revolution. And why should they? They're just a more expensive version of your desktop computer, that's small enough to carry around.

I'm happy to class this as useful, but the laptop's persistent insistence on being merely a small version of the desktop falls somewhat short of "revolutionary".

<comment><USER21> Laptops made new types of work and socializing possible. Affordable laptops enabled people to cowork, work nomadically, come together for "data potlucks", etc. Laptops largely replaced turntables and hardware instruments. *pads merely iterates on this initial revolution, making it more convenient and providing training wheels for those not born into technology-influenced culture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> >> __iPad 3 reviews that complain "all they did was improve the display" are clueless bordering on stupidity. Tablets are pretty much by definition all display; nothing is more fundamental to the tablet experience than the quality of the display. __

While I agree that the display improvements are noteworthy, I would say that tablets are not "by definition all display." The tactile interaction is as much a part of a tablet's worth.

<comment><USER24> iOS devices have had there tactile interaction down since the beginning. They are so responsive compared to Android devices (from my experience), and so I don't see where Apple could have improved in this area.

<comment><USER25> I don't know which Android devices you've used, but I simply haven't found this to be the case. From my experience, the touch response on high Android devices (such as the Galaxy Nexus) is indistinguishable from iOS devices.

<comment><USER26> I'm on a Nexus One at the moment. The touch is good when it works, but it's buggy. The more quickly you tap it the more likely it is to into buggy mode where a big dead spot develops in the lower center part of the screen. It's absolutely infuriating, and it really makes me much more envious of iPhone users than any of the apps.

If the Galaxy Nexus is really on par with the iPhone (and I'm highly skeptical of that) then I might stick with Android for my next phone, but otherwise I have to go iPhone just based on touch characteristics alone.

<comment><USER27> Didn't the Nexus One ship with a notoriously poor capacitive sensor? I recall it being blamed for the N1 struggling with multi-touch compared to other phones.

EDIT:

[http://androidandme.com/2010/03/news/is-multitouch-broken- on...](http://androidandme.com/2010/03/news/is-multitouch-broken-on-the-nexus- one/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Jeff is making the point that [Apple is] "fundamentally innovating in computing as a whole...".

I see the iOS devices (iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad), as just the beginning. Apple has made astounding progress on these mobile devices where their competitors haven't really caught up to yet:

1) The display, amazingly higher-res than HDTVs now (2048-by-1536-pixel resolution at 264 pixels per inch (ppi))

2) Connectivity (Wifi/multiple carriers/LTE even)

3) Battery life to weight ratio (9hrs using cellular network, at 1.46lbs)*

4) Graphics/Processor punch (Dual A5X processor with quad-core graphics)

5) An ecosystem of applications that are on the whole, of good quality, and generate a lot of revenue (25 Billion apps sold [2])

When I say "just the beginning", I really mean that. And I don't mean that Apple will always be at the top, probably not by a long shot. What I want to ask, and I wonder why everyone else isn't asking is, what's next? Apple won't be at the tippy top forever, so won't the next generation of innovators please stand up?

[1] Anyone remember lugging around their 8+ lbs Dell laptop, that had a battery that lasted maybe 2 hours in 2005? I do. My back still hurts.

[2] [http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2012/03/05Apples-App- Store-D...](http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2012/03/05Apples-App-Store- Downloads-Top-25-Billion.html)

</comment><comment><USER29> I realize I'm straying dangerously close to Get Off My Lawn territory, but I worry about the post-PC era. As a programmer, I worry about turning into a sharecropper on a closed platform [1].

[1] [http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePla...](http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePlace)

As a consumer, I worry about "buying" a closed, networked device and discovering that I don't really own it, but merely have a licence to use it under draconian terms of service. I don't want to "buy" a book or a movie or a piece of software, only to have it yanked off my device remotely.

Meanwhile, the government of my country (Canada) is rolling out a new copyright law that will make it a criminal offence to circumvent "digital locks", even if it's for legitimate, legal personal use.

However, I still hold out hope that as the technology matures, costs fall and competitors catch up to Apple's tight vertical integration, it becomes more feasible to run a full-featured open source device with a healthy ecosystem built around it.

</comment><comment><USER30> _"nothing is more fundamental to the tablet experience than the quality of the display"_

Well, I'd have to say the OS's interface and overall UX is more important. Maybe not for some, but it's a big deal for me.

</comment><comment><USER31> I love my iPad 2, don't get me wrong. The thing is, for me the iPad supplements my MacBook Pro: acts as a second monitor, I use it for reading, and it is just large enough to be good for watching movies.

The thing is, most of my computer use is programming and writing. I need a keyboard, support for a term window, Emacs and IntelliJ, TeXShop, etc.

I might be able to earn a living using just an iPad by running a term app and doing development using a remote Linux server with SSH, Emacs, etc. and do writing using Pages, but that would be like running a race hopping on one foot.

I think that "iPad 5" might do it for me however: a larger physical screen size, about half the weight, and great IDE support for doing Lisp, Java, Clojure, etc. I'll wait 2 years and see. I think that this will require new paradigms in writing and programming tools. Mind is open.

</comment><comment><USER32> 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.

<comment><USER33> 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.

<comment><USER34> The only thing missing there is editing, if you are trying to do something beyond adding a few filters you are probably going to want either a mouse or something closer to a proper graphics tablet (which is quite different from a capacitive touchscreen).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Yep, the article is right BUT it's for consumers. The iPad has allowed my grandmother (who is so old fashioned she doesn't believe woman should _drive_ ) to pick up a device and video call me on the other side of the world - <USER2> told her "It's not a computer, it's a new invention" and she picked it up and invested time in learning it.

Most people here are actually producers when it comes to computers, so most people say things like "I still need to product (spreadsheet | programming | lolcat images)" and the pc will never go away. But I think this article was talking about your websurfing, facebook updating, web _reading_ consumers.

</comment><comment><USER36> To all the people who are sad - it will be OK.

Workstations killed mainframes, because you didn't need that stupid command line. You could point and click. But real software engineers would install UNIX tools, or SSH (or telnet) into a server, and take advantage of the pretty display for richer reports.

PCs killed workstations, because they were cheaper, and their OS was more user friendly. Unfortunately, "user friendly" meant "dumbed down". You could take advantage of innovations in IDEs, word processors, email programs, and web browser; but it was harder to instal UNIX tools. You could still SSH into a server (which would be a workstation, if you were on a tight budget) and get UNIX stuff done. You could also configure X, and do workstation stuff.

Now, tablets are killing PCs, because they are cheaper, more portable, and more "user friendly" (dumbed down). There's probably no way to install UNIX tools. But you can get a virtual server for peanuts (or set up a home PC), hook up a USB keyboard, and an SSH "app", and everything is fine. The display is a bit small, but many tablets these days can power a HD display (look at the Raspberry Pi, which uses mobile phone components). Apple may or may not include the right port, but Android tablets can. And you can take advantage of innovations in touch interfaces.

</comment><comment><USER37> "Very, very small PCs – the kind you could fit in your pocket – are starting to have the same amount of computing grunt as a high end desktop PC of, say, 5 years ago. And that was plenty, even back then, for a relatively inefficient general purpose operating system."

I would argue that it's more than they need, that a service like OnLive is before its time but not more than a few years from hitting prime. I would say get ready for the Post Hardware Era.

<comment><USER34> That's going to need some serious network infrastructure to back it up. You will essentially have every computer user in the world constantly streaming very high resolution video for 8 hours+ a day.

The 1GB/month limit most carriers provide is going to be nowhere near enough, you will need more like 1/2 TB per month and it needs to be provided reliably.

<comment><USER38> I think that's completely possible if we change the model of our current infrastructure.

Here in Portugal, our main (wired) ISP has been putting Foneras[1] in every subscribers' home for a couple of years or so, which means that every subscriber they have can connect for free anywhere there's a home with their service. A couple of months ago they launched an iPhone app which can use their network of Wifi routers to make calls through them - they essentially became a mobile provider using Wifi.

I can see this approach taking place on a larger scale; not only related to connectivity, but to actual computing: imagine that each router was also a beefy server, particularly in terms of CPU and GPU capabilities; these would provide the computing needs for wireless devices connected to them.

Using existing ways of moving the "state" of an application between machines, you could have your wireless devices hopping from server to server as you moved around, without having a great impact on the rest of the network.

This would still mean hardware in each home, of course, but it'd be a black box hidden from sight and chosen, bought and managed by some company.

[1]: <http://www.fon.com/en/info/whatsfon>

<comment><USER34> The crux of the problem is that bandwidth is currently oversold since it is largely unused most of the time.

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

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER38> _You could have hardware "basestations" as you suggest which would be an interesting idea. Of course locating these geographically would be a difficult task. You might end up with rural areas where it would be impossible to do any computing at all because no basestation was in range, or you would end up with urban areas where there would be massive demand._

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER34> It's certainly any interesting concept with some merit. However it would change the game from being "damn I can't get any signal, no internet for me but I can still work offline" to "no signal, I literally can't do any computing at all!"

So what I could see happening is people at that point carrying around "personal compute servers" with them for just such an event, or at least having on in their home/office.

Also bear in mind that CPUs/GPUs appear to be getting pretty cheap as well as pretty small and you would need one anyway to do the video decompression so having something on your device capable of doing the basic UI etc isn't much of a stretch.

Perhaps you end up with 3 tiers of processing, i.e your device, your local node and "the cloud" (i.e a proper datacenter). The issue is making all of this transparent from a usability perspective.

<comment><USER38> Oh, I don't think we'll ever return to actual dumb terminals - I think the difference will be that some services will be available and others won't. Or some others will just be scheduled until you get near a basestation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I was so inspired by this article that I actually went to the Apple store in San Francisco and purchased the iPad this evening. After spending a couple hours with it, I'm certainly impressed by the hardware, but I've already decided to return the device tomorrow.

It's a great couch device, but it's too heavy to carry with you. I don't carry a murse, and I'd rather sling a Macbook Air than this for the extra functionality.

Minor things include it running too hot, and the flip cover leaving striated streaks on the display. In my opinion, iOS doesn't scale properly at this size - there is too much white space between the icons on the home screen, for example, and I would prefer to see widgets to show more information without having to open an app.

Ultimately, whether you're happy with the iPad is how much you buy into the Apple cloud versus the Google cloud.

In all truth, there is very little difference between the iPad 2 and the iPad HD. If you squint and peer very close to the screen you can see how high quality the screen is, but looking at the device from where it rests in your hands it's almost impossible to tell the difference.

</comment><comment><USER40> Just today in the IT department (this is why it's good to occasionally work in the office): "So my old PC at home finally bought it. I've seen you're all using Macs (this guy is observant) and I've been wondering if I should get one of them. Or could I just get an iPad instead? I've been tempted to get one of them anyways".

Turns out the iPad does everything he and the wife want, which is mostly surfing the web, listening to iTunes[1] and getting pictures from their point- and-shoot camera to someplace safe. Remaining issue: printing the odd document. But you can get an AirPrint enabled smearjet for £35.

Our recommendation: Get the iPad now, see if it does everything you want. If it does, get another iPad for the wife instead of that Mac you'd share between you.

[1] Explaining iTunes Match made his eyes light up: "So I won't need to back it up[2] to an USB disk anymore? And I don't need to buy the 64 GB iPad to fit it all on?" (Hey, it's like someone designed this service for people like him).

[2] Most casual computer users seem to do this these days because they've already learnt the hard lesson of losing all their stuff once.

</comment><comment><USER41> Two years ago I bought my mom an iPad. I was hesitant to do so because I wasn't sure if she would actually use it. A year ago I bought her a new iMac (upgrade from a previous gen. iMac). She likes it, but now considers the iPad to be her main computing device.

My 5 year old son spends 90% of his supervised 'computer time' on an iPad. He doesn't understand the concept of a pixel, or why it's good that we don't see them. He has an older iMac in his room, but still prefers using the iPad as his 'main computing device'.

Talk about burning a candle at both ends! The term 'desktop' is archaic when thinking about a computer as a tool. Designers and engineers on the forefront of technology are spending their time creating devices for the 'Post PC' generation... not creating a better 'desktop'.

Reading some of the comments here, I cannot help but picture the accountant who still keeps his numbers in a [paper] notebook. At least they still make pencils!

</comment><comment><USER42> PCs will stick around, of course. The worry for me is that when PCs serve only engineers and content creators the production scales will diminish, and prices increase.

</comment><comment><USER43> For me, the time per day I spend on a PC has not changed since getting a tablet. However I can count on my hands the number of times I have bothered turn on TV since getting tablet. The tablet has replaced the TV for me.

</comment><comment><USER44> Apple already announced the Post-PC era. It'll be a slow transition for a couple of more years. We really better input options. Fingers are great but sometimes I want precision.

What's interesting about Jeff coming around is that he's a pretty hard-core Windows guy. It was funny to have Macs come up on the StackOverFlow podcast. Joel would recommend it for family, etc and you could hear it in Jeff's voice that he didn't see the need. We'll find out in 6 months if it's going to be a 3 horse race.

Now Jeff has a reason to learn C. Not to worry, ObjC on iOS is not your father's C. It's a lot more fun.

</comment><comment><USER45> As a hacker, I feel like I am missing out on the wonders of tablets and the Ipad that I see non-hackers getting extremely excited about. I can get super excited about my smartphone, but that's because the device(s) it replaced were infinitely less exciting (my dumbphone, my mp3 player). But for Ipads, I just feel like everything I could do with them can be done on my laptop better. My laptop has a bigger screen so movies is a more pleasant experience. I can play more fun games on my laptop (The many many years of flash games is probably more vast than the games on the Ipad). I can compose documents more comfortably than i can type on a touch screen. I can CODE on my laptop! Granted, my laptop doesn't have 10 hours of battery, or that level of pixel density (where i completely agree with Atwood, displays need to get better), but I have yet to find a reason to buy a tablet. I think that non-hackers who don't really use that many features of a PC should get VERY excited about tablets, but until I can program on a tablet comfortably, I don't think I could bite the bullet and buy one.

</comment><comment><USER46> Email has been around (in some form) since 1965. However, I think it's a bit too early to say that we're living in a "post-mail era". Will such a thing every truly happen? I don't see that happening until we invent teleporters for all the physical items we need shipped.

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

In short, while I see things moving more towards tablets and mobile devices, I'll be convinced that we're in a post-PC era when I see it. Until then, it's all arbitrary speculation.

<comment><USER18> _However, I think it's a bit too early to say that we're living in a "post- mail era". Will such a thing every truly happen? I don't see that happening until we invent teleporters for all the physical items we need shipped._

Well, we are definitely past the start of the post document-mail era. As for the rest, it's just a matter of implementation: is the advanced fabrication tech in your living room, across town, or across the ocean? So long as you get your product in a timely fashion, what's the difference? (Answer: manufacturing and supply-chain costs and how these impact profits and the consumer.)

<comment><USER46> True, fewer and fewer documents get mailed. But I think it's still a bit early to say that we're in a post-mailed-document era. I still get documents mailed to me every day! There are still some uses of physical mail that haven't been replaced by email.

<comment><USER18> _There are still some uses of physical mail that haven't been replaced by email._

Yes, but it's clearly just a matter of time. There's no infrastructure or technology we need to wait on. There's no document transmission function that email couldn't fulfill for more than 90% of the populace, no barriers to that becoming a norm.

Cars didn't cause 100% abandonment of horses instantaneously. Before the development of the largest trucks and most capable offroad vehicles, there were certain uses only draft animals could fulfill for quite awhile. Still I think the post horse-carriage era did begin with the first commercially sold cars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Screen resolutions are not growing because Windows doesn't scale display well.

Real world: many people and a business I know use HD resolution on Full HD displays (and 800x600 on 1280x1024 displays) just because letters are bigger.

I really hate current standard resolution: 1366x768. It fits 20 lines of code in Visual Studio. Even 10 years ago we had better monitors.

</comment><comment><USER48> There is an exponential relation between required dpi and distance of the eye from the printed material or monitor (further you are, less and less dpi is needed). Therefore I'm not sure retina screens are such a great idea for big desktop screens, in a usual desktop setup you probably just wouldn't notice that much difference.

<comment><USER49> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> "all the existing HCI research tells us that higher resolution displays are a deep fundamental improvement in computing"

Citations, please?

<comment><USER51> See jeff's post:

[http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/12/printer-and- screen-...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/12/printer-and-screen- resolution.html) Printer and Screen Resolution (December 2006)

He recapitulates Tufte's argument that information density is curcial to speed of finding information and observes that stagnation in the improvement of screen resolution is holding us back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> _Updates. Toolbars. Service Packs. Settings. Anti-virus. Filesystems. Control panels. All the stuff you hate when your Mom calls you for tech support?_

Sounds more like a Windows problem then a pc problem. Since converting my family to Macs, I haven't had to handle any of this stuff but when they used Windows it was a monthly annoyance.

<comment><USER53> Let's not go overboard - both Mac and iOS have Updates and Settings and service packs, it's just that these are simpler to use than on Windows.

Also the first call I got from my Mum after buying her an iPad 2 was to ask how to increase the size of the Notes font (turns out it couldn't be done).

<comment><USER12> (Try Settings -> General -> Accessibility -> Large Text: it seems to work on my iPad for bumping notes to a larger font size.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Open hardware to the rescue of the PC!

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

With custom manufacturing becoming affordable, as traditional computers start dying, open source hardware will start replacing them. I think we are seeing the first steps in this direction with Raspberry PI, hobbyist open hardware people, 3D printing (in the future: cheap chip printing?), CryogenMod, etc.

<comment><USER34> Interesting, maybe in the future you have 2 options either a fully closed ecosystem or a fully open one.

I wonder if you will be able to use the open one to create stuff for the closed one?

<comment><USER49> _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.

<comment><USER34> Perhaps though the 2 devices will have massively different use cases.

This is already happening for me to an extent, I run a dual boot of Linux and Windows 7. Essentially Linux is my "programming workstation" and Windows 7 is my entertainment.

I would quite happily replace my Windows 7 boot with something more like iOS since the only applications I really use there are Steam and Netflix.

I'm actually quite glad that Linux does not support most of my games, since this keeps my productivity high.

The only irritation is when I want to watch something from netflix in the background whilst working on some code but even that is easily overcome by running netflix from a PS3 on my TV beside my computer.

Regards restricting internet access only to certain devices. At a government level that would be difficult legislation to pass.

I can see domestic ISPs only supporting specific devices perhaps to keep their support costs down, but I'm sure there will always be ways around this. I remember the guy who came around to install my first broadband connection insisting that I would not be able to access the internet at all from my Linux laptop until I showed him how I did it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I'd argue that there is one last barrier to these slate based computers (smartphones, tablets) and that is to take these screens and make them sunlight readable (reflective), color, same retina resolution, and same refresh rate.

once the screen no longer requires a backlight, and can be readable any place a book can, computers will truly be ubiquitous. as for creation tools on these machines they are beginning to arrive now, and they will become more and more mature as time goes on. hopefully a less controlled ecosystem will win out but that much I dont know I can predict.

</comment><comment><USER56> I usually agree with most everything Jeff writes, but I'm highly skeptical that what pushed the "post-PC" era over the top was better display support.

I've seen the screens, they look nice and crisp and clear and...I kind of don't care. Oh, the views on it are great, but it offers me nothing new.

Quite frankly, as product releases go, I question whether Steve would have let this out the door. It's a nice product, but insanely great? In comparison to prior developments, I don't think it meets that bar.

</comment><comment><USER57> It is probably not much the hardware itself as the concept. Everybody can figure out how to use a tablet, the app store, etc. but not everybody can figure out how to use Windows or Ubuntu or OS X. We are close to the point in which everything a 'normal' person (not a developer) may want to do with a computer, such as listen to music, watching videos, receiving and sending email, buying plane tickets he or she can do with an iPad.

</comment><comment><USER58> I've been netbooking it for my chillin' computin' for the past couple years. Since getting an 800x400 AMOLED screen on a smartphone, I haven't even thought about getting a new netbook. There are all sorts of useful form factors. the iPad _IS_ a PC. It just uses a different CPU and proprietary hardware.

Now... a small and light PC that is completely intractable with via a touchscreen, wireless data, etc...

That's a goddamn miracle.

Bloggers just love to historicize the present.

</comment><comment><USER59> I think the demand for tablet-like-PCs is potentially huge. If I'm right, their first couple of years will probably tell us where the frontiers between PCs and post-PCs are and what the world will look like.

</comment><comment><USER60> I'm curious how that chart would look taking into account US and international population growth in the last few decades. Perhaps devices per capita is a better ratio?

</comment><comment><USER61> Really? Hi-def = no more pc? What does an iPad 3 do that an iPad 2 doesn't? How did hd res change anything?

The end of the PC era may be near but it's not because of 10inch hd screens.

<comment><USER62>
      > Really? Hi-def = no more pc?

No. Post-X does not mean "no more X". It never meant that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> An apple product changed everything? Again? Does this one even connect via USB for data transfer? What about HDMI?

</comment><comment><USER64> It's 264 PPI, not DPI.

My monitor is 2048 x 1152 23 inches.

20.05" × 11.28" (50.92cm × 28.64cm) = 102.16 PPI, 0.2486mm dot pitch, 10437 PPI²

At one foot away I still cannot see the individual dots.

There's been a 200 PPI option for over a decade now:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_T220/T221_LCD_monitors>

If the ipad3 has added expense or limited availability to get ppi above 100, it was a waste.

<comment><USER65> One reason Apple jumped straight to 264 PPI is to exactly double each dimension. This makes the 2x scaling beautiful.

(I'm repeating hearsay, but it seems intuitively obvious to me - feel free to correct me.)

<comment><USER64> A smartphone with 854x480 resolution on a 3.7" display also has 264 PPI

(Motorola Droid, Defy, etc.)

Might be related. It's "just" the same kind of matrix scaled to a three times larger display.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> I think the article is correct except for its timing. The iPad 1 did all of this, the updated display resolution really doesn't change the device fundamentally. Sure the fonts and icons look great to Jeff, who just bought his first iPad. But guess what? They looked great on iPad 1 too.

</comment><comment><USER67> What irks me the most about the "post pc era" is its genesis. It is portrayed as a revolution that will fundamentally change computing.

However, by dubbing the tablet the "post-pc", its very definition still depends on the pc, being a definition ex negativo. Many of the arguments here are about whether the tablet can do _everything a pc does_.

The tablet does not revolutionise cultural artifacts or cultural goods, it merely allows for a consumption that is somewhat different from the consumption the pc offers. The consumed goods do not change, social media, media, art and science remain exactly the same, namely consumable goods.

The established dichotomy between the pc and the tablet is a fake one, used to artificially create demand that can then be met through new supplies.

The tablet does not change the mode of production, it is merely another facet of consumption, this time even more openly advertised as such by being advertised a "consumer device".

Calling it innovation is in my opinion a misrepresentation, because it basically reinvents the wheel once more, it undergoes the same syntheses and evolution as the pc did, just accelerated thanks to already available knowledge.

The tablet is a clever remix of technologies already available. It combines different modes of consumption previously divided, but it only changes the mode of reception, not production.

True innovation on the other hand has to change the modes of production first. The tablet cannot achieve anything other items cannot _also_ do, and is thus not innovation or revolution, it is merely evolution, or even just another playing field added alongside others.

Film, recorded music, books and the radio changed the means of production, as did the pc. The walkman, the tablet and the tv may have changed the modes of reception, but nothing new can be created through them that wasn't already available beforehand and is merely refined, not substantially altered.

The "war" of tablets vs pc is just another sales pitch to make either more appealing to their individual audiences.

>> edit (for ease of understanding, an example)

As an example that is less abstract, take the "Hipster". Wearing clothing that is tattered might be "cool" to you and you wear it "ironically, as a statement". If you are poor however, you might have to wear tattered clothes because you lack the means to afford something else. Ironically or not, you are fundamentally still wearing tattered clothes. Irony does not influence the plane of action, but instead the plane of ideas, or in other words: ideology. It's the same in the debate of tablet vs pc: Whether you type a blog-post on your touchscreened tablet or with a keyboard on your pc doesn't change the underlying action, just the mode of action. Whether you prefer one over the other is ideology, the basic action remains unchanged.

>> end edit

</comment><comment><USER68> Lets play to the clairvoyant, the post-tablet era is going to be glasses-PC (circa 2025) and after that is going to be micro holographic touch projectors (circa 2040); and those are going to be more like terminals with everything in the cloud.

</comment><comment><USER69> a guy that writes a blog about coding happy that the new 'era' will not allow you any coding

<comment><USER62> Really? Where did you read that? I thought he wrote how people who never wrote a line of code in their life and never intended to do so now have their needs fulfilled by this device.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> The author conflates 'PC' with 'desktop' and 'general purpose computer', which I take issue with. Three points:

Firstly: The iPad is a PC, a 'personal computer'

Secondly: The quotes refer to 'desktop computer' era being over (though one uses the term 'PC' in the context of 'PC wars'), so why not use 'desktop computer era is over' as the title?(more accurate though less shocking)

Thirdly: Through all this conflation, the author also tries to say that the 'general purpose computer' era is over. Personally, I believe there is a big future in 'general-purpose computer' tablets/phones/etc. (non 'desktop'), as well as in desktops and there is not a shred of evidence in the article which challenges this view...

</comment><comment><USER71> The lack of a decent point in this article makes me wonder whether Apple paid Atwood to write this piece.

<comment><USER72> Do you _really_ think that Apple with all of their billions of dollars would pay someone like Jeff Atwood to write this, or anything? Come on.

<comment><USER73> There would have been a cost involved recently with giving a group of journalists private briefings on osx mountain lion recently. Which would have been done to get more press.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does the use of Tuples in C# lead to poor code maintainability? - <AUTHOR>

As much as I love Tuples for rapid prototyping, I am definitely concerned about the long term readability and maintainability vs. using traditional objects in production software. For instance, it can be difficult to determine what a List<Tuple<string, string, string>> collection actually represents compared to a List<ProductInfo> where ProductInfo is an object with 3 string properties with useful names (ItemNumber, ProductName, Price). Thoughts? <comment><USER2> After working for a while in Python I found myself doing the same thing, but the first-class handling for tuples in Python makes all the difference.

In C#, if the lifetime of your throwaway data structure is very short and tightly scoped (i.e. you only use it inside of one method), you could use an anonymous type. If it's not, I usually find that it's worth it to define a class. Since you're in prototype mode, don't get caught up early on in concerns about good object-oriented design - often I'll just plunk out a class with public fields for use as a data structure and move on.

Also, if immutability is the thing that's important to you, often in the prototype phase (especially when you're the only one working on the code) it's good enough to simply keep in mind that you shouldn't be mutating state. You can always come back later and define full constructors, put "readonly" on members, and upgrade fields to Properties and fix the rest of the code with refactoring tools or a quick find/replace.

<comment><USER3> Regarding immutability, C# 6 makes it a lot easier to write immutable types even for quick prototyping with get only properties:

public string Example { get; }

You can set it in the constructor and only the constructor.

On the other hand in C# it's still relatively hard/annoying to build Structural Equality into your classes (which anonymous types and tuples both handle for you) where the equality of two objects is based on the contents of their properties rather than the equivalence of their references. (Ease of Structural Equality is the number one reason for my typical reliance on Tuple as I tend to use tuples often as Dictionary<K, V>/ILookup<K, V> keys.)

<comment><USER2> That C# 6 feature is nice; I had forgotten about that, thanks!

Also, good call on structural equality, I hadn't even considered that and it's really valuable. One thing I've seen people do is create named tuples by inheriting from Tuple, which (I think) works but seems a little silly/ugly.

<comment><USER3> C# has also supported type aliases for a while:

using MyTuple = Tuple<string, string, string>;

But that's of limited utility (you have to include it in every code file, for instance) and I don't recall the exact circumstances but I recall it being brittle the last time I used it heavily (it was something like the compiler would fail to compile things that should be fine due to it forgetting a type alias half-way through a file), but that was also several compiler versions ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> In my opinion, as such things typically go, it depends on the scope of your tuple usage: I think tuples are perfectly readable/maintainable when used within the context of a single class. It's that middle point between usage within a single method (anonymous types) and usage in the external API (model classes).

I try not to leak Tuples between classes: it's easy enough in the API for your class to "unsplat" your tuple usage in any method calls other classes might need.

Also, Tuples are likely to become even easier to read/maintain in C#7 or so, as F#-like syntax for Tuples is a strongly favored proposal: [https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/issues/347](https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/issues/347)

</comment><comment><USER4> I avoid the use of tuples outside of the scope of a function for the reasons you described. I prefer to define a type, even if that type is private to the containing class. Within a function, I prefer to use anonymous classes because of the improved code readability.

</comment><comment> me-so-stupid I love to use tuples for rapid prototyping too. But when I need the same tuple again on some another place I do refactor my code to use Class instead of tuple.</comment>


Ask HN: Am I shadow-banned? - <AUTHOR> and why? I have 3 submissions. This is only one showing. From different IP. <comment><USER2> I only see 2 submissions in your history, one of them dead, and google.ca seems to be domain-banned, so probably nothing to do with you.

Also, please e-mail the mods with questions like this, they can and will give you the most precise answer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Third one was youtube-link, which I then deleted.

Makes sense indeed, think about all the profiteering kids promoting their shitty video-blogs.

<comment><USER2> YouTube should work

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is this real life? ;-)</comment>


Google loses 1.3% of the search market - <AUTHOR> http://seekingalpha.com/article/156102-searches-climb-5-in-july-google-loses-share

<comment><USER2> I like this bit at the end:

"About the data: The June and July results represent the first results published that were collected with a new Nielsen MegaView Search methodology. Because of these changes, this data - and all related search figures from Nielsen - cannot be trended with results that were collected by the company before June 2009."

Nice of them to collect using the old methodology in parallel so that we can compare the results over a couple of months to see how much of this is sampling noise.

1.3% sounds like a lot, (and it is if you are 5% :) ), but at 66% it is a minor blip.

Other such services show yahoo holding steady, google slowly rising and bing slowly dropping (since the launch peak).</comment>


"//" should indicate a URL - <AUTHOR> http://skyb.us/content/search-prefix-should-indicate-url <comment><USER2> The // prefix is actually used for protocol-relative URLs. So //google.com leads to <https://google.com> on a page with SSL, and it leads to <http://google.com> on an unencrypted page.

See:

<http://nedbatchelder.com/blog/200710.html#e20071017T215538>

<http://paulirish.com/2010/the-protocol-relative-url/>

<comment><USER3> Conversely, the protocol bit is relevant whenever your link is not domain- or protocol-relative, or when you can't be sure.

And _you can't be sure_. Here's why: if someone saves your page on their hard drive and you're using protocol-relative URLs, the implied "http" just became "file". (Which in fact may be a nice excuse for some clever hacks.)

Test it yourself! Save the following snippet to your computer and see how your browser resolves the URL:

      <!DOCTYPE html>
      <title>Testing 1 2 3</title>

Linky

<comment><USER4> HTML Base tag is your friend. <http://www.w3schools.com/TAGS/tag_base.asp>

<comment><USER5> W3Schools is not your friend. <http://w3fools.com/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I assume that the author intends // to replace <http://>, and that all other protocols such as ftp, https, etc. would still be written?

If that's the case, why bother with the // at all? Why not just assume, as most browsers already do, that there's an inferred <http://> at the beginning of whatever the user types in the address bar?

(EDIT - I see that he's talking about how we would refer to URLs in things like print advertisements. Cute idea, but given the ubiquity of web addresses in mass media, and the time it takes for the public to learn anything new, it still sounds like a solution in search of a problem. The average American is still not sure how Twitter works, or what it means when they see a @name or a #tag.)

<comment><USER7> Sorry for the meta-comment, but you seem to be the only person here who actually got what the article was saying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> URL detection is tricky because people omit the "<http://"> part of URLs. It used to be that you could look for stuff beginning with "www.", but nobody uses "www." anymore, so now you basically have to have a list of TLDs and look for anything ending in ".<tld>". Now that everybody will be able to register their own TLD, will URL detection even be feasible for humans any more? I've been thinking about how we're going to solve this problem for a while, because we need some kind of notation to replace ".<tld>". I mean I don't think people will go back to writing <[http://coca-cola>](http://coca-cola>), so when I saw the title of this post I immediately knew what the idea was: let's write //coca-cola to denote "the URL coca-cola". (Unfortunately, both Google Chrome and Safari interpret "//coca-cola" as "file:///coca-cola".)

I don't know why everybody is talking about the technical meaning of //coca- cola, as that's kind of irrelevant. Us web developers will of course still be typing the full <http://coca-cola>, as we always have.

<comment><USER9> > _nobody uses "www." anymore_

Except for the vast majority of high volume sites that know how to balance traffic and don't show "fail whales" every couple days.

Visit google.com, yahoo.com, amazon.com, msn.com, etc, and watch your URL get fixed to correctly reflect the local hostname "www".

Even coca-cola.com. You can type it wrong as you always have, and they'll fix it for you to be "<http://www.coca-cola.com/>.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wouldn't load for me.

mirror: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:skyb.us...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:skyb.us/content/search- prefix-should-indicate-url&hl=en&strip=1)

</comment><comment><USER11> It's funny, Tim Berners-Lee feels pretty much the opposite way:

[http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/the-webs- inventor-r...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/the-webs-inventor- regrets-one-small-thing/)

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm still not convinced anything is actually broken.

</comment><comment><USER13> Throw in gratuitous use of srv records and i'll go for it

</comment><comment><USER14> <http://www.google.com> and <https://www.google.com> have two entirely different meanings when you get right down to it.

Plus `//` is already used as a protocol agnostic way of accessing resources in HTML.

<comment><USER15> Not protocol agnostic, protocol relative.</comment></comment>


World's oldest water gets even older - happy-go-lucky http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-38311781 <comment><AUTHOR> How do they determine how 'old' water is? Is ocean water, particularly near the deepest points just as 'old'?

Also, is this a homeopaths wet dream? Nevermind, I can do without an answer.</comment>


Introducing the Unrestricted Adversarial Examples Challenge - <AUTHOR> http://ai.googleblog.com/2018/09/introducing-unrestricted-adversarial.html <comment><AUTHOR> This has been submitted twice in the last few days but never picked up. I'd love to see some community input on the actual formulation of the contest ([https://github.com/google/unrestricted-adversarial- examples/...](https://github.com/google/unrestricted-adversarial- examples/blob/master/contest_proposal.md)) particularly on the "what should be public" part.</comment>


DropboxMacUpdate - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2017/03/dropboxmacupdate-making-automatic-updates-on-macos-safer-and-more-reliable <comment><USER2> _" Every five hours, DropboxMacUpdate will check its registration database for apps, then check the paths of those apps for the installed version and send them to the server."_

I know it is, in this case, not a huge problem, but I would prefer them to send the latest version number to my machine.</comment>


How to draw a circle in 8086 assembly language? plz help - <AUTHOR>

Here i am working in a project to draw pie chart in 8086 assembly language.. but i dont know how to draw cicle in graphic mode of 8086. plz help me out i'm running low on time.. <comment><USER2> You first need to know how to draw a circle in any language, not necessarily 8086 assembly.

Bresenham's Circle Algorithm:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midpoint_circle_algorithm](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midpoint_circle_algorithm)

And this page:

[http://www.crbond.com/graphic.htm](http://www.crbond.com/graphic.htm)</comment>


Ask HN: How did you learn enough dev-ops to deploy portfolio apps? - <AUTHOR> Hey Hacker News! I am a self-taught engineer and who has hit a bit of a road block. I can't deploy my demo apps to services like Digital Ocean, G Cloud, etc. I have had success with Modulus and Heroku but am wondering how other developers learned to deploy their applications without getting caught in too many rabbit holes (e.g. automated deployment, security, load balancing, etc.) <comment><USER2> >>> I can't deploy my demo apps to services like Digital Ocean, G Cloud, etc

Why?

Personally, for all my demo apps, I have a couple light (T2 Micro which qualify for the free tier) AWS instances lying around, on which I run applications on a random port, and then specifically open up only that port for the external world. So I end up with a pretty ugly looking url ([http://ec2-123-234-123-234.ec2.aws.amazon.com:1337](http://ec2-123-234-123-234.ec2.aws.amazon.com:1337)), which can be put behind a nice looking route53 entry if needed, and horizontally scaled by popping an ELB in front of it (for say a HN release).

For automated deployments, jenkins is usually my one stop shop, since all I need to do is configure a new job and trigger (usually github pushes) to build, test, deploy and restart my service.

It's one time effort, but really helpful in the long run I feel, especially if you have multiple demo apps over time.

</comment><comment><USER3> 1\. Do it by hand. write everything down. 2\. Turn this into shell (or python, ruby, your favorite) scripts, with variables. 3\. Recognize the difficult areas -- configuring load balancers, etc. Conceptualize a general solution. 4\. Find this solution in a CM of your choice -- solving the hardest problems first as a measure of fit.</comment>


Ask HN: What's the current state of XSS attacks? - <AUTHOR> I am reading "The Web Application Hacker's Handbook" and specifically the chapter on Cross Site Scripting attacks. The information seems slightly out of date, and most browsers seem to now protect against the attacks they're describing. What are the current avenues of exploits used for XSS attacks in 2016? Are the new client side frameworks like React and Angular largely immune to XSS? Are more mature server side frameworks like Rails largely immune? Are there any up to date resources on XSS attacks? <comment><USER2> This post didn't gain much traction, but XSS attacks are still pretty popular and Google awards up to $7500 for XSS attacks[1]. React and Angular may help prevent XSS attacks, and while I don't know specifics, they likely do have some ingrained tools to prevent it occurring. I wouldn't be surprised if a XSS exploit could find a way around client-size sanitization though. In a perfect world, all strings coming from your server would be pre-escaped.

Rails is 'immune' in the sense that it doesn't let you directly drop HTML onto pages from strings without escaping it first, and if you would like to do so, you have to explicitly mark the string as safe[2]. This isn't to say that XSS is no longer an issue though, Rails and other frameworks help prevent these occurrences in many cases in simple applications, but larger scale applications have a lot more code and a lot more ways to punch holes in that protection. In fact using Express with with Node.js doesn't sanitize your strings by default (as far as my quick research has shown), which leaves a potential attack vector.

While XSS is a very well known vector, XSS attacks are not uncommon in non- boilerplate web applications. Fortunately sanitization is easy and bugs can often be fixed quickly.

Browsers can prevent some methods of XSS, such as by preventing loading JS from a remote untrusted source. If you find a way to drop JS directly onto a page that the browser can't catch (such as the entire JS source being delivered by the server), there's still vulnerability.

OWASP tends to be the place to go to learn about web security[3]. They have lots of examples of potential exploits.

[1] [https://www.google.ca/about/appsecurity/reward- program/](https://www.google.ca/about/appsecurity/reward-program/) [2] [http://stackoverflow.com/a/3932440](http://stackoverflow.com/a/3932440) [3] [https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Cross- site_Scripting_(XSS)](https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Cross- site_Scripting_\(XSS\))

</comment><comment><USER3> You might want to check out [http://www.html5sec.org](http://www.html5sec.org) for an overview of more up to date vectors.</comment>