Hacker News, "a community for Ex-Redditors" —

TechCrunch's Leena Rao reports on Hacker News, the code demo that quickly became a major aggregator. Now enjoying 1.6m page views a day, its success was due in part to minimalism ("he wanted Hacker News to look like your list of processes in a terminal window"), well-made moderation features, and the arrival of technically-minded Redditors overwhelmed by that site's explosion of trivial and trollish subject matter. With growth, however, HN is beginning to observe similar patterns within itself: "I wish the community would behave the way they did when it was a little village," says creator Paul Graham. — Rob •

The world's first website —

Back up at its original URL courtesy of CERN: "Twenty years of a free, open web." — Rob •

Siri, keeper of secrets —

Robert McMillan writes: "Not everyone realizes this, but whenever you use Siri, Apple’s voice-controlled digital assistant, she remembers what you tell her. How long does she remember? Apple isn’t saying. And the American Civil Liberties Union is concerned." [Wired] — Rob •

Falcon occupies cell tower —

Mobile reception is spotty in parts of Southampton, England, due to a peregrine falcon nesting in a cellular tower. Vodafone, the operator, is forbidden by law from interfering with the nest until the falcon's chicks have fledged. [BBC] — Rob •

Google plans sci-fi style supercomputer —

Farhad Manjoo: "Google has a single towering obsession: It wants to build the Star Trek computer." [Slate] — Rob •

Britt Faulstick reports on Drexel professor Frank Lee's 29-storey game of Pong:

On April 19 and April 24 Philadelphians young and old will have the chance to grab the arcade-style joystick one more time and engage in that timeless quest to spin the bouncing ball past the opponent’s paddle – writ large on the 401-foot north wall of one of the iconic buildings of Philadelphia’s skyline. More than 500 of the 1,514 LEDs affixed to Cira Centre’s shadowbox spandrels will recreate the game’s classic pixilation as competitors will go elbow-to-elbow from a vantage point across the Schuylkill River on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

At The Verge, Tim Carmody reports on Apple's seeming inability to get to grips with account security.

"The conventional wisdom is that this was a run-of-the-mill software security issue. ... No. It isn’t. It’s a troubling symptom that suggests Apple’s self-admittedly bumpy transition from a maker of beautiful devices to a fully-fledged cloud services provider still isn’t going smoothly. Meanwhile, your Apple ID password has come a long way from the short string of characters you tap to update apps on your iPhone. It now offers access to Apple’s entire ecosystem of devices, stores, software, and services."

T-Mobile ditches cellphone contracts —

Cyrus Farivar: "T-Mobile's offering, dubbed “Simple Choice,” makes the company the first of the big four US-based carriers to drop one-year or two-year contracts in favor of purely month-to-month-based arrangements. T-Mobile outlined the new plan on its website Monday." — Rob •

Carl Franzen, for The Verge:

There's a dark cloud hanging over the science of climate change, quite literally. Scientists today have access to supercomputers capable of running advanced simulations of Earth's climate hundreds of years into the future, accounting for millions of tiny variables. But even with all that equipment and training, they still can't quite figure out how clouds work.

AUSTIN—The knight who invented the World Wide Web came to SXSW to point out a few ways in which we're still doing it wrong.

Tim Berners-Lee's "Open Web Platform: Hopes & Fears" keynote hopscotched from the past of the Web to its present and future, with some of the same hectic confusion that his invention shows in practice. (The thought that probably went through attendees' heads: "Sir Tim is nervous at public speaking. Just like us!")

But his conclusion was clear enough: The Web is our work, and we shouldn't put our tools down.

Read the rest

Acer's $1,000 Iconia tablet runs Windows 8, weighs only 2 pounds, and packs in 4GB of RAM, a 128GB SSD and a 1.7Ghz Core i5 CPU. Christopher Null put it through its paces:

The bigger challenge, though, is the lack of a mouse. Yes, tablets are designed to be touched directly in lieu of an external pointer, but as noted above, this is tough given the W700′s resolution. At arm’s length, when it’s placed in the cradle, tapping the right button is nearly impossible. The bottom line: Budget for an external mouse and make it a Bluetooth one as well, unless you want to give up your only USB port.

Watch out, Samsung XE700T1A-A02US! Your reign may be over.

Dumb tech CEO quotes —

"There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance" — Steve Ballmer's 2007 spectacular earns him only ninth spot on Alex Bracetti's collection of the 25 craziest things that tech industry chiefs have told reporters. [Complex via Daring Fireball] — Rob •

The phone booth as "last vestige of privacy" —

Ariana Kelly: "Between 1997 and 2000, when Pacific Bell retired the number at the request of the Mojave Forest Service, the phone received thousands of calls, dozens each day. When asked why they called, most of the callers’ answers could be distilled to this: Because there was a chance someone would pick up." [LA Review of Books] — Rob •

Fredrik Hjelmquist, operator of a music store in Sweden, has invented a hi-fi coffin so that the dead may listen to their favorite tunes in the afterlife.