skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Any PC with a floppy port will do. The difference between 3.5 and 5.25 is the connector. If there is one good thing in a modern PC is that it is a matrioshka of every older PC design going down all the way from your Core i7 mobo to an IBM 5150.

I bet my Atom-based netbook initializes an ISA bus and a couple serial ports when it boots.
Most important part of the article...

"But there’s one question at the top of the list, the answer to which is the key to answering every other question. That question is this: If you already have an iPhone and a MacBook; why would you want this?

The epigraph I used to start this piece — the bit about Steve Jobs demanding that a tablet be useful for more than just reading on the can — indicates that Apple will release nothing without such an answer. I agree that such an answer is essential."

I'm no prophet so I won't even guess whether he (or everyone else for that matter) is right or wrong on what's coming. What I will say is the "Cone of Silence" he refers to is encouraging.

As he points out in the article the last time Apple had all the engineers drop off the grid like this was before the iPhone launch. Given that I have to assume Apple thinks they have something big here (on the logic of the cone's impenetrability being proportional to how great Steve J. thinks the product is)
Yes, I'm starting to work for an online company that's sitting on 20 TB of clickstream data that no one's gotten around to even looking at.
Indeed, which is why a small step (such as introducing a large number of cheap computers) is the only practical step.

You can't wait for perfection - you have to get started with what's practical now and iterate. Equal opportunity for all is the long term goal, not something you should expect tomorrow.

Fortunately whatever else the OLPC project did, it inspired the Eee and that inspired a whole generation of low power, cheap devices which are (more) affordable for everyone. That may not be the step they expected, but it's one in the right direction!
You've misread the wikipedia article. What's remained constant is the fraction of (human) emitted CO2 which remains in the atmosphere and the fraction which is absorbed by oceans and other sinks. For what you've said to hold true would require both anthropogenic and natural sources to be rising in lock-step.
The language is pretty cool, too bad the VM and compiler are terrible.
Great!

Now I can tweet from my Color Classic!

;-)

Is the source public? I would love to play with it.
The comment to which you are replying is incorrect about what the "airborne fraction" means. Your point would be correct if that comment were correct. But, please see my correction to that comment.
Data mining is a lot of statistical work and machine learning, so if your stats knowledge is rusty, basic or non-existent, then I would suggest you read up on that.
The term "Data Abstraction" already has a different meaning. The "simplification" of data implies an understanding of the data, and that modification instills biases in the representation that may limit the fruitfulness of the data itself.

Letting "business types" write data mining apps is already on the market and has been for a while. Look into "Business Intelligence" applications. The verdict is that a) making it easy to do BI actually makes it very complex and b) making analysis easy does not automatically expose or explain what analysis is salient.
Perils of online banking: cyberrobbers escalate attacks on small businesses
I guess he had a one year retention contract.
So, enlighten us: what is an eigenvalue, and what do matrices represent?
Personally, my take on the "unpredictable security measures" is that what's really being said is "things are pretty chaotic here and we don't really have a well-though-out plan in place, but we're going to try to cover that up by claiming that the inconsistency is actually intentional".
> all the engineers drop off the grid like this

"The demo was not going well..."

"By January 2007, when Jobs announced the iPhone at Macworld, only 30 or so of the most senior people on the project had seen it."

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/wireless/magazine/16-02/ff_ipho...
First of all I must say I don't believe in these kind of unpredictable systems: rarely doing this 'select randomly the process from a set of processes' works better than using the best process in the set.

But I don't think this applies:

But terrorist organizations -- especially those employing
suicide bombers -- have very different goals and incentives
from those of smugglers, fare beaters and tax cheats.
Groups like Al Qaeda aim to cause widespread disruption and
terror by whatever means they can, even at great cost to
individual members. In particular, they are willing and
able to sacrifice -- martyr -- the very lives of their
solders in the service of that goal. The fate of any
individual terrorist is irrelevant as long as the loss
contributes to terror and disruption.

Training a terrorist has a cost, and he should succeed the "fate of any individual terrorist is not irrelevant". The terrorist group does not have an infinite number of terrorists (as he correctly concedes in the next paragraph).

So random screening works, not because that influences the behavior even of those who aren't checked, but because makes executing the attack more expensive to overcome the possibility of being detained in the random test.

Of course random screening is not as good as full screening, but from a realistic point of view is the only thing you can apply without shutting down world economy.
The best link between OLPC and netbooks that I've found is Asus's CEO admitting that he was inspired by OLPC when they created the Eee PC:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=728044
Just look at the i86/x64 instruction sets + extensions. It's rather large.
x86 is king. a terrible, ugly and far past its prime king, but king none-the-less.

Edit: The replies below are insightful, I should not have been so reductionist.
I was also surprised by this. The three-ounce rule applies to a single passenger. All it takes is a bit of team work to get around it. A 747 for example can carry between 400 and 500 passengers depending on class layout. A team of 3 terrorists would represent less than 1% of the passengers.
the best terrorist strategy (as long as they have enough volunteers)

Do they have enough volunteers? The Shoe Bomber and the Undie Bomber, compared with the team that pulled off 9/11, are a couple of amateurish mooks. If these are the best men that al-Qaeda can send against the United States, they must not have a very deep bench.
Really Useful Web Development Tutorials You Should Have Read in December 2009
By implicit interfaces I believe you mean inferred interfaces in the same way that 'var' is inferred typing - type/interface definitions still exist, but you would like their assignment to an object to be inferred.

I don't think this is particular helpful. For instance, many interfaces share the same method signatures (although perhaps not the same collection of method signatures) so assignment is unlikely to be accurate and the resulting behaviour of treating an arbitrary object as an implementor of a particular interface seems unlikely to be desirable. For instance, just because I can run and a river can run does not mean we should both be entered into the 100m dash at the olympics. However, I'm open to positive examples that are more beneficial than saving a few letters on your class definition.

What I find interesting (and plan to develop into a longer piece of writing) is an investigation of the general idea of implicit interfaces combined with something like Yegge's prototype pattern (http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/10/universal-design-pat...). The details are still hazy in my mind but an elegant way of requiring that the object passed into a method meets particular conditions at runtime sounds pretty cool and useful to me.
But if you read the article, I believe the point was that if the terrorist gets caught under a random system, the terrorist still achieves a positive result for the terrorists (the govt becomes forced to shut down aviation and then apply the maximum screening to everyone, causing expensive chaos and terror of its own).
http://www.agu.org/about/history/
The American Geophysical Union claims roots going back to 1919. I seem to be breaking a unwritten (if it is written, sorry) rule not comment on one's own posts. I got confused by a previous post to an article with an incorrect title in the post. Anyway, this post is the journal article behind the "popular" article.
Note that "Lists" is the first link at the bottom of the page.
Search Neutrality ≠ Net Neutrality
The Gowalla case is a little more complex than that. The parent company is Alamofire and their Facebook App PackRat has about 50K users, too.
http://alamofire.com/
Fair enough. I've been a student my whole life, and had never worked for a software company before, which is why it was new to me. If you met someone 10 years into his career, then sure, that could be surprising - but everyone has to hear the term for the first time at some point.
You don't understand what I'm saying... The likelihood that there are no deadlocks or race conditions in your threaded applications is incredibly low without a massive amount of testing. Even experts in the field can mess up and find bugs surfacing years later that they didn't expect. The fact that it's hard to make a non-trivial multi-threaded programs bulletproof is proven both theoretically and empirically.

That's why there is a movement in the software community to consolidate threading portions of the code and boil them down to the simplest constructs that could possibly work. It reduces the debugging load significantly. And that's why a lot of time is being invested developing strategies that are atomic and insensitive to threaded programming, because it lets you sidestep the problem entirely. Functional programming is just the leading edge of this trend, it's already sweeping through the imperative and objective world. Things like Software Transactional Memory and Erlang's thread management are examples of tenable approaches. These approaches are a roadmap of how we can move forward and make truly and clearly reliable threaded programs. Programs that don't have land mines waiting for a 1:1000000 shot to set them off and inexplicably ruin everything.

This isn't about "finding your own way." It's about groping for any handhold as we're about to fall into a dark precipice of totally unmanageable massively-parallel and/or distributed code.

P.S. Haskell only seems harder to you because you're clearly not dealing with all the problems that mutable state brings. It's much easier to ignore something than to learn to deal with it.
Thanks. Knew about uxmag, but the others are new to me.

If you have recommendations for Graphic or Industrial design (or anything else, really) -- I'd love them as well.
Neat hardware progress aside, has OLPC been a success in actually educating the target kids? Just putting laptops in hands doesn't automatically educate them. Here in the U.S., there are plenty of schools with computer labs, computers in classrooms, or even, yes, one laptop per child.

Based all my teacher and parent friends, all the increased access to computers here hasn't really improved education much. And we're buying expensive commercial educational software, not just Sugar or gCompris.

Maybe the time and money is better spent funding CC / public domain textbooks? That and Sugar are what I'm more interested in supporting.
I think you're forgetting why unions and minimum wage and child labor laws came into being. It's because people were locked into their seats at the mill, working 10-12 hours a day, and fired when they got sick.

Now, you have people working in the comfort of their climate-controlled home. A homemaker used to get bored to tears taking care of kids, feeling utterly dependent on a spouse for income. Now both parties can feel productive, and each gets the work best suited.
I think Gruber's got it right.

Of course, as a Power User, this leaves me... I dunno, miffed? Annoyed? Agitated?

I'm like 90% sure I'm going to want this thing if only for the fact that it's an eBook reader plus other stuff, but I don't see it being able to replace my laptop for programming when I'm away from home. That's not Apple's fault for introducing something that doesn't completely subsume the personal computing experience, but it leaves me somewhat anxious that now I'm going to be carrying around an iPhone and a MacBook AND an MacLet (iSlate, iTablet, TaBook, iWhatwever) when I go on a trip or something.

That's just too much gear! I at least hope there's some sort of unified power solution between MacBooks or iPods and this thing.
I believe the point the article is making is that the "modern" children's books tend to be written explicitly to "facilitate" learning. To me, modern children books read like powerpoint slides; nothing but cloying bullet points thinly wrapped in an artificial storyline.
>It's how well they think, which is mostly inversely related to WPM.

That's an...interesting claim. Why do you think typing ability is negatively correlated with intelligence?
Kinetic typography: Language in motion
Actually, Windows is NOT the reason that most servers have x86 processors in them... that's due to a different legacy -- namely, x86.

The catch there is that Intel and AMD have accomplished such huge economies of scale combined with such advanced manufacturing technologies that no one else can match their cost to performance ratio.

For markets where cost isn't as constrained, like the big financial systems, stock exchanges, vehicle crash simulations, environmental modeling (like the Earth simulator and the NCAR weather models) you'll see quite a variety of non-x86 processors, including very application-specific PowerPC variants like the one in BlueGene. In markets where performance is far from the primary criterion like in smart phones, ARM dominates.

That said, Windows does have an adverse affect on innovation in other ways -- for example, to function in a corporate environment, it's nearly mandatory to interoperate with Exchange and Office.
Nice idea. The problem I see with his demonstration is that He is going to be in big trouble with the clothes he hangs in that door at the side. (unless he wears all black)
nobody noticed?
I would say it's a red flag about the site. It's certainly not a red flag about the person (why should you have to read through the source to work out how the software works? There isn't even a link to the source from the software beyond using a Google search).
I have used overnightprints.com many, many times and have always been impressed with the quality. I wrote about my experience with them here: http://paulstamatiou.com/you-need-business-cards

In a nutshell.. 1000 high quality cards (in my case double-sided glossy with their standard, great-thickness stock) for like $70 bucks. In hindsight, I should have gone with at least one side not glossy so I can write stuff on it.
Exactly - I expect you are right in the same spot as the rest of us. What I'm wondering about, as I have my MacBook sitting on my chest while typing - is how/will we type into the MacTablet so I can make posts like this one? The MacTablet will likely _nail_ eBook reading (And I say this as a Kindle, K2, and Kindle-on-iPhone regular user), Video (over 200 iTunes videos, mostly TV Shows, purchased in the last three years) and, of course, web browser (though flash is a wildcard)

There may be some _new_ sweet spots created though - the one that comes to my mind - Photo Management/selection/uploading - Something fast, light(er) and easier than a MacBook to pair up with my EOS 7D would be nice. I'm just _praying_ that it will take a USB-GSM/1xEVDO wireless connection so I can use my existing USA(Sprint 1xEVDO) and Canadian(Bell-GSM) connections.
Kindle DRM protection Hacked
For some parents not enrolling their kids in every possible class (from sports to arts) or encouraging their participation in debate or math clubs is somehow failing to prepare them adequately for a competitive college/job market. The idea that actually stepping back and saying "just one extracurricular per year" might actually be better for your kids is controversial for "helicopter parents".

As for Kipling, I would assume the reference I took (from another critic) was referring to either Kipling's more adult books or reading the Jungle Book to very young kids. As a parent of a 2-year-old who is tired of reading and re-reading most of the very simple books in the young kids' section of the library (I agree with gvb regarding many modern storybooks), I'm inspired to pull out something more mature that I might enjoy more as well.
Don't forget the large number of game studios that Microsoft has under its umbrella, including ones that no one has heard of like, say, Bungie ;)

Interestingly, it seems as though the MBA's don't harass the game studios very much. Too bad MS management hasn't taken a lesson from them... but I guess that's what happens when you start bringing in "professional managers (tm)".
From the article: "In 1972, 87% of kids who lived within a mile of school walked or biked daily. Today, only 13% of children bike, walk or get themselves to school."

Interesting point. I remember growing up in the middle of a city, playing outside for hours at a time without my parents' supervision when I was 5. Then when I was 7 I was taking public transportation to school or, if the weather was nice, I would walk 5 or 6 blocks home.

But that was decades ago and in a different country. I wonder if in US today my parents would be reported for "child neglect" if they let me do the same things they let me do then.
Don't read; do.

Reading is great, but it's a means to an end. Pick a project, work on it. When you get stuck, read to figure out how to proceed.

But doing is worth a lot more than reading.
Minimum wage had nothing to do with bad working conditions. Bad working conditions brought about standards in work safety and unionization -- not minimum wage.

Now, you're right about child labor and minimum wage being connected. Minimum wage was first enacted in Australia and New Zealand for the sole reason of preventing businesses and the market from unfairly exploiting workers -- expressly women and children -- by paying them non-living wages.

As far as I can tell we have the same exact thing happening here. Just because a woman is working from "the comfort of [her] climate-controlled home" doesn't make $2.50/hour fair.

(Also, I should state that I'm only concerned here w/ US employees being paid $2.50/hour. I think offshoring/outsourcing is another topic entirely.)
I don't know whether this is what Apple's doing.

But I recommend people keep thinking this way -- if it's not what Apple's doing, then you should go do it ;-)
I didn't say the site was politically inclined. I said they have a clear motivation (inbound page views) to post stories with politically charged headlines.

And Science Daily absolutely is a non-expert publication. Scanning through the headlines on their front page right now, I can't find any that are using jargon definitions of common words in the way that this headline is using "fraction". That's fine in the title of the published paper. But this isn't a link to the paper, is it?
I don't see any need to invoke conspiracies. Most probably they are just reading somewhat uncertain and vague data to support what they think is true (confirmation bias?).
The Achilles Heel of Aging
Patience: A rant on how it was lost (and why it needs to be found)
I've been hearing that for over 10 years now. Wake me up when it's actually in my neighborhood :-)
I haven’t watched TV (or played video games) in 2+ years
This is not the kind of chaos of terror the terrorist has on his mind. Otherwise they will be shutting down traffic light control systems.

Getting caught is a failure. A bomb exploding is a victory.
I bet rackspace isn't happy about this. They need a lot of help with scalability problems.
I think the answer to your question is that the CO2 has been absorbed by the ocean's carbonate buffer system thus far and it's capacity to do this has either already been compromised in the recent past or is likely to be exceeded soon because the change in ocean pH is killing the sensitive lifeforms that are responsible for fixing CO2 as insoluble carbonates.
NEJMp0911552.pdf (application/pdf Object)
I, for one, can type almost 80wpm and am dumb as a rock. I can never solve logic puzzles, and struggle with debugging when writing one-page scripts in Python.
GDP Growth Forecasts, 2010 (Top 10, Bottom 10)
If you were to take the GFM that was implemented on top of showdown and use it for something like a wiki (ala stackoverflow's wiki-fication of questions), then currently you have XSS holes.

I love GFM. I've been using it on userscripts.org for months. But the JS version at http://github.github.com/github-flavored-markdown/preview.ht... has holes that their ruby version does not have - http://github.com/mojombo/github-flavored-markdown/issues/#i...
"...I have heard that this is not true in some markets comprising of very technical experts who are looking for exactly the tool to fit their problem..."

I think this may be one reason us engineers have trouble getting out of the feature mindset when trying to market our products as we tend to be these people as customers so, logically of course, we figure other people must do the same thing when they go looking for products.
Sounds like a contrived reason not to read an article. View->Page Style->No Style.

To each their own, but I think anyone who makes a living by their hands ought to do the utmost to protect them from harm. Proper typing posture staves off cumulative trauma injuries.
Here's my bit of wild-eyed far-out speculation:

A lot of people are speculating that the killer app for the Apple Tablet will be X or that it will be Y. However, the bigger picture involves the following:

- What major inconvenience does it solve?
- What Possibilites inherent in the form factor?
- How will it fit into the Apple ecosystem?
- How will it fit into the general ecosystem?

At least 3 out of 4 of these are key questions for any Apple product.

Major inconvenience solved:

I believe that the Apple Tablet will be a UMPC. It will have enough memory to store all of your personal data (perhaps not including video content). I would be the ultimate solution to all sync problems. In true UMPC fashion, you would be able to conveniently carry your data with you everywhere including on the plane. It will act as a "hub" for such data.

Possibilites inherent in the form factor:

Everything the iPhone is a little too small for. An agenda can work on the iPhone screen, but it would be much better on a 7" or 10" screen. A 7" or 10" screen is large enough to be a digital "Moleskine" or sketchbook. It is comfortably large enough to be a whole house remote control. It can serve as a richer augmented reality interface than an iPhone. Photo touchup in the field -- better on a larger screen than the iPhone.

How will it fit into the Apple ecosystem?

Everything will sync to the tablet. The tablet will be primary store of such information. Mobile Me will be the web accessible copy. The iMac will be there for an even richer input/display and have the computing/graphics horsepower for serious work. Laptops will get phased out, in favor of inexpensive, lightweight input/display clamshells. (Bonjour is the key to Apple's future!)

How will it fit into the general ecosystem?

The UMPC will come into its own. Laptops & netbooks will die off, become the purchase of those who can only afford one piece of kit, or morph into high-end specialist machines.
Ask HN: What are your New Year's resolutions?
Someone on the radio just now said that publicly voicing your pledge to fulfill your resolutions is big for motivation. So what are you all hoping to accomplish?

For me:

1. Read a lot more

2. Practice coding more

3. Waste less time

4. Start a healthy living

5. Less emotion driven - more logic

6. Make at least 5 million dollars