skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's difficult for me to imagine why I'd have more than a couple of apps running in the background on iPad. But, then, I'm a very happy iPhone user who feels like Push Notifications are a great 80% solution to multitasking and who only very rarely feels the need for that other 20% to be taken care of. I'd like to have an app running in the background (other than the "iPod" app) playing music. But clearly I don't need more than one of those. Maybe true multitasking would allow better IM clients. I could see running one or two of those in the background. What else? I'm not going to be downloading torrents on my iPad.
Beautiful Failure
And he favored people with no background over people with "so-so backgrounds." If you haven't been out in the world, its easy to have a spotless background.
I do, but I'd have to dig it out. In one of the earlier versions of Oracle than ran on Windows 95 (arguably the last decent one :), one got a set of manuals with it, one of which was titled something like "Concepts and..." It was in there.
It's because in general I believe tax money is not utilized effectively and their impact on demand is minimal. Non-tax policies could have similar effects. For example the government could impose a ban on manufacturing SUV vehicles or improve the public transport system. Increasing the age at which one could get a driver's license in the USA would probably reduce petrol consumption by a few percent (as more families have more than one car).

What evidence do you have that the money received in tax would not purchase goods and services that would increase emissions?

I never made an axiom that no good policy involves taxation. It was your assumption. The least you could have done was to ask me to clarify my position.
Yeah, I guess it sounds like I have a control problem, but I'd like to think it's a combination of the two; I don't want to share my PRECIOUS with someone who I don't know or trust well enough.
One HUGE difference. The Atari 400 was the first computer I bought - for about that same price as an iPad if I remember correctly. I also bought a surplus real keyboard and wired it to the membrane keyboard's connector. That kind of hacking is not possible Now without license agreements, propriatary connectors, etc
It just may be the killer app of Twitter though, now that I think about it.
I had an Atari 400 and typed quite a bit on it. I assure you the iPad is nothing like an Atari 400. The Atari 400 required a bit of pressure that made it truly unpleasant.
Did they recently change this? It used to be $99 yearly
Actually Redis is a bit more than a k/v store these days. It provides implementations of a variety of basic data structures, including lists that support queue operations. There's BLPOP[1] and BRPOP for blocking job/message requests and LPUSH and RPUSH for placing a job/message on the queue.

That said, I'd still like to see benchmarks showing Redis beating Beanstalkd. Of the two, I've only used Beanstalkd, but it's a great example of keeping things simple while still providing advanced functionality.

_

1 http://code.google.com/p/redis/wiki/BlpopCommand
Firefox says:
financialcryptography.com uses an invalid security certificate.

The certificate is not trusted because the issuer certificate is unknown.
PDF tools worth a look: PDFjam, ConnectNow, GIFfun
Reg, I always value your opinion, but I'm afraid that's an outdated perception of IBM - or a limited one at the very least. IBM is a huge organization, and while some departments may be more conservative than others, there is plenty of innovation happening every day at the labs.

Each release of DB2 keeps innovating and adding useful features. Often these are not in response to something else that's already available on the market (aka, competition), but rather to what our customers will find beneficial (pureXML is a prime example of this).

If you think about it, the very existence of a free edition doesn't quite fit in with the picture you painted. I assure you that IBM is interested in acquiring new customers as much as keeping large, existing ones. How do I know? I'm paid to focus on the former.
or just buy any bluetooth wireless keyboard for the iPad.
There's a second half being written which will do symbolic differentiation, and maybe a few small macros. This is supposed to be a gentle introduction for non-lispers and I seriously think this will be enough for two hours.

But I'm writing something more devious just in case.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I do know how it works. I've done my meta-circular interpreters.

I also know there's an abs function. There's a sqrt function too. That's not really the point of the thing.

And I am never going to believe that (+ (* x x) (* y y))
is clearer than xx + yy, even though I do realise that that's only because those rules were drummed into me at school.

More exotic examples of operator precedence, yes, I agree.
Is that ironic?
Unix How To: Peering at a Process with lsof
Abelson and Sussman make the magic analogy early and often in SICP and their lectures. Does anyone take it literally?

Also, reimplementing functions that are already there is a perfectly acceptable way to learn a language.
Ask HN: How does one actually buy gold
Not being an experienced investor of any sort, the more I read about precious metals and elements, the more it seems like it is time to invest in some as a hedge against future inflation. My opinion is being shaped to first value basic necessities like food, shelter, clothing, and water.

After storing up some of these items, what would be the best way to hedge against the dollar and invest in gold? How do you actually buy bullion?

It seems like a lot of the investments touted today in gold or silver are really just investments in some market security or bet on the price of gold.
Looks very cool. Hopefully, there will be a good turnout of interesting people!
My grandma uses her printer all the time, to print photos and greeting cards. She has a program that makes greeting cards for her, not web-based. She does family history research with a separate program. She uses video chat.

She doesn't really like computers, but she's determined so she knows how to use them. I think that the group that just wants Facebook will start to want something else once they're used to Facebook.
Excellent work.
Literary works are judged against the backdrop of their place and time. If a work is deemed "excellent" for its era, it remains so for all others; even if proven unworthy later, it retains its place in history as the once great literary work (the average personal library is full of has-been literature.) A work might increase in "excellence", if newer works reach back to it for influence, or if the work is deemed prophetic, predicting the norms and realities of a later era.
This doesn't work. The moment you support an unlocked version, everyone will develop for that version, because it is just easier (like creating crappy software for Windows). Very soon non-geek users will have to use software created for the unlocked version and the same problems will crop up.
Yes, it does. See the LPOPRPUSH and BLPOP protocol commands. There's a number of threads on the Redis Google Group about using Redis as a job queue. There's also Resque by a githubber.

http://github.com/defunkt/resque
Making things friendly to developers necessarily introduces holes and seams.

And seams make the Steve very angry. Very angry, indeed!
This advice is garbage.

Which is not to say that it's FALSE, per se, but that it covers the purely mechanical details.

Yes, you need a checking account.

Yes, you need a tax ID.

But, heck, you need a desk too.

And, if you don't eat meals, you'll die, and never do a startup, so why not put that on the list?

Having launched two bootstrapped startups over the last six years (http://SmartFlix.com and http://HeavyInk.com) I would NEVER give this advice to someone - it's like saying "The secret to becoming a tennis pro? Simple: 1) guy a tennis racket; 2) but tennis balls ; 3) and never, EVER forget to buy tennis shoes - you just can't play barefoot".

This stuff will all get done in due time, because it HAS to get done. There's not need to itemize steps which more or less take care of themselves.

The IMPORTANT stuff is the stuff you find in Steve Blank's book Four Steps to the Epiphany, and in a few other great business books (Getting Everything You Can From All You've Got).

1) figure out you value proposition (who are you helping?)
2) who are you selling to?
3) what is your unique selling proposition (how do you convey the value to your would-be customers?)
4) what is your plan to iterate in discovering your customers?
5) what is your plan to iterate in discovering the proper marketing channels to reach your customers?

etc.

"Get a bank account" is the kind of bogus filler that you find in a housewive's magazine about how to turn her candle making hobby into a small little business selling to friends and relatives.

Entrepreneurs need REAL advice.
Pretend you’re Apple
That's amusing - I didn't get "The Great Gatsby" at all, but liked "Catcher in the Rye".

I doubt I can articulate why I liked it, though - neither the plot nor the characters were about "likability", and I can't say I walked away with any profound life lessons. It was unique among books I've read in that I put it down at the end and thought "Wow, that was something... but I'm not sure what."
I don't fully comprehend all the angst over the "closed" nature of the iPad. Where were all these people when Sony brought out the PS3? or when Microsoft brought out the Xbox? How about the Wii? DS? PSP? Amazon Kindle? Nook? All of these are specialized computing devices. All of them are officially "closed" (though a great many are hackable). The fact that those systems are closed dosen't threaten mainstream general purpose computers. Why should the iPad? It's a device built for a specific purpose: consuming entertainment and media content as well as some work-related tasks like email and word processing.
Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make
5 Young Scientists Searching for Energy Breakthroughs With Stimulus Funds
How exactly would you do this with Redis? Redis does not push out data to N > 1 listeners/observers/subscribers. I suppose you could use either SYNC and pretend to be a replication slave, MONITOR and watch for RPUSH, or BLPOP. BLPOP hangs/blocks the client though.

Sure, the Redis C codebase is fairly approachable. Perhaps you were suggesting adding new protocol commands?
The iPad Is For Everyone But Us
If you don't own one, then why are you commenting about it? Until you've used the iPhone keyboard for a significant length of time, how can you claim that you don't like it?

I don't know anyone that would claim that the iPhone has a great keyboard or would want to do any lengthy typing on it. By and large though, people I know think that it's 'better than expected'.

Perhaps with the larger size of the iPad, it might work well for a keyboard. I'm still not typing for hours on it, but for emails or notes during a meeting, it might work just fine.
Isn't multitouch patented by Apple?
Many of those famous books are famous only because people read them and feel cultured and sophisticated (IMHO).
remember this?
http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone
This comment regurgitates a meme, contains only the word "First," or makes a moderately original pun regarding the title and/or author, but is otherwise completely devoid of actual value.
Yah, I desired a usable phone.
Strange, I just read the first two chapters of Catcher in the Rye at the local coffee shop... It was gonna be next on my list when I finish On the Road.
Well, OLPC has different goals. OLPC is meant to spark an interest in computers and teach people in third-world countries how to program so that they can deploy that skill to bootstrap themselves out of poverty. The ability to uncover complexity is therefore fundamental to the OLPC, and its design hints toward it.

iPad is for people who are content to use Facebook.
That's easy to say that if you've done this before. This is a nice list for people like me who may want to break from corporate life but have not run a business and would like to see the practical steps outlined somewhere (so as to minimize the obvious missteps).
I'd suggest it's both, and that they work together.

I LIKE using my Mac and my iPhone. I DON'T like using my BlackBerry and Windows machine.

All of those machines offer pretty good usability (I can use them all to get things done). But I'm not attracted to the BlackBerry and the Windows box. It's not that they're ugly, just . . . unattractive.

I suggest Apple has tapped in to something innately human: we like pretty stuff. Or at least enough people do to make the iPhone the best selling smartphone in the world. . . .

The usability Apple mixed in with the lipstick makes these things irresistible for large chunks of the market. These things sell like crazy.
Since we're not seeing an increase in UTF-16 or UCS-2 or anything else like that, this would seem evidence that the Web, or at least Google's view of it, is becoming even more increasingly dominated by Western European languages, which is itself an interesting idea.

This assumes that new pages (in languages with non-Latin scripts) are likely to use national encodings, which (in my experience) is not true. Given any popular* website written in Arabic, Cyrillic, Hangul, Kanji, etc, chances are that it will be in UTF-8. The only times I see encodings like SJIS, KOI8, or ISO-8859-1 any more are in old old pages, written before mass popularity of internet, or on amateur/very small websites. The former were created before UTF-8, the latter by unskilled or inexperienced authors.
I had taken a look at it before, and was wondering: Is there a way we can do long-polling stuff with fab?

(by "long-polling stuff" I mean deferring response.finish())
I enjoyed his books greatly, not just for the story, but for the mere enjoyment of reading his prose. I enjoyed Nine Stories & Franny ans Zooey the most of all.

I've heard that he never stopped writing, and that he has quite a few works that have yet to be published. Hopefully those works will see the light of day now.
Apple Lifts 3G VoIP Restrictions, iCall with 3G Support Available Immediately
I hated typing on the 400... the pressure was always hard to judge, and I always made mistakes when typing commands. Then again, I was a young kid, so I'm sure my dad appreciated the membrane keyboard when I was using it.

Now, when I hand my toddler my iPhone to watch one of his videos, it always comes back all grimy. I think I'm starting to appreciate the 400's keyboard more and more...
MSI's 10-inch Tegra/Android tablet coming this year for $500
Another post on this topic, with links to research papers: http://rdist.root.org/2009/10/29/stop-using-unsafe-keyed-has...
Here's the blog: http://shed-skin.blogspot.com/

And the project: http://code.google.com/p/shedskin/
It seems to be primarily a matter of taste with Safari vs FF. Except on Linux you don't have Safari as an option.

I also stick with FF on the Mac. I have tried Safari briefly a couple of times, but I didn't have the patience yet to try discover any features that might be better. It's also what you are used to, maybe...
Indeed you can. (fab) is 100% async:

http://gist.github.com/287475#file_hello_async.js
When you list 9 steps and not one of them is "Build something", you're probably doing it wrong.

Edit: You know what, I take this back; not only too harsh but somewhat off topic. I think the title got me expecting one thing and upon reading another felt unfulfilled.
How to Analyze Traffic Funnels and Retention in Facebook Applications
That's a great point and I agree with you. However by that logic, shouldn't the amount of time counted for football include when the quarterback comes under center? There's a lot of football going on when Peyton Manning comes to the line of scrimmage. Or when a quarterback is trying to draw the defense offsides.
At $205 a pound I don't see how these metals can be so rare.

Nevertheless, I suggest it would be wise for the USA to maintain its own stockpile of REs, much as we have a strategic petroleum reserve. While the dollar can still buy something, go buy a million ounces of Terbium and put it on an empty :-) shelf in Fort Knox. That may drive the price up enough to stimulate domestic production. Even if not, it would provide a cushion against the day China embargoes exports. There's a lag between (say) the time you reopen the California mine and fabricated metals are created; the strategic reserve would be used during that interval.

The point behind stockpiling is not to raise the price. I don't see this as a subsidy any more than I see education funding as a subsidy. The USA is trying to ensure an adequate future supply: metals in the one case and capable workers in another.

This is not to imply there's an equivalence between people and essential materials. The obligation to children today is clearly greater than the obligation to have materials tomorrow. But you really should have both.
Another consideration is what kind of startup are you? What companies are similar? Where are they located?

For example, google, linkedin and facebook are "Palo Alto (and South).

Your startup would benefit from relationships with other companies, so where are those relationships in the bay area?
Oracle said no one will be laid off and they will dramatically increase R&D spending.
The steps are more about setting up a business rather than running a business.

Not all business build something either. Say you simply want a business to do consulting under. In the article, his PerlUSA he started with was just that.
Are these 2 minute videos a way of marketing your book differently like you discuss in this particular video? (no sarcasm here, I'm generally curious on how you've been using this advice to market your own book :) )
They just speak to people in different ways. Personally, I got a lot out of "Catcher In The Rye" and "On The Road", but the themes of those books resonated heavily with me at the time.

I enjoyed "The Great Gatsby" as a story, but it didn't connect with me in the way it seems to connect with others. However, I suspect that read in a different moment of my life its impact could be profoundly different.
MOST stories.
The PCjr was a chicklet keyboard.
The iPad Will Make Apple’s Acquisition Of Quattro Wireless Look Even Smarter
It's better than plain HTTP if your browser will complain next time if the cert changes, because at least you're assured that if you weren't under attack on first visit, you're not under attack now. Displaying a huge error when the site has made some effort is ironic.

(The point of the error is that a normal, valid certificate means that some CA has vouched for the identity of the website. When it's some random website you don't care about, this isn't important. When it's your bank or a business, it is.)
The magic of 140 characters
Oy FINALLY people are catching on to this. Ive sold cell phones since 2002 and here is the deal:

Basically non t-mobile, verizon or whatever stores are independent stores. They buy a phone, say for $500. Then a contract gives them a spiff for it, say $250. So the store charges you $300 for the phone and makes $50 off the sale. IF you terminate the contract with t-mobile or any of these companies before your contract is up AT ANY TIME, that $250 is not paid to the store, or is deducted from what the carrier owes the store. Basically the store (like google) MUST charge you $250 or they lose more money than they made off of your sale.

This is why the little cellphone stores make you sign similar agreements. Now how the company recoups the "price of the phone" by early termination fee, I don't know. The fee is pure profit for the carrier.
4 Wrong Ways and 1 Awesome Way to Choose a Language
Privacy 2.0: Give a little, take a little
Wow, some of you guys are being pretty harsh. This isn't "The Only 9 Startup Steps" it's just 9 steps most people need to take and if you're unfamilair with them it's great to see some information laid out about them.

Personally I found it pretty useful. I'm working on some of them but it's unfamiliar territory and I'm not sure what all needs to be done exactly. I found this to be some good practical advice that complements some of the more esoteric higher level advice that we normally see around here.
As long as Apple didn't disable that.
Steve Jobs and the tablet of hope
Yes. The distinction between Unicode and UTF-8 is pretty important; Unicode IS NOT AN ENCODING.
"Don't do crypto yourself."
We can have a free internet, only if we can keep it
Sounds like slackware hit the end of their switch statement ;)
Using Google Maps API with R
Interesting, but the MP3 player market seems to be somewhat of a fluke in terms of resisting commoditization. Perhaps it's due to the iTunes marketplace keeping Apple's product line superior, in which case the iPad + App Store combo could end up doing the same. Then again, the iPhone doesn't have the market share that the iPod does, and I think iPhone market share will peak and then drop as Android and other mobile handsets come online that are truly competitive.

On the other hand, businesses generally buy PCs because they're far cheaper, but the market for MP3 players in a business context is basically non-existent, whereas it's potentially huge for the tablet market, so that's another mark against Apple.

It'll be interesting to see how it all turns out.
"...For the last time LISP IS NOT MAGIC..."

Clarke's Law, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". If you are used to java, clojure - or any lisp - is sufficiently advanced to be considered magic.

Edit: possessive apostrophe
When I read a book I do at least want it to be entertaining. I'm a big reader, and a fan of all sorts of novels including 'high' literature. I just found this book dull, the main character was unsympathetic, and not a lot happened. That is, though, purely my opinion of the book at the time that I read it (about 10 years ago IIRC).
Fair point, not all business' build things: I would suggest not even bothering to "set up a business" until you at least have a) something to sell and b) someone to sell it to, however.
What Will iPad Really Change
World's Most Beautiful Bridges
Viral T-shirts
Quick and dirty filtering HTTP proxy using only Python stdlib
Boy, when you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody.

matching quote from the book imho. reading the quotes at http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Catcher_in_the_Rye really brings back the memories.
I didn't like Catcher in the Rye, but I did enjoy On the Road a great deal.
Yeah, Buckley's... riiight.

Good ads, but they feel forced. As if someone in the marketing dept. said "let's not add any sweeteners, let them have Paracetamol (or what have you) as is and then build whole marketing pitch around its awful taste". Pretty much like someone trying to mass market a car without an A/C. Brilliant marketing plan, it gets noticed, everyone is going like "WTF ... what am I missing here?", but in the end when someone chooses between a handful of products, the awful tasting one won't be in the first place. I know that I personally never bought Buckley's and not likely to.
That's pretty cool. It reminds me of an old movie about orders of magnitude and scale that just went through factors of 10 in constant time from a person out to the observable universe.

It's weird how there are vast scales where there's nothing.