skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Brad is a little behind the times regarding price fixing by a publisher.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_fixing

"In August 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that vertical price fixing by a manufacturer and its retailers, also known as retail price maintenance, is not a per se violation."

That ruling, of course, is precisely why MacMillan will be able to establish Amazon as an "Agency" with no control over what prices are presented to the customer, allowing MacMillan to "fix the price."
You raise an interesting concept - can one generation of Americans vote or permit, via debt financing, to obligate a future generation to pay back the debt incurred? Lysander Spooner, amongst others, wrote about this.
Likely Apple designed the iPad to work with most of the existing web, and wasn't naive enough to believe that the web will design itself around Apple's iPad.

EDIT: The iPhone was one of many mobile devices, so it warrants sites having mobile versions.
You have to be able to read between the lines. "Dramatically streamline the tax code" is classic political double-speak for "flat tax", which means the elimination of most forms of taxation on US corporations. Much of the "complexity" of US tax code is part of the long legislative history of closing tax loopholes that large businesses have successfully exploited to escape taxation in the past.

But even if you don't take my word on this, he actually does call for tax cuts in the post:

"Make capital gains on investments up to $1mm in small companies tax free"

This has nothing to do with "streamlining" the tax code. Cuban wants the ability to invest in hedge funds and other "small businesses" without paying capital gains tax on the profits, and he's framing it as a way of "encouraging investment" in the mom and pop store down the street (who will never, ever be assisted by this kind of a policy change). In reality, Cuban is proposing yet another loophole that would be used primarily by rich people and large corporations to escape taxation.
I answered no to a couple of them. But more importantly
"I am primarily competing against myself"
I need people around to compete with to bounce ideas off and raise the bar for each other
If you can quickly crate high quality books that people actually like you will make a lot of money as an author. To paraphrase one of the best "We don't subsidize an incompetent hore why must we subsidize incompetent authors."

Most published authors suck which has a lot to do with them making no money. What publishers focus on is not high quality books but rather figuring out how to convince people to buy crap books that they will not actually read.

Amazon cut's into this in two ways, if you can read reviews before you buy you are less likely to pickup something you don't like. The other approach is by removing the limited shelf space at the book store you reduce the control large publishing houses have over the channel which allows higher quality books to compete without backing from a major publishing houses .
Designing Startup Metrics To Drive Successful Behavior
Keep in mind that they don't keep progressing linearly forever because of the nature of the service that's attempting to be provided -- neither are far off from being able to do basically all the things that can be done on a 2D panel attached to a speaker or two: interface device input, 2D/3D animation, sound effects/music, a bit of local persistence, access to the videocamera,... what else is there? I'm not sure of each's multitouch API, if any, but, really, there's not that much more beyond those things that HAS to be implemented for the vast majority of web pages and apps to fully function. Support for accelerometers and other such devices would be nice, but is hardly important to reading the New York Times or the other 99.999% of things people do/want to do with the web. Perhaps in 2030 there'll be argument about whether the web- or proprietary-way has the best support for holographic 3D displays or 360-channel surround sound, etc., but those and many other things that the two technologies don't support today seem likely to continue to overall be niche things. In other words, things whose proper role is a plug-in, not a vital part of many pages' experience. That's fine: there's going to be a role for plug-ins for a long, long time, perhaps forever. But, the fundamentals? We're getting pretty close to having them covered.

Also, I think it's well worth taking a good look at HTML5's rate of progress over the years. A huge chunk of the HTML5 effort has been toward just standardizing the response to the tag soup that is out there. That work is essentially done and doesn't have to be repeated. Just in the last year or two have things really taken off as far as adding new functionality to browsers and example pages, and it's only been in the last couple of months that a few actual commercial pages have started to use these things. In large part, that's because the web has been stuck for most of a decade because of IE stagnation. [Also note that the rest of the browser/platform vendors didn't seem to have a good mechanism to rapidly innovate together on until the HTML5 effort came together. I don't expect that that diplomatic work will have to be done again, either.] The web platform after the IE stagnation seems likely to move much faster toward covering the gaps that remain in the web platform.
No. Bcrypted passwords have nonces in them, just like "salted" hashes. You don't have to think about it. You just use bcrypt.
Ironic that Apple is the one forcing Amazon's hand for not allowing publishers to use the agency model. Steve Jobs went to war with the record labels when they wanted the same thing as Macmillan. Even better is that Amazon went agency for their music sales which put a kink in Apple's plans and caused them to introduce flex pricing and DRM free content. This is all the result of two egos duking it out. Fun to watch.
Any options for students graduating this year, sounds like an amazing opportunity. I'd love to chat more, pjharrin [at] gmail d0t com
indigoviolet@gmail.com
> amateur self-publishers

If amateur self-publishers have access to the market, then how do you figure that non-'mass market paperbacks' don't?
If it was simply an issue of paying back what we owe this could work but we need more credit going forward -- lots more, so we have to keep paying out indefinitely. It's a classic debt cycle.
I'm all for cutting out the no-reply addresses, but this doesn't seem like the best example. The email is an automated response saying that the sender's address could not be verified, so the message was ignored. If the sender replied to it, then the email would just come from the same sender address, which would still be unverifiable, and then what?

I suppose they could set the reply address to some generic support location. But in that case, the best solution would have been to forward the initial (and unverifiable) email to the support location in the first place.
It's very sad but true. I have become embarrassingly dreadful recently - I've been reading everything and anything.

My last day job; I refused to doss about on the web. And as a webdev never suffered - if we had connectivity issues. Other's looked stranded.

I also was pretty diligent in using books. I absorb so much more reading from paper. I also find the quality of information online to be weaker than print and lower than the past. There is a lot of uneducated opinion, repeated ideas; and it makes finding information more arduous too.

It's strange how the non-multitasking disconnected days of old used to feel better. I'd download usegroup messages and read in a burst, then do something else. I'd also sit back reflect and fine tune a reply.

When the web cost me more - dialup - I was far more discerning.

It's really a case of poor time management and prioritisation. The web can be a distraction; it's easy to lose hours. This is actually a good wake up call.
MacRuby 0.5 Released
I don't understand your numbers in relation to what Wikipedia has to say on the issue. How does your number relate to these? If at all?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_public_debt

2001	$144.5 billion	1.4%

2002	$409.5 billion	3.9%

2003	$589.0 billion	5.5%

2004	$605.0 billion	5.3%

2005	$523.0 billion	4.3%

2006	$536.5 billion	4.1%

2007	$459.5 billion	3.4%

2008	$1017.0 billion	(proj.) 7.4%

I think it's a shame we let Pay As You Go expire in 2002. It seemed to be working pretty well to keep spending under control.
I've been waiting for a service like this for a long time. I look forward to trying it out!
Indeed,

Despite all the ideological noise, one might actually find a tremendous amount of commonality in policy between the administrations.

It's worth noting also that a good portion of the Obama debit has involved making good the implicit guarantees which the Bush administration issued on Fannie etc debt.

I'm not in favor of this but it wasn't cooked up by the democrats out of whole cloth - it merely continued the direction things were already going in.
Really? I get my dividends just fine...

http://www.google.com/finance?q=ibm

http://www.google.com/finance?q=microsoft

http://www.google.com/finance?q=sun

http://www.google.com/finance?q=oracle

etc. etc. etc.

And their dividend payouts are about on par with my non-tech holdings also.
Why are authors going to stick with publishers in 10 years or 20 years or however long it takes for there to be more eBook purchasers than physical book purchasers?

I mean, it only took cell phones what, 15 years before they were so common that people in third world nations had them, right?
What you are missing from the argument is that the reason the publishers existed was not for the ancillary services, but because of the huge capital costs of running a printing press and moving that object down the production chain to the network of distributors and retailers. If we can accept that the printed book is no longer the primary artifact, we can accept that we no longer need huge publishing houses to wrap all of the costs in.

The cost differences between producing a paper book and an eBook are striking to me. I read the linked article and it makes some imaginative leaps in assigning all costs to the eBook venture, resulting in some ridiculous numbers. If you compare the costs of physically printing the book to publishing an eBook, there is obviously a huge difference. Look at lulu.com for starters on this.

On the other hand, his argument for flexible pricing is quite sensible. The difference as we go to eBooks will be that the popular books will cost more, and the less popular books will cost less, as we get the physical production costs out of the way and the overhead is greatly reduced.

Just like recording artists and labels, authors will separate from publishers, as publishers fragment into the the physical production, editorial service providers and financial risk backing operations.
Yeah I agree, excellent point!
Right, it's like the late night infomercials that sell various stuffs....usually with a 2-for-1 offer at the end of the commercial and a discount...all followed by a statement "A 120 dollar value! Yours for $19.99"
I hate these kind of checklists because all they end up showing you is who you wish you were. Have someone else fill it out for you.
What's the problem you see? Looks fine to me.
You're asking about the relative merit of two hash functions, one of which allows your attacker to test a candidate password in 1 millisecond, the other of which allows the same in less than 1 nanosecond. Using the latter provides your attacker with a 1,000,000x productivity boost. Personally, I'm not that generous.

As far as CPU exhaustion, there are some huge sites which use bcrypt (like, in the top 10)[1]. It is not a problem, provided you choose your work factor carefully.

As far as complex passwords, use them. Try to get your users to use them. But it's an orthogonal concern: your attacker will still be able to work their way through the gigantic keyspace of your monster passwords at 1,000,000x the rate of what they could do if you'd have used bcrypt.

[1] Just looked this up. Not the top 10, but the top 15 for sure.
To be clear, publishers can set any price they want on the content they own. Amazon never set (nor could it) the price at which Macmillan was selling their content. Amazon was just asking for the freedom to determine what price they could sell it to their customer at - even if it was below they price they were purchasing it at.

You don't think Amazon/WalMart/Target forced Scribner to sell "Under the Dome" for $9, do you? Hardcover releases are typically sold at a 47 percent discount, Under the Dome has a list of $35, so amazon probably paid around $18.00 for that, and turned around and sold it to their customer for $9.

That's what Amazon was trying to get the rights to do with eBooks. Macmillan didn't want Amazon discounting books to their customers.
It's always possible it will be irrelevant.
> Astounding. Where was this alarmism while the Republicans were spending money in the Middle East like drunken sailors and we were in the last recession?

It is interesting to see someone use the "Bush did it, so it's okay" defense. (If it wasn't okay when Bush did it, then bring up Bush isn't an argument.)

However, even the snark is wrong because there was alarmism and criticism from the right and left. See for example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9WKimKIyUQ&feature=playe... which, according to
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/jan/24/super-bowl-ads-c... was produced by moveon.org for the 04 superbowl (cbs declined to run it).

What? Moveon.org isn't complaining this time?
Awww. :(
Conjuring Up the Latest Buzz, Without a Word
I just want any release version for Mac. Do I have to wait for version 12?
Here's a little list, not from a web developer's perspective, but from the perspective of someone who really wanted to write apps for the iPhone OS but is turned-off by the AppStore. Did I say turned-off? I meant outraged. Offended. Disgusted.

1. Neither the iPhone nor the iPad are going to replace full-blown computers. They're neither powerful enough nor comfortable enough for serious work. Of course, the situation could change dramatically a few years from now, but I'm sure we'll figure something out when the time comes. For now, get a Mac and have a blast hacking it :)

2. If you think Apple's touch devices have taken the world by storm and everything else pales in comparison, I humbly suggest you come to New Delhi and count the number of iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad owners. Most of the world just can't afford to spend cash on shiny entertainment devices. People are still going to buy and use computers. You can still write apps for Mac OS X/Linux/Windows. The world has not yet ended.

3. Most of the apps you find on the AppStore could conceivably be written as webapps. Why bother with ObjC and Cocoa when you can just use JavaScript+HTML5? A large percentage of apps just pull data from a server and display it in pretty boxes. On the other hand, if you're writing a game, you're already a "special case" and have to play by Apple's rules -- which are not different from what Microsoft/Nintendo/Sony impose on their developers. So, for most of your programming needs, JavaScript+HTML5 should be enough.

4. Have we forgotten that these days, Apple are an entertainment and content distribution company who just happen to make computers? Apple are not marketing the iPad as a general-purpose computer; they want to sell it as an entertainment device. Since it's a niche device, in the grand scheme of things, the closed nature of the iPhone OS doesn't really matter.

This list doesn't do much to allay the major concerns of the tech community: the iPad is, in fact, a full-blown computer that is hopelessly locked-in by Apple and their delusional policies, that it could be much more than just an entertainment device, that we have something radically different from the traditional model of computing but cannot exploit the thousands of possibilities this gives us. This list is just an indication that we mustn't lose hope yet. Let the guys in Cupertino figure out when - if ever - they want to loosen their grip on the iPhone OS ecosystem. In the meantime, we'll just write web apps :)

EDIT: In a previous comment, I mentioned I don't want to write JavaScript. It's true. But I can put up with JS if it means I don't have to sell out to Apple.
I think the outrage hinges on how popular you think the iPad will be. Hence, my lack of outrage. :)
> You did implicitly via the social contract.

In every other contract, I'm not bound if the other side doesn't satisfy its obligations. Also, there's a concept of a "meeting of the minds".

The social contract isn't a contract. It's a promise to use force.
the surprising thing is it must be a real one -- look at that orientation sensor going nuts!
The iPad and a dwindling offline escape
> If Congress finally acts to eliminate waste, the growth in healthcare costs can be slowed.

What waste is that? Medicare already pays less per procedure than anyone else.

Are you suggesting that Medicare should cut services?

Be careful when citing studies. The goal isn't to minimize the cost per death, it's to minimize the cost of lives saved. The two are different.
Here's what I'm hearing from Macmillan: whine whine whine, blah blah blah, windowing. Whine whine whine, blah blah blah, price increase. Whine whine whine, blah blah blah, most books will be released simultaneously.

(When I hear that I start speculating on what books a hit-driven industry will make into the exceptions from simultaneous release. Oh, right: the ones they think I'm most likely to want to read.)

I understand on an intellectual level that Macmillan has business model problems, but their problems are not my problems. Attempting to make them my problems does not endear them to me.
> Great products, according to Mr. Jobs, are triumphs of “taste.”

This is basically the same thing a high dollar fashion house is offering as well. Is a $2000 Louis Vuitton scarf warmer than a $10 Walmart scarf? Probably not. But you can guarantee it'll match this season's shoes out of Milan.
I always found Snow Crash's organic approach to this idea better.
Our current wars are actually heavily funded through emergency spending bills, which are off-budget and not included in deficit calculations.

Edit: Also, the 2009 deficit of $1.2 trillion was announced on Jan 7, 2009, two weeks before Obama took office. http://money.cnn.com/2009/01/07/news/economy/cbo_2009_budget...
On dev channel, both in Mac and Windows, I have had ver 5 running since about last week. I know its kind of hard to believe, but as fast as ver4 was, ver5 'feels' even faster. I didn't know it could be even faster than it already was. Extremely impressed. The dev version on mac is much much better than ver4.

This is kinda sad, because this is the first time I had a 'stable' mac browser. Safari has 'beach ball syndrome' and it could be argued that, as far as stability is concerned, safari 4 on mac is like IE6. Firefox was never very stable under Mac (still much better than safari).

Experiencing such amazing speed and stability from a google browser, I can't wait to find out what google will bring to the table with Chrome OS when it finally comes out.

Exciting times.
I want privacy because I break the law
I do see your point about modifying the hardware when it's no longer connected to a public network but cable infrastructure is a shared medium. The actions of one customer can effect hundreds of other customers. For example, we saw a specific firmware revision that caused the modem's burst modulator (upstream signal) to turn on a high power constant carrier in certain circumstances which would DoS all the modems on the same upstream offline. I've heard this was responsible for a massive outage in Phoenix last year due to 8 modems being upgraded before the code was fully tested. If you upgrade the firmware yourself it's putting other people at risk -- including digital phone subscribers who may be using their services as a life line. Changing your MAC address has some risk simply because MACs are supposed to be unique. You could accidentally DoS another customer offline by doing it although statistically the chances are pretty low you'd use another subscriber's MAC but it does happen from time to time when someone simply increments the last digit of the MAC address.
That orientation sensor is way faster than my iPhone's.
In the time it took the author to sing Amazon praises, Amazon went on and accepted Macmillan's demands.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1091282

That teaches you to never write deep reflections on breaking tech gossip. Tweet early, tweet often.
Sales taxes are administered by the states. They have nothing to do with federal tax policy.
Brilliant PR by Apple. Not sure how many people actually watch the Grammy's but I bet you this cost a lot less than a commercial spot.
Book Copies Y Combinator Logo For Cover?
To all you nay-sayers: see, the next time you host the Grammy's you'll be able to pull out your nominees list in style! How's that for a use case scenario.

But seriously though, I think the iPad is going to be the next big revolution: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1091208 (I'm really desperate for readers).
or... just use dev channel. Which automatically updates for you with nightlies. Why would anyone use a third party software to update browser when they already make it extremely easy for you?

To update, just use the browser (dev channel), and it will update for you even before the blogheads starts writing about it, with the latest version as soon as it comes out.
No, you don't have to wait.

Posted from Chrome on Mac.
Whenever I read articles like this, I wonder if there's some management conspiracy, especially amongst VC-backed firms, to keep tech salaries stagnant. A very successful conspiracy, seeing how programmers and systems administrators in San Francisco make roughly the same amount of money in 2010 that they did in 1999, without any inflationary adjustments (because they never got those adjustments).
Actually, Colbert's been asking for an iPad from Apple this whole last week. Every show, he'd work in how he wants--nay, deserves--an iPad.
JQuery source explorer
Book Review: Coders at work
The way I thought of immediately uses 0 pointers:

(defun nthFromEnd (lst n)
(labels ((from-end-helper (lst n)
(if (null lst)
0
(let ((ret (from-end-helper (cdr lst) n)))
(if (eq ret n)
(throw 'answer (car lst))
(+ ret 1))))))
(catch 'answer
(when (from-end-helper lst n)
nil))))

CL-USER> (nthfromend '(1 2 3 4 5) 6)
NIL
CL-USER> (nthfromend '(1 2 3 4 5) 3)
2
CL-USER> (nthfromend '(1 2 3 4 5) 0)
5

I didn't hammer it very hard so maybe I missed a case or two. The other obvious problem is that it's not tail recursive (nor very elegant in general)
Adobe's development strategy in general seems to be to release v1.0 of something...then pile crap on top of it for as long as possible hoping that Moore's law helps them out.

http://mrgan.tumblr.com/post/235455865/the-many-sliders-of-p...
Link the image directly, It's not showing up for me.