skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, you should get your facts straight first.
"Android only has what, 256MB of available disk space for 3rd party programs?"

That's nonsense. It depends on the device. Also, the G1 has far less then 256 MB free for apps, yet a typical app is around 100kB large. Also data can be on the SD Card and future version of android will be able to install apps on the sd card as well (maybe even the current version, don't know).

"Google can and will pull your app if it doesn't like it"

Where is the proof for that? Afaik they still have to show the behavior Apple is showing constantly by pulling normal apps. Guess what, you can easily install and use another market application and Google won't forbid you to do so:
http://slideme.org/ is a good example. You can install it easily on an _unrooted_ device like other applications.

I agree that the android market could use some approval process for applications that need security (like banking apps). Something like the SSL-Info in your browser. But that's about it. Also could you please point me to any viruses and worms you are mentioning?

By the way, what do you mean by "complete control over code execution, unless you root your device"? who is controling what exactly? If you mean native code (i suppose you mean the sandbox is the dalvik vm), i should point you to http://developer.android.com/sdk/ndk/1.5_r1/index.html .
Lady Gaga's Lessons For The Music Business
To add to the evidence, I'm an experienced Python programmer who is currently waiting very impatiently for his Amazon shipment of "Real World Haskell" and "Purely Functional Data Structures". (Oh, and "Garfield Minus Garfield".)
I agree with you about opportunities to tinker/hack. Just check out Maker Faire, or Ramsey Electronics or Ardunio stuff.

But I think there is a valid concern about the trend to legislate against tinkering--restricting sales of radios that can hear on cell phone frequencies, DVDCSS, DRM, suppression of chemistry sets, evacuating a school due to misunderstanding of an electronics experiment.
Let me see if I understand the skill set listed here:

1. I know of a bunch of open source code that I can download.
2. I can run code written in Javascript, PHP or C.
I have scripts that I copied from other places I can run as well.
3. I will put your shared data in the cloud and create lots of mirror sites similar to your own.

In case any of this sounds impossible, watch me steal your customer credit card numbers from your data center.
The point of the argument is that in the old days you didn't have to buy anything extra; you could tinker with your main computer. This drew in some opportunistic hackers.
I suspect that when you're running a confidence game, such as a fractional reserve banking system (yes, I know that example isn't too apropos here), this sort of secrecy is required. It was the excuse that Paulson made for the initial set of TARP recipients, many of whom didn't need the money (at least at that time), but he didn't want to single out those in the worst shape.
In my opinion She sings very well (live, avoiding lypsyncing), plays the piano, is original, provocative, good looking, a bit freak, genius, looking mad/insane sometimes... I love Lady Gaga!
Impressive.

It might be very interesting to chat.

I'd appreciate if you dropped me an email to dfong <a.t> lightsailenergy.com :-)
Android: Fragmentation? More like Fragmentawesome.
"""There's another reality distortion field at work, though, and everyone that makes a living from the tech industry is within its tractor-beam. That RDF tells us that computers are awesome, they work great and only those too stupid to live can't work them"""

Not everyone. It's more and more obvious to me that I only thrive in computing where I can control my environment. I do make a living from the tech industry, and I find myself in the same position as "normals" do when faced with "software for normals", and I hate it as much as "they" do.

Error messages are meaningless to "them" but meaningful to me. So called 'friendly' error messages are also meaningless to "them" and worse they are meaningless to me as well.

Hiding complexity isn't simplifying things. Arjan van de Ven said about the 5 second linux boot project "Don't settle for 'make boot faster'; it's the wrong question. [..] It's not about booting faster, it's about booting in 5 seconds". - http://lwn.net/Articles/299483/

Apple are saying "it's not about a nice GUI over the top of a complex system, it's about a simple system". They've thrown out everything they can get away with and then a bit more; which Linux distro's can't or wont do. Linux is 'simplified' by people who don't want or need it to be simple, Windows is 'simplified' by people hobbled by backwards compatibility, inertia and lack of focused obsessive direction.
Python Tail Call Optimization Decorator
If I understand this correctly, you can't make free games for Xbox? At least you can make free apps for the App Store.
If the iPad has a way to enable the Webkit Inspector, you’ve got your tinkerer’s playground right there! The equivalent of Ctrl-Reset is about:blank.

Unix OS : iPad : Browser :: MOS CPU : Apple II : BASIC

I’m sure that in your day there were curmudgeons who grew up with Altairs railing against the kids these days that bought computers that not only had one-chip CPUs (make your own damn ALU from TTL), they even came fully assembled! Just like you didn’t want to have to deal with wire-wrapping and debouncing yourself, kids these days don’t want to have to deal with stupid implementation details like booting an operating system. Just as you wanted a standardized BASIC prompt that let you punch in code listings you got from friends and magazines, kids these days want a standards-based browser that they can use to tinker with the whole world’s creations.

Having your code running persistently on a server (whether abstracted like App Engine and Heroku, or old-school like a VPS) where other people can interface with it is far more important to the youth of today than something that dies along with your battery and wireless connection.
> Fitt's law falls apart at 2560x1600.

Indeed. I'm running 1920x1200 on a 24". I would really like a simple tool on WinXP so that I could "midimize" a window: drag a title bar to the corner of the desktop area (minus the task bar) and have the window snap to 1/4 of the desktop, or drag to an edge and snap to 1/2 the available space. I do something use the "Tile Vertically" and "Tile Horizontally" commands to get a neat layout, but it's too awkward to do it all the time.
Wonder what a mathematicians python looks like...
> 2. We test vaccines exhaustively and have decades of field data about them.

Other medicines are also tested. The problem with vaccines are that they are incredibly widely used (millions of kids get them). Thalidomide also managed to get to the market in the past (and was deemed safe) – and severely affected thousands of people.

So, the barrier of safety for vaccines should be much higher than general medicine.

> 3. Children receive vaccines only against diseases which are very dangerous to children and not impossible to get.

The problem is the long vaccination schedule in the USA. It is much larger than most other first world countries. This vaccination schedule still doesn’t include the extra shit that is pawned off by private doctors.

A good example in the adult schedule with which I am familiar is Hepatitis A. In most sensible countries, only health workers are immunised for HepA (you need periodic booster shots, etc…). Yet it is on the USA’s vaccination schedule. Hepatitis A is rarely fatal (only in people with reduced immune systems).

Another example is chicken pox – the symptoms are mild (especially in children) and you get immunity from one instance. I had chicken pox and it wasn’t that big a deal.

Now, another problem I have is that every time a person with a baby goes to a doctor, he tries to pawn off vaccines – some of which are not on the schedule and most of which are not necessary. This is BS.

So, to make my point clear:

1.	Vaccines are extremely valuable and necessary and are a modern day miracle

2.	Vaccines should not be used to remove any diseases which may cause discomfort – vaccines should not be on the schedule if the disease is not life threatening.

3.	It is the parent’s choice and obligation to check its vaccines. Don’t trust a doctor that says “trust me” or wants to pawn of this season’s newest (and most expensive) vaccine. Parents should take charge of their children’s health care.

4.	Since vaccines are widely used (all small children) the bar for new vaccines should be higher. New vaccines should not be mandatory or on the list.
But the Apple IIe cost $1400 in 1983 (over $3000 in today's dollars), so most people never had a "main computer" to begin with. Now vastly more people can own a computer at all. And the type of person who spent a month's wages to tinker with a computer in the 1980s is not going to buy an iPad as their only computer today.
Is "Value Added Investor" An Oxymoron?
I would think the iPad will be successful but that isn't what worries me.

The path apple is going down with locked down systems and being succesful with that approach kinda scares me.

I just think: "Why 2010 will be like 1984."
I don't quite understand the issue, but I think the conflict being , is that because google loves content and backlinks , he had first built a service under the disguise of just being a legitimate human powered search, and can now leverage his network to give credibility to other links for the highest price ? Can anybody else provide more context ?
I think the web itself gives the individual a lot more to tinker with and explore than in the old days.

For example, you can still play around with applesoft basic.

Applesoft basic interpreter in javascript:

http://www.calormen.com/applesoft/
Google Twists Knife In IE6, Pulls Support From Docs And Sites
> "didn't have to buy anything extra; you could tinker with your main computer"

You realize that mass adoption of the "home computer" is a very, very recent phenomenon, right? I grew up with a computer in the late 80s/early 90s because my father was in the field, but most of my neighbours did not start getting computers until the mid 90s. IMHO the image of the precocious youngster learning to hack on the machine his family just happened to have is a bit of selection bias.

People look back at the wonderful days of the 70s and 80s with rose tinted glasses - the truth of the matter is back then computers were exclusively hacking machines (i.e., you couldn't work them at all without some fairly in-depth knowledge), you did buy them just to hack on it.
Answer this: You have somehow given a completely unlocked iPad to a child that will run any unsigned executable.

How are they going to figure out that they can hack its guts?

Now answer this: You have given a child a personal computer running Windows 7 or OS X 10.6.

How are they going to figure out that they can hack its guts?
LIVE TWIST
Is it possible that JC underrepresents the value of his services - which purport they are "Helping people find information they can trust"?

https://mahalo-press.s3.amazonaws.com/MahaloPressKit.pdf :

Perhaps Mahalo will (at no extra charge) help steer people away from secret pre-release details about Apple mobile devices.
Does anyone's VT100 emulator support the answerback function these days?

Terminal on OS X doesn't seem to. I think I remember in the dark ages there were some that let you set the answerback message remotely, but I suspect people figured out that was a bad idea.

Ah, but who among us didn't embed a CTRL-E in our "you are about to be idle killed" messages and set our answerback messages to "".
I found this article, quite interesting. It was a lot deeper than I originally thought it would be. On topic, but from a very unique angle. Very well written too.
> many people won’t have the time to do that.

The basic concepts and main ideas aren't that hard: certainly no harder than understanding high-school level mathematics. Ever see what Alan Kay was able to teach children to do in the 70s, with an intuitive enough development environment and programming language.

Being able to write straightforward little algorithms to solve data-munging tasks is more and more a matter of basic literacy, especially for people like lawyers, or scientists, who need to sort and sift through masses of data, find the interesting patterns, and explain it to the world.
Find Somewhere to Work With Laptopfriendlycafes
Or is this a new, quieter-but-more-pernicious hack of their db?
Microsoft Profits Boosted by Windows 7 Sales‎
That would be a virtual machine or interpreter, and that's against the TOS.
The Essence of iPad by Joe Hewitt
The other non-trivial relevant issue was that at launch time he panned Squidoo as spam

flamed Squidoo in the mainstream press so often that he got them penalized
http://searchengineland.com/search-spam-fight-mahalo-1-squid...
(all so he could promote Mahalo)

....

fast forward the clock a couple years and Jason is operating well outside of Google's guidelines, massively auto-generating scraped content web pages. The auto-generating scraped pages are far worse than anything Squidoo ever did.

Jason publicly claims an ignorance of SEO to act like he doesn't know any better, then inside his corporate sales material the key selling point is SEO.

How can he both be ignorant of SEO and use it as his key selling point?
There's a lot of context. The guy who made this site publically called out SEO's as scumbags, then used the dirtiest SEO tricks in the book to make his site rank well. When called out on it, he claims that he doesn't know SEO. Apparently now he's selling his expertise in this area he claims not to know anything about.
Victims lost $9.3 billion to 419 scammers in 2009
After enough reporters get fired for listening to Jason, I am sure the market will work out that inefficiency ;)
Worse, you can't make free updates for Xbox games. MS demands that all additional content cost money - this has been a point of contention between Valve and MS recently, as they are in the habit of releasing frequent, small content packs their games, and the pricing structure prevents this.
He moved to LA.
Right, but the actual mechanism of the secret-message-in-a-safe-in-a-safe makes no difference to the well-known game theory of nuclear retaliation. That is what makes it an odd practice. No other country does this because it serves no purpose.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1246661/New-scandal-...

"Statute of Limitations" was my wording for the following from the article "But the scientists will escape prosecution because the offences took place more than six months ago."

Excuse me if I used a technical law term incorrectly. Someone decided (outside of the law?) that more than 6 months deserves forgiveness.

There you go...gramps.
childhood diseases decreased 90% between 1850 and 1940, paralleling improved sanitation and hygienic practices, well before mandatory vaccination programs

The polio vaccine's first mass vaccination campaign was in 1955, take a look at what happened to the incidence of polio: http://www.post-polio.org/ir-usa.html

A measles vaccine became available in 1963. Take a look at what happened to the incidence of (or more importantly the deaths caused by) measles here: http://www.iayork.com/MysteryRays/2009/09/02/measles-deaths-...

You are spreading misinformation, you should do the research first.
Tesla plans IPO to raise up to $100M
Old news, at best; or, misleading hype, at worst.

Corporations are not extensions of the Public Square. It is perfectly reasonable to require certain behavior as part of an employment agreement. If I ran a hamburger stand, I would fire any employee who gave political commentary or rant while serving hamburgers. And, if one chooses to air grievances against one's employer in the Public Square (i.e. on the Internet, or in newspapers), it is perfectly understandable that the employer would dismiss the employee.

To say "the Constitution does not apply to corporations" is in one way simply false: all legal entities (people, corporations, government) are required to adhere to the rule of law -- law founded on the Constitution.

But the bigger point is: the Constitution's purpose is not to protect individuals from corporations -- it's to protect us from _Government_.
Unfortunately most of the 'best-case' type things I mention are highly unrealistic. I'll let you know if I do hear something tho. :)
"While that's true, the orthogonal skills can sometimes make the real work easier. Knowing even a small amount of VBA could save you hours in Excel"

"""It is a very important lesson in rationality, that at any time, the Environment may suddenly ask you almost any question, which requires you to draw on 7 different fields of knowledge. If you missed studying a single one of them, you may suffer arbitrarily large penalties up to and including capital punishment. You can die for an answer you gave in 10 seconds, without realizing that a field of knowledge existed of which you were ignorant.

This is why there is a virtue of scholarship."""

- Good Ol' EY - http://lesswrong.com/lw/qx/timeless_identity/

This is the answer to the endless questions from my schooldays - "when are we ever going to use this?" and "will it be on the test?". If you know something you can recognise if you are in a situation where it is useful and benefit from knowing it (or choose not to use it). If you don't, you cannot recognise when you are in a situation it would be useful and will suffer arbitrary consequences from the lack of it, and won't even realise that there was a missed opportunity.
Mmm... It's more like "take forever off". You can efficienc-ize yourself right out of a position.
So many new opportunities for 'First'...
Perhaps it's an app that should be running in the cloud, similar to what Palm is trying to do with Project Ares.

http://ares.palm.com/Ares/about.html

I think Apple's attitude is that anything that can't run in a safe, restricted sandbox needs to get the hell out of the consumer's device and run on your servers.
"Considering that 419 scams have been well-known since the 1970s, this trend is particularly disturbing. However, Ultrascan says scammers are expanding their operations and shifting their focus to emerging Internet markets, where there's more fresh meat getting online every day."

Yes, I thought everyone knew about such scams by now, but of course there are newbies coming online for the first time every day, all over the world.

In advanced countries with advanced email providers, there is already a great deal of filtering out of 419 messages, but evidently more protection is still necessary for the gullible.
No, that's the crappy java programmer
I can't speak to the morality of Mahalo and Jason's hand in it but I think since there are attacks on his person that I should bring to light some of the positives he's done for the startup community.

Techcrunch50

This Week In Startups (including encounter with Keiretsu Forum)
But I think there is a valid concern about the trend to legislate against tinkering--restricting sales of radios that can hear on cell phone frequencies, DVDCSS, DRM, suppression of chemistry sets, evacuating a school due to misunderstanding of an electronics experiment.

Exactly. In Apple's vision of the future, using your own computer in ways they don't approve of is illegal: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/02/apple-says-jailbreaking... . That's right out of Stallman's "Right to Read" (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html), which 10 years ago I thought was ridiculously paranoid but now seems to be the environment many companies are striving to create.
Most countries with these problems have high unemployment - so increasing the number of healthy workers would not do anything for their problems.
I switched to a netbook with emacs to see whether I could get by programming on it a couple weeks ago. I've been using nothing but 1920x1200 screens (even on my laptops) for 10 years.

The secret for me (along with knowing the keys for managing bookmarks and multiple buffers well) is abusing virtual desktops. With 6 or 9 virtual desktops, running emacs in one, documentation in one, web browser in one, IRC in one, terminal in one, etc. it's a breeze for me. It's like using a tiling window manager. I don't think I'm any less productive thanks to the screen size than I usually am.

I will say that I'm glad I'm not writing a more verbose language like C++, C# or Java (not an insult, I like C#) -- I can see how it could be much more painful than it is with Clojure and Scheme, which are relatively concise and encourage a little-independent-pieces-of-code sort of functional programming.
From the article:

Lynne Gobbell was fired because her boss didn't like the bumper sticker on her car.

During the 2004 presidential election, Gobbell put a "Kerry for President" sticker on her bumper. When her boss saw it, he said Gobbell could "either work for John Kerry or work for me." Gobbell refused to take the sticker off her car and was immediately fired.

That's pretty hard to believe - unless Ms. Gobbel was working for Bush. Can anyone here speak to the validity of some of the author's claims? It sounds like - with the above example at the very least - wrongful termination lawsuits would punish such firing practices.
Not to worry. The iPad will be used by the mundains and the remnant - who make all the progress - will use the Chinese clone with the USB and camera and open source everything.
nothing special happened for me
The VP8 codec: High compression + low complexity
The official link is here: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/01/modern-browsers...
My concern is if/when they come to dominate content distribution and become the only channel (or a member of an oligopoly of channels, all using "fair use" adverse licenses and DRM). At which point I'm effectively forced to lease rather than own my content, under whatever terms they dictate.
I think phasing out IE6 is actually good for MS as well.
IE 6 support being phased out for Google's docs and sites apps
Because you're against HN offsetting it's carbon footprint?
Review My App: Hearts Net (multiplayer iPhone card game)
I agree. The fears about Android fragmentation are overblown. There is a huge continuum between, say, the iPhone and J2ME on the other end.
OK, dodge.
For one, Windows 7 virtual desktop support is godawful. There are third-party tools to make it possible, but they are rife with graphical glitches and inconsistent handling of your desktops in weird edge ways.
Best Quote:

You know what startups hear when you say “help their strategy”?

“This person is going to write a report.” Startups don’t need more reports. Some of them don’t even have printers.
Hey guys,

I am one of those programmers who is clueless about marketing that we get so often here. Suggestions for improving my website, iPhone marketing in general, iPhone game marketing in particular, or other comments are welcome.

I worked really hard to make WiFi multiplayer games work well. This is best tested if you and a friend try it. If it doesn't work for you, I'd like to know why not.

Some anecdata: this app was approved for sale in less than 24 hours!

Here's some promo codes for your trouble.

RXXKXJXMJ6PR
749TRELXYAMH
YPMA7J9MRK9K
WTXPP76R6YRJ
Seems like a true story:

http://www.slate.com/id/2106714/
This is what I use: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3370/3638277193_27cc47d9b8.jp.... The only extra hardware I need to run a 30 and a 24 off of my Macbook is a USB->DVI adapter... less than a hundred bucks.

His set up is pretty nice, though I don't think I could use all of those screens.

Some of the prices he throws out in his article are also kind of whack. I don't know of any Macbooks that cost $3600.
Google, I owe you one.
'We hear that Google will be phasing out IE6 support for the remainder of Google’s major products, including Gmail and Calendar, over the coming year.'

That be would twisting a knife - and I would love to see it happen. Pulling support for some new features in Docs/Sites isn't that significant.