skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, and even closer to Debt Bondage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_bondage

Note it's a pretty thin line between the two, and this is a feudalistic system of peonage. The only difference from peonage really comes down to whether you are forced to work for one company or can switch employment while still garnished.

I think this speaks to the value of credit scores and social pressure for enforcing consumer debt contracts, as opposed to prison or garnishment. Sure there are always abusive edge cases to point to, but it's worked quite well overall.

Obviously there's going to be a problem with a massive real estate gold rush bubble fueled by lax regulation, profiteering and fraud by both consumers and finance companies. But last I checked the consumers are getting whacked pretty hard for their sins. Not so sure about finance.
I appreciate the feedback. I find it hard to balance between introducing a new audience to the material and having something new for people who follow online.

I love this quote: "Repetition in an age of infinite content availability is unnecessary." I'm just wondering how to cope with it; infinite availability is not the same as infinite attention.

Always open to suggestions,

Eric
I found a big tank of helium in the pile of junk at the house I moved into about a year ago and ended up giving it away since I had no use for it (after making a ton of party balloons).

I guess I should have kept the tank and retired after purchasing a private island in the Caribbean...
I interpret part of this short article as if the author, with "I'm not saying you must write JavaScript a certain way. Do what makes you the most comfortable, write code that is fun to write." implies that it's ok to write JS function names etc. in any way, which is very bad advice, because, some (or most?) JS engines have case sensitivity on function calls; Math.floor() will work, but math.floor() will throw a reference error and Math.Floor() will throw an undefined function error. Really: you must write JavaScript a certain, very specific way, or it just won't work everywhere :)
The point that's worth mentioning is that, in the olden days, families had just one computer, they cost a small fortune. That isn't the case anymore. In my family of 5, there are currently 10 computers of various sizes in use. This is mostly my fault since I own 5.

An iPad can be used for viewing the photos that someone just edited in photoshop on their 'regular' pc. They're complimental.
Some of us are old enough to remember when assembler was supposed to rot your brain. When BASIC or COBOL or another compiler was going to make you stupid. When new tools and new abstractions were viewed as scary by some folks.

I trust the kids. They're smart. Smarter than us.

Hand'm all iPads. I can't wait to see what they'll come up with.
Ambiguous? JavaScript Object Notation should probably use JavaScript's camelCasing, no? ;)
If that were the case, don't you think he'd be using an iPhone over an Android phone?
Oh, btw. Guess who pays the sins of the spenders. That's right. People on this board, who watch as their hard work is eaten up by inflation and taxes. Because banks will get paid no matter what.
I take issue with this step:

"Thus, as k increases, the left side approaches 1, and we can take the exponential of both sides to give..."

k/k-1 -> 1 in the limit.

The problem is that most people don't have an infinite number of women to choose from, so k/k-1 is likely NOT sufficiently close to 1. The algorithm then takes the exponential of both sides, making the matter worse...

So, based on the average number of serious girlfriends the average person seems to have before getting married (~4), the average person probably shouldn't pass on the first N / e... they should probably pass on something more like the first N / (e^1.3) or so.
Some VCs try to negotiate tranches. Based on how rarely this comes up, I suspect they're a rather small minority.

The right answer is probably "We're negotiating our first round of funding right now. We'll negotiate our second round of funding later."
No, you have a point about open systems in general, to which I agree wholeheartedly, I simply referring to consumer-facing devices.

And if the consumer really wanted an open system, again Linux on the desktop (Ubuntu?) should be have much more market share than it does.
I agree. I hope the iPad feels as accessible as finger painting, albeit less messy:

http://michael.terretta.com/an-information-appliance-for-the...
Good points, thanks. I didn't look because I'm not interested in DRM'd files - never "bought" one yet.

Arguably, it may be deceiving the customer to have the buttons say "Buy" instead of "License". The terms are elusive; with a couple of minutes of clicking, I only found this for the paper+ebook "Amazon Upgrade": http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=1...

You may return a particular Online Book for a full refund within 30 days of your purchase date, provided that you have not accessed more than 20% of its digitized pages.

Interesting.

P.S. Ah, terms for ebooks are under the Kindle hardware (unlike MP3s, etc.) http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...

[...] Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy [...]. Digital Content will be deemed licensed to you [...] you may not sell [...]

I seem to remember some legal kerfuffles a while ago about resale of boxed software (with the 'first sale' you mentioned). Things don't seem to be going well for "buyers" ... (And I wonder if that is really good for sellers, in the long run.)
The way my 4 year old interacts with iPod Touch and does some amazing things. Learn words, numbers, play kid's games.

I think he will learn lot more interactively on iPad.
I think you underestimate the ability of Apple (or any company really) to stimulate demand for bad platforms/products. They have a lot of money which gives them a lot of power to make really pretty things and market them so that people want them.
Do you think that content would have to be available as a native app or would a web based solution be good enough?
Not to be snarky, but why isn't John Gruber an evangelist at Apple? Surely Apple would want him on their team.
How the Apple iPad Will Change the Way You Watch Movies
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Think bigger. What is needed is a new way to construct software altogether, that works as fluidly with a touch interface as with a keyboard.

Why are engineers so shortsighted? "Build an app creator for the plebes, but us serious engineers will never build software with an iPad!"

On the contrary. Your keyboard is going to be slowly ripped away from you over the next decade. And you'll be happy about it.

BTW: Starting this weekend, I am working on this very problem. Check back in 6-9 months :)
John Gruber has been pretty fair recently, at least on the Apple patents front.
He's already evangelizing for Apple as a somewhat objective 3rd party. Bringing him in-house would cost them money and compromise his perceived reliability.
"As an aside, I was surprised that the article did not take advantage of static imports..."

I also much prefer the readability of static imports, but it won't work for the "equals," "toString" and "hashCode" methods, obviously.
These people can still declare bankruptcy. They still have assets, so I'd say it's nothing like debt slavery.
Indeed, it's not courting-specific at all, or even human-specific. The same math could be used to answer questions like: "If you are a hamburger bun selecting patties from a conveyor belt, how do you optimize your selection of a quality patty?"
He's currently doing a good job of at least appearing neutral. See his recent comments on Apple's patent litigation against HTC -- he doesn't like that at all.

http://daringfireball.net/2010/03/this_apple_htc_patent_thin...

(And I, of course, am a completely neutral third-party John Gruber evangelist.)
So when is it going to start preserving filesystem modification times? That's only been on the TODO list for what, close to ten years?

I'd really like to see that (which has existed in branches) before some sort of massive effort to keep up with the DVCS Joneses.
"But last I checked the consumers are getting whacked pretty hard for their sins"

Please elaborate. Consumers are walking away from their mortgages (in many cases, 0 percent down and ARM) or they have been defaulting (staying in the house without paying mortgage for 2+ years in many cases) . Consumers are walking away from their obligation of credit card debts (10%+ discharge rate) at an all time high. Credit scores get reset after bankruptcy pretty quickly now, after 3 years. Heck, you can buy a house with a FHA mortgage up to 500k with 3% down only 2-3 years out of bankruptcy.

What is real is consumers don't have 'jobs' anymore.
"Such is the march of progress. 40 years ago you could open the hood of your car and see and touch just about every component in there. And you had to, because many of those components required frequent maintenance. To properly own a car required, to some degree, that you understood how a car worked. Today, you open the hood of your car and you see a big sealed block and a basin for the windshield washer fluid. You can buy a new car, drive it for years, and never once open the hood yourself."

(Warning, car guy!) First, I don't think this is a bad thing. The average person doesn't want to perform any maintenance anyways. Heck, oil changes. They're still just as easy to perform. You're not even saving any time by going to the dealership and back, plus waiting around. You're certainly not saving any money (I can save $45 changing my oil myself). People just don't want to expend the effort.

In the case of cars, at least in the US, they went from an object to pride to... a nuisance for most motorists. They want to be comforted, coddled, and have as much as possible done for them so they can chat with friends, sip their coffee, or have a conversation via text message.

That applies to many things. I know plenty of folks who spend $10-12 a day on lunch. $10-12 of ingredients gets me a far better lunch for the entire week. Even saves me time, because I don't have to wait in a line every day.

It's not cheaper. It's not even less time. It's the time spent is "lower impact" I guess. That's what's paid for. Consumers are given a choice, and many choose the path of overall least resistance. I'm sure there's plenty of other psychological factors at play (i.e., "Well I have the money to not need to cook for myself all the time!", advertising making things seem more appealing), but the reality is when presented with all the options, folks just want to do the least work possible.

Give people more iPads. At least in the current consumer culture, it's exactly what people want. They don't want to explore or program. It's the path of computing least resistance. Enthusiasts and people who have a serious need for one will still buy computers.
The article did mention that it costs money ($2000 or so) to go into bankruptcy, which means you have to save up that much money before you can go broke. Not always an option when a quarter of your wages are being garnished.
It would be more humane to deny some people large amounts of perpetual unsecured credit to begin with. I think the ongoing compounding of credit card debt might even be worse for some people than the limited-term high interest rates of payday loans or pawnshops.
Because android phones are not bad. Especially since the launch of the Droid, they've become incredibly competitive. After about 2 years, Apple's lost their clear lead and the market has started to produce competitors.

It doesn't look like the market has things which compete with the iPad just yet.
Things have never been better for kids and technology than they are today, and I agree with Gruber that it's a bit myopic to suggest otherwise.

But, it is dangerous to ignore negative events, just because the overall trend has been positive for the past 30 years. Apple has been responsible for a number of very negative events in the past few years. Going back to more closed systems is not a good thing, even if the iPad is awesome and seems like magic and kids love it (and I'm sure they do). The iPad and iPhone are more closed, more hostile to tinkerers, more hostile to adventurous users, than most other similar devices. This is a bad thing. One shouldn't apologize for a company doing bad things, just because things in the industry as a whole are better than they were ten or fifteen or twenty years ago.

Open Source software has made dramatic improvements in the landscape for kids learning technology today. Apple is fighting those improvements, and they should be called out for that bad behavior. Apple is behaving in ways that are bad for developers, and bad for kids who might become hackers. Just because they also happen to build awesome products, and do happen to provide an approved relief valve for their closed ecosystem, doesn't make it OK to be hostile to developers and would-be hackers.
Why do you assume he'd want to work at Apple? He's certainly making more money on his own, doing his own thing, from his own home, on his own time. Working at Apple would be a step down.
Yeah, and I'm fine with that.

I'm so against the notion that every tool has to have all the feature/act like every other tool. DVCS vs CVCS, vim vs IDE, etc. A variety of tools focused on different strengths is a great thing. A bunch of me-also's is not.
I really wish someone in the know would reply to your post because I think you have the most salient point. In fact, do the same open source advocates decry the Playstation and Nintendo platforms?
There is very little difference between union strikes (especially in "closed shop" states/countries) and the mafia extorting protection money from businesses.
On the topic of Atari 2600 BASIC, at least there was PEEK and POKE, not that it was easy to figure out the different addresses without a manual.

Amusingly, I have a floppy on my desk that my little brother wrote on when he was about 4 or 5. It has two commands on the label - POKE and PEAK :)
Where are the 3D graphics processed? They keep throwing around the 'websockets' term as if they are piping the graphics over ip, but using webgl would seem to indicate the graphics are being generated in the users GPU.
How Haiti Got Mapped After the Earthquake
Thanks! But how can they determine the peak if they don't know how much remains unfound in offshore reserves?
I never used Hypercard, though I am aware of it.

I've noticed a couple of things, though:

* Many people howl for the return of Hypercard

* There are dozens of Hypercard clones/reimaginations/etc out there that no one seems to be using.

What is it that the implementations out there are missing that make them undesirable to the people demanding Hypercard? Is it just lack of ubiquity, or something else?
[eBook] A Practical Guide to Geostatistical Mapping (with R)
Well, you can always set your user agent in Safari to:

Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10

and experience the new layout. To do this, just go to Develop -> User Agent -> Other...
Google Acquires Online Video Platform Episodic
Gruber has the magic combination of writing ability, old-school journalism skills, and getting Apple's product design philosophy. People like him because he makes good arguments supported by both facts and common sense.

The worst thing Apple could do would be to sully that with their money.
Google translate has Haitian Creole but not Latin? No offense to Haitian Creole, but Latin seems like a pretty important language to be lacking. Anyone know a site for translating from Latin?
Adora Svitak: What adults can learn from kids
You may be right -- I have heard through some informal contacts that the decision to pull out of China was taken at the highest levels, and in secret.

Apparently this is a deliberate strategy when dealing with totalitarian governments -- even if they have people on the ground, they have to keep them in the dark about big decisions.
How to get Free Food & Coffee in Silicon Valley
Ever been to Napoli? It reset my idea of what a dirty city looks like.
whether or not the ipad is a step in the wrong direction, i feel bad for the kid learning how to program by having to save up to pay for an apple developer account (and having to use his parents' bank account information since he's under age), learning with apple-supplied-and-regulated documentation, then submitting his work to apple, stressing out over whether they'll approve of it and think it's good enough, and then probably not making much money at all on the whole thing and taking that to mean he's a bad programmer. not to mention all of the idiots dismissing his software with "this app sux" on the app's review page.
If you're founding alone, who's got your back?
Pretty won't fix your broken app
I doubt it. The real potential hackers will immediately want to jailbreak it. This is what I would do if this thing came out when I was a kid. I wanted to take everything apart. Even if they don't have a PC in their home, they'll find a way to do it. A friends house, the library, etc. Kids are amazing.
Trying to Profit from Video, Google Purchases Episodic
I don't think you're actually supposed to translate it from "Latin" to English. Jason has essentially plugged a handful of meaty keywords from the past few months of frothing-mouthed punditry into a piece of bog-standard lorem ipsum text.

OK, here, I'll translate:

"You've already heard everything you need to about the iPad. It's been covered by everyone from the Today Show to Stephen Colbert to David Pogue from the New York Times, and your mom even has an opinion.

You either made up your mind to buy one or not the second you saw Steve Jobs hold it aloft in Moses-like fashion back in January. Why are you even bothering to read real reviews? You've known exactly what they're going to say for months."
12 years in the making.

In Java 8:

java.util.Strings.isBlank(string) -- returns true if the string is null or "", else returns false.

Its wishful thinking hoping for this in Java 7... So I'll just lower some standards.
Microsoft's iPad Strategy: Ignore It
I think I agree with you, but as frustrating as they are, weren't Rovian tactics shown to work pretty well?
HN Summary
While I agree that being able to sell apps on the iTunes Store is a good thing, and worth $99, I don't think that Apple should limit owners of their iP* devices from creating and installing unapproved applications. Why should I have to pay $99 just to sign my own apps for personal use? You don't pay the car manufacturer for a license to modify your car. This is the only problem I have with these devices.

In my opinion, Apple should just do what Windows does with downloads, and warn users when installing unsigned apps. This provides the best of both worlds. Keep charging for the privilege to sell on the App Store, but please, just let me use my device how I want to.
The reality is that this 13 year old kid has positive reviews on his app, has the increased confidence to go along with actually making something, and will undoubtedly use that confidence and passion to create more substantive projects as he gets older.

The bar is ostensibly higher for the inexperienced to get involved with programming. But $99 for a developer license is nothing compared to the cost of an Apple ][e, Amiga, Atari, etc. Most kids already have a Mac anyhow. And if they don't, a Mac mini + LCD is not prohibitively expensive. PcC developers have to start on something, too.

I see the iPad as an easier way for a 13 year old to show off his work. And at that age, since you're not living off the money you make, you are largely living off props. And what better way to boost confidence than to have real live customers.
So it turns out that if you make more than some specified amount, determined by the average for your state, you can no longer have your debts absolved by bankruptcy.
Best you can do is enter into a 5+ year payment plan, where they garnish your wages automatically.
The Government-Technology Gap
This is a gross simplification. Let's expand this discussion to public verses private. I'm going to talk about education instead of the USPS because I know more about education. Goal of a public education system: provide actual learning, understanding, and life-long skills to everyone. Goal of a private education system: maximize profits by providing competitive diplomas as cheaply as possible.

See the issue? The priority in the private system is on making profit and providing diplomas to people. The priority in the public system is on actual learning. The rampant grade inflation at Ivy League schools is a great example of learning taking a back seat in favor of producing graduates that look good on paper.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that "public" universities are any better. At my university (UIUC), research grants account for the vast majority of the funding for the engineering college. Consequently, research is the priority, not the education of the students. Simply put, the priority is where the money is. If the money is tied to the learning of the students, the students will actually learn. If it's tied to producing diplomas or publications, that's where the priority will be placed. UIUC can get away with it because its engineering graduates are still extremely highly paid. The prestige of UIUC's faculty is responsible for that, but it would be erroneous to attribute it to the educational curriculum. I can tell you from personal experience that the vast majority of graduates are average programmers at best and many haven't really internalized essential CS skills like algorithms, data structures, etc. One example that really sticks out in my mind: I went to a talk by Alan Kay last semester. Hardly any undergraduates attend, or even know or care who Alan Kay is. Alan puts up a few slides with pictures of McCarthy, Sutherland, Church, etc. Not a single undergraduate can name their primary contributions to the field. No one even knew the importance of Lisp! As Alan aptly put it, "you all are lucky your field isn't Physics; if it were you would be kicked out of the department and sent back to high school for not knowing the fundamentals of past research" (paraphrasing).

So why doesn't your grocery store example hold up? The success of a grocery store is strongly coupled to the quality of its product. Spoiled food is spoiled food. Education? Turns out the diploma, not learning, is what matters the most. The USPS is a similar situation, true value of the service (essentially free communication for all citizens everywhere) is only loosely coupled with the financial success of the service.
Check back in 6-9 months :)

I'm excited to hear about it.
Yeah, John Gruber is neutral about Apple the same way Cory Doctorow is neutral about open platform.
Good Actor, Bad Actor
All I can say is thank goodness I can use Git with Subversion without anyone being the wiser. Local feature branches are one of the godsends of DVCS.
That is far from reality. Gruber criticizes Apple in areas he feels they deserve it (App Store policies, and most recently their patent lawsuits).

You may not agree with where he criticizes and where he agrees, but he is far from doing nothing but praising Apple.
Got this running on my linnode instance. It plays well, some textures take time to load, and it's hammering disk io.

That said.. It plays really well on my hackintosh. 40 - 60 fps average, sound is okay. Play it with a webkit browser, the nightly safari works well.
AFAIK, he used to work at Apple, but on apple.com. I don't think he was a software engineer, but I remember reading that he used to work on the web side. This was probably the mid- to late-90s.