skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It looks like it depends on the book. The publishers get to set that restriction. If I recall, the same obnoxious restriction was enabled on Nook lending as well.

Hopefully this will lighten as time goes by and the publishers stop being so short sighted. I think they're worried about the loopholes involved such as the turning off wireless with another poster already confirmed works.
Spokeo: Not your grandma's phonebook
There's a similar tool at http://color-theme-select.heroku.com it's also in beta, allowing to generate custom themes and select from a large collection of them. I've contacted the author to see if he's fixing the "generate emacs-lisp" feature.

Would be nice people could use that tool to create themes for emacs 24, and send them to emacs-devel.
The standards community is like this too. Just consider how many W3C working groups are secret, for example. You wouldn't believe how much push-back I get when I ask for everything to be public.

(The W3C even has a second level of secrecy known as "team", which even W3C members who pay $60,000+ every year don't get access to.)
>My take on this thread is that it is a personal attack on Sebastian. That's why I commented.

Wrongo, as far as I'm concerned.

Want to know why I'm in this thread?

>HN would be a better place without a constant stream of victory spam.

Personally motivated and predicated upon a total misunderstanding of what I'm striving for. Not the first time I've had this problem with you.
A guy at a help desk says something inane like that to dodge being recorded ("for quality assurance") as bad-mouthing the product. He didn't code that app or set that field size.

Setting a field size that stupidly small could have a lot of causes, from a lazy coder who figures 1000 characters is enough to an actual directive from an executive saying that they don't want long assessments. (I've had higher-ups in a client's company tell me to do just that, in other contexts.)

In any case, it remains fucking terrible.
Sometimes?
Thanks. I'll look into that one.
GawkerGate
You're probably right, although that's another problem. I've heard (this is not my area) that most of the big, expensive machines all use their own proprietary image formats.

Although I once had some emergency dental work done in New Zealand, and they were able to give me a laser-printed copy of their digital X-ray along with a printout of my EMR as I was walking out the door.
A lot of people are speculating if Amazon came up with these terms or not.

From everything I can find (esp. this article - http://gizmodo.com/5388168/dont-get-too-excited-about-the-no...) the restrictions on Kindle lending are identical to the ones the Nook has (at least when it rolled out).

The B&N site for Nook currently states:

Exclusive LendMe™ Technology
NOOK's exclusive LendMe™ technology lets you share favorite books with friends. LendMe™ books can be lent for up to 14 days. Just choose the book you want to share and send it to your friend's NOOK, computer, or handheld device enabled with NOOK software.

It sounds like the publishers are the ones setting the terms.
Medical electronic record systems are almost always poorly designed like this one. That's why doctors perceive such deficiencies as "natural."
The last unconquered sector of the web
Out of all of the software patents granted, probably only 0.01% of them are arguably patentable. By 'arguably patentable,' I mean that there is actually debate to be had on the issue. All of the rest of them are frivolous and no one other than MBAs and patent lawyers think that they are valid (or should exist).
I have recently observed that buying and using ebooks is like being put into a time machine and being forced to re-live the early days of digital music downloads. Do we seriously have to re-learn all those lessons in every single industry that starts to shift to digital content?
Trolling much jonovos?

Wrong title - they have no plans for Gingerbread but are working on Froyo update per the chat logs you yourself posted.
Yeah, that's what I was referring to when I talked about the potential payoff. I certainly have skills and a decent resume, but have had trouble getting interviews my way.
If we don't consider what made a person "popular", ie have many friends, this "phenomenon" just makes statistical sense to me. You have a greater chance of being in a pool of friends that is large, while your pool of Facebook friends is smaller, so out of that smaller pool you have less of a chance of one of them being less popular than you. It is already unlikely that unpopular people are one of your Facebook friends because they themselves have so few friends.

I have no mathematical proof; this is merely what I intuit.
An MRI of my abdomen only outputs 256x512 images. Medical images suck.
Kill Arial or why your website should be hard to read
How is it piracy? They would still have the restriction of a single lending for a single 14-day period.

Right now, my girlfriend and I are reading the same physical book. I read it at work over my lunch break and she reads it at night before going to bed. Is this piracy too?
I wonder about the business model. This isn't win-win - the courier companies lose. It would be better for them if you didn't exist. Presumably they remain competitive by passing the savings from unclaimed losses on to their customers in their pricing. So the more successful you are, the worse it is for their margins and/or for general courier pricing; yet your income relies on their existence and the current difficulty of getting a claim through.

Will this cause you problems? Will your success cause the pain that you are solving to disappear, thus putting you out of business? Do you have arrangements with them, and permission to scrape their site / use their API on your customers' behalf?
Pinax Gets New Project Website
It depends if the name of the company name is "The BigCo" or just "BigCo", but as he referred to it as BigCo just before then it would seem to be a mistake.
Yeah, I shouldn't have worded my previous two comments as I did, they were too inflammatory so I apologize for that.

I had just found out a day or two ago that a family member was severely discriminated against at work (it's all good though, she resolved it herself before telling us. When you work in tech you can often "prove" yourself right, which she did), so you're right about the touching a nerve thing.

Anyways, cheers! I know you meant no offense.
The sad part of the only lend once restriction that seems to be prevalent is that the most likely side effect of the 14 day loan is using it to get your friends or family hooked on a series.

I just sent my sister a trial loan for the first book in a series I enjoyed and think she will, and I don't really forsee her calling or emailing me to ask for the second book. If she likes it she'll just buy it herself and keep reading.

Being able to loan the book out repeatedly for a good series is likely to generate a LOT of sales for the publishers. But most of them likely don't or won't see that.
Rearrange your registration forms.
I think the idea of 'buying' an ebook is a ridiculous concept in itself.

I think it would be more sensible to employ a model where books are provided via a rental service.

Charge for the service, not the IP.
Was I supposed to open doors using nothing but my elbows?

Yes, actually.

My mother called me with directions to her new apartment...

"Go into the lobby and hit '614' with your elbow. I'll buzz you in."

"Go into the elevator and hit '6' with your elbow."

"Get off the elevator, turn right, and go down the hall to Apartment 614. Hit the doorbell with your elbow. I'll let you in."

"Why with my elbow?" I asked.

She replied, "You're not coming empty handed, are you?"
That's correct. We disagree on the internet, therefore I must be an admirer of one of the biggest murderers of the 20th century.
Mayor Hacks Snowmageddon With Epic Tweets
I do remember a pretty good computing column in Boys Life magazine, actually.
In terms of training an exercise I was given when starting was to take 4 letters from a word like "IDOL", printed in a nice serif font like goudi or jenson and blow each one up to letterhead size individually then try and kern the word by hand. it seems easy at first but its hard to get right and an experienced designer will be able to tell quickly which parts are wrong. it will help you appreciate 'mass' and balance. another trick when looking at layouts is to blur your eyes and see what elements 'pop'. ones placed too close together will meld and dominate, strongly colored ones will bully others etc etc
Why do you see this as an edge case?
A more acceptable response would be "Thank you for your feedback, I'll pass it on."

In fact "we did that on purpose" is possibly one of the worst things he could say. What authority does he have for making that assertion, was he on the design team? He's putting (rather rude) words into the mouths of the people who built the system.
yeah, "profitable". Let's say at break even.

And yet somehow they needed 200 more million, for a total of 360 million sunk into that ship. Do you have a clue of how profitable a company in which 360 million dollars were invested needs to be? Do you really see them ever getting even close to being that profitable? How?
Let's look at your first example, the attempt doesn't need to fail just because someone copied it in 2 days. Let's say I come up with a great new idea for a smartphone app. It's actually an easy idea to implement, but having the idea in the first place wasn't necessarily obvious. Once I launch my app other developers can copy it quite easily. But that doesn't mean my market share goes to zero. I'll still have a first to market advantage and I can compete on features and quality with my competitors. I should still be able to make a reasonable income from my app, an income that's related to how well I've implemented and marketed it. It's true I won't get much of a wind fall for having had the initial flash of inspiration, but that seems pretty fair to me. Anyone could have had that idea, I was just lucky enough to have had it first, and I probably didn't do a large amount of actual work to come up with it, so why should I have a monopoly on it ?

As for your second example, where you're trying to sell your idea to a company, I wonder if you aren't overestimating the amount of protection the patent will give you ? Are you considering the asymmetry in legal resources between yourself and the company ? There are many grounds for finding software patents invalid and if the idea is valuable enough, the corporation may well litigate you all the way to the Supreme Court. Do you have the resources for that ?
Maciej's write-up will have accurate numbers but it was a pile. Something in the 7 to 10 mil range for the first 36 or so hours.
Show HN: go back in time and get nostalgic about 2010 with rrrewind.com
Tips to promote your applications on the web
Did you rent a scooter and rider around Cat ba island? Good times...
Could it be for backward compatibility with something else?

A lot of medical data processing is spread through a huge series of SQL and mainframe databases with lots of hacks to keep them roughly compatible.

A friend worked medical database where "sex" was a seven field containing values from {"F", "M", "Male", "woman"...}
etc.

This is horrific but it's possible to imagine that it arose as a compromised between various equally terrible options...
Etiquette is such a funny thing. I know I sometimes notice people who aren't following protocol, usually out of ignorance of the rules, and it can really bug me. Why should it matter to me if someone is holding their fork in a fist, rather than between two fingers? But it seems ugly to me. Obviously it is the vey definition of uncouth, but it surprises me that it seems ugly. As if all of us following the rules do something pretty by doing so.
I emailed him, thanking him for one of his blog posts though I found insightful.
I sure do :)
"It's called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe in it." -George Carlin
Knuth's Toilet Paper Problem
I actually don't know anyone that was issued a privacy screen and told they had to use it. Sounds like a good policy though. (Just offering my own data point here.)
The same way that they've been handling it till now. Book lending isn't really a new invention. Even with the turn off the wireless hack, you can have a max of two copies of the book at once. I don't think it's that big a deal.
Antenna Power Calculations
Glassdoor weirds me out a bit from the other side.

It's a little unsettling going there the day after a round of interviews and basically reading a description of what it was like to be interviewed by me. No names, but I can definitely identify myself and some other co-workers by the questions we asked candidates.
Watch out! There's an obscure trojan for Android devices on unofficial markets!

Quick! Buy our antivirus software!
PHP. I typically use Symfony, but at work we use Zend for everything.
Just set up an instance of Pinax last night on Slicehost with Debian 5.0. Very smooth, highly recommend, especially if you want social features.

Would like better Facebook / Google / Twitter oauth integration though.
yay! let the DNS system abusi.ng begin!
Use -nw and get your terminal's theme for free!
I learned a lot in the six months or so (of the job I have in mind), but it very quickly plateaued and from then on it was all very much self-directed learning, automating as much of my work as possible and writing tools to make my life easier and to learn new technologies. But there's only so much of that you can do without sufficient external challenges.

Most colleagues did nothing of the sort and were roughly as productive without developing any broader skills, as far as any performance evaluations showed. It's spending an hour performing repetitive manual changes to some code, or spending 55 minutes doing it programatically in Vim and gaining some precious Vim-fu in the process. The output is the same at the end but the programmer isn't.

When there is no further scope to learn from my work (apart from pipe dream re-write projects that never materialise) and I am not doing any significant critical or analytical thinking, I leave. It sounds like your place had a lot more to teach you.
The Common Lisp Reader's algorithm
What is the reliability of TLD registrations in other countries? While it seems like a nice idea to have a clever name, have there been problems working with foreign registrars?
FYI, "Pinax is an open-source platform built on the Django Web Framework.

By integrating numerous reusable Django apps and providing starter projects and infrastructure tools, Pinax takes care of the things that many sites have in common so you can focus on what makes your site different.

Pinax has been used for everything from social networks to conference websites, and from intranets to online games."

-from the website
Use Webkit and Imagemagick to create cross-browser buttons and other swag
Reflecting a milestone year: 12 Tech-Lessons learned in 12 months
I knew someone that spent some time in China, and she said that for things like speeding, the cops will actually call you stupid for not trying to out-run them if they try to pull you over for something like speeding.

[ I wouldn't try to apply this to all of China though. It's a large place, and it could just be something local to where she was (I forget where exactly, it was a few years ago that she told me about it). ]
Yeah, I'd be disappointed if Wired ran my picture but omitted links to any of my projects. If this article were about men, we'd be ignoring it.
we use django-oauth-access for that and it will be included in Pinax before 0.9

see https://github.com/eldarion/django-oauth-access
with Google App Engine
Sorry, Im generalizing more of how the publisher views it.

I think based on the current connectivity and technology of things this is probably the best compromise they could come up with.

Your girlfriend and I can't read the book at the same physical time (unless you read at the same pace and are at the same point, I suppose). A distributed lock mechanism could be used for it, but it doesn't look like Amazon came up with these terms - the publishers did. See my other comment, but this is the exact same terms which were set on the Nook lending when it came out.
Agreed on the more acceptable response, but the corporate culture of the company may not make that the worst thing he could say in terms of staying employed.

He clearly wasn't coached to say "I'll pass it on" and was floundering to respond to a person who was upset over what the help desk guy could easily recognize was a real flaw in the software, while obviously not feeling remotely secure in saying anything that might even suggest that this was a flaw.
I bet there is a decent-sized market with untapped demand for laptops / "tablets" (http://paulgraham.com/tablets.html) with a built-in privacy screen mechanism. The hardware itself could be the screen, either by making the screen part of the case itself, or through the display which would enable people to read only from certain angles.
My point was that all countries use realpolitik and lie about it, even if democracies are nicer when it doesn't cost anything etc. (Wartime, including the cold war, tends to get moral considerations thrown out.)

It is propaganda to condemn a player morally for acting like everyone else in a game where survival literally is at stake. At a minimum you should talk carefully about the implications.

Also, I noted it is easy to give examples where other countries are much worse, without Chomsky or anyone else caring.

It seems like propaganda.

You wrote that you had no problem with that, you wrote in anothe comment that you are no fan of Chomsky -- and now you are the "opposite"??

Out the door again.
Could you provide a source? It sounds interesting, if true.

Such a result has interesting implications. Since we know the demand for medicine is not perfectly inelastic (various experiments with copays prove this), it would suggest that some external force (insurance companies?) is keeping prices down and the constraining factor is supply.
I agree - the author seems to think that problems with a particular design are intrinsic to any electronic solution.
I'm a HTC Hero user (US, CDMA version) on Sprint, and I'm currently running a Cyanogen build on it. I've actually run a number of different ROMs on my phone, Cyanogen just tends to be the most stable, and cruft-free. There are step by step guides for rooting and installing a new bootloader to your phone, which are all fairly easy to follow. Once you've done that, it's just a matter of dropping the ROM image onto your SD card, booting into recovery mode, and hitting install. Not a one click solution, but given an hour or two, simple to follow.

As to the quality of the ROMs themselves, it (of course) varies. I've never had anything that was just outright unusable (except maybe the stock ROM -- it was ungodly slow). The first few ROMs I used crashed about once or twice a week, which was annoying, but typically happened while I wasn't using the phone, so I just felt it vibrate in my pocket. Now that I've switched to Cyanogen though, this problem has completely disappeared, and the phone is very quick, especially compared to the stock image. Seriously, if anyone else has a HTC Hero, I'd recommend rooting and moving to the Cyanogen mod ROM, it's like having a completely different phone. Plus, I get to be on 2.2, while the stock ROM is still on 2.1

The only downside of it so far is that I couldn't manage to get my carrier voicemail working with the image. There may be a workaround for this, I just haven't looked. Since Google Voice integrates so well with the handset, you can tell your phone to forward all of your voice mail to VG, but not use it for any thing else (or choose when to use it for calls, etc., it's amazingly flexible).

I use the xda-developers forum for all of my rooting and ROM needs, and you can probably browse some of the feedback and FAQs there if you have any questions. Alternatively, my e-mail is in my profile if you have any questions you can't seem to find answers to.
Just a note:
Kindle books can only be loaned out ONCE, for a two week period.

Your phrasing of "two weeks at a time" read to me like you though you could loan it out again after that two weeks was up. Apologies if my reading was incorrect.
Developers is still too broad, that's for sure. I would have started by spliting it into problem domains: enterprise apps, enterprise middleware, enterprise foundations, consumer apps, etc. For each of these, I'd identify salient requirements: enterprise apps need to be easy to build, handle lots of form-ish data, connect with disparate systems; consumer apps needs strong branding capability, etc. As with any market analysis, this would include information about size of market, number of dollars, how the customers behave, etc.

I would then have identified our core competencies: amazing browser interaction, strong form builder, strong component re-use architecture, automated version control and deployment to the cloud, etc.

Take the first, overlay it with the second, and start sorting by "closest" and "number of dollars."

The closest we were to identifying a market was (more by default than choice) "consumer apps." Unfortunately, that's a really bad market for development tools because there are so many good, free ones available.

We later tried switching to enterprise apps, but we had significant deficiencies there (poor integration support [great web services support, good RDB support, but no other integration options], no on-premise deployment (a real problem for most enterprises, especially two years ago), among others.

Since we weren't willing to commit to that market segment to fill the holes (instead, focusing on developing a little of everything), we couldn't build a compelling sales story.

Ultimately, the problem was they put their headphones on, started coding, looked up three years later, then tried to scramble to figure out how to take everything they'd built and get people to use it. They should have started from day one looking for customers to work with, started telling their story to see what resonated, and adjusted their roadmap to match.
I call bi.ng. Nobody else take it, please.

The traditional high-value domains have been nouns, which sort of makes sense because we used to have a 1:1 relationship between companies and their sites. Now it's 1:* relationship, with individual sites for particular actions. Opening up a TLD that fit well with those verbs would be very pleasant. Oo mentioned some company-centric ones in the article (e.g. Googling) but I think much stronger ones would be along the lines of shari.ng and golfi.ng.
how much money do you think they can make with that?
I would hope that my doctor uses mainstream technology (internet, iPad) and could differentiate between what is "common" and what is possible.

If one isn't able to do that, I would seriously question their ability to properly diagnose complex ailments.
This, is Twitter.

It's a bit of a PR stunt too, of course. But this sort of public, real-time communication strikes me as vastly superior to, say, a call to 911 or Public Sanitation. For one thing, everyone can read it and respond immediately.

Maybe you don't want to tweet that your house is being robbed. (Maybe you do?) But for any issue of general concern, Twitter surely beats the pants off traditional media and modes of communication.

Keep it up Twitterverse!
Rules are just guidelines that are meant to be broken. How else can change happen?
"It's not just a job... it's an indenture!"
You know investors have confidence in a company when they finance what basically amounts to a executive cash out round.
If full name is not really important, i suggest to ignore it.

Username / Password / Email
Solar Funnels that Convert Sunlight into Fuel
Since this seems like it's only targeting the Chinese market, it seems like there is a high possibility of a governmental hand in this (China spying on their own people, or some other government -- US, Russia, etc -- spying on China).