skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are scripts out there to unlock even Kindle 3 books. The method involves downloading two scripts and unlocking it through a certain version of Kindle for PC. (New versions of KfPC don't work). Search for 'unswindle'.
Attempt to provide an alternate POV:

"The truly staggering valuation of $50 billion that Goldman Sachs has placed on Facebook, the Internet social networking website is significantly higher than the estimated $30 billion value of silver held in [all] the vaults of the world."

http://news.silverseek.com/SilverSeek/1294236772.php
Painless NP-complete problems: an embedded DSL for SMT solving
Take an iPad, add a real touch type keyboard with mechanical switches, make the screen B+W for longer battery life and include user replacable AA batteries and you have the perfect TRS80 portable
Brow Beat : Selections from the JFK Archives
All of that is to get a professionally typeset and edited book with cover art and yadda yadda.

I am less certain than you / the publishers are that the market really gives a damn about all that. For most readers, a plain epub may be good enough.

Is that expensive effort necessary? Or does it have the nature of gilt hand-illustrated drop caps: something that the market learns to live without in return for a radical reduction in price.
Music works the same way. You use CDs to build up a fan base. It's a physical artifact they can keep and develop loyalty towards. When the fan base is big enough, you can make a living. Maybe. After 20 years of hard work. Being an artist that works in creative original artwork, be it sculpture, music or books is NOT an easy path. Easy path is a corporate job with benefits. Very easy path is government job with benefits you can't get fired from and where you don't actually have to work. Both these are bureaucracy and administration. If you want to be artsy, you won't have stable or high income unless you are lucky, a very hard worker, smart at marketing, brilliant at art, and work at it every day for at least 10-30 years.
> I also hate reading pdfs on the computer since the text is straining and I prefer to read for fun lying down or outside and not at a desk.

Ignoring the rest of your post, the Kindle basically solves the above problems. I can read for hours with it, whereas I get fidgety reading a PDF on the computer in a few minutes, and my eyes feel tired as well.
I agree, but developers have enough on their plate and knowing how to administer your workstation isn't the same as administrating a server.

That said, allowing user system wide installation could be possible. I think, at least under Linux, combining selinux and cgroup to provide sandboxed system wide user install could be possible but you'd possibly need to bypass classic unix directory ownership and permissions. That might require to much work or not even be impossible.

Anyone here with enough knowledge to confirm or refute my feeling ?
Python, gdb and a very large core dump
great design work, who was the designer?
"... We discovered that we could tell what performance group the interviewees belonged to within a minute or two by their attitudes toward people and politics. Individuals who were ranked low by their managers spoke of organizational politics as if it were poison. They were exceptionally annoyed by the people side of the business. ... They characterized the social side of organizations as "soft and gushy." They sounded like Spock turned bitter...
The difference between them and those ranked at the bottom of the totem pole was clear. They had found a way to make peace with organizations, people, and politics. They climbed to the top of their field by mastering both hard things and soft and gushy people ..."

Is this why people try so hard to be popular? Training for mastering the 'soft & gushy'?
On a per-copy basis, those costs are probably not very high.
I can't hazard a guess at the efficiency of their fact checking procedures,but they seem to at least try to have one.
That's a pretty good suggestion. The 800 downloads won't go away. If she offers the book for download at her personal site, she can have a forum there for fans to talk and give feedback. That would give a better idea of the real interest in the book and she'd have control over it and better good will from readers.
Oh, you'd rather have a helicopter next door while you slept?
Actually the issue is maximum amount of RAM, not CPU power. 2x 12-core Opterons gives you 24 2Ghz cores out of the box, with up to 128 or 256GB of RAM.
These mockups look great. The world would be a better place if this idea was followed through on by someone. I don't see it being the source of huge financial gain (comfortable hopefully), the social gain is immense.

I wanted the same thing as a vertical for music teachers. Target the teachers not the students. Students will come when there are teachers. It doesn't have to be pure-virtual, initially it can just be an in-out board.

Also it should be subject focused with puts (I have skill x and am willing to teach) or calls (needs to be taught a skill). Calculus, beginning programming or linguistics. Subjects that many students have mental roadblocks getting over that require the tutor to map the roadblock and route around it.
Intern for a SV-style Startup in Austin, TX
Dreamhost MLK Hosting Sale (ten bucks for a year)
Sadly, I renewed for hosting a couple weeks ago, but thought others might be interested.
How about this study from a black professor into why rich black kids still flunk: http://www.eastbayexpress.com/gyrobase/rich-black-flunking/C...

He got his reputation attacked when it was shown that there was a belief that the school should take care of everything (Parents didn't encourage/supervise, students didn't care, etc).
What happened to feed auto-discovery in Firefox 4?
Sure.

But don't you have to factor in those who download it for free to find the "real price" then?
Facebook has yet to really monetize it's 500mm users.

Example: in just a couple of years from when it chose to, it can eviscerate a $37 billion company: eBay. Hell, it could do it as a hobby at first. Then it can start to make real money. Imagine reputation based on your social graph, auction ads/placement based on all the fine grained data they have (and then once they have data on your past purchasing interest/decisions...), etc...
That doesn't help if you tend not to read the sorts of popular books that are easy to find in second-hand bookshops.

Nor if you don't want to spend a bunch of time shopping for books that may or may not be in stock.

In my experience, second-hand bookstores are great for serendipitous finds - books that look interesting that you weren't looking for and maybe didn't know existed, not so much for finding a specific book.
The city's new nature
BTW, you can apply here: http://seeinginteractive.com/company/jobs/hacker-interns/
Some of them are so slow.
Waiting for better javascript performance optimization.
I think the intangible costs of bringing books to market probably are higher than most people think they are (the point of the grandparent post) but that's besides the point. So what if the cost is significantly reduced? Books should be priced at whatever price the market should bear. Reduced price for consumers is not an absolute good; higher profits at publishers increase the incentive for them to continue bringing books to market.
Actually, I'm not even sure CC was the basis for this ruling, but rather Israeli copyright law.

The main issue in this case was the dispute whether 15 images used illegally count for one violation of Israeli copyright law, or 15 - one per each image used.

In this case, plaintiffs were awarded damages for 15 violations of the Israeli copyright law, in accordance with Israeli copyright law, which apparently makes it very clear that each publication is to be seen as a separate work of art.
You can also use acoustic ranging, since sound travels at about 1 foot per millisecond. We did this with ultrasound at MIT -- http://nms.csail.mit.edu/papers/index.php?detail=9

You can get about 1cm of ranging error (median), and say 10cm of positioning error.
Why is this from a throwaway account anyway?
Yes, that's a great example. If you sat me down in front of the two, I could not easily tell you which was the Objective-C application and which was Java. I used Cyberduck on an almost daily basis for years without ever realizing it was Java. That is the app that convinced me Java has a place on Mac OS X.
I really don't understand how the price of silver is related to Facebook's valuation.
But eBooks are really convenient, so customers willingly pay more for this extra value.
Just like starcraft SCVs!
Ah. The answer is no. There are some RSS feeds around I believe, and there are Twitter accounts that retweet articles that go past a certain voting threshold, e.g. 20, 50, 100...
Implementing REST
I renewed my hosting a week ago (darn it). But thought others might be interested.
It used to be that buying a great portable game was $40.

Full stop, you couldn't leave the store with a great, recent portable game for anything less than $40.

Now, I can get Plants vs. Zombies on my iPad, a game that rivals or even exceeds the production values, play time and overall fun of these $40 games, for under $8. At 2 AM. Without leaving my house.

Why aren't we seeing the same pricing evolution with eBooks?

We got to that cost structure in digitally distributed games by eliminating a bunch of bullshit salaries that exist between the creators and the consumers. We need to see the same cutting happen in the publishing industry before we can enjoy decent pricing. By its nature, this is going to be slower – software and game developers are quicker to try new technologies and distribution channels than people whose industry began over 500 years ago. But it's going to happen – there's no reason to be so stingy with publishing when you don't have to risk physical printing and distribution. Which means a lot of professional taste makers are going to find themselves obsolete.
That's a very good point. The download was a very effective marketing tool whether the musician wanted it to be or not.

Really, the hardest thing in these creative industries is marketing, promoting your personal or band brand identity and developing a following.

Smart communities wait to see where paths form and then put in walkways.

Smart marketing is seeing what actually works to promote your product and then encouraging more of it. Clearly for the described musician downloads were building a fan base from which he was able to then make a living.
How to Identify a Good Perl Programmer
Belarusian mobile operators gave police list of demonstrators
Slides are nice, but a video or a transcript of the talk would be a lot more useful. Does anyone know where this talk was given? The title is too generic for my Google skills.
That is the wrong question. The question should be, "Why are ebooks priced so high?"
Should everyone go to prison for a month when they turn 18 to discourage crime?
All of the world's silver is supposedly worth less than a shitty social networking site...
I'm going to be a pedant here - that does not look like a swarm, and they don't claim it is (in the video, at least). By "swarm" I would understand that all have the same programming and that the assembly process is emergent from simpler instructions plus exploration and feedback. Instead they appear to be programmed to act sequentially with a pre-planned set of actions. There is no feedback, no emergence. In short, it's nowhere near as cool as you seem to think it is. It's just a bunch of dumb machines doing exactly what they are told to do, with no smarts.
Slick. Could use a way to generate a URL for an equation.

EDIT: There is, but it doesn't seem to work e.g.

http://graph.tk/#y%3Dsqrt(1-x%5E100)

http://graph.tk/#y=sqrt(1-x^100)
In case it was not clear, the part of my post following the word "also" only refers to reading pdfs on a desktop/laptop/pad computer screen.

The reasons why, before the "also", I stated "I don't own an ereader and don't plan to get one." are not stated. They are:

I tried a Kindle and found the user interface difficult, the speed slow, and did not like the markup options. The battery stuff is also an issue, as is the cost. I can't read 100 books at once so there is no point to being able to carry 100 books with me.

Hard copies are so much better for me there's no comparison.

Didn't mean to get into a discussion of preferences or technology, nor is this expanded comment meant to reflect in any way on what works for other people who obviously have different values and interests.

I was starting my previous comment with the preamble to briefly give some background to my claim that I own many printed books but no ebooks. This was because I wanted to establish I have no personal motivation or interest in whether ebooks are available of her work or not. The motivation of the comment was a criticism of elements of her article, such as comparing herself to a potentially best-selling author.
The only people being cut out are those who are too lazy to post on their own blog or start a discussion thread on their favorite forum/link aggregator. I think blocking people who don't care enough to do that from commenting might be a net win.
It depends on the value of the book, and the author, and the content.

A very famous author is more akin to a best selling band. The can afford to charge less because they can make up for it through volume.

I've written several books, and they are available in print as well as digital formats. I think that my books are valuable and that people reading them will get $10 worth of value out of them (actually I think they will get a lot more).

The real question for me is, "Why are some people so cheap as to think my work is worthless and theirs is so valuable?"

Some won't hesitate to plop down $4 at Starbucks for a coffee but then complain that a book that will bring hours of pleasure or instruction is not worth two or three times as much.
The idea of allowing users to control what individual permissions they have is good in theory, very hard in practice. It faces two main challenges that I can think of:

1) There are UI issues that have been raised elsewhere in this thread - mainly, that users get confused when shown a set of complex options. Having watched usability studies where users are given a lot of relatively complex options, I'd suspect that a model where users have to pick among the permissions to give an app is going to fail massively (ie, user turns on everything without actually understanding anything, turns off everything by default or just cancels out of the app install altogether.) A model where apps request permissions right when it's needed will be annoying users with all the dialogs needed.

2) Some apps don't work if they don't get all the permissions they need (imagine an address book app for an email program - if you don't get email address it just doesn't work.) Adding a lot of conditionals to change how your app works based on what permissions they get can be expensive and adds a lot of unnecessary test cases.

In my opinion, Facebook's decision give more granular permissions, but to make it an all or nothing proposition allows them to protect their users by removing spammy/malicious apps, and simplifies the applications built on their platform . This puts responsibility on them to actively remove malicious applications, and on developers to pick only the permissions they need. Given that users tend to make bad decisions given a set of complex options that they don't understand, it seems like they made a rational choice. AppStores on the various phone platforms have a similar decision to make as to how to best protect users from apps, and there isn't consensus as to the best model in that arena either.

They do need to step up their activity to remove malicious apps in light of giving regular applications this option.
$3000 stipend for an entire summer? That's well below minimum wage in San Francisco, and less than a fifth of what the large tech companies pay for (technical) internships. If they're trying to "compete with large companies like Google, Microsoft or even Facebook for talent," this hardly seems like the way to do it.

Do I just misunderstand the article? Do the companies themselves make up the rest? Or is this "competing for talent" claim mostly posturing?
Seek Randomness
Just for the record: Google has two engineering offices in Russia and one of Googles co-founders is born in Russia.
It is an attempt to provide perspective. Silver has many industrial and high-tech uses; Facebook is basically MySpace 2.0.
Presentation: Redis, The Hacker's Database
Compuserve ad: "By the year 2000, the world may catch up with the way Compuserve's electronic mall lets you shop today."
How and Why I Switched to a Standing Desk
How is it more bullshit than any other pricing? Does it really cost github anywhere near $7/month to allow me to set five of my repos as private?

Just like private repositories are a service that brings value that people are willing to pay for, so is having an entire book in a small and portable format.

Ignore the costs related to making and distributing the physical objects when it comes to pricing them; if that's accepted wisdom for start-ups, why wouldn't it be for established companies?
Ketchup - A Small jQuery Plugin to Validate your Forms
Ketchup is a small (3.4KB minified & gzipped) jQuery Plugin that helps you to validate your forms. It comes pre-styled and with 18 basic validations and a bubble like style.
Does your service attempt to verify these people renting do in fact have a drivers licence?
US and Britain to China: "your censorship of the internet is evil!"

Then when copyright gets involved...

Britain passes https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/u-k-passes-internet-di...

http://www.zeropaid.com/news/91378/feds-seize-domain-names-o...

The same western nations that are against censorship of the internet in China, seem to even drop due process as soon as copyright comes up. I am not sure this situation is very stable -- something has to change.

Similarly with patents. I'm glad the media is waking up when China gets involved :)
Ask HN: Seed funds in the Bay Area working in Mobile?
We just started raising a seed round and due to a series of interesting events, we're going to be in the Bay Area (we're based in Boston) for a week or so at the end of January. Who knows, last time I was over in CA, I was supposed to be there for a weekend -- Startup School -- and ended up staying for a couple weeks.

I was wondering if y'all knew of any interesting seed funds (or people) in the Bay Area that are trying to change the world wrt. the Mobile Consumer space.

Gracias,
Marc (Geek - Zazu)
I'd not be at all keen to loan my car to some random stranger

Neither would I. Nor would I want to type "rental car" into Youtube if I ever decided to participate in this program.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyjbmOVcbHI
It looks more like UK TC and there's even a France TC !
I think nobody know about them.

[edit] Well not only UK, first page just happened to be very UK oriented but if you read further there is a bit more diversity.
So, if the architecture really doesn't matter, why not use the Lions' book and teach Sixth Edition Unix, or use "The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System"? Is it a holdover from the 1980s, when microkernels were still interesting, or is it because Tanenbaum is seen as a 'real' academic?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lions%27_Commentary_on_UNIX_6th...

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/design-44bsd/
Travel Or Start a Business? Why Not Both At the Same Time?
The famous four
Using standardized gear doesn't really have much to do with expecting to go pro. It's painfully frustrating to play most any sport or game when the results of your actions aren't consistent.

Couple that frustration with the fact that regulation balls are common and cheaper, and I don't think you'll find these popular at all in practice.

I'd like to be wrong about that; it would be great if it worked out. I just don't think there's much chance of it going anywhere in reality. Any money behind this would be better spent on distributing small solar panels and batteries to serve the same purpose.
Longsoon comes to mind (it has the MIPS dialect of RiSC, with hw qemu x86 accel., dedicated DSP-like additional cores with FMA etc).
Lots of them working together means active traffic management becomes critical to prevent collisions. That'll be regulated because even if they're moving things the size of bricks rather than I beams, do you want to see what happens when two hovering robots each carrying a brick 5 metres off the ground bump into each other and suddenly stop hovering? Or if they start creating turbulence for each other and interfere with flight even without contact? Even if it doesn't get regulated by law the insurance implications would force de facto regulation.

Lots of small components means more joints. With a brick as our example that's fine but I'm not convinced the gain over a squad of fairly cheap bricklayers is there - with a girder frame structure as is more typical for large commercial premises that means for the same design it's simultaneously weaker, heavier and more expensive. Not a trio of attributes I'd want to apply to my structure.

This is a sort of technology I love, that's clearly very interesting and with all sorts of potential. But I don't see construction as the ideal target market for it, by a long way. Freight unloading would have been a great case had it not gone containerised some years ago. Warehouse order picking as with Amazon et al? Perhaps. You can have the storage floor as a controlled space without people underneath which reduces the safety issues and there wouldn't be the same problem with noise nuisance. If we wanted to go down that road though I'm not sure it's a big enough win over cranes / arms and conveyor belts, or that either is a win over fairly cheap people pushing trolleys (having worked alongside exactly that in the past).

If we want to stick with construction it would make good sense for use in hazardous environments because it would provide a way of deploying a large, highly mobile force to an area where you couldn't deploy human labour (or where that deployment becomes severely impractical / unattractive for whatever reason - see the film 'Moon' for example), but I'm not sure that's a large enough market to justify the expense of developing the tech enough to make it fully usable. There doesn't seem to currently be a shortage of labour prepared to go and work in Siberian gold mines or northern Canadian tar sands quarries, for the right price, and I can't see the power technology for these devices scaling to the point to make them likely cheaper any time soon to invest in it.

Cool tech searching for a better application IMHO. I'd love to see that better application though and would be heading down there to watch when it happened.
We started in 2003 and just kind of stumbled onto this model because we had no other options. It wasn't planned out like I just described, although I 100% believe it is the business model of the future for independent artists. I had to hack together all the tech for it, so my new startup (nationbuilder.com) is about packaging it all up so others can do this model too.

There is some background in this Washington Post article from 2006. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08...
These things don't look very powerful, to put it mildly. GPS means outdoors which means wind which is a bit harder for a small, light hovering robot to handle. Indoor lets them demonstrate the principle with a useful simplifying assumption of no wind.
i don't see anything wrong with "westerners" trying to figure out simple solutions for real problems the third world is facing. Many are completely impractical, but what if the tech from this device can inspire a more practical kinetic energy capture device? why not?
Good point in that it is capped, and hence regressive, on the income side, but it's still net redistributive to the lower brackets on the pay-out side. My mistake.