skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone who reads her genre but not her books (saw a few paragraphs, decided to pass), I'd say:

1) The quality was noticeably worse than authors in the genre I enjoy but, critically, difficult to distinguish from at least some New York books that I've paid money for.

2) I did not find myself thinking "Dang, you know what this excerpt needed? A publisher. I mean, look at it, it's so... not published."

3) I wish her every success, and strongly hope that authors I enjoy adopt the model themselves, because continuing the current model adds no value to me and, in fact, subtracts it when I have to deal with territory lockouts or "The book is ready -- you can read it next year."
What a Drama Queen
Great question. My first instinct would be that none of the gains are as dramatic as the drops. Basically this change gets rid of most of the negative outliers.
Thank you, it was driving me nuts that I couldn't remember the name of the Espresso.
XP, the real catalyst to agile, was born out of the Smalltalk hacker community with Kent Beck and Ward Cunningham in particular. They're the furthest from methodologists I could imagine.

The only professional methodologists on the agile manifesto, for that matter, were Alistair Cockburn and maybe Jim Highsmith. And even they were all about preaching for less paperwork & process. The rest were in the trenches software team leads or (at worst) software consultants like Martin Fowler.
Thanks for the update!

A lot of people had issues with the 3.0.4 release (and rolled back to 3.0.3), so definitely check this out, but commit your code first to be on the safe side (not like we ever wouldn't right?).
> I never understood why people are buying proprietary, expensive stuff like Photoshop just for mock-ups.

When I was younger, I couldn't imagine why people would spend hundreds on Creative Suite, MS Office, etc. I could just use GIMP, Inkscape, OpenOffice, etc. for free, and stick it to the man.

Now, I run a business, and I think anyone who uses substandard tools to save a few hundred bucks is crazy. I also think anyone who really believes that the freebie tools I mentioned are even close to the standard of the professional tools I mentioned is crazy. The cost of these professional tools is relatively small compared to the money they save through increased efficiency alone, but in many cases they get much better results that would justify the cost anyway.

(I could list a numerous objective, widely applicable reasons in each case, and I have done so in other forums on several occasions, but this probably isn't the place. I'm just trying to explain why people do the things you asked about.)
Algorithms, A Dropbox Challenge and Dynamic Programming
Google cares about "paid links" in the sense that they don't want people to use their pagerank for monetary gain. This is clearly not TechCrunch's intent. Similarly, tiny conferences like http://www.alohaonrails.com/ do the same thing, and don't get shut down. I don't see the double standard in that case.
Best Thesis Writing Guidelines
A thesis needs to be written in the proper manner for students to obtain the degree. Failure to write good theses will result in the non attainment of the degree. Therefore, students need to know the best methods of writing the best thesis.
The one thing I could see this being useful for is standardizing pagination for large result sets. Ideally, the server would return meta pagination information that includes total number of results, offset, limit, etc.

Unfortunately, this spec doesn't address that at all as far as I can tell :(
Desalination is very energy hungry. with Oil possibly going up 100% (if Libya and Tunisia both stop providing oil), it could easily be 200% higher than current prices for water. But it would still be small compared to other expenses - by your calculation, by ~$300/year. Something you'd start to feel (but then, everything would shoot up in price)
This is the latest release, which the team as worked very hard to get out and has been a whole year in the making.

Retroshare offers:

* Private Encrypted Instant Messaging / Group Chat.

* Decentralised Forums / Channels.

* Anonymous Turtle File Sharing.

* PGP Authentiation / SSL encryption.

Retroshare has over 100,000 downloads already but is still virtually unknown. Please help me raise awareness.

Thanks,
drBob.
Langshan Mountain World Natural Heritage
Assuming you're in the US (you don't say), here are the IRS rules on if you need to file a return (essentially if you have earnings on the app store of over $5700 in 2010, and probably near the same amount in 2011, and your parents continue to claim you as a dependent.)

http://www.irs.gov/publications/p929/ar02.html

But the Ts & Cs of being an Apple registered developer (which you need to be in order to become an iOS app developer state that):

You certify that you are of the legal age of majority in the jurisdiction in which you reside (at least 18 years of age in many countries) and you represent that you are legally permitted to become a Registered Apple Developer.

Unless otherwise agreed or permitted by Apple in writing, you cannot share or transfer any benefits you receive from Apple in connection with being a Registered Apple Developer. The Apple ID and password you use to login as a Registered Apple Developer cannot be shared in any way or with any one. You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your Apple ID and password and for any activity in connection with your account. Notwithstanding the foregoing restrictions in this Section 1, if you are the parent or legal guardian of individuals between the ages of 13 and the legal age of majority in the jurisdiction in which you reside, you may allow such individuals to share your Apple ID and password for their use solely under your supervision and only in accordance with this Agreement. You are responsible for such individuals’ compliance with and violations of this Agreement and any other Apple agreements.

So, in essence, your parents have to be the 'Developer', and you can share their credentials. Your "parents" will need to submit the app to the App Store, etc.
Berita Terdepan - good news: Sony MRW-F3 Card reader
If you mean an output device based on Braille, then yes, you can get a Braille terminal, or "refreshable Braille display" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refreshable_Braille_display), which displays a row of characters via Braille, and can indicate the cursor position as well. That would make it possible to interact with the command line. They appear to cost about $5-10k, depending on whether you want a 40-character or 80-character row of characters.

You might also look at http://live.gnome.org/Orca , which helps you interact with graphical programs via both speech and Braille (and magnification for as long as you continue to have some vision).

As far as "input devices based on Braille"; you can probably get a keyboard with Braille lettering on the keys, but if you can touch-type you don't really need the labels anyway.

Hope that helps.
I wonder what history would have been like if the Roman empire had gunpowder and bronze cannons? Just like with hot air balloons, they had all the necessary basic technology but never thought to put the pieces together.
Facebook in Real Life: Startup Finds the Art & the Ego in Social Interactions
Google was willing to ban BMW for hidden text

That lasted, what was it, 48 hours? I have no interest in picking a fight, but for the benefit of other HNers because this really matters for their businesses: there is definitely a point in brand value where the rules change. A one-man operation who pulled a BMW would get terminated without a second thought and would find it very, very difficult to get their old rankings back. Google can't do that to BMW because if BMW can't rank for auto-related queries in Germany then Google looks stupid.

(Public sanction like the BMW thing is more a messaging tactic than anything else. I mean, case in point, we're talking about a single identifiable incident prominent enough to be mentioned in the mass media in a foreign country multiple years ago. Ditto the incident where Google Japan got wrist-slapped for buying reviews. What's the French phrase "to encourage the others"?)
That's true I guess I didn't express myself as clearly as I could have. What I meant to say is that our intent in posting was in no way malicious and we are going to add something that tells you we are posting to your wall. I agree that it's definitely a necessary addition so that our users know exactly what theyre getting
Some good points here. A couple thoughts:

- If, for some reason that I can't really conceive of, you wanted to connect to a far-away access point, you'd need a highly directional antenna (due to RF physics). Doing this actually makes direction finding extremely challenging, for the same reason you can't see a laser from the side (unless it's super high power and has something to reflect off of, which is unlikely to be the case in the wifi scenario).

- End-to-end encryption plus an anonymization mechanism like Tor seems to me to be pretty impervious to attackers, assuming the implementation of your encryption and anonymization are both correct (which, admittedly, is a big if, but is not a /fundamental/ issue; you could envision a system engineered to be correct). If you have a secure, trust-worthy, out-of-band mechanism for exchanging keys with whoever you want to talk to, even if someone owns the infrastructure you're using they won't be able to decrypt your communication, or know who the source and destination are if you're using an anonymization mechanism. This also assumes you trust the person you're communicating with, etc.

I'd love for someone to correct my understanding of this if I'm wrong.
Respect!
Now there's a mantra:

ACCEPTed
COMMITed
RESOLVEd
Spent the whole day learning about Oracle functions, queried Google over 100 times, and didn't come across a single BigResource result! Google definitely made an improvement.
For anyone interested in seeing this run well in a safari build on mac, please see http://chromium.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/samples/audio/bin/W...

It's a webkit/safari build with web audio in it, so audio is perfect as hell in it. :)

And for firefox, just get firefox 4 (god no, not 3.6!).
Why would literate slaves pose a risk to stability, necessarily?

Keep in mind that slavery for these people was nothing like the chattel slavery of the US south. Being an educated slave did mean that you had some restrictions on what you could do; it also freed you from having to worry about food and shelter, say. Similar tradeoffs have been made by salaried workers in Japan in the 70s and throughout the Western world during the industrial revolution

And even the restrictions part was ... varied. If you're a slave and your owner lives in Athens while you live in a Greek city on the Bosporus and supervise your owners business interests in the Black Sea (an actual example I recall from some of the primary sources from my Greek history classes in college), you really don't have much in the way of restrictions on you. Yes, legally you're a slave. So what? It has very little impact on your day-to-day life, at least as long as business is good.
Again, I am mostly familiar with events through the film.

My point was that a lot of people were having similar ideas around the same time. I'm sure there were dozens, if not hundreds, of other aspiring CS students around the US who spent a few days dreaming about websites that would look a lot like Facebook, had they come to fruition.

Having the idea of a dating website that focuses on a specific community, like Harvard, does not entitle you to exact payment from every other person who implements a dating website -- let alone Facebook, which was not primarily a dating website.

If you care to debate that point in a more general sense, I'd like to know your opinion on business method patents before proceeding.

The question of Zuckerberg's motive in not shutting out the Winklevoss twins as soon as he began work on the Facebook project is debatable. If you take the idea presented in the film that Zuckerberg is not primarily motivated by money, I can understand why he didn't really think about the consequences of what he was doing. By not ending their relationship immediately, he could have seen himself as keeping doors open for himself, rather than shutting them out of competition. It seems unlikely that the Winklevoss twins could have successfully created a competitor website, considering how long it had taken them to develop what they had.

This is especially plausible because we're talking about undergraduates messing around in their dorm rooms here. Business takes on a different meaning. Was Facebook started because it seemed like a cool idea, or to make billions by exploiting nature? I don't know, but the former seems more likely.
Printing supported not only governments, but revolutions. I have a hard time believing the American Revolution could remotely have happened without the printing press.

Consider the modern parallel of the Egyptian Revolution being enabled by Facebook.
It's hard to tell because this write-up is so poor, but my guess from the pictures is that the lighting is much of the actual invention here. Perhaps they've got a technology for uniformly lighting a color LCD without a typical backlight. The display looks uniformly bright and the colors look good, which makes me suspect that they are not merely relying on the background image to provide the "backlight".

Or maybe it's just a completely normal LCD being demoed in front of a cleverly lit diorama. ;)
And as clocks started showing up everywhere, that transition to and from daylight savings time became very annoying as we had to manually adjust a dozen clocks.

I was in college shortly after the digitization of everything started (Caltech, class of '82). I took a course in digital logic. I don't remember the name of the textbook, but I remember the last chapter (or perhaps it was an appendix) and the TERRIFIC advice it gave--still relevant today.

The title was "The Engineer as Dope Pusher". It talked about how engineers want to do fun things, and so if not careful will end up pushing things into products that don't belong there, because the engineer wants to play with them. For example, suppose you are an engineer designing the timer for a dryer. On the one hand, you can use the common mechanical timer, with the circular dial. This thing is cheap (because they've been manufactured essentially unchanged for decades and so the process is highly optimized), and it is reliable (again, decades of experience have worked all the bugs out), and consumers all know how to use them.

But you've been reading about these new-fangled micro-controllers. Those sounds a hell of lot more fun than a 50 year old mechanical timer. If you go with a micro-controller, you'll get to play with something new. You'll get to write software. Maybe display the time remaining with an LED progress bar, and you can do some neat animations on it to signal completion. Maybe implement a bunch of different drying modes.

Never mind that your fancy micro-controller based dryer interface offers no advantage at all to the consumer or the manufacturer. Instead, it costs more for the parts. It involves many more parts--the micro-controller logic board, a power supply, the progress display, the input buttons whereas the old mechanical timer was two parts (the timer, and the dial). The parts are more expensive. It is harder to assemble them. The consumer knows how to use the old system--the new system will probably require them to actually read the manual (oh, someone has to write a new manual). The fancy system might also be less reliable (more parts to break, and the manufacturer does not have experience with running digital electronics in the environment of a dryer).

Software engineers in particular have a tendency to become dope pushers, from what I've seen.
I have a feeling the young adult fiction area (where this author is focused) is where much of the ebook money is coming from in general(but it's going to balloon everywhere). I can see how serial authors who get kids hooked on their series can have a nicely incrementing revenue stream. I'm sure you can think of a couple examples of traditionally published YA fiction that have long lines of fans loyally paying top dollar for hardcover versions of the newest volume.

There was an article earlier this month in the NYT (web version: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/05/books/05ebooks.html) with some observations on children consuming ebook content.

"At HarperCollins, for example, e-books made up 25 percent of all young-adult sales in January, up from about 6 percent a year before — a boom in sales that quickly got the attention of publishers there."

And that's from the publishing 'house' example.

The NYT article also observes that a lot of kids are getting ebook readers as gifts. When a grandparent/aunt/uncle can't think of a specific book to give a kid for their birthday or whatever, rather than give them a piece of junk toy or unwanted clothes, they can buy an ebook reader, maybe with a small Amazon gift certificate or a DVD full of formatted Gutenberg texts.

I can only imagine it will be a short time before the author's age falls even further for some of these stories of young writers making money. I could see the clever goth girl in junior high pounding out a thin book a month and self-publishing for $.99.[1] Ebooks have disconnected the feeling of "value" and "heft" of a book, which publishers have been inadvertently reinforcing for years with the hard/soft cover versions of books.

As with the Twilight (although, not so much with the Harry Potter) books I mentioned earlier, our idea of "quality" isn't necessarily important to hook kids. If it's escapist literature with a character with whom a kid can identify, you could pull a George Lucas (oh look, another one) and use Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces as a money-printing machine.

[1] What a perfect time, too: take the last few years of your livejournal blog, put it into chapters, and format it for the Kindle.
If you've spent 14 years designing and never even tried to design a site in Photoshop I can't possibly fathom how you could have an opinion of the process.

Agree or not, try new things. Try old things. Make an informed decision.
Maybe, and maybe not. Worth at least reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invincible if you haven't for a counter-argument.
So what about for hidden tor services?
Your last paragraph comes off as rather dismissive. How does abstracting away the control flow promote bad code? Programers should only need to worry about the control flow of their program when they absolutely must (which is pretty rare) otherwise the compiler (or interpretor) should be able to take care of those details. Its not that people can't handle callbacks or events, its that they should not have to for most of the things node forces you to use them for (everything, all the time).
I would like to point out that if it had been taken with a Canon 5Dmk2 it would have been even better!

And so on, and so on, and on...
Your comment got me thinking. Buffett has pledged 99% of his net worth to charity when he's gone, and has enlisted other wealthy entrepreneurs to follow suit by donating at least 50%. Will that allocation of capital produce greater good than would a lesser amount garnered through investments based not on seeking the best ROI but instead based on furthering the greater good?

Honest questions, and ones that I don't have the answers to: has his contribution to Coca-Cola and Philip Morris as an investor harmed the greater good more than the $44 billion or so of his net worth that will flow to charities? Could entrepreneurs and capitalists create more good with that $44 billion than the Gates Foundation?
I'm surprised to discover that there's a jasonnation.
When we discussed this before the algorithm change, people -- including me -- pointed out that the Demand Media relationship earned Google $50M a year, and this was likely to influence their engineering at some level. moultano argued that due to Google's self-organization, it wouldn't work out that way. Lo and behold the change rewards demand media and small startups' blood boil. Just sayin' ...
Skating to where the puck is going
Students learn XNA and Silverlight Gaming at Pace Game Camp
Ah, your point makes much more sense now. Yes, the author had some overly complex examples, but I'm optimistic about using user-space libraries to handle flow control without having to add new language primitives.
Rule number one - people new to the internet say Noob and not Newbie.
Thanks for your thoughts I really appreciate it. And I think it's gonna end up being around $200 for the month.
If it's escapist literature with a character with whom a kid can identify, you could pull a George Lucas (oh look, another one) and use Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces as a money-printing machine.

This is quite similar to the formula which prints money in urban fantasy, whose core market is grown women. They're often shlocky, but that is part of the appeal.

Anecdotally, from reading reviews prior to purchasing, a lot of my fellow Plucky Mechanic Dating Brooding Vampire Lord readers love their Kindles to death, despite being neither juvenile nor obviously tech savvy.
Which authors do you enjoy in the genre?
Same problem as a few others, can't get past menu screen. I can scroll up and down, but can't select anything. Tried in Safari 5 and Firefox 4 on OS X.6.5
The value traditional publishing adds is a variety of professional staff (editor, copyeditor, designers, etc), potentially fronting advance money to cover costs for writers to devote full time to writing, and to some extent as a filtering mechanism (you know a published book usually isn't going to have egregious spelling/typesetting errors that make it unreadable).

That's legitimately valuable, but the quotes by Konrath in the article are spot-on: If you don't need the full traditional staff to put out a good product and don't need the advance money, traditional publishing becomes less and less useful to you.

I'm a little more optimistic about the traditional model than most people are - I think with some basic adjustments and modernizations, they've got another pretty good 10-30 years in them doing things similar to how they're done now. But it's definitely more viable than ever to go outside the model, especially for people able to put out a polished product without help.
The price can not go below the combined cost of its h/w components. Otherwise, I'd just buy 1000 kindles and sell their components separately. Profit.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day. eHow's business model doesn't see any difference between worthwhile content and inane babel. Some people do put good stuff on that site, but I don't know why they bother.
Maybe you should reread the post. You've actually just restated his supposedly "misguided" point that Apple succeeds due to its excellent execution of existing product concepts, not by inventing those concepts.
Well, I tell you what:
wherever you here English language, be ready that
working people are going to be treated more or less like dirt, banking system is going to be a too big of a sector of the economy and many other problems.
That is cultural, it is not easily fixable.
US was and is culturally English civilization, and this is like a death sentence.