skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"[The Mackbook Air] wouldn't even be on most people's radar when looking for a cheap mobile computer they can surf the web on."

The article suggests that netbooks have three primary features: lightweight, low price, long battery life. The MB Air nails two of those, and works for consumers that don't mind the extra price. For those who are price sensitive, netbooks have been attacked on the bottom front by tablets and smartphones.
France Drops Plans for 'Google Tax'
The road less traveled is starting and running Instapaper. Chasing the FBI is a waste of time. If you really care about the problem, start a "company" meant to provoke the FBI into accidentally procuring its servers.
Are $0.99 Kindle eBooks a good idea?
A separate currency for Greece may not have solved Greece's problems, but that's not the point. What it does it make Greece responsible for its own problems, protecting Europe a little bit more and aligning incentives better.

It's about responsibility, not a magic bullet.
How to badly misunderstand US health spending figures
How to Make Text Look Interesting: Minimalist Web Design
Do you have a reliable source for that?
Valve is also working on DotA 2 (LoL is very similar to the original DotA).
I completely agree with the author's argument about smartphones and tablets, but I think @nextparadigms is right about the MacBook Air. It belongs in a completely different market segment, along with $2,000 "ultraportables" from Lenovo and Toshiba. That segment has been there for a long time even before netbooks appeared.

It's definitely possible to pack a real Core 2 or i7 processor, an optical drive, and 10+ hours of battery life in a 11-13 inch form factor with a weight of no more than 3 pounds. It gets pretty damn expensive, though, even without the mandatory Apple mark-up.

Personally, I would urge anyone who has a good enough budget to get a real ultraportable instead of a half-assed Atom netbook. But if somebody is shopping for a $350 netbook, I don't think they'd consider the MacBook Air a serious alternative. If anything, smartphones and tablets are stealing market share from both netbooks and ultraportables.
Magic Numbers in Distributed Systems
Yeah technologoy has made zero progress since 1991.

Sent from my iPhone
The MBA proved that your netbook form-factor computer didn't have to suck. You didn't have to compromise (acceptable) performance for form-factor.
That's what I was wandering too. While I didn't have any sources to link, as far as my experience at university and in general here a lot of people own netbooks and as an estimate, at least 1/3 of students had netbooks as opposed to laptops.

I used one (Samsung N130 or something, a bit old) for the first few weeks before I got a new laptop and loved the size and battery life . .
Seth's Blog: Dependency on external motivation
I think this will curse them and intelligent developers will avoid them like the plague. But is really a wakeup call with how VC companies treat employees.
It seems to me like the word "genie" in modern English(from the same root I suspect) gets across the idea very well without all the misleading associations.
as with the most things in HTML5 ... it fails gracefully. knobs for webkit and other browsers which support the range-type. normale input type boxes for everyone else.

but yeah, there would be better ways to handle this.
Same here in Brazil
German - I'm moving to Berlin in a few weeks and want to cram as much language learning into that time as possible.

Can any of you talented polyglots recommend techniques for learning lots of vocabulary quickly?
How To Use Google Docs to Build MVPs And Other Quick Tools
He didn't guess. nextparadigms admitted that he didn't read the article.
We were significantly harder hit than either you or Marco, looks like. Our entire stack of 3 servers - app server and db master/slave - disappeared and remains offline to this point.

I'm curious about what happened, but ultimately I put this down to an unfortunate side effect of using blades.
I imagine it's simply complex. Part of the box model involves expanding containers to fit the content within them, and properties like float, overflow, width, and height run counter to that. So what do you do with "expand this div to fit the text it contains, but also allow the text to be truncated if it doesn't fit, and remember to leave room for the ellipses"?

When you get into fancier concepts like truncating a set of lines, or only at certain word/phrase/sentence boundaries, you're into desktop publishing typesetting. To do that properly you're not just truncating when the container overflows, you're also adjusting the spacing between words and letters to make every line look consistent and to get as much of the text to fit neatly as you can. There aren't many pieces of software that professionals trust to do that well, and the ones that exist are expensive. We're not likely to see those algorithms getting into everyone's browser.
Some should build a hard drive that logs being powered up and powered down!
Strict Low-Calorie Diet 'Defeats Diabetes'
Five books to help you become a better Software Engineer
Really, all of them?

I used a Samsung N130 (Single core 1.6GHZ Atom, 2GB RAM) for a few weeks and it was fast enough to do very basic Java development, browsing, SSH, etc. while out at uni.
The "Mac user who wants a netbook" is a small enough market that it probably has no real impact on the decline of netbook sales. More likely it is a combination of other factors discussed.
Well, I certainly hope that reports of the netbook's death are in fact reports of the death of the netbook's hype...

I'm another of those who find them almost perfect devices. It gets used for real, serious, mobile computing. Visual Studio 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2 on a netbook with a long battery life make a wonderful go-anywhere productivity device and let me work far, far more easily than I could otherwise because it can just slip in the bottom of my bag. I can and do write music on it almost anywhere in a MIDI sequencer. Firefox works well for regular browsing, OpenOffice works well for note taking in meetings. I can touchtype on my netbook with comparable speed and accuracy to any other device, certainly fast enough to take notes live in a presentation. I won't claim it's fast enough for doing any very heavy photography work but it's a very useful portable preview and backing storage device.

Give me a tablet with a card reader and decent storage and I could do the photography as easily on that, I'll concede. Give me a good mobile browser and that's pretty much as good as on the netbook, though from my experience with Android Firefox and Chrome I'm not convinced yet. Music? Maybe, I can see it could be done but I'm not sure the apps are there yet from what I've heard.

The rest though? You want to show me someone typing at an accurate 100WPM on a tablet without an external keyboard? (By which point I'd rather have them integrated and a bit more rugged, personally.) You want to show me someone doing serious software development on a tablet?

Small, light, cheap, compatible. Netbooks are all of these and let me Just Get On With It. Tablets aren't.
An Artistic Twist On Family Photo Sharing with Photogram
Arch Linux Packages Visualization
> Back in my high school days, the biggest motivation for kids to learn programming was really so that we could design our own games since we had no concept of what the programming industry was all about.

+1 on this -- my first attempts at programming were with ZZT and it got me hooked.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZZT
They need to reboot the servers and it takes two hours to get them back up again.
Standard Nordea cron job.
Where does security fit?
Very little conversational German, Swedish and took Latin/Spanish growing up.

Hur är läget? Alles klar? Todos bien?

Quite frankly the only languages you really need in the western world (aside from English) are French and Spanish (and possibly Portugese). Germans and Scandinavians mostly speak perfect English and for the most part don't tolerate my broken attempt at their language. (although they very much appreciate it)

French and Spanish are probably the most valuable because they tend to be less inclined to master English and both have very large native speaker bases. Other useful languages would be Mandarin, Russian and Arabic.
Thanks - link at the bottom (I'm blind!).
Yes, this sounds like an equally absurd idea as copying a key from 100 meters.
Facebook needs to find a way to make a different kind of App Store
Then I learned something new :)
The company in question is actually located outside of the US, and so are all employees who have access to the key. It keeps its servers in the US only because of issues with cost and latency, I think.
Google doesn't like that I heard.
STL ALT.NET Presentation on Hacker News Radio, by Jeff Sigmon
I can't agree; while I won't deny it's slower and less capable than my main machine, it's very rarely an obstacle in my regular use of it.
Very Steve Jobs-ish. Yup. Nope.
My netbook was originally 1GB so I bought a 2GB stick for dirt cheap, something like $20 or so.

And this may sound painful but on the 10.1" screen I would have 2 windows next to each other, split vertically so each taking up half the screen, and it was fine.
That assumes price is the only selling point. It isn't for me; I like the extra portability of the smaller machine. It goes to places a 13" wouldn't because it fits in the bag more easily.
If it was an iPhone app (anybody?) then its really not so far-fetched. It would be easier and cheaper ($1?) than risking exposure to the homeowner and possible identification.
A currency post without a bitcoin reference? Anybody holding btc, sell now: the bubble is over.
I really like the website! Would it be possible to add more languages and allow users to enter text - stem it and add the dictionary entries automatically?
How employees get screwed in private equity deals (former Skype employee)
As a test, I took one of the email addresses from the list of Arizona law enforcement addresses that lulzsec just released (http://lulzsecurity.com/releases/chinga_la_migra_1.txt).

ShouldIChange site reports no instances of compromised records in it's db.
Hacker Poll: Do You Want To Use a PaaS?
I go one step further - I consciously think of another number as I enter my PIN, just in case a Telepath is nearby!
Solar Sinter Project [video]
Go Daddy Said to Be In Talks for KKR, Silver Lake Purchase
...or a rock and a window. $0, the homeowner provides the rock.
EDIT - I just saw the sources page for the ShouldIChange site: https://shouldichangemypassword.com/sources.php
Laptops Powered by Typing Could Be on the Way
The guy from the Bourne Shell Identity?
I think your missing the boat. The reason why netbooks had such a rapid rise and fall is early adopters liked them more than the average user and there is little reason to upgrade quickly. If you have an internet connected phone and a powerful PC adding a netbook or an iPad still has value. However, you can get a fairly powerful laptop for the 400$ so they don't really help people who only need one system.
Actually, it would seem valve has actually started hosting vanilla servers, which is great for new players.
Thumbprints are for casual identification, NOT for security. Biometrics are a hash, and like your garage-door opener, millions of people have the same thumbprint biometric as you have.
The whole student management system at my uni (which was implemented at the start of this year) is like this too, down between 2am and 4am to 'synchronise the timetabling system'. I think it's to do with the massive Oracle backend, but I don't really understand the need.
It was reported in basically every major newspaper. The Times of India discovered a wire transfer of 100k from the head of Pakistani intelligence (Mahmood Ahmed) to the lead hijacker (Mohamed Atta) shortly before 9/11, and then papers like the NYT/WSJ confirmed the findings with unnamed senior US officials. The US then pressured Pakistan to get Mahmud Ahmed to step down from the ISI, which he did. (Despite being covered in virtually every major newspaper worldwide, none of this was even mentioned by the 9/11 commission report.) If you Google it there are dozens of writeups analyzing the evidence, here is one below chosen mostly at random, along with his Wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmud_Ahmed#Removal_from_ISI

http://kkak.typepad.com/blog/2011/05/death-of-bin-laden-may-...

The kicker is that Ahmed had breakfast with almost all of the senior Bush administration the day before, the day of, and the two days after 9/11. He actually watched the attacks on TV with Porter Goss and Bob Graham.
States are sovereign entities, the others are not. However, under the Constitution states give up some of their sovereign rights, among them the right to mint their own currency.
Clustering SSD arrays for the Cloud
The problems you are describing are different problems. Problems to do with run-away politicians raising aggregate demand beyond the country's productive capacity, of states failing to enforce taxes appropriately, and so on.

Maybe Greece has some of those problems, but the key problem that Greece is facing right now is created by the fact that they don't have their own currency.

Imagine a village with two people, one is a baker by trade and the other is a butcher. Both are unemployed: the butcher does not have money to pay for bread, and therefore the baker does not have an income. Because of this, the baker does not have money to pay for meat, and therefore the butcher does not have an income. Because of this, the butcher does not have money to pay for bread...

Of course, the grid lock would be obvious in this simple situation, and the baker and butcher would soon get rid of the old social construct that is money and payment, and create a new social construct, effectively introducing their own currency.

The above is very much a simplification, but it describes the gist of the situation that Greece is in: double digit unemployment and youth unemployment around 40% - a staggering inefficiency! - all because of a social construct (money) being handled in an utterly stupid way.

If only somebody were to start spending money, the cycle could be broken. If the Greek government were monetarily sovereign, they would be able to fix the situation.

Greece would not face inflation as you claim if they reintroduced their own currency. Certainly, that currency would drop significantly in value initially. This affects the cost of imports, and that will in turn affect inflation. But you wouldn't see anything like the free-fall you claim. After all, Greece did okay (not perfectly, but okay) before the Euro as well.
I do it the opposite.

I've known for a long time how it was meant to be pronounced, so when talking to other programmers/hacker types, I say DEE-mun, but when talking to ordinary people I say DAE-mun so they don't say "wtf demons on computers now?" or somesuch - most don't, but some more religious types look at you funny...
Not really.

I have an Acer from their first-gen series that's still perfectly satisfying for development and some browsing. I write a lot of Python code on it, run and test it under Django (sqlite, MySQL and PostgreSQL) and Google App Engine dev_appserver and it works well enough. Its memory has been maxed out at 1.5 GB (newer models can have more) and my most serious problem with it is that the disk is slow (but it's industry-standard sized and can be easily replaced by a faster one (or an SSD). The second one is the screen - 1024x600 is somewhat limiting sometimes (but it has a VGA port and can do dual head).

What are you running on your Samsung? It's hardware should make it a bit zippier than mine.
Not that this kind of attack is likely unless you leave your keys sitting out in public, but it might be a good case for Lockitron if you're paranoid: https://lockitron.com
True, back in the days of Counter Strike 1.6 it was a terrible, buggy piece of DRM. It's improved by leaps and bounds since then.
Part of the problem is how enterprise-y companies do things. Taking 3 months to roll out a new browser is ridiculous. But then, so is designing your website to only work on the most popular browser, and they do that, too.

Fix the latter and you can probably fix the former at the same time.
Contact Valve tech support, they might refund your money.
You don't necessarily need to encrypt the boot volume.
No.

I am also happy with my first-gen Acer Aspire One.
Though they advertise & promote Azure as PaaS, you can actually use it for IaaS. They offer a Virtual Machine role which is the rough equivalent of an EC2 instance. I think most folks go the PaaS route though.
Any recommendation on the best way to learn lock picking?
I've used this LDA code http://code.google.com/p/plda/
on multiple systems, however it's not really as well packaged as the Apple code seems to be.
Home Office Technology Trends: Good-looking and Productivity-enhancing
Ask HN: Writing software documentation
What tool do you use to write/maintain software documentation?

The product I'm documenting is fairly complex in that it has a server component and client libraries for a ton of languages, so I (will) have a tons of API docs, tutorials, admin guides, overviews, etc.

The default solution seems to by Sphinx, and I used it on the previous product, but it's not enough. It's too level, ie. I don't want to create tables, I want the tool to create tables based on templates. Also, Sphinx generates good readable pages, but it's not good for API docs IMO. (I think the Python API docs are not very good.)

I find the best consistent documentation out there is MSDN. Ideally I'd like something that takes some markup and generates documentation like that.
it's so cute when modern scholars reinvent things.

pro tip: we already had a war over this.
As the Greece example shows very clearly, this does not work in the long run.

By the way, this is also the reason that the gold standard failed. The gold standard was essentially a currency shared by the entire world. This had some advantages for international trade, namely no or reduced exchange rate risks.

However, differences in how productivity developed in different countries ultimately led to countries being squeezed out of money to the point where politicians either had to default or rule by violence against their own citizens.

A currency cannot survive for very long unless there is a significantly sized central authority that balances inequalities and acts in the interest of all citizens of the currency zone.
I'd say the 13" laptop won't kill the 10" netbook at least until it fits in the same space.

I carry mine with me much more than I would carry a 13" laptop.
Can someone more knowledgeable describe why each new FF version breaks existing extensions? Can't FF have a more stable extension architecture?

Edit: though the idea that enterprise is useless may be dangerous. Each new FF user is worth maybe pennies or nothing at all in revenue to Mozilla, while enterprise 'seats' can get a nice premium.
Please, don't start them off in Visual Basic or Java. I learned those 2 back when I was in high school, and when I taught myself Python, I was overjoyed at how much less annoying bits there were to deal with. I'm not that great of a programmer, but Python just felt so much easier to just pick up and go.

As for actual course material, I'm not quite sure. Python does include a turtle module, and that's pretty classic for teaching programming at least.

Good luck!
LulzSec IRC leak: the full record
Who invented e-mail?
I agree. They likely still have intentions of making it a Skype competitor, but it will be in the browser rather than on the desktop.
Genie is from the arabic "jinn"
The entire notion of 'certifying' a browser is ridiculous anyway. This is how IT organization get 'stuck' still having IE 6 as the approved browser.

With all of the work going into web standards, agile processes, and automated testing, why is certification such a huge labor-intensive ordeal anymore?
Like the other guy said, that's more of a software issue. A minimal linux distro with a lightweight WM tends to work well. An easy way to aid the lack of RAM is to use an SD card or USB drive as swap (to save the SSD from overuse). The keyboards on those things, on the other hand, are simply not compatible with my fingers.
It's privately held, so the information on who owns it isn't public. Mike Harrington was a co-founder, he may still have some stake in the company.
They have been on Pastebin for over two weeks. Why they were framed as exclusive is beyond me.
When it comes to PaaS, the developer is king
This is actually one of the most important arguments in favour of using fiscal policy for employment and inflation targeting.

Monetary policy (i.e. the interest rate) is just such a blunt tool, and its effects are really not that well understood.
Curriculum review comittees could reduce redundancy and fill gaps by reviewing course documents.
Agreed. After reading this post, I looked on Amazon and saw that a variety of EEE PC and Samsung netbooks are still for sale in the $200-$400 price range. I also found that around 30 million netbooks are expected to be sold in 2011. Not dead.

Given the subject of the post and the amount of detail the author went into, I was disappointed that there was no mention (or links to posts) of any sales numbers. Just the word dead, death, or killed mentioned 12 times.
I feel for you as you have the technological version of my curse. It is a standing joke among my friends that if I like a dish at any restaurant it will be stricken from the menu next time it is revised. Seems the same people also say "Ohhh Steve is happy, let's fix it..."

That said I still love the netbook although I had to step up a little. I bought an ASUS One which was great but still a little under powered (even stuffed a touch screen kit into it)... from there I moved to a Sony TZ and now finally to a Sony Z. I love the compact form factor (though the Z really sits on the edge) but because I am on the road a lot I needed a bit more processing power than a true Netbook provided. I will suggest to anyone though to look for the Sony TZ series units used. Mine is a 390C, 1366x768 screen, SSD, 4 Gig RAM, wonderful keyboard and runs forever on a charge. If I hadn't needed a bit more horsepower I wouldn't have replaced it for a long time. I wish Sony hadn't killed the TZ but then again, perhaps because I liked it.
And they entirely funded the port of Perl to Windows, pretty much starting ActiveState in the process (it was called HiP Communications at the time).
Ford Tries New Fonts to Make Driving Easier
Cheap, yes, but I'm not sure "perfect" is the right word. Most netbooks are just a bit too underpowered to run a modern IDE comfortably, and at the same time they don't have particularly impressive battery life (3-4 hours of web surfing is typical). An MBA 11" has a bigger screen, is tons faster, and will get you 6+ hours of battery under similar circumstances. Sure it's $1000 versus $350, but are developers looking for a good portable hacking machine that price sensitive?
They're almost always broken, failing, or have no battery life left (and you can't get replacements). It's much more trouble than it's worth.
You Never Learn Anything While You are Talking
3 dollars per month? I suggest you to hike up that price.. I know it sounds like people would be more willing to pay if the price is lower, but I can tell you that at 3 USD, you will never be able to grow your business or market it effectively.
Isn't anyone else bothered by the fact that business method patents weren't addressed? For us software folks, the business method patent issue is a lot more pertinent given that the majority of software patents hinge on this idea.
That's my point -- a single reasonably competent sign poster couldn't be expected to handle the duties for an entire city. The responsibilities placed upon the sign poster in my example went way above and beyond anything reasonable.

I'm not trying to defend the IT folks who do a terrible job of security for municipal/state governments, but in my experience there's a lot more work to be done than resources provided to do it.