skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many stores have become worse in the exact same way, but the bookstores have been bitten by it sooner than some others. Stores started, even before the economic downturn, to not carry items that are niche or infrequently needed. Sure, many of the items that are still there were bought most, or brought better margin, but the reason people went there without question was because the niche items were there, too.

Electronic stores are another example of the same thing, and IMO, have been hurt because of it. There are a lot of short-term gains for long-term losses.

I think consumers warmed to buying on the internet because the local stores failed them. They were willing to pay the premium and were scared of and disliked online transactions. Now, the cat is out of the bag.

Some of this was due to commercial real estate prices shooting up but a good amount was their own doing.

Have you noticed that many brands, in many different markets, that had the biggest following 10 to 15 years ago are some of the worst now? They rid the brand to death for short-term gains. Now, I take a good look at the less-known brands before ever thinking of going with the big traditional names.
Google doesn't need to win on patents.

Apple does, if they care about marketshare. Apple is making tons of money. Why do they need to sue people?

Does google patents their Google plus stuff? No. They challenge facebook head on with their own innovation. Frankly, it would take a lot for facebook to copy their innovation.

So what if your competitor copy you? If you're the biggest badass software company, why do you care?

Maybe if you are not good enough, you don't deserve to win.

Then again, I just happen to run a public domain magazine that doesn't amount to much. What do I know about success and failure?

Although I do think Google is the most badass software company around.
You so want the answer to this to be "the monkey", but because of our humanocentric maleocracy, the answer is "nobody".
And, from my experience with at least the downtown Boston store, they also diversified into CDs and DVDs--which turned out to be a diversification into something in even worse decline than their core business.
Animals won't have rights until we can objectively prove that they are conscious and sentient just as we are. Probably 20 years or so.
I'm not an Apple hater but I'm certainly a patent hater. What's your feeling of the patent heavily discussed earlier: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...

It patents using regex on a mobile device to parse text and automatically turn parts of the text into actionable links, such as email, hyperlink, etc. Software patents help no one.
If reasonattlm is right, it may be worthwhile for me to work my tail off and sacrifice peace of mind in the short term in order to live forever in the long term. So what he says is somewhat relevant.
Also see JSCEX, which uses the C# keyword await

http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs/browse_thread/thread/3...
The best book I've found for picking up rails was the latest edition of the Agile Web Development book, which I actually own 3 different editions of it, for differing versions of rails.

The lack of a Django book, probably has more to do with the fact of the community being more focused on tutorials and Blogs rather than cashing in, although there are a few django books out there. That said with the documentation and tutorials out there I've never felt a great need for a missing book.
I think this case illustrates one of those landmark moments when you get to choose the forest or the trees. There has to be an equitable middle ground where we don't have to throw out the baby with the bath water but the direction of these patent lawsuits are troubling.

For me the greatest adverse affect is on open-sourcing software. Open sourcing software is not free, there is a very real cost to the people who share even without lawsuits. If the project is interesting enough, sure people will fork it and contribute but you also get half-brained support requests for people who can't get your project to compile or what not.

With the possibility of lawsuits it becomes even more tempting to just keep your code locked away. For a small or medium-sized company it pays to keep any innovative code locked away internally to avoid patent trolls.

If these claims go through and Android falls on the mercy of Apple to license the technology at whatever price they name if they are gracious enough to, then we have to ask ourselves long and hard, will it be worth the wait until these patents expire? Is there any meaning to having Android perennially over-priced compared to Apple for the next several decades so that Apple wins big with any smartphone sale?
Help me pick a cellphone
I'm a web developer/ producer. mostly i build wordpress or drupal sites but i've done joomla, modx, magento, ektron, dotnetnuke, code igniter. I've been doing this about 6 years and i've never owned a smartphone in my life. thinking about biting the bullet. I'm on verizon in the ny metro area. I have no idea what i want. help me figure it out.
Your comment reminded me of this awesome story about Bill Gates.

http://www.borrett.id.au/computing/petals-bg.htm
> So instead I only use software that is "Free" as in "Freedom to do what I want with it", like BSD, MIT or Apache.

As a developer, I sure enjoy the freedoms BSD and MIT grant me. If I held a lot of patents, I wouldn't be so happy with Apache.

OTOH, as a user, I appreciate the rights *GPL software gives me.

BSD vs. GPL is a user rights vs. developer rights thing. You use your license as a tool to achieve the balance you intend to reach.

BTW, the way Canonical used the AGPL with Launchpad is brilliant. I never imagined that license could be that useful.
You're making the mistake of thinking the twitter account is somehow "official." It is, again, just an "anybody" claiming to be in LulzSec
The US population is around 312 million people. 1-2 million people a year 1/3 to 2/3 of 1% annual population growth through immigration.

In contrast, in 1907, the US population was around 87 million and there were about 1.3 million registered immigrants for about 1.4% growth through immigration--anywhere from two to four times the level today.
do you actually know why the ceiling exists. it seems not?
It has nothing to do with wise men.
Amazon Simple Email Service Announces Attachment Support
Oddly enough, the two Borders that were left in our town were ex-local shops Borders bought out a while back (all their own shops closed first).
As long as they keep playing and don't cheat, those careless mistakes will happen. It may take months but the game is great at dealing random misfortunes. I've been struck by lightning.

And future versions will likely have more dangers and more things to tempt you into danger.
You're right. The project just ended up being underwhelming when we only got 3 players deep after a month or two of alpha testing. :P
Out of curiosity, what is the large source of the disparity? I was aware you don't get as nice of a tax break (though that will become irrelevant when you are making no money). Individually, I'd be surprised if your family had to pay over $1,500 a month for everyone, which is pretty comparable to group rates.
Twitter down ... again?
Verizon has a lot of choices, but something from the Droid line is probably your best bet. If you want a physical keyboard, then I'd recommend the Droid 3 (http://engt.co/k9nRy4), but if you're fine with an onscreen one, then I'd go with a Droid X2 (http://engt.co/lUahHe) or Droid Charge (http://engt.co/jPK3k6) – the X2 has a faster processor and arguably nicer design, but the Charge has a gorgeous screen and 4G support, so it's up to you there. Bottom line: Droid 3 for physical keyboard, Charge or X2 otherwise.
Also, professors will adjust the difficulty of the course to get the right grade curve. If everyone is OK with a 3,000 word essay, bump it up to 5,000 words. Eventually, you will more or less have to cheat if you want to pass.
Yes, that is what happens.
RE:

"I often have to manage images/css/js manually, figure out where to put them, etc"

This has (yay!) been solved in 1.3 with the inclusion of the staticfiles app. I now just put my app-specific static stuff in static/ and then run manage.py collectstatic and all is well in the world :)
Isn't the main point here that we can sustain growth without actually 'working'? Is that due our definition of 'work' being flawed in that is not actually tied to the real value of an economy or because we are approaching post scarcity?

If the first was true millions would slave away every day without producing anything of value at all and what we see now is just a society telling everybody that you simply 'ought to have a job'.

In the second case we should worry about how to make such a society actually work (distribute its wealth better).
8-track tape has few (if any) aficionados, due to its self-destructive media and scarcity of quality playback devices.

Physical books, on the other hand, require no special playback technology and are arguably one of the most perfect user interfaces ever devised. I have century old books in my library that are still fascinating and useable, in contrast to my collection of audio tape, floppy disks, and even some CDs that can no longer be read reliably (my vinyl still works, though). It feels a bit premature to declare the end of physical books.
Gotta agree the comment on the article by acitrano - they probably do own copyright to the picture, but to reveal why outside of court would needlessly undermine the trope which has made it famous.

Indeed, I presume that surfacing "the legal angle" was a motivation for sending lawyer letters in the first place.

After this press hit and the "bird absconding with camera" video, I'm sure there are a lot of wheels turning about how to spin another viral play on animals "stealing" products to use themselves. You won't have to wait long to see the next one.
How are they going to place those images inside Chrome's [disappearing] URL bar?
Jesus. Thank you.

My wife just finished a grueling, thankless year for bullshit pay as a visiting professor at a local branch of a state college. She poured her heart into it, ended up with health problems from lack of sleep and irregular access to food (not that she'd admit that, but I'm on the outside and could see it clearly), and didn't get her contract extended because she was so perturbed at people cheating their way through class instead of sitting the f* down and learning some really simple physics that she couldn't bear it. Couldn't sleep, really. (She's kind of an idealist.)

I loved Panos's post for this very reason, knowing the human side of academia as nyustern and GP obviously don't. This attitude that people should teach for the love of the field and that wanting to be paid for it is venal - that's sheer poison.

The triviality of the pay is just the last droplet of spittle.
In my experience, I found it difficult from time to time to do certain thing, but when you dig deeper you almost always find that the hooks you need and the functionality you need is already there.

I come to think that the Django team must have the Guido's time machine. If you need something, take a good look, the solution might be under your feet.
It's mostly about attention seeking.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this:

What I mean is: You do what you can within your means and within the reasonable timeframes given to you by the course, and not necessarily carry the complete burden of their success on your shoulders. In my opinion it's the responsibility of everyone -- parents, peers, the community, teachers, administrators, and whoever else -- to teach, and foster the learning environment in such a way that maximizes the chance of success to the younger citizens of this world. If you view the responsibility as being shared between all, the pressure naturally significantly decreases as you know you directly can't be blamed if things don't work out for your students. It's a complex system.

At the simplest level, don't people attend school to assist them in being successful in life? Assist them in growing and developing into whatever they want to be? If that's so, and being that teachers are the most important parts of the school environment (other than the students themselves), isn't one of the teacher's primary jobs to assist in this success? Because teachers spend so much time with students, they naturally have tremendous (though varying degrees of) influence. If a teacher is lazy, naturally students will be encouraged to be lazy. If a teacher acts like it's OK to cheat, naturally students will be more likely to think it's OK to cheat.

There are bigger questions at hand than the direct and concrete subject matter of an individual university course, and in a lot of cases I believe these questions are just as important, if not more important. Most importantly, keeping these larger questions in mind assist students in staying properly focused and motivated, and thus increasing chance of achievement.

So yes, I do believe you should do what you can to bring success to your students.
I'd be curious for the details other asked for (define high rate, and how did you serve bottle)... Bottle services requests admirably. Not much there other than regexing your path and calling your function. If you had scalability issues I'd be tempted to believe it wasn't bottle code that was causing your problem (assuming you were using a real webserver to serve bottle workers).
idk.. I can type extremely fast using android SlideIt keyboard, definitely faster than hardware.
I responded with this to hpguy who also responded to my comment (a university teacher):

I would love to hear your thoughts on this:

What I mean is: You do what you can within your means and within the reasonable timeframes given to you by the course, and not necessarily carry the complete burden of their success on your shoulders. In my opinion it's the responsibility of everyone -- parents, peers, the community, teachers, administrators, and whoever else -- to teach, and foster the learning environment in such a way that maximizes the chance of success to the younger citizens of this world. If you view the responsibility as being shared between all, the pressure naturally significantly decreases as you know you directly can't be blamed if things don't work out for your students. It's a complex system.

At the simplest level, don't people attend school to assist them in being successful in life? Assist them in growing and developing into whatever they want to be? If that's so, and being that teachers are the most important parts of the school environment, isn't one of the teacher's primary jobs to assist in this success? Because teachers spend so much time with students, they naturally have tremendous (though varying degrees of) influence. If a teacher is lazy, naturally students will be encouraged to be lazy. If a teacher acts like it's OK to cheat, naturally students will be more likely to think it's OK to cheat.

There are bigger questions at hand than the direct and concrete subject matter of an individual university course, and in a lot of cases I believe these questions are just as important, if not more important. Most importantly, keeping these larger questions in mind assist students in staying properly focused and motivated, and thus increasing chance of achievement.

So yes, I do believe you should do what you can to bring success to your students.
I have a physical iPad staring at me, its dark screen like a pool of liquid possibility, a bottomless ocean of imagination. And porn.
How is this different from any geo-location app? The website tells me zero.
As a new father of an 11 month old (and a very generous family that won't stop finding cute outfits), I have a few thoughts:

1. Just read your FAQ page, and it says if my return package is over 13 oz, I need to take it to the post office. While this sounds trivial initially, how many people know how much their packages weigh? I don't have a postal scale handy, so would I always have to go to the post office to ensure I can get my package out?

2. As numerous people have commented here, you have a lot of competition just with family alone. Granted not everybody's family will be as generous as mine. But we've bought a small percentage of clothes for our little guy compared to our family buying every cute outfit they see at Kohls or Target, and a lot of hand me downs from a little cousin a year old than our little guy.

Your bio on your site seems to suggest that you haven't had your baby yet (unless I've misread it). I wonder if, once you have your baby, you might realize that you yourself have no need for your service (if your family is anything like mine).

Then again, maybe this will take off with a small niche. Nobody can predict the future, right? :)
As one commenter points out, it's actually pretty reasonable to give copyright to the owner of the camera— Who owns copyright on the abstract art produced when my Roomba knocks my paints over on the canvas?

Another points out it's not really different from the common practice of wildlife trap photography; the monkey wasn't "trying" to take a picture, it just triggered the mechanism accidentally.

Arguing that the owner of the camera shouldn't have copyright because he didn't intend to take the picture seems highly dangerous to me— you're throwing out a lot of photography there.
I'll bring in another perspective. I'm in a huge dilemma.

I love books. I also like paper books, but I believe that in the long run we're better off without them for economic and environmental reasons, and e-books are a pretty darned good alternative. I think that the inherent value of a book is its contents. Whether it is tangible or not doesn't matter as much.

Because of this, I think book romanticism is pretty stupid. However, I can't help but feel captivated by it. I have a few theories on why this may be so:

I do like that my books are tangible possessions, that I can look back at the notes my father made into them in college, that I can find an old train pass I used as a bookmark that brings back memories. Or I know that that mark is from when I spilled coffee all over my theory of computation book when I fell asleep studying for the final. I associate my books with other things, thoughts. Currently this doesn't quite work this way with e-books. That's why they don't feel "personal". This can be remedied, but I don't know to what extent.

I don't give a damn about big box stores, but I care very much about my local stores. The difference is in experience. When I'm buying a book, I don't want to feel like I'm a standardized entity there to benefit a company whose sole purpose is to maximize profits. The alternative to this what I can only describe as "intellectual flirtation".

Example: Today I happened to have some free time and I wandered into my favorite bookstore. I looked around, grabbed a book about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and sat in a corner reading for an hour. No one nagged me to buy anything. The book was well written but it wasn't as comprehensive as I hoped, so I moved to the fiction section, and onto mathematics, dipping into books as I wished. Finally, I found a book about the role of Tea in Japanese culture and decided to buy it. While I was paying, the cashier struck up a conversation with me about the book itself and we had a small debate about the topic and he also recommended another author to me.

Now, as you can see the act of going to a bookstore is not a thing I do just to buy books. I do it so I can have a change of scenery and pace, relax, learn and have some personal time to just think (when do we do that, seriously?). I also do it because it's profoundly social (i.e. not web 2.0 style "me too" social). I like conversing about the things I find interesting, and it seems bookstores gather people like me, whether they work there or just visit to buy. Finally, the cost of all this is a possible few extra dollars on my book.

It's a tough choice for me.
This is untrue. Hacks against the Arizona cops and (secondary) attacks on Sony were 'called' as well.
1. The author has a valid reason for not reading the patent: there is an enormous disincentive to reading patents built into patent law (treble damages). Even if it was possible to glean useful information from the vague gobbldeygook that is a modern software patent application, reading them would still be a risky proposition.

2. The "prior art" in this article isn't valid, but that doesn't make this patent good. Patents like this are bad for the industry.

Imagine if the WIMP interface had been patented out the wazoo like this back when Microsoft and Apple were duking it out for the PC market the first time (or even better, when Apple copied it from Xerox). Would that have resulted in a better outcome for consumers? For the industry? For anyone other than patent lawyers? Absolutely, positively not.

Nobody invents in a vacuum; everyone builds on each other in a process of iterative improvement (even Apple; for the most recent example check out the blatant copy of Android's notification tray in iOS 5). If we all had to pay royalties to the entire stack of inventors who came before us, innovation would grind to a halt.
I thought this was an april fools joke, then I looked at the date.
Photoblurr: Not a video. Definitely not a slideshow.
On Verizon, the iPhone is always a great choice, especially with new hardware coming out in the near future.

Otherwise, figure out what the newest Android is. It changes pretty often. Droids are a solid product line.
They're all erroring out now. If the traffic from the redirect was enough to take one of News Corp's sites offline, I imagine that it's throwing Twitter to a loop too.
Correct. Most people who give a camera to a monkey do so with the intent that a picture is taken.

Another issue that is often omitted is "selection". Most photographers take thousands of photos and then choose only a few picks. This selection process is every bit as creative (if not more) as pointing a camera at some subject and pressing a button. A picture taken by a monkey is rarely the only picture -- most of the interesting pictures that were not taken by photographers themselves are actually the rare few in long series of misses. The fact that a photographer was smart enough to choose "the one" hit should be rewarded.

Finally, the "copyrightability", believe it or not, is subtly determined by who the artist is, as was demonstrated countless times by pop art stars such as Warhol and Lichtenstein. Since we here are gentlemen of precision so to speak, think of it this way: there is an "intent" factor X which is multiplied by the "stature" factory Y (meaning stature of the artist/photographer in the art world -- terribly hard to determine, I know), which results in some "copyrightability" value Z. It is incredibly unfair to the lesser known artists of course, but such is the nature of fame and art. It's a winner-takes-all world.
This tragically recurrent idea that you can make up your own idea about what a patent covers without reading it is absolute fucking horseshit and should be abhorrent to anybody that values truth over ideology.

No, Apple did not patent potrait-landscape flipping. It took me about two minutes to verify this by reading the actual description on the actual patent.

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...

You don't even have to understand exactly what is claimed to see that orientation-flipping itself isn't being claimed. Just look at the background section:

Some portable devices use one or more accelerometers to automatically adjust the orientation of the information on the screen. In these devices, information is displayed on the display in a portrait view or a landscape view based on an analysis of data received from the one or more accelerometers.

Again, this is background information leading up to the actual summary of the claims. This is what Apple patented a specific enhancement to. They did not patent mousetraps. They patented what they think is a better mousetrap.