skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You've just missed two critical points:

1) The point of iPad learning isn't words on paper, it's finding new ways to engage students using platforms that naturally excite them. By claiming what we need is "cheap words on cheap paper", you're essentially ignoring all technology. Even paper was too expensive for schools in the past, and technology will catch up.

2) Ebooks reach MUCH further than paper. Is your biology book available in rural India? With smartphone penetration in the developing world hitting all time highs and expected to expand even more dramatically, this kind of system opens up the possibility for globalizing education and giving any school with this device great tools. Will the iPad/iDevice lead the charge in the developing world? Probably not, but this is opening the doors, defining the systems and getting the entire chain into it, from publishers, to authors, to teachers and students. It's a great first step.
Regarding precedent, your statement is absolutely true and happening now. Many brilliant iranian (even foreign born) technologists do not participate in open or entrepreneurial endeavors bc of their ties back home and fear of repercussions on self or family.

This case shows exactly how far and what the regime is capable of.
Awesome job guys. I'm really digging this stack. It is giving me motivation to learn more about Backbone.js
For the average consumer, $6 is probably less of an issue than the hassle of physically going to the drug store to get the pictures developed. I don't want to part with my 6 bucks, but I really don't want to waste two round trips to the store to get physical images when I could instead just upload them to the website of my choice (for free or at least cheap).

Beyond that, film is just a pain in the ass. You can carry a single card that holds hundreds of images, or you can carry 4 rolls of film and get 96 images. Every time you take a picture, you're counting down the number of images you can take. And you need to buy the right ISO, even though you're an amateur and don't know what the hell ISO is.

Film was destined to die out for casual photographers as soon as digital reached the "meh, these photos are okay" stage, because "okay" is good enough for most people, and film is just so inconvenient in comparison to digital.
Quixey Challenge: Fix a bug in 1 minute to win $100. Refer a winner to win $50.
It's an open (and probably unanswerable) question whether the invasion would have gone differently if not for all the popular global protest (though I can imagine that the US would have been less restrained if they knew the world wasn't watching).

I was responding to the OP's contention that the Boomer generation was more committed to protesting in support of social justice than people are these days.
Don't forget we are at the very beginning of tablets. With book devices already under $99 pretty soon you can buy "digital books" for the cost of a paperback book today and have a dozen of them in your house and lend them out all you want.
Cheap and easy SSL: Heroku + Cloudflare
47% bought one as a gift, that worries me. It's similar to my own anecdotal evidence from people I know who bought them: they have an iPad, but they bought their kid/niece/nephew a kindle fire.

It seems like a lot of these are going to families as a 'second tablet'.
Apple's Education Event: On the Road to Vendor Lock-in
I'm calling contrarianism. The fundamental premise behind this article is flawed. Things get worse without getting better all the time. We still have the Patriot act, the DMCA, the Copyright Term Extension Act, ACTA, etc. Make no mistake about it, if SOPA passes, it will be with us for a long, long time.

I hate to break it to Maddox, but the current situation is nothing new. I think our founding fathers would smile to see what is happening around SOPA, because it's exactly what they designed our system of government for. We have to remain ever vigilant to protect our freedoms from whoever wants to take them. Because if we don't, our freedoms will be taken away.
Exactly. The basic reading experience is better on a Kindle, but once you use the glossary, take notes (and get them back as small cards, that was beautiful) and build interactivity into the text (from search up to interactive tests, video content, image slideshow or even 3D models and micro-applications) it starts creaking under the weight.

Random access speed (when going to a specific page, or to return a list of results) is also nice for a textbook, while it's not very useful for a novel.

nb: the more I think about it, the more those e-textbook sound like modern Hypercard stacks.
And here I had always thought Google Code Search was based on some kind of fancy federated radix-tree. Very nice design Russ.
Pretty much. When it comes to international relations one must always tread carefully.

A scene from Yes, Prime Minister might help illustrate the point. Jim Hacker (the Prime Minister) is talking to Sir Humphrey Appleby (Cabinet Secretary) about a nurse caught with a bottle of whiskey in the fictional Middle Eastern country of Kumran, and sentenced to 40 lashes.

Jim: This is very worrying. There's a lot of public sympathy.

Humphrey: I'm sure the Foreign Secretary will advise you.

Jim: He advises me to do nothing.

Humphrey: I'm sure that's good advice.

Jim: Humphrey, we must do something.

Humphrey: The Kumranis are good friends of Britain. They placed a huge defense contract with us, they tell us about the Soviets in Iraq, they even sabotage OPEC agreements for us. We can't afford to upset them.

Jim: I know, but a British national is facing a barbaric punishment for a trivial offense. The Foreign Office is there to protect British nationals.

Humphrey: To protect British interests.

Jim: It's not in her interest to be flogged.

Humphrey: It's not in ours to prevent it.

Jim: This could hurt the government very badly.

Humphrey: Well, I understand that tomorrow the Foreign Secretary will deliver a strong note of protest.

Jim: Why can't he do it now?

Humphrey: We haven't got their agreement yet! We're seeing the ambassador privately now. Once they approve the wording, we hand it over. Then we'll have done all we can.

Jim: Very heartless.

Humphrey: It's safer to be heartless than mindless. History is the triumph of the heartless over the mindless.
Dispelling the myths of customer retention in retail
From a long-term perspective, it's probably more effective, as a user, to pirate everything that's not easily available for legal purchase, with the intent of making outdated, overpriced distribution channels unprofitable.

I'm not trying to make the argument that this is ethical or anything, but purely from the perspective of solving the "piracy problem", I believe it would be the most effective.
I understood the point. It is a false dilemma though. I can participate in local government (or in my case continue to do so) while still hoping and working for someone to push a better status quo through at higher levels. Suggesting only one or the other is the best possible way to maintain the status quo - since real differences need to exist at all levels.

For example, I live in a place that zealously enforces wiretapping laws to stop police filming. I can push my hardest to get my town to change their enforcement policy, even to great effect, but the law is in place and a zealous district attorney could still prosecute. The next town over won't change their enforcement over my local actions. Perhaps while doing my thing, I should endorse and support someone who will do the same thing at the state level, no?
Yes of course. If you really want to go through the trouble. Be my guest. It's not going to mean anything.
All the cgit.freedesktop.org links in the seclists thread time out for me. Do they point to the commit or work for others?
Tracking helps you build great analytics. I, as a developer, would have otherwise no idea of what's happening in my app.
I understand that it is nice but I also think it throws out the baby with the bath water.
Kodak has starting to function more like a patent troll in recent years, as it seemed to lose its ability to create profits the old-fashioned way. It's gone from a truly all-around amazing company, to an increasingly parasitic force in the world.

Very sad to watch.
> My claim is that as long as recycling is a net gain, after you count all the costs, it doesn't matter what percentage of the total waste stream it is.

Then you are ignoring the very existence of opportunity cost.
I'm just not interested in listening to somebody that talks like that, whether corrected or not. You might have great ideas or a post or whatever the link was, but it's an immediate turn off for me. Sorry. =)
I sometimes wonder whether Russ Cox is actually human or is in fact a collective pen name for a group of very talented hackers :)
The licensing and economics isn't clear to me.

Can a school district buy 1,000 iPads ($500,000) and purchase one iBook to put on all devices ($15)? (total $500,015). The original cost of those books, which would last about a decade, is about $100, so the textbook investment seems a lot cheaper ($100,000).

Or are kids supposed to bring their own iPads ($500 is a lot for some families expecting "free" eduction) and the district provides licenses for the books ($15,000 for one subject per year for the above example, $150,000 over 10 years). That's still more expensive than paper books.
I think you have a great point. I have an older kindle (odd to say that about something I got less than 6 months ago...) that I think is fantastic as a dedicated reader. I would pay for the Fire swiftly, if it was a better reader, but the store models I have seen seem to be worse as dedicated readers.
Lobbyists look for the gravy train. Not for a one-off, unstably funded contract job.

Well, there are lobbyists who will take such work, but you're getting second tier work at best. Unless they believe in you, personally.

I've been peripherally involved in such a relationship at the state level, and it worked out. Even then, though, there was a stable group of professionals who were organized and whose organization was able to contract with the lobbyist over a period of years.
To play devil's advocate to these 3 implications:

1) Will all the textbook publishers even buy into this? They didn't give much indication at their speech (there are more publishers than McGraw Hill), but it seems hard to imagine they are happy about going from $90/book to $14/book. What's Apple's cut on these books? 30%? Less? Loss leader to sell iPads?

2) This will widen the gap between rich and poor students. The rich ones who can afford the iPad will get the purported better education through interactive books while the poor will be left behind with the old text books. Don't give me the "well now students can buy an iPad cause books are cheaper" thing either - kids in high school don't pay anything for books.

3) eBooks are mighty small when compared to other products for Amazon and Apple. It looks like January 2011 was about $80M. By comparison, Apple's revenue is over $100B/year and Amazon's is $36B/year.
I think that people need to realize that politics, like any other industry, has a learning curve. It's not that Mr.Ham is unfit to win, or that he's not senatorial material, it's that he's a newbie to a very complex world.

Even Obama, who has risen extremely quickly in US politics, was in the Illinois state senate for several terms before trying a run for the US Senate. He ran in 2000 and lost 2:1, but won in 2004. A politician need to learn how to win, just like every other competitive system.

I'm glad that people are getting excited about politics and trying to change a system they dislike, but there's nothing wrong with being realistic about how difficult is is to get into the system.
"Iran is not such a bad country. I can know because I've been traveling it for 5 weeks. It's a weird place, with a govt that is not much supported by the educated-youth. But not all that bad as the media try to make us believe."

I'm sorry, but if the government of a country is going execute someone for "violating the sanctity of Islam", they are a bad country.

By accepting this behavior, you are just allowing it to continue. I don't accept it and I will always be against a country that treats its citizens this way. More people need to stand up to this bullshit.

"Believe me, here in the Netherlands I know some folks with strong sentiments agains the US, and I tell them the same: "The US is not such a bad country". So maybe it is just me :)"

The US has some problems, but it's still better than 99% of the world in terms of freedom.

Unlike the US, Most of the world has state-controlled media and an Internet Firewall. Hopefully, it never happens here in the US.
LNMR... um... LaMiNaR? RoMuLaN?
FreeBSD 9.0 with VirtIO in the cloud- nice performance
A Primer to Personal Web Design (featuring some of your favorite Hacker Newsers)
If you had grown up with a Kindle, and someone gave you a book for Christmas, you'd say they were certifiably insane.

Look at the features: a) It smells better b) You can store them and it only takes an entire room of your house c) They weigh enough such that you can curve your children's distressingly straight spines with them.
If you are OK with using your own moral compass to determine whether it's OK to share your ebook, you can very very easily do this with Calibre. Connect your kindle, back up your books onto your computer, which you can then share with friends and family with a simple email.
I see many comments about the cost of an iPad - that is not the real issue here. The real issue is these textbooks and knowledge will be funneled through DRM, and a single provider (Apple). Even if Apple gave away the iPads, I will still have issues with DRM on textbooks. And even if these books end up being DRM-free, will they still be proprietary to Apple's platforms?

If most/all schools adopt this and require it, and the books are DRM hindered to a proprietary platform, then that means that it will become a defacto requirement for every student to own an Apple device, in order to receive education.

It may work, and would certainly be good for Apple... but I don't like it.
Iran's recent history is fraught with human rights violations. Each time stories like this are raised (on an almost daily basis), we need to support those who are actively campaigning to improve situations for Iranians, and do our part by informing our leaders of these concerns.

People can learn more about Iran's denial of education and send messages to UN members here:

http://can-you-solve-this.org/

Or help support campaigns such as "The International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran":

http://www.iranhumanrights.org/

If anyone has any other information on campaigns/activists tackling human rights violations, I would love to hear about them.
Yup, also on 11.04 Natty. Tried with and without Numlock LED turned on, nothing happened.
IPhone owners living in the past finally get a peek at the present
If you could do this over again, would you still choose socket.io for websockets, or would you go with something else like PusherApp?
Pirating is immoral regardless of the pirate's opinion on the matter.
Test PAC: The Reddit community now has a PAC
'far's I know, iBooks and iBookStore uses EPUB + DRM. Those textbooks would be EPUB3 with extensions and a custom file extension.
Thanks. Looks like it's available only on the development version - I wonder if it's production ready...

Also - I took a look at the article - it does not mention using a total node approach of using something like node-http-proxy for load balancing. Any idea on such a set-up? I need HTTPS as well.
Congressmembers supporting SOPA pre-Jan. 18: 80-31; Jan. 19: 65-101
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It's "champing at the bit."
"Romantic" and "useful" are your emotional response and opinion. Others have different values so they react differently. Since other people don't have all the same values as you, presenting your views as fact doesn't illuminate much.

You also compared your favorite parts of one medium with your least favorite parts of another. Why not ask yourself your favorite parts of ebooks and your worst parts of books also? You'll have a more valid comparison then.

I point this out because this pattern of comparing things is so common -- confusing opinion with objective truth and comparing the best of A with the worst of B -- and we benefit from avoiding the pattern. I didn't mean just to single javanix out and I hope this came out respectfully.
5 Reasons To Keep A Work Diary
Another nude pic scandal: this time Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker.
What's the reason for not offering more scope limiters?
Socket.io is a great library. When it comes to a contender, I see Server-side Events [1] as a contender to WebSockets. I feel it's a simpler architecture which fits HTTP/REST better than WebSockets in the general case. I built a couple of small experiments/examples using CoffeeScript and Redis [2]; the middleware.coffee in particular is designed to be used together with REST, where if you send "Accept: text/event-stream" you will get updates to the resource(s) on that URL.

1: http://dev.w3.org/html5/eventsource/
2: https://gist.github.com/1560654
What was Summify's business model again?? :-P
Rebellion against authority has a weird way of turning into its own authority. Or as Einstein said:

To punish me for my contempt of authority, Fate has made me an authority myself.
This is really great. As a suggestion I would put the prices rows (From 8K, 12K etc) outside of the grid and the grid will just contain information of the current car, being easier to eye scan.
X axis: Kms/miles
Y axis: Price
For the tooltips saying ("14 cars that are worse..") that could be on the right side. But not sure about this one.
A man is being executed because software he wrote was used in a pornographic website.

It's pretty reprehensible that you feel the need to try and derail the topic and apologize for Iran by drawing similarities to the US as if that makes it OK. But hey, thanks for downplaying this dude's impending death!

edit: I'm also not sure that the detention of captured combatants and the execution of a native citizen are quite the same thing
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I think we need to wait a bit and let the data come in to support the fact that these books are in fact better.
SOPA in US and Censorship in India: A cocktail to destroy Internet Freedom
Yes, I built my version almost in tandem with Steve. Pusher hosts their js lib on github under the MIT license which made building these things supremely easy.
Those who say "Only those with something to hide will have something to fear" are those that fail to recognize we're all criminals. We've all broken some sort of law at some point in time, and most break dozens of laws every day in the course of their life.

There are so many things that are technically illegal. There are too many laws that aren't up to date with what people expect to be able to reasonably do.
It's tough to know the exact number, especially since the numbers from the drives are delayed by several weeks and some of the drives we held weren't "tagged" for me, but from what's come in so far, and the drives we ran in India, we should have registered about 10,000 people.

I haven't been able to get a number of the individuals who sent in for swab kits as a result of our efforts, so I'm not including those numbers. But I'm hopeful that with all the posts online + press (CNN, NPR, Wired, BBC, GOOD, tech blogs, etc.) that those numbers add up to something significant as well.
Love the stack, already working on something similar (mine involves nginx, though.) Given we haven't deployed, it's refreshing to see a similar diagram from those already out in front.
I think it's worth bringing up a factor mentioned here a while ago - Piracy serves as a useful market signal. The fact that people are pirating content means there's demand - if they're pirating it, but nobody's paying for it, that means the rights holders are creating a product people want, but the price & delivery mechanism aren't right yet. That's an awful lot better information than just that people aren't buying something - and I'd argue it's one of the signals that got the record industry to actually start taking DRM-free music sales seriously.

Obviously it's not a great signal on price - piracy's always going to have the lowest price - but knowing there's demand means you can start to adjust your strategy to try to capture some genuinely lost sales.
It's not a house, it's an abstract thing. How can you own a number ?
School could very well distribute DRM-less texbooks (iBooks works as a regular eBooks reader, and I expect the ibooks 2 format is just EPUB3 with a few extensions), though I really doubt publishers will ever be on board with the idea.

The DRM would also be added by the ibookstore, so you should be able to get a non-DRM'd ebook out of the author application thing: a commenter noted he'd exported an ibook, changed the extension and had no trouble loading it into a non-apple ebook reader (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3485150)
World of Goo launched on Steam and still saw 90% piracy.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/12/my-software-is-bein...
I've been using CoffeScript and backbone.js a lot lately, it really has changed my approach to web apps (keep the server light, just transfer json back and forth). The approach that has worked the best for me is to keep pages such as the landing and authentication as traditional rendered pages and save the client side rendering for the user-authenticated 'meaty' parts of the app.

If you want to look a couple really-small examples I have a couple apps on github I used for learning backbone.js/coffeescript. They both use the underscore.js template engine.

https://github.com/jwarzech/realtime_hn
Backend is sinatra, takes a HN story url and polls the comments in reverse chronological order.

https://github.com/jwarzech/inspire_board
Backend is rails, polls images from dribbble and lets you save your favorites.
In canada auto trader rules: they seem to have every car for sale listed, both by dealers and private. Its nice to only go to one place, but will these data owners pull out on you?
This is similar to how stores of the same type cluster together. But the sushi analogy may not map to web services, because with sushi you might explicitly seek variety. With a web service of this sort, you get drawn in. They have your contract, your data, etc, and there's a cost to switching.
Google named best place to work in America
Will Apple be more profitable than Exxon Mobil in 2012?
How many people uses their smartphone to read the news?
I wrote an iPhone app to remotely control my gf's vibrat... (NSFW?)
"I use Wikipedia as basically an extension of my brain."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exocortex

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...
Speak to a doctor. It's possible that there is a simple "shibboleth" you can use like "I am not your lawyer and this is not legal advise" for lawyers.