skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed, I just lost because of improper python syntax. Hardcore C would be more fun, with memsets and frees such that bugs can exist in memory management.
Someone needs to be paid to be able to continue producing the things you enjoy. Otherwise they stop getting made. So before I get any further, I think artists, developers, etc. need to be compensated for their work. It should be illegal to copy someone else's digital goods and sell them for a profit (ie. copying a cd whether you paid for the original or not and reselling it). That doesn't mean I think copyright holders need to be compensated in the same way they have in the past. We're in the midst of trying to figure out how exactly to do that. Louis CK's movie, Radiohead's In Rainbows, Kickstarter... they're all examples of people trying to figure out how this all works moving forward. Some of it works, some of it doesn't. Eventually, we'll figure out a system that does.

We're going through a cultural shift in the way we obtain information. We forget that buying and individually owning books, movies, music, etc. is a relatively new thing and wasn't always the norm. But because there are entire industries built around these things, organizations like the RIAA and the MPAA have an obvious interest in keeping things they way they are.

People should be allowed to share as they want without repercussion. Some people will pay for things, others won't and some can't even if they wanted to. That's never going to change no matter how many laws are passed trying to stop it. People shouldn't be denied access to materials just because they didn't or can't pay for them.

Libraries are essentially what the internet has become except on a much smaller scale. One person / institution / organization buys all the books, cds, movies, etc. and lends them to others for free. Some will argue the differences is there are a limited number of copies that can be lent out at any one time. And while that's true, it's irrelevant. Just because that's the way things have been doesn't mean that's the way they need to be. As more libraries expand their digital content, the lines between our views on libraries, piracy and the sharing of information will become increasingly blurred.

We're living in a time when people have access to information like never before. People are being exposed to music, books and films they never would have before. We're learning things we never would have been able to 10 years ago. Walls and barriers to learning and education are being torn down. Those are all good things that we should be celebrating, not trying to destroy.
That would be the case if we were talking about college, where, 20 years ago textbooks were easily $100, and you had more of them per class. I think the economics work even better there...

But I'm using High School as the example and assuming the district is paying the costs and keeping textbooks and iPads on average for 3 years.

Some people have claimed that iPads won't last very long... but Apple offers AppleCare+ (at least for the iPhone, I expect they'll offer even better warrantees for school districts.)

AppleCare+ will replace a damaged device up to three times for $49 over the course of 3 years, IIRC.

I think the economics are great for high schools, but positively spectacular for colleges (and I'm assuming college textbooks are no longer as cheap as $100, and that the resell situation is as bad- we'd be lucky to get $15 on resale, and the books were bound with glue designed to fall apart over the course of a single semester.)
Lowendbox to close?
Yeah. The primer decided all of the content, the actor was for emoting instead of poor voice synth, iirc.
I believe you could potentially publish any type of book to the iBookstore.

Here's the Help section for "publishing to iBookstore": https://gist.github.com/1641657

And this is from the iBooks Author homepage: "Available free on the Mac App store, iBooks Author is an amazing new app that allows anyone to create beautiful Multi-Touch textbooks — and just about any other kind of book — for iPad. With galleries, video, interactive diagrams, 3D objects, and more, these books bring content to life in ways the printed page never could."
Yes, you can charge: http://code.google.com/chrome/webstore/docs/index.html
Mozilla demos MediaStream Processing, audio mixing in Firefox
Show HN: A GitHub + AngelList API mashup that ranks startups
When I first saw Trello I "felt" that something cool was going on under the hood. So I did a little poking to see what JS technologies you guys were using. The piece I was most excited to learn about was backbone. Had never seen it before and was really impressed by the space it was filling and what it's capable of. Thanks for the write up.
Facebook Debuts 60 New Open Graph Apps
> We can assume in both cases, the iPad and the Texbooks last 3 years (6 semesters, and 6 different students) before having to be replaced.

I suspect this assumption is flawed. Textbooks will last much longer than an iPad, especially once you start considering theft.

The downside of this setup to me is that the students would need the iPads at home to do homework. So either you let the students take them from the class room (where I suspect they will get stolen relatively frequently), or require students to own their own iPad (which isn't really feasible). If this solution had a way of viewing the books via a computer as well, then it starts to become feasible.
But were they able to make a viable living from selling their game? 90% piracy does not equate to 90% loss of revenue. Not every pirate is a potential customer. Far from it. Were sales of the game higher because of the publicity due to the piracy? I don't know for sure and neither does anyone else. An instance of piracy is not necessarily something bad. Classical piracy is. But not digital 'piracy' necessarily. And by extension, high amounts of digital 'piracy' is not necessarily bad. Just some food for thought.
Students set off to compete in the biggest business competition in Edinburgh
While following a live stream of the presentation, I was trying to determine who the customer is, and I still don't know.

For college students, I think this makes complete sense from both an economical and practical standpoint. The iPad is a useful device beyond being a textbook reader and $15 to buy a textbook for class would be fantastic (I might pay $15 to get rid of some of the textbooks cluttering my shelf).

I don't think this college textbooks are an interesting space, however, since individuals are largely responsible for purchasing their own books. Disrupting institutional buying is game changing especially in a world where many if not most school districts are facing budget pressure year after year. This is who Algebra I, Geometry, and Biology textbooks are for, not college students. If they are the primary customer of these resources, I would expect a clear advantage in both the product and the price - similar to how digital encyclopedias and wikipedia completely eliminated the business model of the multi-volume, hard copy encyclopedia. The product appears, at face value, clearly better: up to date content, interactivity, multimedia, zero weight and volume. As far as I can tell, the price, however, is significantly higher than the incumbent product with no "results" to justify the increased price.

As someone who is interested in selling software solutions to customers, I find pitches like this interesting. I also come from a family of teachers (wife, parents, in-laws, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc.) and feel I can empathize with school's position as a potential customer.
Re: Zone - I'm not distracted by changing pages anymore. Just an unconscious muscle twitch and (with newer kindles, and all iPads), I'm onto the next page. I've had many a 12+ hour reading sessions, and several "Get sucked into a book" weekends with digital texts.

Volatility - My books are in the Amazon Cloud. All of my digital books are still available to me. 100%. I have access to about 5% of the paper books I've purchased in my life. The _worst_ case scenario, is that Digital Books become as Volatile as paper books, if Amazon.com goes out of business, and I'm stuck with (horrors) the physical representation of the book as present on my kindle/iPad (and Laptop backup, and back blaze backup of my Laptop).

The cloud changes everything for volatility.

DRM Sucks. Big Time. With that said, Amazon's implementation only impact is that I don't casually lend books to other - which I typically never have anyways, so no impact on me. I too like (and frequently take use) of the fact that 100% of my books are available on my Kindle, iPad, iPhone, Laptop, and CloudReader.

But - with that said - the DRM on physical books is pretty harsh too - You need to go to a photocopier to make a copy of the book. I just lend my mother my cloud reader account, and she can read any of my books on the web. Or lend a second friend my Kindle, and voila - he has all of my books. While I still have all of them on my iPad and iPhone. Or, if I don't have five lent out, I can pull them onto my old K2.

I don't think DRM on the kindle has ever stopped me from reading, or lending a book to someone I know. It _does_ prevent casual lending. Agreed there.

I haven't read a paper book in about 4 years. I find it bizarre to even consider moving back to them.
Yes, I've seen it on HN before and it's the bee's knees.
Turn your links into advertising media. Brand your links with Brinx.
This creates another middlemen, which, once become big, can dictate their rules. We're better off with the current distributed nature of Web.
when you combine CoffeeScript and a good async library, you can indeed get rid of that stuff

My experience has been that you could only do this in few cases. Not an issue that can be worked around elegantly in libraries, you need language support.
http://tamejs.org/
Signed up for Standford's courses and haven't heard a thing?
Anyone else?
I'm not sure when they started, but 10gen now packages and distributes their own MongoDB Debian and Redhat packages. It seems like the right move, so that they're not beholden to the update schedule of the distros.
Blackout Day, The Public Consciousness, and a general defense of Slacktivism.
It shouldn't: http://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2012-0064
I took it to mean "be forward-thinking rather than conservative."
The US Government did a horrible job of negotiating the refinancing of the banks. If they were smarter, they would have hired a tough distressed-debt guy and got a deal that was doable, but made it clear to the bank management that they were no longer in the driving seat.

Even if they hadn't driven a hard economic bargain, the government could still have imposed salary/bonus restraint. The argument that the banks had is that everyone would leave : The reality is that in a hyper-regulated business, the government/FINRA could just politely suggest that people either stayed in their current jobs (to comply with their regulatory duties, etc) or leave the industry...
But people, especially in a service industry, NEVER have no incentive not to help anyone. People are helpful by nature, and easily conned.
But those books can be used for 10 kids (a decade of use per book, each book stays at grade level). An iPad will not last a decade in a classroom/schoolbag/kids room.
Interesting that I am receiving downvotes for this comment (although there seem to be some upvotes as well).

It isn't a bash against Apple - I would have the same concerns if it was Amazon or Google, if there was DRM and/or device lock-in.

And I think ebooks could be very good for students - however, limiting it with DRM and device lock-in is not how it should be done.
It's actually all about the DRM. Dynamic textbooks in that form factor could be done using open standards, but it's Apple's locked in proprietary format that Apple is selling to textbook publishers.
If a new e-textbook is under $15, what's the point of seeking a used one? Even if that were an option, you wouldn't save much, and I would expect e-textbooks to be updated more frequently, so you might be missing something if you bought last year's e-textbook.

I suspect with lots of students they sell their old textbooks to save space as much as to recoup some of the cost (or get some money for beer).
You are right, I'm writing carelessly. I meant strip loosely as "causes the header to not be sent" or not in full.
I apologize if this might sound like a naive question: but why haven't textbooks been published on the internet all these years?

I mean why couldn't some non-profit organization theoretically have created some HTML standard and template for textbooks with the ability to do videos, interactive input, notes...etc other bells and whistles...then hired expert textbook writers, and just cranked out a few online quality textbooks for use in high schools, colleges or whatever. Then all you'd need to consume the content is any kind of HTML reader/browser on any type of computing device.

What has really been preventing this from happening? I just don't get what business Apple has in "reinventing" textbooks or e-book formats or why we had to wait all these years for them to do it (and lock it into their ecosystem).
IBooks 2 lets authors set textbook prices in exchange for Apple exclusivity
99%'s incredibly naive, more like 50%.

Just to remind you America has:

By far the highest incarceration rate of a 'free' country
An abnormally high murder rate
A recent history of torture and incarceration of foreigners without trial

Not particularly free in my book, especially the propensity to lock up relatively high proportion of its own citizens.
I am assuming that CoffeeScript should be able to add new syntax where the need arises, as the number of CoffeeScript users is probably still pretty low and able to adapt to change.

From what I can tell, CoffeeScript - and the Javascript/Node world - would really benefit from something like F#'s workflow/computation-expression syntax, which will take a fairly straight-forward readable statement and behind the scenes de-sugar the hell out of it into a bunch of closures.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/F_Sharp_Programming/Computation...

EDIT: search for "De-sugared syntax" on this page for an example.
Prototyping for Designers
What if someone doesn't want to use iPad? You can't make one tablet type mandatory to read a textbook. That's ridiculous. The problem is two fold here. Apple pushes lock in on authors and schools, which causes students lock in. It's a vicious cycle. Therefore I don't really get what is so exciting about it.
I didn't see anywhere an indication that Apple wouldn't support open, non-DRM ebooks. They do now. If you want to build a publishing business making textbooks without DRM, Apple will be happy to support you. Distribute however you want. If you want to make them free on the iBookstore without DRM, Apple will likely support you.

When I went to college, the text books were a proprietary system with built in DRM.

The professors and the text publishers had deals, involving kickbacks I'm sure, and professors were known to demand that you used the current Edition (which was really no better, and often worse than the previous).

They enforced this by asking questions that involved answers that were different in different editions or that weren't covered in previous editions.

Further, all the books had physical DRM. The glue they were bound with and the cardboard the covers was made out of was designed to disintegrate over the course of a semester, even with good care. I kept my books on a shelf next to my desk in my dorm and never took them to class, and still couldn't sell them at the end of the semester because they'd fallen apart.

Once again, Apple's taking a proprietary industry that is used to charging high prices and trying to democratize it and bring prices down.

Apple did this successfully with the music industry before getting them to give up on DRM.

This is a good forward step with the textbook industry.

Plus by definition if you create software which supports new features you have lock-in.

Apple supports the ePub 2 standard. Apple is as interoperable as they can be. Its amazon that created a proprietary ebook standard. Apple's evolving the standard forward, but I've not seen anything to indicate that these aren't just ePub 3 books.
Schools (and corporations) have embraced lock-in from Microsoft and Oracle with open arms, for both longer lock-in time periods, and for greater investment amounts. It's a problem there too, but this is a much smaller problem than locking into Exchange for the next 5 years.
Thanks for the extra references.

To clarify: I wasn't referring to how the Islamic Regime came to power (although, as you point out, that would be an interesting and complex topic in itself). I was commenting on the fact that in most cases (except perhaps in extreme cases such as North Korea where governments hold their citizens captive) governments cannot be isolated from what the majority thinks or feels. Many people are uncomfortable by this so advocate the "it's the government that did it" argument.

Using the Nazis as an example was perhaps lazy (although they did get quite a bit of support from the general population, one shouldn't forget, they were voted in, unlike the Islamic regime in Iran). How about other examples: Many Chinese people in the mainland, due to an array of complex nationalistic, historical, and financial reasons back many of the deplorable aspects of China's regime. Same in Saudi Arabia, people turn a blind eye as long as they get their hefty unemployment benefits. Even France's government acknowledged Algerian atrocities very recently, because you know what, the general public still has grandiose ideas about the empire and don't want to hear that sort of thing. Turkey is going through a similar process with its Armenian history.

Another, longer example: I was always told that the animosity between Turkey and Greece was a thing that the governments created, that there existed a "brotherhood of these two peoples on two sides of Aegean". Well, when I traveled to Greece on a couple of occasions, I found the hard way that this was not completely true, people did hold the historical grudges), it wasn't something that he governments made up (same on the Turkish side, too, of course. In fact it was just the reverse: the governments noted this trend and were responding to it in populist ways to get more votes.
Announcing the card.io mobile payments SDK and the card.io payments app
Plan 9 kernel history
> What about software that phones home and require some physical gizmo like a CD or dongle to use, after you've already spent a nice sum of money to acquire it?

I still don't think this warrants comparison to rape.
Yahoo Freezes Hiring and Considers Layoffs
Learning to Sit Alone, in a Quiet Empty Room
Doesn't work on FF 9.0.1 running on a windows box either.
I signed up for probabilistic graph networks and haven't heard anything. I thought it was supposed to start at the end of Jan.
Americans Won’t Welcome Web-Piracy Crackdown: Joe Karaganis
The recommended k-12 textbook replacement cycle is generally six years. Of course, there is damage and loss that has to be taken into account, but districts generally try to stretch their purchases out at least that long.
Agreed. I'm not at all interested in giving my email out just to see what this is all about.
"Everyone aspire large wealth disparity"

I hear things like this a lot about human nature, and I try really hard to believe them, but at the end of the day I have to admit that I don't personally know a single person who thinks this way. Everyone I know would very much like to pay off their debt, have easy access to shelter, food, and entertainment for themselves and their loved ones, and not have to work but be able to do whatever they love doing as much as they want to do it. It is possible that there is not enough aggregate wealth in the world for everyone to be prosperous enough to achieve these things, so desiring them is equivalent to the desire for wealth disparity, but it is not the disparity itself. I am not suggesting that there are no people who desire disparity itself, only that I have trouble convincing myself that it is "everyone", since I don't know any.
Deconstructing Constructive Criticism
Socket.io: https://github.com/LearnBoost/socket.io/issues/686

MongoDB (on FreeBSD): https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-3927

Redis: https://github.com/antirez/redis/issues/91

. . . are a few.
But the textbooks would likely be in circulation longer than the iPad.
Imagine if the company behind this was, say, Microsoft — I’m guessing there would be a lot less defense of propriety, DRM-laden educational material. Really, imagine an HN thread discussing a proprietary Microsoft-backed textbook platform. Besides the level of polish, what’s the fundamental philosophical difference?

Don’t get me wrong, this looks really neat, and I think this is a glimpse into the future of education. I’m just a bit sick of Apple getting a free pass on things that people would be up in arms about if they came from almost any other tech company.
I tried to follow this announcement through the web today and I noticed a few things I would like to comment on as an educational technologist.

1. It did not impress me (iBooks). Looked like gorgeous Apple design on 'CDROM' type educational software we used to have in the old days.

2. I liked the glossary and notes/annotations that turned into summary cards for learning.

3. Interactive features are added using Keynote(?)

or

4. You need to know 'HTM5' and Javascript to do interactive stuff (this is not GarageBand for eLearning as someone told me it would be).

5. The way iBooks Textbooks are now part of iTunes U does add a lot to iTunes U. Now it can disrupt LMS (Learning Management Systems) vendors as well.

6. I still love eInk.

Then some worries.

7. What happened to epub and similar standards?

8. Is this new format a lovely zip file we can extract and inspect?

9. Is it possible to read iBooks on other devices/platforms?

10. Am I allowed to share my iBooks with friends and relatives?

11. Will my grandchildren be able to read my iBooks in 50 years time?
There are some disturbing thoughts that arise from this. For example, what if in a thousand years from now, all information about this century is forgotten, because it was written in a digital format which can no longer be read. Or some sort of technological apocalypse occurs, and there are no non-digital sources to be read.