skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is the reason to be interested in such matters, but I fail to see much of interest in this initiative from the strict perspective of textbook quality. (I will admit, however, that I am alien to the current e-textbook market and technologies.)

While fancy galleries, embedded videos and the such are quite nice, I would dare to suppose that they are not exactly novelties in the ebook field.
I might be austere, but Apple-style animations seem toyish, distracting and out-of-place. "Dynamically updated data" seems to be only pushable to Dashcode HTML widgets, which might be lacking in flexibility (but I might be wrong). There does not seem to be a framework for mathematical interactions that could aid comprehension, for example, nor one for on-the-fly manipulation of text structure that allows the student to fold blocks/etc., e.g. to focus on a particular paragraph/conceptual element.

Briefly stated: is Apple's "reinvention" merely reduced to a basic authoring tool and a branded store, which can tangentially (but importantly) channel external efforts in the sector?
"You may distribute books created in iBooks Author free of charge on your own website. If you wish to sell your book, you must do so through the iBookstore."
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5071#3

Does that mean you can't charge money for your output unless it's through the iBookstore? In other words, you couldn't publish for-purchase work to other eBook stores like Kindle?
i love how this question became a parallel discussion about the CEO responsability to the board, but NO ONE addrese
How vulnerable are all javascript approaches in terms of injection type attacks? Do apps like node and mongo effectively prevent them, or is it still possible to shoot yourself in the foot? I've read some off hand comments along the lines of "as long as you're not a total moron you have nothing to worry about", but that sounds a lot like what was said about sql injections and xss before exploiting them went mainstream and it turned out everyones apps were filled with them. Has anyone audited a real world app built with a stack like this and come away with any experience to share?
Automattic and Wordpress PP and ToS are CC-licensed:

http://automattic.com/privacy/
http://en.wordpress.com/tos/
Iran confirms death sentence for 'porn site' web programmer
Python's concurrent.futures
So Amazon's underground PR effort got Sarah Lacy to write a largely negative article about how they're destroying the publishing business by dumping books at below cost and overpaying authors? That's a pretty paranoid POV.

Both Amazon and Apple want to obsolete publishers and labels eventually. It's a no brainer. They're high-overhead middlemen that are adding less to the value chain every day. By eliminating them, they can lower prices to consumers while increasing profit to themselves as the new distributors of content.
CSS3 Gradient Syntax changed and is now final
I just ran the letters modb-re-nojs-li through my handy word_solver and came up with some candidates: MoRN, NoRM, ModeRN, NiMRod, ReMiNd, MeRLiN, LiMNeR, NiMbLeR
Thanks for that reminder. We might see iBooks versus all other vendors using EPUB3 then.
Along these lines, it makes me wonder how long it will be until we see the rise of free agency in the tech sector.
To say the mp3 was not well received before the iPod is goofy. You remember Napster right?!
Why Apple Won't Disrupt the Textbook Industry Anytime Soon
1) In US high schools, the students don't generally buy the books, the school does. They often use them for several years in a row. Publishers know this when pricing them. So on one hand, they give up the high price point, but on the other, they (maybe) get an annual stream of revenue. I say maybe because schools could likely buy iPads and load them with books, then lend those out year after year. In fact, that could be hugely economical. If you standardize around a book for 4 years or so, you can literally leave the devices "as-is" and not do OS updates or anything.

The publishers don't really have a choice. If they don't buy in, some upstart publishing house could swoop in and eat their market. Apple has just lowered the barrier to entry significantly.

2) This argument comes up all the time with new technology. The cost isn't going to be a factor forever. The reality is that kids of the future are going to need a computing device to get work done, especially by high school. If the recent trend is a guide, that device is likely to look more like an iPad than a desktop computer. When I was a college freshman 16 years ago), only the rich kids had cell phones. A basic cell phone can be had for a very affordable price now.

3) They're not looking to make money on the books. They're looking to recover costs and take on Amazon. iBooks is a backwater compared to Kindle and Apple has got to know it. The only way to compete is to do something different from what everyone else is doing. This is a classic Apple move. They didn't take on Microsoft in the enterprise with the Mac, they went after the home market which gave them more freedom to operate.
"It would be far better to continue to work on technological solutions and to continue the frustrating and thankless chore of pressuring and cajoling our dear friends around the world into deploying their traditional police powers against the worst of the intellectual-property pirates."

If the premium content makers cannot protect their own content then they should figure out how without wrecking the Internet at the expense of the taxpayer. Retrograde bills like SOPA and PIPA impose an enormous negative externality on Internet service providers for the sake of preserving the failing business models of intellectual monopolists, who want the taxpayer to subsidize the cost of production in the Internet age.

The economic woes of the entertainment and news industries stem from longstanding trends that predate piracy on the Internet by decades. Typesetting and printing were expensive operations before the advent of word processing, electronic typesetting and low-cost on-demand publishing. Today, the marginal cost of reproducing digital content is close to zero. The decline in employment in the news, publishing and recording industries reflects the surfeit of digital goods in new media, the efficiencies of computerization and the oversupply of labor. SOPA will not reverse this trend.
You can check the web sites of the respective courses or better check here: http://class-central.com/. 5 or so classes are starting from the 23rd of January, I think one is starting from 30th of Jan. And rest are starting in Feb or March.
No, it's all about the money. Publishers will use it, if they think it provides the best profit/risk ratio,.
You don't get it. Your choice is limited. With physical text book - you can get any of those choices, including buying the book. With DRM + vendor locked ebook you can't buy and use it if your device doesn't fit into the vendor's plan. We aren't in the stone age of computing anymore. Interoperability and open standards are intended to avoid exactly this problem.
regarding 2... I know that some schools have purchased them for their students along with an insurance plan that covers loss or damage to the device itself. They also were able to filter the ability for the students to install apps and access to the default apps (youtube was removed example).

(There was a story on NPR a while back about it, I can't seem to find it now)
Although Karunamon already replied, I think you were responding to me. I'm not sure I understand the question - I'm not arguing that it is not an intuitive aspect of theft, I am stating that it has not been intuitive to people I have discussed this with. It is a fact, not an argument - are you trying to ask if I'm arguing that it should be an intuitive aspect of theft? If so then I really don't have an opinion - I think intuition is completely subjective and that there is no "should" about it.
That's correct -- because we compile to "standard" JavaScript, we're at least somewhat comfortable introducing significant changes (even to the syntax) where desirable. Even if you never get around to updating older pieces of code, all of the compiled JS continues to be fully compatible and interoperable with the newer stuff.
I think that was his point. "Every windows machine affected" doesn't mean Windows 7 only.
I don't really feel like registering for the practices, so how does this work? Do they give you a piece of code that has a bug in it and you're supposed to find it and fix it?
It's most likely done intentionally to protect against leaking the clicker's identity. See the issue Facebook had back then: http://www.benedelman.org/news/052010-1.html
Does Microsoft charge you a fee to develop and sell an app? No. But once you're locked into the iApps, iBooks, iTunes U, iUniverse - Apple gets its 30% off the top. And no alternatives are allowed.
On the other hand, schools are probably interested in being able to get updated content every year, rather than using the same book for 10 years.

In some subjects, that might not be important. In others, like science or math, it might be useful to have up-to-date information presented with the latest pedagogical techniques.

Hell, being able to update textbooks to references the latest internet memes would probably do wonders at raising entertainment value.
If some one wanted to they could do the same thing by having a pay-to-use website implementing an interactive textbook - a lot of students have laptops.
You are right upto some extent. But what I hear from great founders (such as PG,BFeld etc) is that to go and learn to code yourself. In that way you are not under mercy of a developer to bring out your product.
I agree that someone needs to be clear whether he wants to be a web developer or web entrepreneur but what I think if you are a web developer then developing a web based product is easy (?). May be may be not. I have not gone to that deep end.
I have almost started a similar website of yours (Startup frontier) but a different niche. The idea has been pushed to a deep freezer. But thinking of reviving it soon.

But thank for the inputs. Check your email.
i love how this question became a parallel discussion about the CEO responsibility to the board, but NOBODY addressed the main point.

if no one can mention how a deal with MS does not KILL the company, how can they defend that a deal was the best?

CEO et al job is to maximize value for the company. not to serve shareholders that want to make a quick buck turning around shares.
Ask HN: Do Ex-coders miss the thrill?
In a previous life (about 2 decades ago), I used to write code (often 12+ hours a day) and used to enjoy it tremendously.

Since then, I generally derive almost the equal amount of pleasure getting my people to create new apps etc. but at times, miss (acutely) the thrill of hitting the compile/run button myself and seeing things come alive.

What have others here in my shoes been experiencing? Please share. :)
Most laptops have the Fn button.

Fn+ScrLk is NumLk, and then Ctrl-Alt-8 (on my Lenovo) is exactly the same as Ctrl-Alt-Numpad/8 on a regular keyboard.
I believe that they go 6 years between changing the edition or textbook they are using. I don't believe the actual text books last that long. Surely some last longer and some don't last nearly as long.

The 3 years I chose was based on the average time that textbooks lasted in my high school. (I worked in the text book department during school, and that was the time period, though it may have been 3.5 years.)
Why Google Web Fonts aren’t really open source
Hands-on with Apple’s new breed of digital textbooks for the iPad [video]
It might also include things that don't work so great now, but show promise, and will work great in 2 years at their current rate of development.
[video]

If you submit a link to a video or pdf, please warn us by appending [video] or [pdf] to the title.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Yes, the education angle seems appropriate given what this event was all about, but can I also say that it’s extremely boring?

What’s much cooler are the books that are possible with the tools Apple provides now. They are like Al Gore’s Our Choice (whose UI was phenomenally awesome), only even better (when looking at some details), also better integrated and (at least nearly) standards based.

Oh, and their authoring tool makes it easy for nearly everyone to make books like that and easily distribute them. That’s just cool, independent of any education bullshit that’s going on.
No, I'm not. In both cases I'm assuming they are owned by the school and giving the costs to provide them for one child through the four years of school.
dodger: I'd be curious to know where y'all bled over CoffeeScript or Backbone, if you don't mind sharing.
Lunduke Compiler can now build itself on all supported platforms
I like how I got to the site, get a 1/2 second flash of the article which is then covered up by a full screen popup telling me to enable javascript (I use noscript). I just wanted to read the goddamn article!
Keen On…Inside Apple: How Apple Is Organized Like A Terrorist Cell (TCTV)
What would be the difference in how you would handle this in a single-page JS app like Trello versus a traditional Java/Python/Ruby-based multi-page backend that mostly serves HTML pages?

It seems like at the end of the day you still need to validate and sanitize user input before doing anything with it.
Glock: The Rise of America's Gun (book review)
I really enjoy reading and will be nostalgic about physical books. I also really like my kindle. For fiction reading I have not found it's match. But for non-fiction there is a UX feature where physical books currently dominate any book reader I've tried (laptop, tablet, kindle, smartphone).

Flipping to the index or table of contents, keeping a pen or finger in another page and flipping back and forth. Once that is figured out I will be a complete convert and stop preferring physical books.
The Real Difference Between Git and Mercurial
Sending an incorrect site referrer to a downstream website doesn't solve the identity problem! HTTP headers have existed even before all these applications came into being. One just has to abide by some of those basics.
"Accessing physical textbook can't be mandatory, since you can get it in a number of ways (buy it, go to the library, borrow from your friend etc.)."

First day of class, you show up. You get your textbook from the teacher. You take it home. You put a cover on it. You use that textbook all year. At the end you turn it in.

I assure you few K-12 students have ever given a crap about having the freedom to buy a copy of their own from a different source rather than using the one handed out by the teacher.
I used to write code for hours and hours and hours and then I ended up going into management etc. I'm now going back to writing code (which I've always done as a hobby) and I'm happy about it. I don't think the intellectual challenge in management is anything close to the challenge in coding.
http://coursekit.com/ has been advertised a bunch at my school lately, I haven't used it, but their design and implementation seems interesting
Do you think the internet is a bad idea too? There is an awful lot of digital knowledge and tools out there these days we won't have access to in the event of a collapse. I think it is a bit of a stretch to say that this is "the big problem with electronic books".
New IT site
I tried to master site umumble. Hopefully with time it will be wonderful well-known site. Published test post (с++): http://umumble.com/blogs/cpp/354/
I'm assuming the students take the textbooks home from school and would do the same with the iPad. I don't believe textbooks would last longer than an iPad, I believe they wouldn't last nearly as long. Textbooks fall apart, this is how the textbook industry gets revenue from replacement. iPads generally don't fall apart. I doubt there would be much iPad theft, and if there was, it wouldn't be too hard for Apple to provide technical solutions that make the schools iPads difficult to use and thus resell on the secondary market, much the same way the "Find my iPhone" lets you remotely wipe your phone.

If school districts opted for this feature, the iPad could simply stop working if not connected to the internet for a week, and when it does connect to the internet, it checks to see if its been stolen and if so, wipes itself and renders itself inoperable.

This would be relatively easy for Apple to implement and is the kind of thing they would do if they're entering into agreements to sell large numbers of iPads to school districts.

Thus stealing a school iPad makes little sense- the machine would have no value after a week.

Edit: He proposed a problem with my perspective, I proposed a solution. So, naturally, I'm being down voted.
Amazon DynamoDB: First Look
The used textbook market was on shaky ground well before ebooks arrived on the scene. Every year, publishers force new editions on the market, making changes to the exercises (so old editions are incompatible with new ones) but making no substantial changes to the actual learning material. Some instructors prefer to assign old editions so their students can find cheaper copies, but most don't care, and others are even contractually obligated (via the school) to use only the newest edition.
Now people downloading tons of content are "activists"?

I don't buy it. If they're doing so publicly as a challenge... maybe, but that doesn't seem like the case for many people who are doing it.
We let you create surveys and display those on your website in a “targeted” manner

A better title for your article would have been:

why to never rely on referers

(which can be blocked or purposely malformed)
Julian Assange Rolling Stone interview
And you could nearly do it now. Certainly, actors on demands already exist, just not in real time.

Combine automatic text generation (a long-time research topic) with some other existing tech and we could be 90% to the primer.
I disagree with this. Pirating makes the problem apparent to the MPAA; people want their products, but the existing distribution channels are not working. If people didn't pirate the MPAA's products, then the MPAA would conclude that nobody wanted their products anymore. That wouldn't result in positive change for people that like movies but want to play them under Linux, for example.

Piracy proves that DRM only hurts the people willing to pay money for the product. It has no effect on piracy whatsoever. In fact, DRM may be causing piracy.
There's certainly more to the story. He lived there as a citizen for many years and probably had enemies. Iran doesn't seem to be working their way through github.

Remember, prosecutions start with who they want to get, and then try to find some laws they broke. So often the stated charge is something incidental like tax evasion.
Ask PG: lost simple account password 
PG,

I posted this --> http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3484944

Without realizing that I should have put the tag of Ask PG. I haven't lost my password, just haven't been able to login from the get go.

Please help!! Thanks!
Teens Share Passwords As a Form of Intimacy
The day Wikipedia turned black
I came to the comments just to bemoan this as well.

I see this pretty often and I have a tip for developers who really want to insist on JS without infuriating their visitors: Don't let me see the site work before intentionally breaking it to try and force me to be tracked by your marketing code.
People who think Facebook is Google
If they can't sue you, then they just buy you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANGEL_Learning
I'd love to hear what HN thinks I can do to become more profitable! :)
A related concern: 1984-style "party" that views any historical content as a threat to it's existence easily censors and edits both non-fiction and fiction literature to promote itself.

With paper printing and thousands of independent copies, this becomes difficult. With digital copies, especially in an iTunes-match or Amazon Digital Locker scenario, this becomes trivial.

If you think this is paranoid, watch the latest moves that DHS and TSA are making and combine them with SOPA for chilling effect.

The digitization of books is, to me, like the digitization of voting - appealing, but very dangerous and possibly not worth the societal dangers that come with it.
That is not DRM. That is shoddy craftsmanship, poor quality, etc.

Or planned obsolescence. I guess selling Math books with a 15 year lifespan is bad business.
I'm not saying that they missed out on 90% of their revenue (though it's fair to say they lost out on some revenue). Rather, they did everything right: a fun game that anyone can play, great press, broad distribution through multiple channels, and no DRM. And yet a huge audience still saw it fit to pirate their game.

It'll be interesting to watch the evolution of game distribution. Xbox and iOS are massively growing platforms that also bring built-in DRM that's significantly harder to circumvent.
Generation Flux: DJ Patil
Admittedly, I missed the dichotomy in your original post between those making ends meet and those aspiring to wealth disparity - I thought you meant that even those just trying to make ends meet aspire to wealth disparity, which is why egalitarian movements fail, when what I think you meant is that once people stop having to make ends meet, they then begin to aspire wealth disparity.

I would be very interested to see the data you are basing your knowledge of society on, since it must be outside your personal experience.

Also I'm not familiar with the modern social class definition system that you speak of, where can I read about that?
>especially once you start considering theft

>where I suspect they will get stolen relatively frequently

I think your assumption is even more flawed. Textbooks are replaced every 3+ years or so, that's a given. You're worried about something that might happen.
Would it be possible to show some examples on the page? Like previously corrected bugs?
But does the Apple/iPad/iBooks solution somehow circumvent those nuisances?
The "hard to talk to" test is almost the perfect description of how I feel about working with certain clients (for lack of a better phrase) in my current job.

Prior to this gig, I would have said one my strengths was actually working and communicating with users of software I helped write or support.

Now, it seems like our team is mostly "walled off" from the external people we could do the most for.

Any tips out there for breaking through that wall? It is really discouraging . . .
Technically, they did cap prices after the "I am rich" app.

Back to the subject: I expect prices will rise to whatever the market accepts.

On the one hand, that may be less than what it currently accepts, because a) people expect lower prices for non-physical goods and b) there may be more competition.

On the other hand, production prices for 'books' might increase by orders of magnitude if publishers insert lots of interactive stuff (but I guess many textbooks already ship with CDs or URLs, so that effect may not be that large)
Twitter Bootstrap 2 launch party - 31st January
Mobile Morning Coffee (01/19/12)