skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We can only hope. My university use(d|s) a competitor (sorry, name escapes me, though I supported it for a year or two) that was also crap. It's terrifying just how horrible these systems are.
Printed books are not going extinct. Only publisher and most book store are.

Printed books will become a small percentage of all books, but they will be around for a very long time, even if they mostly become vanity items.

I prefer the tactile experience of paper books, you may call that vanity, I just call it my preference, not worse than anyone's brand preference.
Textbooks need fast navigation and color. Textbooks also aren’t read like novels. All this is true of current textbooks, even without any animations, videos or interactive elements.

E-ink is a bad fit for them. All it has going for it is the lower price of available devices (which is a major plus) and that some people claim they get eyestrain from reading on LCDs (hardly an issue with textbooks).
"We custom-built a client-side Model cache to handle updates and simplify client-side Model reuse."

Is this related at all to backbone.iosync.js?* Or, if not, is it something that Fog Creek will be open to sharing in the future?

* https://github.com/logicalparadox/backbone.iobind
> The content distributors are strangling themselves because they're trying to protect their existing means of distribution and refuse to adopt new ones that people actually want to use and pay for.

In 2008 Starz and Netflix entered into an agreement where Netflix would be able to license and distribute Starz media for $30 million. Said contract expired, Netflix offers $300 million to renew, and Starz rejects the offer under the premise that their content is worth more.

Now Starz, like HBO (eg. HBO Go), is planning to roll out their own streaming service--which I would say is both an attempt to protect their means of distribution as well as an effort to adopt to new models.

As an aside, I tried to use HBO Go a few weeks ago...and was prompted to enter the details of my cable tv service in order to gain access. I didn't have the time/patience to proceed and decided to read instead.

All I can say is if every content distribution company expects users to pay a separate fee, etc, for streaming content they're SOL. Evidence of Netflix, Hulu, iTunes and the like show that people prefer one-stop shopping.

Edit: typo
Convenience is better.

Records, arguably, provide superior sound to an MP3 player, but can you bring a 2,000 record collection with you when travelling?
Whitehouse.gov wouldn't be at risk, but any start-up site would be.

See also: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120110/11395317367/websit...
I'd really like to hear your explanation for why you have no obligation. Just because pirating isn't theft in the technical sense, it doesn't mean you're excempt from paying for someone else's work if you use it for their intended purposes. (as in downloading a song and listening to it)
This has been the biggest problem with ebooks in general in my mind. Kindle books are DRM'ed, I couldn't sell them once I'm done with them, which keeps me buying physical books.
So I see it as the problem that really needs to be figured out (and is why I was hopeful for bitcoin at one point, it seemed to have a DRM system that allowed for transfer of ownership).
Apologies if this is slightly off topic.
Gotta love this pinterest collection of SOPA & PIPA tips
I thought the primer was driven by an actor in a booth, not an AI. Should I re-read?
Where does one get xrumer? It would be interesting to analyze the data. Or is that traded separately?
It also exports an ".ibooks" file, which is an epub file with a different filename extension. This is the file that gets shipped to ibooks.

It looks like standard epub, with some additional files (so it _should_ degrade.)

Apple put some ncx extensions (looks like thumbnails) into a separate file, and referenced it from a meta tag in the .ncx file. They added their usual com.apple.ibooks.display-options.xml file, that they have for their fixed-layout epubs, but I think they're using CSS for layout in the new files.

The xhtml/css generated from their app doesn't render well in a browser or calibre. I suspect that's because of their use of avant-garde css features (e.g. @page ). I think these files would be able to degrade to other epub readers with some css tweaks.
We are definitely going to tweak the interface to give the user more freedom to do exactly what they want.
What we've launched here is definitely an MVP, there are a number of really great features that we're working on but didn't feel ready to implement them at this point.

As for sources, we are definitely going to expand a lot; we felt that what we have now was sufficient for launching.
I did a lot of UI changes yesterday. Also added "Say Thanks" Buttons to make it easier to tweet Senators who have come out to oppose PIPA!

Over 700 tweets to senators so far! Wish HN would support, but at least others are!
Node.js, Redis, and MongoDB? They've gone full web-scale!

In all seriousness, though, it looks like they are using Redis for exactly the right reasons, and the larger architecture is pretty much the definition of a sane forward-looking design.
I think a better term than "brainless" is "mindless." Mindless is the opposite of mindfulness, which is being aware, awake, and just plain giving a damn. The mindless are none of those things.
I have a feeling that Javascript based NoSQL backed web development is going to be just fine in two years. Quite possibly the standard stack for a large percentage of projects.
Birds, Ducks and Robots
Why Will SOPA and PIPA Kill Innovation and Entrepreneurship on the Internet?
Until college, I never owned my textbooks, and they had to be returned to the school.
Python Web Development on Windows with Cygwin
You can't have dots and no capital letters.
That's an opinion. Stating opinion as fact is a worthless contribution, in fact a detriment, to healthy discussion.

I wouldn't argue that there's moral high ground here, I'd simply put it this way:

Anyone who thinks there is a better way to keep people from pirating music than to make the legal means of acquisition simple, affordable, and to not play games with release dates, is a fucking idiot.
Blogspam. Questions appear elsewhere.
The Peace Prize has been given for way crazier stuff than what Sal Khan is doing. If a banker can receive it for giving loans to people, why not Sal Khan for educating them?
I don't get it, why are Twitter shutting it down? Makes little sense to me.

I guess there are some cases (like Wordly ----> Google Docs) where that happened and was good in the end?

Most seem to mean the product is completely dead.
People have been talking about the economics of the iPad seemingly implying that it is more expensive. For schools right now textbooks are really expensive and textbook management is expensive as well (a lot of bulk to move around and account for, etc.) Since school districts have to pay for all this, lets do some rough numbers....

Lets assume you're talking about a high school, they have four grades, 9, 10, 11 & 12 and are on a semester system. How many classes does each student take a semester? 10? 7? (My high school was run like a college so my experience isn't typical. We took 10 classes each semester and had 2.5 textbooks per class (english classes often had 6-7 books) Each class requires how many text books? 1.2? 2?

If we assume lower numbers for a typical high school, 4 grades, 1.2 text books per class, 2 semesters per year, 7 classes per semester and a textbook cost of $80 is 4 x 1.2 x 2 x 7 x 80 = $5,376 in text books to put one student thru the whole four years.

Alternatively, the school could buy one iPad, and with an average textbook cost of $15 and everything else the same the calculation is: 4 x 1.2 x 2 x 7 x 15 + $500 = $1,508.

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.

To me, the iPad solution looks cheaper, and all the other benefits- less weight, more interactivity, etc, come for free.

Edit: Left out a term in the second calculation, so corrected, and using asterisks for multiplication resulted in bad formatting, so fixed.
I remember that date, being in New York myself. Seeing the police embrace their militaristic fantasy of being under attack; seeing the futility of organized dissent when it came to changing the course of an autonomous government. That was my last protest. "Cypherpunks write code".
How does this apply to the publishing of non-textbooks? Can you create interactive storybooks? It seems that this is clearly textbook focused, but are there restrictions on using this for other types of books?
According to the commit in question (http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/commit/?id=7d2543a3...), the feature either releases all grabs or kills clients which have any active grabs.

A regular fullscreen application (such as MPlayer, VLC, Chromium, …) does not grab the keyboard and/or pointer. However, applications like pinentry-gtk (for things like entering your GPG passphrase) or screenlockers do grab the keyboard and pointer.

So, in short: no, this doesn’t seem useful in that case. And what you are usually intended to do is use the shortcuts of your window manager to kill the window/application or switch to a different workspace/desktop with a shortcut and kill the process from there.
Well good for them. They used to rent space in our office, and they were a great bunch of guys, quite clever and always focussed on making a good service for their users. Twitter is lucky to have them.
SOPA Opera twist: Celeb Music Producer Swizz Beatz is secret CEO of Megaupload
Petzl clarified their stance when the list first came out: http://www.petzl.com/us/outdoor/news-2/2011/12/22/petzl-amer...
It's most likely a talent acquisition, not a product acquisition. Keeping Summify up and running would be a waste of developer time (from Twitter's point of view).
My (minimal) criteria is it has to be packaged in Debian.

A couple years ago I considered both MongoDB and CouchDB immature for that reason. The recent confusion of CouchDB/Couchbase etc. shows that was a reasonable view.
Tl;dr? Anybody?
In the spirit of fairness - really?

Communist Germany, USSR, Communist China/Mao, North Korea, Mussolini's Italy, etc.? All of those were or are "religious" governments?
Hipster hits 100,000 users today, releases Android App
Agreed, does anyone have more specifics on what exactly he developed?
This is just a screwed up verson of Islam they are having in Iran. If thats what Islam stands for, I don't want to be a muslim anymore. I am sick of these stupid gready people representing any religion( in this case Islam) from wrong perspective. There is no such a thing as killing a person if he/she disgraced Islam.
(As an aside, can you talk more about the Bayer detail-destroying filter? I love this stuff.)
Concise and hard hitting article.
This is the kind of thing that boggles my mind. World of Goo was a huge success! How the piracy rate fits into the relative success or failure of World of Goo is not at all clear. I don't see how anyone can believe that there's a possible reality where World of Goo would be just as successful as it was with a 0% piracy rate, and where information exchange is free. You can't have both! If World of Goo had made a pittance and its developers had died in poverty, maybe there would have been an argument to make there. But as it is, that piracy figure is just a number that has no tangible connection to the number of possible sales in a world where piracy is either morally abhorrent to everyone, or technically impossible. And that world is something for dystopian science fiction to explore, not one that I would ever wish to experience.
1. CoffeeScript doesn't alleviate this yet. I doubt will be much progress on this until we find a good way to implement defer/async.
https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/issues/350#issuec...

I am writing a sizable Node app myself. In the end, you just get used to the callback style.
Fake Halo 4 Beta invites trick you into revealing your Xbox Live password
The offending commit[1] loads fine for me, but I'd rather not call out some poor OSS contributor by name here.

My question is: what is the actual function/line that causes the screen lock to die? My C knowledge is close to non-existent, but the ungrab all function looks a bit suspicious. Some commentary by someone who understands what's going on here would be appreciated.

[1]: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/commit/?id=7d2543a3...
The problem is not only DRM, but lock in into Apple. Using iTunes is not acceptable, it's not interoperable.
Chaotic Moon: From Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily to the Board of Awesomeness
Was it Moodle by chance? That's the only competitor to Blackboard I've ever seen.
While I am envious that upcoming generations will not know the absolute joy of lugging around Chemistry, Physics and Math tombs, I am a little weary that this plan will eliminate the used text book market. I, for one, certainly bought more than one used textbook for less than 50% of the price of a new text. I also had professors recommend going to the off-campus, unaffiliated book store for used texts rather than going to the for-profit on-campus book store in the student union.
ISP in protest to SOPA gives one day of service for free
Data Governance Demystified – Lessons from the Trenches
Why you don't get enough YouTube views on your videos and how to fix it
Plus you also get an ipad for life.
Very cool! Not sure where the data is coming from, but no results near my ZIP code (95129) for Acura NSX even though there are plenty on AutoTrader and Craigslist.

Having attempted the creation of a number of flight search products I am sympathetic how hard it is to get this sort of data - you either pay lots of money for it or you screen-scrape. Ick.

But, overall, awesome!
That's a fair point. I'm in higher education and our school doesn't buy books. I've created video lectures using Camtasia using a Wacom tablet and pen. The notes are in PDF format and I've created my own exercises. Students for one of my classes don't need to buy a book because I've got everything done for that course.

I'd like to use something like iBook Author but only if I can export it in a device independent way.
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4 Lessons I Learned About Business While Flying a Plane (Yes, I’m still alive)
I love the $15 price for textbooks. That is great and would really help keep prices down for students as most books are $100+ now.

My question is, can these be put onto a Kindle? Also, is there an iBook app for Windows/OSX?
All this are just dirty tactics from Apple to lock users into their iTunes infrastructure. One wouldn't be able to use those textbooks anywhere outside iTunes, therefore it's defective by design and authors shouldn't fall for it.
Ask HN; What are some great start-up resource for legal docs?
What are some resources for more legal minded/those with a legal education start-up members to refer to for advice or samples when drafting documents, especially including co-founders agreement/articles of formation and partnership agreements?

Westlaw and lexis are in play if there are references you suggest there too.

Thanks!
(Mostly, perhaps, because I think it's dangerous to assume SOPA-advocates intend this SOPA provision to apply in a nefarious (or ridiculous) way. Ascribing ill-motives to your opponents is not helpful when trying to resolve things in way that's acceptable to both sides. . .)

I actually think the opposite is true. I think, "what is the worst they can do with this law?" That's what has to be acceptable to me. Because there are a lot of "theys," and somewhere somebody is going to get the idea that the law can be applied in a new way because of the way it is written. I vaguely recall a Supreme Court decision in the '90s (or was it the '80s?) that pissed a lot of people off. They interpreted the law as it was written, not as most people thought it was intended. Their answer was (Scalia or somebody) "we need to write a new law." I wish I could recall more.

The good lawyers I know are quite articulate and are capable of making themselves quite clear. As you indicate, the law on its best day is fraught with multiple interpretations simply because as a whole it's a complex system of many interacting parts. But each part we add should be as clear as possible. I see passing a law with terms ill-defined as, frankly, malpractice.

And Turar rephrased it as he interpreted it, yes. My point is the original should have been phrased like that if that is what they meant. It's not beyond the authors' capabilities. In short, I expect them to do the best they can. When I see something like this, I don't think they are doing their best and they should be made to do it again.

But tell me, how would it have helped you if you yourself were absolutely certain (and correct) that Apple was misapplying its TOS and was in breach of contract?

Corporations can be fined for misbehaving. If it was illegal for them to do so, then they could be stopped. I agree with you, and that's one of my issues: there's nothing reasonable to do on small issues that few people care about. Thus a few of us get screwed. Unfortunately, this eventually leads to regulations, about which everybody (including me) whines, because they will be slopilly-worded and we'll all wonder whether or not we're complying and ...[spend too much time on HN arguing about it :-) ] ....

And, yes, I did pick up that you don't defend SOPA as written, but rather we are off on a related (but different) subject. As they say, "meta."
Show HN: codecloud.io, a NodeJS+SQLite back-end for your mobile app
Am I correct in my understanding of these types?

Vect a n = vector of a with known length n
(n ** Vect a n) = vector of a with unknown length n

When I think of it this way it's obvious why filter takes a Vect and returns a pair. Though it seems ugly to have to write each vector function to take both "static" and "dynamic" vectors.
Pirate Bay Message to the Netherlands
Try to access thepiratebay.org from the Netherlands and this is what you get.
So one book, for 1,000 students, would be 1/5 the cost of the iPads. That's one book.

Try four or five books, and you're close to the cost of an iPad.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't think you should have to sign-in to do the practices.
So "most of the world" is China and some muslim countries? I'm pretty sure Canada, India, most of Africa and pretty much all of Europe have neither state-controlled media nor an internet firewall.

Of course, I do agree that people need to know about and boycott such regimes as much as they can.
Good for those guys for living the dream. Too bad that dream didn't also result in job creation in Vancouver, Canada.

There is quite a bit of noise in media about the economic benefits of investing in foreign entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, it strikes me that these guys chose the quick win and we will now see those economics benefits move south of the Canadian border.
The rise of the printing press lead to the decline of scribes and handwritten books. Illumination, for the most part, is a lost art.

The rise of gun-based warfare lead to the decline of sword-making in Japan. It never recovered.

The movement from an oral society, where stories were passed down by story-telling, to a written society in ancient Greece, lead to the decline of the art of story-telling.

Disruptive technological advancement can, and has historically, lead to the loss of an artform, even while granting numerous additional benefits. The decline of an art is sad - it is a loss of a form of expression we once had.

I love my Kindle, but I also love old leather-bound books. The subtle creases and variation that marks some of my old books as unique and the sentiments/bond created by handling a physical object cannot be replicated by my Kindle, and I recognize that even while choosing to use my Kindle for convenience for most reading.

Even small things like some books are designed around the structure and material, with pages or patterns that are dependent on having two sides you can view in parallel, are a huge difference.

It's a new media that, if it does replace the old for the most part, will result in a small loss. There are benefits (such as hyperlinks) but there is still a cost that should be acknowledged.
As an employee, you have no basis for understanding the perceived loss that piracy incurs- you are paid 100% what you agreed upon for your creative efforts. Someone else is taking the risk and losing the profit. If you went to get your paycheck and found out that it was 40% lower than what you thought, you might feel some of that self-righteous anger that businesses are espousing.

More realistically the worst you will feel is a denied promotion, or lost a job because your company can't realize it's investment in you.

Unless you are directly culpable for the creation and distribution of a product and lose money on it because people won't honor your effort, you don't have a basis for passing judgment based on your personal experience (in other words, you're no expert :) ).
For startup forms, you should probably start here:

http://www.orrick.com/practices/corporate/emergingCompanies/...

For court filings take a look at PlainSite:

http://www.plainsite.org
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Clickable link: http://www.codecloud.io
I like their pants. A little pricey but really great looking.
Ask HN: How to handle being fired from contracted freelance work?
About 6 months ago I started working with a friend (I no longer consider this person a friend) who asked me to build two websites for his law school. Eventually we signed a contract and began work.

As of today, the project has been cancelled/I have been fired because I refused to do an immense amount of non-programming work (100hrs by his measure) that would contribute to the project. For good reason to, by accepting the responsibility for this work I would had jeopardized any chance of successfully completing the projects in time.

Since he's a law student he has threatened me countless times about legal repercussions if I refuse to carry out his requests. And now that I am fired he is asking whether or not I will refund the money paid to me so far voluntarily, or if they need to consider options for involuntary reimbursement.

I'm looking for any guidance I can get with how I should handle this. Thanks in advance.
I doubt many K-12 kids care. And it's not like they get much flexibility in other areas of their educations.

Anyway, now that iPads are usable without iTunes or a computer at all, I don't see how iTunes is relevant.
The loser in bankruptcy is the bank. The etymology of the term comes from "banca rotta" (Italian), meaning to literally break the bench (table) from which an early bank operated.

Technically, bankruptcy is a discharge of debts and financial obligations. If there are funds available, there may be a fractional payment of the nominal value of a debt (what you hear as "pennies on the dollar" in the financial press).

What's also literally happening is that money wealth is being destroyed, insofar as the debts of of debtor are considered assets to the creditor, and that the creditor can make loans on the strength of those assets.

The bank (or other creditor) has to wipe out the loan or lien. Literally, the value of these is reduced or zeroed out.

Debt forgiveness has an ancient tradition. It's part of some of the earliest legal codes (debt sabbaticals would occur every seventh year), and is included in the Catholic version of the Lord's Prayer, though protestants generally exchange "trespasses" for "debts".
“How I Launched My Business” With Tasha Ross of FiddleCakes
How I made $500/month from blog micro-transactions