skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Disagreement isn't being a dick. And I agree more with you that Doctorow, I have cases and cases of books (my back remembers this every time I have to move). But I, and I may have misread Doctorow's article, take it that his point wasn't that "the screen" (phones, e-readers, laptops, etc.) is a good device to read things from but that it is good enough.

I think of this as similar to the comparison between a live concert, a CD and an MP3. The concert is the one that really moves me, that's the one that makes me want to get up and dance or at least tap my feet. A good band vibrates my guts just as well as I hear them.

A CD is nothing like that experience, it's flat by comparison, the tones aren't as low or as high and I can't feel the music thump in my stomach like I can at a concert. But at the end of a great show, I'll plunk down $10 so that I can hear a really great band again.

Now an MP3 is even more flattened, I don't know what the science is but I think that on a lot of rips I can hear some sort of difference from the CD. There are parts that don't feel as crisp, etc. But MP3s, (and by this I mean "compressed digital music files") are doing really well out there. Apple sells a lot of them. In other words they seem "good enough". Or it may just be that when people evaluate different formats, concert, CD or MP3 they choose the most portable one and don't care as much about the quality.

That's what I was trying to cite, without judgment, that it seems people will sacrifice a lot of quality for a gain in some other area. I don't see why it would be different with books.

I remember reading a book ("Scrolling Forward" by David M. Levy, Arcade Pub., New York, 1st ed.) the author was an alum of Xerox PARC; he had written his thesis on one of the first WYSIWYG word processor typing systems, an early machine with a mouse. After this experience he went off to learn the very analog art of calligraphy. He felt that he had lost his connection with the feel of the page and the art of writing, he also wrote this whole book about what "document" means in the digital age. I mean to say that there may also be a more expanded notion of what reading and novel mean in the future. Or maybe not.
But would that be the right architecture? I think it would be better to POST some more abstract XML data to GAE-side code, which is then closely tied to the data structures. That way I can test and evlve two parts of the big app independently.
How many times to the daily fluctuations of wall street affect the rate of inflation or an average person's life?

I believe there's been at least one major stock market crash that has not led to a recession.
>> The remote API abstracts that away so you can write scripts as if you were operating locally without those limitations.

But you still have to write the code assuming it can be interrupted by network going down etc. Once you do that, you might as well run it next to the data, no?

I can see the CPU-intensive argument, but this is less important now given relaxation of CPU rules.

Also, consider this paper by Jim Gray: http://dslab.epfl.ch/courses/pods/fall06/readings/gray-econo... where he concludes from economics point of view: Put the computation near the data. The recurrent theme of this analysis is that "On Demand" computing is only economical for very CPU-intensive (100,000 instructions per byte or a CPU-day per gigabyte of network traffic) applications.
Cycling Enters the Electronic Age With a New Gear-Shifting System
"Things have become so cut throat, that even Twitter is afraid to monetize their monster. That is not natural. People really do need to eat."

I can drink to that.
Apple Wants To Make Jailbreaking Worthy Of Jail Time, $2500 Fine
Mob Wars Creator Puts A Hit Out On Zynga, Sues For Copyright Infringement
It seems like you should be able to quantify defense by keeping track of the points scored by the guy you're covering...

Glad to see my hometown team developing new basketball statistics :-)
It's far less complex than you might think. If China did not buy US debt or other debt then there currency would inflate which would harm their economy in the short term.

Just remember China is not stupid and they feel their long term goals are tied with holding a lot of US debt.

PS: Another advantage is they can avoid military and diplomatic confrontations with the US and the rest of the world without a strong military. Compare the US military budget with the trade imbalance and it's not a bad deal.
Want to try something hard? Voice drawing....
Ah yes, I forgot about sxsw. It looks ... overwhelming
"You're not going to be damaged," he said. "You're going to be enhanced."

That sounds just like a pre-supervillain scenario in just about every superhero movie I've seen.
The action of the electronic system is so effortless that, compared with mechanical levers, it leaves users feeling almost disconnected from the bike.

That seems like it'll be the death of the product for many.
Novell GroupWise warms up to iPhone
How to save the economy: Reverse Inheritence
The substance of his criticism of the Austrian school is in his fifth paragraph. It's not "sneering" or a straw-man attack; it asks a question that (Krugman claims) the Austrian economists' theories can't answer. If you want to defend them, try addressing that question rather than making irrelevant claims for Hayek's brilliance.
<pre> does the formatting, but not the escaping.
Are you, maybe, stretching the definition of entrepreneur too much? If you're building something innovative, but not a business, then you might be a pioneer, a visionary, or a leader. It's not about the money. You can get rich in any one of different ways without being an entrepreneur.

Now, if you're an entrepreneur and a visionary who changes the world, you get double karma.
Fail Whale: How an image went from e-card to Twitter icon.
Awesome. I hope I can sell my company on that.
FORGET cards and flowers, I'm BUILDING a gift. Right now.
I'm not in a startup either, but my thought has always been, you put as much effort in as interests you. The goal is to get an idea good enough to make you want to obsess over it.

I guess my problem is that I keep hoping I'll meet a girl who feels the same way. Every girlfriend I've had has been less intense (I think that's the word I want?), and as a result when I get into these moods where I want to write for 8 hours straight, or code like mad, or whatever, she doesn't understand. And then, in turn, they never have these moments that I do, where you pour yourself into something and suddenly have something magical and your own.

I hope there're girls like that: I've met a few guys like that, but never girls. A guy can dream, I guess.
Atypical for me to like a youtube video posted on a social news site, but the idea, planning, and execution seem flawless -- a true hacker :)

-SI
I've summed up my thoughts in a blog post:
http://blog.obiefernandez.com/content/2009/02/rails-maturity...

Totally backing off the idea of certification, but still think a defined RMM is a good idea.

Cheers,
Obie
That is such a cool idea. Sounds much more fun than renting an apartment. Any other ideas like that ever come up? Is this something common among, say, YC applicants?
But that doesn't account for who else is on the court with you or against you or for when a team plays zone defense.

Also, help defense makes a huge difference - just ask Marcus Camby :).
Tell us how much a cubic mile of water weighs in ounces.
Then get back to us re: the "arbitrary" Metric system.
Markup is still parsed inside a <pre> tag. <xmp> is more like CDATA.
Lets Go Deep - Bargain Basement Ball Players For The 2009 MLB Season
Classically, the definition of entrepreneurs has been the former. People who set out to make companies and get rich. Just try google: define:entrepreneur.

When we use a language, we should respect its definitions or pretty soon people start saying something and meaning something entirely else. Maybe instead of entrepreneur, we need another word like doer...
By "people", do you mean the average Joe or programmers like yourself who take the time to visit sites like HN and posting comments?
Somehow I'm really happy that my ex hometown (Amsterdam) is not on that list because I have a dark brown feeeling it would not come out too well.

The fact that the author puts the differences between the various cities down to law enforcement suggests another take on the matter, a new baseline is needed from places where prostitution is legal.
I will try to use this for some data warehouse-ish stuff. Pull down a large dataset, run some computations, put some new data back.

Also, if you want to use sockets in your GAE app then you could have the socket code live somewhere else (since you can't use sockets on GAE).

Third, backups. Bulkload is great for pushing data to Google, but now we can pull it down for archival.
I'm curious, what can China buy using those dollars? Is there really nothing at all? Someone mentioned buying fortune 500 companies, but I rememember the outcry when an oil company was about to be bought.
Apology for the idea of a Rails Maturity Model
Comparing to http://oursignal.com the NYT version is when engineers tries to copy a designer's work.
Europe's economic slump deeper than expected
I almost got into Hollywood by getting paper, tags, washers, from LA, and printing/binding my script, and sending it from the UK to the screenwriting agent in Los Angeles. They only read properly bound US Letter scripts (with the right WEIGHT of paper). However, I fudged up by saying I had an updated version, he said send a PDF, and he probably binned the old one and forgot about the PDF.
This badly needs to go through the research checklist "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation" by Peter Norvig (director of research at Google).

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
Frank Kern's Mass Control 2.0
Fran kern's new Mass Control 2.0 is on fire with 41202 people in queue to get their hands on Mass control 2.0 .Get special Mass control 2.0 review and bonuses .
Once I started using <label> for all my forms, I became quite keenly aware of others' forms which don't use it. It's extremely convenient.

edit: http://htmldog.com/ has great tutorials on modern and complete form building. It's a fantastic resource.
Many of the abuses in Stallman's tale have been brought to life by textbook publishers.

I have taken a number of classes which used books having an online time-limited, non-transferrable homework supplement.

Anyone who is counting on "the invisible hand of the market" to kill DRM will be in for a rude surprise when they find themselves among one of the captive audiences where it flourishes.
founder?
This sounds like Google Web Toolkit but weaker.
And blatant Vannevar Bush, Xanadu and Ted Nelson references!
Some films by Alain Resnais deserve to be on this list:

Je t'aime, je t'aime: a time machine experiment gone wrong. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063152/

Providence: a story told while it's being written. Sometimes the writer changes his mind, sometimes his imagination takes him where he doesn't want to go. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076574/

Smoking / No Smoking: two films that explore different possible 'forks' of the same story. The first fork is the decision by one character to smoke a cigarette. In the first film she does, in the second she doesn't. There are three or four forks in each film which all completely change the fate of the characters. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108167/

Other films that come to mind:

Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys , by Michael Haneke. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0216625/

Akira has an ending just about as powerful as the ending of 2001. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094625/

Beyond a reasonable doubt (Fritz Lang) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049006/

(but why am I writing this on hacker news?)
Vertigo (Hitchcock) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052357/
He thinks that LA differs from Boston b/c of enforcement??? Has he ever been to either city? Boston is overflowing w/ Irish Catholics and LA is overflowing w/ scantily clad starlets.
Apple Being Sued for iPhone Screen Rendering Acceleration
so you do hallmark holidays?
I think one of my undergrad drawing teachers incorporated elements from this book in her lesson plan, but I've never read it myself.

It strikes me that different people need different approaches to learn how to make the mental shift. The very fact that it's a right-brained thing means it's impossible to give someone a process. You can explain it at a meta-level, but I think the only thing that really produces the desired result is some sort of suggestive technique--like a koan.
> It seems like you should be able to quantify defense by keeping track of the points scored by the guy you're covering...

You'd need to watch deviations from the average points the guy scores. Otherwise whoever is guarding the enemy star player looks bad.
Any suggestions for such a system?
Agreed. Just as with consoles, 'Next Gen' is now current gen, so the quaifier is no longer necessary.
Algorithmic art in Java and Flash
I have a $0.99 app and we built in email support. If a user has a concern or issue they can email me directly.
My favorite Cameron Crazies chant ever: "Whose your Daddy? Battier."
Ugh. It's not as if SCons is a particularly great build tool.
In the chart I linked to, "public debt" is US govt debt. My comment still stands. I won't argue with you that the situation doesn't suck (of course it does), but I will argue that the situation is not dire - the chart I linked to shows that current debt/GDP is around the median since WWII, and it has never been a serious problem before. I will also argue that there is no risk of China taking over the US, at least anytime soon.
The Coming Cloud Computing Wars
Yikes. As someone who bemoaned indexed shifters (in favor of older friction shifters), I think this is a disturbing development.
Amazing!

I've often wondered whether it would be possible to temporarily re-engineer myself into a tool for solving a specific hard problem.

I'm just re-reading On Lisp, and I'm struck by the similarity to the bottom-up programming paradigm. You build the language up to your problem, as well as breaking the problem down to your language.

This reminds me of the Focused in Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky. In that case, they were no better than slaves, but one could imagine voluntary focusing. Like the book's protagonist, I was at once horrified by the conditions of the subjects, but thrilled by the prospect of human automation.
New bike equipment can have a hard time displacing conventional gear. On one hand, a large part of the market seems to be driven by people buying gear for racing* , who can be fanatical about things like shaving a few grams of weight off their bike. Very tough standards. On the other extreme, there are the (admittedly much smaller) touring / commuter cyclists, who tend to prefer stuff that, in a pinch, could be fixed with nothing but zip ties and a multi-tool. Air-less tires and chain-less drivetrains seems to have been reinvented several times, but haven't ever really caught on.

* and people who buy gear marketed to people who race, but that's neither here nor there.
By Michael Lewis.
SXSW was aptly put as 'Spring break for geeks'
I am absolutely serious! Why do you find it depressing? I think it's a celebration of who we are that we're able to give each other what that person really wants.

Valentine's Day should be about love for those around you and she and I love each other. We just shouldn't be married and we're lucky to have figured that out before we began to hate each other.
Sounds like a great idea (and definitely a huge pie), but enterprise sales can be very tricky. Good luck breaking in! May you forever doom the Visual Source Safes and ClearCases of that world to oblivion :-) They truly deserve it.

On the good side, you should be able to price very competitively, and these days, everyone will be looking to cut costs.
This was the key to ending my loneliness years ago. Once I realized that there were great women who were just as alone as I was, I suddenly had motivation to go out and look for them.
Imho, you shouldn't be storing images and sounds on your SCM... that's not really what it's for. We store most of those externally, in a non-version-controlled environment. That really greatly reduces the space requirements (like, by a factor of 20). It also makes it much quicker to clone the repo on a new machine.
I've been interested in this as well. I've joined Plenty Of Fish because it was free and I have nothing to lose (except my dignity maybe?).

I'm a big proponent for joining things outside your comfort zone. Take an internship, join Habitat for Humanity, get into a running club, or do some type of intramural sport...whatever you're interested in. Dating takes a lot of work, and if you expect something to come to you, it probably won't happen. You kinda have to throw yourself into the situation to see some success.
Apple seems to be getting eviler by the day. It's the same kind of attitude they're taking with Palm and the Pre—threatening legal action to scare people away from doing things they really ought to have a right to do. I guess that's what happens when you're at the top of a market.
Linkbait.

Apple wants to retain status quo (which is "may or may not be illegal under DMCA but not decided by court") whereas EFF wants an explicit temporary DMCA exemption.
dude, nothing topped speedo guy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpHB6W_r9ag
I think you don't understand the intent. It's to help you give hints to the rendering engine about where you'd prefer to have line breaks if there needs to be one nearby, so that you can tweak some of your text so it reads better.

I'd be surprised if it broke your layout on a browser (aside from the fact it's not a standardized tag).
Great article. As a basketball player in my youth, I always struggled with the dynamic of selfishness and selflessness inherent in the game and this was best attempt I've seen at explaining it. There really are so many way a player can help his team that do not improve, and even decrease, his stats. The use of statistical methods to identify this, like Moneyball did for baseball, is fascinating.
It's generally a bad idea to give away major plot points of a story without first providing a spoiler warning.
Mashing up the New York Times Best Sellers: ReadingRadar.com
I think the point of the article is that straight statistics like that are not always accurate. For example, what if a player allows the person he is guarding to score more points on average, but during the time is he is on floor, the opposing team tends to score fewer points. This is easily possible if the player is a great help defender who tends to stray from his own man to help his teammates.
Harper's Index on the web
Now if all the Web 2.0 blogs can die along with it we can get some decent tech coverage again.
Abraham Lincoln: A Technology Leader of His Time
Cross-posted from the blog's comments...

OK, let's say I want to change the world and I decide starting a company is the best way to do that. I guess that means I'm not an entrepreneur, huh?

"But the sooner an entrepreneur and young budding CEOs realise that there really is only one metric that counts in this game, the sooner we will get beyond the recent Web 2.0 silliness and thereby give birth to a revitalised start up environment where some truly amazing, long lasting companies will be created."

To the contrary, the Web 2.0 silliness is a result of people thinking like you. Most Web 2.0 companies (reddit, twitter, youtube) are time-wasters. If entrepreneurs were looking to change the world, they'd be working on something real like online education.
Ask YC: Can you control the lizard-spit function?
Underneath your tongue there's a gland (I think) that will occasionally fire a reptile-like spray of saliva. It's happened to most people I've talked to.

Does any of you know what this strange anatomical feature is actually called and/or how to fire it at will?
Read it a few hours ago and really enjoyed it. The recognition of all of these teams that there are ways to build a team beyond the conventional is smart thinking, even if doesn't always result in titles out of the box..
IMVU is 3d avatar chat; it’s also a pride-inducing piece of software engineering.
Twitter as a tool to circumvent NCAA ban on texting prospective student-athletes
Actually, everyone in China does have more and more printed Chinese money. In order to maintain the currency peg, and to actually get the US dollars from the hands of industry into the hands of the government... the Bank of China has to print lots and lots of money.

The entire phenomenon can be thought of as the USA exporting inflation to China.

On a smaller scale, this is actually a good idea. It's known as building a foreign currency reserve. It serves as buffer against inflation. If the Renminbi were to spiral out of control, they could adjust the peg, give US dollars back to the people in exchange for large quantities of Renminbi, and just retire the money. People would keep their holdings denominated in the dollar until things settled down with Renminbi. Every country has foreign currency reserves. In fact, with a stable foreign currency, building a foreign currency reserve is the safest way to inject money into an economy.

Generally, it is thought that Chinese holdings of American debt are far larger than necessary for an effective foreign currency reserve.
One of my artist friends has always told me that 'Drawing is about learning to see.'

I am starting to believe him. Since I do fantasize about being able to pull out a sketchpad in a public park and draw convincingly and/or do caricatures, I've ordered the book. I feel like I can be open to a non-traditional approach.

Just ordered the book along with another book I've always wanted to get 'Impro by Keith Johnstone'
Could you elaborate on its shortcomings?
This so-called spoiler is on the back cover.

The book is full of surprises, of which that's one of the least. Oh, did I say too much?

In any case, I'd be more interested in discussions of my main points.
Old fashioned thinking. Only money counts. I disagree.
He pushed it too hard and didn't realize that by the time it gained traction, the term would be out of vogue. I mean, at least when Pat Riley trademarked three-peat, that could happen again. There won't be another Web 2.0 after this iceberg melts.
They don't want the perfect Pepsi, they want the perfect Pepsence.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spagh...

Seriously, the big name brand companies have done a ton of research on this already - we should learn from them for once.
"Today's data wipes out any illusion that the euro zone is getting off lightly in this global downturn," said Jörg Radeke, an economist at the Center for Economics and Business Research in London.

I thought I saw a thread in just the past day or so here on HN that suggested the European way would be seen as the way to manage economies in the future. I'm not buying.
> New bike equipment can have a hard time displacing conventional gear.

Remember the one-year Japanese BioPace fad that infected Shimano (non-round/oval chainrings that were hard to maintain a steady pedaling cadence with because they weren't round but supposedly were more efficient)? Most Every bike that year (even high-end XT) came with these odd-shaped chainrings. The next year, BioPace was gone.

I still own a BioPace mountain bike - that I keep for sentimental reasons and to look cool (though the bike shop says I'm not the only BioPace'd owner).
Yes, of course, let us in the U.S. keep telling ourselves that China (and Japan) have no other option but to keep extending us ever increasing amounts of debt. Our credit is safe, it is rated AAA, there are no other outlets, a U.S. debt crisis would be a seventeen sigma event, blah blah blah.

It all sounds familiar, somehow.
It's simple: Don't buy an iphone, buy some other phone that does not require jailbreaking and let them stew. If enough people do it then they'll get the message and change their game.