skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My 12 year old niece has one. She uses it for school and absolutely loves it. A normal laptop would have been too heavy for her to carry around all day, and the netbook's keyboard is a better size for her.

I would love to have one myself for travelling. I don't code much when I'm travelling, and it's plenty big for general web surfing.
""It can be dangerous and it's definitely exciting," said McIlvaine, who had served as a sergeant in U.S. Air Force and started his retail career in security. "Your adrenaline is flowing as you are checking the house. You don't know what to expect."

Once the home is vacated and the locks are changed, McIlvaine can spend thousands of dollars cleaning it up. He leaves it to the sheriff to dispose of what's deemed the homeowner's personal property, while hiring contractors to haul out the trash. He never ever opens the refrigerator, a lesson he learned the hard way after looking in a freezer filled with rotten fish."

http://money.cnn.com/2008/06/11/news/economy/mcilvaine/?post...
I guess that's the luxury of being a shop that builds software vs. a shop that builds open source ORMs. We can target a single DB and technology, and not need to cater to thousands of angry devs with different naming conventions and religious views as to the virtues of Postgre vs MySql.

Wrapping a relational database with an object layer is really a simple, straightforward problem. It surprising that so many smart people feel compelled to spend so much time and effort engineering overly complex solutions to it.
as long as you don't run anything ghs.google.com - one of our startups just found out that Google is being blocked in certain parts of China :(
Whats the problem? pigz works as advertised for me. Almost a 4x speed increase on a 4 core system, assuming your storage I/O can keep up.
$100k/year?! I thought even the expensive ones maxed out around $50k/year?
People like this organization:
http://www.chitowndailynews.org/
or come to the Philippines - most of the Filipinos are English speaking. Mor.ph is based here (they are trying to get some market share from Heroku - sorry pg) - you can incorporate in Hong Kong a pvt ltd to fast-track your corporate entity and have access to the a big pool of I.T. talent :)
I own one, MSI u100 series.

I had been looking at laptops for awhile, and after a lot of discussions my older brother and I decided that the netbook was the way to go. It's cheap, portable, and can handle whatever I throw at it. Sure, I can't play game after game on it, but I can play the basics.

I also use it as my work computer. (Mainly school). Mostly reports and stuff, but I like to fool around with photoshop and stuff.

All in all, the netbook is a solid choice for the middle to lower class. Not all of us can afford an apple device, as they can be pretty pricey. More and more netbooks are coming out that are just as good as the lower end Dell laptops that your grandparents/parents buy in the attempt to show that they are "hip".
Me too. I'd have found a way to make it cheaper. I'd already figure out how to network and how to leverage it to make it work for me and yet, I subsidized their game for longer because I wanted access to a school with small classes and personal relationships with profs.

All of that is pretty overrated, teaching quality on margin is worse and unless it's a Top 100 school, you're basically wasting time. And even if it is, you're still probably wasting a good deal of money.

Should've just left the military, gone to community college and taken a scholarship to keep as cheap as I could've. Oh well, now I know.
Finding Revenue In Retention
I'd be interested in knowing more about why it's unpopular. I'm a fan of mmap() because I like the way it can simplify my code, and so far I've been pleased with the speed as well. But if there are subtle downsides I'd love to be aware of them. My instinct was that mmap() isn't used much because it's relatively new, and because it's traditionally had poor support on Windows.

I'm primarily a Linux user, but the best discussion I was able to find with a quick search was this exchange on freebsd-questions from several years ago:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2004-Ju...

Do you have know of any updated articles about it's performance tradeoffs?
Hacker House is looking for another roommate
Pain?
>the scaling is the hard part, not the starting

The scaling isn't the hard part when you have some cash to hire ex-Facebook, ex-MySpace, ex-<insert large website here> employees.
I love this concept! I was just using the default firefox page, but now this is my homepage.
If you line up devices starting with a big desktop PC on one side and simple mobile phone on the other end, there's a gap today between netbook and smart phone. I wonder if something like this is the thing that will fill the void. Imagine adding a WAN dongle and a Bluetooth headset to this. With Skype, it's half phone/half PC.

Writing this post got me thinking about something. It would be cool to be able to carry this in my backpack in the "on" state and get notifications about important events via smaller, wristwatch-like devices. Imagine your watch vibrating when you get a call and showing you caller ID info or text messages popping up on it.

There are certainly downsides compared to the iPhone or what I hope the first really nice Android device will be. However, I find these too small for "real" work so I have to carry a laptop around anyway. A hybrid could be both to some portion of the population.
Paul Krugman: Revenge of the Glut
Tap Tap Revenge 2 Lands Tonight
I will always hand it to Obama, his team understands the Internet. I do find it funny however that people think because Obama is great at the Internet that the whole Democratic party is good at the Internet.

We are working on a new web app that deals with politics. And in the last few weeks I have been to every member of the congress and senates websites. And I can say without question, they are all equally pathetic at using the Internet. It is just because Obama is the only mainstream (minus Ron Paul who isn't quite mainstream) politician that gets the Internet that people think democrats are so much better at it.
Nielsen readily admits that the usability of his site is bad, but it is distinctive looking.
I worked on an e-learning app for a while, and may return to it after some time. Here is what I've learned: if you really want to create a killer e-learning app, you have to approach it from the UI point of view: make it really really really easy to teach and to learn. That, imho, is the biggest roadblock to an explosion of innovation in the education space. Once you have that, you can scrape open education content into your app, open it up to users, and they'll take it from there. Feel free to contact me if you want to chat more.
Try skyline (Rte 35) above Woodside (take Rte 84, Woodside Rd to get there). It's very family friendly., more like a small town than traditional suburbia. Going home seems like going to a national park. Schools are Portola Valley and Woodside, among the best in CA. Hundreds of miles of trails a step from your back door. I raised my kids there.
I think they think it's going to come back within a year or two or five at most.

I think they are being delusional. For the next twenty years, minimum, bankers in general and investment bankers in particular should come to expect that if anybody's making lots of money, they're going to get scrutinized. Not just by the government and not just by the people, but by the banks themselves. The banks have seen what happens when you pay too much money to those people, and while the upper echelon shall always be handsomely paid, I think the rank and file are going to see a severe and long-term pay cut.

At this point, you tell an investment bank that if they don't pay a lot they aren't going to get the smartest possible people and the reaction is likely to be "Thank god! At least when they make mistakes they won't make really smart mistakes! Those are the worst." Why should they pay someone five million to destroy the company when they can find people for $200,000 who will do quite adequately? (Recall that "beating the market" is very hard and that an index fund is generally an astonishingly good investment, all things considered.)

It will come back, though. It will come back when those who remember how we got here are flushed out of the system and the people of 2040 or 2050 make the same damn mistake and fall into the credit bubble trap again, as the balance of the workforce tilts away from those who are at least 20 today. But that's probably not soon enough for the students of today.
The Ultimate Problem Solving Flowchart
Only if they don't think about it too much, I'm amazed people find this selfish drivel so influential.
Check out these guys: http://www.chitowndailynews.org/
I cannot believe they have to archive every change. My understanding of FOIA was that interim and draft documents did not have to be retained. Maybe that was just for Illinois FOIA.
I develop Mac software for free and release the source under GPL. The two ideas aren't completely incompatible (though one is perhaps more likely to find shareware than freeware on the Mac, and shareware isn't typically open-sourced).

It's more a question of how "pure" your environment is. Yes, technically, if Apple decided to radically change something about my system, there is a chance I may not be able to access some application or data after an upgrade (once it's "closed"). But it would also be extremely stupid of them to alienate their customer base in such a way. So for all practical purposes, there is no real risk. And I am willing to accept that minimal risk.

It also helps that the company has decided not to make complete garbage, and actually makes a useful product. In such a case, why shouldn't it have my money?
About Language. Part of the population speaks basic English so getting around at first is not that hard. This is more so in business and of course tourism. We are a country of immigrants, so people are very friendly and welcoming to foreigners. Your basic Spanish can ramp up in a couple of months if you take basic lessons. If you are really on a shoestring you can always place an ad offering "my English for your Castellano, conversation" ad on some hostel or hotel or just go to a pub! (this is trivial, everybody would like freebie conversation, this is a classic way for hooking up, too :) (BTW: the language is called Castellano, like the language you speak isn't called British but English; but it's the same thing.)

There are no safe parts of the country as a whole, it depends on the citi or town you pick. The largest city, Buenos Aires, 13 million, is mostly OK if you follow some basic rules (e.g. don't carry expensive watches or too much money, and stay in nice parts of the city.) If you have a big budget, you can live in isolation within the very expensive neighborhoods. But beware, it can get as fancy as you can imagine and your expenses get to Manhattan-life level. There are many areas in this city.

About security outside Buenos Aires, security is mostly very good. There are a few exceptions and again, in large cities you are OK as long as you stay within OK areas.

And even in the not that common case of mugging, say you leave a house party at a friend's place, it goes like this: "give me your money", "here you go", you give them your wallet with $200 and the guy leaves. You lost u$d 57, big deal, yawn. Just always carry something over 50 so they take it and leave.

Argentina is the 8th largest country in the world with an extremely varied geography. Have a look in Wikipedia. There is mountain, sea, jungle, prairie, desert, you name it. :) My advice is don't plan settling before checking out the options. ADSL 3Mbit is available on most big cities for $40-$70. The quality of the connection varies significantly.

Budget varies a lot. Touristy prices are crazy high, don't fall into that. Temporary rent is also 50% more expensive. In BA an OK-good flat with 1 bedroom will go for u$d 350-500/mo and u$d 70-100 more for bills. In other towns you can get a beautiful house for that money. It all depends. Transport is cheap, just try to have always coins with you (trust me on this one.) Groceries depend on how fancy you live, for my spartan lifestyle is about u$d 55-80/week. Clothes and shoes are somewhat expensive, bring them. Same for skiing equipment and stuff like that. Computer hardware is mostly cheap, fancy things are a bit more expensive, like laptops.

Something important: Don't use your foreign credit card. If you plan to stay, get a basic account with debit card (also, payments with local debit card get 4%+ refund from taxes.)

And don't get too literal on statistics, in particular of the CIA "Factbook." For example, they say it is an "intermediate" chance of getting disease here. This is only applicable for people who come already in extreme poverty.

For more info drop me an email.
I am Fairly Confident TechCrunch is Raising Capital Right Now
Trust me, there's no shortage of entrepreneurialism in China.

Insert something about sufficient sample size and selection bias here. Is there something hard wired in Americans' (specifically white Americans') brains that assume that anything they read about a few Chinese people automatically apply to the entire country?
This is exactly what I've wanted for quite some time! Previous attempts at getting it have included a Gateway Handbook 486 (which got 10 hours on 4 AAs, but had an atrocious LCD), and the OLPC XO-1. When the OMAP3 started shipping I wondered how long it would be before someone made a netbook with one -- it takes balls most people don't have to ship a non-x86 computer. This one hits it out of the park!

There are some unanswered questions:

* What's the ratio of battery capacity screen:keyboard?
* What voltage/amperage is used for the charger? (how big is it?)
* How fast can it read from the MicroSD and USB2?

My only gripes with it that I can see are:

* The mediocre keyboard layout (the lower-right corner, as always)
* Using MicroSD instead of plain
* Not having a Mini-PCI-E Flash slot in the internal space (could share with one of the USB ports)
* Only 256mb of RAM (really gimps web-browsing)
* It's a bit thick with the keyboard (though it's worth it for the battery)
While the iPhone is ringing, if you tap the power button twice quickly, it will send the caller to voicemail. A single tap will silence the ring. I thought most iPhone users googled lists of iPhone tips and tricks.
High-tech immigrants leaving the U.S.
Well, I work at a shop that builds software, but it's installed enterprise software, which means we don't fully control the deployment platform and have to support multiple databases. Control of the deployment model is definitely a huge, huge plus of a SaaS model, but the economics don't really work out for that in our industry. We also happen to write our own (currently closed-source) ORM framework to build on top of. One of the nice things about building our own framework is that we only have to deal with the complexities that we care about (i.e. our sort of performance requirements, our sort of object graphs, the databases our customers need).

The problem with pretty much any kind of framework, ORM or not, is that eventually it becomes bloated by being flexible enough to meet the requirements of thousands of different developers, meaning that any given one of them only ever uses a small percentage of the overall functional footprint. Keeping things simple yet powerful is definitely the hardest part about it all, especially given that different users have vastly different opinions about what's simple or what power they need.
With the e-mail functionality so well done, mms seems a little redundant. I would call it ahead of its time for dropping mms. However... I will say the way it handles it is annoying... You have to log in to some site to view it? Why not just convert it to an e-mail?
Expect the valuable materials to be gone. For example, http://www.michronicleonline.com/articlelive/articles/2440/1... .
I only have 10 years SV on my back, but here are some points I have observed. SF as mentioned is not a place you want to have your children to go public school. I was told that schooling is not necessarily assigned to your local area and you can end up sending your child to school by bus, which I think is not such a good idea.
My home is in Redwood Shores and Peninsula overall is a good place to be (except East Palo Alto) with children, many good schools. Most cities on the west side along the foot of the Mountains are prime locations like Los Altos, Saratoga, Los Gatos, Woodside, but for sure not cheap. There are a couple of cities very desirable for families, because of the good schooling like Cupertino, Fremont Mission, Foster City.
You will find many good places to raise your children, but for SV has a steep price tag. Personally despite living at a nice with highly rated schools I still ended up enrolling my daughters into private school, which tells a lot about California and the broken education system. Good Luck
A lot of the stuff in an OS X install is open source.
I totally forgot about Skittles before I saw this, I went to the store today and bought some. They are still awesome and taste like floor wax.
CPI-adjusted Dow Jones Industrial Average predictions:

http://itulip.com/forums/showthread.php?p=80503#post80503

iTulip has been very successful in its forecasts so far:

http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthread.php?p=39099#poststop
I don't think Krugman's conclusion that a savings glut is the problem is explicit enough. It's that so much of the savings was lent for consumption expenses, not investment in capital. This effectively localized the consumption in a relatively small population, which couldn't really consume as much as they were allowed to leverage, leading to inflation in pricing of the goods they were consuming (houses in this case). If the same savings had been consumed locally rather than given for consumption elsewhere, the total consumption would have been spread out enough to avoid the inflationary effects that blew up the bubble.
How much RAM?

256mb - Gizmodo

What's the ratio of battery capacity screen:keyboard?

"Standalone touchscreen should last between 3 and 5 hours. With the keyboard attached, the system should last between 10 and 15 hours." - their FAQ

How fast can it read from the MicroSD and USB2?

Faster than I can.
http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/faqs.htm

The FAQ made me grin with regards to OS:

...This enables to install many OSes on the device, including Google Android, Ubuntu, Angstrom, and Windows CE, though we would not recommend the latter. You are free to do whatever you want.
Before switching to a Mac, I was a Linux user for years and years.

I use a Mac simply because I feel OS X is the better operating system. Linux has made strides on the desktop but when push comes to shove, it's just not "there" yet. I'm sure I'm going to be downmodded for saying that, but I really feel it's the truth. Desktop Linux is unstable. While it doesn't crash often, it does sometimes, and I feel that one crash is too many. Multiple displays are wonky. Flash still doesn't work properly. Etc. Etc.

I use OS X because it has the UNIX underpinnings I need to do my job with the stable desktop and cohesive UI that I feel Linux is missing.

Unlike many Linux zealots, I don't feel that there is anything "wrong" with closed-source software. I didn't use Linux for years because it was free as in beer or free as in freedom. I used it because I thought it was the better tool.

And that's why I use a Mac.

Here is my biggest concern though: Apple is an evil, proprietary company. In my opinion, worse than Microsoft. If you use OS X, you are legally locked in to Apple hardware. You cannot legally run OS X on anything but Apple-bought-and-branded computers. At least, with Windows, I have the freedom to install the software on any bloody hardware I want. Yeah yeah, you can Hackintosh or whatever, but it goes against Apple's EULA.

Just because Apple releases parts of OS X under open source licenses, doesn't mean OS X isn't completely proprietary. You can only run it on what Apple lets you run it on. If you need to upgrade your workstation(s) and want to stick with OS X, you are completely at mercy to Apple's products and prices.

In the end, I suck it up. Hopefully one day this will change, but right now OS X is a pleasure to use, and that outweighs the dislike I have with the license.
It's all about your priorities...but I'm surprised that you think switching to Linux will make you less productive (at least you've qualified it with, "for a while"). People who uses computers a lot, as I presume you are, can generally be more productive on a Linux system...it's just dramatically more flexible, and so it can be tuned to suit your requirements in ways that Windows and Mac OS X cannot. I'm completely useless on a Windows or Mac machine...not because I don't know how they work and all the things I need to do to make them more useful (like installing vim, Cygwin, and PuTTY on Windows immediately), but because they are just less friendly to software development work. Package management is also a joke on Windows and Mac OS X...every time I have to install a new piece of software it makes me want to stab someones eyes out. There's sort of a belief that Windows has more software than Linux...but, to me, it always feels like it has dramatically less, because the base system is so limited. A stock Linux system has tons of software, and hundreds or thousands of more apps are a single command away. Mac and Windows are simply anemic by comparison, and you have to hit the web to find additional stuff and install it using whatever archaic process the developer opted to use.

Anyway, back to the point, if you believe Open Source is a good thing for the world, then using more of it, supporting more of it, and building more of it, should be among your goals in life. I happen to believe that, so those are among my goals each day. However, they aren't my only goals, and I don't think they necessarily need to be your only goals. I also have to make a living, so I work on some small bits of proprietary software that coexists with the Open Source software I work on. I also have to have some fun, so I have a Nintendo Wii running all proprietary non-Open Source software. I have to test my commercial products on Internet Explorer and Safari, so I have a dual booting system that can boot Windows for running IE and Safari. When I built an HTPC, I used Windows Vista, because there are no Blu Ray player software products for Linux (and there may never be an Open Source Blu Ray player). I'm less extreme than I once was; there was a time when I had no proprietary software in my life, and it worked fine for me at that time.

But, I take satisfaction in taking part in the Open Source community. I wouldn't find using a Mac or a Windows machine as my primary system as satisfying. Some folks have other priorities. UI and hardware beauty, as found in Apple products, are important to a lot of people, and they are willing to accept the higher cost and the legal restrictions that come with it. I find Open Source and freedom dramatically more beautiful than the restrictive and infantilizing Mac experience, but I'm probably wired up funny. Using a Mac makes me angry, while most people seem to find it peaceful, or something.
Why is it be surprising? We just witnessed these banks lose hundreds of BILLIONS of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars of shareholder wealth, probably hundreds of billions of dollars of bondholder wealth... and bonuses fell by half. With incentives like that, anybody would be a fool not to at least consider it.

Edit: and while I hope so, and we'll deserve what we get if we don't take action, it's actually not at all clear that the finance industry will be massively regulated after this, at least not in the right way. Many congresspeople are a combination of incompetent and outright owned by the finance companies and people.