skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Absolutely. I get really skeeved out when I find books referencing Wikipedia as a source-- which translates in my head to "some random guy on the Internet said...."
Looks great but does anyone else think the price is a bit expensive? Not that this is a great comparison, but I can buy a netbook for $299 or less these days.

Why such a up-front hardware cost when Amazon will get recurring revenue from Kindle books? Are they taking a loss on the book sales to boost downloads?
A New Take on Incubators
The thing I always wonder about is 'PhD stupidity'. Basically, PhD's usually seem to get a sense of entitlement, which may put them at a disadvantage when entering the real world and leaving the academic world. What the author seems to be misunderstanding, is that employers aren't impressed by a PhD for an entry level job (actually it probably makes them very hesitant). However, the PhD is likely to get trapped into the whole 'I have a PhD so I'm important' mentality that seems to go around, so they never figure out that the PhD is stopping them getting a real job.

I think the other major problem is that people take PhD's that won't help them get a job. I've known forensic scientists who've been stuck in deli counters, because there's only a handful of available jobs in the entire western world. I've known journalist grads who've been flat out rejected because of their degree, because it teaches them poor skills (the main skill desired now is the ability to write with personality, which journalism courses actively discourage).

So I'm sure there's a lot of ways that can contribute to a PhD making you unemployable, however it's probably always down to poor choice or poor judgment.

Personally I'd love to get a PhD in physics out of pure interest. However, the one thing I'd worry about, and I've told to friends going the PhD route, is that taking a PhD keeps you out of the career field for 10+ years. So you have to really evaluate if 10+ years of experience is better for you career wise than a PhD and 0 years experience, because all the fields I'm interested in (career wise, not academically) don't give a damn if you have a PhD, so even though I'd like to have a degree in something I'm not going to waste my time.
It seems as though I hear this "next big thing in news" revelation every 6 months or so. I think we continue to have difficulty imagining the as-yet-unrealized "hyperlocal killer app," or perhaps it will simply turn out to be the right combination of things we already know well, like (micro-) blogging and social networking and web aggregation/filtering.

It's fascinating to watch society struggle with changes in the foundations of media, and what an uncertain and even precarious situation we have right now.
how did you get the certification needed to teach linear algebra?
Ulrich Drepper is a brilliant programmer and an expert on his field, but he cannot work with people. I figure that the former is the only reason why he's still around.
I would say "In truth, SOME can accomplish a heck of a lot with that time and money." I think it really depends on the person, and their experiences up to the end of high school.

Give me that time and money now, and I can hopefully accomplish something useful.

Give me that time and money when I was just out of high school, and chances are very good that it would have gone to waste. I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life (still don't, but a bit less so than back then), I had no idea how to work hard, and only a vague idea of how the world works. Those are things I started to learn in college.

The opportunity cost goes both ways.
http://htmldog.com/ wasn't bad as far as I remember.
Be careful with the books, do not pick "old-style" one, which pays no attention to web standards and semantics. I'd recommend "Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook" by Dan Cederholm (http://astore.amazon.com/simplebits-20/detail/1590593812). Not exactly introductory, but worth reading.
I abandoned PHP about two years back. 8 months ago, after going to a conference and hearing the folks at Flickr talk, specifically Cal Henderson (http://www.krisjordan.com/2008/09/16/cal-henderson-scalable-...) I got re-energized to take another stab at making PHP pleasant to work with.

The results of my last push evolved into a PHP framework: Recess. (http://www.recessframework.org) It's got annotations for a declarative, meta-programming style. It's inherently RESTful (and more fine-grained content negotiation is coming soon). The Models/ORM are lazy so that you can chain together queries that evaluate at the last minute. Recess deploys just fine to commodity $5/mo servers and was designed to be lightweight and fast without giving up object-oriented design (a la Code Igniter).

What I feel gets lost in the "PHP is terrible" literature is a distinction between PHP as a programming language and PHP as a technology / platform. As a programming language, from an academic perspective, PHP is embarrassing. As a technology/platform it's incredibly well suited for web applications because that's exactly its intention. PHP's shared-nothing execution model, simple deployment, efficiency & performance make it a great technology for authoring web applications. Tooling has gotten much better too with Eclipse's PDT & XDebug.

If you're growing tired of PHP and looking for a platform/framework to develop on that is more productive and enjoyable try taking Recess for a spin. For me, at least, it's made PHP fun again: http://www.recessframework.org/
Do we have to call it 'cloud'? Can't we just call it hosting like we used to?

I use linode for hosting, moved from slicehost - cheaper, and more options. Multiple datacenters etc.
Wasn't there some Microsoft thing?
So one of the arguments in that article is, there is no labor shortage because companies get inundated with lots and lots of resumes, but they hire only a very small percentage of those resumes ...

But as anyone who has had to go through those resumes know, the vast majority of the resumes are from people who are totally unqualified for the job .. the fact that employers go through the entire resume pool and are unable to find qualified employees proves the shortage.

And that's just basic qualifications, we aren't even talking about actually knowing how to write good code yet.

p.s. if anyone is looking for a job and is a good java coder with some experience in webapps and GWT, send me a message.
U.S. Cyber Infrastructure Vulnerable to Attacks
Does anyone know of a similar reader at about the same price point which supports annotation of the text (for example with a stylus)?
I'm not sure how useful code highlighting would be in 16 shades of grey.
Few Match Google; Does That Make It a Monopoly?
It should. We use Amazon AND AppEngine. AppEngine for e-mails.
UNSW has a brilliant instructor in computer science -- I've watched a bunch of vids by him. Richard Buckland. Explains things really well. I'm doing a higher diploma (software devt)in NUIGalway, Ireland... doing M.Sc. next year. primary degree was in Commerce 10 years ago. go figure.
Twitter Switches From TinyURL To Bit.ly
"A few dozen such accelerators, like Y Combinator, have cropped up this decade. “They deal with somewhat later-stage companies that have established themselves in their markets but simply need to scale up,” Adkins says."

It's hard to imagine getting it wronger. And this woman is
the president of the "National Business Incubation Association?"
Not having a keyboard would make it a pain in the ass to search for content. Amazon is highly vested in making it easy for you to get more content. Yadda yadda, the keyboard aint going anywhere.
Giving a robot its own Facebook profile
"Case Western, is that the "local university" "

No. Wrong side. ;)
Just like with C, there are definitely talented coders out there who can make PHP behave correctly. Sadly, they are a minority. Many of them move on to other languages and frameworks.

What does that mean? I'll take the compliment, but I'm not sure what the difficulty is in making PHP 'behave correctly.'
I think the first reason is probably the most significant. A lot of the other things are just warts and pet peeves, but what really got me down working with PHP professionally was the level of code I had to work with. Not only did I end up having to maintain flaming wreckages of code written by people who couldn't even properly be called amateurs, but after doing it for a couple years I found it very hard to improve my craft by seeking out good code to learn from.

I jumped headlong into Rails 4 years ago after having been enamored with Ruby over Perl for sysadmin type scripting and text-munging. Yeah Ruby has some bad warts too (the runtime!), but the quality of code in the community is an order of magnitude better.
Amazon's near-$500 price tag kills Kindle DX buzz
I often end up at http://www.w3schools.com/ They have some pretty straighforward examples to get you started.
How is this question relevant?

Does creating jobs and generating wealth justify being an exploiter and parasite?
This looks like it will be a great product, especially for all the technical pdfs I've built up over the years.

Still not wild about the DRM though -- I made the mistake of buying DRMed music that I can't listen to anymore. I'm not going to do the same with books.

Anyone else trying to justify a $500 pdf reader? :)
oof, good point.
I'm a big fan of PHP for myself. But I've seen enough of PHP script kiddies out there making nearly free (as in beer) websites/webapps. They become a mess in no time.

Mostly hacking phpnuke, joomla or some other messy portals. Hacked sites mostly never get any security updates or any kind. But employers having free work done are ok with this scheme so more and more script kiddies emerge.

Also there is not much thing going on PHP nowadays. Maybe PHP is at peek for it's purpose - doing web apps easy and quickly.
Me neither and there are a few instances where I regret it, but mostly during the time I "should" have been in school I was learning how to run my own company, live and provide for myself, taxes, health care and everything else. I have college educated friends who have gone back to working retail with no savings account because they don't know better. (I yell at them and teach them things from time to time, least I can do when I see friends making mistakes.)

I think in the long run it wont matter what level of education I've "completed", I'm always going to be learning and I'm always going to try to be good at what I do. Taking classes might help me one day, you never know.
What Verna Taught Me
Not that this is a great comparison, but I can buy a netbook for $299 or less these days.

It's expensive, but it may still be a good value. For example, an iPod costs more than a netbook too.
In what topic?
I've met A-list CS theory folks who wind up getting that only around mid career!
The e-ink screen is the major cost component.
> After all, they only have 16m people on a tiny piece of land.

Do you think that matters? I feel no more connected to people living 100 km away than people living 300 km away.
http://dev.opera.com/articles/wsc/

This is an interesting take on learning things right the first time around (the historyof HTML has been riddled with right and wrong ways to do things).

Since HTML alone doesn't suffice anymore, "Head First HTML, XHTML and CSS" is a pretty good place to get started.

Good Luck!
there is, I would suggest, a difference between complaints and whining.

Whining is only, really, allowed when you pay for a service. Other wise register your complaint calmly and sensibly.

Secondly there is a vast difference between losing some tweets and gmail losing emails or gdocs losing documents. Sure have a bit of a moan: but you can only really viably complain if what is lost has significant value (a point the blog writer makes whe nhe talks about grannies vs. companies losing email).
I wonder how Safari Online would look/work on it. It would be great to have this display in combo with an online bookshelf.
How is this a question?
>>* Perl has support for classes, but you feel like it's a hack every time you write one.

Check out Moose for Perl. Then name an OO system in production that is better.

(-: If you can give an example, I'll immediately buy a book on it. :-)

Edit: Syntax.
Then we'll agree to differ. I think simple, direct and engaging writing is difficult, and coming up with such a range of ideas to exploit is equally difficult. I think in this field Asimov has very, very few peers. I'm not upset that you don't think he was a genius.
I usually use a minimum of 16 for anything that isn't throwaway.
When the first iPod was released, everyone complained it was too expensive ($400), and we all know how that story ended.
Tom Shannon's anti-gravity sculpture [TED Video]
America's Entrepreneurial Health
Be glad.
Tom's sculptures are simply amazing, especially the "Color Compass Atoms" piece.
I've got nothing against PHP, it's just a matter of preference. There are a lot of fantastic apps built using PHP and I use them on a frequent basis. However, if I build something, it's Ruby all the way. I just find it much cleaner and pleasurable to develop with. Looking at PHP makes my eyes hurt now.

The great thing about PHP is that the difficult problems have mostly been worked out. Getting a PHP site up and running and scalable is standard stuff.
This is really cool. I have the Kindle 2 and the PDF conversion on many books is really bad, but especially programming books. However, the Kindle DX looks huge. I'm not sure I could carry that thing around the same way I do the Kindle 2.
Where can those PDFs come from? Can I just send it files from my computer's hard drive and then read them on the Kindle, like an iPod for PDF?
> The Dutch will talk about how they don't think anyone should be without health care, but if they saw someone in need they wouldn't help them.

[citation needed]
Azure.
https://www.microsoft.com/azure/default.mspx

I haven't looked at it in depth so I don't know how it compares to the offerings listed above. My guess is that it's closer to AppEngine - you write to the MS stack and deploy on their infrastructure, the details of that infrastructure are opaque to you.
It has a USB 2.0 port.
Am I tired, or was that comment nothing but ad hominem?

That was kind of the point. I was trying to be classy, like you.

Perhaps you should take the high road next time and assume that I am just stating my own opinions, not trying to argue with anybody.

I didn't mean to start an argument, I was just responding to your post. You said that a degree in computer science adds nothing to how someone develops software. I replied that this seems false, gave my reasons why, and asked if anyone had evidence to the contrary. You took offense and started flaming.

[yadda yadda yadda ... you insulted my argument then said a bunch of other irrelevant stuff ... yadda yadda yadda]

My argument was short because what you said is prima facie false: you more or less said that years of training in software development adds nothing to one's software development skill set. It doesn't take much to rebut that.

The rest of what you said was all well and good, but you're now attacking a strawman. We're not talking about a cost-benefit analysis of going to college, so your points aren't really germane here. We're talking about your claim that college adds nothing, which you still haven't backed up ... probably because it's a completely untenable position. Four years of anything will add something to your skill set.

But flame on ... I'm done with the thread.
You get a kindle email address. You email PDFs to it and they automagically appear on your device. Although this costs $0.10 a pdf. You can also plug it in and it opens as a flash drive, then you just drag and drop. (In the case of the Kindle 2 you also have to convert to the right format, DX sounds like it will be easier)
Nothing means you cannot complain.
Languages are like tools: buying a the best set you can afford is the best possible start to a project. PHP doesn't cause SQL injection flaws, but it doesn't make it any easier. How many escape functions are there ? Shall we count them ?

----------

mysql_escape_string() - Escapes a string for use in a mysql_query

mysql_real_escape_string() - Escapes special characters in a string for use in a SQL statement

mysqli_real_escape_string() - Escapes special characters in a string for use in a SQL statement, taking into account the current charset of the connection

addslashes() - Quote string with slashes

stripslashes() - Un-quotes a quoted string

The magic_quotes_gpc directive

The magic_quotes_runtime directive

stripcslashes() - Un-quote string quoted with addcslashes

stripslashes() - Un-quotes a quoted string

addcslashes() - Quote string with slashes in a C style

htmlspecialchars() - Convert special characters to HTML entities

quotemeta() - Quote meta characters

get_magic_quotes_gpc() - Gets the current configuration setting of magic quotes gpc

----------------

I especially love the contrast between "mysql_escape_string" and "mysql_real_escape_string," since the first one is fake in a magical, side-effect-laden way.
You assume that certification needs to fall within a particular discipline. And you have probably also assumed that "college" is at least approximately equal to "university", which is not the case in Ontario, Canada. What was required was a Teacher of Adults certificate and demonstrated competence. Short of posting my entire resume, I'll just say that there are areas of military avionics that require a little more than the mere ability to use an oscilloscope, and that I had had teaching experience in the interim period.
Another fake meme: Van Gogh apparently didn't cut off his ear
Don't be that sure, I can envision a version with a single button activating the voice recognition software that will allow you to download whatever you want.
With the first kindle that was very difficult unless you had a US credit card with a US address.
Creative minds: the links between mental illness and creativity
Master's.
If you can develop as quickly in PHP as you can with RoR, then you are not using RoR to it's full potential.
No, I already mentioned that some place else. If you want to get interesting take a look at how unique IDs are generated.

They rely on the Scheme random number generator which is seeded using the milliseconds of Unix epoch. Since PG regularly restarts the server it should be possible to get a window of time in which to test a succession of random number seeds. If you could hang around until the server was dead (say test every few seconds), then login and obtain a cookie you'd have enough to do a prediction of the server seed. You could then run the random number generator forward predicting cookie values and then run them by the server to see which ones are valid.

As people log in you'd be able to impersonate them. Assuming that an admin logged in while you were testing you'd be able to impersonate an administrator and have some fun on the site.
Interesting, I see those entries... I had been looking at this :

http://www.slicehost.com/articles/2008/3/26/announcing-the-s...

". Please note that the current iteration allows access to DNS only."

I guess they had another iteration since then, thanks for the info!
Web 2.0 Publishing and Happy 1.0, Computing Now
The problem here is that nobody can release a similar device and get adoption because they don't have the content. Similar to iTunes and the iPod. I'm pretty sure this is going to be a device monopoly.

The only people that could pull off a licensing deal would be Barnes and Noble or Borders and they don't seem to be in a position to do that. At least Apple has the Zune Store as competition (as much as it sucks). Amazon's going to have nothing. Sony can't compete on device technology alone without the ability to get content onto those devices easily.
I've never seen OCaml code before. Can someone explain this part of the code?

(* sorry, can't resist some pattern matching. sweet sickly arcane sugar. *)
let _ =
match Sys.argv with
[| _; q |] -> display (search q)
| _ -> failwith "Usage: twittersearch \"search terms\""
How VC Brad Feld Got the Gist of Gist: Anatomy of a Software Deal
I need to redo my personal site, and this video convinced me to use P2.
Once you see the e-ink screen in person, the $500 price tag just doesn't matter. It's jaw-dropping. It is considerably better than you might imagine.

(I speak from experience with the Sony PRS-505, but it is my understanding that the kindle e-ink is almost identical.)
Everyone in the market for a Louis Vuitton bag is always bummed when they realize they can't afford the $5,000 bag in the window. But once they're in the store, the $500 bag in the back ends up looking like a great deal in comparison.
can it read protected PDFs also? I suppose that i can enter my password with the keyboard.
New Features of C# 4.0
Is WiMAX finally here? WiMAX Comes to Two Dell Laptops in the United States
Major movie studio starts targeting file sharers, wants 1000 bucks for each movie
More importantly than how much it costs is how it represents itself. If a service specifically tells you that from time to time you can expect a few hiccups, you can't complain, paid or not. If Gmail were to announce that it had developed the perfect spam filter, and people switched to it for that very reason, they would have every right to complain if it didn't work.
True Entrepreneurs
It does mean you can't complain (or risk sounding like a whiny teenager)
It doesn't mean you can't offer constructive criticism or take your business elsewhere.
I prefer linode over slicehost because they let me run 32 bit systems as well as 64 bit ones.
This type of circular reference has happened before: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090211/1249253735.shtml
M.S. Software Engineering. It was fun and definitely worth it. Having an undergrad in EE, I learned a lot and it prepared me for my current Technical Lead position very well.
Glad there's an option for us high school drop outs :)
I don't think this is a great comparison. iPods were going up against portable CD players and hard-to-use/lower capacity mp3 players. And, people could convert their CD collections for nothing or buy a single song at a time.

If you were a student (or if you are a student) would you buy a $500 Kindle to read textbooks, plus a lot more to download digital versions of the texts? Unless there's a slam-dunk cost benefit that students can see, I don't think this is going to make a huge impact on the textbook market at this price point.

As for magazines and newspapers, I don't think most people can justify a $500 expense to read magazines and papers that they can get for much cheaper in print or free on the Web. I subscribe to the WSJ for $90 a year and read the NYT for free on my iPod Touch and Web browser. Even if the NYT started charging $50 for the Touch and Web versions, it would still be just a fraction of the investment required for reading it on the Kindle.
http://osvdb.org/search?request=PHP

http://osvdb.org/search?request=Python

http://osvdb.org/search?request=Perl

http://osvdb.org/search?request=Ruby

"One of these things, is not like the others, one of these things is not the same..."

No, there's nothing "mythical" about bad PHP security. At the point where there is a two order-of-magnitude difference between PHP and Python/Perl/Ruby, I stop even really caring about the "why". PHP may be popular, but it's not that much more popular. (And even if you want to say that PHP is two orders of magnitude more popular, well, not all Python/Perl/Ruby vulns are web-related, either.)
they could always go with a virtual keyboard now that the refresh times of the screen are getting better.
Kindle Books Now 35% Of Sales When Kindle Version Available
Agreed, but then they could have been putting their efforts into fixing both of those problems, rather than playing the blame game. That may have been too little too late, though. It takes quite a bit of effort and time to overcome the reputation you get when you provide bad service and crappy products, even if you're really aggressive about fixing both of those flaws.