skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"For example, the Kindle lets readers down with respect to one subtle but powerful element of the traditional book’s appeal: its role as an identity marker. Pulling out a particular book on an airline flight or in a doctor’s office can mean staking a claim to being a particular kind of person."
--
That is easily resovalbe. Having a second smaller outside screen (like flip phones do), showing what you are reading :P

But honeslty, if you are judging a person by what they are reading, then you are are bit superficial (you can have smart people, splurging on silly books once and a while).
I think having a kindle right now means a lot more:
You either:

1. Are an avid book reader, so a Kindle is a huge convenience for you (worth the price)

2. Have good money, (or generous parents).

I think the Kindle is expensive, b/c the technology itself is expensive, and it will get cheaper by time. Remember, the first hard drive based MP3 players were even more expensive at the beginning.
And the Kindle is a wireless device. (works everywhere).
Most people it are used to get 99$ or free cellphones, but they forget they are buying a heavy subsidized device which will cost a lot more money down the road with their $60-$90/month service rates.
G.D.P. Seen as Inadequate Measure of Economic Health
> We give them a free plane ride home.

For someone that was brought in to the US and is now at an age to have completed their secondary education home is the United States. No amount of paper waving and applying of the rules is going to change that.

Anyway, I'm wasting my time with this, I only wish that in your life you will never ever come up against a situation where you will be forced to realize just how cruel your stance is.

We're not debating murder here, that's just a straw man. We are not dealing with assault, committed by minors or otherwise.

The subject was immigration, specifically by minors too young to even realize what that means.
Free Weight Loss For Teens - 5 Things Teens Can Do Now to Lose Weight
Remember that Amazon is not infallible. In fact, Amazon has had at least two S3 outages that resulted in permanent data-loss.

Would you put all of your eggs in a bookstore who just recently decided to become an egg storage vendor?
IE7 doesn't wrap the code in the textboxes. It's displayed on a single line making it hard to read.
If you have multiple device, (in the same account), and when you buy a book, all those devices will receive it. So you are your kids can read them at the same time.

Get a family account and login with the kindles on that, so your kids will enjoy your books too. As for more advanced features, it is still a very early market, and features are coming one by one.
Give it time.
Top Open Source Software for Windows, Linux according to Sourceforge | Jeez Tech
To beat the book, to be better than the book, Amazon...

This is a classic case of a solution looking for a problem. I imagine that a Kindle would be a great companion on a plane, a train, or in a backpack, but other than that...

I can't imagine using one of these things at work or at home, where I do 90% of my reading. I love books. I have shevles full of them in my home and office. I love the feel and smell and the little notes I have written in them over the years. I love to see all of them on my shelves or just a few spread out on the bed or table. I love the manual process of leafing through them to scan, to retrieve, or for no reason at all. They are my friends, old and new.

If the purpose of the Kindle was to augment personal reading for travel, then great. But to be "better" than books, never.
I heard this one before, and for all I can tell it's simply not true. What's your setup?

I have tried some simple benchmarks against two apps. One with a single subclass, and another with 3 subclasses. The one with a single subclass used 22M (RSS), the one with 3 subclasses used 23M (RSS).

This was running it with thin. The code is here: http://gist.github.com/187475
"... or pass on to my kids." and "... roughly 75% of the books I read I'll never read again." are mutually exclusive, no?

I read a lot of objections to the Kindle stating that you don't own the books. Personally I read a book once and I'm done with it (unless its a programming/reference book). I assume most people are the same way. So why hoard books if you're not going to read them?

The other thing is that "buying" a book for the Kindle is more akin to "renting" the book. You don't own it, Amazon does. You don't own a DVD you're renting from Blockbuster, or Netflix, but I don't hear people complaining about wasting that money.

I also think that if I'm going to read a book more than once, I'm going to buy a hardback version of it and keep it on my bookshelf. If not, then I'll buy/check-out a paperback book and donate/return it when I'm done reading it.

I think there are really two distinct kinds of books, and critics often confuse the two.

(I don't own a Kindle, but have given some thought to it and read up on people's objections)
Here we go again. Nice to see an old favorite.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=499678

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=457752

... and probably more.
Trollim Lets Coders Battle For Programming Superiority
That intro video on the homepage is so good, it nearly got me excited about American sports!

Very polished.
yes. I understand it is marketing, just as much as having a $25 burger on the menu. The difference is that I don't understand what a $25 burger can honestly signal. Maybe, for the target market, a $25 burger can honestly signal something important, that I just don't understand? Perhaps "we take care to make you feel like you are eating at an expensive restaurant." I can imagine that being important to some people. I'm pretty certain, though, that a $25 burger on my menu would signal something that was very negative to my target market. If nothing else, it would look like a dishonest signal. Because I don't understand what a $25 burger is signaling, I would not follow through on that signal.

I mean, I am trying to signal that I'm one of you. I'm not going to fuck around in an attempt to extract pennies from you. I'd be doing this for free if that didn't carry some serious negative consequences. If you are not a nerd, you have no idea how much many of us hate talking to sales every time we need to buy new equipment or space. Like most marketing signals, if I don't follow through, if this isn't an honest signal, the market would believe me for about five minutes.
My mother tells me that when she was very young she had never seen a black person before as the neighborhood she lived was all white (not segregated, just homogeneous.) She tells me that when her parents decided to move and put their house up for sale a black couple came to take a look at the house. When they drove up, she and her sister we so amazed that they shouted incessantly "Look, Mom, Look! They're black!"much to embarrassment of her parents. She tells me that she doesn't remember making any judgments about the people based on their color, but the remarks were obvious enough to show that yes, kids notice.
I do something similar usually stopping around 45 minutes. I've gone to this method over a couple years of trial and error and it seems to be ideal for me. I have also come across studies which show that people can only focus on something for about 40-50 minutes before losing interest. So a short break is needed after that time period to refresh.

Also I have noticed that I tend to accomplish something worthy (eg. fixing a bug, implementing a small feature) at around the 45 minute point so it is good for motivation as I can take a break knowing I have accomplished something.
i hope prices come down.

I live in SF, which is not cheap at all (second most expensive market in the US), and I think NYC is ridicusly overpriced.
A software engineer in NYC makes less than in SF, yet the cost of living are at least 30% more (rent and groceries, and everything else). and you have to pay a NYC tax also.

No wonder there are no startups in NYC.

The only great sides of NYC, are it's nightlife, and lots of girls (meaning even if you are a dork, you will get laid).
When it comes to dating, SF/Silicon valley, is a dessert in comparison.
Maybe someone who knows more than me about this can tell me: why, on panels of industry experts deconstructing the crisis, do we constantly hear the assertion that nobody saw this coming? And what really confuses me, is why do the experts participating in such panels/media interviews/round tables not challenge that assertion?
I use Sequel when I am doing projects in Sinatra. It's elegant.
GitHub is moving to Rackspace
Also fun: http://dotgov.gov/
"But honeslty, if you are judging a person by what they are reading, then you are are bit superficial"

It's easy to be dismissive of these kinds of social indicators, but they have power and influence, and taking them seriously can help you to understand how to improve the product in question.
I've got a DX and I love it, but I feel extremely silly paying for books on it. Especially when the Kindle book is $9.99 and the paperback is $12.99.
Everyone in one conference room at our client's offices. Much fun.
I'm sure you can make a better book if you try. The Kindle isn't, though. It's just very, very good.

Today I'm buying the new Dan Brown book because it's so convenient to purchase via Kindle. I'd never buy Dan Brown books physically. They're not worth that. But they're incredible thrillers.
How many of those PhDs went to elementary & secondary education in the US?
When all you have is a hammer ...

jQuery is not a good architecture for a full client application. jQuery is meant for flipping some dom attributes here and there. It does a poor job of modeling the UI state. Sinatra is also a poor architecture choice for the client since the client has persistent state.

We already have a well designed client architecture. It's called Cocoa and its implemented in the browser as Cappuccino.
Seinfeld is the 6th highest-earning celebrity in the over-50 set, earning $85 million last year. Like many other top earners, he doesn't just get paid, but was shrewd enough to retain rather than sell his financial interest in the properties he created, so he makes money as both a performer and a producer.

http://www.forbes.com/2009/08/13/top-celebrities-50-business...

His overall net worth is well north of $200m, plus he's about to launch a new series.
7 of the Most Famous Scientologist Couples (& 3 Runners Up)
>But honeslty, if you are judging a person by what they are reading, then you are are bit superficial

Judging a person by the... cover of the book they're reading?
There are other methods of judgment, though. Sometimes the judgment is of the product itself. Nobody who's seen me with a Kindle has gone away thinking anything other than "This is somebody who reads hardcore." They don't get an idea of what I read, same as they don't get an idea of what's on my iPod, but the existence of the product says something in and of itself.

Perhaps being judgmental about books is on the way out. It's happened before. Perhaps there'll be even more emphasis on clothing judgmentalism.
Again you bring up an element - the t-shirt test - which has nothing to do with 6 months olds. There is an enormous developmental and cognitive difference between a 6 month old infant and a four year old child. An infant is extremely observant - this is well-documented - but is not making any judgements about those observations, other than "Am I fed, safe and comfortable". The implication that a six month old is judging others based on race is an astonishing and improbable claim so it's highly significant that that claim is not substantiated by the article. Newsweek was wildly skewing the science to sell magazines.
The Kindle is subsidized. You pay $9.99 every time you buy a book for it.

If I'm going to spend more than $100 on something like this, I really don't want to have to continue to pay to keep it useful. On the other hand, to subsidize the Kindle to the point where they could afford to sell it for $100, they'd have to sell books for a lot more than $10, and (ignoring libraries and used books) a paper back doesn't often cost too much more than $10.
My 3 year-old and 5-year old are around others of different skin colors often and neither have ever asked about skin color or verbalized anything like that. That's because they're not around racists. My wife and I recognize others based on their character not skin color. One friend of theirs is Malcolm, not "the black kid". Another kid is Benjamin, not "the asian kid". If the morons of this world would stop giving color so much attention, maybe the next generation would realize that skin color doesn't matter at all.
5' tall but I can see out of windows on two sides since I'm on a corner.
I don't care about being in a cubicle as much as I care about sitting down all day :-(

The older I get, the more restless I become. Even though my wife has to deal with weather extremes in her job, I'm beginning to envy her!
With order=4 you can ditch the monkeys and still write Shakespeare!
That isn't a new discovery either. I've spent a great deal of time studying New Zealand and Māori culture and history specifically (so much that I actually changed my keyboard layout to Māori so I could write in the language)... this is old news. Like, generations old.

Edit:

Here's my fairly old page about this very topic:
http://kotiro.petermichaud.com/research/mythical-creatures/p...

They have a legend about the "Pouakai" that people have thought for a long time was the eagle. That old link proves this is old news (or maybe I broke the story first without realizing 8)
Fan or Die
Let's go with hundreds of millions within a few years. I'd bet on that.
On hacking your ADD
Of those of you afflicted with ADD/ADHD tendencies during your normal working day, how do you deal? For instance, when you're required to read a manual, or some other mind-numbing task, what are your tricks for getting it done?
> I read a lot of objections to the Kindle stating that you don't own the books. Personally I read a book once and I'm done with it (unless its a programming/reference book). I assume most people are the same way. So why hoard books if you're not going to read them?

I think that's a weird assumption. I read a book, maybe read it again in a year, maybe look at it sometime to remember some passage or some quote or some line of argument, and if it's any good, I'll almost always end up lending it to one or more friends. Many other people I know treat books similarly. I get equal or greater pleasure out of sharing good books as I do reading them myself, so not being able to do that really cuts down on the value of the book to me.

I'm also not sure it's a good profit model. I frequently buy multiple copies -- 2 or 3 -- of good books to give them to friends who I know will appreciate them but probably wouldn't have the money or inclination to track down a copy on their own, and presumably, those friends might be more inclined to investigate those authors in the future.

I'm not sure that Amazon wants us to think about the Kindle as "renting" books, because in America we have a huge, public-funded infrastructure of libraries dedicated to renting books for absolutely free; it's hard for the Kindle to compete with that. They usually (for most categories of books) have a better selection than the Kindle, too.
His name came up in a book somewhere and I read up a bit on what he did, absolutely amazing.

He's definitely one of the less visible heroes of computing, I figured a posting wouldn't hurt.
OK you got me on those 2 cases.
For sort order:

$sort_order=="ASC"?"ASC":"DESC"

For offsets and limits convert/parse it to a number first and ensure it's within sane bounds.

You're right though. Parameterization isn't a magic bullet that allows you to forget about all other unclean data if you're using other unclean data in an SQL query.

Surely we all know this though? :/
Fortunately, Greek mathematicians have discovered approaches to handle "beasts" like that thousands of years ago; it's called "reductio ad absurdum" (proof by contradiction). If someone shown that P=NP implied a contradiction, that would disprove the conjecture.
The title makes an incorrect claim. Science does not need to be saved, and America is no more unscientific than any society has ever been. It is also not capitalism that hinders a scientific society, as the author claims. A simple examination of the current world would allow the author to see this. Germany has a cultural fascination with psychics and esp, Russia has long had institutional studies of supernatural powers, and throughout Asia participation in acupuncture and astrology is considered normal.

Science is hard. It is a process which requires work and time. People don't want, and don't need, to spend every second of their day researching claims and questing beliefs. After all, it is far easier to believe in the unsubstantiated claims of acupuncture, astrology, chiropractice, or traditional medicine than it is to do the footwork to see that these are based upon incorrect hypothesis which are easily falsified. And belief in such baloney has very little effect upon anyone's everyday life.
Thanks, I had been putting that off for a long, long time, but that tool provided enough of an impetus to do it. Shaved 6 requests off my front page. Some day when I get a moment I'll do another one for all the buttons.
interesting take on new incubation concept.
ITransport - Could iPhone apps change the way we travel?
I have the kindle reader on my iphone, and was looking for some Camus to read on it. Unfortunately, the only books available to kindle having anything to do with Camus are books and essays about Camus, not actual Camus books (you cannot, for example, purchase The Stranger for your kindle).

In fact, the two books I have bought for my kindle app I've ended up not reading at all.

Even if the kindle dropped to the sweet spot price point, I probably wouldn't get one. And I'm probably not the only one. Wasn't there an episode of Star Trek where books were portrayed as an oddity: collectors items, status symbols?

Once e-readers and books are inexpensive enough, it will be more expensive to purchase a hard copy. And thus, they will turn into status symbols - I doubt the market for them will disappear, just change. Sort of like how owning a horse now is (somewhat) considered a status symbol.
Wow, this is pretty awesome. I work with various federal agencies and am amazed at how little they share resources, even within the same agency. This seems like a huge step in promoting reuse of resources.
This is similiar to the advice to NOT write your own encryption code: Odds are, somebody already wrote it 10 times better than you could.
Competency has a tendency to hide in random distributions. The people who were wrong can assert that there is always some portion of people somewhere claiming that something bad is about to happen and that this group -- with people like "Dr. Doom" -- just got lucky.

Interestingly, the same group of people usually are the ones crying "but facts are facts" when objecting to pure rhetoric (what other people call a plausible alternative hypothesis that is not easily tested by statistical inference).
Every time I see something like this I'm reminded of the idea of trying stop drug addicts by maEvery time I see something like this I'm reminded of the idea of trying stop drug addicts by making drugs harder to get. Somehow, some way, you're going to get the drug.

The problem is not to restrict your access, but to change your desire. There's a much deeper problem if you require hand-slapping to stop you viewing sites like reddit while at work.
Humans evolving 100 times faster than historical levels.
"The Kindle is subsidized." -- Not any more than an ipod/touch is. You are actually paying the fair price for device is.
An iphone at 99, is a heavily subsidized device. The real cost would be more than $400-$500. You are paying it down the road with the $70-$100/mo plan.

Technically, you can buy a kindle, and use it only for pdfs and never buy a book, and that's still ok.
Remember that book costs slide downward over time. I got me the complete Sherlock Holmes for a dollar, and a bit of Austen and Dickens for free. I think Neuromancer was about seven dollars, too. So it's not a flat price eating away at you.
Ask HN: Alternative to Matlab for control system design?
Specifically I'm looking for a (free) language that has available add-ons for things like transfer functions, bode plots, LTI simulations, etc.
Why silly? I'm curious.
i'd make the argument that the article submission itself is a bit too much like reddit, hence the reddit-like response from myself and others. i couldn't really think of anything very HN topical to say.

its an interesting post, for sure, but not what i'd consider standard HN fare.
I have a Kindle and one of my favourite things is that people can't see what I'm reading. I can sit in an airport lobby and read programming books, sci-fi, Harry Potter, or Michael Ondaatje and no one can tell. Feels good man.
I'm surprised more correlation hasn't been pointed out between the hardcover book and the LP. Both are unnecessary embellishments to the data they hold inside, but both have a set of advantages over pure digital information
Poor use of an ORM (or pretty much any robust full-featured library) has its risks. I'm not sure how you provide features that AR includes without putting your memory at risk of overuse.

Model.find(:all) is going to be problematic across the board, there will always be a risk when you start playing with things like including children (there's a great benefit as well). You need to know what you're doing with any ORM.
I think this might be it:
http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/
Yeah, I'm going to call shenanigans on this article, and to be blunt, the author is talking out of his ass.

The very first sentence is the problem:

"Life, it turns out, is a series of tradeoffs between great experience and high convenience."

No, it isn't. By pretending this is a hard and fast rule to all things in life, the author has taken the mistaken position that no product can ever be a great experience and be convenient at the same time. We know from experience - the iPod/iTMS, the Wii, etc, that this is just clearly false.

The author then further fails to use even the most rudimentary logic:

"the entire e-reader market consisted of just 1 million units in all of 2008, and Amazon nabbed only a slice of it. By contrast, Microsoft sold about 1 million Zune music players..."

Using this flawless logic, we can also surmise that the iPhone is a terrible failure - just think about how many non-smartphones Nokia sold last year! The iPhone only sold a fraction of those last year! Not all markets are built the same. There's no reason to believe that the Kindle wasn't a huge success in its market. The problem with the Zune is that it failed to capture even a tiny portion of its* target market - this comparison is completely invalid.
Oh, definitely. I read British kid's fantasy in the middle of big literature discussions, and Shakespeare on the way to drunken concerts. It beat when I was reading Infinite Jest last year and getting weird looks from everybody.
Click "sign up now" in that window, and the insert the promo code "pipiobeta"... fill out the rest of the info, and BAM! your online and ready to go.
Clearwire Launches 4G WiMAX Network in Silicon Valley