skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't see any reason why palm couldn't still disable evil apps no matter where they came from.
This point was made on his LJ, and he responded:

That's just semantics. Palm is still in control of it. It is their catalog, and the app is surely hosted on their servers.

So maybe the user-facing interface for getting at apps is a web page instead of a "store" application that runs on the device. That's just an implementation detail. Palm is still mediating my interaction with my customers.
The issue is not the sharing of ideas, but sharing of how the software was made. It is more like saying: "if I buy your food, you have to give me the recipe or I will sue you." There is a huge difference between using gcc and knowing how it was created, for example.

Nobody is restricting you from creating a similar food or software (unless there is a patent, which is an entirely different issue). You have the right to create your version, and I have my right to sell only the product, not the process that made it.
You want to stop using hard currency so that you can use a different hard currency? Additionally, the Fed(s) aren't fond of competing currencies.
I read that the other day, pretty good article
A key difference is that the games played with higher intelligence are not zero sum.

If someone takes Provigil and shortens their life by 5 years (say), yet comes up with a breakthrough in physics that improves the lives of millions, then it's not the same as just running a bit faster in the 100m dash by using steroids. The latter is (arguably[1]) cheating, the former is self-sacrificing.

As for steroids themselves, they are only considered bad because they have negative side effects. If they had no side effects, they'd be like taking a multivitamin.

[1] why arguably? Because things like Phelps' bodysuit are also arguably cheating.
A friend of mine is about three years out from a Harvard MBA. Although many of his professors were famous for their business research/theories/whatever (example: http://www.claytonchristensen.com/), he doesn't believe the actual classroom experience justified the price tag (in terms of tuition and lost wages). Are you that much better off having listened to Clay talk about disruptive technologies than having read his books and discussed them online with some interesting people?

Two outcomes were notable: First, he has a pedigree that gives him lots of options in life. He's a biz guy with a biotech company now, but his credential could probably convince a manufacturing executive that he could provide value (right or wrong, it's a likely scenario). Secondly, he has a huge network of fellow alumni who are doing interesting/powerful/lucrative/whatever things that he can call upon without seeming like a leech.

The average Harvard MBA student is making over $100K upon admission. So, two years @ $100K == $200K in lost earnings - $25K in summer internship compensation == $175K. Tack on another $100K in tuition and absurd housing costs, and it's nearly a $300K pedigree.

I have an MBA from a "lesser" program. I enjoyed it and think I learned a lot. But, the degree isn't worth nearly as much as my friend's Harvard MBA when used as a signaling mechanism or club membership card (literally in most major cities!).

Edit: I realized I didn't actually bother to answer the OP's question. I guess I don't have a good answer.
I think it's just for Google Chrome. I think it updates continuously so release dates are a little...useless?
How to Get More Bicyclists on the Road
Negative. Three results from the same Windows XP box:

Google Chrome 3

Internet Explorer 7 (released October 2006)

Firefox 3 (released June 2008)

Techy: If-it-weren't-Google-it-might-be-marketing-but-Google-would-never-do-that.
No. The exact opposite. I'm saying that saying it is on at prime time is completely meaningless. If it wasn't on at prime time, no one would care. Where scheduling is concerned, I think what people want to know is "given that I want to watch this show, which hour of prime time is it on." They already know it's on prime time. Telling them that is redundant.

Please don't take this as harsh though. I'm just trying to be clear. There is also the issue of which day a week a show comes on, which is less granular than time of day but still useful. I just don't think telling people something is on at prime time is helpful. They know that already.
http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/00011931250414337...

Look at page 102 or CTRL+F for PRINCIPAL AND SELLING STOCKHOLDERS

No Bezos, so either he sold before or sold after. Roger Ebert sold though!
Personally I think everyone wants to learn something, because we all have some sort of desire which needs some new knowledge to be had in order to be achieved. The problem is that our current educational system tells students to learn something usually at an unoptimal time. What I mean is that if I am I taught algebra when I realize I want to learn it, and I do it myself, there is less time wasted in being forced to learn it.
Blogspam. Just the comic stolen from here: http://dilbert.com/fast/1995-02-05/
Would the tutorials be 'portable' between platforms? They both use atmega chips. I just got my arduino a couple of weeks ago & would love to run through some of these projects.
It's funny, these articles about how Apple is doomed because of a pending software/hardware release remind me of the good old days where people on Slashdot would say Windows' time was up since the new version of Linux distro foobar was going to beat it.

It might have ended up true, in a sense, but by that point nobody really cared anymore, the world had changed. I think the same thing is going to happen here -- Apple has such a ridiculous head start in this market that by the time we can look out and see what looks to be a healthy ecosystem it will probably be well past the point anyone really cares and have moved onto the next big thing.
I agree, except instead of one hour, one minute.
Libertarianism is devolving? I beg to differ.
I was following along johnny's reasoning. I was saying that if by his reasoning adderall makes you smart, then it makes you dumber too. He said there are various components to intelligence. Creativity could be one too. So if focus is one aspect and it is enhanced, and it makes you smart, then creativity, which is hindered makes you dumber. Sorry if I wasn't clear before.
Whatever terminology you'd like to choose, I think it's still a useful distinction to be aware of and to consider. To rephrase the article . . . there are two reasons to execute two things in parallel. 1) To reduce latency by executing two operations at the same time instead of in serial, as in processing web server requests. 2) To increase the speed of execution of a single operation by utilizing multiple processor cores at once.

There's a ton of overlap as far as techniques (threads, monitors, locks, actors, and so on), but those two high-level goals have very different optimal strategies, and different languages and programming paradigms have different strengths and weaknesses relative to those two. Concurrency is generally more of a high-level consequence of the core algorithm you're using; parallelism is a low-level implementation detail around how a given function or process completes. Concurrency isn't generally going to be retrofitted automatically by the compiler; parallelism can be deduced either statically or at runtime or explicitly signaled by the programmer.
I don't fault him for his love of openness above all else. I like open systems too! But I don't think most consumers care. I certainly don't think they obsess over the couple thousand apps Apple's rejected (like we in tech do). They're too busy marveling at the 75,000 apps that are available.

Google will win the Cell Phone Wars if they can iterate fast enough to become "Good Enough" to Apple's "Great". That's what worked for Microsoft. But I don't think a normal consumer will ever choose an inferior open phone over a closed one with more capabilities.
A well thought-out post and a good read, but both of the author's points about the limitations of relational databases are a little misleading.

The first, "Every single element in a relation (aka table) has to be exactly the same type" is true in many relational databases, but isn't necessary: SQLite, for example, is implemented with a nice form of dynamic typing where individual columns can take on multiple data types.

Second, "SQL isn't even Turing-complete" is sort of a folk theorem in computer science that isn't necessarily true anymore, especially with all of the proprietary SQL dialects in existence: the original standard, SQL92, is basically equivalent to relational algebra, which has the expressive power of first-order logic - it's so weak it can't even express concepts like graph reachability. But constructs like recursive queries have been added to the SQL standard since SQL92 which may make even standard SQL Turing Complete.
Colabopad is a web based smartboard... the current focus is on educational applications. However you could create interactive games also, for instance it should be possible to create a simple chess or checkers implementation and 2D adventure games... Simply put:

Take and share notes on tablet devices
Deliver E-Learning
Collaborate with others on graphics related tasks
Have fun
The Mythical Django Pony, a blessing?
Do you suffer from phantom monitor pain when your 2nd screen is taken away?
Django Contributor Analysis
That's ridiculous.

Why should I let Palm decide what I can install on my phone? Android, Windows Mobile and PalmOS users have been doing fine with having the option of installing their own software.
I've read it somewhere too. It makes sense if you think about it. In certain types of ADHD, the hyperactiity is in the thoughts. So the person would have more thoughts racing through his or her head than normal and this probably constitutes the creativity since they have more random thoughts to seed a good idea. The drive for this is thought to be caused by understimulation. In other words the mind is bored, so we start racing through thoughts to try to make something more exciting. What Adderall does is stimulate your mind so that it's no longer bored. Less random thoughts are needed and the person can focus on one thing better. Of course, the random thoughts, which constituted the creativity, is traded off. It's actually my theory behind how it works (I have ADHD).
While I generally agree with you, on such a touchy subject as IQ and race, you do need to be a bit more careful with your words.
What if the evil app removes their capability to do so?
As someone who has recently completed an MBA, all of these answers could be correct. It really comes down to who you are and what you try to get out of it.

I have classmates that did the MBA to get a job at an investment bank or consulting firm; generally they're getting those jobs. An MBA is essentially a required degree for those kind of jobs, and about 25-75% of grads go to those jobs, depending on the school.

I have classmates that did the MBA to switch careers. One classmate was a doctor (orthopedic surgeon to be exact) that didn't want to be doing hip replacements his entire life. This was my case... I fell into consulting after I left the Navy and hated it; the MBA got me out of consulting.

I also have classmates that did the MBA to up-skill themselves. This was also a big reason for me; I had a lot to learn on the finance/accounting side of things, and picked up a number of skills across a bunch of business topics. Sometimes this is to break through in a career ladder; I had a friend that had been CFO of a small subsidiary of a large corporate who is now the CFO of a small but rapidly growing VC-funded startup. The MBA was a big "tick in the box" for them when hiring, since he has the skills to stay CFO for a long time.

Coming out of the MBA, my job opportunities included a startup, doing some work for a VC, and working for a well-known web-tech BigCo. However, I also came out of the MBA with student loans, which affect those options.

Fundamentally, you make your MBA what you want it to be. If you want to do a startup while studying for an MBA, there will be a ton of people to support you and there will be opportunities to work on your company for class. (A number of my classmates have done exactly that.) I focused on startups and entrepreneurship and I came out with opportunities in those areas.

Sure you can read and study your way to up-skilling yourself, but an MBA does it quickly and combines it with proof (the degree, a signaling device) and opportunities.

An MBA is a) a set of skills, b) a network of people, c) a concentrated set of opportunities for development, and d) a big cost (real and opportunity).

Does the OP have the "fire in the belly" to do a startup, and a startup with a big enough long-term future? If not, then the MBA might be a good option. (And the fact that he's asking around instead of starting a company seems to indicate that this might be the case.)

I realize now this is a little long... I hope it's useful.
I'm pretty sure that in user tests most people don't know what the URL bar is.
What concerns me is the question of what happens when economic growth finally does take off again. At what point will increasing demand for oil push prices into another economy-crippling super-spike?
> And try and convince a programmer that it's possible that their program's memory can be wrong. They understand in theory but refuse to code for the possibility.

Because the hardware can still detect multi-bit errors, just not transparently correct them. So you shut the machine down automatically until you get new dram installed.

Programmers _are_ coding for machines-will-fail-temporarily, but coding to "handle" random memory errors instead of buying the right ECC hardware would be insane.
Corbet (lwn editor) posts them here from time to time. And he posted in this thread as well, so he knows about it, and presumably would have said something if he was annoyed.

I bet they get way more exposure (and thus subscriptions) from people widely distributing those links than they lose...
Heroku Casts - screencasts series on how to use Heroku
Almost all versions of Chrome will read "released 2009" since the browser has only been around since 2008 anyway.
Preforking echo server in Python, inspired by Unicorn-is-Unix
> I don't think a normal consumer will ever choose an inferior open phone over a closed one with more capabilities.

Yep. There are only two ways to "beat" Apple at this point: install Android on the freebee (< $100 unsubsidized) phones with basic contracts that 99% of the world uses (this would be the Microsoft strategy), or honestly build a better product than Apple. Given the limitations of the average cell phone, I can't decide which path is more difficult.

People continue to claim that an OS will dominate all of the non-Apple smartphones out there. Symbian is already there and no one is talking about how dominant they are. Dethroning the iPhone is clearly going to be more difficult than most of the cacophonous mouthpieces realize, so my advise to them is to stop making your future self look bad, and think harder.
That's fine and dandy, but when I want to use your libraries with JRuby or MacRuby, I'm SOL. I kind of like the portability of avoiding fork() and exec() for those reasons.
It hinders, it does not prevent you from being creative. And the reason why it would make you less creative is that it makes you more satisfied. When you are satisfied in your mind you naturally make less of an effort to strain your thoughts to come up with something exciting.

If you're on nootropics and something is exciting, does it get more exciting? And something boring becomes doable because you have less urge to replace it with something more exciting. So it obviously would still seem comparatively boring.
While I think that there are definitely problems with the US education system, I think that if we leave everything up to the children it'll be worse off. There will be some that are freed to excel to higher heights, but -- taking from your example -- there will be far fewer people with even a basic understanding of algebra.

While it might not exactly be Lord of the Flies, children aren't known for making the best decisions for themselves nor for having a level of resistance to peer-pressure.
Blogspam!! if you think in this way then all blogs which links to other website are Blogspam.
Drawing heavily on the work of J. Philippe Rushton—a psychologist who specializes in comparing the circumference of what he calls the Negroid brain with the length of the Negroid penis—Saletan took the fundamentalist position to its logical conclusion.

This essay doesn't attempt to accurately and fairly summarize opposing arguments.
I lost any interest in what Malcolm Gladwell has to say about race after he argued that East Asian children have better math skills because their ancestors cultivated rice and not wheat.

http://www.pressrun.net/weblog/2009/09/outliers-whats-rice-g...
This seems like an aimless rant. Rails (and Hibernate to my knowledge) uses SQL for exactly what he recommends: filtering, aggregation, and joining. The RDBMS is a very real and concrete concept in ActiveRecord. If you don't know SQL, it's going to make it difficult to get beyond the most basic ActiveRecord functionality.
I doubt you'll ever see this, for security reasons.

I'm just imagining a scenario where I install your app, and it decides to SMS all of my contacts with a bit.ly link to spread itself, send out emails and do whatever else it wants to.

At least linking through Palm, they know who you are as the app author and can shut down the app if necessary and go after you if your app turns malicious.
"straw man" is the new "disingenuous".
Not so amazing as Skype nor Vonage match the phone experience as neither take control of your dialer nor run in the background. If Skype is closed your phone won't ring and your calls will be missed.
1. Continuous network of physically segregated bike lanes. (No, that painted line running for two blocks and ending abruptly doesn't count.)

2. Secure bike parking facilities at major destinations.

3. Smoother integration with transit (e.g. bike racks on buses, bikes on commuter trains).

4. Convenient city-wide bike rental program (e.g. Vélib' in Paris).

5. Abandon helmet laws and stop talking about 'safety'. The most reliable way to reduce the number of injuries is to increase the number of cyclists, and mandating helmets/kvetching about safety creates a false perception that cycling is more dangerous than driving (it's not).
But this is exactly his point, this kind of gatekeeping is ridiculous. If it hasn't been necessary for PalmOS previous and it's damn clear that desktop operating systems don't work this why, why do phones have to? There's much more sensitive information on my desktop computer and much more potential for damage yet when it comes to my phone I have to be treated with kid gloves?

I think the much better argument to make in Palm's favor is that 30% is a lot of money, not that it's a good idea to keep users "safe."
Processes don't share mutable data, not without explicitly using IPC.

In nearly all Unixes, both processes share their entire address spaces after the fork(), just immutably -- pages are only copied when they're written to by one of the processes, otherwise they are shared till exit. Copy-on-write is what makes fork() tractable performance-wise.
Can we make it a rule to submit the print version of these inc articles? I usually like the content but I dislike some webadmin telling me how fast I need to read a slide by changing slides every x seconds.

http://www.inc.com/print/117
Well, it's a Rack web server. Just use one that works on those, problem solved. That's the whole point of Rack.
RyanMcGreal must not have taken too much time reading the linked article, because this is NOT Unicorn ported to Python. It is a port of the very simple example server written in Ruby in Ryan Tomayko's article about Unicorn.

See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=865306

At the end of Jacob's post he states that he'll be spending his evening reading Unicorn's source. Not porting it.
You still can install whatever you want on the phone. You just need to jump through a few (very minor) hoops to enable developer mode.

The Palm Pre has a thriving homebrew community of hackers who have done exactly this, and have written over 250 apps that don't go through the standard Palm app store and can be installed just by a normal download link.

See: http://www.precentral.net/homebrew-apps

Palm devs have even been following the homebrew community closely and invited many of the developers there to offer their apps through the official app store as well as through the homebrew scene.
There's nothing about Android that guarantees that Android phones will always be inferior to the iPhone. HTC has made great strides toward rivaling the iPhone's hardware. I suspect, with more and more Android phones coming on the market, and with Android's openness, the apps and improved stability will soon follow, and the iPhone will be left in the dust.
Epic troll. Bravo.

But seriously: fork(2) is natural and mathematical. There is no IO involved. That is to say, when you call it, you don't have to activate some spinning mechanical thing and wait several million or billion cycles while it clatters and bumbles along, filling the higher caches with code and data.

fork is blazing fast; effectively an O(1) operation. It's just about as light-weight as process creation can get.

fork is useful. It allows one to manage complicated families of processes, complete with pre-fork and post-fork activity. Threads can't match it here. The only thing I can think of that surpasses the multiprocessing capability of a forking process is modern async IO. And then you have to implement all the management stuff by hand.

With all due respect, someone who claims to have embedded experience shouldn't have to ask hacker news about the benefits of fork, unless your embedded experience is all on Windows Mobile and its ilk, where CreateProcess rules the day.
Why didn't they use Twisted?
In this same world where Apple and Palm babysit phone owners does Dell get to dictate what software I install on my netbook and get to ban certain pieces of software because they're not approved by them? I understand the idea of vendor lock in and I don't think it's in Palm's worst interests to try to profit from their App Catalog but trying to justify it based on safety just sounds absurd.
never heard of IdeaPaint before. Very cool. I need to paint my son's room with that stuff.
Standardized tests of any kind are fundamentally flawed. You can't measure a person's intelligence using a test. You can only measure very specific things, and even then you can't expect to do a good job of it. Does a high SAT score predict success in college? People with great test scores drop out / fail out / join the peace corps by the thousands every year. Testing can a good indicator, but it's not an ideal solution.

I'm not against testing. There has to be some way to decide who gets into what college, and the SAT is a published standard. But there's no point in defending a flawed system. Let's just accept that IQ tests are a bit ridiculous and move on.
Python, to take one example, is a great general purpose language. It is terse, expressive, introspective, and high-level, and it supports multiple programming paradigms (imperative, OO, functional). Its standard library is robust and full-featured, and it also benefits from a vast ecosystem of third-party libraries that do just about everything imaginable.

It will never be as fast in execution as, say, C (though we can expect impressive speed improvements through the improved use of VMs); but in terms of developer productivity you can't beat a high-level dynamic language.

For any complex app, you need good project management software, version control, unit testing, clear and comprehensive documentation, and so on. I can't think of any reason why you can't apply these techniques using a dynamic language.