codebaobab

From the point of view of the Postal Service, there is nothing to take into consideration. A zip code uniquely identifies a geographical area (for the purposes of mail delivery) and it does not matter if that area crosses municipal, city or county boundaries. When a zip code does cross boundaries, the Postal Service picks one city that it uses as the "Actual" name for that zip code--even though a bunch of addresses in that zip code clearly fall in a different city! This is the city name that gets returned if you do a lookup or address verification. The post office is well aware that other cities might lie in that geographic area and accepts those city names as well. For example, follow the link below and enter 28451.

  http://zip4.usps.com/zip4/citytown_zip.jsp

It is true that it might confuse the user if you auto-populate the city name, but I think that in practice it wouldn't be much of a problem. If you live in a split zip code and your city's name is not the Postal Service's "Actual" name, then you are probably already used to receiving lots of mail with that other city's name on it. For example: almost all bulk mail will use the "Actual" city name.

A subscription service for men's clothing is an excellent idea! There is so much not to like about the current experience of shopping for clothes now.

I proactively bought gift copies...

Seriously, it is amazing how way ahead of the curve he was. ISMM was originally published when Tim Ferriss was only 1 year old, but the only real difference between it and 4 Hour Work Week is the scale that the Internet makes available. Every time some hungry hacker blogs about supplementing his income by selling photos on some stock photography site--man, it's deja vu all over again.

Actually, that seems like a low estimate. I think I remember him already having coined that term when I was buying his books 20 years ago...

...And Don was already Old School then...

And the first thing that popped into my head was: I wonder if AskPatio11.com is available? Throw up these instructions and a webform and voilá. And then, if we hook it into Pat's email, we can get real time stats on his response and acceptance rates. For paying customers maybe we can offer access to stats on what the best time of day to email is and what help requests/idea critques are trending.

On a more serious note, thanks for writing this, Patrick. I had an idea a few days ago--more precisely a new permutation on an idea I've been banging on for over a year now--and my goal is to launch on Jan 1. I would really like to have your input on some of the details. I had decided to not email you--you are busy and right now I can't afford to pay for your time--but I'll take 60% odds. So you'll be hearing from me as soon as I launch, hopefully 21 days from today.

OK, you got me on that one. I've been a professional Smalltalk programmer for almost 20 years and I've never heard of the Resilient Smalltalk Embedded Platform.

This may not be 100% literally true, but it is definitely true in spirit. (The previous poster is referring to Lars Bak, but both Hotspot and V8 are/were team efforts.) The family tree here is:

  self->hotspot->V8

But, yes, Lars is the man.

My impression is that the iPhone App Store does a much better job of letting small developers make money than the iTunes music store does of letting small bands make money. I wonder what the core difference is?

You don't need a database, just a mapping function and a seed. I haven't seen anyone else do this, but I worked out a solution a while back.

I'm not not thinking about repeat customers. I am thinking about competitors and people looking to gather industry information.

The point, as stated by tptacek, is that sites quite often leak information.

The first thing that crossed my mind was: "Apple wants to force Adobe Flash into the Mac App Store".

Now, the current App Store terms of service seem to preclude the distribution of plugins like Flash. But let's pretend, just for a minute, that they didn't. Apple would see the following advantages to having the Flash plugin on the App Store:

1) No need to worry about syncing Flash updates to OS X updates. No more risk of shipping an "outdated" version of Flash like happened with 10.6.4 back in the summer.

2) There is a visible, user friendly update stream (that is separate from the OS update stream.) This should enable users to easily always be using the latest version.

3) Apple can wield the hammer (as hard or as soft as it chooses) against bugs in the plugin--that's part of the terms of service in App Store. It makes it easy to push back on Adobe when they find bugs during the review process (even if the bugs they "find" are bugs that were known from previous releases.)

And, who knows? Now that Safari 5 has an official plugin mechanism, perhaps the App Store will open up for Safari plugins in the not too distant future.

Perhaps your comment was meant to be light-hearted and I am just being pedantic, but all an interested party has to do is come back a few more times over the course of a few days and note the values of new IDs. At that point they know the rate at which you are (adding new customers/adding new content/whatever) and can project backwards from there (completely ignoring the absolute value of the initial ID.)

I had an idea for an online business a few years back that I never really pursued, but I did work out a scheme to assign key objects random ids so that when those ids appeared in a URL, you couldn't tell how many of those had been created. I keep meaning to do a write up, but, until now, I've never heard anyone else notice the potential to leak information, so I just assumed that no one else cared.

Have you thought about music? I consume a lot more author-specific music than I do author-specific books. (In other words, while I consume both books and music pretty voraciously, I don't buy books from the same author nearly as often as I buy music from the same band.)

Re #4: For me, music discovery is still a painful and unsolved problem. Its hard to put my finger on precisely what the problem is, but I suspect that part of the problem is that there is so much music out there that new releases drown everything else out.

To put it bluntly, how am I supposed to find the next Suba or Orchestra Baobab?

"In normal privacy settings you can specific that either everyone can add you as a friend or only friends of friends."

There was a big privacy setting change last October that you could opt out of. So it is theoretically possible that he did. (I wish I had. I didn't understand the ramifications at the time.)

Obviously, if this is in fact the case, it is still a case of Zuckerberg not playing by the rules he is setting for everyone else.

The Mac OS X support is cool and I would love to be able to run older OS X versions in a VM, but it looks like they've still got quite a bit of work before it is really usable. Issues include:

"Even when idle, OS X guests currently burn 100% CPU. This is a power management issue that will be addressed in a future release."

:(

http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch14.html

Anyone hiring in Denver? Or willing to hire a remote hacker?

Dan Ingalls (the original implementor of Smalltalk) built a weather station that showed the weather on a logarithmic graph. Very cool idea.

http://weather-dimensions.com/index.html

Stanza on the iPhone turns to the next page with a single touch on the right side of the screen (and turns back a page with a touch on the left.) When I first started using Stanza, I was annoyed that it didn't scroll. But now I definitely prefer the touch-to-flip interaction.

It looks like the iPad is going to have a swipe-to-flip interaction. I'm wondering if I'll like that as much as touch-to-flip.

I agree. I even have a bookmark: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=patio11

I must confess that I was very surprised to hear that Apple initiated a lawsuit against HTC and I am wondering if there is some backstory that we don't know.

I am not going to try and argue that Apple is some kind of altruistic, saintly company. But Apple's recent history lead me to believe that they viewed patents as defensive, not offensive weapons. Yes, they sued Nokia, but only after Nokia sued them first.

So questions that come to my mind include: Why HTC? Why now? Why hasn't Apple sued Palm? (Surely the Pre infringes on something!)

And is there any significance to the fact that the suit was filed with the ITC?

If Apple really is going to go on the patent offensive, I will be very disappointed.

The oldest use of the quote that I can find is from a 1998 WHO document: http://www.searo.who.int/en/Section1257/Section2181/Section2...

“Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas" is a 2001 novel by James Patterson, so I don't think that can be the origin of the story.

Also, note that Brian Dyson was CEO of Coca Cola Enterprises (NYSE: CCE) not CEO of The Coca Cola Company (NYSE: KO). (When people say "Coke" or "Coca Cola" they almost always mean the latter, not the former.) http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?topic_id=5949&fuse...

Before&After Magazine is my design How-To favorite.

http://www.bamagazine.com/

I am not a design professional, so not all of their stuff is useful to me. But their typography and layout advice is excellent.

Some of the content of their back issues has been reworked into a couple of books. One of those might be a good starting point.