skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a short review of the concept of channel coding with some perspective on the history of this field.

No real technical information there... The title is a bit misleading. If you want to understand Gallager codes (LDPC codes) better look elsewhere (Gallager's paper or thesis might be a better starting point: http://www.rle.mit.edu/rgallager/documents/ldpc.pdf)
1. FD: I didn't go through the whole flow.
2. I post at Post.ly (See #3 -- because I'm wondering under which context I would even post in Post.ly), and it creates a Posterous blog (wait, you're setting up a blog for me? you didn't mention that... what if I already have a blog?) -- and then links the Tweet to it. This seems even more like a bastard child to me now than I originally thought, not to mention a completely confusing user experience.
3. What exactly is the audience here. Most tweets are about referring to existing content (at least the tweets with links) -- under which context are you saying -- "here world, here's a random webpage I just created out of the blue with some files" -- wheres the story+context here?

I maintain my stance, this seems like a desperate attempt to jump on the Twitter bandwagon instead of really thinking about how to make your core product more valuable.
Ok. So this could be uncomfortable news for the guys at Spotify. Anyone else find them selves still buying music from iTunes?
Not really an issue on my mac with two 1280x1024 displays. I can span both monitors in about 2-3 inches of mouse movement. Some people really like text-based input though, which explains the popularity of Apps like Quicksilver.
The one thing that has me hooked on Firefox on mac is their multitouch gesture support.

3 finger swipe up/down - go to top/bottom of page
3 finger swipe left/right - go forward/back
rotate - switch between open tabs

Even safari doesn't support all of those..
I have a common four character name as login with Apple’s developer connection.

I regularly get locked out (and have to request a new password) presumably because other users try to login to my account (not remembering their real login).

This scheme sucks! Perhaps a better scheme would be to ban the IP for 10 minutes after half a dozen failed logins.
Yeah I got that. http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B0015TCML0/?tag=kwab-...

Maybe they'll restock soon.
So you let grammar trump your profit?
Or put a switch guard [1] on one of the two switches. I've done this in three spots in my house. The guard goes over the switch which is less used.

[1] http://www.homedepot.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDi...
Firebug Demystified
I guess that PuTTY could be excused since that is more related to the SSH login sequence. It doesn't really matter which SSH tool you are using, that basic annoyance will be there. But when you are using the ssh command from a bash prompt, it is less work to cancel and start over than it is to reopen putty.

If you are opening a connection that is not saved in your session list, you might consider choosing "Duplicate Session" from the window menu at the top left and avoid retyping the server address in the putty dialog. The annoying thing is that the "Restart Session" command is not available when the connection is still open, so you will need to close the dysfunctional one after launching the duplicate.

If it is a saved session, you can store the user name under Connection->Data so that you do not need to type it on each launch.
Wow. So, I didn't send you an email, and then you send me an email with the indicator "Re:" which traditionally (well, in the last few years of email history) means that you are responding to my email... which I didn't send.

Sorry to be a purist, but I consider that a misleading subject line, which is one of the indicators of spam.

Yes, traditionally, RE: meant "in regards to" and was a standard header on memos to denote the subject (watch Mad Men if you don't recall memos). But we all know that nowadays it is the changed subject line of an email response in a thread... which is why it gets the attention the author mentions.

Sure, we all have to do whatever we can to get noticed. But maybe I'm the only one here who thinks that there are ways to do this without "overloading" the RE. And please don't say "ah, but his is Re, while Outlook uses RE, totally different!". Because it's not.

As a test, try something other than RE: Try using "Subj:" or Oh, one more thing re: price list or any of the other countless ways one can get attention in a subject without "fooling" the user.

The mispelling, though, is not a bad touch.
When building interfaces it's funny (or not, depending on the pressure) to find that users interpret the icons in completely novel ways.

Which is why I always think - do I really need an icon here, or should I use text?

The worst example I have come across was a package we took over where there was an icon of a dog. Incredibly, this was supposed to be "Fetch from database" (dog, fetch, geddit?). Even after days of using it my brain still locked up looking at the damn dog - imagine my poor users who only had to interact with the software occasionally. Switching the icons to text cleared up any confusion.

Unless screen real estate is really at a premium (eg iPhone), I prefer to see text, and any application that gives me the choice (eg. Firefox) I immediately configure to do so.
The sample code is pretty interesting from a return value vs exception perspective: despite being forced to look at return values, the code still silently ignores all errors
Thanks! Nope, no recommendations yet. I'd either have to build in recommendations or (preferably) somehow yank that data from Amazon. Might be something I try to do next, since I've had a couple of users ask me about it.
NVidia's engineering department doesn't seem to, to give one example where I've worked. They expect long hours, and they expect to pay a premium over market price for them.
To me, a quote request form says the company isn't really serious about this whole Internet thing :) I associate it with a site someone put up in 1995 and hasn't touched since. Probably just me.

But, in this case this may actually be a win, since the product isn't mass market. Whoever goes through the trouble of filling out a request is likely already sold on the product, so less time spent on sales.
I think it's both at the same time. It's something they thrust down your throat in school from an early age and it is hated accordingly. But contrary to some of the other subjects, school is not the only place in which you're confronted with english. There's also games, music, movies, the web, talking to people from other countries and later science. So I think necessity and inevitability has replaced prestige as the dominant motivation over the past 15 or 20 years or so.
You make a very good point: not everybody has a large screen TV. Also, the Wii-mote has accessibility problems: while it may be great for gamers, it's not so good for people with limited dexterity.

Maybe using a scroll-wheel, like the one on the iPod, would be a better solution. You'd be able to quickly scroll through on-screen options with the wheel.
My main browser on the Mac is now Chromium 35449 (very stable, and extensions work on it).

Firefox has become what is was created to fight (at least on the Mac). Sad..
IPv4 Free Pool Drops Below 10%
The problem I've had with outsourcing is the treating of programmers like bodies. It seems like just when I've developed a good rapport with our programmers they are gone. Months of development knowledge, API knowledge, etc are right out the door.

My job requires me to train my replacement on our APIs if I leave. Over there, I guess it's not the same. When a programmer leaves I'm not given any notice. Just a new contact, who I then have to give the documentation, explain the work, and guide with the work. And this has happened to me 3 times in the last year.

Other than that, the guys are fantastic and good at their job.
I'm curious; what do you think is the OS that's ready for the desktop? By the high score of your comment, I'm guessing a lot of people agree with your sentiment, and I don't understand your distinction between what is "ok for some users" and "ready for the desktop."
The Oracle of Unstructured Information: A Three-Horse Race
If someone misspelled something in an email reply, I would just assume they had a misspelling in their automated response form letter. That would make me think much less of the company. I'm glad it converted better for you, but I'm guessing that another variable changed at the same time that actually made the difference.
There is some empirical evidence in a book called Peopleware.

http://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Teams-S...

I would paste some quotes but I lost my copy.
Ikea also sells massive wood furniture. It's just more expensive. E.g. we have a nice massive birch table from Ikea.
First of all, when I arrive, I have no idea What the app is for, how it helps me, etc. I suggest you add a paragraph or two explaining what it does and how to get started.
But overall it's a pretty cool site. Good luck!
We're working on a sizable Android app over at http://vodpod.com. We're hoping to test it it in the next few weeks.

My impression, after two months, is that the architecture is solid. A good deal of thought has been given to privacy, information sharing, and interoperability. It's a very open platform, and I think that's a big strength. On the other hand, it's Java, and there is a lot of infrastructure required to accomplish simple tasks, such as moving to a new part of the app or displaying a notification. Perhaps that's my Ruby bias, though. :)
The income stream from new customers in this business is not so high anymore (I think maybe $700 or a bit less a month), and I firmly believe that even though it's okay to play dirty when breaking into something new, afterwards go back and clean up your act.

I have a long list of customers now, and I don't want them rerequesting the pricelist and seeing that same mistake. It's obvious then - and when your client list is long enough it is more profitable to target old clients instead of new ones. Upgrades, customisations, etc.
That page gives an overview over the (dead tree) literature on the topic:
http://forums.construx.com/blogs/stevemcc/archive/2008/03/27...

An interesting data point he cites is the comparision between Lotus 123 version 3 and Excel 3.0: "Excel took 50 staff years to produce 649,000 lines of code. Lotus 123 took 260 staff years to produce 400,000 lines of code. [...] The difference in productivity between the two teams was more than a factor of 8."
But then it will probably not be too difficult to find people who will tell you that 123 was still the better product.

[Edit: Another important point is that the these factors are between the best and the worst. The difference between the best and the median can be considerably smaller, so it is not that surprising not to see any programmers paid ten times the average.]
Indeed; the person who sprang to mind was Jonathan Ive - known as a good designer, wikipedia puts a million pound salary on him, he is an Apple higher up.

Is he paid that because he's a Senior VP, or because he's worth that? If he is worth that, how much is he worth it full stop, and how much is he worth it but only when he can amplify his efforts, direct chunks of the company, refuse compromise, etc. using the power and respect of the SVP position? How far can the two be separated?
Startup time is usually a matter of vacuuming your sqlite. I actually ended up running firefox entirely from ram, which makes it significantly faster.
Good point. I made the classic mistake of forgetting to correct for my own bias :). That said, I at least appreciate that they make fun of the parties on both the left and right, which are more and more becoming paradies of themselves rather than collections of reasonable human beings interested in debate and compromise. However I think the most important point is exactly what you and several other people have said: get lots of input and make up your own mind. I'm not sure how many people are interested in doing the legwork though...
My (limited) experience with Indian outsourced teams is similar. One thing that I've found helpful is to have at least one face-to-face meeting with the outsourced team as it tends to better "humanize" both sides of the interaction.
You cannot do a complete overhaul of your UI with no warning and expect users to love you.
Come back to CloudBerry Lab website next week to download a version of CloudBerry Explorer with Amazon S3 versioning support http://s3.cloudberrylab.com/
This sales strategy works for higher-end (read: pricier) stuff. It will not work too well for less-pricy stuff, impulse buys, or purchases where the buyer is looking to make a quick decision.

Usually when I see a "contact us for a quote" I already know that they are trying to price their product (to me) based on how much they think they can get out of me. Meaning, if I am rich, the same product is more expensive to me than if I was a poor bloke. It's a form of market segmentation, pricing is definitely more of an art than science.

Either way, this means it's a "high-touch" purchasing decision; meaning I probably have to go and and forth with some sales guy to reach some price. If I'm not in the mood for the hassle and I'm looking for an impulse buy, I'll immediately forget this site and move on.
Excellent work. I'm telling all my friends about this great resource.
If this were true, we would expect men to try to entice women into marriage and women to hold out and continue to play the field.

At least anecdotally, I see the exact opposite.
Interesting. But I doubt it will be that simple. Even if the Chinese will overshadow everything else in a few years, English will stay the dominant language in the western world. Latin limped on far over thousand years after the fall of its empire.
Survive does not mean thrive.

The Irish have also had a long time to adapt to that diet. They're much less carb sensitive than others. Hence the difference between people from cultures who've eaten a traditionally low-carb diet vs those eating a high-carb diet. Native Americans suffer greatly, but those who traditionally farmed (Asians who eat rice for example) are healthy.
this is the third or fourth time I've heard the phrase "good on them" on HN. I would typically expect someone to say "good for them". I'm not trying to bash your language skills or anything and I don't think it sounds wrong, just different :)

If you don't mind me asking where are you from? (I'm from Iowa).
While your theory makes sense, I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't statistically significant.
It might be to me, but I can be somewhat pedantic.

Professional correspondence should be just that: professional. It doesn't need to be rushed. Get rid of the red squiggly underlines. It's so easy to spot mistakes when typing on a computer that it seems extremely lazy not to correct them.
I've had pretty good success with Google when using the term "quick reference" rather than "cheat sheet".
Ask HN: Nice OS X app for recording a personal log
Does anyone know a good looking, well functioning OS X app to record a personal log? I recently started a new adventure and I want to keep a diary. Now using text edit but I would prefer something that can keep track of days and do encryption on entries/notes.
I call that a mistake.
I think it's odd that you have such a problem with co-opting the use of "Re:" (even though you admit he is using it in the original sense), but you don't have an issue with him co-opting the English language by intentionally misspelling words.

Besides, when a customer requests pricing, many systems will send an e-mail to the salesperson who can hit "reply" to send an e-mail to the customer.
One of the highlights of 3.6 is TraceMonkey, which should result in a performance boost.
This is the typical model for enterprise software that is sold through a sales team. The price of the product is determined by how much the customer is willing to pay and can vary widely from one sale to the next. Sales made this way usually yield a higher price at the expense of speed/volume. You can only sell as fast as your sales team works.
Can Email be plugged into DRM?
My laymen terminology and understanding is, DRM is an sudo encryption scheme that prevents people outside a particular group from viewing the content.

If my understanding is correct, can email be plugged into DRM to allow a group of users the ability to see that email?
How? Just clearing the cache?
Great job, thank you for sharing this resource with us.

Please add this cheat sheet for Xcode: http://cocoasamurai.blogspot.com/2009/08/xcode-shortcuts-upd...

It's not mine but I have found it useful.
I agree with your sentiment. However, in this case the site has a long road ahead of it, to restore lost or buried functionality.

From the top of my head:

- Tipjar honor roll is hidden in a separate screen, which removes "status" related incentives to tip (a loss for artists)

- Social features are buried; the artist doesn't feel like they are "there" on the site

- Can't see what's ahead or behind you on the browsing playlists

- On Chrome, the user account information is occluded by the status bar whenever you hover on a link

- "Sliding" effects make the interface feel sluggish

All of these issues can be addressed without the "reversion" people are calling for... but there are some long nights ahead for the dev team if they want to match the prior version in raw usability.
Is this just a way for me to log what books I've read? I'm not really getting the point, I'm sorry to say.
Interesting that most of the discussion here makes bilingualism seem like the pinnacle of achievement.

But I guess I belittle bilingualism because I am fluent in two languages and strive for three or four.
Product idea: A little plastic boot that slides onto a light switch to represent its true function. Like a Japanese eraser garbage can.
"But we all know that nowadays it is the changed subject line of an email response in a thread... which is why it gets the attention the author mentions."

No, I think many people are aware of the broader definition. Reading this and other comments here, I was expecting this to be a spamming tactic...but the email in question is sent in response to an active request for information. "Re: Klein SDK pricelist request" is a perfectly honest and understandable subject line.
ram: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1120475 (I think I've seen windows guides somewhere)

defragmenting: http://lifehacker.com/5344418/make-firefox-faster-by-vacuumi...
excellent work, just bookmarked it. The only thing I'll recommend you is to improve that adsense there or look for a new revenue model, you won't earn much from it at the place it is, maybe sell ebooks later: kind of the "devcheatsheet book".
Some of my software asks "Save before exit?" whether I've changed anything or not

Ooops. I made some like that.
No, they belligerently designed their <video> and <audio> implementations to make that incredibly difficult to do without forking the whole project.

They link directly with liboggplay instead of using a library like ffmpeg (Chrome), gstreamer (Opera), Quicktime (Safari), or DirectShow (IE, eventually). They don't even support any other container formats! I hope their heads fall off.
I posted a day or two ago that I'm leaving the US, and I'm not kidding.
How do people from religious backgrounds where “karma” refers to something serious feel about the word being appropriated to mean a number on a web page?
Pen v keyboard v Newton v Graffiti v Treo v iPhone
Too much of a good thing - the decline of Guitar Hero and Rock Band
> I didn't know languages education was voluntary in the US.

It's mandatory, but you get to choose which language to study. Choice is generally either Spanish, French, or German (and sometimes Japanese). Most kids choose Spanish (at least, that's what it seems like).

You take a few years of it before graduating high school.

And, as someone else posted, it's pretty universal that most people forget almost all of it as soon as they've satisified either their high school or else college requirements. I don't have any idea if colleges require foreign language credits or not.
If you filled out the contact form, then you did send an email of sorts, and he is responding to your email, that you did send.
and in Firefox
I guess that's what the "about" link in the top right-hand corner is there for. I suppose it needs to be more obvious?

Edit: probably need some sort of boilerplate on the front page to explain it succinctly. Thanks for the pointer.
http://aws.amazon.com/startupchallenge/ has some more info on the finalists
A professional scientist doesn't pick up a copy of New Scientist at the newsagent when he meant to get Nature...
I was suffering horrible hangs will some sites updated, notably Facebook.

On upgrading Firefox to 3.6 I had to edit the install.rdf of the "It's all text" extension to allow it to work. I noticed a comment on the Mozilla add-ons site saying that this extension could be the cause of the slowdowns.

Anyway (with the hacked install.rdf) "It's all text" still works in Firefox 3.6 and my slow-downs have gone.

Happy! I didn't want to swap to Chrome without "It's all text", noscript and adblock plus.
You got it. Just a minimalist reading diary - there are other sites that handle reading + networking (goodreads, readernaut, etc) but I find them all too cluttered. The 'about' page tells more about what I was aiming for.
Sergey Brin's relief mission to Haiti
I don't know the original quote, but it's often repeated that Linux is "not ready for the desktop." So, irony.
Firefox lets you customize that. Here's what I do:

1) First, get rid of the search box. Go to View, then Toolbars, then Customize. That will pop up a box with all of the possible wigits you can select. Click on the search box in the upper right portion of your Firefox window and drag it into that box.

2) Now with the search box gone, the next step is to make the location bar act as one. To do this, type “about: config” into the location bar. Then select “keyword.url” and enter “http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&q=”. Now whatever you type into the location bar that’s not a URL will do a Google search. You have to exit and re-start Firefox for this to take effect.
It's definitely a prestige language in Scandinavia, remember that most of our pop culture is in English.
A lot of these "startup as self-help" threads seem to draw a false distinction between entrepreneurship and full-time employment, framing the latter as some kind of moral cowardice.

While it may not make you feel like a Nietzschean superman, there are compelling reasons to consider finishing your degree and getting a normal job - for example, the chance to work with a large team of experts who know what they are doing, or to have access to world-class infrastructure, or to work in a field that you'd never be able to enter as an entrepreneur (steering Mars rovers, say).

It's fun to take a risk and pursue a dream (even if you don't appear to have any clear product idea), but there are reasons beyond risk avoidance why many people don't choose to go that route.
Understanding the Objective-C Runtime
More gentle introduction in this (free to download) text book:
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/book.html
— it’s by one of the authors responsible for rediscovering Gallager codes
I personally like the approach that JetBrains takes. There products are also developer-targeted and not-necessarily cheap.

They handle this by showing the price, allowing you to download a 30-day trial, and then sending out an email soliciting feedback once your trial is about to expire. The email comes from an account that is easily recognized as jetbrains, but instead of 'sales@jetbrains.com' or something similar, it actually appears to come from a person (i.e. john_smith@jetbrains.com). This email could still be autogenerated for all I know, but I certainly felt a more personal connection than the usual "do not reply, this email was autogenerated" stuff that I normally get.