skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was referring to concepts presented in "The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite" by David Kessler.

Of course, I wouldn't expect a lot of people on HN to agree, thus the down-votes.

A lot of the food industry is based on pumping the salt, sugar and fat so that we eat/buy more. So people focused on making money are more likely to side with Taubes (even if he's wrong) than with Kessler.

If I could down vote this thread, I would.
How often do you read a label before switching on a light? I work at a building that has a big panel of them, and I still just flip them on and off until it looks right rather than read the label.

When it's a matter of handed-or-maimed, don't rely on a label!
I think I figured out Apple's e-reader strategy.
as Mormons (meat eaters):

meat eaters who should be nearly vegetarians (although definitely are not, in general):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_of_Wisdom#Meat
Have a look at mintty as well. http://mintty.googlecode.com.
Fixed. Thanks for pointing that out.
Startup time is MUCH improved in Firefox 3.6. Chrome still feels slightly quicker, but we're talking on the order of 100s of milliseconds. For something that I do once a day, at most, the difference is negligible.
You don’t. And he doesn’t claim that, does he?

The author of the article has previously often advocated user testing, not trusting your gut.
Large number of UK government held data-sets now available
Maybe you could do it Google-style, where you feature the hotlink but also offer a cached version of it. Or, alternatively, you can hotlink to Google's cache of it (since they almost certainly have one!).
I have yet to encounter a company that doesn't follow the "pay as little as we can get away with" policy.
Actually doesn't matter if the names are not exactly the same (try opening a department store called "Waltmart") they can make it stick if they can convince a judge that someone else is trading off their reputation. That's not difficult to do if both entities are in similar businesses.
The problem with public universities
The funny thing is that Taubes book basically recommends you do away with those things anyway:
who likes burgers without the bun? fries are out, shakes are out, tacos without the shell? no thanks, etc, etc.

Where he differs, he has a lot more science to back it up.
I remember when I used to get excited when a new version of firefox came out, but now I just don't care. The performance is abysmal and frustrating. I am on mac and even though chrome doesn't have an official release yet and no plugins, I have already switched 100% to it. I do hope that we will eventually see competition between the browsers again, but at this state, I don't see that much coming out from mozilla.
Z80 CPU Homebrew Computer
Definitely, you know what your users are looking for. Amazon Associates could work for monetization.
Doctors Without Borders: Setting up an inflatable plug-and-play hospital
I like it. Though I feel that some of these guides don't really qualify as cheat sheets. I consider a cheat sheet to be a quick reference with helpful commands, syntax, examples etc. Some of these documents are just condensed howto guides. For instance, most of the SEO ones. Something to think about anyway.
We can do everything except that last one right now.

Make each member a client and make your landlord and internet company vendors. Make an invoice for each month (you can make them repeat), then make a receipt when they pay (it can handle them paying half, 3 months, whatever). You can go into a business or see on the dashboard who hasn't paid.
I love it. And I'm an old user.
The Google Ads are just a placeholder. I think Amazon books would be very relevant, and I am going to look into some other affiliate programs such as thinkgeek.com.
Sunspider and V8 are standard javascript benchmarks. I have found that the test results compare favourably to real world usage. For example Google wave is sluggish on firefox while chrome has no problems with it.
I gave it answers for Helvetica and got Akzidenz-Grotesk. Close enough, I guess.
Yeah, this list was more about pure play review sites. Obviously Amazon pretty much invented the space.
Haiti disaster - a telecoms success story...?
One way to marginally improve the common password strength is to at least add the name or the URL of site to it. So if the password is 123456 then the hackernews password might be 123456news.ycombinator.com.
I wonder if Adams has ever read Donald A. Norman's classic The Design of Everyday Things. He'd probably love it; this kind of critique is exactly what the book explores so well.
Google and Yahoo have tons of reviews as well.
I think their name choice is a bit unfortunate.
Brand Your Captcha? Introducing AdCaptcher
A not uncommon scenario: There is data X, as the result of some experiment. Researches in group 1 say X implies A and B, researchers in group 2 say X implies A and C, and researchers in group 3 say X implies Q then A. They all propose different sets of experiments to further understand the phenomenon, they all write different papers, etc. Yet we can say there is consensus about implication A. Even if some data Y comes along (at a later point) completely disproving A, consensus on A (currently) drives further research.

For example: the ether, higgs particle, various cutting edge medical stuff.

My point here is they aren't voting on what is true so much as agreeing on the most likely scenario given the evidence and deciding how to further persue investigation.
Unless you have a strong, raw intellectual motivation in the endeavor, start by learning whatever allows you to accomplish tasks of interest to you. This is a strong motivating factor. If you like it, you'll keep learning more in order to accomplish more.

Tasks that save you time and effort are a good place to start. Tasks that entertain you are another.

In this regard, a scripting language with a good interface to your system (file access, graphics/presentation support, network support) is often cited as a good place to start. Many people suggest Python.

As you move to tackling larger problems, and/or growing your previous work, you'll find it beneficial to learn more about designs and techniques that aid in staying organized, keeping your work maintainable and efficient, etc. At that point, you'll want to look beyond the references for the language you started in and learn more general principles. (But even when you start, look for the BEST references in the language of your choice. The best references incorporate some of this context and explain it well, giving you a head start and helping you to avoid "bad" practices you may latter have to "unlearn".)

P.S. Perhaps implied in the above, the environment you want to work in / control will influence your choice. For "general" programming -- freestanding programs running on your machine -- you might find e.g Python the best starting point. If you mostly want to control things in your browser, then Javascript (along with HTML, CSS, and the DOM model -- which is already incorporating a quantity of semi-arbitrary detail that frustrates some people). If you were trying to ease administering a UNIX-flavor environment, you might consider Perl. If you spend most of your time in Microsoft Office documents, then Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) or whatever it is these days.

How long it takes depends largely on you. Some people, particularly with a strong motivation to accomplish specific things, learn quite a lot in a couple of months. On the other hand, I've worked with people having technology degrees who nonetheless seem fairly clueless.
it does sound like a natural and good step forward for them. i admit it also feels lame to me, but then i'm not extra passionate about blogging or tweeting (though i do both using wordpress and the twitter website).
There is no need to offer authors money. You just need to formulate something clever around reputation/kudos.
I like the clean simplistic design. I also like that you have a short "privacy policy" right on the page.

I'd so some testing on the "Where Are You?" button because it might confuse users into thinking that they have to put where THEY are when they click that button. Maybe "Send Question" or even just "Go".

I don't have an iPhone so I can't test what comes up when you receive the email but the home page is really well done.
I have one UI pet peeve: mousing over large screens.

I look at it this way: when the Apple Macintosh made the mouse popular in 1984, it was with a 9 inch, 512x324 resolution display. I got started computing on a 17 inch, 640x480 resolution display, so not that much larger in terms of usable screen real estate. Now, I have two 22 inch, 1680x1050 resolution displays, one turned vertically. For comparison, I made this image
http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/thOvKDvamA7iCeQLCdyGIw?...

The red box in the middle is the old Macintosh display. It looks roughly 5 inches across the diagonal. Mousing interfaces haven't changed in any significant way in the last 30 years, but displays have grown astronomically in that time. If arguments against the mouse over text interfaces were contentious back-in-the-day, it's even worse now. My wrists can't take this anymore.
Its a feature that in no way connects with their core product. Sure, if they added a TWEET THIS blog post link, and did a direct integration to Twitter for helping spread the word on a blog entry, I would understand.

However, this is a completely separate branch.
Does it matter that the trademark is based on something that precedes the company? I vaguely recall hearing that a trademark is hard to defend if it becomes part of the common language.
Bad design is everywhere...

My old microwave oven had one control, a dial. Just put the food in and turn it. The whole dial represented 12 minutes, so just estimate how far to turn it. My new microwave has 22 buttons. I forget which is which. I have to turn on the lights and get my glasses.

The previous owner installed vertical blinds on the double hung windows. Think about that. Impossible to have open windows without endless noise and movement.

An office where I work is near an airport. They have a key card system that beeps with a successful swipe. So you can't hear the beep when an airplane is passing overhead (every 5 minutes) and have to wait until it's gone to get into the building.

Another office has "gone green" and installed motion sensors everywhere to turn off lights not being used. Good luck finishing up in the restroom if you've been sitting too long.

Some of my software asks "Save before exit?" whether I've changed anything or not. I got so tired of trying to remember if I had updated or only viewed, I just click "Yes" every time. Pointless.

Every time the garbage truck drops the dumpster back down next door, 3 car alarms go off. No one ever responds, because they assume that it's a false alarm. Not that big a deal until the garbage truck shows up at 4:00 a.m. on Saturday.

My TV remote has 33 buttons. So they're so small, you have to stop and look at it to hit "Mute" or "Last Channel", the only 2 buttons I ever use. Who designed this thing, a munchkin?

The airports in Orlando, Philadelphia, San Jose, and Miami put the restaurants (not counting junk food) outside of security. So you have to wonder, "Do I have enough time to eat and then get through the line?" (Pittsburgh, Tampa, and Chicago Midway did it right.)

The trunk release and gas cap release levers in my car are next to each other but not visible. It's hard to pull one without the other. Seems like my gas cap door is always open.

A theater we went to the other night only had aisles on the sides with 50 seats in between. Do your really want that great seat in the center knowing you may have to climb over 25 people if you need the restroom before the movie is over?

Intersections that gridlock because of traffic from the next light. Too many to mention.

Microsoft Windows.
Top 8 Mobile Trends of 2010
As a person who spends a lot of his time on Twitter (follow me here), I read about all the latest rumors circulating the Web.
How to raise money without lying to investors
Does it do deduplication, or do I have to pay for too much storage when a large file changes just a little each day?

This is why I use JungleDisk.
> Were the switches ordered the way I thought they should be, and that was my memory trick, or were they ordered the opposite of how I would have done it, and THAT was my memory trick.

I'm glad I'm not the only one that uses this "opposite of normal logic" trick in order to remember how things work sometimes.
I'd rather not have electrical connections on the floor near a sink. Yes, I know that the garbage disposal has power, but it's not at a local minima.
I think it is a good idea to enable users to give some feedback. I will look into ways to report broken links. Thanks for pointing that out.
Thanks for the feedback. If you would like to test the full cycle you can send me a location request at gcrawshaw@gmail.com
Hillary Clinton on Internet freedom
This is absolutely true. (Fellow Indian here. Why did you think you would be downvoted? :) )

Let me expand one reason. Bureaucracy. The engineers or even managers you talk to may not have the authority/incentive to be honest with you. The directive from above will be to sugar coat anything they utter.
Well, I was looking at the DX manual - I confess I'm waiting to lay my mitts on one, which should be landing in my corner of Europe today.

If you're talking of the 6" e-ink screen (I have one of the Hanlin ones, branded BeBook), I do not think there's a good way of reading PDFs "printed" to Letter/A4 on them. (Thus the DX.)

(Short, of course, of intelligently reflowing the PDF to a smaller page size - which currently seems to be an opportunity ;-)
Supreme Court rejects limits on corporate spending in electoral campaigns
Here is the video
http://vimeo.com/8729673
Not that there aren't times when a founder needs to get ejected, but I think it happens about 10x as many times as it is good for the company.

The boards at these companies are too often like the group of senators that killed Julius Caesar. Nominally trying to save the state/company, but really just interested in their own power, and almost always the true bringers of chaos and destruction.
Entrepreneur-product fit
It does seem to be improved, but on my system (new-ish MBP running OS X), Chrome and Safari startup is nearly instantaneous, and Firefox still lags. I don't know how it compares on Windows.

Still.. bravo to the Firefox team for making a big improvement in this department. My ire is now refocused on the (lack of) JavaScript performance. :-)
To prevent incoming connections you don't want.
From camel to Cadillac in a single generation....there is still a long ways to go in terms of human rights in that part of the world.
" Why did you think you would be downvoted? :) "

This has happened to me before :-). I was called a "traitor" (to whom?) and "elitist" for saying something similar to this in another forum.

I don't mind. Karma (even on HN) is just a number on a webpage :-P
LuaForge's ftp server is broken since the big LuaForge crash a few months ago, so those pages are badly out of date. Browse http://github.com/keplerproject for more recent information.
It's Time to Elevate Entrepreneurs
Incorrect. Have you tried it?

Hitting "Post to Twitter" puts the content in a Posterous and tweets a link to it. How does that not connect with their core product?
> The demographic for "Maybe we should look seriously at cheap options for energy efficiency and carbon mitigation." is practically zero.

Actually, that demographic is huge. Folks would love cheaper energy.

What they're being offered is more expensive energy and carbon mitigation.
Sure, if you like coffee tables made of cardboard inside thin plastic, with particleboard legs.

Their stuff is just crap.

It looks good, it's lightweight and dirt cheap, and actually appears to serve the purpose of furniture, but it ultimately fails miserably.
> Microsoft Windows.

hahaha!

(I know I will be down-voted for that comment but I'm ready to risk 4 karma points to display my appreciation of that last point)
But then Apple would be ceding the future of electronic publishing of text to Amazon, and could never differentiate its hardware over the Kindle's, unless Amazon decided to support richer media in its files than the Kindle will actually display (not likely). That's not a plan that's consistent with Apple's strategy so far.
So google should hold the key to everyone's access to everything? Direct Navigation is still more important in most parts of the world than the search engine from a company's perspective. How would I google to email you? What would I put on a business card? How do I tell you to get to our website in a commercial?
I wouldn't even say that it confirms a problem with the design, just that it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to have the thing labeled in the first place.

If his sole reason for disliking this particular interface was that he couldn't remember which switch was which, I too am quite surprised that his first thought was to have a new countertop switch installed rather than stick a label on it or grab a sharpie.
I never saw that feature where when you hide the bookmarks toolbar, it comes up on the new tab page. Vertical space reclaimed!
As a counter anecdote, I have installed USB 3G mobile connection things.

A few years ago, the software was so fussy that we broke a Windows install past our ability to fix it merely by installing in the wrong order. After install it needed to be run as an administrator then as a user, then configured with custom profiles choosing which kinds of devices you might have. It was a mess.

Today I had to install the latest version and wasn't looking forward to it. Plugged the device in, it appeared as a USB stick with an installer. Ran the installer, ran the program - on first launch it quietly detected and installed some drivers and presented with a 'connect' button which ... worked.

I wish there was some standard way I could give feedback to the development team for their excellent work and to the company management for encouraging (or at least, permitting and subsequently getting out of the way of) such improvement and customer focus.
I read the FOIA feedback on the IPCC's report and it was full of really incredulous scientists' comments about the innacuracy and question begging nature of their report.

To substantiate what I said, check in the documents folder:
ipcc-tar-master.rtf
ipcc-tar-master2.rtf
hey there -- you've developed a really useful tool and I can see myself using this in the future all the time for helping learn languages... BUT I really think you need categorization by language for this to really take off. Otherwise great concept and implementation, hope it takes off!
Impressive, but it would be better if the newly opened bug had a link to the page you're raising the issue about.
I'd rather the powered finger chipper wasn't that easily turned on. Personally I go for a switch with one of those nifty red covers.
Mono-lingual Canadian here with a question for both of you:

What do adolescents in your countries think of learning english?

Most anglophone Canadians start learning french in grade 4, unless their parents put them in an immersion program at a younger age. In Ontario we were required to take French until grade 9 and after that the VAST majority of us stopped because we hated it.

Is it like that with English in other parts of the world? Or is English enough of a prestige language (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestige_%28sociolinguistics%29) that young people enjoy learning it?
It does connect with their core product. When you attach media it creates a posterous blog for you which hosts the content.
I guess anyone who hasn't checked the FOIA docs. Otherwise, I can't see how any intellectually honest person can. Just briefly skim README.txt in the documents folder if you are skeptical. It's the programmer's journal detailing all the atrocities he ran across as he reengineered the datasets and climate models.
Concepts, typically most important are:

. variables
. code
. conditional code (if statements)
. repeating code (loops/while/until/for)
. code grouping (procedures/methods/functions)
. variable grouping (records/structs)

More advanced concepts then become

. boolean logic (extension to conditionals)
. Object oriented coding (think: code+struct grouping)
. namespaces (think: grouping of objects)
. generics / reflections
. pointers
(certain languages expose this completely
(some implicitly: through pass by val or pass by ref
(some implicitly: by primitives vs objects
. preprocessor (only certain languages)
. recursion (repeating code but through function)
. functional features

----

How do you pick these concepts up? Few ways, but I think the following three are most common:

1) Old School Method :: Understand what is happening on the bare metal, and then work building syntactic sugar between what is happening really, and what you want to happen.

Assembly
-> C
-> OPP (C++/Java/C#)
-> scripting (Perl/Python/Ruby)
-> Functional (Lisp)

2) New Schooling :: Doing simple things in simple way (KISS principle), and then moving towards complicated systems ( a decent litmus test for language complexity is 'hello world' program. The more lines / syntax it requires, the more complicated language is. For example: for Java one needs to use objects / namespaces / static methods / functions / etc ) -> used by new academia

Scripting (Python/Ruby)
-> C#/Java/C++

3) Learning on the job :: fixing existing code, read code, tweak it, rinse, repeat. Learn from examples. Used by some vocational schools.

----

Libraries are in itself own big concept. Languages without libraries are bare, and, outside of curiosity, not practical. Very often knowing a language implies not only understanding of language grammar, but also it's libraries

You can think that libraries define half of what is considered programming language. For C++ you got STL/Boost. For Perl you got CPAN.

Kind regards

Adam Żochowski
I'm betting this is going to flip around in the next eighty years or so, and not towards Spanish.

If China's economy doesn't crash and burn (and, if it does, if it does not fail to rise again from the ashes like ours did after the Great Depression), Chinese is likely to become an important trade language. It's a difficult language, but then again - for different reasons - so is English.

I'm placing my bets that within a century, there will be two primary trade languages (Chinese, probably Mandarin but also likely Cantonese), and English. And perhaps, a century or so after that, simply a pidgin of the two.

The way global communications is bringing people closer cognitively will effectively starve out other languages. People will still speak them - likely limited to their local social groups (family, friends, et cetera), but fall to a global trade language (pidgin of English+Chinese) for nearly every other encounter.

In some ways, this may be extremely interesting from a linguistics standpoint: Everyone will speak a common language, but there will be more and more language-isolates, as individual social circles become more insulated from each other by the global trade language.
That is friggin' striking.

It's not very intuitive to navigate on the first visit, however. Once you've been to the site a few times, you probably get used to the structure. Also, the huge background makes for some really pixelated and stretched images.

Essentially, they have created the entire experience to be a visualizer. The redesign makes the experience more about listening to music and less about interacting with the community and 'quests'. I don't know if that's necessarily a good thing. I don't know if they can compete with the other music sites just based on content.

It changes what makes the T61 unique, for sure.