skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not talking 1984-the-police-own-all-the-cameras. It becomes cheap enough that some random person walking down the street can point a cellphone at the event as it happens, or a store owner's security camera can catch it on film, etc. Unless you are trying to imply that every random person will just happen to be friendly with any random police officer that gives you trouble.
"There is also a web based system for asking Larry & Sergey questions."

Google Moderator (it's public now). HN user "litewulf" worked on it...
Agreed. Design is not simply a matter of appearance. Google's design is clear and useful. This Air theme is arty for the sake of being arty, and it's not even particularly attractive.
Are you not including Social Security and Medicare in social services?

The complaint from the right is that the federal government confiscates the wealth of its citizens and redistributes it, presumably suboptimally. Leaving aside the objections to coerced wealth redistribution, there are questions of inefficiency, corruption, fraud, etc. i.e. One can easily imagine that a free market in social services would result in a more prosperous nation.

In any case, I think the right does not distinguish between Social Security, Medicare, and other entitlements in its objections to a spendy fed.
The 'usual bugaboo' is 'entitlements', which includes Medicare and Social Security, and is roughly $1.6 trillion.

I don't agree with the money we're pissing away in the Middle East either, but you can't honestly call social services a 'tiny minority' of that budget.
Yes but the designers have to prove (using formal usability testing) that their 4 pixel bezel is superior to a 3 or a 5 pixel bezel for example.
Actually my wife made me sit through the thing which is why I know. Earlier in the show he talked to her after identifying her as his daughter.
How is the revenue from social security different from that of other federal taxes (esp. income)?
Chances are because this is likely to be faster and more compatible. I don't know how what the performance of the IBM one is like but the Quercus pages say "Performance is 4x mod_php and is comparable with PHP accelerator performance.". In other words, about as fast as PHP.
One huge "Causation does not imply correlation" needs to be stamped on this one. There is a good chance that companies with complex names have worse marketing overall.
Woe is a pretty strong emotion. Think of being completely lost of in grief. It pushes far beyond bad day to rocked-to-the-core
No ads, no money...
X only makes mine jump. C results in a weird puff of smoke. I took a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d2Gqy2zIsE

This is Flash 10 on Safari 4 on OS X, by the way.
Related: http://www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/

I always thought this was a pretty good visual representation of budget distribution. Note this reflects the 2010 budget, not the proposed 2011 budget.
Am I the only person in NYC rolling their eyes at this continual barrage of "IN NYC IT RAINS MANNA FROM THE SKY!" ?
hey sorry for getting so silent. but the best is the enemy of the good.
Lots of issues about just how great wikileaks is for all this--but until there is something better then let's give them some support.
I'm counting down the seconds until we get a comment about how this is "evil"
Google has it easy in this respect. At many other companies it can be hard to know if people are slacking off or just not that smart.
Yes, private pensions have different rules and regulations about when to put money in, take it out, etc. For one thing, social security forces you to contribute. If you would rather spend your money on something else (in general, or just this month), you can't. Sometimes that hurts people who are trying to make rent. Sometimes it's inefficient b/c they could have used the same money for something better. Private pensions, if they get nothing else right, at least are voluntary.
no money, no power...
I would not be even slightly surprised if they went out of their way to tuck ad blocking into a little niche somewhere that requires several clicks to find - it's definitely easier to imagine than them promoting their own platform as easily ad-less when almost every dollar they make comes from ads.
IPad Keynote in less than 180 Seconds: Incredible, Beautiful, Amazing
I'm saying that 560 billion, for one category of social services, is not a small part of the budget.

Of course I would like to slash at social security too.
I think one of the biggest problems is the insane level of reliance Google now has for domain authority.

It feels like a cheap cop-out for controlling spam: the side effect is that you have heavy hitters like Maholo, Target, etc... all out spamming the more relevant websites.

A more general example of this algorithm problem is that it ranks the pages of Digg, HN, or similar to be higher than the actual website it links to, and most of the times those pages are devoid of any actual content, merely containing a couple of votes and no comments.
It's either a glitch or they began filling the "Popular" column with random results. I reloaded the page a few times and got different results there, one included some ad blocking extension.

Screenshot: http://imgur.com/HT1R9.png
VoxPop: Extracting Emotion from Online Discourse
I don't get the feeling that this design saw much user testing. As you describe, the domain plays an important part in helping mentally filter results and thus doesn't really merit relegation to rollover visibility.

What I think would qualify for that is the rest of the URL path.

Overall, as nice as it all looks, there are some serious discoverability issues. "Show options" doesn't need to be shown in as much detail as Google has it, but the plus-sign itself isn't enough to go on. The rollover visibility for the other Google products just makes it hard to find them; the header isn't that noisy with them visible. The single gear for settings/sign in is a little better than the lone plus sign, but still, such condensation is extreme, especially for the importance Google places on getting users to use accounts.
Sorry. iPod Touch combined to fat fingers.
It is marginally related to the article, both being about Google. It isn't fair to say that he was trolling just because half of his comment wasn't discussed in the blog post.
The argument being made was that the PHP runtime is 4-5 times slower than Python and that PHP only looks as fast as it does because of the C libraries. This is simply untrue and the OP wasn't able to back it up. Cores don't come into it.
I tried to read it like that, but the part where his screenshot of the rickrolling, which includes the whole ajaxian post, has attribution to him, as well as a direct link to his site. Im not sure how that is not exposure/fame.
"Unlike Microsoft who required some hefty developer fees."

You only had to pay for the developer tools you decided to use, and I don't recall VB[3|5|5] being all that expensive. But it's been awhile since I even considered it. Assorted Borland products may have been less expensive.

Nowadays there are free .Net development tools. But I recall Microsoft as standing out in the help the give people wanting t build for their platform, back when I would still code VB for money.
I like Robert Heinlein, but I don't recall any of his books touching these topics. Can you give some specific recommendations for my reading list?
Ask HN: HTML/JS Standards Question
Nearly everyone (except maybe my coworkers) knows that web standards dictate that lower case HTML tags must always be used. But the question is, why does the JavaScript method .tagName return the object's tag in UPPERCASE?

Good Code:

<div id="welcome">Hello</div>

Bad Code:

<DIV ID="welcome">Hello</DIV>

JavaScript:

document.getElementById("welcome").tagName;

For both, the code would return "DIV" and not "div".
http://tryruby.org/

For example.
I think most scientists know pi to 4 characters: M_PI
Also covered. ;)

> The "55 inch" language applies to large establishments of more than a few thousand square feet. Such places can show the big game on a TV set, but only if they don't use "more than 4 audiovisual devices, of which not more than 1 audiovisual device is located in any 1 room, and no such audiovisual device has a diagonal screen size greater than 55 inches, and any audio portion of the performance or display is communicated by means of a total of not more than 6 loudspeakers, of which not more than 4 loudspeakers are located in any 1 room or adjoining outdoor space."
It doesn't matter whether I do something warranting eviction. The owner of the private property I am on has final say over who is on his property. He can invite me onto his property for the sole purpose of evicting me to make me mad at him, if he likes. He does not need a reason to change his mind, because he can do what he likes with his property. Ownership of property is a major basis of common law, traced back to the dawn of civilization. Our entire society depends upon it.
It's really not any more bizarre than having copies of strings of characters be illegal. Or copies of sound patterns, vocal pitches, etc.
If you really want to do these things, then whether or not you get into YC, or whether or not you find a co-founder will just be a minor distraction to your actual goals.

YC is great if the timing is right and if you can get into it. At the same time, if someone were to tell me, "go spend 6 months finding a co-founder and working on something together, and then we'll talk", I would nod politely, and then proceed to spend the next 6 months building my project. Those are 6 months that you could use to get off the ground, if you're really motivated. You could launch in 6 months if your project doesn't require a large initial outlay of resources. And if your project is awesome enough, then it will attract people interested in your project, and it will gain momentum.
One of the thing proper to Erlang's hot code loading is that it uses a vm-centralized code server that handles and garbage collects the different versions of code.

This server can in turn notify subscribers about code changes; the OTP framework uses this to propagate code upgrades in its behaviours (gen_fsm, gen_event [and all the handlers], gen_server) with a callback function that lets the programmer define what changes to the data structures and state currently in running code have to be applied.

Does node.js have anything similar to that? Or is there anything of the kind planned?

I don't really know the in and outs of node.js, but from the blog post, it seems like there's no way to update current state and the only real upgrades will be done on new calls. Is this because node.js just doesn't have the same objectives in mind?
Unity3D, silverlight, WebGL
Thumbnails, but yes. Just tested it. Wasn't aware of that, but doesn't matter too much for me. I don't use it for images, am not ashamed of my images, and you only see what file was changed, not the changes made. An unlikely security problem, but probably a bad idea anyway.

With a little complaining, I'd bet they'd put up an opt-out option, take out image thumbnails, and hopefully a layer of security over the feed.
CIA Agents Search for Corporate Dirt
VC: "Saying No Sucks…"
They took free bsd made their own OS. Have they given back to BSD? Not in any major way. Sure they released Darwin but now they started keeping parts back to stop hackintoshes. They took KHTML for webkit sure they release source as required but they don't contribute upstream. So they embrace and extend but so far they have only taken from places that are so impoverished that their is no point to extinguish(desktop freebsd, KHTML user share?)
Hitchins: North Korea is even weirder and more despicable than you thought
I'm not sure I get what kind of psychological theory the article is describing.

"Things that are easy to understand are perceived as better than hard to understand things unless you're in some kind of mood that makes the opposite true."

How am I supposed to get anything useful out of a theory like that?
The high cost of broken tools
What do you purpose to do with the millions of elderly people who rely on it? It's easy to cut budgets on paper but there's a very real moral and ethical cost. Social security is a life or death issue for the elderly.
Google Chrome  has "native support" for greasemonkey scripts
The iPad’s Closed System
Alan Kay (1972). A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages
Just want to add what a fantastic thread of comments there is on this page. Thanks for such well thought-out debate and discussion guys.
I really enjoyed this. I've done the crappy wordpress thing, the redesign thing, the giving up thing... This post kind of inspired me to go back to my site and get something simple going again.
I have nothing to add except for: yay!
Advertising has always been a way to make otherwise losing propositions profitable

Or you could, you know, be the guy paying for the AdWords. I sell a product to consumers over the Internet. Stop the presses, I know. I have many competitors who do free versions essentially the same product, monetized by ads. My ads, since if Google polled the entire world saying "Hey who of you would pay cash money to speak to an elementary school English teacher currently making Reading Rainbow bingo cards?" I'd be up in the front row shouting "OOH OOH PICK ME!"

Since I know what Google charges me and I can estimate what Google keeps, I can ballpark estimate the CPMs for their sites. Its in the $2 a month range. The effective CPM for my site is more than twenty times higher than that.

Ads also have a pernicious effect on your product design. A core skill for B2C products is optimizing them so that the user gets through the workflow successfully. We optimize for success, because successful users pay us money. If you have CPC ads on your site, you have to optimize for failure: the ad has to be more enticing than your application/content or you don't get paid.

Granted, there are some audiences who don't pay money for anything (why hello, students) and some applications whose users will not pay money for them (why hello, URL shorteners/social networkers/anything starting with the letters Tw), but you don't have to make these. There is literally infinite need for solutions to problems, even in B2C (C stands for consumer, i.e., one who buys products), that you could deliver profitably. And then spend a portion of those profits tossing nickels to sites without business sense so you can steal their users and charge them dollars.
... as long as you're not taking the kind that has mercury in it.
"according to a preliminary study of 81 patients in Austria."

Keep in mind that it is not rare that findings made at the preliminary stage don't hold up when more rigorous studies are undertaken.

There was a total of 81 patients in this trial. What is the statistical significance of the finding?
And now, digital evolution (2005)
Was the Tesla Roadster a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)?
The exact opposite of the iPad. Or, better, how the iPad could have been if the computer revolution would've gone right.
You don't get to decide what warrants eviction. Neither do I, I would've let them stay. But it wasn't my call.

Freedom of speech can be used to say all sorts of foul, obnoxious, even indefensible things. In much the same way, common law property rights can be used in a witless way. Criticizing their behavior is the appropriate response, not abusing the concept of rights.
That's some serious irony right there.
Thoughtful... but I'm more inclined to believe that the company with said diagram has an organizational problem with regards to handling support requests.
Does Chrome support scrolling to where you were on the page when you hit the back button yet? That was what made me switch back to firefox.
When my dad was growing up, getting into Harvard was considered a nice thing, but it wasn't expected that everyone halfway smart would vie for the Ivy League. Most people applied to two or three schools-- usually good colleges close by, such as the state flagships.

Now there's an obsession with elite schools, and it has trickled down even to the pre-school level, at ridiculous costs in both time and money. It's not about education; it's about social climbing.

I believe this is because society is beginning to unravel, even as technology and the economy improve. When society contracts, social connections become important because of the dwindling resources and hoarding.
This idea of a dumbed-down computing experience reminds me of AOL. I wonder if Apple continues going down that road, if it will cost them. Look at the exodus from the proprietary, locked down "internet" that occurred in the last decade.

Now AOL was never as cool as Apple is, so perhaps it won't be an embarassing device to be seen using. But if Apple keeps moving in this direction, those kinds of negative connotations might hurt them. It's a bit early to have any certainty though...
Out of curiosity, would this prevent a chrome equivalent of the SQLite manager?
It's a joke, not a challenge.

Suddenly this seems relevant again:

http://www.stanford.edu/~pgbovine/geek-behaviors.htm

(particularly the Obsessing over correctness and completeness bit).
this is exactly what's going to make me switch from firefox to chromium
I'm arguing for the portion of the bit-arranging that the publisher (or record label or movie studio) is responsible for. I think we tend to under-estimate that, probably for the simple reason that it is invisible to us.

I'm not about to argue that they deserve every last cent they demand, though. Only that pricing should be dragged down kicking and streaming by what the market is willing to bear for the content and not encouraged to free-fall until it barely covers the cost of the bit-moving. As much as I may want cheap books, I can sympathize with a publisher's desire to not get bitch-slapped by the invisible hand.

(Also: I'm usually opposed to meta-discussion about moderation, but I did want you to know that I am not the ass-hat that voted you to zero.)
Does Google personalize the design of the search page in any way? A/B testing to find the best design on average won't give you the optimal design for each individual.
To elaborate on Dave's point here, the ARPU for Paypal is low because Paypal's revenue is just a cut of the transaction value that they facilitate. For example, I pay them about ~$1.19 or so out of every $30 purchase.

US-based customer services reps cannot complete a phone call for less than $7 fully loaded. You really, realllllly do not want to have a CS infrastructure taking multiple calls to resolve Mrs. Smith's inability to successfully use her computer when Mrs. Smith is probably going to be worth less than a buck fifty to you and will likely need more handholding next time, too.
DocsDiag - DOCSIS cable modem diagnostics
I'm more worried about the dihydrogen monoxide they're inhaling every day.
We could phase it out without reducing benefits for people who have already paid a lot into it or are already getting paid benefits.

There may be better and faster plans too, I don't know, but this one would work without hurting anyone.
How to Create Creativity
How does the free market provide services to people who have no money? I agree it's good to help people but we have social security and other social programs exactly because there was no help when people needed it. I don't think anything has changed since. It's probably gotten worse.
i.e. the engineers who are more interested in solving problems than in monetary incentives.
Simple ideas that produce nice sound bites are also much easier to repeat over and over in a stump speech. The simplicity of the ideas (producing this so-called "fluency effect") combined with the power of repetition (which might be another example of the fluency effect) means that a candidate whose goal is to get elected is better off saying as little as possible about issues of substance.
You are wrong. It matters if you do something warranting eviction.

The supreme court ruled in Brown v. Board of Eduction of Topeka that racial segregation is a violation of the 14th amendment. This means you cannot evict people even from your privately owned businesses because of their race due to the commerce clause: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Clause

So if the people with the bumper stickers were black and asked to leave because they were black, it would be a slam dunk case against them.

Now we may see if this reaches the supreme court and whether they protect people from being discriminated for their political views.
What's the difference between a missing person and someone who wants to be missing?
webspam. Search for 1935 buick and get back dozens of sites that have "OEM fuel injectors for your 1935 buick" or "OEM stereo for your 1935 buick", etc, etc.

Google has let their core brand go bad.
I'd like for the PostgreSQL team to add synchronous replication :) (ideally as a per transaction setting)

Well, exactly this is planed for a future release: http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Streaming_Replication#Future...
If it provides those too, it's called a cult, not a corporation.
It's interesting to read the comments here, because I was involved in the design of a lot of these features, and many of the elements of "Air" have been considered and rejected for exactly the reasons that HN readers point out.
One of the better articles illustrating the differences between the iPhone and the Droid.
Amazon has been trying to sell authors on the concept of cutting out publishers entirely, and just jumping on board with Kindle self-publishing.

Given the reaction by authors to this move, I don't think many would be receptive to this idea any more - Amazon has shown that it's willing to bend its suppliers over a barrel and strongarm people in pricing. Given that Kindle self-publishing is still in its infancy, and still has yet to sign a major author willing to ditch a publisher, this recent news hasn't really helped its case any.
HTML is not necessarily case sensitive, you can use upper or lowercase tags in HTML 5, and perhaps others. With that in mind, the tags should be normalized when querying what an element is (hr == HR == hR == Hr). Uppercase was chosen:

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...

"These attributes must return element names converted to ASCII uppercase, regardless of the case with which they were created."
I like the http://duckduckgo.com/ design. I use duckduckgo for search now instead of Google.
Winning an argument with your boss or HR person over whether it is art or not is pointless when you're being fired. Nudity in the workplace is generally frowned upon. Whether that is right or wrong is another point entirely.
Facebook And Twitter Will Always Be Crappy Businesses
.tagName evaluates to the name of the HTML 4 element, and names are written all-caps in the HTML 4 and older specifications. All-caps is convenient because you can write about, for example, the A element by just typing its name. The standards committees renamed them to lowercase for XHTML and HTML 5, because writing about 'a' elements is ever so much more consistent. Morons.

P.S. In HTML 4 and older, tags are case insensitive. And practical browsers will accept both cases for the foreseeable future.
The iPad is not a personal computer in the sense that we currently understand. One wonders what led the author that it would be? Apple is still making the mac, which is not closed.
You're using a very strange definition of embrace, extend, extinguish.
Maybe they just don't think PHP is such a bad choice. Any comparable language would probably require refactoring/optimizing tools, so these aren't a reason to switch on their own, they have a lot of legacy PHP code and developers who are familiar with it, and PHP powers quite a few FB-sized websites.
Here's the required CSS: http://www.injectiondesign.com/google/designs/air2/2/clarity...
While it doesn't break a page visually, uppercase HTML tags restrict a page from validating properly?
Most of the time, I use \pi.
it would allow the implementation of everything in the App Store

How?
How it hurts.
The iPad CPU: Details on the Apple A4