skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, I think the windowing system is to blame. It is vertical space that is precious but your eyes can't find too much use for horizontal space. Think pages of a newspaper that is divided into nice columns and compartments for a good reason.

So, there's extra horizontal space on your wall-sized monitor and a good windowing system supports the user in maximizing its usage and not necessarily in maximizing each window. However, systems like Windows make it near impossible to make your windows behave.

A typical scenario is having a couple of browser windows open for reading (like having some reference documentation at hand) and simultaneously typing into an active Emacs window partially/mostly underneath them both. If the windowing system insists on popping the active window to the top any of this becomes impossible, and you pretty much have no choice but to fall back to merely flipping between windows, and at this point it begins to feel stupid not to maximize all of them anyway.

But the downside is there, too. Going back to books and newspapers for a reference, in opposition web pages can be just horrible to read when the browser window is maximized. You don't read a book in a widescreen aspect ratio either. Your eyes beg for a limited visual region to operate in. As for myself, I've found that I get a nice reading width by stretching the width of the browser window to 2/3 or 3/5 of the width of the screen. If ads are cluttering the sides or the layout flows outside then Readability takes care of it. As for design advice, "p { width: 66em !important }" would be good.
This is mine:

http://phosphorusandlime.blogspot.com/2005/11/php-cheat-shee...

Helpful for php projects. I find I use it almost exclusively for the date formatting section.
I made Rhino on Rails (inspired by Yegge), check it out
Reaction to Cyber Shockwave
It seems more like they fired what few good devs they had, more like.
James Randi is proved right again.

Unfortunately, the retraction won't get a fraction of the coverage the original claims received, and we'll likely see this case brought up as 'evidence' in political arguments for years to come.
Leave Something Behind When You’re Gone
Skimmed, but what I gathered is:

The plumb lines diverged a bit. According to Palmer this means the earth is hollow, and everyone except him is chocking it up to air currents. Clearly, they can be pretty significant at that sort of distance. Few have been able to replicate the results all, and most get the expected results (parallel, with room for jostling / air currents randomizing).

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. It's too much to absorb right now.
This can be put on Wikipedia. They keep known-false things in there, with adequate flagging that it is such.

As long as it exists somewhere else, it can be on Wikipedia.
What a birthday present!
Reddit: IAmA grad student who has tried nearly every "study"/"smart" drug
You can simulate a mouse with existing hardware by decoupling the moving of the pointer and tapping (=clicking).

Therefore, moving your finger around the screen or tapping in a new position would only move the "mouse" pointer and not generate mouse clicks.

The mouse buttons could be mapped to some physical buttons on the device or to virtual buttons on the bottom or corners of the screen (think of your typical laptop touchpad layout).

Even better, the software could support a touchpad mode where the finger coordinates on the screen aren't mapped 1:1 to where the "mouse" pointer moves but as deltas similarly to how a touchpad works. This would allow for a fine-grained mouse movement even with the touchscreen and this would naturally limit the mouse clicking to specific locations / buttons only.
The proposal acknowledges that the current JS/V8 cannot really deliver on the original promise that all IO should be async. This is mainly because of awkward syntax in JS. The awkward syntax comes from the lack of native futures.

Where does the proposal acknowledge this? This discussion is about different styles of evented async programming, e.g. Promises vs pure function callbacks. What awkward syntax do you mean?

If that's the path they chose, what will distinguish Node from high performance network libraries in other languages, such as EventMachine and Twisted?

The main thing distinguishing Node from these frameworks is JavaScript's easy anonymous functions for easy asynchronous callbacks.

Node has it's reputation for speed precisely because it doesn't offer any blocking operations.

Node does offer blocking operations e.g. on the file system. I use them once when the program starts up to read configuration data. It's not going to cause problems unless you're doing blocking IO on every connection.

Node has a reputation for being able to scale to thousands of connections due to its evented nature - not a reputation for speed.
The file system cache doesn't contribute to committed bytes, the metric that the Exo CTO is appealing to - in this respect the Ars Technica article is mistaken. (Actually, the fact that the Ars Technica article used Task Manager made me inclined to dismiss it as clueless.)

Estimating real memory pressure is tough. There's the working set; but the working set may expand when you have sufficient physical memory, even though the marginal performance gains may be small. Similarly, the file system cache may expand when you have sufficient physical memory, but the marginal gains become small there too.

Probably the best unified metric would be the amount of time applications spend blocked on I/O, where that I/O is either paging committed bytes in from disk, or data that would be cacheable - and would have been cached - on a system with more memory. But that's extremely hard to predict.
Wiimote-Controlled Robot Drum Circle Makes Human Hippies Obsolete
My background is a vertical gradient. I have a script that runs via cron every 5 or 10 seconds that sets the top and bottom colors of the gradient to values that reflect the memory usage (top) and cpu usage (bottom) at any given time.

So if my memory usage is low, the top color of the bg gradient is blue and if it's high the top color is red. It varies smoothly in between. Similarly, the bottom color varies between two colors to indicate low/high cpu usage. This way, if I'm executing a long-running, cpu-intensive task, I have a subtle indication of whether it's still running.
An OS can game that kind of statistic, though, by spending more memory on what Windows would call working set (the "hot" set of pages for a process which are preferentially kept in physical memory) at the expense of the file system cache.

Also, predictive prefetching may increase paging in, but in an async fashion, so the application is never actually blocked. This may cause spurious increases in the stats. You need to examine the amount of time threads are actually blocked by the paging behaviour.
SourceForge.net chooses Python, TurboGears and MongoDB
While not for iPhone Apps, Facebook's translations for Connect sites works similarly: http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Internationali...
This could be done and applications wouldn't have to be rewritten. Likewise, you can just run a desktop OS and desktop apps on a tablet and nothing would have to be rewritten. Everybody thinks that sounds great; once they use it, nobody thinks so anymore. Because it's awful. That's the whole point of iPad using an OS and a collection of apps that from day 1 has been intended for touch.
You'd still need to re-implement a significant part of each and every Flash app/game. Many of them would require a totally new UI and interaction model.
You're either capable of completing a project, or you aren't. If you've had trouble with this your whole life, it's unlikely this will change. It's just who you are.

Don't be offended. It sucks, but it's reality. Some people do, some people don't.That's the way it is.

/awaiting mass downvotes
FYI, if you think you may have ADHD, you probably meet diagnostic criteria. If you would look to get medication, fill out an online adult ADHD checklist and bring it to your doctor.
"Nobody caring because most things that occur on hover you can do without,"

I don't think that's at all true. Yes, the concept of mouseovers could be done without (if it had been done without from the very beginning), but since so many Flash apps rely on it now, you can't have a decent Flash experience on a device that doesn't have it. Try using many Flash video sites without an ability to mouseover: the controls hide until their moused-over. A click on anything but the controls means "pause".

"and websurfing on even the best phone is so fraught with compromises and frustrating relative to a desktop that you really don't care (free)."

I strongly disagree. The web on phones before iPhone was indeed compromised and frustrating. But iPhone and some other recent phones have such good browsers that one often hears of people saying they reach for their phone more often than their laptop.
Climate change may make plants more fragrant
Not the current $6b+ yearly profits, sure, but they were still hugely profitable. Google IPOd towards the end of 2004, a year in which they made $400m profit on $3.2b in revenue: http://investor.google.com/fin_data2004.html

(But I agree that you don't need $400m profit to IPO.)
that would make sense. because the timing happened when I switched it to the ancient hotmail address, it could have his imported data still stored and rechecked to find my old email where it hadnt before.
Can you learn physics from a comic book?
Meet Magic-1, The Homemade CPU
I disagree, mainly because all of science is based on the idea that this is not true. But I suppose you could try asking someone who explains things better than you.
Rhino on Rails (inspired by Yegge's blog), implemented and used for a photoblog
What is the best alternative to paypal for accepting donations or small payments for content on a site?
Consider the embedded Flash people use on the web. Many Flash games (most?) critically rely on mouse position. Many Flash video players hide controls until the applet is hovered over.

In contrast, the usage of hover in HTML pages is almost always just to highlight something to show that it can be interacted with.
That's exactly what's happening. When you create a Facebook page, it gives you the option to hook it up to Twitter.

The only interesting part of this story is what uninformed jackasses tech journalists can be. I mean come on... a tiny bit of investigation and this "story" never happens.
Flash has not supported multitouch until the latest release, meaning no existing flash content was developed with that in mind. Nice logical fallacy though!
Maybe I'm not reading the posting right, but I really don't see a problem. Why can't the screen detect a slide over as a mouseover, but consider a tap as a click. Current trackpads already do this on laptops. I can drag my finger around to move the cursor and trigger a click by tapping on the pad.

If my laptop's trackpad can do it, I see no reason why a touchscreen can't do it.
Computer Programming is going to be the last or nearly the last actual job that humans will have.

I'm not worried.
To make my background I took the best (manual) DSLR camera I could get my hands on, pointed it off my back deck at a view that I found eye wandering to whenever possible, unfocused all the way and took a picture. The only processing I did was to desaturate it a bit before making it my background.

This creates the pleasant illusion that my eye is focused on the near tasks in the windows but the outside view is present in the background, and blurred, just as if it were really there.
There is a long standing tradition at a major customer of my company, unrelated to this system, that any worker anywhere on the line can hit a Big Red Button which will stop the line if they detect a quality issue. Hitting the Big Red Button has immediate costs: it delays production ($$$), it incurs overtime expenses to get the lost production back ($$$), it throws your supply lines into chaos ($$), it causes you to miss targets with your customers and pay out contractual damages ($$$$$$), etc, etc.

Hitting the Big Red Button on a software project is cheaper, but not free. (For example, the Big Red Button plan for customer acceptance testing might sound like "Nobody goes home if there is an unknown risk to delivery", and a translation error anywhere means there is an unknown risk to delivery until you have verified that whatever process introduced the error was not similarly out of control elsewhere.)
There aren't a lot of details, but Adobe sounds confident that they've made Flash pretty usable for touchscreen Android devices.

From the second video here: http://androidandme.com/2010/02/news/adobe-teases-us-with-fl...

"From a developer perspective, there's nothing that I needed to do to ensure that my game is functioning on this [touchscreen] tablet device. It operates the same as it does on the desktop or on this tablet device. Obviously the inputs are mapped, and that's taken care of automatically by Flash player. So Flash Player is able to bring hundreds and thousands of casual games that [are] online from day one." (Emphasis mine.)
Are people here really suggesting we replace a mouse driven hover state on traditional computers with a touch driven tap and hold on touch screen devices? How does that make one lick of sense? What do you do while you're tapping and holding? Use another finger to navigate around your hover based controls? This is so counter intuitive I'm a bit baffled people are even suggesting it.

Half of the brilliance of computing moving in the way of touch is that you start to interact with digital things the way you would handle actual physical objects. People have been training themselves to use a mouse to move a cursor around a screen for the past 25 years, which is really awkward when you think about it.

With touch things work exactly how you expect them to. There have been dozens of studies with very young children who have had 0 experience with traditional computers who simply "get" touch devices, because its human nature.

I believe Apple understands this and they are not going to spend significant time solving problems that do not need to be solved, especially when said problems really just need to be unsolved and forgotten.
Reid Hoffman on Putting His Angel Days Behind Him
Since switching from a Blackberry to a Nexus One, I've found I use my phone to email/text a lot less, and to browse the web a lot more.

When I first switched, several people with keyboardless phones told me that I would get used to not having a physical keyboard after a while and not miss it. Five weeks later I'm not sure that's the case - I've gotten faster and more accurate with the virtual keyboard than I was at first, but I'm still a lot slower and less accurate than I was on the Blackberry (or the Palm Treo that was my primary phone before it). I absolutely cannot use my N1 to compose any sort of text unless I'm sitting still; with the Blackberry I could fire off a message while walking down the street.

For day-to-day usage, I think the increased utility from the web browser and other apps (Google Voice rocks!) probably outweighs the decreased utility from quick/easy SMS and email replies, but like everything in the engineering world there's a trade-off.
How Many Primes
I think the tradesman analogy is good, but the future programming career may have elements of the starving artist in it as well. Working for free to build a portfolio is a feature typical of creative trades that would be foreign to an architect or plumber.
Eventually, Wikipedia will also be a source of past-wrong explanations, in the form of years-old page revisions.
Online advertising moves into the end game
It is delusional to believe that one person can have the skills to create great music, market that music, perform PR for the band and manage themselves.

I would venture to say that not only is indie music far bigger than you think it is--but I would go further--that there is more indie music than there is professionally published music. This applies much more to music than to games, and more to games than to movies, due to budget issues (obviously).

It's just that you don't see most of it unless you're looking for it.

One of my music folders has around 64 days of music in it. This folder contains entirely indie music, produced by a single category of fans, published biyearly at Comiket. A large portion of it sounds professionally produced; I would say the ratio of "good to bad" is no different than that of professionally published music.

... and this is from one category of fans, from a single set of conventions.

For every professionally published album, there are a dozen garage bands publishing their own. And even among those who do publish through a record label, there are thousands of indie labels. When I hear a song I like and look it up on Wikipedia, a major label is the exception, not the rule.

Of course, I mostly listen to electronic music, so it might be different here. But I doubt it.
Bits are trivially copyable; alternators not so much.
SaaS. Where is the 'starving artist' edition of Google?
Infographic: The 10 Most Expensive Pieces of Art Ever Sold
It's just a feeling, so please take it with a grain of salt, but I think people see mechanical turk a bit like a game on which they can win small amounts of money. Turning it into work and making people translate for cash (as opposed to entertainment) is likely to lead to higher rates.
Because a phone has no concept of a cursor. When you lift your finger off of the phone, it is gone. Motion on a trackpad is saved by the computer as a change to the cursor position. This can be simulated by saving state in the touchDown/touchUp events, but it isn't like polling for the current mouse position.

The other thing to think about is that if you do have a mouseover event, you are likely going to try and display something (like a tooltip). On a phone, this would be covered by your finger.
It is a bit weird that doctors are only supposed to prescribe these drugs for medical conditions and not enhancement. If the effects are beneficial and the drug is safe, why not allow healthy people to take it?

Of course, it's not hard to get a prescription if you want one. I just wish everyone didn't have to play this game of off-label prescriptions and lying to doctors.

Edit: Disclaimer: I take modafinil and I find it very useful.
I was awfully close to actually paying $350 on an eBay auction for a key..

Luckily some blog my friend linked me to on Facebook was giving out some invites. I thought it'd just be another scam, but I got an invite mailed to me in a couple of hours. Go figure...

Anyway here's the blog: http://starcraft2betainvites.blogspot.com
Unfortunately most conventional stores don't stock any sizes large enough. The three sizes on the rack is what you get, and if you move to a country with an average size smaller than you (or like something in a shop that treats male fashion consumers as rake-thin models just like the females), you're basically out of luck nearly 100% of the time.

I generally don't find anything larger than 36" waist where I am and that's already got room to spare at the actual waist. Of course leg length is also an issue - anything bigger than 34/36 and you must have 2m legs, right? And then adjustment prices are high too :S
Merlin2010
I agree, there is a huge difference in a touch interface and a mouse/keyboard interface. I don't think that the answer is simply to simulate one with the other.

There have been dozens of studies with very young children who have had 0 experience with traditional computers who simply "get" touch devices, because its human nature.

Case in point: my 2 year old. He can use my iPhone with no problems. He can swipe the main screen left and right to find the icon he's looking for. Start the program, and be on his way. He can also start up iTunes on it, and play his music videos that I've loaded onto it. He also completely "gets" how to use the picture viewer. Now, if iTunes is playing my music and doesn't come up with the video screen, he's lost, but for the most part, it works well. The touch interface makes so much sense that he figured out how to get around in 2 minutes.
More, more: you know you want it
I think your feeling is way off. The people I have dealt with on MTurk view it as work, and to most of them, five American dollars is a great deal of money.

I have met people who call themselves freelance translators, and after they finish my translation, they are eager for more at the same rate.
Chaitin’s constant has the problem that unlike pi, no one can memorize its first n digits.
Self-contained emacs
I Had Downtime Today. Here’s What I’m Doing About It.
How do you suppose their motives? Do you claim to have some sort of window into the minds of those working at Whole Foods?

Maybe the people of Whole Foods, the entrepreneurs, the investors, the daily stakeholders, are in fact working towards the benefit of society as a whole because that's what motivates them. Many people find their happiness in the growth and happiness of other human beings. It is implied that this other-centeredness is normal only if it is confined to romantic partners, or nuclear family, but who among us isn't moved by the struggles of a population ravaged by natural disaster, war, plague or famine? It may well be that one's motivations, human creatures as we are, might be shoehorned into the rubric of self-interest (misleadingly named though it would be) by saying that other-centeredness makes us feel better. But one might as easily say that one's more self-centered actions are in fact shaped by the entire society as in the invisible hand, designed in fact to help others: your food choices are not, in fact, your own, but shaped by corporate stakeholders for their own interests. You can look at it either way.

The point is that motivations are varied and complex, and cannot be summarized neatly in phrases such as 'utility' or 'self-interest' without hiding demons worth of complexity within them.

I personally work for others, for the people of the world, the whole of its green mantle, the earth's future potential. In this way I extend my extended phenotype, it is true -- in some way I will exist and persist as forces and memes and influences varied and grander and grander, with time, if cloudier, muddied, dilute. But I will also be working for something that has always been and will always be greater than my own small self. There is joy in this, but it is not centered in me.
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Forget the background — install xmonad [1] and never see it again. As a bonus point, you also won't have to worry about arranging your windows ;)

[1] http://xmonad.org/
What other criteria would you employ to decide the ethics of treatment to non humans?

(Its a question, not a rhetoric. eg. Killing humans is not OK, killing poultry is, intelligent aliens from space is not.)
Ruby is not a callable orientated language
Is that JavaScript or is it just CSS? If a HTML element has a CSS hover property, the first tap will activate that instead of the anchor. But, in any case, if it works for CSS it should play well with others, too.
As long as it exists somewhere else, it can be on Wikipedia.

Unless it's not "notable" enough to warrant inclusion.
How to Convert Image into another Format