skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used to argue in favor of json-rpc as well, but I have to say that I have allied with the dark side now. if for no other reason than caching, with REST you have fine control over what addressable resources get cached and which do not. This is huge for performance in some systems. I have found once you use REST semantics in earnest to build an application, it is hard to levy argument against it. So much of the webs infrastructure starts to work with you and not against you once you start to use it.
Not sure if it's a grammar mistake but actually that parses as: The passenger seat is spinning at 40k rpm.

Now that's what I call exciting. ;-)
Huh. Sorry, I can't access it now either.
You can take the modern era's productivity dividend in leisure time. About 37 million Americans do.

For this group of people, the average family is supported by only 800 hours of work/year (about 16 hours/week).

This group of people has all the food they need (in fact, they typically eat vastly more than they need), a house to live in (about half own the home), most own an AC, a car, a TV, all the basic comforts.

You can read about this group of people, their lifestyle and their choices here:

http://www.heritage.org/research/welfare/bg1713.cfm
I agree with that. But here you aren't talking about HTTP you are talking about RPC. You could have gone with RPC directly from the very beginning. Typically, you put that on top of HTTP to avoid firewalls, etc.

I said simple as possible, but the real world is always complex and one day you may have to use something other than JSON-RPC in which case someone will have to create an adapter or an abstraction. Thankfully this is easy to do in software even if it sometimes looks nightmarish.
That's the eternal question. According to the western religions, an entity (a certain Satan that should not be confused with yours truly :) rebelled against God precisely because he did not believe in the whole story and sought the "throne".

"And remember when Abraham said, `My Lord, show me how You gives life to the dead.' God said, `Do you not believe ?' Abraham said, `Yes, but I ask this that my heart may be at ease.' God answered, `Take four birds and make them attached to thee. Then put each of them on a hill; then call them; they will come to thee in haste.' And know that Allah Is Mighty and Wise." - 2:262

-

I think the interesting twist in the meme that OP is seeding is to consider whether fairly advanced species send agents to emerging species to mind fuck them into oblivion. According to OP's vision, it is not merely possible, but absolutely necessary, for us to pursue destructive technology to the point that the fate of the species can be decided by any single individual in the collective.
Oh, I just noticed that we sparred before around this post: http://000fff.org/getting-to-the-customer-why-everything-you... about the exact same issue (I am Xianhang Zhang). I don't know if we're going to get any more productive the second time around.

Proving usability testing works when creating a product has the same problem with proving something like agile development works. Every project is unique so you never know how things would have turned out if you did things another way.

The best you're going to get is anecdotal evidence that early stage usability testing caused significant pivots around the core concept and assume that these pivots are generally positive.

Much of the customer development stuff Steve Blank talks about fall into this category.
awesome! way to rock the vote people.
One can build a service that has so-called "Rails-style meaningful URIs" that also returns hyperlinks to new resources. They aren't mutually exclusive.

That said, yes, everyone seems to forget about hypertext. I'm curious: if I'm building a REST-based JSON-formatted service, what's the convention for returning related URIs? Ex: if I return a Product resource andi want to have links to the products image, the owner's resource, edit this product, and so on, is there a standard way to return them in the JSON structure, or doesthis nor matter?
10 Reasons you still love to be single
Dupe:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1121201
It just goes to show that having a PhD doesn't make you smart, or perhaps that excessive emotionality can turn smart people into dummies.
I thought so too, at first, but there is additional commentary at lambda-the-ultimate.org.
I recently saw a blog post where someone wrote about the feedback they received and they weren't happy. The same person then revised their questions and tried a more task oriented approach and they were much happier.

http://www.i-proving.ca/space/David+Jones/blog/2010-01-27_1?...

Then again, Feedback Army is just a usability testing tool. The right one for the job. I think it's best when a breadth of ideas are needed quickly or you need some ideas about where to start improving your site.

You should use other methods to do testing that requires a lot of depth from one or two people.

Here are a few more posts where folks have written up their experiences:

http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/how-an-...

http://www.mattmazur.com/2010/02/reflections-on-precedens-ha...

(p.s. I run Feedback Army :))
I missed the joke too .. Would someone kindly explain?
"The best you're going to get is anecdotal evidence that early stage usability testing caused significant pivots around the core concept and assume that these pivots are generally positive.

Much of the customer development stuff Steve Blank talks about fall into this category."

In other words. There is no evidence what so ever. Thank you for proving my point.

I have 15 years of anecdotal evidence that there is no correlation between Usability testing and successful products.

And I am still asking you to provide evidence.

Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, LastFM, 37Signals and so on. None of them to my knowledge did usability testing before they launched their products.

Again you are welcome to prove me wrong. With regards to Steve Blank then I don't think that is what he is saying.

There are however evidence that listening to customers don't help http://entrepreneur.venturebeat.com/2010/02/11/bolt-peters-r...
Cookie-based authentication is generally only applicable to the browser interface. From my point of view where REST really shines is at the API level.
HTTP authentication while not particularly great in the browser ( mainly because of UI/logging out issues ) is good at the API level where you send your credentials with each request.
By default, your followers were auto-populated from your contact list, potentially revealing who you most email.
I like their approach using a variety of tools at different stages of product development to get the job done.

I think something our field may benefit from is a guide that explains how to use the different usability services and at what point in the project cycle they should be used.
Yes, CF is a CDN that sits on top of S3. It's usually very easy to turn on. Spend the hour to get it all running and you'll be glad you did.
The fleet of mobile devices (Nokia and Windows Mobile) all use WiFi to connect to the internet. There wasn't a good tethering option.
The fleet are all in downtown Mountain View (a place flooded with varying WiFi signals. This problem is compounded by having dozens to hundreds of devices in close proximity to each other.
We found that the devices would not hold a reliable persistent connection which would cause intermittent Talos test failures. Each of these failures could potentially waste a person's time to go deal with it which in turn wastes money. Hence they came up with the Faraday cage.

Please note this is just the story as I understand it from taking a tour of the room. I might have missed something important or subtle there. :)
> Much of it is just "I haven't learned to do my job."

The point of the article is that java makes his job harder. There are standard tools (syslog, truss, ldd) that he uses to troubleshoot problems under unix, and java supports zero of them.
Let me start off by saying that I think you have an awesome website and your product is well marketed. That being say, no, I would not use this to teach SQL nor would I recommend it to people learning SQL. And it's not because I think you have a bad product; it's due to the fact that Excel is a spreadsheet management tool, not a database.

I applaud your looking for innovative ways to market your product but this has the potential to do harm to someone's career IMO. I can only imagine a job interviewer's response when someone says they learned SQL using Excel. Excel is not a database and, if you were to try to teach people SQL using a non-database product, I think you are doing them a disservice. Same goes for Google Spreadsheets or any other spreadsheet product. They aren't databases and should not be confused with a real database. IMO "learning SQL" is not the same thing as "learning how to write queries" yet that is what you imply with this tool/question. I think the SQL community across all platforms would not support it for these reasons.

Excel is a great way to learn what a column is and what a row is but it's a horrible tool to learn what a table is, why you need a primary key, what foreign keys are and do, or about the various data types. You cannot learn SQL if you ignore those elements and Excel just does not do those well. Even something as small as MS Access would be a massive improvement over Excel. You don't need an RDBMS for SQL but you do need a DBMS that checks types and does PKs/FKs or what's the point?

My background: I teach SQL Server for my company, http://www.learnitfirst.com/, and have been teaching SQL since the '90s. I think I have about 1600 SQL-based videos online at this time (if not more!).

EDIT: Removed certain items. Email if you want to hear them
Sorry, I didn't see that one.
JavaScript, CSS, HTML and REST is what you should learn everything else is transferable to any back end language and servers you choose.

Once you start building applications in this manner you can write you REST services in the language of the day and implement it on the server of the day.
It's possible my perspective is skewed. I write APIs for stateful applications, so clients don't ask for the same information over and over, reducing the need/utility of browser caching. I can see how REST would help solve the caching problem.
I did some of my own experiments with a couple of throwaway accounts, before the privacy improvements on Thursday.

I set up a profile on one account ahead of time. This was very easy to do; Google Reader encourages it at various places.

When I logged into GMail and got the "Buzz" welcome screen, it offered "Try Buzz" and "No thanks." I clicked "No thanks" and it took me to GMail, but the Buzz UI was enabled anyways. When I logged into second account that was a contact of the first, it received a notification that the first account was following the second, with a link to the first account's profile and list of followees/followers.

Now, this part is a bit foreign to many people, but imagine that the fact you email someone is a secret and potentially damaging to you. Maybe you are a whistleblower talking to a government regulator. Someone I know had a stalker added to their Buzz followers along with people she didn't want the stalker to learn about (because stalkers will try to get at their victims through their friends and family). Maybe you don't want certain people aware of your sexual orientation, or your religious or political activities.

At this point, the damage is already done. Before Thursday night, there was no clear notification or way to opt-out of the public followers list until after it had been created and then broadcast to a list of people. By the time you got around to checking out Buzz, realizing that your information had been disclosed, and figuring out how to remove it, it could easily be too late. Note that Google did not "suggest" people to follow and then let users "accept" these defaults. They were added without the user's knowledge or consent.

Worse, if you found the "Turn off Buzz" link in the GMail footer and clicked it before blocking your followers, changing your profile settings, etc., then all your information is still public but hidden from your GMail pages! It's then much harder either to discover the problem or to fix it.

And Google has admitted to some outright bugs that made the situation worse for the "Fuck you Google" blogger. For example, people still appeared in the "Following you" list on Google Reader even after they were blocked and you set your Reader shared items to private; they couldn't actually see your shared items then but it appeared to the user that they could. Also, before Thursday there was no way to block a user who did not have a public profile.

My friends who work at Google are convinced these are real problems[1]. I think you are dismissing them way too quickly.

[1]: http://www.google.com/buzz/mbrubeck/HEN2DyJooNZ/This-looks-l...
Perhaps he expected a scientific study of what happens in people's brains when they think they are talking to God, or some statistics relating the things people think God has told them with their own prior beliefs, or something of the kind.

Perhaps he expected an account of how someone met with someone else they admired/feared so much that it was like talking to God.
Paypal sucks, but unfortunately Paypal is also the best. All of the alternatives suffer from one or more or all of these problems:

* Only support for USA.

* Supports countries outside USA too, but not enough.

* Does not support enough payment methods. Supporting only credit cards is not acceptable, plenty of people don't have credit cards.

* Not convenient enough or too confusing for customers. For example, requiring registration is a big no-no. People don't want to register, they just want to buy my product. Even credit card validation - where the customer has to wait a few days for the credit card to be verified - is too much of a hassle.

* Too expensive for the customer. If you're selling $10 gadgets then the $20 international wire transfer fees will scare away all your customers.

* Too expensive for the merchant. I'm not willing to pay $100 per month for a merchant account if I don't know up front how much I'll sell. I'd prefer if they take a small percentage of revenue instead so that I at least can't lose any money.
Programming by Sketching
Lets see. I am in India. They have frozen bank withdrwals without any prior intimation, and this is almost unbeliveable any personal intimation after that as well.

1. Bank transfers to India have been frozen since 27 Jan at least (Not personal exp, other people exp on various forums). The first communications from Paypal was 6th Feb, when the shitstorm was already out.

2. I have ~45KUSD with Paypal, which I cant withdraw right now. There had been no email sent to me. All I can read is their Paypal blog.

3. I had a withdrawal initiated around 6 Feb. This withdrawal was reversed, Still no email was sent to me.

4. I have been in touch with Paypal support, and while the response has always been. "Yeah you cant withdraw, we are sorry, and we wont give you any timeline when you can do that".

5. On 9th Feb. tha paypal blog said "Customers should be able to withdraw their funds to a local bank within the next few days." This has still not been made available. (As of my communication with support yesterday). I have no idea what to expect of the phrase "next few days."

6. The Paypal blog post was commentless for the last few days,(which has been only channel of public communication), they did not publish or answer my comments. Here is a a screenshot, http://www.ubuntu-pics.de/bild/42471/screenshot_019_w06Yk5.p...
whether this is insulting, inflamatory etc, is left to your imagination.

7. In response to my question to support of whether the suspension is a "regulatory or technical issue", they responed its a technical issue.

I am still willing to believe that it is a regulatory issue which is hurting them, the absokute lack of transparency and communication is absolutely unfogivable. If github goes down for an hour we expect them to keep a
15 minute-updated status blog statins what is the issue, and what they are trying to resolve that. WHy is it unreasionable to expect this of Paypal.

I have ~45K with Paypal, which as a 25 yo Indian is quote a bit to me. (Its more than what I have ever kept at one bank at one time ever.), so I obvioulsy trusted Paypal a lot.
This time they have proved themselves entirely incapable of keeping that trust to me. Paypal is still convinient enough that I will accept them, but you can be sure I am not
gonna be advocating or having them as my first preference.

Right now to me paypal is evil
Out of curiosity, what would your reaction be if you found that it wasn't fiction? Would you accept the entity the author was conversing with as God? Or would you think he was a demon? Or just an advanced godlike alien being beyond which another, more powerful entity exists in the unknowable (kinda hard, since this being created the entirety of our reality).
Yes, was just reading the comparision here http://www.bucketexplorer.com/documentation/cloudfront--amaz...

Sadly, it says changes on Cloud Front take 24 hours to refresh plus it doesn't support HTTPS. While the latter is still okay but the first condition defeats the purpose of the whole setup.
In this context, the etymology of "hysteria" is interesting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteria#History
Explicit vs Implicit Social Nets
PayPal's issue with Indian accounts was due to your local banking regulations. PayPal cannot violate your local laws, so if you want change, then change the laws. You can't blame them for being cut off by your banks. And github keeping you updated on their server status isn't the same as a publicly traded international corporation keeping you updated on private talks with a government and banks.

The lesson you should take away has to be that you shouldn't treat a payment processor like a bank and hold $45,000 there. Doing business is in part about assessing risk, and holding all your money in a PayPal account should've jumped out as a major risk even without this situation.
Thanks for posting this! I read it a while back and lost the link.

The part that's stayed with me the most about this story is the following:

"...imagine discovering a secret thought or program, accessible to any intelligent individual, which, if abused, will eliminate your species instantly."

"Each and every individual in such a species must eventually become capable of destroying their entire species at any time. Yet they must learn to control themselves to the degree that they can survive even such deadly insight."

What a great thought. How would our species survive if any one of us had the ability to destroy all of us. I think of this in the context of the internet. I'm strongly of the opinion that the internet should not be censored or restricted in any way. However, what if there was a way to make the equivalent of a Nuclear Bomb with low-cost, easily available materials? How would the internet handle that knowledge? What would it do to society?
I work for a regional ISP, and I can tell you the cost of storage is only one small part. A huge part of it is upgrading all of your layer 3 routers to even have the capability to do this kind of logging; it is definitely not built into legacy equipment so you're essentially dictating that all these companies spend millions or more to upgrade their entire infrastructure.
And of course, beyond the hardware, you need a lot of network engineers and software engineers to design and put it all together; its an effort that would and does take many years and is never really complete.
My average ticket is around $40 and my volume is in the tens of thousands per month range. Many small tickets, in other words, rather than few big ones. I sell virtual goods and services, nothing tangible. Over the course of the ten years, there have been over 100 held payments, reversals, and chargebacks. PayPal has won a significant number of those chargebacks and recovered the funds for me.

The situation you described of having an account closed due to fraud problems, funds held for 180 days, and no help during that time is the same experience they'd have with a merchant account anywhere else. The policies are exactly the same, because they trickle down from the card associations themselves -- more than 1% chargeback rate, or a categorization as a high risk business due to what's being sold, and the MAP is bound to close the account and hold payments for 6 months or their own ability to process credit cards becomes at risk with Visa and MasterCard.

I've actually gone through that with a normal merchant account underwritten by a bank. My experience with PayPal has been much more pleasant, though I expect they would do no less if for some reason they classified me as high risk. They have the same obligations to Visa/MasterCard as anyone else doing payment processing does.
When I am out and about the last thing I want to do is post crap on my phone. Maybe I'm just old, but it seems rude to divert my attention from the people I am hanging out with in order to check/post on buzz.
That is a good point about EC2 being a black box. When something really slows down (SimpleDB queries, network access, etc.) it takes effort to track down the problem(s).

I think that AWS is a good resource for scaling up non-realtime calculations like map reduce, but may not be a great choice for 24x7 hosting.
How about ignoring people because they make their blog require a login just to read it?
I recall seeing at some point, but alas cannot recall where, a study that looked at average productivity per hour vs. hours worked each day/week. If memory serves me, they found that productivity/hr reliably dropped at the beginning and end of the work day, mostly independent of how many hours were worked, and also dropped steadily with increasing hours per week beyond some threshold, up to a (surprisingly low) point where the marginal productivity of an additional hour was actually negative.

The end result basically said that 4-hr workdays are less than half as productive as 8-hr workdays, and that diminishing returns make long work weeks quickly useless. Interestingly, per hour productivity peaked fairly low--something like 30hrs/week, I think. So, all else equal, if you're paying people hourly, you get best value for money having more people, working fewer hours in fewer days.

On the other hand, if you're paying people a salary, you technically always get more value up to the point of burnout (i.e., negative marginal productivity), but for whatever work week length, you get best value for money having people work a few very long days. That is, 12hr days M-R would be more productive than 8hr days M-S.

Unfortunately, I've been unable to find the study in question again; so take the above with a grain of salt, as my memory is certainly fallible.
I stopped reading when the author made a leap in logic from superhuman intelligence to omniscience, and then from omniscience to time travel just within the abstract. This was obviously not a well thought out piece.
Tell YC: Valentine's Day Special - LoveLogger.com
Space: The Final Frontier of Profit?
That's a nice looking graph, you can see relative and magnitude changes quickly. But one thing I didn't like was having to roll over the circles to see what the points referred to. It's like a treasure hunt; I would prefer to see what the data refers to at a glance.

Graphic specialists: good graphic, or bad graphic?
This is very cynical. So saying "thank you" implies that a meeting was one-sided?

I thought it was just being polite.
amazon payments
How much traffic was each LB seeing? The use of round-robin DNS does not always result in an even distribution of traffic.
Valentine’s Day Special: top ten math/stat pickup lines EVER
I was going to register ComplaintPostsSucks.com...