skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That is, perhaps, a little harsh. I'm about as far from them on the political scale as is possible without being Atilla the Hun, but they do have one insight shining like a gem among so much donkey offal:

There is nothing natural or inevitable about what’s considered ‘normal’ today. Time, like work, has become commodified – a recent legacy of industrial capitalism. Yet the logic of industrial time is out of step with today’s conditions, where instant communications and mobile technologies bring new risks and pressures, as well as opportunities.

This is right in every respect, I think.

It is taken by many as an article of faith that there are 10x productivity differences in knowledge workers. If we actually mean that, then 2x differences in numbers of hours worked should be quite sustainable. As I've said before, why should my daily life be fit to the schedule designed to maximize the productivity of illiterate water loom operators.

Where this report gets really really wacky is assuming that everyone can do it, which probably requires massive amounts of wealth flowing around to support unproductive workers. That might even work, for a while at least, if you had some sort of unfair advantage which could conceal you from the market -- taxing authority, perhaps, or such a booming economy that you could afford extravagances like the demands of the United Auto Workers out of the petty cash drawer.

There are also hard limits on how much value can be wrung out of the labor of low-skilled people, and those hard limits work in pretty much direct proportion to hours labored. I think achieving income parity (and relatedly, working hour parity) between them and high-skilled workers is probably a lost cause. I can sell software while sleeping, a trader can act as a productivity multiplier on millions in capital at the click of a button, but this floor isn't getting swept until somebody actually pushes a broom over it for an hour. (Oh, more bad news: robots can already do that, and it will only be a few more years before the cleaning company we outsource to figures out how to exploit that differential profitably.)
All frisbee-playing dogs in the world have lost a hero.
POC (Proof of Concept) Before approaching VCs ?
Dearest Entrepreneurs of YC,

Methinks I have a great idea for a Web startup; since I have never really plunged into the whole VC scene ever before, I was wondering should I have a Proof-of-Concept BEFORE I approach VCs ? Thing is, the POC might set me back by a few months, where I could be devoting on all aspects (marketing, funding, ideas, recruitment).
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Reuters: Gay Social Networking Site Raises $625K Seed Funding
Because the absract syntax for a graph does not map directly to a concrete syntax the way lists do. With lists you can just always use the literal equivalent for sublists, but for graphs you need to be able to express true references to otherwise-anonymous nodes. This is hard.

The W3C basically salted the earth for graph languages by promoting their awful XML syntax for RDF for so long -- it doesn't just encourage you to just write things as kookily-flavored standard XML trees -- it's also incapable of expressing true non-tree graphs!

N3 is a much better syntax, but even it doesn't quite get quite to the level of homoiconicty you desire: http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Notation3
Oops, I misremembered the original title; sorry.
Still use winamp with the enhancer DSP plugin.
Does "freemium" strike anyone else as "shareware"? Limited functionality until paid for? Is it just an attempt to shrug off the bad image shareware has acquired?

edit: no, really. I'm asking. Is there a conceptual difference, or is it just using a new buzz-word to boost perceptions?
Oh, don't get me wrong, I think there could be a great case for cutting work weeks. The article caught my eye because I was hoping that they had done an actual study that indicated that working fewer hours would lead to higher overall productivity (though I think that cutting them by 50 - 70% is probably wishful thinking).
The double entendre was completely unintentional. Testing against women is important but one of the big hangups a lot of people have is the sexual component. This is one technique I've discovered to help ease out of that mindset.

As a strategy for picking up women, this is somewhere down the bottom in terms of effectiveness. As it turns out, asking someone to participate in a user study is about the least sexiest thing imaginable.
GMX is not too bad
Corporations will always find time to complain ;-)
This is a terrible report.

Some of it is just flat wrong (e.g. the perl error message only exists if you write it -- if the developer didn't check for errors, they just don't show up).

Much of it is just "I haven't learned to do my job."
Sophisticated users will reveal sophisticated usability flaws in your application but even unsophisticated users can reveal the unsophisticated flaws.

One really great tip (for sober testing, not drunk) is to use role playing. If you were soliciting feedback for a blog analytics package for example, you could tell users "Imagine you're the CEO of a lollipop manufacturer". Most people end up getting really into the role you're asking them to play and ask surprisingly insightful questions.

That being said, you still need to test with sophisticated users but they're much harder to get and their time is expensive so it's always a good idea to test with a few unsophisticated users first and fix the obvious usability flaws so you can maximize the amount of relevant feedback you do get from your sophisticated users.
Incredible amount of content... sadly, gotta read the rest of this later. What I've read thus far, though, looks very good. Lots of references to info, too.
Thought-provoking, and I say that as a Christian. It also reminds me of my favorite short story: http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
Traditional free trials aren't always crippled

I didn't say that. In fact free trials are often fully functional. But trials expire. That makes them different from 'freemium'.

Shareware is a little different. There are at least two kinds - shareware that is limited and its purpose is largely demonstration to entice you to buy the full product. Doom was that kind of shareware, the stuff you paid for was not the 'bonus levels' it was the actual game.
There's also, less commonly, shareware that's useful as is but certain extra features cost money. This is the closest analogue to a 'freemium' web service.

The original question, though, was 'what's the difference between a free trial and freemium'. And the answer remains the same, free trials expire, freemium done right is a useful standalone product in its own right that you can use for as long as you like.
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Glitch: Flickr’s Stewart Butterfield Explains His Ambitious Online Game
I am already tired of this person...

EDIT: Her posts are very hard to read/follow and it is mostly meta stuff related to her not being able to keep up with comments on her previous post.
I am using the TRAMP support instead from my desktop Emacs which runs all the time. TRAMP support within Emacs is very good, aside of the dired support all the vc commands work on the remote machines, too.
Why not OpenOffice?
Reading through this and the thread's link, and scanning a couple others, I completely agree with you. They're trolls, and little else.
Seriously?

- he equates long jvm startup times with generally slow execution times.

- he equates uncaught java stacktraces with properly displayed error messages from command-line tools

- he gets frustrated that ldd and similar tools don't work on java apps

- he equates the JVM startup overhead (syscalls) as meaning that a "hello world" program is overly complex, rather than, you know, an entire VM starting up.

Basically, he has not the slightest clue about what Java is or how it works, and assumes it's just like all his c-language CLI tools. Which, obviously, it's not.
I'm going to admit I only skimmed the article; you have to be a fairly prominent author for me to take you seriously and actualy read your whole post when writing a blog post titled "Screw Google." But that said this person has their cause celeb and has had their 15 min of fame. Can we move on? Google seems to be. Let's see if they can navigate out of this successfully.
First, I'd like to say I agree the reasoning behind the article is unconvincing.

Now that's out of the way, I disagree with extending PG's "Pie Fallacy" like this. As PG mentions in his article repeatedly, wealth is not the same thing as money. The pie of products that people will trade money for is quite limited, and unless you have a farm and don't mind living in a shack, you will need money.

The probability that people made obsolete will then create something useful in order to barter their "wealth" for money, money for supplies, and finally supplies for a living, is exceedingly small. Think about how many of you here are making niche web-apps that would be the first things to drop off of a customer's expenses when the market declines.

It is true that overall wealth would increase if everyone just worked on something else (even if it is unlikely to be traded for currency), but that is exactly what the article is suggesting: generating wealth in the community.

In the end, all this illustrates is a power struggle. A business owner will seek to turn all productivity increases into profit. Employees will seek to maintain or increase salary per effort. These two goals are fundamentally opposed. The reason the article sounds so absurd is because it is arguing in the favor of employees at the expense of business owners.
...and lead to massive karma drop for anyone willing to refute the HTML5 fanatics...
No, we really don't need to. Emulating an extremely arrogant, two-faced search engine spammer is not one of my goals.
Not only that but in an era where one's productivity is directly tied to one's creativity, more downtime is more productive.
Hopefully Google is following some of these complaints. Personally, I'm adding feedback on their "disabling Buzz" help page: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...

They're doing serious damage to their image with this. I hope they wake up soon.
libcaca.

http://caca.zoy.org/
thanks. ill find another.
Interesting and well written. However, being an agnostic I offer this:

From A Scientific Rationale for Belief in God http://www.vexen.co.uk/religion/God_AI.html

>I present here a concise rationale for the existence of God. The work of Ray Kurzweil and other artificial intelligence researchers is critical to my thesis. An entity (computers or humans, it not mattering which) will eventually become all-knowing. How much time passes before what is likely to be a rapid convergence to all-knowing is not important...
I did about 5 years of not-so-successful freelancing, mostly getting paid for about 50% of the projects I wrote specs for. Then I decided to go for very long term relationships. The turning point was when I finally got a couple of apps working as semi-passive income. Custom made, dedicated to each client, paid only as "rent" (no up-front money). Now I can work anything from 0 to 20 hours per week for living expenses.

With the rest of the time I do wildly different things. Last year I simply wasted it, learned Clojure, did social stuff, read a whole lot. The year before it was two startups at once. Which was predictably very fun and unsuccessful.
Prelude> (0.1 + 0.2) == 0.3
False
Prelude Ratio> 1 % 10 + 2 % 10 == 3 % 10
True
Shareware doesn't have a bad image because developers ask for money. Shareware has a bad image for numerous other reasons: perceived lack of professionalism on part of developers, low quality, (largely inaccurate) association with viral infections, a mindset determinedly stuck in 1996, and the fact that shareware has no meaning to most of the people on the Internet.

I would never, ever say "shareware" within earshot of a customer. (Though "freemium" doesn't sound to me like a customer-friendly word either.)
It's pretty similar, I have another comment on this thread talking about this so I'm going to try not to repeat myself but a basic difference is that 'shareware' is a much broader term. Shareware can be anything from fully functional 'nagware' to a useful product with extra features in the pay version to a product with limited features with the limits removed in the pay version. And there are probably another 30 variations.

Freemium is a web service where ideally the free version is useful and you pay for certain additional features or a reduction in the limits of existing features. This makes the model like that of some shareware. You're generally buying a service so the something-ware name becomes even less sensible.

That's not to say that 'freemium' is not one ugly gargoyle of a word that I hope drops into the same oblivion pit where we left 'folksonomy' and other monsters.
That is not exactly what was said. The idea is that URLs are not the same as resources, and that similar URLs do not necessarily imply a relationship between two resources.
The use of numeric URL in Picasa has been blocked by google now. In either case, if you had your gmail address as an URL in Picasa you have been exposed to email harvesters all along, that's why there is an option to create any alias you like for Picasaweb.
I heard that llamas everywhere joined into a class action lawsuit and filed suit for being whipped repeatedly. AOL, having newly acquired the company, decided to remove the llama whipping features, instead opting for non-llama-whipping ones.
This woman has some serious control/anger issues.
How it it better than jove? (Just curious).
There's a saying: bandwidth is money; latency is physics.

You can always get more bandwidth (more flow per second) through the pipes by just building more pipes. This isn't difficult, just expensive.

Reducing latency, however, is much harder. Eventually you still have to deal with a photon moving through fiber and an electron and a circuit.
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Agreed. There was a link here at HN sometimes to an article about a ship with wind turbines going to see and returning with stored hydrogen as an Energy source which I thought was a good idea, if the economics eventually make it viable.
Nobody Hates Software More Than Software Developers
Because success is not measured by the usability of your product.

There are countless examples of way too complex products that are still successful and almost any successful company you can think of DIDN'T do usability testing.

Companies like Amazon do A/B testing, Apple don't do usability testing at all.

Usability starts to matter later on, when you can measure on actual customer behavior rather than user opinion.

Down vote me all you want. I challenge anyone to prove that usability tests are actually making more successful products.
This is my goal that I'm working towards.
Ever had your project interrupted when a European decides to take six weeks of consecutive vacation? I'll take puritan productivity any day.
That's really an unfounded response. Sure, he might be arrogant and he might spam search engines..but let me ask you this, if you could "spam search engines" and get away with it all while profiting, would you do it? You would be an idiot not to. This might be an unpopular response, but you know deep down it's the truth.

Now I actually watched the video, and I admit that it's inspirational. He speaks many truths and through the duration of the video he mostly concentrates on his failures, and to me that's an invaluable resource. This has NOTHING to do with emulating anyone, in fact he points out at the end that you should not copy anyone and suggests you should lead and by leading you will find your successes in life. Fairly redundant material, but reiterating it from time to time helps.

As for him being two face, and arrogant..again, unfounded. You don't know the guy, do you? Judging someone via hearsay and via the internet is not cool.

As for the video, its worth the watch if you have the time.
He doesn't but that's because he's talking about a model where you give away something for free and charge for a better or more featureful version of it.

Charging everyone (even a nominal amount) from day zero is great but has a narrow application - it mostly works when people perfectly understand what your product does. In the case of pinboard, 'del.icio.us minus the suck plus some other stuff'. The original del.icio.us would have got exactly nowhere charging users from day 1.
Related:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/12/iceland-haven-fr...

http://www.thestandard.com/news/2010/02/12/icelanders-hope-h...
It may be a natural fit for the iPad, but it isn't a natural fit for humans. Wasn't that the whole point of the iPad?

I also look at my dad's fingers, which have enough thickness that he can't comfortably press buttons on smaller devices. I have girlish hands :) so I can manage it, but really ... you're actually implying that we should throw away hundreds of years of using a pen?
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Do you really think it's that simple?

It's not.

There is a whole list of issues with asking people about what they think.

Again success of a product is not secured by these kind of tests. Sure if you are doing something that is outright useless but then asking anyone (like girlfriend) is enough.

What he is suggesting is equivalent of doing code review with a first year programmer.

Wouldn't you call BS if I suggested something like that?

I am telling you as a professional, that's not any way to go about testing your product. Unless it's outright useless. But then you don't have to spend 5USD on a beer. You can ask ANYONE for free.

Opinions are not valuable feedback.
"I never thought I'd see the day when a Linux distribution would be serving Microsoft search results by default, even though it is through the thinly veiled disguise of Yahoo."

Clearly you didn't read the article.
Both Amazon & Apple do usability testing. Apple doesn't do focus groups which are an entirely different thing.
Extremely good multi-part series on understanding personality temperaments/indicators/etc.:

Part 1: Temperament for Dummies
http://www.erictb.info/temperament1.html

Part 2: MBTI and the 16 Types and Cognitive Functions
http://www.erictb.info/temperament2.html

Part 3: APS and Other Systems (Enneagram, Horney, Type A, etc)
http://www.erictb.info/temperament3.html

Part 4: APS and Dynamic Type: adding moderate scales to EISeNFelT (from 16 to 81 types)
http://www.erictb.info/dynamictype.html

From what I gather each person has potential to display ALL personality types. The question is to what degree and in what contexts we prefer them.

I sure like having some kind of framework (or several) to help me analyze people. Learning to identify traits using a few simplifying tools (MBTI, color code, enneagram, love languages, etc.) helps me quickly figure out how best to get along with someone so we can communicate and get stuff done (in a work environment especially), understand better how someone prefers to interact with ideas (casual conversation and debate), understand people's underlying motivations a bit (particularly important with family and relationships), and in general just "get" people.

-A softened ENTJ
What happened to the author of the blog in regards to Google Buzz was inexcusable, but had I encountered her writing in any other context I probably wouldn't have responded well. In case you haven't caught on, she's a pretty crazy feminist. A choice quote from her blog:

In this space, women’s experiences are acknowledged as real and legitimate (men’s, too, but we talk about women a lot more). In this space, biological or evolutionary explanations for behavior are considered to be socially motivated. If you disagree with any of these statements, this is not the space for you.

The idea that biology plays no role in behavior is just ridiculous and scientifically disproven. She's advocating a far left feminist idea that your biological sex has no impact on your gender, that there is only a socially constructed gender. In reality our gender is a combination of both social and biological pressures. It's the worst kind of feminist that doesn't even bother to read Wikipedia [1, 2]. I deal pretty extensively in gender issues in courses outside of my CS curriculum and this woman is uninformed and misleading in a lot of the stuff she writes.

Long story short, she's had her 15 minutes of fame and was the impetuous for an important movement against Google. But I wont be reading any more of her writing.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biology_of_gender#Differences

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_intelligence#Specific_a...

EDIT: As I have said several times in the past few hours, her concerns about privacy are completely valid. Please do not take this post to mean that they are not. I'm just pointing out that she holds several views that are not factual. I give one such view as an example in this post.

EDIT2: Clarified gender/sex wording. Changed "She's advocating a far left feminist idea that there is no such thing as having a biological sex, only a socially constructed gender" to what is currently there.
The contents of URL strings are not supposed to represent resources -- If a client of your "REST API" needs to concatenate strings together to form new URLs based on an out-of-band 'specification', YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG

Repeat after me: Hypertext. Is. The. Engine. Of. Application. State.

URL strings should be completely opaque -- you should be finding link to new resources in other resources, not constructing them yourself (query strings added to found resources are permitted).

The whole "meaningful URL" thing is a strong signal of False REST, and it infects the Rails ecosystem pervasively. REST has nothing to do with your oh-so-clever request routing rules.
Except that if you look at it from a utility point of view: a child in the middle of Africa, as he ages, is going to produce a lot less value than someone in a developed country. In one year a programmer makes perhaps $150k's worth of product, including a large amount of taxes which the government can allocate as he pleases, while an African farmer doing survival farming is going to make a tiny fraction of that, and not one that can easily be allocated to worthy projects. Beans and bananas can buy microscopes or vaccines, but you need a lot of them.

Considering that the value produced by the programmer (or whoever) can be reinvested or dedicated eventually to fighting infant mortality, I think there's a balance to be reached. It's not as simple as saying that infant mortality must have priority over anti-aging.
tldr: fiction. I closed the tab when he started talking about dinosaurs not having respect for other life.
You seem to have a mistaken idea of what user testing is. It's not asking people what they think of this software, it's asking them to perform specific tasks and then observing where they make mistakes or have issues.

The benefits of user testing are well documented. You're most definitely in the minority position for claiming this.
I hope this gets as many votes as the original story (500 atm - what is the record?). because apparently nothing bad happened in the end - nothing was shared that wasn't public before.
shalmanese

Amazon do A/B tests.

Apple doing usability tests? Not according to those I know there. Don't you mean testing?
One way to do this is to have the clients pass the authentication information in the headers with every request.