skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All 'wealth' is created by labor, either directly or indirectly. (Think of an economy with no money). The more people work - subject to efficiency, the more wealth being generated. However, people do not produce wealth equally. Suppose there is a 10% unemployment. If these people's efficiency is an average 70% and the employed had an overall efficiency of 80%, there is an optimum hours per week for full employment.
I am quite aware of what a usability test is as I have spend quite some time observing them.

But as I have also learned over the years is that usability test does not equal more successful product.

You are welcome to prove the benefits claim.

I don't care if you can prove some academic self referencing point about usability testing improving customer sentiment. I care about successful products and there is absolutely nothing that proves that usability tests or the UCD method is better than any other design process.

What company's success is based on them doing usability tests. By all means, please share.
I was thinking of how many tons and how big the sails were on mast ships. If there was a design of a much lighter and smaller hulled ship ( catamarans have less drag ), and a much larger mast assembly, seemingly, it could power a decent sized generator with some force.

Power could be stored onboard and transfered via a cable-connected, station out at sea.

Thanks for your reply.
This whole debacle is completely ridiculous, mainly because it's so confusing. I won't go into all the inconsistencies and weird privacy policy interplay issues that are going on, as others have, but I'll say this:

If I can't pound ten beers in an hour and still understand your privacy policy, it's too complicated.
And a small addition to point 1 - don't post your customers' emails in public. Especially if you're going to describe them as whining dramatics. It's the equivalent of announcing 'if you send me any feedback I dislike, I'll post it on the net and make fun of you'.
Oh wait the comments on HN are public and my ex can see them? But there was no warning!!! Screw HN!
A few years ago for my day job I was technical consultant on a demonstration being given to the Bulgarian Navy. Our equipment worked perfectly from the moment it was installed, so apart from helping our partners solve a problem with their kit, I had very little to do. I had a Bulgarian phrase book, so I decided to test out this technique:

http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/LearningLanguages.html?HN

I went to the local shops and bought a copy in Bulgarian of "Men At Arms" by Terry Pratchett, and I set about decrypting it.

As you might expect, I didn't really get all that far in four days, but I was able to go to the local shops and order coffee, comment on the weather, reply to questions about my work, and read the menu. I could also do some actual shopping, with considerable tolerance from the vendors, no doubt, but without anything other than Bulgarian and good will.

We had a formal dinner at the end, and as the Rear Admiral came down the line shaking hands I said "Blagodarya" (can't write Cyrillic) and he stopped dead in his tracks. "You speak Bulgarian?" he asked, in tones of great surprise. "Only a few hundred words - I've only been here 3 days" was my reply. He proceeded to quiz me on common phrases, and seemed surprised and impressed.

Later, when we all got a "Thank You" email, I was the only one whose email was personalised. More, even though that contract was never awarded, we have since been contacted to start negotiations for other work. Clearly the episode made an impression.

Sadly, after leaving I didn't have the chance to continue practising and I lost it all quite quickly, but there was a magic period of a few hours where I was really getting the hang of communicating (comprehension was significantly better than synthesis), and it has made me regret again my mono-lingual background.
Preach it brother.

Maybe java itself doesn't suck - I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt because a lot of fairly smart folks seem to like it. But a large number of real life java tools and programs suck. It's to the point where I shudder in revulsion every time I see the telltale indications that a solaris (or even worse - linux) tool is written in java - it promises a future that involves playing with 50 levels of shell wrappers to get a remotely meaningful error message.
I so agree, this is a good example of her confusion too http://fugitivus.wordpress.com/a-daily-dose-of-sexism/
Sort of... it doesn't really lessen the emotional impact of thinking that a crazy ex might have just found out where you live, what you've been reading for the past few years, and what you've been saying to your current significant other. Even if that didn't actually happen she can't really be faulted for thinking that it did given how confusing and buggy the interfaces are.
Pharmacy | chemist
OnLine Pharmacy uk and online chemist Website - that provides you online pharmacy and online chemist with access to free info from a pharmacy and chemist brand name you know and trust.
In the interests of assisting your English:

You mean "copy-writer" as in "one who writes copy (text)". And I don't think you need someone else to write your copy. I think you just need someone to make small corrections to your copy. You need a "copy-editor".

I think it's important that the voice is yours, even if someone else helps with the grammar and/or spelling. Your English is clearly good enough to communicate what you intend to say. It just needs a little tidying.
I'm not sure I'm interested in watching someone who cannot put his phone aside for the duration of an interview.
Certainly I did. I understand the reasoning, the arrow shows which way the text will move. The convention is that the arrow shows where your eyes want to go.
Also Christian, and I found it to be a clever bit of fiction, really. Well-written, entertaining. Also, thanks for that link :)
I think it's pretty dangerous to ignore people complaining about privacy because they hold weird political positions.
I thought his complaint about displaying stack traces in lieu of proper error messages was one of his more justified complaints. Granted, it's more of a java culture issue than a java language issue, but it's still java.
When people say vi, they mean vim.
Execution tracing should eliminate the cast if it is not necessary.
Worth mentioning:

http://mindview.net/WebLog/log-0023

and more on that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

the report itself (PDF): http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf
For the love of all that is decent in this world, stop voting this garbage up.
Heh. FWIW, could be simpler:

Prelude> let developers = "developers" : developers
Prelude> developers
Well, last time I talked to him in DMs on Twitter, he did say he considered himself to be God. That's not hearsay, it was what he wrote. That's pretty arrogant, don't you think? Other than that, no I don't know him personally, but his character certainly comes across in interviews and the recent back-and-forth with Aaron Wall.

No, I would not spam search engines if I could get away with it. Anyone that knows me knows that I've turned away money in my services by not adding black hat features its competitors add. I believe I can be successful without working against the interests of everyone else on the web, and so far that's worked out just fine.

Clearly, my "deep down truth" is not your "deep down truth". You're further down the white/black hat scale than me.
Agreed; that's not at all what I'm saying. See my edit. I've made several posts supporting her position on Google Buzz in the past few hours. You'll notice that I lead off my post with an expression of support for her. It's the other 99% of her blog that I'm criticizing.

Also, her view is not a political position any more than rejecting evolution is a political position.
You've confused violence with lethality. It's absolutely true that more male attacks against their partners are lethal. However, it is not true that most violence or even most violence serious enough to require first aid is committed by the male partner.

There have been dozens of studies conducted across multiple countries showing that very similar rates of men and women report being the victims of domestic violence (despite cultural norms that make male reporting difficult). Newer studies regarding the treatment of minor injuries sustained from DV are also actually show greater numbers of male victims of female attackers.

One of the biggest problems in dealing with this issue is the general incredulity the public have that women could be aggressors.

Several of these studies are listed at the bottom of this page: http://www.mensrights.com.au/page13y.htm
> - he equates uncaught java stacktraces with properly displayed error messages from command-line tools

Maybe that isn't fair, but there's something about java that seems to make programmers think that uncaught exceptions are an acceptable standard error exit.

Or maybe I'm just really unlucky in happening to run into the problem over and over and over again.
Or:

ghci> 0.1 + 0.2 == (0.3 :: Ratio Int)
True

Same type, less syntax.
The "Reply" link doesn't show up immediately. On deeper comments it takes longer to show up, thus discouraging the "flame exchange" problem.

Are you willing to put contact details in your profile? Or email me for more comments, suggestions and random advice?
Computer programs use memory? Inconceivable!
That being said, it's interesting to hear his story.

He talks about from being considered a hero before the dot com crash to being a fraud after.
As a quick example, the link grammar immediately highlighted that your second sentence:

> I have been living in London for past 6 years
> and my English still sucks.

doesn't parse. You need a "the" before "past" for natural sounding English. It really might help a lot, and perhaps get your error rate down to an acceptable level without having to pay for external assistance.

As a footnote, in the fourth sentence it did not pick up that you meant "conversation" and not "conversion."
Yes, its abit long but worth it.

Developing awareness to the unknown in your daily life requires practice, the book with its anecdotes helps in that.
All of Apple's objections were public. (Also, Mozilla's objections to H.264, Google's opinion, Opera's position, Nokia's position, etc. They were all public.)

There _have_ been some private discussions between various people interested in solving the codec problem, but they have yet to bear useful fruit and the spec was unaffected by them. All the objections that affected the spec were public from the get-go.
No idea what the "real story" is here, or if there is one beyond what they've said. There's no patent review issue here, though, since the canvas stuff has already been published as FPWD by the W3C HTML working group in the HTML5 spec itself. Thus Adobe is already bound by the patent policy on this stuff.
True enough, I guess it is clear which tribal affinity I possess by that article, but at the same time I do not make that choice without reason.

While both flagship products may be closed source I dont think it is very fair to compare the two company's on that basis alone.
Track Mouse Activity On Your Computer
Ok, but whose lab is this person using and how much is he paying to use it?

My wife works in 'biotech' research, and it seems to me that even if you can scrimp on people fees, paying for equipment is going to be expensive unless you work in an area that doesn't require much of it.

Interesting article, and hopefully things will move in that direction, but I think 'build it yourself' can only get you so far. Hopefully that range will continue to expand though.
I am still waiting for someone to tell me how they know the difference between what they call god and an advanced alien race tricking them into believing in them.

How would you know?
Friends don't let friends browse while logged in to google/gmail.
Germany flowers
Employment Future: The Decade Ahead In Jobs [visualization]
Anyone who's been following this stuff knows that my opinion on microdata is only barely above my opinion of RDFa, so saying that I'm biased on this is pretty silly. I'd be perfectly happy to see both features die, I think they're both pretty silly! Unfortunately, people have put forward a number of use cases that they want addressed, so we apparently need _some_ solution, and if we're going to have one I'd rather it not be the waaaay over-complicated RDFa.

Re the second bit: describing the WHATWG as "opaque" is pretty silly, given how radically open it is.

(PS. Hickson, not Hixon.)
This is why I like things like Android -- it allows the hardware people to make hardware, and the software people to make software. Android may not be perfect but it's better than anything hardware manufacturers put on their phones before. (It would be even better if it were GPL3, so that users could actually change the supposedly-free software on their devices.)
That's very interesting, although without a little context, it's hard to know what to make of it. What do you do during the 3h59ms that you work? Where do you live? What do you do with the other 20h1m on the day when you work?
Hooray for gedit!
The problem is not that it's crap, but that it's trap.

[ crap = something that just lies there and the reasonably alert can choose to step over ]
Much like the evolution debate, does it really matter? I mean, if we're trying to write software, build a business or otherwise live our lives, does it matter where we think we came from, or how much of our behavior we think descends from what bits of our biology? Personally, I find both those questions about as useful as trying to figure out your behavior based on tracing the racial characteristics of your ancestors; I mean, I think most people would agree that your ancestor's DNA effects you in some way, but it just seems like a poor way of getting to know you.
Its interface did not really scale with peoples' music collections. Software with better library management eventually replaced it.
I would guess that falls into the same category as Artur C Clarke's Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

The point is essentially moot - what can you / are you going to do about it?
Jason acts like a motivational speaker in a hospice.
You know, comments like yours is why I keep on coming back to HN. I went to her "About this blog" page, and was reading quite happily until I came to the exact sentence that you are quoting, and then stopped reading, came here and found your comment. I can agree with a significant amount of far-leftism, but social construction of biology is where I draw the line.
It's not about getting to know other people, it's about getting to know yourself, and realize your inbuilt biological and evolutionary biases so that you may balance for them. Pretending your cognitive software is hardware-neutral is just making those biases something you "don't know that you don't know."
I agree that it's difficult to represent graphs textually. So why not do it graphically?
On a philosophical level you may be right, and you make an interesting argument. :) My only goal was to point out the factual error in believing that there is no biological component of behavior.
This is a repost of an article that's at least a decade old. It has references to jre 1.1.8, green threads versus native threads, and so on.
well, even given the exact same person, one hour is not equal to the next. at 90 hours a week, after the first or second week, I get less useful work done than if I just work 20 hours.

I imagine 'optimal' productivity for one person varies considerably from person to person, and situation to situation, (and I imagine /on average/ optimal productivity means working more than 20 hours a week)

Which is why I was so disappointed by this article. I thought they were going to do some research on the optimal number of hours/week to work for maximum productivity. (I suppose I shouldn't be too disappointed; just measuring productivity is /hard/)
How? The only reaon this works is that 'this' in a function that is not called on an object will default to the global object (window for browser js).

So just saying 'this' in an arbitrary function has the same effect.
Amazon do both A/B testing & usability testing.

Apple's own HIG advocates for usability testing: http://developer.apple.com/Mac/library/documentation/UserExp...

Do you have a cite that either does not do usability testing?
I read that particular phrase as a slightly weaker argument: a claim that when people put forth biological or evolutionary explanations for behavior, they usually have social reasons for doing so, as opposed to scientific ones. That is, they have a political or social claim they want to make, and cloak it in scientific rhetoric.

Oddly, some prominent evolutionary biologists take that position, too; Stephen Jay Gould's criticisms of sociobiology sometimes fall along those lines.
Since I managed to run GNU/Linux properly, I thought that software can also be good. Grewing I started to put my hands in software development, and now I'm aware that everything sucks. I realized this by myself, than I read this article and ...well, I totally agree.

There's no good software out there. There's just software that sucks less.
http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button
Smiled through the whole read.

Only thing that needs to be revised is 'genetic warfare'. That is definitely not a future problem. It's a very very old one.

Also, while I think "prescience" would most certainly be in god's vocabulary, I think he'd be 'ultra fashionable' and think of it's use in casual conversation as being passe.

Kinda Spoiler

The end reminded me of "What does Marsellus Wallace look like?"
Interesting. I've liked Roundcube enough to use as a backup way to access mail, but I've never looked at the plugins.

What are some of the plugins that you find useful?
Agreed and to measure productivity over a year is more difficult. The authors present some data in their report, but some of the examples are difficult to accept (like Utah public servants). However, if you make a thought experiment in has merits. Assume 5 programmers with equal skills and a 'fixed work load'. From a social point of view it will be better for them to be all employed working for less hours than 4 of them working full hours.
Hilarious ending. I wonder how it would sound if a woman had the same conversation?
Have you seen his Chicken special? The one where he kills a few dozen cute fluffy yellow chickens in front of a live audience? That show was full of shock value, all aimed at getting people to realise just what happens in the industry, and also where your chicken dinner comes from
PHP, Python and J2EE respectively ;-)
How I Loved, And Lost, an Aardvark
On an otherwise idle 440MHz UltraSparcII running Solaris 8 with the Java 2 JRE 1.3.1, it takes jar over half a second just to report that it can’t find the file

This article is clearly outdated. A lot has happened in the ten years since the 1.3 release. One example is that they discovered a bug in the jar code that made it much slower than it should be.

http://blogs.sun.com/CoreJavaTechTips/entry/superduper_slow_...
Even if you interpret it that way, she isn't qualified to reject the body of scientific biological research because she thinks the authors have ulterior motives. Such a claim would require strong evidence. Are there scientists with agendas? Yes. But on the whole, I think you can be pretty confident of objectivity.

Gould is a relevant example, but he didn't reject the influence of biology. He simply rejected the idea of determinism based on our biology [1]. I don't think our biology determines us either, but we'd be fools not to take it into account.

EDIT: A choice quote from Gould's piece:

We are not denying that there are genetic components to human behavior. But we suspect that human biological universals are to be discovered more in the generalities of eating, excreting and sleeping than in such specific and highly variable habits as warfare, sexual exploitation of women and the use of money as a medium of exchange. What Wilson's book illustrates to us is the enormous difficulty in separating out not only the effects of environment (e.g., cultural transmission) but also the personal and social class prejudice of the researcher. Wilson joins the long parade of biological determinists whose work has served to buttress the institutions of their society by exonerating them from responsibility for social problems.

Similarly, I don't support using biology as an excuse for sexist behavior. But denying that biology affects behavior is not scientifically accurate.

[1] http://www.nybooks.com/articles/9017?sess=305fe41afae729849e...
The opening sentence will turn off a lot of folks on HN, I suspect: "I’m a big fan of ...the work Jason Calacanis does to promote startups and help entrepreneurs."
This is all out of the recollection of the author in the story; if the author is the type of person to use "prescience", he could easily have injected the word in his narrative.

On the other hand, if this god is what he claims to be, I imagine he'd use whatever words best conveyed his point- if he was trying to make one- and who are we to say "prescience" was not the perfect word when speaking to our narrator?
Random encoding, fewer transmissions
Yeah, apart from the part that might actually be interesting to HN readers, which everyone seems to have missed?

She complained about privacy in Buzz, as did other people. Her case was specifically mediaworthy and got widespread attention (going by what she says at least, I hadn't heard of it myself). The product manager of Buzz got directly in touch with her, pointed out they are fixing the issues that affect her, gave her direct instructions to make sure she'd turned it off, and encouraged her to submit further bug/issue reports. Surely all of us who manage products -- if you're a startup that's you -- can learn from this in one way or another, regardless of who starts the Internet flame train in the first place.
‘so what, exactly, makes you god?’

‘I did’

‘Why?’

‘Seemed like a good idea at the time’

^ When I read this I looked around for Douglas Adams. Rest his soul.
"... What are the system requirements?: A web browser with Flash installed, on pretty much any computer purchased in the last few years. ..." from ~ http://glitch.com/

Oops ~ http://www.google.com/search?q=flash+ipad+iphone
I was going to say that. The web has become pretty fast once I disabled Javascript and uninstalled Flash. I don't miss anything on everyday browsing (= killing time or finding interesting things) nor on research. Highly recommended that you try it.
It's not as good as something one hardware manufacturer (Apple) has put on their phone (iPhone OS).
No user (statistically) cares about GPL 1, 2 or 3 or the possibilities some modular design opens for either hardware or software developers. They care about the UI not sucking. At the end of the day, that's the gap Android has to bridge.
> The second is that all the people that frequently contact
> HER (via an anonymous account which forwards to her Google
> account) now have her personal Gmail account and are
> following her on Buzz (and Google Reader), which she can't
> stop from happening.

Until now, hiding your mail address from spam was one of the biggest concerns one had with email. Now, that might turn into hiding from Google. Or at least circumventing where we don't want it to do something with our private data we do not agree with.

That might turn out to be hard.
The title makes me really want to not watch this.
Yet, European firms are still comparable to Americans in terms of productivity and compete successfully in global markets. Intriguing, no?
"... PHP, Python and J2EE ..."

Hack and get the job done by yourself, hack get the job done and others can help, engineer and get the job done with lots of overheads.