skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Do you seek quick/regular feedback on your project as you develop?
I'm working on a small app right now and keep waiting for two of my friends to log on so I could show them what I did last night. It's not ready for a "Review my app" post on HN yet and most of my friends/family aren't computer-savvy enough to give me useful feedback till the app is actually done. I wanted to know if I'm the only one who develops this way: I make a small new feature or two each day, show it to my potential users, get their feedback, and incorporate appropriate suggestions. Then I continue with the project.

By small feature, I mean UI elements, basic functionality and layout etc. I don't want to make the entire UI or a complex feature and then find out my users don't like it. So now I wait for my friends to tell me if the logo looks ok, the colors are decent, or if the keyboard shortcut makes sense.

I would love to form a group with HNers to test out little things in each other's apps on a regular basis and give feedback. It would be more like sharing with team mates and less like an organized beta-test. Would anyone be interested in something like this? The goal is to have more polished apps before we share them with the rest of the community and not waste too much effort building something that users don't want.
Think big with a gig: Our experimental fiber network
What always has interested me is that whoever is running it has some sizeable investment. It can't be cheap.
YouTube Safety Mode: block "... violence such as a political protest or ..."
I effectively just track metacritic and one review site that I browse over to every couple of days and read the reviews that look interesting. I go out of my way to avoid learning about future releases, with the exception of Atlus games which can be missed in a way that Halo 3 can not be missed (Halo 3 will still be something you can get two years from now). This way I am only rarely excited about something in the future, which right now I consider a waste of time; there's so much good stuff now that drooling over something six months away is just silly.

I am not completely successful; I knew about Fallout 3 for a while because it got onto some of my RSS feeds that had nothing to do with gaming per se. But for the most part it works.
Found via http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2010-02-10-n58.html
you could make that an option possibly?
The video is edited and posted along with an MP3 download & transcript.

http://mixergy.com/y-combinator-paul-graham/
Well you know what they say about putting lipstick on a pig...
So the real question is if someone can build something like this that connects perfect strangers via video/audio so easily through their browsers on any operating system that supports flash/webcam/mic, why can't I pull up a page, enter someone's email address, and drop into a chat just like chatroulette with the person I'm looking for without having to install anything extra?

I know gmail has audio/video support (and has for a while), but it uses a special plugin and doesn't support linux, which I guess is fine (although annoying), but why should I have to install your special plugin if I've got flash installed and Chatroulette can do it?

Mark
They are indeed evil, but sometimes a necessary evil. Browsers apart (you shouldn't block a user from going to check info on the web), some parts of your applications are simply not meant to be modified/run at the same time.
Yes, we need to do some work to make things properly compatible with Chrome. Hopefully I'll have some spare time in the next couple of weeks to do that.
> If that's what you're doing, I see the value: you're the Drobo to Riverbed's NetApp.

You've got me exactly.

> Your "benefits" section is still too technical, where it isn't, it's too fuzzy.

I agree - I've been struggling a lot with the copy. When I try and make it less technical it ends up being fuzzy. I'm interested in hiring a copywriter if I can get any good recommendations.
useful socially to have shared experiences

Overall, I agree, though plenty of arguments can be made for and against this, especially where TV is concerned (given its brain-rotting tendencies). Personally, I grew up on mostly different shows than everyone else anyway, so I only shared experiences with an extremely small group of people, most of whom I'm sure I never met. Bill Nye, Nova, and generally PBS (no cable) were my shows of choice through all of elementary school. I also had the Animaniacs lineup near its beginning, but the vast majority of other kids my age (at my school) didn't get most of it.

Not bragging about my "mental might" here, my parents & older sister just did a good job loading me with things to learn before and during that age, so I had a real intellectual advantage at elementary school. They taught me most things 1-on-1 well before they came up in school. It's definitely put me in a different social circle, as I associate more with geeks than other stereotypes, but I'm happy here. For myself, I'll call not sharing a lot of the "normal" TV experience a positive thing.
"And the US Army certainly didn't go a good job of carrying out their mission [in Vietnam] (the US Navy hasn't been put to the test since WWII ... and one might say they haven't been doing a bang up job of policing the sea lanes as of late (South China Sea, off the Horn of Africa))"

In both cases, the mission was hampered by political leadership. The military was winning the Vietnam War, it was just taking longer than necessary because the White House was micromanaging the war and establishing unrealistic rules and requirements.

As for piracy, the Navy has been kept out of the game because it's cheaper to pay ransom than to pay for any significant military operations against pirates. There was a time where we would say "millions for defense but not a penny for tribute", land the Marines in North Africa, and force the pirates to allow safe passage. Nowadays we'd rather pay the tribute--and invading Somalia would be a far more difficult mission.
I would also suggest that when you have the boxes installed at a customer's site, it may be an opportunity to sell more stuff to them, by adding functionality to the boxes. For example, a customer might want VPN and if they are happy with the Synctus boxes, might want it to go through them. Or perhaps a corporate wiki, replicated through all sites in the organisation. Or accessing some or all the shared files by ftp or http. Or a revision control system -- you getb the idea.
That's awesome , it should fairly become popular. I've tried something like this a while ago based on an opensource calendar system, a kind of Win-project for normal folk, I just at some point set the project on standby but this is awesome. Just leave it as simple as it is, maybe an api and allow people to embed, that'll be fine.
I understand that experiments need to be done in order to prove suspicions, and I understand that popular science media will exaggerate for impact, but when I read these articles I always end up wondering if the people writing or researching even have children. I keep reading about various 'discoveries' which are completely obvious to anyone who has a child.

Still it's good to spread the word to those who don't that children are way more complicated than we've thought. They are, essentially, tiny humans with all the behaviors and fewer of the social graces and emotional control.
6 Global Corporations Started by Their Founder's Shitty Luck
I toyed with the code a bit (which was a bit bizarre looking until I realized the mix of tabs and spaces was meant to be viewed with tabs equalling 2 spaces). One minor thing worth noting: The demo page has a "console.log(...)" statement in it. That causes an error in Opera, so I took it out.

Here's why the dropdown doesn't [quite] work in Opera:

Uniform wraps form elements with divs and spans in order to achieve the altered look. The actual form elements are set to opacity 0 to hide them. For some reason (which I couldn't figure out), the actual select element ends up with a height of 5 pixels. You'll see that if you click on the upper 5 pixels of the dropdown, you'll get the dropdown to open up like it should.

The simple fix was to force the height of the select element with CSS to something bigger, such as 23px. I added "height: 23px;" to this CSS block: http://github.com/pixelmatrix/uniform/blob/master/css/unifor... and then the dropdown began working as advertised.
Twitter Testing BitTorrent to Speed Servers
Don't mess with The Jesus!

It's from Big Lebowski :) Great movie if you haven't seen it.
Pixar Animation Chills Out Its Server Room
More People Working In Part-Time Jobs
LiveU Puts the Power of a News Van in Your Backpack (Video)
One of the things I liked about the original is that it wasn't just in a limited time period, so you could see how things worked differently in various time periods.
> I agree - I've been struggling a lot with the copy.

Separate the technical and non-technical out into separate pages. The technical stuff can then get as technical as you want.
Then it is safe to assume that gmail will have a feature to block buzz... problem solved?
http://tinychat.com / tokbox.com / stickam.com / etc.
"Which is what a large amount of people already do, who own a TV."

I don't necessarily agree with this statement. I do not believe people are as selective with what they watch if they own a TV (yes, I know, there are always exceptions). When you actively seek out the content when/where/how you want it, as well as probably paying for it in some cases, you are much more selective with what you watch and how much time you spend watching it.

If people own a TV, they are using the hundreds of channels they have to suck up time rather than providing them true entertainment. People who own TVs, in my opinion, are much more likely to channel surf and just find a boring show to fill up their time because they find nothing else to do. This gets even worse with the increasing use of DVRs.

It turns into not filling an interest/entertainment need but rather providing a diversion.
Link that won't expire:

http://www.livescience.com/culture/children-passions-autonom...
Updating Carbonmade's Finances
Did apple approved Opera they can release it?
> I intended to put all the technical information in multiple HTML hyperlinked pages rather than as PDF downloads. Is this what you mean - would PDF downloads be better?

I personally prefer HTML to PDF. YMMV.
> "Without branches, what happens is either broken trunk or giant commits, both often worse than the (real) complexity brought by branch."

Or you do your development in a way that doesn't break the build, and do it in several steps.

For example, just build new code that can be specified to be used at runtime, then when it works just like the existing default code, switch it over (Effectively doing your own branch).
I didn't explained myself well then.

My point is that, in my opinion, there is no progress in art exactly for the reason you have just given that there is no objective "better" to measure progress with.

About TV..., if you are talking about TV shows I wouldn't consider them art at all.
Does nobody remember CU-SeeMe and VocalTec iPhone c. 1995?
Wave is still choppy for me.
interesting read. However, the author does not account for inflationary or deflationary effects with respect to changes in the supply of money. Also the author seems to forget that our sovereign debt was created by reckless government spending at the expense of its taxpayers, for whom it shows no accountability to. Other countries who hold our debt obviously feel that our labor is overpriced. Wages will drop before they spend. Gotta love globalization!
It cannot even access facebook?
You are my new best friend.
Google "from nand to tetris", there are many versions around, text video etc. It starts with a "nand" gate - an electrical device that for all practical purposes has two binary inputs x,y and one output z with this mapping:

x=0,y=0 => z=1
x=1,y=0 => z=1
x=0,y=1 => z=1
x=1,y=1 => z=0

where usually "0" is represented by zero volts and "1" is represented by e.g. 5 volts.

(As for how a nand gate is actually built -- well, how much electronics/physics do you know? if not much, just assume it magically does. A lego version that works with levers instead of voltages can be found here http://goldfish.ikaruga.co.uk/ornand.html )

(edit: formatting)
Revising Book on Disorders of the Mind
Neat! I'm attempting to generate a ranking for Seattle now. [Edit: Nevermind, this Java newbie got bored trying to figure out jars and classpaths.] I also didn't realize before that you could find users by their most-used language:

http://github.com/search?type=Users&language=python&...

...and GitHub's own results are ranked by total number of followers, which gives a simpler version of this article's "connectedness" measurement.
> it's a great product at a great price

I agree. There are very large numbers of people who use computers and find them a complete pain in the arse. This includes most non-technical people using office computers. Most of these people would love a product that "just works" without hassle. And most IT managers would love a product that doesn't need to be continually cossetted my expensive sys admins for it to continue working.
Agreed on "hampered by political leadership", but my studies of the US Army in the period tells me it also was a very large factor in the early to middle part of the mess (About Face by Hackworth would be a good first book to read on this). I could go into many details but this is probably not the forum for that.

One big leadership one, though, is apropos: the 6 month tour of duty "ticket punch" for officers. For the Army at large (at least for a long time) it was perceived that Vietnam was a side show to the greater Cold War. However it was also perceived that getting "combat experience" was going to be a necessary part of one's "resume" for higher advancement. So officers would come in for a 6 six month tour ... and I probably don't have to detail how badly that worked out.
I'm pretty sure I've seen plenty of 5 letter .com domain names available using nxdom.com (started by someone here at HN). Especially ones that aren't easily pronounceable such as TPUTH.

I'd check to verify, but nxdom is blocked by my employer now because of the GAE hosting, I think.
Digital Sound
Just nabbed it from my library. Excellent looking book after a quick skim-through, it explains a lot of the reasoning behind design choices and their effects, something most design books either lack or are weak in. Or assume a higher level of knowledge of art concepts / terms.
Old-style computers get new life in develping countries
Celery 1.0 released
Our IT department has twice weekly scheduled maintenance windows. Every month, a couple of those windows will include taking down parts of the infrastructure for kernel updates.
Frequently, the services involved are clustered and involve no user downtime, that said, it still takes a team of three or four people a few hours to administrate the maintenance, monitoring to be sure everything is going smoothly and putting out any fires that might arise.
3.5 * ~$100 * 1 hour * 2 times a month = ~$700 per month
$700 / $3 per server = 200 servers that could potentially be reduced to seconds of maintenance administration instead of an hour.
Yay!!.....hmm..wait a second..

(addendum: whoa, my tail's on fire!!)
Has it really, or only in perception? Some proof of this would be nice. Last I saw, neither Apple or Linux have really made a huge dent in the consumer and business desktop space. Sure, they are more viable options than in 2005, but it still seems that most consumers are going for Windows, and businesses still buy Windows + Office.
Setting Emacs Up for C# Development
... Just like the web. If anything, the web is worse if you're susceptible to this sort of time wasting brain rot addiction.

I'd say it's best to cure the problem (If you have one) than to proclaim that TV is bad.

The same sort of personality could waste time reading the dictionary or an encyclopedia. Not because they want to lookup something, just because they're bored. But that doesn't mean books are bad.
Obligatory: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euTu04297sI

(NSFW)
Fireplace Company
Fireplace Company of Wilshire Fireplace comprising a lots of fireplace equipments like traditional, contemporary, antiques and antique reproductions to their California locations.
If enough people vote Pirate, maybe governments will.
Time for the other so-called broadband providers to shake in their boots.

I like companies that have no respect for established business models. In this perspective, despite its size, I think it's fair to call Google a start-up.
If they capture every video stream that goes through their servers they must have a TON of raw footage, I'm sure some of it could be spliced together/sold/subscribed to/whatever.

Not a pretty business model (at least, I'm assuming there's a low pretty-to-ugly ratio on Chatroulette :-) but probably a functional one.
+1 to being able to embed. That would be a really nice feature to have and would build awareness for what you're working on. Every time someone embedded a timeline in their blog (or wherever) it would be free advertising.

Looks great, good luck!
My mom actually didn't want to take me to tennis lessons. I bugged her about it until she relented. That's why I still play unlike a lot of my friends from high school.

A very good book about this is called Drive by Daniel Pink. It presents case study after case study of why autonomy matters to both kids and adults, some of which were conducted by the Fed. Highly recommended.
In any significant engagement you're going to have a long period where you consistently fuck up and have to adjust. A healthy organization actually will adjust, though, and that's more important, because whether you get it right at first has more to do with whether you've been doing substantially the same thing recently, which for the military largely depends upon how warlike the politicians have been lately ;)
> I still don't really buy that it was "laborious effort."

Having read accounts of said effort, I wonder what you think qualifies as laborious. They did days of testing with groups of kids.

> And I don't think the song is popular because of some fantastic musical merits.

And no one said that it has fantastic musical merits. Instead, they say that it has fantastic kid music merits.

That's a hard market to crack. Lots of people try to write Barney, but few actually pull it off.

There are lots of songs that could have become the standard. That one did, by design and labor.
Ask HN: server security intro/reference?
I'm just starting out in server land. Prior to this, everything I've built has been on top of an infrastructure that someone else secured and maintained.

Last couple days I've been perusing security related posts here, and following links.

And I have to say: gaaa!

Admin/security is a firehose.

My problem is that waiting until I know that I know enough would mean that I'll never get anything done, I'll always be waiting to be better. In development the idea of waiting to learn something until you need it makes sense. In admin/security that approach can be fatal.

What I'd like to see, if you're aware of any, is a resource or resources that allow you to approach things with a strategy of layered importance. An overview of where you're going, where the details are then arranged as:

- If nothing else, do these few N things first and absolutely.
- Next, certainly do these things as soon as you can.
- Finally, for uber control and confidence, consider these.

I guess knowing how people break things down into categories and areas of focus would be helpful too.

The question is mainly about server security, but if you want to throw something in about app security/integrity, and recovery from a server or app breach, that would be appreciated too.

Thanks. I think I'll go breath into a paper bag for awhile.

[edit: formatting]
I've seen it both ways, but I changed it just for you.
I think this is more around trying to force the broadband providers to get their act together. Scare them ;0)
What makes YUI more professional?

I've used both quite a bit and I've found the YUI documentation to be frustrating to navigate and overly complex. YUI reminds me of the standard Java libraries in all the wrong ways. jquery has fantastically straight-forward, simple documentation.
not to be confused with http://sprawsm.com/uni-form/
From what I've seen, at least, it seems that children don't have short attention spans intrinsically; they just have short attention spans for what they find uninteresting.

All aristocrat-peasant societies socialize their population to flatter the aristocracy, including by pretending to be interested in their interests; democratic-market societies like the United States are aristocrat-peasant societies in which everyone is treated as an aristocrat. (See www.historyexplained.com for the theoretical model of aristocrat-peasant and tribal societies; but bear in mind that its model of history is wrong. Read _1491: New Revalations of the Americas Before Columbus_; had the northern American Indians only been immune to smallpox, we'd think of democratic-market societies as a shoddy alternative to the one true way of self-controlled tribalism -- which the Middle Ages, too, had been fitfully evolving into.)

So, the problem is not that children have short attention spans; it's that they haven't learned to fake interest in the manner expected in Western societies. (From your name, I'm guessing that you're American or Canadian.) When a Western child, or a member of most types of tribal societies, is bored, he or she doesn't try to hide it; by contrast, when genuinely interested in something, such a person exhibits a passionate interest uninhibited by concepts of aristocratic reserve.

In short: figure out what a child is interested in -- or rather, let the child figure that out for him- or herself -- and all the rest should come together on its own. Just hope it's not an interest that leads to graduate school in the humanities...
Google Buzz Review & Analysis
What are the implications of Google Buzz. From its marketing strategy to its impact in the enterprise.
I agree to an extent. The author should not have been critical of one show and praiseworthy of another. TV is great for winding down and not having to think much. Both shows fill that capacity in a lot of respects.
The one glaring omission in this post is the commercials. I absolutely can't stand commercials. 2 minutes of commercials for 5 minutes of actual show? Give me a break. That is the only reason why I don't watch TV.
A minority of CS conferences are double-blind - I've only submitted to one that was. But it's difficult to maintain true author-blindness. If your work builds on previous work at all, it's difficult to maintain that. Further, I once reviewed a paper that was double-blind, and before I made it through the abstract I knew immediately where the paper came from. (Not the specific authors, but I knew it had to be from a particular company.)
Political protests in Iran have proven to be plenty violent. I can understand why some people may not want to see them.
Also, the real record label is rarely mentioned on the packaging of the media or within the copyright notices. Record labels use "imprint" labels as "brands". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Record_label#Imprint

For example, Lady Gaga's "The Fame" was released by Interscope Records which is an imprint of Universal. The current hit single "TiK ToK" from "Kes$a" was released Jive Recors, which is an imprint of Sony BMG. The 2009 re-release of the single "New Born" from "The Muse" was released by A&E Records, which is an imprint of Warner Music.
Owning your net access, owning the DNS, routing through their backbone. These guys have all your bases covered.

How do you form an underground internet that bypasses the big players?
Just imagine if all agencies used truth in advertising...don't think they would be able to have toilet paper ads on tv anymore.