skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Be advised that this seems useful only in broadcast media. In practice this means only wireless, such as 802.11g (Wifi). There are no more wired broadcast media in widespread use, the new Ethernet standards specifying that each endpoint must be individually switched (no more hubs). This could improve the bandwidth of all broadcast media tremendously, at a cost of higher memory (for storing the sent packets) and processing (for decoding) usage.

tl;dr: Better Wifi and WAN wireless nets in the next standards.
even worse:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=typhoon+fiber+int...
Take a look at this; I submitted it a couple days ago and found it very interesting:

http://thepowergeneration.blogspot.com/2009/09/hydrogen-chal...

If you had other ships carrying away the generated hydrogen, it seems like a brilliant idea.
Taking a Polar Flight? Be Sure to Check the Cosmic Forecast
I was going to register PayPalSucks.com...
Increased Presence Of Women In Workplace Causing Changes At Home
You must be specific what exact browser version and OS you used. Otherwise those numbers mean nothing.
Some interesting info and numbers in there. For example, the most recent blog post http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2010/01/20/the-4-big-myths... has received 750,000 visitors in the three weeks since it's been published. Those visitors resulted in 10,000 new members. That's about 34,000 visitors and 450 conversions per day and the overall conversion rate was 1.33%.

If OkCupid had to buy that much traffic and conversions through a CPC program they'd pay tens of thousands of dollars (or more). At $0.10 per click they would pay $75,000 for 750,000 visitors, at a more realistic $0.20+, they'd pay $150,000+. At a 1% conversion rate that would be $10-$20 per new member, or $100,000 to $200,000 total for 10,000 new members. Sensitivity test the variables up or down, but this shows the blog value-creation potential. Nice work, guys!
You are still better off simply making a copy of the JS you are including and not having to put that 'huge responsibility' on someone else. It's the code you've tested against, after all. And if you feel S3 provides better reliability, you can put it there yourself. S3 fallback isn't going to do anything about 'I'm letting arbitrary 3rd party code run on my page'.
I don't think it is, after all, I wrote that article. Usability testing can be done at all stages of the design cycle from paper prototyping to maintenance.
Apple advocates it but don't do it themselves. They follow the genius design method.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_12/b3925608....

This article doesn't cite it but hint's at it.

Which is obvious for a couple of reasons. Apple is paranoid that anything regarding what they work on get's out.
and Apple use the Genius design method. Apple do new things not me to products.

Other than that you must take my word for it and those I know at Apple. But again if you can find anything that proves that Apple do usability testing then by all means please share.

With regards to Amazon. I know that what matters at amazon is A/B testing.

http://glinden.blogspot.com/2007/06/ab-testing-at-amazon-and...

And looking at their checkout process it doesn't look like anything that have been anywhere near a usability test.

But you are missing the point here.

The companies didn't become successful because of usability testing that is the crux of the matter and the claim behind the 5USD that is wrong. To the extent it testing your product matters you can ask ANYONE. If it is that bad then why spend 5USD on a beer.

But most likely it wont be totally unusable and then the actual evidence of usability test having any positive influence on your likely success.
A stack trace can be much more helpful in actually solving a problem than a "proper" error message. Of course it depends on the nature of the problem; I can see how it would be different for sysadmin-type problems (missing config file, etc.)
It's not true. I don't hate software. In fact, I quite like it. But I do sometimes hate the things which people make software do - such as spyware/malware/DRM, etc. And you only need to fear blue screens if you're running Windows.

Software is never perfect. You can tinker with it endlessly. If you're a perfectionist then software development is probably not the career for you. I look at writing software in the same way that an author might look at writing a novel. At some point you have to publish. There are always alternative plots that you can think of, the characters aren't always as interesting as they could be and sometimes there are regrets and missed opportunities. Also readers will have diverse opinions about what you wrote, which may be quite different from how you imagined the novel would be interpreted.
S3 is meant as a storage system and very reliable in storing bits, but not serving them. CloudFront is meant as a CDN and very reliable in serving bits.
Yes, it does, because a correct understanding of human behavior is extremely important for design of economic and political systems... and even in finding a significant other.

Much the way that an understanding of evolution is critical to prevent the spread and creation of multi-drug resistant bacteria. We created MRSA through our ignorance and we're not going to fix it by pretending evolution doesn't happen.
Of course it can be done a all stages.

It just doesn't matter in the beginning.

Show me examples of companies who wouldn't be a success if it wasn't for the usability testing they did up front.

If it's so well proven that should be easy for you.

You are confusing improvements to an established already successful e-commerce company with creating one from scratch.

It's quite obvious if you already have a successful site you can adjust accordingly which is exactly what Amazon do all the time. Because that is what e-commerce sites must do to keep sales up.
Google to run Yale e-mail
You can easily see one millionth of an inch. During my training as a Mechanical Engineer we did some work at a metrology lab. We used what in the US is called a Gauge block
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauge_block . If you set two gauge blocks by one millionth difference you can see the light between them. Also don't forget the human eye can see as far as a few light years - think stars!

By the way the Wikipedia article on Gauge blocks is also very inspirational for any aspiring inventors/enterpreneurs.
Stop believing in things that could might as well be an advanced alien race.
The yampa library is an embedded domain specific language for haskell that is graph based.

With regular haskell syntax it is indeed quite tricky (and ugly) to describe the graphs, but there is a popular haskell extension (arrow syntax) that makes things very elegant. You give names to the nodes of the graph and then you describe the connections between the nodes

yampa is used for making interactive simulations (games) or graphical user interfaces. It takes a purely functional approach to these problem domains (no monads!)

http://www.haskell.org/yampa/
> tldr: fiction

The title says "Talking to god". You didn't seriously expect...?
Thank you very much for the interesting link to Bertrand Russel's take on this issue. Some time ago, another very interesting piece of Betrand Russel was linked by another HN user, and I have to say that reading Mr. Russel's essays should be required reading for some classes; probably in addition to reading some of his mathematical work, which is highly recommended, too.

That aside, I think that the article does not address another important (probably too recent) reason/ambition for increased work load: improving ones social status. As already indicated this probably was a non-issue when the article was authored, but then again my comment would fall into the just-for-the-record category...
Reminds me of an old story of a politician "slandering" his opponent in the campaign by telling the mostly poorly educated locals things like "Do you know what that man did at college? He matriculated!" in a tone that suggests that's something sleazy. There was no means to rebut it. It was true and if you then gave a vocabulary lesson to your voters, you would just be calling them stupid.
> 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.

This might interest you if you haven't heard of it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROWE

Results Only Work Environment - you agree on a set of tasks with your manager, you complete them, you get paid. Doesn't matter when you do it or how long it takes you. That lets people choose to work at a slower pace with more goofing off on Facebook or webcomics, or work in a blaze and hit the beach, or whatever. People who wish to produce manic levels of work can produce more and get paid for it as gauged by results, people who want to work less can complete less tasks can do so and still get paid a reasonable amount. I think there'll be some kinks to be ironed out, but it's more or less the future.

> (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.)

Cleaning floors is notoriously hard to outsource, but the technology-in-theory for automating/roboticizing much more of manual labor is already there. It's why I'd like to see the world get more wealthier - people have a false believe that if there's no more poor people, everything will get more expensive. Pretty false idea - if more people are doing R&D, pure science, engineering, art, programming instead of manual labor, we'll see huge gains in new innovation and can roboticize/automate much of the manual labor away. Hell, when I was in China I'd see like 30 guys with chisels tearing up asphalt which you'd have one guy with a jackhammer doing in the States. The labor was cheaper than the machinery, but as the Chinese get more educated and into high skilled work, that'll change and they'll switch over to jackhammers and whatever we invent next after jackhammers.
I think it is just the way he remembers/has selected that particular password.
I think it's why he chose that particular password. So if my password was lucy, the association would probably be a girl I was attracted to at the time I chose it.
Or just use the "sherlock holmes" approach he mentions in the piece.
Your tech career: How to cope with an unsupportive boss
> This blog is protected, to view it you must log in. <

I have a Wordpress account, but it doesn't seem to bring down the wall for me. Can you please quote an excerpt?
Question related to assembly programming
Hello HN,
Please tell me how many different varieties of assembly language exists like x86 etc,,their differences(how do they differ from one another)
which varient should i choose?
Please give me some insight on the tools that are needed for programming in assembly.some say i need to buy a intel 8085/8086 kit.but others say a simulator would do.i'am damn confused.
also suggest good simulators if that's the case
Except she isn't crazy. There (is? was?) some smart and eye-opening stuff on that blog, although she seems to have locked it down now, presumably to weather the storm of new readers. I hope it returns.

Also: it may not be immediately evident, but to call someone a "crazy feminist" is the same kind of triggering words as "uppity" is to black people. Accusations of craziness have a long history of being used to shut up women who were making a fuss.
Interesting, that is my biggest annoyance on Vista, too. I wonder if there might be a problem with SATA that users have been attributing to Vista or other OSes.
Yes it is, and you're not contributing to the discussion. Take a look at this guy, this is how it's done: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1121239
And if you have IMAP enabled, Buzz will show up there too, with replies to your posts looking like e-mails. There is a feature in Gmail Labs called "Advanced IMAP Controls", that lets you disable Buzz showing up in IMAP folders.
Incognito Mode
That isn't the case for the vast majority of the workforce.
Looking for opinions from people who teach SQL 
Thanks for reading...

I have an Excel add-in that allows you to preform SQL select in Excel (www.querycell.com)

It's been suggested to me that I should make a version specifically for people learning SQL. So lots of tutorials, maybe register a www.learnsql.com like domain and really push it as an educational tool.

Question : Would you use a tool like this to teach SQL or recommend it to people learning SQL ?

IMHO :

Pros
- Visual feedback (you can highlight/color rows that match your query)
- Familiar comfortable environment for newbies
- Possibly easier to set up in a night-classes or school environment than databses

Cons
- If someone is learning SQL they will eventually need to learn about a RDBMS so why not immediately
- Excel has some stigma
Can you explain more? It seems like you're saying that RESTful APIs should somehow be self-documenting, and that there should be no need for an API specification. I've never heard this argument before and would love to know more.
Fair enough, but I hope you won't overlook the points that:

1) People are, in fact, fucking crazy.

2) People often have difficulty in coming to terms with the above fact in its simple form, to the detriment of their development as rationalists; it's why I use "People are crazy, the world is mad" as a slogan. They pass up opportunities like a valid startup idea or signing up for cryonics because they think that other people will laugh, and they haven't gotten on a deep gut level that the people laughing at them are crazy. Vide: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Conformity_bias

This is why I objected to the downvoting of the original comment (I'm pleased to see it's been voted up now). The referenced poll is, in fact, more proof that humans are fucking crazy, and people need proof of that.
It seems it was pulled of the Internet, here's a copy - http://img38.imageshack.us/img38/329/harrietjacobsfuckyougoo...
Official Google statement issued to businessinsider.com:

> We reached out to blogger in question this morning and addressed her concerns with Google Buzz and Google Reader. Some of the concerns were due to confusion the product experience created. Her report also helped us discover one bug and one product issue in Google Reader:

> 1) If you block people in Buzz, they still show up as following you in Reader. This is a bug, and we're working to fix it. Provided that your Google Reader shared items are protected, only the people you've explicitly allowed to see them can do so -- regardless of who appears to be following you in Reader.

> 2) Until now, there has not been functionality to block people from following you in Google Reader. We're adding this to the Reader interface.

> We are making these two changes as fast as possible and we'll get them live in the next few days.

Archived copy of the article in question: http://img38.imageshack.us/img38/329/harrietjacobsfuckyougoo...
And its built around their own Flash-renderer-optimised clone of SVG (FXG)... because... its more convenient for them, I guess?
The Other Secret of Monkey Island
And it's not like they're clever enough to track ip addresses and cookies or anything.
Paypal suxxors, sometimes.

Been using it for years and years and years. It has not sucked for me.. except once. But then again, my bank sucks. Amazon sucks as a payment system. Google sucks as a payment system.

Thing is, so many people use Paypal, and its indecently convenient, that you end up living with the suckage.

Just like that crappy car you have that sucks. You get out of bed one morning, the very time that you need it to go to that new job, and it wont start. Ugh! You get it fixed, then it works like a charm for the next 8 months. Then it sucks again.

These PayPal suxx horror stories are true. But they are few and far between. I don't see less people using Paypal because of those stories. I see more. Putting them out there is good because PayPal will hopefully pay attention.

But stop griping and get a decent alternative to paypal, and NO, what you are about to suggest is not a decent alternative, unless it works exactly like paypal and all my friends and employees use it.
I usually just take projections with grain of salt. "10 years" is pretty long. I wonder has any one collected multiyear projections statistics and compare predictions to real world?
Here is where I think the problem lies. First, Google doesn't show your contact list. It doesn't. This was what people were suggesting, and it's not true.

Basically, what is happening is the same thing that happens at twitter by default. People follow other people, and followers, NOT contacts, are shared. People can see who is following you, but they can't see your contacts.

So, when someone joins Buzz, Google suggests they follow certain people, and sets them up. These are people they have in their contacts list. These people in turn have also done the same thing, most likely. Followers, like on Twitter, are shared publicly.

Basically, a lot of people were following people when they really didn't want to be, and despite the ability to prevent it, they accepted the defaults.

Google has made changes to make it more obvious, but from my own experience, and from everything I've read, seen, or done, is that this was all preventable. The problem was, people didn't take the time to read, or understand, what was happening, just happily clicking along.

Of course, that's probably just as dangerous. Should Google have handled it differently? Yes. Did they betray users privacy? Possibly, depending on if you accept that users using software have a certain level of responsibility, or that the software is supposed to assume you don't know what you are doing.

Edit: More information this morning, and I feel vindicated. =)
x86 isn't an assembly language it is an instruction set. That is to say it provides an instruction that allows you to add the value at a memory location and a constant. Intel's assembly language exposes this instruction one way vs GNU's assmebly language that exposes this a different way. So you have instruction sets then you have for lack of a better word instruction patterns. So you can use GNU Assembler (GAS) with x86, power, and arm instructions is each a different language?

If you want to learn x86 assembly and have an x86 computer then all you need is an assembler. Have a power Mac then you have every thing you need to run power assembly. There is a free online book called the Art of Assembly.
Is there a good alternative to PayPal? This tends to be one of the little issues I am concerned about when I think of starting my own online small business or am interested in donations for my free projects.
There have been a bunch of threads around here; http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=526517 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=918700 have a bunch of alternatives on them. Seems like people are okay with Spreedly and Braintree.
Why would you care? Either they are interesting or not and helpful or not. If neither, ignore them.
original: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1120145

Official Google statement issued to businessinsider.com:

> We reached out to blogger in question this morning and addressed her concerns with Google Buzz and Google Reader. Some of the concerns were due to confusion the product experience created. Her report also helped us discover one bug and one product issue in Google Reader:

> 1) If you block people in Buzz, they still show up as following you in Reader. This is a bug, and we're working to fix it. Provided that your Google Reader shared items are protected, only the people you've explicitly allowed to see them can do so -- regardless of who appears to be following you in Reader.

> 2) Until now, there has not been functionality to block people from following you in Google Reader. We're adding this to the Reader interface.

> We are making these two changes as fast as possible and we'll get them live in the next few days.
I agree with most of the article, but I wish Jeff Atwood would stop telling us what programmers should be like and who we should not hire. He has good observations, but he's talking like a cult leader and that's annoying.
> But the demo always made me feel like it was a web-based Outlook UI-wise.

My experience too, after using it for about a year. It's OK, but it's nowhere near as good as gmail.
thanks for your responses. looks like i'm getting a Mac.
Bjarne Stroustrup left the following comment on this article:

I hugely enjoyed this article. I can't think when I last read an article that
made so many important points. Thanks for not sugar-coating the description of
real-world problems and real solutions. And thanks for not drowning those
points in jargon.

You can find it at the bottom, but I missed it on my first read, so I thought others might have missed it as well. Also, I think it is a pretty good additional reason to read the article :).
They should be developing this in Unity. You can publish to Win, Mac, all major browsers, and iPhone/iPad. Not only that, you get actual 3d rendering support, including PhysX, and a nice content pipeline.
My Biology Term Paper Allowed Me to come out From The groove I was In
Sometimes I wonder where I fit it. Life is hard. I just want to know where my niche is. Where I can feel comfortable and completely myself. I don’t deal well with change. I think most people don’t.
For the tldr; crowd, its basically about how given a big enough sample size very unlikely things become a possibility, ex: you puppy shooting you in the face.
Right this is a huge item when it comes to scalability. I argue this with developers all the time. The problem is that session is like Crack, it starts with just a little. It is so easy to get caught up in storing off some info in a property bag or List for later use, but it binds you to so much hardware and software infrastructure, by using just one little pattern.

I am old enough to remember the first time the session pattern was used in a web framework, I remember cringing then just as I do now when I see it used.
My friend Craig, an engineer for an oceanography company, has been working on very similar ideas for a while. Here are two of his proposals:

http://longshotcity.com/2008/11/17/flymill/

http://www.paratow.com/
to err is human, but to persevere is diabolical.
errare humanum est, sed perseverare diabolicum. Seneca

To err is human, but to persevere in error is only the act of a fool. "Cujusvis hominis est errare, nullius nisi insipientis in errore perseverare". Cicero
Ext JS is not free. Ext JS is only free for open source projects, they are dual licensed. They used to be free, but they "clarified" their rules. http://www.extjs.com/products/license.php
How Google Buzz for mobile will change your life
Unfortunately such traces too often don't contain much useful information at all. The proper procedure would be to catch the exceptions and annotate it with something useful like 'Config file /etc/foo/bar not found'.

From the Admin POV that's more helpful than a 200 line pamphlet boiling down to something like 'AbstractConfigFactory: nullPointerException'.
Funny, thats just how I feel about the old testament...
Doesn't CloudFront builds over S3? I was reading about CloudFront and what I understand is that it is basically a distribution mechanism for S3.
The BLS does this kind of thing. You can start by looking here: http://www.bls.gov/opub/ooq/2003/spring/art01.pdf

These projections are voodoo, but politicians and economic developers take them to the bank.
Nope those are systems that few people use. If I'm gonna pay a contractor in virtually any country, PayPal is the place to be.
That will not work for my specific case because even if my users include static JS file, they cannot include static JS file which will stall their browser in case the server falls.