skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't normally care for rants, but I think this one was great.

A few more "pet peeves":

1. Don't sit on my desk. I'm a programmer. My desk is also my dining table.

2. If I'm eating at my desk, don't touch my food. I'm so busy that I usually bring what I think I'll need for the day. I didn't factor in your needs too. Go to the vending machine.

3. If your come to my desk and see my typing furiously and I don't look up, that means I'm busy writing code or commenting on hn. Either way, if the building's not on fire, go away and send me an email.

4. If you get upset in a discussion with someone else, don't raise your voice, don't yell profanities, and most of all, don't slam the door or throw anything. That's when I leave for the day. Some of us have had enough of that for one lifetime.

5. If we're talking in my office, face me and take your hand off the doorknob. If it's important, I'm not going to rush through it because you're in a hurry to get somewhere else. If it's not important, then leave me alone.

6. If we're meeting, turn off your cellphone. If it vibrates, don't look at it to see who it is. If I'm not the most important person at that moment, then I don't want to meet with you.

7. I'm always happy to discuss important matters, but I don't do "status" meetings. If you want to know status, email me and I'll reply. Otherwise, my status report would read, "Nothing accomplished. Spent all day in status meetings."

8. If there's cake in the breakroom, have a piece, but leave your Tupperware in your car. This isn't Cheesecake Factory.

9. Don't lie to me. Ever. If you tell me that Joe agreed with these mods, I can easily confirm that with Joe. If he says you never talked to him, I will never listen to anything you ever say again.

10. If you had Mexican for lunch, cut the rest of us a break and use the restroom at the Shell station.
Patent for idea of online user communities may bite Facebook
With regards to cryogenic applications:

Right now a 500 L dewar of liquid He costs about $500 USD. (more for some locations in EU) You can already buy regenerators that capture the boiled off LHe and this can save a good amount of money with some suppliers. If Helium becomes more scarce this type of technology will become much more common.

A larger concern is the scarcity of He3 - This has become very expensive in Europe due to the US's crazy ambition to install thousands of He3 based detectors for people smuggling nuclear bombs into the USA. See http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2549/he-3-and-homeland-securi... for more info. Like other posters I don't understand why the Russians don't step up!
>It may be less cost-effective

The point is, it is more cost-effective, in the end. It's just that current accounting methods favour short term accounting.
This reminds me of MIT's research initiative to automate any GUI using screenshots

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1072710
Yes. I like that the first example was an OSX password dialog. I'm sure there's no potential for misuse of this feature...
You can do anything with software. But that flexibility will cost you.
Java 7 : The new java.util.Objects class
Perhaps it's just a bit of fun.
Ding ding ding! Right answer.

The reason that IPv6 has seen minimal adoption so far is that the market has no reason to care about it yet. When will it start caring? 541 days from today, give or take. That's when IANA is projected to run out of IPv4 addresses. It is not the day that the internet goes up in a puff of smoke if we haven't finished deploying IPv6; it's the day that market pressure begins to accumulate and the day we find out what an IPv4 address is actually worth on the open market. When it becomes cheaper for large consumers of IP addresses to transition their networks to IPv6 than to continue paying for IPv4 addresses, that is when the "magic moment" will happen.
Direct link: http://vimeo.com/10595371 (without the useless bla)

The PCMag review is quite good. That’s the way video reviews should be done. It’s also without surprises.
Is anyone else getting tired of this meme?
I'm not convinced that (3) is going to be true in the long run. It's when using IPV4 is a problem that people will switch. And that will come when ISPs start using NAT on their users.
I find it sad that there is pretty much nothing about this interface that could not be rendered in a standard browser interface. Yet they are investing loads of money, hype and effort and everyone will have orgasms about it just because it's an "app". And in the end we've just reverted what would have previously be done in an open, standard way into a proprietary, closed, single vendor (and, I'm guessing, expensive) format.
The iPad is the first Personal Computer-- what you have is a work computer.
Good luck with that after unilaterally borking the UI design in the latest LTS release.
The Hurt Locker DVD
smarter ventures is a good read on fund raising, given from the lawyers perspective

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Smarter-Ventures-Survivors-Venture-C...
App developers rush to explore iPad's potential
That would be a nice sort of holiday. Discussion sites could auto-reply to any comments made on that day with their choice of "go outside" reminders, "get a life" insults, or helpful links to local outdoor or otherwise just non-internet activities.
This video describes our company using agile... in fact I thought that I was outside the office of an iteration planning.
Another and somewhat more subtle consideration: if you're deploying web crawlers or related tools from EC2, an increasing number of web sites are blocking access from the Amazon IP blocks due to the volume of vermin.
And, the IMHO brilliant spoof by Techcrunch: http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/01/new-york-times-ipad/
14 years later, and it doesn't seem too strange..
Perhaps it's because it's late and I'm tired and a bit grumpy, but I can't see the benefit at all here. Only downsides.

1. The whole idea of teaching a user to accept another programme pretending to be the one they're running, and intercepting all inputs for that I find dangerous.

2. The bubble cursor would be annoying and frustrating, far more often that it would be useful. Have another look at that video, and see just how far the mouse is, often, from the target it's selecting. Especially when it's sometimes over the text of another question. What about cases where you don't want to click anything, you just want to bring that window to the front, or remove focus from the flash video so you can press space to scroll (not pause)?

3. The slowing of the cursor over controls looks the most useful, but would make navigation of your application interface like playing one of those games where your character keeps getting stuck in puddles of honey carelessly left lying about, and slowing dramatically. It'd turn moving your cursor into a game of dodge the gravity wells. Now picture your Mum accidentally moving her mouse into the centre of those six rows of toolbars she has in IE. She'll never be able to get it out again
As an ordinary user, I can abandon ipv4 as soon as the services that I use are on ipv6. I don't need to be able to connect to every one of the 500 million computers on the network via ipv6 - I only need to be able to connect to the servers and services that I actually use - Google, Amazon, YCombinator, etc.

Worst case, I'd need to connect to all the computers in my P2P network - a few million, or all the computers in my bot net - a few million more. And in both of those cases, the client software either is or will be smart enough to keep me connected via a proxy of some sort.

For example - To get to Google without ipv4, I don't need to connect to every one of their millions of servers via IPV6, I only need to get a quad A from my DNS and connect to their external facing load balancers via ipv6. As soon as I can do that, I don't need ipv4 to use Google. For all I care they could be running Arcnet on their back end servers.

Another consideration is the prevalence of NAT and proxies in the corporate world. Corp users are already NAT'd, Proxied, Content Filtered anyway, so upgrading the the corporate web proxy to do 4 to 6 translation puts the entire corp desktop on the 6 network in one shot, and isn't a major re-think of Corp networking.
Bubble cursor worries me far less than sticky icons. The mapping between mouse and pointer displacement is currently a well defined linear relationship that humans can internalize trivially.

I've always felt that mouse "acceleration" undermined that relationship, but at least it was in a way that mapped to the motion of the mouse.

Changing that to include all possible targets en-route to your destination seems almost malicious: I know where I want to move the pointer but other GUI elements in between will try to thwart me!
The thing about generalizations is 90% of the time they are true. Your city enforces city ordinances, that rare other 10%. A lot of other places don't and would be offended at the idea of having to. You know where else is clean? Singapore, the take it seriously (caning in extreme circumstances).

Now I know Yorkshire and London doesn't have a dog poop problem, but the majority of Western Europe (I only know of France, Germany, and parts of Spain I visited) do.

So we can say he is 90% correct. Which is still passing on most standardized tests.
agreed, living in NYC, i know many ibankers and very few of them actually enjoy what they do. They're pretty much glorified excel junkies.
"Conference-Room Boarding"... Does it Violate the Geneva Convention? 
Like most entrepreneurs I know I am big on keeping things moving and dislike long, drawn-out meetings. For me, the best pitches and/or meetings are short and to the point- sort of like a hurry-up offense in football.
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Thanks for the recommendation, Dale. The legal perspective is of course a very important part of the whole VC/funding process.
Moreover why does every content site need an app? What's the point?
“There is no longer enough mail to sustain six days of delivery.”
Just one of many signs that say "Yes Martha, the internet really has changed a lot about our lives"
There's a few reviews out now, and in most of them the iPad never seemed to leave the reviewers side. I think in the BoingBoing review (but I'm not going back to re-read it) the review (can't remember her name) claimed to have been using the iPad for 12 hours straight.

I don't recall reading a review where the reviewer complained about the problems you've stated here
And it doesn't upset half the people FROM the US, either.
I'm quite sure that malicous code has been written to do similar things already. I think what they've done with the technique is of interest here, not the technique (reading pixels from the screen and intercepting the mouse / keyboard).
I wonder about the Kindle
TBH I, like most techy-people was not excited about the iPad at launch. However, the more I see about it, the more excited I get.

Although it is a simple device, I think it is becoming quite obvious that the apps are going to make this device (unlike the iPhone which was groundbreaking before the apps), I think the small amount of extra screen real estate you get with the iPad is going to make a huge difference.

I think there is also just something overtly natural about not having an intermediary device to interact with it like a mouse. Just my thoughts...
I think some Logitech mice used to have haptic feedback, which would vibrate the mouse slighly as you moved over buttons etc. I haven't tried it but always thought that was a much better mechanism for "feeling" buttons and other UI elements that slowing the cursor.
Agreed,and many customers will switch without knowing it.

If Comcast swapped my cable modem for a V6 capable modem, and if as a part of routine upgrades, my Dlink-whatever got swapped with one that has native v6, I'd be on v6 without knowing it. My Vista, Win7, Mac and Solaris clients would 'just work'. I.e. - when I dropped a /64 onto my home lan - consisting of a handful of laptops and an OpenSolaris server - my Vista, Win 7 and Mac picked up the V6 network and started using v6 w/o even a re-boot.

The harder part is making a decision to shut off IPV4. It's at that point that you have to make a service availability decision.
Unless your hanging out with buddies or using an iPad, I think it's pretty common knowledge that propping your feet up is unprofessional at best and rude at worst.
Dog owners also don't often seem to think much about how their dog's bark territorial dog-threats at whoever happens to walk by on the sidewalk. I mean, imagine I programmed a motion activated robot to yell threats at whoever walked by, that would be rather rude of me, right? But let your dog do the same, and no problem at all. People should train their dog not to bark at people on the sidewalk.
01010010 01001001 01010000
Yeah, I like the style, no messing around just got straight down to it.
I suppose if we had a space elevator, we could just run a pipeline alongside it. :)
I'm relieved that the US will at least have something to trade to China for the rare earth metals which are also running out.
You're making a lot of generalizations here. What makes you think it isn't offensive to put your feet up in American culture? It depends on the setting, really. While it may not be offensive if you're just hanging out at home with some friends, it's obviously unprofessional and rude to do it in a business meeting, an interview, at class, etc. You're telling me that your mother never told you to get your feet off the furniture?
20 Hot Silicon Valley Startups You Need To Watch
Click "view as one page" on bottom right if you prefer scrolling to clicking.
While I don't doubt volumes have fallen as a result of things like email, the US postal service also hasn't done itself any favors. You read anecdotes like this, and it's a wonder that volumes haven't plummeted even faster: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/04/things-a...
It seems like there is an element of this being a means to an end, I don't think they really want everyone to use this. Rather widen what researchers in their field can work on and persuade the companies that make this software to include solid UI research down the track.
Could someone please tell me how this device possibly can be an success once people figure out that they cant watch free online porn with it?
A statistic I just made up proves that 37.8% of all internet activity is devoted to consumption of nudity for recreational purposes. (non-recreational is only 12.2%)
"It’s five days of delivery, six days of service and Express Mail seven days a week"

"It also will save more than $3 billion a year"

If both of those are true, the change is reasonable.
Click "view as one page" on bottom right if you prefer scrolling to clicking.
Does their patent actually include an implementation of their idea? Prior art notwithstanding, it strikes me that if you want to profit from your idea but don't want to be bothered with pesky things like implementation and marketing, all you need to do is to patent it. Its almost certain that sometime in the future someone else will have the same idea.
I think I may have accidently downvoted you, sorry. Either that or by the time I returned to the tab you were at -1 but still being displayed as 1 to me as I hadn't refreshed. I think you are correct as GNU/Linux has largely followed Microsoft button placement for so long it seems to be too much of a break with what people are used to for such an unproven gain (can anyone actually point to any evidence for these buttons? I'd gladly change my mind if there is some).
Sales Pros - Born or Made?
Funny thing is, I was aware of the feature, but had incorrectly assumed how it works. My assumption was that the feature was only available in-network (to other Gmail addresses) and actually recalled the message from the server, so long as the recipient hadn't logged in and seen it already.

After reading the Gmail blog entry on it, I'd call it an invisible delayed passive confirmation, since Gmail labels it "undo" rather than "cancel." Makes perfect sense, though.
Estimated selling prices for lunar He3 are around $6-10 million per kg (with the commercial viability of even that figure being pretty optimistic), so I'm going to go with 'no'.
I suppose it'll work much like BBC iPlayer or whatnot with streaming H.264 to the device (If that's even how it works, I am not knowledgeable on the subject). Many porn sites claim to have iPhone versions, not that I know anything about that or have ever tried,
I really wish djb would date his posts. His rants are good, but hard to contextualize.
That's precisely the way U.S. patent law works -- to be entitled to a patent for a new and non-obvious invention, you're not required even to have actually made the invention ("reduced it to practice"), let alone commercialized it.

If you actually conceived the new invention yourself (i.e., you didn't copy it), and you were the first to do so, then basically all you have to do is provide a written description of the invention that would enable a hypothetical "person of ordinary skill" in the relevant art(s) to make and use the invention.

(There are other requirements too, of course - for example, you have to disclose the "best mode," as then subjectively contemplated by you, for practicing the invention; you have to provide at least one written claim, which in essence is an infringement checklist; you have to disclose to the patent examiner all "information material to patentability" that you know about; you can't wait more than one year after the first offer for sale, public use, publication, etc.)

Here's the underlying assumption: The first inventor should be allowed to set up a toll booth for 20 years (originally 17 years) as a reward for "merely" documenting how to practice the invention in a centralized national database, that is, in the Patent Office collection.

That might have made sense 200 years ago. But I've long wondered whether that part of the patent law has outlived its usefulness -- arguably we don't need the same incentives to help build up a national library of engineering knowledge as we did in 1790.
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Do imports from low-wage countries drive technology advancements in the U.S.?
I just put together a javascript + canvas demo of bubble cursors based on the demo in the video. It does make it a lot easier to target small elements.

http://mwomwo.nfshost.com/bubblecursor/bubbles.html

I agree with you that stickiness doesn't sound like a great feature. Clicking the wrong thing also seems like a risk, but that might be better solved by making buttons not do things that you can't undo.

Bubble cursors seems to me like it could definitely be a win.
Most of the important packages I receive from USPS don't come on Saturdays anyhow. If I'm like most people, the 6th day won't be missed.
Good criticisms. But a publicly-funded post office has some advantages, too. They will operate at a loss in tiny areas, which means you can still get mail to Grandma, even though there is only one traffic light in her town.

Also - 39 cents to send a letter anywhere in the country? Still a pretty good deal.
I hope these insane patents continue to surface, patent trolls seem to be shooting themselves in the foot.
Scoble and Eric Ries on how to ship software that rocks customer's lives
They still deliver 177 billion pieces of mail a year. By raising the price of delivery by 2 cents, they could make up the difference.
Give it several billion years and it adds up.
Helium is also critical for scuba diving in the 200' to 1,000' depths. Currently, the most affordable, safest, and most common way to conduct these dives is with open-circuit systems, where every breath is taken from the tank and exhausted into the sea where it bubbles away.

A common mix is 21/35 (21% Oxygen, 35% Helium, the remainder almost entirely Nitrogen). Divers often use such mixes for dives in the 165 foot range. At that depth, a fit diver consumes a little over three cubic feet of gas per minute, which means that a little over one cubic foot of Helium is lost forever into the atmosphere each minute per diver.

An alternative is a closed-circuit or rebreather system, where the exhaust gas is scrubbed of carbon dioxide and fresh oxygen added to replace the oxygen metabolized by the diver. Such systems are far more complicated, more expensive, and require much more training to dive safely.

But one of the advantages of closed-circuit diving is that the inert gases (including Helium) are not exhausted with every breath. Therefore, it doesn't matter how many minutes a dive takes, Helium is not being exhausted into the water with every breath. This makes for a substantial savings in cost per dive and saves a non-renewable resource.

As Helium prices rise, I hop there will be an economic incentive for divers to take up closed-circuit diving, which will in turn lead to the development of simpler, cheaper and safer systems.
Thanks, I checked the book out from the library; it's exactly what I was looking for.
Milo tracks Best Buy iPad availability
That was hilarious and fantastic so, no.
The postal service derives a significant amount of its revenue from pitching direct mail to businesses as an effective way to reach customers (4)

This whole report from USPS (1) is worth reading but some notable excerpts:

"In 2009, 84 billion pieces of first-class mail and 83 billion pieces of direct mail were handled."

Invoices and bills constitute a large part of first-class mail (and they continue to move online, become paperless)

"One top marketing agency observed companies moving one-third of direct-mail acquisition spending online"

Imagine UPS/DHL/FedEx's profits if they went from deliver-on-demand to deliver-to-everywhere-regardless-of-demand:

"A key driver to the costs of delivering mail is the obligation to deliver to virtually every mail address, regardless of volume, 6 days a week... These costs are largely fixed so they grow with the size of the network, which has been grown by an average of 1.4 million addresses every year"

"Wages and benefits account for 80 percent of operating costs." (And they are directly tied to the people infrastructure required to meet the obligation to deliver mail to virtually every mail address)

Obviously, you can't make it up on volume alone:

"A First-class stamp costs 44 cents, while other major posts charge an average of 78 cents."

(1) http://www.usps.com/strategicplanning/_pdf/Ensuring_Viable_U...

(2) http://www.usps.com/postalhistory/PiecesofMail1789to2009.htm

(3) http://www.usps.com/householddiary/_pdf/USPS_HDS_FY08_FINAL_...

(4)http://www.usps.com/directmail/resourcecenter/research.htm?f...

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=direct+mail...
Twitter Predicts Box-Office Sales Better Than a Prediction Market
And I have equally aggravating anecdotes about issues with private companies' customer service. It doesn't prove anything. I'd take the people at my MVC (NJ's "new" DMV) and post office over the people at my cable or internet provider, my private healthcare, and my cell phone company in a heart beat. Those companies aren't doing themselves any favors but somehow they manage to make it. The Zappos in the world are few and far between. So better to look at the facts than the attitude of the clerk you interact with on a daily basis, fact is no other service reaches every address in the US and that is a necessity that we need to keep up.

If they can keep the USPS afloat by cutting expenses instead of using taxpayer money, I'm all for it.