skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great post. Approached from an angle not often taken here.

Oddly, you said one thing that just didn't sit well with me. I re-read it several times trying to figure out why I was so uncomfortable with it:

Claude Shannon didn't have to satisfy any customers. He could spend years developing a theory, whose practical value was only clear after it was sufficiently developed.

This is exactly the opposite of my thinking. I've been in academia and in the trenches. I prefer the trenches.

Where I come from you don't have anything until you're able to satisfy customers. Building theories, tools, and new approaches is great, so great, in fact, that some of the best breakthroughs I've ever seen were because a customer demanded something people like us never imagined or thought possible.

I love satisfying customers with whatever I have in my back pocket. And lots of that stuff was developed by the giants whose shoulders I stand on. I always imagined that they were satisfying their own customers, but I guess quite a few of them were just doing "basic research".

You reminded us that there needs to be room for both the "trench warrior" and the "dreamer". When you're building a team, you need to decide who would be better for the role at hand and approach the recruiting accordingly.
I initially missed it, but the page itself is at http://www.seomoz.org/pro_landing.php
Agreed, but with auto filtering preferred over the plugin/search box minus method.
If it's something I need to focus on and think all the way through, either silence or light classical.

If it's a trivial but time-consuming let's-wire-A-to-B-to-C kind of task, then I'll put on an interview podcast (e.g. NPR's Fresh Air or something techy like The Changelog). Those don't require the same level of attention as an audiobook or an information-dense podcast like Radiolab.
FWIW, Duck Duck Go does not show their results.
Uh. Wouldn't those connections need to be made of atoms?
Wait until you're older. While most young people don't have catastrophic things happen. But enough do that I have no idea how many apparently healthy young people I personally know who have contracted cancer, been in accidents, or otherwise had sudden very large costs.

Let me give a few. A motorcycle accident broke an arm, and the other person left with no insurance information (my brother's arm is recovered). A propane accident lead to burns over 30% of his body (my brother-in-law Abe survived with significant scarring, but it was touch and go for a while). Hodgkin's lymphoma (killed Mark). A stumble leaving a Halloween part lead to falling with the corner of the step hitting her backbone (Ardith is partially paralyzed + has other health problems). Cancer of the small intestine lead to major surgery and months of chemo (Euna looks like she will survive). A brain cyst lead to balance problems and could have been lethal had it not been for expensive brain surgery (I know 2 women this happened to, both are nicely recovered but one had to never have kids). A jump on a dirt bike went wrong when there proved to be a mine shaft on the other side of the hill he jumped over (Matt is now paraplegic). Oh, and then we have depression leading to suicide attempts (I knew multiple people who succeeded).

Then there is the chronic stuff. I know multiple people with diabetes, several more with Chrohn's disease. Severe allergies are common and can be expensive. Schizophrenia hits 1% of the population.

These are just some of the people I personally know that stuff happened to. Most (luckily) were covered by someone's insurance. But not all.

Yes, you can roll the dice and play roulette. Yes, young people feel immortal. But stuff goes wrong often enough that you're highly advised not to if you have a choice. If you pay attention and live a while, you too will collect a nasty list of sad examples.
For lots of very specific error messages, they are the only page with an answer.
The Story of Bottled Water
I believe he's got the "free climbing" metaphor mis=mangled, but oh, well. Even mangled, he's got a point, and it's basically that Charles Petzold did have it right: IDEs rot your mind. I know the author explicitly says otherwise, but if you read the article, that's exactly what he's saying.
This article points out exactly why the "above the fold" debate is an absolute MYTH when you're building a sales page with a specific function.

In my experience length wins out 99% of the time.
How Raytheon is using Hadoop to build a scalable, distributed triple store
The court is not all about politics.

The whole thing is about regulating a commercial transaction (buying health insurance) and taxes (aka fees). Both are areas that there is a lot of precedent saying that Congress is within its rights.
I would argue that people with the capability to recognize an affiliate link should also have the intelligence/judgment necessary to determine whether a review is unbiased or not. In effect, I think a "sponsored link" disclaimer is pointless. Personally, when I see a such a disclaimer, I practically assume that the article will be slanted. I would rather make that judgment myself.

Furthermore, as I pointed out it's not only affiliate links that can slant a review. I'm taking any review I read with a grain of salt, and my estimation of the author's or publication's integrity is a large factor in how much faith I have in a review. This is why it is such a big deal when stories come out like the TechCrunch author who demanded merchandise in exchange for reviews.
Yeah, but for the kind of searches EE is winning for, all or most of the rest of the links are garbage.

Think like a junior developer for writing queries needed to write Big Freaking Enterprise backend software. For example, the first thing that popped into my head for a query likely to generate an EE result was [sort combobox java] -- it is something that you'll actually have to do for Big Freaking Enterprise development, it uses an "unsexy" programming language, and the phrasing is just off enough that people who know what they're talking about wouldn't phrase their pages that way.

And sure enough, EE wins. See http://www.pastie.org/881242 for the other results with my annotations.
did you look at the traffic graph? SO overtook EE and is still growing--no incentive to buy them. SO users will replicate the content anyway.
I've heard a few people complain about the low-light scenarios and was worried about it. However when I got a good LED light with a long neck, I found it was trivial to position it far enough to the side so there'd be no glare.
Who sponsored/paid for the research - that is also important.
Indeed, it is liker saying that more green, let's say Europe,
is full of cheats compared to USA, where people are "more conventional".
There was by the way report that many studies are fraudulent nowadays. Perhaps this is the case.
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Yeah, I'm getting 6 kb/s on the 138mb OS X platform DMG. Fun.
FTW, this is an awesome tip. Can one alter the google address bar?
Why Mark Zuckerberg Should Be Scared of the iPad
Still, the effort Amazon seems to have put in show that it is clearly focused on selling books, not the hardware the books are read on. That the app is almost certain to make it into the App store shows that the reverse is true with Apple: it wants the iPad to be the go-to media device, whatever that media may be.
i always got more organic traffic to my site when i was using google adds on my blog.
They used to have a better paywall where Google's spider could see the results to index but if you went there - even from Google's cache you couldn't.

I suspect Google cracked down on this so they had to unblock the results. The block is in place for a few scientific journals, they must have worked out some deal with google to protect their content.
Good point. Though I'm still sure that he's right in that there are many, many connections in the human brain.
No, seriously, it's perfectly sensible. Casual users will just smile at the licence, use the code, and move on. Corporate users will probably throw a fit when they see the licence, and then get their lawyers to negotiate something that suits them better. Crockford can either just say "OK, I license you to use this code for evil" and get a nice story to tell, or charge them money for a different licence. It's a way of getting a little control over "major" uses of the code, while not getting in the way of casual uses. Oh, and did I mention that it's also hilarious?
Eventually, perhaps. But I happen to know there is A LOT of Microsoft SQL Server and MS Exchange help on there that can be found no where else -- well, at least nowhere outside of a 100 page technet article of some of the deepest technicalese you have ever read.

And what's to say Stack Overflow won't become like EE some day, and start holding answers hostage? EE wasn't always this way you know... [edit: I realize this is a completely different line of thinking -- it just popped into my head]
This seems like the type of thing you would have some sort of replacable card for. Assuming it's a fairly common problem.
I'm generally a Hacker, but sometimes when the stars are right I have a spurt of Superheroics.
"Aging" is not going to be cured. PERIOD. FULL STOP!

Why not? It may be difficult, but aging is a collection of physical processes, and physical processes can be modified with sufficiently advanced technology.

Sure, with improvements in medicine, we can keep people productive into their 70s and 80s when they used to spend their last decade or so as invalids. The future of medicine looks like this: you're healthy and active into old age, then you hit the floor.

That's exactly my point. Medicine today consists largely of playing whack-a-mole with diseases whose underlying cause is aging. That's expensive and produces continuously decreasing benefits. We haven't failed to cure aging; we haven't even tried.
There's also the possibility that they believe it's bad legislation. And the the democrats voted for it as a partisan measure.

Just throwing that out there.

I've never understood why it's only the opposition that can be partisan and not the majority.
Good point, I've lost track..
I spend a lot of my day on a Windows machine. There's an AutoHotKey script ("Ghoster") that tints (by default, with a medium gray) all but the focused window -- as a means of lessening distraction. I haven't tried writing any AHK scripting, but now that I think of it, it shouldn't be too hard (?) to adapt it to instead tint (with a lighter shade) the focused window. Since it paints over everything, it should affect the Safari Flash widget.

I supposed I could instead park the Safari browser window in the background, but that would be kind of a pain with regard to usability.
You know how you're supposed to return your rental modem by a certain date to avoid paying an extra fee? The person who previously rented my last apartment did not get her's returned by the date, so she owed the ISP $100. She also left the country prior to paying it. Lo and behold, when I tried to get coverage, they discovered the bill and asked me to pay it.

"I'm sorry, I think you have a misunderstanding. I am not this young Swedish lady."

"Are you related to her? Is she your wife, girlfriend, etc?"

"No."

"Quite the coincidence that two foreigners would end up renting the same apartment back to back."

"We're translators. Her contract is up, I'm replacing her, it is my employer's apartment."

"Oh. So that makes you coworkers?"

"Well, in a manner of speaking."

"You should pay to avoid causing embarrassment for your employer."

This is one of those times when my American brain goes "Oh hellllllllllllllll no" and my Japanese brain goes "Oh effity, you're right, that is what I am expected to do in this situation."

I paid.

If your adult child defaults on a loan, and someone knocks on your door (and there may be an actual physical knock and likely as not the person who is knocking is a yakuza enforcer, even if your adult child was in debt to an arm of a major publicly traded corporation), you pay. If your drunken useless excuse of a son has an automobile accident, you show up to the hospital several times with flowers and once with a discrete envelope with a generous amount of money to convey the depth of your sorrow for the lapse.
Take Back Your Time by Ditching Bad Clients
Hacking a poster with gum.
Yeah - but "almost certain to make it" is not the same as "made it", you know? Not being cynical, just basing my opinion on previous actions on Apple's part.
32GB Flash Drives
Hobnox - audio tool
Top cities most vulnerable to cybercrime (according to Symantec)
"Atomico itself is the largest single investor in its new fund"
Esther Dyson: To Russia with Social Media
The real problem is not that you could break the encryption (although in most models it's laughably easy to circumvent it), but that you can just create fake fingerprints and use them to unlock it.

Everyone leaves fingerprints all the time - just find one, scan it and you can create your own. If anyone's interested, the german magazine c't had an article about it.
Congratulations on your apparent luck in only working with groups where you did have some semblance of 'culture fit'.

My experience has clearly been different than your own.

I can't speak to whether it's a bigger issue in other industries, but it's a sufficient issue for me personally that I've turned down jobs based on it.
Once again Hulu can’t tell the difference between a web browser & a web browser
Safari Online has re-instated an HTML view on some items, but others are visible only via Flash. (I know, but $30 / month (promotional price) for access to their entire library outweighs my Flash aversion.)
Hello iPad, surfing the web while watching telly up 35%
I include this kind of rewrite in my webserver, so my CSS files stay clean. For instance,

data = data.replace(/^\s*border-radius:\s*(\w+);$/mg, 'border-radius: $1; -moz-border-radius: $1; -webkit-border-radius: $1;');

I just have to change it in the one place when some new CSS tweak comes along.
How come? Honest question. Would making that information available hurt your business somehow? Don't get me wrong, my typical impulse is to play numbers very close to the vest, but I'm realizing more and more that the real risk of transparency is usually pretty low.
There's been a lot of talk here about the need for academic researchers to share their data. I'm interested what people's opinions are about this when it's corporations doing the researching.
Hallelujah - Even though I have my iPad on order (and reserved, just for good measure) - and will hopefully be in reading bliss in 12 days, I would _kill_ to get a decent book light for my Kindles. I've gone through three of them, and even with a difuser (which was a hack), I always ended up having to try and read _around_ that one stupid glare point on the screen. I finally gave up and switched to my iPhone for dark light reading.

So, share - which LED light are you using, and do you have a diffuser or any after-market modifications to it?
Atomico Ventures raises $165m fund for “disruptive” early-stage Euro startups
Stanza (an ebook reader on the app store) does this by allowing you to slide your finger up and down the middle of the screen. I found it a really nice feature as you can constantly adjust it while you are reading.
haha, there is a banner ad: "Tired of scrolling?"
The title of the article is a little misleading, I think. It's really not about how being green makes you a cheater any more than being about how voting for Obama makes you a racist. I don't think the research is implying anything in particular about people who buy green, other than the fact that they believe they are doing something moral. Other self-perceived moral acts will presumably also result in an increased likelihood of cheating later as well.
Yes, dell has awesome returns from 1990 to today. We were not in a bubble in 1990. If you bought into dell between jan 1999 - august 2000, you are still in the hole by at least 50%, and possibly by up to about 70%. If you bought it at the peak, you were very badly screwed.

If you bought it in 1990, the correct investment decision would have been to sell it in late 1999-mid 2000 when it seemed to plateau, and possibly buy back in to it later. However you look at it, staying long in a bubble is always irrational. Even if the company performed miraculously before the bubble and will perform miraculously after it, you can only lose by holding it in the bubble.

(Of course, this predicates knowing when the sector is in a bubble. Which, suffice to say, is hard.)
The Mighty Awesome Power of Scala
I've never had a problem with affiliate links. I don't think they're dirty. I can recognise a valuable review opposed to a worthless review, so whether there are affiliate links in the review doesn't affect my reception of the review.

It doesn't make any difference to me if a review is bad because it's a forced shilling exercise or because it's an uninformed review, it's just bad and easily ignored, usually by the first or second paragraph.

I click on so few links that if an occasional shill gets some change from my purchase, I don't care, because I would have bought the item (or not) anyway, and not based on a single review.

As for identifying affiliate links, I don't think it's necessary from a moral perspective. I think the FTC is nosing around in the area of late, so it might be a safe thing to do. I can't think of an unwieldy way to do it though.

If you want to make it obvious you'd put it in the link text, ">The Bible (sponsored link)<". That kind of looks ugly, although if it became common maybe I could get used to it.

A tool tip (title attribute) might be good enough, and less distracting when merely reading the text.
The best thing about this post was the case-study description of the full, 'first principles', customer development-type approach to landing page optimization including lessons learned from face to face selling, and a handful of very specific surveys and customer conversations. Usually, these kinds of case studies focus on either landing page opt. or customer development, but don't put it all together.
Yes. For software jobs it's really knowledge/skills or particular industry experience which employers are looking for rather than cultural match. Culture does matter to some extent, but in all the industries in which I've worked skills were more important.

I'm not really in favour of applying a speed dating style to job interviewing. This is the third world factory employment model, where there is large oversupply of low skilled workers with near identical skills.
In my opinion, yes, it does make sense. Our system isn't producing enough engineers because many of those with the smarts for it go the finance or MBA route instead. The classes are easier and it seems to generate higher income, so why not, right?

So, we can change some of those systemic factors, which I'm all in favor of but in the short term, creating new Americans who may look a little different and have a funny last name will do more to increase the number of American engineers than not doing so.

Regarding the too-easy dismissal of this concern as xenophobia, I'll only say that I've met a bunch of people who are for immigration reform in general, but once you talk about H-1B or a similar program, all of a sudden that program's a ripoff which helps the corporations at the expense of the little guy by increasing labor supply. So, what, it was ok to import garden workers but we can't import tech workers? (not aimed at you, aimed at my strawman which I have indeed heard from several otherwise liberal people).

Anyways, yeah, once you advocate reducing immigration for the express purpose of not unduly expanding the labor pool, I'm going to call it "dey took our jawbs" -- if that makes the person uncomfortable, they should argue from a different position :)
You don't think the media experience pales in comparison to the iPhone?

Or the customisability/flexibility pales in comparison to Android?
Yes, but Alexa says the same thing and has for a while.
Patton: "A good plan violently executed now is far better than a perfect plan executed next week."
Still, if an attacker were to have access to the salt, I would be in the same situation. I guess I could always increase the cost by a lot, but once they've calculated all of the results, its too simple to get the SSNs.
um, I'm new to HN, but how do you downvote a comment?
It's certainly better from a marketing perspective to say "We have 100,000 apps" than 1,000. I'd be curious to know what a prospective first-time smartphone buyer thinks, perhaps their conception might be that it's 100x better.

They won't think that when buying their second smartphone though.
HTML5 Online Conference
YATE, JavaScript Templating
We played around with Greg Borenstein's $.srender (based on John Resig's JS templates) and Rizqi Ahmad's chain.js (http://wiki.github.com/raid-ox/chain.js/demos). We liked chain.js's syntax but wanted $.srender's speed. In addition to which we were looking for something that would be valid XML / XHMTL so that the page could be previewed before actually running the template itself. So Jeff came up with YATE (http://labs.mudynamics.com/2010/03/19/yate-javascript-templating-engine-for-agile-ui-development/), Yet Another Templating Engine.

Would appreciate your feedback.
It's a completely different scenario from Google Voice. Apple's rejection of Google Voice has more to do with AT&T than anything. Google Voice was a substitute product for AT&T call plans, therefore not good for AT&T.

iPads and e-books are complementary products. Amazon doesn't care how many Kindles are sold, as long as they keep selling books. Apple doesn't care how many e-books are sold, as long as they keep selling iPads.

Want to take a bet that the Kindle App will be approved?
That's just a silly argument. There are thousands of factors going into which phone you buy, just one of which (and not the biggest) is the OS. I don't think the poor sales are at all indicative of the quality of the OS, and even if they're indicative of the perceived quality (which I'd argue is still not true) that's more of a marketing problem.
If by that you mean the search field in a google page, yes you can, for example with a greasemonkey script.

However, I see little point in that -- searching from the location bar just seems easier to me. CTRL-t gets you a new tab with focus in the location bar from anywhere, and I don't have to wait for any page to load to type in the query. Even if google is fast, it's still not as fast.

Also, you can set up other easy searches. For example, stuff I have used in the past 2 hours:

- gis (google image search)

- gfi (google finance)

- listof (google I feel lucky, site:wikipedia.org with search string "list of %s")
Wiring some S-Expressions and parsing them, would be more apt than the eval comparsion.
i use namecheap, and will often query a name as well.

i have found that over the course of weeks, i have not lost out on a good name.
The error wikipedia is talking about is an integer overflow, so it's not the algorithm that's faulty, it's that particular implementation ... and that's hardly something to reject a potential candidate about.

I do want to see a candidate speak about its complexity (demonstrate it at least intuitively), and about the impact that the partitioning function has.

But these are things any CS college student in his second year should know about (otherwise they've wasted their time in college, and frankly I haven't seen many of those).

I'd really wish we'd stop with the "mine is bigger than yours attitude" ... there are lots of good developers out there. They are just more specialized in other domains, and finding the right match is indeed hard ... but the faulty interviews we are so accustomed with are to be blamed.
Some images relating to this:

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http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4035/4453821027_92d4fb8a93.jp...