skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nielsen is well known for his Jakob's Law of the Web User Experience, which states that "users spend most of their time on other websites."

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html

Yes, any designer of any one website has to plan for an audience that has already developed habits of viewing on other websites. That's why banner blindness

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/banner-blindness.html

is such an important issue in website design. Don't put ANYTHING on your site that looks like a banner advertisement if you want site viewers actually to see it.
Aw, sorry about that. What browser are you using?
Whatever you think of IBM's ends, the use of these means:

"Mueller points out that two of the patents that IBM listed in its [threatening] letter to Hercules are included in the list of 500 patents that IBM promised to not assert against open source software in 2005."

Can't be seen as good.
Can anyone please explain that scalable links stuff? I tried searching for it, but I guess the term "scalable links" is very insider lingo.
Then you're not drinking enough.

Seriously.

Alcohol is a great evolutionary adaptation, since it allows people to be extremely dour and responsible most of the time, while being able to loosen up with chemical assistance. Countries that are known for their seriousness and work ethic often have a strong drinking culture (e.g. Germany, Japan). There's a Steve Sailer article about this; I can't find it, and the domain is auto-killed upon submission anyway.
You sigh with relief remembering all your important files are stored in your Dropbox folder
The Creative Coalition Campaign’s Guardian ad, deconstructed
> b) wikileaks employees had been detained by various gov'ts and

This turned out to be false, the guy that was detained in Iceland was detained for breaking into somebody's business and there is little or no evidence it had anything to do with his relationship to wikileaks.
"Browse the LabApp Catalog" needs to be much more prominent - perhaps make it look more like a button? Overall I really like the idea though. After working in research labs for the past few years this service is sorely needed
I agree. But imho this is no reason to not include the suggested feature.

There are so many settings and warnings that a common user does not understand. This new one would not scare any users away I guess. They will just ignore it.

I would be very happy to notice that my browser suddenly uses a different certificate to validate the certificate of one of my servers.
Toko barcode, mesin kasir, dan software toko by Fastechindo.com
Um, buy a new one and restore from your nightly backup? Or for important things, maybe replace it and let your RAID mirror rebuild?
How do you square that with public key cryptography?
I dont see it. Latest Firefox on OS X.
Good stuff! So you use Paypal/Ejunkie... That's obviously easier than getting a merchant account and jumping in with something like BrainTree. Can you run thru why you made that choice and why you're sticking with it? Any plans to change?
This one counts only if you embrace the cloud :) For me, a RAID-1 does a good job, too.
That was my initial understanding too, but I am not sure if TurboHercules, the for-profit company, is shielded as is openHercules, the open-source project. This loophole may allow them to sue and keep their promise at the same time. Again, I am not quite clear if this is the case.
Can you make add the control to switch to the map view? Looking around sometimes takes too long to load in Satellite mode, which is probably indicative of my broadband speed.
I wonder if it is due to involvement from Apple? Apple products are known for paying attention to what seems like trivial detail but is actually important to the end user experience.
You post to HN about your impeccable backup practices
Will jotting down license plates pay the rent?
> Otherwise, you could write another article about all the ideas people have on the toilet, titled "The Benefit of Pooping."

People do write about thinking in the shower, so why is pooping out of line?

> Creative thinking in the bathroom is probably less an effect of being naked as it is being in a private space with nothing better to think about.

Is it "private space with nothing to think about" or running water?
I could see that happening, particularly because -- as Scott points out -- when you are sitting around being happy, you aren't doing anything particularly productive. Cultures with a particular set of rules regarding button-pushing would be naturally more materially wealthy than those without, although not necessarily as happy.
80s TV ads show newspapers weren't always confused about their value proposition
Once you, the user, are removing root certificates from your browser, the trust system has failed. Especially since while you and I may understand the full implications of such an action, "you the user" in general can not. The entire point of the trust system was to remove the need for the generic end-user to make such decisions, and if it fails that, it fails everything.

Moreover, even as a sophisticated user, I have to observe that I actually do not trust a single root certificate in my browser the requisite 100% that is necessary for this whole system to work. I can not assign a 0% probability to any of them being compromised by a hostile force, especially when the hostile force isn't necessary a random hacker but may be a sovereign government.

So, while your point is totally correct, it should be pointed out it isn't really a defense of the current system. (Which you may not have intended it as, but I have seen others use it this way and it's worth pointing out.)
As on Fox News, for every opinion one can find a counterpoint.

This particular counterpoint does more damage than good in the age of TL;DR.

I'd rather read the writings of 'an educated person who knows they feel vaguely anxious and insecure whenever they write "however" or "than me" or "was" or "which,"' than the incoherence of someone who thinks grammar is pointless.

I often see this counterpoint cited, but never its conclusion about "the overopinionated and underinformed little book that put so many people in this unhappy state of grammatical angst. I've spent too much of my scholarly life studying English grammar in a serious way. English syntax is a deep and interesting subject. It is much too important to be reduced to a bunch of trivial don't-do-this prescriptions."

There's Drivers' Ed, and then there's Skip Barber Racing School. That experts learn more doesn't mean novices should learn less.
Sorry, this app is not very good. No landscape mode support (only portrait). No search function. There may be 23,000 free books in here but it's impossible to tell because there is no way to browse by author or title. You can only browse from pre-selected categories like "Adventure", "Fantasy", "Horror".

The covers look pretty and the way you can browse categories is nice, but I wish you would focus on real functionality like "search by title", or "search by author", instead of just making it look pretty. It's a freakin' book app after all... 99% of the user's time is going to be spent reading, not staring at pretty covers.

This seems like an 80/20 rule. Why spend 80% of your time designing the interface that users will only use 20% of their time?
Reminds me of this old website, I think it was mentioned in a Blue Man Group song: http://wordsontheleft.com/
Is it possible to do a web crawl scan of https and SSL certs and find out which certificates have this questionable one as their root?
Oh, I'm bookmarking this for sure.
After reading that I am very glad that I never read that book. (Passive voice is a favorite of mine.)
"I've found typing on it to be pretty tolerable, but editing is just not fun."

That's great summary of my experience on the iPhone (and I'd guess many other similar devices). Anything longer than a tweet or an SMS message and you're probably going to want to do some editing. It's possible on the iPhone, but pretty grim all the same.
To make matters worse, part-way through the interview the candidate starting listing their “requirements”, which conferences they’d be attending, which technologies they would use, etc.

I was flabbergasted. Granted, my friend was glad the candidate was so forthcoming with his lack of professionalism.

How in the hell does it reflect a lack of professionalism to expect to be sent to conferences? To have the company invest in one's career is a natural right of the employee, and companies that don't respect this right end up bleeding talent and becoming shells.

It just sounds like he's being honest about his expectations. If the company doesn't have the resources to send him to the conferences, then they shouldn't hire him, but that's not a lack of professionalism.

This bit was just flamingly offensive, even though I agree with the rest of the OP.
If you're doing template meta-programming in C++, those long type names are more than just a nuisance. They are a program unto themselves - a declarative program which requires similar thinking to that of Prolog. What would have helped me when I was having to provide wrappers to uBlas (http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_42_0/libs/numeric/ublas/doc/...) is if the compiler had formatted the type names as programs. I could only understand the error once I did that myself; otherwise, it was impossible to see.

For people not doing template meta-programming, I agree using the typedefs is better. But even if you're just using a library that makes use of template metaprogramming - such as uBlas - it could help you figure out why you're using it wrong.
> Whoops! So much for open source allowing for greater scrutiny and security.

I think you're jumping to conclusions here. For one it did get detected, secondly the theory is that faults are detected earlier and fixed faster, not that they don't occur at all. So no matter how long this has been in the wild, the question is how long it would have been there if it had not been open source. My guess is in this particular case just as long, but there are many other cases besides this one.
It's worth noting that the advice is just a comment left on an Edward Tufte thread (which, as a whole, is a lot more interesting): http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...
Journalism class was the only worthwhile "language arts" class I took in high school. The "literature" ones were, IMO, mostly a bunch of horse shit and a waste of time, to put it very bluntly. There are classes and teachers that I looked back on more fondly when I was done with them because I realized they'd been good for me even if they were difficult, but none of the literature ones were in that category, only the journalism class stuck with me as something useful.

Why? Because the lit ones were about writing bullshit about some teacher's bullshit interpretation of what was more often than not some sort of bullshit book/essay/play/whatever, whereas the journalism class was about how to convey facts to a hurried reader quickly and efficiently.

Ok... rant over:-)
Anyone want to comment on the scientific reason for this?

Plenty of commenters on HN and dzone are claiming that RAID-1 will provide sufficient protection. Unfortunately, RAID-1 doesn't guard against data corruption or accidental destruction of data. I highly recommend something like Backblaze ($5/mo, unlimited storage, fairly hacker-friendly).
Introduction to Zyke CMS
It would be better if it wouldn't ask for my real email. Disposable emails ftw.
>What was your solution, pull out immediately?

How about "Not going there in the first place" ?
It's slightly amusing that the first sentence of the linked article is grammatically incorrect

I was actually tempted to drop the first paragraph of the quote, but thought against it considering the etiquette in these cases. The second paragraph is where the meat is :-)
If this is how you were taught to write high school essays, you were lucky.

I. Introduction
II. Body
A. Point 1
B. Point 2
C. Point 3
III. Conclusion

-5 points for each deviation.
Techscursions: Managing Intellij dependencies with Gradle
Which part of it? Why you would want to get them, or why Google does not want you to get them?

Links are the primary determinant of rankings in competitive searches. (Competitive searches are high value ones with lots of savvy folks angling to win, or ones where there are other players for the search term with built in advantages: for example, [credit cards], [buy viagra online], or [facebook] are competitive searches, [patio11], [elementary reading bingo cards] or [how do i sort an array in ruby] are not.) Thus, you want links.

Most methods of actively acquiring links are extraordinarily labor intensive: they boil down to sending emails to folks asking for them to link to you, possibly with a sweetener to the deal (such as money, content, a reciprocal link, etc etc). Google likes this state of affairs, because as long as links are hard to get, then the number of links you have is a good proxy for either quality or prodigious effort expended in ranking. Either works for Google -- it makes spam less cost-effective than buying AdWords ads, and there might be gains to the user experience, too. (A less jaded individual might flip that sentence.)

If you're on a campaign to get links, ideally you'd want that to scale out of proportion to the time invested, for the same reason you want users, sales, etc etc to scale out of proportion to the time invested. Google wants exactly the opposite, for the above reason. Accordingly, virtually any tactic which repeatedly results in scalable link generation will eventually be discounted, regardless of whether it improves the user experience or conforms with Google's guidelines, which they enforce in an arbitrary and capricious fashion.

One example of this is widgets, which do result in scalable link acquisition. See the video for what I think of them.
How about:

Make engineers write concise sentences by combining journalism with the technical report format. Paragraphs in a newspaper article are ordered by importance, so that at whatever point readers stop reading they know that the part they have read was more important than the part left unread.

I think the second paragraph is pretty good, especially given the emphasis on concise sentences.
So do you never use such structures in speech? They're a way of getting the point across clearly and succinctly. Just because they taught you it's "wrong" in school doesn't mean that it doesn't have value.
I would like to see some privacy laws that effectively stated that:

1) All privacy settings must be easy to find, and govern the level of privacy of all aspects of communication.

2) All use of your data on a given service must be disclosed in plain English on an easy to find part of the site.

3) All sites are required to have a "scrub" feature that a user can use to delete all data associated with him from the service.

I am often concerned by how much of my info is out there, even though I try to control it as much as possible. I don't want to slide to the side of being the equivalent of an internet hermit, however. But sometimes you really don't have a choice, it's either be a hermit or let advertisers have your information.

Wish that would change.
Sections and segments and symbols oh my. Dissecting a Linux executable.
You can always put in a junk email if you only want to send, but there is just something magical about hitting the reply-to button on an email from jiggaboo-skeezXXX and having it go to a real person.

I'm the developer by the way.
This article begs the question "what for?"

* Document stores map pretty easily to object oriented systems, and thus negate the need for an ORM

* Distributed hashtables don't have the featuresets available to warrant an ORM abstraction

I guess it might work for Cassandra et al. But IMO ORMs barely work for SQL databases. How well will they map on to column stores?
> I define a "flipper" as someone whose sole purpose in owning a security is to pass it off at a higher price to another "flipper" down the road.

Huh? The vast majority of people own stock because they think that they'll be able to sell said stock for more money later. (Yes, they'll take dividends along the way, but since there are short-term traders who "harvest" dividends, that doesn't change things.)

With bonds, there are folks who plan to hold to maturity, but they're in the minority. Other folks are just looking for fixed income for "a while" until they come up with something else to do with that money.

> If most of the trading boils down to huge groups of firms selling back and forth to each other, it doesn't seem to matter to me whether the spreads shrink or not.

Sure it does - you benefit from the decreased spread whenever you trade.

If you really think that the spread doesn't matter to you, feel free to throw $1/share my way every time you buy or sell.
The associated bugzilla ticket was posted here on hacker news earlier today: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1244164

Resuming the matter, the SSL system is broken, as it works today, one of the messages clearly states:

Both "RSA Security 1024 V3" and "RSA Security 2048 V3" are shown as valid in Apple's System Roots.

Microsoft's list includes "RSA Security 2048 V3", but not "RSA Security 1024 V3".

Has someone checked if they are included in Opera and Chrome as well?
You're an inspiration to me.

Quicky: From reading your blog, I see you had a desktop programme in java at the start. Do you still have a desktop programme now, or is it all web based?

If you have a desktop programme, do you have any advice on choice of language so that non-techies can download and run with as little fuss?
When I started my business, my level of web programming expertise was "I can create a page in HTML in Notepad." Dealing with Paypal callbacks causing key generation, accounting, etc was way the heck out of my capabilities. Enter e-junkie. As I gradually improved in my web programming abilities, it always made more sense to extend e-junkie than it did to rip out and replace, particularly since they wrap both Checkout and Paypal in a consistent interface.

It works, costs $5 a month, is reliable like you wouldn't believe, and their lead developer literally sends me Christmas cards. Why would I ever change?

It is likely that my next product will not use e-junkie, though -- subscriptions, blech.
If you want to take the story semi-seriously, it really depends on the definition of "happiness". If it was like an electrical stimulation to certain parts of the brain (colloquially called the "pleasure center" even if that's not accurate), the natural outcome would be pretty much the entire species pairing up and holding each other's buttons until death by dehydration.

As others observe, if this is a metaphor for sex, it is a terrible one. A metaphor useful to the extent it has similarities with the target of the metaphor and this deviates in numerous critical ways that render any resulting "insights" completely irrelevant to the question of sex. Numerous, numerous, numerous.
Inspired by this comment, I just spent 8 hours re-optimizing one of my sites. I managed to cut loading time in half. We'll see if that has any effect on sales...
Federal appeals court rules for Comcast and against FCC on net neutrality case
The scientific basis, according to the article, is that the platters shrink ever so slightly in the extreme cold, and that this slight shrinking can be the difference between a clean read and a head crash.
That's the point of the article- those are known tradeoffs we made.

Search is important! That's why it's going to be in the first update. However, it's not core to the app. We can draw out 90% of peoples' searches in collections, categories, and authors. I know we have 90% coverage, because I have the stats from our iPhone app. We get blasted with a bunch of one stars from people who want search. We get a lot of five stars from people who like browsing normally. We ship an update, we get a lot of five stars from everyone.

The reason we spent 80% of the time designing the browsing interface interface is because it isn't the 20% interface. It is the 80% interface. Most people don't spend lots of time searching, they search a couple times for things they specifically want, then they browse the rest of the time.

This might not be the case for you- but, in the first version, I don't care if you like it. I don't care in the first version if anyone specifically likes it. I care that we build an app that satisfies 80% of people based on known priorities and known stats, and then and only then do we start building the features that everyone else wants.

In this case, that included search.
This came at the perfect time. I'm just starting to outline a series of technical articles for my 'blog, and I was having trouble getting them organized.

Thanks.
UK election 6 May - what it means for IT
Assuming it follows convention, you could give it your.email+SPAM@gmail.com and then just flag messages sent to +SPAM as likely badness.
Thanks, that means a lot to me.

As of April 6th I have a desktop program. If that phrasing suggests to you that I have a very consequential A/B test planned for this month, you're very perceptive. :)

choice of language

Forget language, focus on the packager/installer. Java, .NET, and that RIA/Flex stuff all work fine if you file off all the edges in your installer. For Java, I strongly recommend you take a look at Launch4j (OSS for Windows) and possibly Excelsior JET ($$$ for Windows). The Mac side is easier since Macs are a very predictable environment for Java these days -- use the mac jarbundler task and you're pretty much home free.
10 speculations on iPhone OS 4
Looks like it might take an act of Congress to bestow the authority? Can't find the full text of the decision yet, but first reports seem to suggest the court finds the FCC's authority doesn't extend to enforcing net neutrality rather than net neutrality is itself unenforceable.
I think they have hit the long tale of firefox browser adoption, people that don't care much what browser they use.
US court rules against FCC on net neutrality
Agreed with making browse a button, I would also consider moving it above software consumers heading.

And create a button for creators to sign up and move that above the software creators heading.

I think it looks great, but needs louder call to actions.
It's virtually my mantra on economic issues, but: Second-order effects, second-order effects, second-order effects. The fact that I am not now currently in jail does not mean the law has no effect on my life, and when you put it that way the logical error being promoted here comes out starkly.

(I often find myself thinking this is why capitalism attracts so much enmity, as it is a major economy system that only makes sense when you consider second-order effects, perhaps the only such major system. Socialism and communism all have soothing first-order stories ("Is somebody richer than you? Take it from them, and they'll be less rich and you'll be more rich! And let's not worry about the second-order effects of such actions! Everything will always stay the same! Wheee!") and the problems don't arise until you consider the second-order effects.)
Looks pretty sharp. When building a homepage for marketplace-type sites, it can be really difficult to effectively connect with both your buyer and seller audiences at the same time. I think you guys nailed it.

I'm sure this is already on your todo list, but a friendlier login would make the checkout process much smoother. It's jarring to click the button to download software and then get directed to a page that simply says "You need to log in."

The button to download software is confusing -- the button text seems to default to the license name. Looks like you're planning to offer software under multiple licenses, but the button text should still contain a verb. Maybe "Download [license]" or "Purchase [license]".

With all the attention Apple's App marketplace gets, it's surprising that there aren't more marketplaces for traditional software. Seems like a big opportunity.
Il Giornale dell'Arte - Banksy: dalla strada allo schermo
Okay - figured it out, errant ' chars. Try again!