skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> More seriously, I predict that we'll see official support products for linking multiple iPads together in a workstation capacity within a year. Well, probably just two iPads at most, but third-party products might go for more.

Are you talking 'iPad-like devices' or actual iPads? If you're talking actual iPads, I see the price as a barrier to these becoming ubiquitous devices. If the 'pad' market follows the PC market, Apple will just be at the luxury end of the spectrum.
I'm not sure how healthy it is to think about people entirely in terms of goals or statistics.
The best approach is to fix it for the person behind the scenes. You can keep the original input (you should), but you should also reformat the phone number in an acceptable format for your uses. This does take a lot of work, however. It's not reasonable to ask someone to add their country code to their phone number. However, you do have the ability to add it yourself. And you should. It won't always be a human that needs the phone number.
I spent an unreasonable amount of time porting software that is generally run on Linux and Mac OS X to RedHat (mostly because their fork of Linux appears to be a museum of obsolete libraries).

The BSD forks are often quite interesting in their goals. Some of the Linux ones are as well. There are so many more Linux forks than BSD forks though.
Firefox Pranks
Stupid American Website Owners
Grid Design with Sass.. In Django
At first I thought this was a typo. Then I thought it was another April Fools joke. Now I feel bad for the Seton Hill marketing team trying to compete against the much better known Seton Hall University.
As I posted at the OP:

My essentials:
- SizeUp + Cinch
- TextMate
- Quicksilver
- iStat menus
- TextExpander
- The Unarchiver
- Growl
- Perian
- Movist

Also, for webdevs:
- WebKit nightly
- ImageOptim
- Colors.app
- Transmit
- xScope
- CSSEdit
- Sequel Pro
- Changes.app
- Reggy
- GitX
This is the correct response to people that behave rudely, but it's not an excuse to behave rudely.
I really don't like how you keep sidestepping the hard questions that were raised.

Instead of curling up in semantics discussions, how about simply answering a few of those? I think you could do that without revealing anything about the magic sauce of your product.

To reiterate:

* Does your system support the full SQL vocabulary, including all join types?

* Is it ACID?

* Do I really not have to arrange my data in any special way (schema-, or partition-wise)?

* Does it really scale near-linear, regardless of the workload that I apply?

* Why do you bother with MySQL-Hosting as a secondary product if your new db scales down just fine?
John Donovan said he and other executives flew to Apple's Cupertino, Calif., campus to give the handset maker a "crash course in wireless networking."

The prospect of nitty gritty communications issues being communicated by executives is possibly frightening, but I suppose a CTO could be briefed up on the issues.

The issues they mention, e.g. message querying, sound more like a "we don't do this particular operation very well right now, please stop hurting us" talk. These can be fantastically productive. Back in the '90s I was with a group that got one of these from Sybase. (They called it a talk on optimization.) The presenter knew their products warts inside and out, started us down the road with the big, common ones, then worked with us on our specifics. No where in the printed documentation would you find this knowledge, but once you had it passed to you orally you could dramatically improve performance. I have never seen a project benefit more from a half day meeting.
Exact cash rarely matters. If a friend of mine wants to get a soda at the machine, and all I have is a toonie, I'll give him the toonie [note: that's 2CAD, machines rarely go over 1.25CAD for a can of pop]. I'm a cheapskate, but it really doesn't matter in the end. I'll probably ask him for money if I'm short, too.

And, yes, I'm pretty sure I honestly believe that this isn't useful, and that I'm not making this belief up to start a fight. Why would I be confused on this matter?
And if you do, things can became pretty complicated.
If a cable has an HDMI logo on the box, it is guaranteed to work. Specs are specs.
His Lisp rant is great too: http://jng.imagine27.com/articles/2010-02-26-100553_do_you_r...

It's my own fault, I sometimes try engaging certain superficial functional and Lisp crowds on the internet. Comments are quickly down-voted because of the prevalent mob mentality and inability for independent thought. Have we all not yet evolved beyond peer pressure ? Really ? Sometimes there are some gems when an independent thinker has something to add to the conversation instead of mob screech and splintered egos that ruin the dialog. I basically end up writing my own posts on my own site to summarize and lower the signal-to-noise ratio.
I thought we already knew this whole web2.0 thingie is more than rounded corners. It's the "web services and integration" that's interesting.

There is more than one service offering a geocoding API. Use any of them to do the hard work for you.

Your form should have one single field, named "Address". Let the user type whatever s/he wants. Get this input and pass it along to Google Maps, or Yahoo Maps, or WhateverMaps. Your geocoding service will return things in a way that is obviously more parseable.
You're missing the point of the parent post. Someone who's moving from the cities to the suburbs for money reasons, even though he wants to live in the city, is living a mediocre life. Someone who lives in the suburbs because they want to and it makes them happy is living the dream. The post may be poorly worded, but it shouldn't be interpreted as "suburbs are boring" but rather "someone who finds suburbs boring but is forced to lived there."
Exclusive Interview with LogoMoose Creator Dirk Leys
I had lots of these "person I know is smart but sucks at <school/work/relationships/life/etc.>" chats with my father while growing up.

My father always responded, "if they were so smart, why didn't they just use their intelligence to figure out how to succeed at those things?"
Why not go the game console route and just have an 'Other OS' option? Pad-like devices don't preclude geekiness. It's just that Apple is currently the only 'real world' implementation and they are very anal about their devices.

I think that most people are 'up in arms' about things like the inability to install 'unapproved' apps. When Microsoft was trying to push the 'Trusted Computing' platform people were rabidly against it because then it would cause Microsoft to be the sole approver of applications for Windows. Now that Apple has created the same thing within the iPhone/iPad-OS people praise them for it and call it innovative and revolutionary.

> This thinking leads to a kind of UI cargo cult where the nerds are copying superficial aspects of the iPad without understanding what fundamental properties make it "iPad-like".

So people look at a device, and copy the aspects of it that they like. Now they are a 'cargo cult' because these aspects are not the aspects that you like?
It’s really a shame that OS X doesn’t have a consistent shortcut for switching tabs. It’s ctrl+tab for Safari but not Terminal. – edit: scrap that, only true for at least those using German keyboard layouts, not everyone using US keyboard layouts (and others?)

(Cool thing, though, for all these commands is that you can simply switch direction by throwing in shift.)
I think on some level this is a rant about Americans, even if you didn't intend it to be one. My Indian and German friends are aware of the fact that not every country has states, even though their countries do. I would bet money on the same being true for Brazilians and Australians. I would bet money on Japanese people being aware of the fact that not every country is partitioned into prefectures.

Maybe this is because Indians, Germans etc. are not socialized to see their way of running a nation as the only way, at least not in the way Americans are. Maybe not. In any case it's a nice demonstration of how collective cultural ignorance leads to annoyed visitors and, one might presume, lost sales.
They do if you want to receive mail. Puerto Rican municipalities have nothing whatsoever to do with mailing addresses (and in fact the situation is worse, since many PR addresses include an "urbanization").

Moreover, Indiana has counties that correspond to Puerto Rican municipalities. Drawing this sort of specious parallel is entertaining, to be sure, but doesn't help people place orders.
Yes, my city has a Fry's.

And I've had the same experience as you. I've never seen a store so stocked with salespeople (and 70 cash registers!) but with so little interest in the process of selling and supporting material.

But my original point was that the typical person sitting at a checkout with an HDTV doesn't know what the HDMI cable does, much less that they can buy it at Fry's or Monoprice for 25x cheaper.
Excited mark_l_watson?
Android: fragmentation is innovation, but it could kill you
I have an E72, and the lack of flashy gfx transitions doesn't bother me at all. So long as it's responsive and doesn't make some painful-to-the-eyes glitch-out session during transition, I have never needed eye candy. It does it's job.
Re # 4. My experience is exactly the opposite.

I guess there needs to be a #5 - Outsourcing is a competency in itself and can be hard. People have different experiences and offer conflicting advice. If you do it often, you will find ways of doing it better. If you just need to outsource something once, it may not be worth the learning curve or risk.
Yup, I use just about all of those. Also: http://blog.tlrobinson.net/post/360281269/installation-log
"If school really was invented for the sole purpose of creating a generation of unthinking worker drones, then this means that everything that we believe in - capitalism, the economies of scale, marketing - hinges on the creation of a dumb populace."

No! It means that over a hundred years ago, people with attitudes we would today call fairly socialist, communist, or perhaps most likely fascist thought their success depended on the creation of a dumb populace. (Regardless of how successful they were and how that came from capitalism, they were very casually command-and-control people, with no belief that it could be any other way; exactly which style of command-and-control you ascribe to them hardly matters, really.) It does not prove they were correct.

Even today people commit the crime of thinking the next 20 years will be just like today, but people suffered from this problem even more so 100 years ago. No concept of an information or service economy, just factory drones forevermore into the future.

You can see this all over the literature; for one classic example see Brave New World.

"We have no alternative to school, ... far cries from the economies of scale afforded to the capitalistic society."

Self-directed learning with heavy computer involvement and individual tutoring follow-ups and check-ups without masses of children in lockstep. Serious re-thinks of the core curricula, which can only be described as inherited, not carefully-considered. The tech for this is currently rapidly developing, but we aren't there quite yet. But it'll be there long before society adjusts to the idea.

Interestingly, while schools have been out-of-step with what the economy needed for at least the last 30-40 years if Gatto is correct, it is arguable that we had no practical choice; there is no way that the sketch I provided above could have worked in 1980, the tech was simply not there no matter how much money you threw at it.

Yes, I am fully aware this is little more than a sketch. But this is just a HN comment, after all.

I'd also prescribe a healthy recognition of the fact that what matters is what sort of adult pops out, and not what stuff was "covered". The fact that geometry is in the curriculum is virtually irrelevant if effectively nobody remembers it when they are even 4 years out of school. A serious rethink should be based on this fact. Obviously, geometry is not critical to a society because regardless of how hard we cover it is school the citizenry in fact does not remember or understand it.

(Note: It is distinctly possible that when Marx claimed that capitalism would be dehumanizing and evil, that to the extent it was true, it was true because people read his works and figured if they weren't dehumanizing their workers they weren't doing it right. Was it all a self-fulfilling prophecy? Your knee-jerk answer is too simple, regardless of which way your knee jerked.)
Again, nobody is disagreeing. This isn't a defense of Monster, it's a typical It's More Complicated Than That jibe. Don't buy Monster unless that flowchart checks out, but also realize that it's not impossible to see signal degradation on those cheaper digital cables.

It's just a lot less likely.
It's a valid point, but I don't think you can consider an iPad or other similar device to be 'limited' if they contain a modern web browser. They may not have a midi interface or connect to old devices, but I think you over estimate how many people need that.
Yet (iirc) when you had other work to do you chose to cut out the middleman and simply post job offers directly on your blog.

Does that mean you found those sites less useful than the direct approach?
Or was it simply that you were already getting a lot of unsolicited job offers in your blog comments and felt you had a big enough pool of talent to draw upon directly?
Silly kid. Why buy symbian when you can get an N900?
I wrote about Credit Card forms a while back as well.

http://www.jasonlotito.com/programming/what-i-know-about-des...

Anyways, you mention in your post:

"Making something a simple form that is fully internationalized and has useful validation is no where near as easy as they would like us to believe."

It's not easy, but it's not as time consuming and as difficult as you think it is. Getting the phone numbers right doesn't take years. A week is all you need from design to testing, and you are done.

Postal Codes are easy as well, considering their are numerous services that allow you to verify the Postal Code to the address. However, even taking something as simple as the common case, a user from the US entering a 6 digit code has probably made an error, and that solves a common problem.

House numbers and other addresses never presented a significant problem. I've seen more problems with not accepting different encodings then with the actual input.

And why is this important, even if you just want to serve an American audience? Because not every American lives in the US. Consider just the Armed Services, stationed all over the world.

No.

If you don't want to do it, that's fine. But don't complain that it's too much work or not worth it.
The theory is that there are lots of transactions where you do not have cash or check (or would prefer not to use them). Some examples: your friend owes you money but does not have cash (yes, it does happen). You order food with coworkers and do not have cash (or change, we bump to pay people back for lunch almost every day). Or you are buying something off craigslist and want the security of PayPal rather than just giving someone cash (oops turns out it was counterfeit). Or you are doing a large transaction where check isn't accepted (>$100?) and don't have or want to carry that much cash.

Some people think this is a great idea, others not. Only time will tell. We would love for it to be successful, but have a lot of other things in the works as well. ;)
The other reason why newspapers are going out of business
Check delicious? I myself sometimes tag blogs I find that only _might_ be useful later, rather than subscribe to them. At first pass I pulled a bunch, with a pretty low false positive rate at least on the first few, using economics+finance+blogs as tag filters.
Sadly?
Congrats Adam!
Non-profits can’t possibly save the news
If this idea about objects is interesting to you, check out Bruce Sterling's book "Shaping Things, " (non-affiliate link: http://www.amazon.com/Shaping-Things-Mediaworks-Pamphlets-St... )

He talks about how objects have changed and will change over time. Jesse is talking about "spimes" in this particular talk.

The step after this? "Biots."
Is parsing the addresses on the back end harder than providing the same number of support formats on the front end?
I recall an informal survey on the Wikipedia mailing list at some point, and their (admittedly not very scientific) conclusion was that most of the Hindi speakers who edit Wikipedia are also fluent enough English speakers (at least in written English) that they can also edit the English Wikipedia, and for various reasons they often prefer to.

Some of the reasons cited, going by memory, were: 1. English Wikipedia already has more existing content for scaffolding so you're not writing from scratch; 2. English is seen as more official/academic, so an encyclopedia article in Hindi feels wrong, like writing a journal article in Hindi; 3. for India-specific topics in particular, writing in English is seen as a way to disseminate information about India and Indian culture to a worldwide audience; 4. English is more neutral in a within-India political context, without the north-south issues Hindi sometimes has.
This is true, but perhaps not surprising. Its relatively new than we're trying to sell software to "normal" people more often than fellow geeks.

In my mind, AOL is the company that first crossed this divide. CompuServe was decidedly not for normal folks, AOL most definitely was.
That huge listbox of states is designed to normalize the incoming data so that you don't end up with address in California that use "Ca", "CA", "Calif." and "California" -- or any number of misspellings that users are prone to input.

Sure, there are other ways to normalize an address from freetext input, but they often require using a third party system from FedEx or UPS.
On the other hand side, people should just man the hell up and stop caring.

Some people take these things hard. I'm one of them, some days. Developing a thick skin is important, but I would never view "stop caring" as a positive way to deal with anything.
"I felt for those guys. Each one pouring out his heart, projecting his hopes onto Valerie, hoping she'll reply with equal enthusiasm, hoping she might be the one that will finally see and appreciate him.

She said, “Ugh. Losers. I get like ten of these a day,” and clicked [delete] on all of them, without replying."

While his thesis might be true, this is not a good example of it.

Those guys undoubtedly sent off many such heartfelt messages each day. They're playing the law of averages, and their chances are much better if they indicate they read her profile.

And like she said, she gets 10 of those messages everyday, so she can afford to be choosy. If she answered every one of them back, they would all e-mail her back, and get their hopes up, and she'd have to e-mail back... It's a waste of her time to bother.

It's not callous, it's a reflection of the reality that men are much easier than women, making women a comparatively rare commodity.

This happens in real life all the time, and the only thing that's different online is that men can send such messages without having to overcome their shyness. So women get many more messages, and have to be comparatively more selective with them.
I'll need multi-tasking before I can consider this anything more than a toy I'm using in the same room as my laptop.
It seems like it would make it that much easier if it were a text box and a country selection (rather than just a text area, so you can reliably know the country). Since most countries that I'm familiar with have a limited number of ways of representing an address. The larger variation seems to be between address formats of different countries.
Of course I exaggerate in the post, you're right that it'll probably take just a week to get coded up. (Which means three weeks, the way development often goes.)

The question is whether or not that time is well spent, or if I would be better off using that time to improve whatever product/service the form is attached to. Especially when you're on a lean (i.e. startup) budget, the decision becomes pretty clear.
Solaris no longer free, Open Solaris may die
Facebook bets on coal for new Oregon data center
You are right - I mixed the names. Just fixed :) Thanks for noticing it :)
LOL =)
The pdf conversion is awesome! I just tried printing http://times.com/ to a pdf in firefox and it ended up putting the main content of the site on page 2, whereas yours seemed to render it perfectly.
It does have a consistent shortcut: Command+{ and Command+}. Works in every app that has tabs.
No, but people did leave Friendster and Myspace for Facebook because the sites ran like crap and would try to put viruses on your computer.
It's kind of hard to put Bayesian Data Analysis into boxes and sell it :-)

Even so, email me if you want to talk about it.

You too, Max.
Have you thought about the reverse, i.e., a tool that could convert pdfs to html faithfully?

I would be willing to pay money for a reliable tool that didn't need much manual editing after processing.

Unfortunately, the pdftohtml project (http://pdftohtml.sourceforge.net/) has been inactive, and the current version has trouble with even moderately complex layouts.
Well, your default HTML generates one screwey PDF. When viewed in Mac OSX Preview, I get the text "T pe our HTML here..." Then, when I select the text, certain letters get partially removed or overwritten and I end up with gibberish.

I've just spent weeks working on HTML -> PDF conversion code, so I know it's not just my viewer. I've put all kinds of crazy stuff through there.
Maybe allow for a same-domain policy so that you can still use the fancy styling for visited links for your own site, since more than likely the website will have that information in their logs already or be able to track it other ways.
After seeing a few of these kinds of posts over the last few, ahem, years, I am going to take a stab at organizing a Los Angeles based Hacker News group. Let's start really small. Send me your email address if you are interested in

A) being on an email list
B) getting together in person (only one meeting for now)

iphpdonthitme of gmail
CLICK!! "Oh, no. No bullets left!!!"

"No bullets left? Hey, laughing boy: no bullets left."

"Whaddya mean, no bullets left. Lemme see that thing."

"BOOM!!"

"Hey, whaddya know, there was one bullet left."

"One bullet left? Hey, laughing boy..."

"I know, I know!!"

Daffy walks off with his bill reversed...
Or:

* allow the user to enter a free-form address, normalize it and then prompt the user for confirmation that the normalization was correct.

* Allow the user to edit fields on the confirmation page.

* Log any differences between the normalization and what the user changes for further refinement of the normalization process.

* Don't require fields that may not be relevant to all addresses that you plan to capture.

* Allow some sort of contact avenue on the address confirmation page so that they can complain when the interface doesn't allow them to properly enter their address. (If people hit a brickwall while trying to submit their address, they are more likely to just give up if they have to hunt down contact information. At the very least, if there is an easy way for them to complain, you get some sort of feedback even if you lose them as a customer.)