skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I use a variety of Apple keyboards, an IBM Model M (wonderful original PS2 model), and an IBM ThinkPad keyboard, depending on which machine I'm using at any given time. All excellent, especially with the Caps Lock key set to Control. All non-Apple and non-ThinkPad laptop keyboards I've seen are horrific, as are all cheap "included with hardware" keyboards from Dell and the like. Stay far away.

PS: Heed the advice above about keeping your wrists straight as you type. Avoid the mouse "flick," where you move your right hand to the mouse on the right (left) of your keyboard and thus flex your wrist slightly to the right (left). In addition, try ordinary and reverse wrist curls with very light dumbbells (<20 lbs each), and do them regularly. Will do wonders to keep RSI at bay.
Blackberry 9000 Preview
Android handset
Google can do a much better job with consumer B than Facebook. Facebook has to guess based on his wall posts, listed interests, etc. Given the sad state of natural language parsing, how well do you think this will work? At best they'll look at the bands I like and recommend similar ones. If they're lucky, they'll end up as good at that as Pandora. Or Netflix for movies.

Google knows your interests based on what sites you visit. Perhaps you visit an auto blog, which has Google Ads. Then you visit MySpace, which has Google Ads. Google shows you auto ads on MySpace. This sort of thing is already commonplace with ad networks.

Google has your entire search history. This is a far more effective way to determine your interests than Facebook. Facebook can't get beyond what bands and books and movies you like right now.
I don't disagree with you, especially in that television advertising isn't going anywhere (though DVR is clearly reducing value) but that doesn't refute the fact that Facebook won't make as much money off of online advertising as Google.

Supposedly a picture is worth a thousand words. I wonder how many pictures a video is worth. Or how many 468x60 internet banners a full blown page in a magazine is.

I think the big disadvantage to internet advertising is it feels so cheap, even when it isn't. When you see an ad on ESPN, you know somebody spent a lot of money to put it there, and that lends credibility. When you see an ad on espn.com, you don't get that sense even if the company happened to spend more online than the guy on television.

I would love to know television's effective CPM rate versus Google's
The Blacksmith and the Bookkeeper, Part 1
Announcing Facebook Connect
No we didnt win either. our project was to have a trip planner which would scour bus and train timetables and present it on Android. This was only for the sydney region by the way. Very primitive (duh).

http://talkingwombat.com/
mate a baby daughter (or son) beats winning the android challenge any day!!
Poor man's CDN
agree with you. me and my co-founder both have mortgages and families (actually he has kids, I dont), so this was like a trial to see how we would work with a heavy deadline and was a great learning experience. Atleast we got a chance to fail fast (on Android anyway). But wierdly enough, we noticied google transit went public - so atleast it vindicates the usefulness of our idea... we will now try to work on a real platform now - iphone or (shudder) nokia...

--- edit :
by the way google transit wasnt there when we had started out, keeping eye on the labs page, we only noticed about a month before the deadline!
Is this article useful for someone who doesn't know git? It would be helpful to have summaries/prerequisites as a first post... As is I can't bring myself to read it.
Is this an advertisement? Why not more details?
"... I'm going to make an application on Google App Engine this weekend. Do you have a good idea? ..."

Something I want is "best of hackernews: by category" something that lists best by category, re: ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=184766

- login using openid for hackerid users

- hn users submit link for best story of the week/day

- assign to category

- user can vote 1 up/down story of day/week

- extra points for RSS/Atom feed of outcome

With a feed it should give 10x effect for efforts like the one listed to extract useful info.
I bought the bluetooth version last week and I am very happy with it so far. It's almost the same as my MBP's keyboard, so the transition is not bad. The itunes controls are handy too.
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We didn't win. I don't think judges did a thorough job - I was monitoring logs on my server and they never tried the advanced features in our app. Those required the backend usage, so I would know and the phone-server connection was the whole point why we made the application in the first place.

Anyway, we have this app on Windows Mobile too, so we will launch it soon-ish to start getting the user feedback.
Yes. Unfortunately Hacker News looks like it was designed by hackers :[

But that's like the 10th time hard-to-read-text has happened to me today, and it gives me an idea.

On-the-fly, stored in the cloud site specific CSS customizations would be a killer feature for a Firefox extension. Something that useful must already be in Firebug ;) /goes to check
I stumbled upon this link while digging around for some history on Interleaf:

http://oldvw.stores.yahoo.net/com.html
Bots don't require computer vision or any kind of sensory input; they can extract the native data they need straight out of the application's memory space.

I'm pretty sure WoW keeps track of all applications running on your computer. I think the way people do it is by using a hub and packet sniffers on a separate computer, although I imagine WoW traffic could easily be encrypted... so shrug.
"We ought to remember what we've had for breakfast for the past 30 days, but we can't."

Bullshit - I've had Cocoa Puffs.
Unique Rails Job
"Since YC sets up founders and angels in the best atmosphere possible, the founders can be completely product-focused."

YC companies are completely product focused for 2.5 months. That's it.

Then you dive into fundraising, which is close to a full time job for 1 of the founders... And as much as YC helps, that still takes a long time.

As an illustration, of the 20+ YC companies that demo'd late March (6 weeks ago), only 2 are funded that I'm aware of, and a few more have term sheets (which is really the start of the negotiation... "deals fall through").

YC accelerates the funding process a bit, but a lot less that you might think.
How to win friends and influence people - summary
Right. That's the exact same essay that the linked article was talking about...is there something you wanted to say about it?
what about java's OOP only? why wouldn't the design lower variance?

my take is that java's high variability is caused by its verbosity: more codes = more 'moving parts' = more things that can go wrong

to disprove my theory, give me a verbose language with low variability in solution times
Penrose’s books are well worth reading even if you disagree with the speculative bits. He is an eloquent writer, and most of it is lucid layman-accessible explanations of “credible science.”
Why be pissy about hotlinking, look at it as an advertising opportunity.

Someone hotlinking your photo is letting you put your ad in their context. You can use the [PT] flag to hand stuff off to a proxy that will composite a hot pink URL over the image and make it memorable. Hotlinker gets images, you get ad impressions everybody happy...
Why, why, WHY does it seem that everyone wants to boil life's little gems into soulless powerpoint slides???

[http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint]

The boiled down life's lessons in a minute essentially suck the nectar, the subtle and gentle breeze of a late spring reading out and leave us with a husk, a shallow shell.

Trying to extract real context out of a summary of "How to win friends and influence people" is like saying Michelangelo was this artist dude who made a naked man statue he called David. and leaving it at that.

Go read the book. I did. It changed how I interact with people. The book is genuine, its not a quick fix instant gratification job. It is about how other people do matter and how we can help them help us by understanding their needs, their desires. Dale's book is about recognizing how you interact with others and how to make fundamental changes in yourself to be stronger socially.
These are things we all "know" but never quite put together as a system. I just came upon this system myself and I have started implementing it, I am not much of a writer and so I had two articles written for me. I just started on this myself so I have not gone all the way from step 1 to 7 but when I do I will compile the results and post them.
Three’s Company Or Three’s A Crowd? Google To Launch “Friend Connect” On Monday
I'm using it for a simple web app, testing in FF2/FF3/Safari, seems to work fine... there are some annoying bugs in the implementation (the kind that have been open for years), and inconsistencies between Safari and FF, but nothing I couldn't work around so far.

What were your issues?
Google Annouces "Friend Connect" - Joins Myspace and Facebook in Data Portability Models
Isn't it more that the Yahoo! board would not meet Microsoft's terms of stock price? From what I've gotten out of the noise, any "reasonable" board would have accepted the price, it was attractive. They instead effectively said "we'll only accept for a bit more," knowing (or guessing) that the "bit more" is not an acceptable price. If my judgment is in error here, please show me the way.
this is the shit, for less that $1,600 you get lcd's on your buttons :) customizable with Shakespeare on the space bar! Now that is pimp.
http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus/
I think "for nothing" meant "for fun" or "just because I feel like it," not "to procrastinate." And no, a person who makes a claim simply has to defeat any challenges to it--in science, this is known as 'falsifiability'.
This is also similar to 5 whys of Toyota - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys

Or as Joel puts it - fix every problem twice - one to get customer off the phone and once again to make sure this problem never shows up again. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/customerservice.html

The key in all three cases is continuous iteration to raise efficiency.
A statement is falsifiable if it can potentially be shown false. His statements are certainly falsifiable, and I'm not criticising them on those grounds, but they are so annoying, almost unnatural, that I don't even want to bother with it.

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

...is the logical possibility that an assertion can be shown false by an observation or a physical experiment.

It's probably stupid of me to respond to people by saying "wrong", but like everyone else I get weary, and so I have two conflicting feelings:

One feeling, to show why someone is wrong.

A second feeling, to merely assert that he is wrong.

The latter is quite a bit more efficient. I have this feeling almost every time I read one of nostro's comments, but usually suppress the urge. Oh, well. I mean, here's what he's positing: That abilities are based on different capacities for pleasure/pain, or somesuch. It's so silly, so unrealistic, that such a claim really does require actual evidence to even be taken seriously. The whole evolution of man would be nothing but redirecting pleasure and pain, rather than language, and intelligence, and motor skills, (etc, etc, etc) if that was the case. NONSENSE.

Of course, since no evidence exists for such a thing, no evidence was presented. And that is that. It's not easy to prove a negative and so I just say, "Wrong". This rubs people badly. Oh, well.
At 107, Livermore centennial lightbulb is still a real live wire
why not use a wiki? its simple, flexible and with the right template it does the job.

try dokuwiki it's my favorite and it uses text files for storage.
Safari Search Plugin Inquisitor Acquired By Yahoo!
The Joy of Freeing Up Mental RAM
I disagree with your assessment. Perl is used in many large scale distributed computational applications. It works great and has a great developer community. The only drawback for perl is the perception that people (like you) have about it. It was born in the system admin world, but it has grown up to be a full fledged language.
Good Advice for Entrepreneurs from KPCB
Sorry for the late reply; I failed to notice this question until now.

I'd really like to see a test suite for an actual javascript application, like that "vi written in javascript". But with the application written using best practice Javascript techniques (not polluting the global namespace etc). Basically a non-trivial example that I can examine and then adopt the techniques used.

The area that I am most interested in is how to test DOM object manipulations. If I click on object 1 does object 2 move to x,y co-ordinates, stuff like that.
I really miss a pointing stick keyboard.
With 'spontaneous' I mean: not caused by anything. All really new ideas are spontaneous.

You find them (freshly created) inside yourself, but you can't tell where they were coming from.
Is this an automated response from adblock? Someone always says this in any topic about advertising. I'm starting to think it's adblock saying it, and not the user who decided to install adblock.
And the people who install adblock and think it's great to reply to a topic about advertising with "Ads? What ads? I see no adverts ;)"
0 bucks.
Having a TV doesn't actually mean you have to sit there comatose only watching it and doing nothing else.

I like a good comedy or music tv on in the background whilst working personally.
is all wrong!
wiki's are one of the most abused softwares (as in used where they shouldn't be). In fact one of our current competitors uses a wiki for what we're building custom software for. It's such a PoS, you can tell it wasn't designed for that use. We might use a wiki for internal documentation at some point.
I think Matt has brought up a very good point. He is right for the most part. Facebook is trying to create some new web 2.0 type of advertising model. It is trying to be different in the ad space and it is not working.

Although, I do think advertising can work for Facebook. They need to start small and focus advertising around features that people use on facebook. There are certain applications that people use more then others on facebook. Mainly photos, videos, events, news feeds AND SEARCH. People search on facebook, not so much to find information as they use google for. I think facebook can create a similar adwords model and build advertising around those core services.
Google - The Noble Knight
3 Stars for Linkspank!
How to Be a Man
Facebook’s Valuation Problem
Here it is http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=181392
Your all living in dreamland. No one is going to really give a toss about an article here or there, in whatever blog or whatever advert they see. The point is: The internet works a specific way. People who are 'in need' can find that on the net by 'search'. These are the only people that are worth targeting because they are the only ones who give a shit about what your selling/offering. The point is very simple. If you want to launch a Website you have to spend a small fortune, and heres what on:

0) Have an old domain, New domains are penalized thus take 6 months or more to get top for 2 word search terms. 1 word search terms can take 2 years.

1) Correct SEO, your site will be indexed properly and optimized for your targets. Miss this and miss your target.

2) Link building, this is getting harder all the time. Google see link building as the enemy and are doing all they can to discount unnatural links.

3) Remove all barriers to entry, no sign ups etc, immediate gratification.

4) Innovation and content. Killer apps that people find useful and content that is compelling.

For the record, I have about 10 popular domains, have been recently featured on Techcrunch twice and all of the suggested blogs, which are all good, but at the end of the day, search traffic is what counts in the long run.

This is precisely why Facebook and other social platforms perform so badly for advertisers, people using them are simply not in search mode. That and the adverts online are totally crap!
You're wrong. At least I think so. Because you're not meeting your opponent at the same level of argument.

I'm simplifying somewhat, but...you appear to be saying that, for some definition of "cause", the evolution of man is "caused" by "language, and intelligence, and motor skills, (etc, etc, etc)". It is wrong, you say, to claim that the "cause" could be "nothing but redirecting pleasure and pain" (I'm not sure from where in the original you get that "redirection" aspect, but I'll copy it over).

But your argument is at a different level that that of the OP. Whereas the OP offers a theory, or maybe rather a hypothesis, of what could "cause" the evolution of language, intelligence, motor skills, &c., suggesting pleasure/pain differentiation as a primitive process, you just claim language, intelligence, &C. as somehow "primitive" processes in causing human evolution. You're not even trying to find out what "causes" them, whereas the OP is. You claim "non-falsifiability" for your opponent's claim, which I don't take for granted: it seems possible to check whether there are differences in the pleasure/pain differentiation of individual test subjects, and see whether that is correlated with those individuals reaching their goals. You just seem to want to avoid meeting the argument.

Which is wrong, I think.
There's nothing wrong with disagreeing...
As it happens, he only knows drums and sucks pretty bad at guitar and singing.
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Surprised nobody mentioned this: http://datahand.com/products/proii.htm

Never seen one, but heard crazy stories...
Had anyone else just assumed McCarthy was dead? Sorry John.
This was one of the first keyboards I ever used. It was also the worst keyboard I have ever used. And because I learned to type on it, for about a year afterwards, I couldn't type properly on normal keyboards.

Stay away.
I completely disagree.
The blackberry doesn't even have a competent browser. No ajax support. For me also the keyboard is just unusable compared to the iphone. Pretty small screen also.

Blackberry does seem to have quite a hold in corporates etc, but in terms of usability the clear winner for me is the iPhone.

Also the email client on the iPhone is pretty awesome.
hackers are better than experts anyway.
I got the Microsoft Natural Ergo 4000(did they start with 1?).

I bought that after my wrists started hurting from being bent on a regular keyboard. It takes about a day to get used to it and about 3 for your fingers to get used to the new key placement. But overall, its very comfortable.
Pools of blood
I ditched my TV but I still have a projector. That way I can watch things I really like, but it's enough of a hassle that I have to really want to.

It works well for me, anyway.
Design patterns for accessible, crawlable and indexable content
Just because the good (spending more time on things of value) is being clouded by bad (sanctimoniously bragging about not having a TV) doesn't mean the good doesn't exist.
Wow... I want to do this.

Any ideas on living / working in these areas? How can you get online?
What about trust as a factor in engagement? According to this survey http://tinyurl.com/3jcxjj recommendations from friends are trusted more than any other source of information. This is what people are looking to exploit with the social graph. Facebook beacon was an early clumsy attempt. If you can persuade people to pass on your message to friends you will significantly increase the response rate.

An example of this in action is at the end of this article on Duncan Watts http://tinyurl.com/3pgps7

"
Typically, people ignore this "share with your friends" pitch. But Watts and Peretti included technology called ForwardTrack, which displays the route the ad travels once you've forwarded it. This turned ad forwarding into a piece of social cartography. People would pass the ad specifically to those friends most likely to keep it moving. It became a Facebook-like contest to sign up the most friends.
"
Reserved words: what are they good for? (Absolutely nothing?)
the minimum budget is whatever you can afford...

The standard (2) options are search engines and their paid advertising platform.

The "2.0" option is social media.

Option (1) Search Engines

have SEO done on your site; any traffic you don't have to pay for is the best, second register with only Google, Yahoo and MSN paid ads; spread your budget according to engine traffic and technology to catch click fraud, 65% google, 25% yahoo and 10% MSN (live).

- adjust your budget according to cost per action on your site (setup analytics) to the correct engine for your audience (google = mainstream, every genre) (yahoo = less technical audience) (MSN = industrial and older)

option (2) social media

this is the hardest option and unless your site is naturally viral or something people would care about (in which case it would have probably already got "buzz" or users) trying a social media campaign on a site that your mom,dad,sister,brother or friend wouldn't visit more than once a week probably isn't worth your time (unless you have that in abundance)

if you need any free advice email me.
That's assuming your time is free.
Personally, I find the design very elegant. I would hate to see changes (apart from the font color issue, if some readers have problems with that).
Perhaps the key to making social network ads work is knowing where people are. AdWords has made marketing many, many internet only niche businesses possible. Privacy issues aside, Facebook could allow local bricks and mortar businesses to reach people geographically nearby via the internet.

While Facebook is a great way to keep in touch with friends who don't live nearby, I'm also friends with people that live in the same town and I see all the time - to see photos, arrange events, etc. You can join a group for the city you live in.

So, Facebook knows where people are and that some proportion of their friends live there too. Now there is new market for offline businesses - garages, restaurants, bars, shops - to reach local people on the web.

There are even Facebook groups for people that work in the same company. I'm sure the pizza place across the road from one of their buildings would like to advertise their promotion to everyone in that group.
I second the usefulness of Robocopy. I've been using it for years (debuted in some resource kit (Win2k?) and then someone wrote a GUI for it for you sissies: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc160891.aspx

Create a .bat file that calls other more granular bat files (so that you can backup certain things more frequently) and then schedule a task to run nightly.
I once paid a guy to write articles and submit them to these article sites. There were a few visitors coming from those sites at the beginning, but it didn't help much. (This has also been 2 years ago, things might have changed)
looks like too much information is trying to be displayed at once
I'm sure that the stuff on Sun's website is just the "omg cool" marketing version; the real version probably has a less "awesome" color scheme. But you do bring up a good question... where do you store these containers? Do you just rent a warehouse and have them delivered?
another value of being a y-c funded company; PG will go to bat for your even in forums ;) (granted it is his forum)