skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great.. so they test the apps using the saucelabs tool and discover that it doesn't work in IE8.

They then have to contact whoever wrote the software (do they even know _who wrote_ all the different apps they must have?). The vendor says "Sure, we can make it work with IE8 - pay us this much / day". Or they say "Sorry this app only supports IE6 and look at the 10 year support contract that you signed - IE6 is the only browser we support"

Nice idea from SauceLab but the reality is that testing whether it works in a browser is only the first step and not the biggest hurdle. Fixing it is.

(I've also just noticed that SauceLab is a cloud service - yes they have a solution if your app is behind a firewall - and it says it's as easy as a-b-c. Of course the reality is different. I bet a lot of the apps are firewalled to the extent that they're nowhere near an internet connection and would need network admins to then open it all up. Not really practical given all the effort involved)
Perhaps you should learn the quote first: Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Now you just need to prove that the liberties being abrogated are essential and that the security being provided is temporary.
Every once in awhile, you see a Google emerge from the Valley. But for every Google emerging from the Valley, there are ten thousand equally ambitious startups that fail. Some of them fail catastrophically... Given the lifestyle in the City, products are much closer to the pavement and are a solution to a real-world problem from Day 1. Not some social network plaything.

This is the main reason NY will never usurp Silicon Valley. Tech-wise NY's culture is too conventional.

"Why build Z when X is good enough?"

"This idea is stupid."

"What's the point? It doesn't make any money."
WordPress Copies Facebook's "Like"
Your post is both depressing and familiar. I think the reasonable long term solution is that each dev team have one admin as well. That way you have "your guy" who knows what's going on with the code being developed/deployed.

I'm not sure if there would be enough work for a full time admin / team so maybe one admin could be shared among two or more dev teams.
I'm going to guess you're not being sarcastic and give a straight answer.

They are going to do that. This only has the Terran campaign.
Well his words were a bit stronger than New York isn't "the ideal environment for tech start ups" ;).

I think the real advantage that the valley has right now is mindshare. This won't change without some prodding. The argument has to be made strongly for New York if this is ever going to change.
Now this is Hacker News. Made my day!
It's kind of crazy that the cover for a $140 kindle costs $60.
Don't worry about it. Krugman says deficits are ok.
Sorry about that, says the guy who wrote said 'ad'. :-) Here's a link to the actual decision: http://www.hmg.gov.uk/epetition-responses/petition-view.aspx...
Google Analytics market share in the top 1m domains
Being the admin, I'm pretty sensitive to:

1) People trying to bump the priority of their own tickets by showing up in my cube. This is inevitably at the expense of other, more polite, users of the system. Prioritizing requests is one of the toughest parts of operations job - if you think I'm doing it all wrong, you can talk to my manager.

2) People who think that "open a ticket" means "go to hell". It actually means "We need to document all changes done to production and we need to prioritize requests. Please help us do our job by using the system designed to do so. The request will be done within 5 minutes if its urgent/important/really simple. But we still need a ticket to document it and follow up if it causes issues in the future."

On the other hand, if you boss is competent, he can raise the availability and priorities of admins in all kinds of management meetings. Hopefully resulting in better priority for developer requests and maybe even hiring few more admins.
It was prior to that, but it wasn't at a border crossing. It was a drug search inside the borders of Switzerland.
Right, they might find it's broken after they test it. But they said they're not even going to bother testing it because that would cost too much.
If a rich person gave 50 percent of his money to the US Treasury, it would be the equivilent of a 50 percent asset levy on the money. I suspect a generally-imposed 50 percent levy could be regarded as an economically-destructive thing. A specifically-imposed one would be the same, on a smaller scale.

It comes down to whether the billions of dollars fund businesses or bureaucrats.
I don't care how few readers your blog may be getting right now -- if your CMS can cache content, turn that option on now.

The dinky homespun CMS that I run my NIN & Tool sites with essentially runs off static cache files, and has taken it's share of suddenly intense links from Slashdot, Digg, Reddit and the like without so much as a flinch.
Ask HN: Would a Startup bother transferring an H1B Visa?
I've an H1B visa, working for a software company in NYC. Lately I've been seriously thinking about relocating to the West Coast and working for a startup.

AFAIK transferring an H1B visa is less cumbersome than getting it in the first place, but would a startup even bother with this process? I understand this visa has restrictions working against the youngest startups, such as offering a salary at least in the average for the position. But what about more advanced startups?

Any experience to share would be greatly appreciated.
What if some of the visitors had visited before -- or seen the prior logo before, on Patrick's blog or another story -- but from another browser or where the cookies had expired/cleared? Then, seeing the second logo on a followup visit would have a 'slightly off' look that could deter signup. ("Is this a knockoff site?")
Writing a JavaScript interpreter for DBN using PEG.js and canvas
This article explains how to make a parser for John Maeda's "Design By Numbers" language in JavaScript, using PEG.js
My (admittedly nonsensical) reaction to the first photo:

Wait -- you mean they had sunlight during the depression?!
Are they more cheerful for being in colour? The effect on me is to deepen my empathy, so they leave me a bit sadder, actually.

I also look at #9 and thank my stars that I am culturally allowed to do manual work in jeans and boots.
What about happy Ruby tests!? http://github.com/malditogeek/redgreen_supermario :D
I don't fly from Heathrow airport for this reason. As far as I'm concerned, I do have something to hide: the intimate details of my body are not for the amusement or abuse of random "security" staff. If you don't like that point of view, f@#% off: we voted out the government who tried to turn us into a fear-driven police state, and now we are laughing at all the former ministers when they bleat about how much the world will end when the new government starts undoing all the abusive laws and regulations that the old one imposed.
A couple months ago I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations to see the relative benefits of focusing on one idea versus doing many at once, and in most scenarios, focusing on one idea has the highest probability of success.

See the analysis here: http://www.startuptrekking.com/2010/05/startup-analysis-is-s...
A follow up article with a more in depth technical component would be nice to see as well. ;)
Photo number 6 is Twitter circa 1940.
It really bums me out when companies that have terrible, user-hostile policies get rewarded with record-smashing sales. You know their CEOs see the sales report and are all too happy to attribute it to their own doing. See Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 for another example.
pg did this a while ago, only counting the votes of older users or more karma, cant remember exactly.

it was pretty much the same.
Perhaps neither.
In finding you attractive, I am interested in your character (your ideas, imagination, execution), so lying to me will be useless because I'm not interested in what you're working on as much as why and how you're working on it.

In taking you seriously, I am interested in your business (working with you, connecting you with people who might benefit your company), so lying to me will actually hurt you because you'll portray your company inaccurately.
That's a very fair point. The argument is not that Palo Alto should be making Foursquare. It's more that with all of our iThings and Droids, we're at a place where these local/mobile apps are starting to matter more and it seems the most obvious place for these to spring up is in large cities. This is not a reason New York is fundamentally better as much as it seems that New York might be better for the times.

I have no doubt that these types of apps will be used all over the country in towns big and small. It's just easier to get critical mass in the cities.
Ask HN: Taking notes in a meeting with an iPad
Are you using your iPad to take notes during meetings? What app do you like using to take meeting notes?
IPad-Powered Kegbot by Yelp Engineers
Not very many smiles.

Maybe this was before the convention of, "Say cheese!"

Or more likely, I suspect, because life was hard and people had little.

Makes one appreciate how good we have it now.

</adjusts air conditioning> </shifts butt in Aeron> </grabs Red Bull>
Ask HN: Are you bilingual?
If so, do you think correctly translating blogs could be useful?

I created the site after frustrating attempt to translate one of Paul Graham's essays to Korean. I used Google Translate initially, but the translated content completely sucked. Yahoo wasn't any better. My Korean isn't all that good, so it took me a while to correctly translate his essay. Then I thought of crowd-sourcing/wiki model, where there could be combined efforts from anyone on the web to correctly translate interesting blogs or any other contents on the web. Another good example is Ryan Tomayko's blog about REST. It's just fundamental concept, I think all web developers should know and follow it, no matter what language they use.

While I did two-years of computer science in college (eventually graduating with EE degree), I didn't have programming career. I used Ruby on Rails to build it, but I don't think it's nowhere close to be good enough. And having a full-time job prevents me from working/improving it seriously.

So, if you are bilingual and find it useful, I would love to elicit your help. Perhaps I could learn one or two things from you. I am always up for learning new things and improving my skills (however low it might be).

Please let me know!
No matter how experienced he is, and no matter what arguments he makes, he is still one guy.

You should worry only if multiple people tell you the same thing and if you can't get any traction.
I'm concerned on two fronts:
1) if quality of visual design is the thing being tested, then it might be more useful if the objective information in the two logos were the same. As it is, the difference here could be entirely attributed to the bingo card image being in one logo and not the other. (I know, the choice to put it in is a design decision, but it's useful to distinguish between testing the design/look-feel and the information in the logo)
2) I don't see in the write-up where brand confusion is accounted for here. What percentage of those shown the new logo had seen the previous one on a previous visit, and turned away because they thought they had the wrong site, or had otherwise diminished their view of the brand because of confusion?
well, yes... but my question was why didn't they do that for the last 10 (has it been 10 years?) since starcraft was released?
While I believe the article is correct, and later experiments probably bear it out, Milgram's experiments don't directly support that cliam: The "teacher" (the subject) could not see the person he believed he was shocking at all.

Nonetheless, it's a relevant link to bring up because of the chain of command and obedience to authority aspects at play here.
I love you guys, but a) it is 4:50 in the morning and I am scarcely coherent and b) there are several dozen HNers in Japan.
So we can see this in action with multiple people:
http://thingler.com/2bc64a49abc2d42d9bee2beb032c2a59
> "Wait, So 20 Phones On 4 Carriers Outsold 1 Phone On 1 Carrier? Shocking."

But as hackers who write and sell apps for a given platform, we don't care how many devices make up a platform. We just want to write apps for the platform that has more users.
That probably wasn't the most appropriate means of expressing my opinion. Apologies.
I don't love it anymore. I don't thrill every time I pick it up. It is no longer an idee fixe. It's ... simply there. I use the hell out of it; like my laptop and cel phone (and my bathtub and car.) A part of life.

And no, you can't have mine.

I'm sure Steve will be along in another few months to sprinkle a little magic dust on the product and start up the waka waka machine...
It has a builtin light (and some magic so that the Kindle powers the light), but still, yeah.

I'm looking at getting upsold by $110 on a $139 device. First it was "well, $50 for 3G everywhere forever is probably worth it". Now it's "$60 to keep my now-$189 Kindle nice and to have a light that doesn't suck is probably worth it."
My dad has a picture of him sitting in his one-room school house around 1942 that looks almost exactly like the one in this post. He has his shoes on in the picture which I guess was a rarity - the teacher used to make him take them off at the door because of all the cow crap he stepped in milking the cow before school.
http://denverpost.slideshowpro.com/albums/001/496/album-1251...

is that snow in new mexico?! is that normal there?
I read all the boring comments and this is the only one I liked. Learning is hard, caring about stuff that has no relevance to food or sex is hard. School is not about helping the rug rats but getting them out of the adults hair until they can kill their own horse for supper. Edumacation is about following rules. Follow pointless rules in a chain for 200 hours straight and maybe you'll discover something that actually helps the human race. Otherwise its all masturbation. If the kid is stupid, I want the kid beaten into submition. If the kid is smart, he can do the assignments trivially and get an A. I see no need to change the way babysitting kids works. Creativity is not the same as rule following skills. If she really wanted to educate herself she would have realized that she should have been skipping class, reading more sci fi and masturbating harder. She was probably just unhappy from being russian.
RIM says it won’t sacrifice security for sake of expansion
um, they did release an expansion...
Makes me wonder how today will be remembered...

"An unemployed hipster tweeting from his iPhone outside a shuttered financial firm. New York, New York, April 2010. Reproduction from JPEG. Photo by Jack Smith. Holographic Storage Division, Library of Congress."
The source of the photos, library of congress set on flickr is amazing

http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/
EPIC is a reputable organization, and have filed a federal lawsuit to help stop this practice. I just sent them a donation, and encourage others to do the same.
It handled Unicode well - ☃
US Study : Games overtake email as second top online time killer
It is brilliant. It is better than a laptop at just about every thing I use it for and has incredible battery life Serious video editing writing and storage are not so easy which will mean I won't get rid of the tower anytime soon but it is well worth the price. The size is a little troublesome though. A smaller benzle would do a world of good. Even with my xxxl hands I type faster on the 4G. Websurfing could be smoother on picture lad end sites but if for reading content it can't be beat.
Solution = chrome frame. Now all their wonderful internal apps will still work. And the rest of the web world can move on.

Solution != selenium in the cloud. Sauce is obviously just kidding around here. Selenium doesn't test your site for you. You need to hire extremely skilled testers to build up a solid selenium test suite.
7Eleven Phillipines uses Google Apps and Socialwok to improve productivity
"Seeing the writing on the wall..."

Really? Is this what it has come to? I bought an iPhone 3G on day one, used it until the Nexus One came out, and have recently gone back to iOS and bought an iPhone 4.

Why? Because in my opinion, the quality of the apps I use on a daily basis are simply superior on iOS as compared to Android, whether the iPhone has 1% or 99% of the smartphone market. I'll repeat that again: the quality of the iPhone and iOS4 remains the same regardless of its market share!

I love Android's openness, and I even use Google Voice as my sole telephone number (yes, even with my iPhone 4). Wasn't enough; couldn't take the glitchiness, even in Android 2.2, and other annoying features of Android.

Because I know someone will yell "provide examples," here are some superior iOS apps that have no rival on Android: Reeder for iPhone (NewsRob is okay...), Twitter (Twitter for Android is okay...), Instapaper, Simplenote (there are glitchy apps that use the Simplenote API on Android), Dropbox (can't save for local access on Android), Pastebot, Calcbot, Convertbot (all are great examples of apps that are possible on Android, but have no where near the attention to detail), BeejiveIM, Calendar (yes I know Android has a calendar app, but it's weak), Mail (for all non-Gmail accounts, Android sucks, and for Gmail accounts, I find iOS4 to be equal to Android's stock Gmail app), etc. Oh, and I forgot to include all of the games that Android lacks, but I don't really play games so I didn't miss them with my Nexus One.

Point is, not everything is zero-sum; I can enjoy my iPhone regardless of how small or large its market share is! Can't we all just get along?
I complained about this decision myself. Continuing to insist upon using IE6 puts civil servants and the public whose data is entrusted to them at extremely serious risk of being compromised - i.e. data being lost, stolen or altered by unauthorized persons or criminal organizations.
All better. TwitPic made changes to whitelist Embedly. http://blog.embed.ly/twitpic
Hiring someone just to make contributions in the name of your corp would be illegal, because that's using your company's treasury to make contributions to campaigns, which is explicitly forbidden by existing law.

No matter how long I stare at this I just don't see how corporations are contributing to campaigns beyond what is allowed by the PAC limit (which is a tiny sum.)

This lack of data on the part of the speaker and lack of understanding on my part, prevents me from believing that corporations are the puppet masters of Congress. In a sense it's self evident, but I can't bring myself to blindly blame it on campaign money. I want to be sure of the cause so I don't, as the speaker ironically puts it, end up "hacking at the branches."
Superman Comic Saves Family Home From Foreclosure
This reminded me of early 20th century photographs of Russia at the Smithsonian:

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/

They were constructed due to the photographer foresight of using different lens filters.
Reminds me of these images of Russia made with Digichromatography:

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/
Thanks for taking the time to answer so thoroughly. I wish I had the time to play with it or could offer my time to help but, like you, I am busy with my company. If you think I can help in any way, feel free to email me (email in profile).

Best of luck and keep us posted!
I disagree. It's more than mindshare. New York does have a lot of good things going for it, but it has one main weakness tech-wise: pragmatism.

"That's a dumb idea"

"Why build Z when X already exists?"

"How does this make money now or ever?"

Yes NY is less likely to have major disasters like web van, but for the same reason it's also less likely to have a google. Only tech cultures that are as crazy or crazier than SV can hope to beat it.

People in NY may be very open to stuff like fashion, but imo they're very close minded when it comes to tech.
Great points. Though one tangential thing is - MBA school is largely not funded and I believe this largely cuts out the ability of people with MBA's to be in a startup at the early phase. I do not doubt the fact that a lot of MBA's and lawyers are very smart innovative people, just that the cost of their education often undermines their ability to take risk.
That is a social phenomenon alright, but freeters are not coextensive with Japanese youth. Japanese companies offering part-time employment frequently offer it on a day-labor basis: you do your day, you get your money, and you and the company are even. The employment relationship is as durable as those struck up with the gentlemen standing outside your local Home Depot in the United States. There are cell phone websites where you can browse jobs and be doing mind-numbing greeter-style work within 20 minutes.

You'd find very, very different professional norms if you either hung around my salaryman buddies or hung around young ladies of my acquaintance who are on the "pink-collar" track.
Yes and Yes. There are actually some pretty decent ski resorts in the mountains there. (Though they don't compare with Colorado.)

I'll bet you didn't know that it also snows at the Grand Canyon. I've seen it.
missing some xss checking i see... seemed to have went down after a bunch of people started playing on it
It's worth noting, that all of the sites shown share another thing in common.

They were all established / founded in the early web. I'm not saying that there was not competition, or that their success was because they were first - they still gave superior products which beat any rivals at the time.

However, trying to draw parallels with these site's design and success today is not totally relevant. If you launched either of them today as they were / are, they may not succeed (despite as we know, the core product / service / functionality being great).

Rob Walling writes in his book that these days:
'It's Market(ing) First, aesthetics second and functionality third'.

Firstly you need to have a market for your product and hopefully be able to market it well enough to get people to 'want your product' / know you exist.

Then when they look at your site, you need the aesthetics to give a first impression of your product and gain trust from your customers in your product.
It doesn't matter if your service / functionality is brilliant. If you can't get the user to even try you over any competitor, then you've wasted your time.

Then thirdly, if you're lucky to achieve the top two - give your customers a good user experience / functionality they want, so hopefully they pay / keep coming back.

The reason the sites given in the example can happily remain ugly, is because they already have the user's trust and are a known 'experience'. Therefore the aesthetics don't need to work as hard to make an impression as say a newly formed start up today.

- EDIT... I'm not saying that a site which is kept basic in design can't be successful. Infact, I agree quite heavily with the principle of keeping things simple and have blogged about it in the past.

Perhaps the original author should've done the article on one of the many great sites over the last few years, which have embraced this 'Keep it simple and clean' attitude. Hacker news being a perfect example.
" In human cultures, we debate the morality of -- gasp! -- breastfeeding in public."

What of human cultures outside the U.S.?
Quite. The lowest point in the state is something like 2,500 feet and average is around 5,500. Been in snow there myself and I've only been twice. It's gorgeous.

http://www.google.com/images?q=new%20mexico%20snow