skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you enjoy USMC's Warfighting, you've got to go read Clauswitz's "On War" - it established modern military science. It's the most clear thinking, straightforward work on a difficult topic I've read. Seriously, read the first 20 pages of On War and you'll think more clearly for the rest of your life. I'm not exaggerating, it's that good. Everyone in their life should skim Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and read the first 20 pages of On War:

http://www.clausewitz.com/readings/OnWar1873/TOC.htm
> Misery and pain is part and parcel of being alive and that's the way it should be.

While I don't disagree with your message overall, this statement stood out as being quite odd. Why should we have misery and pain?
I'm not sure why they are still supporting their decision to make that link accessible to everybody.
http://www.mail-archive.com/dev@httpd.apache.org/msg48333.ht...
Great post. I've been "bored" of Facebook for some time now (as I suspect many are). There's another thread on the main page where people are discussing whether or not Facebook is on the way out - I think it is, we're just waiting for something to replace it with. Twitter? Nope. My less technical and/or web savvy friends are never going to be interested in it. Diaspora? Maybe. But it seems like the purpose of Diaspora was to replace Facebook from the outset - that's just not how these things happen. More likely is that it will be something completely out of left field.
>Looks like something that crawled out of 70's Star Trek episode.

My first thought when I saw that picture was: "He looks like a Ferengi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferengi).
You should be aware the the Dvorak vs Qwerty debate is politically charged. If it turned out that Dvorak were superior, this would be evidence for market failure.

A lot of people want to demonstrate that market failure [edit: does or] does not exist, hence there are many more attempts to show the inferiority [edit: or superiority] of Dvorak than you would expect to see in a politically neutral context.
Thanks, I didn't know that algorithm and your comment made me look it up.

For anyone else who skimmed the article and doesn't know the algorithm, check it out at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyer-Moore. It's a very quick read to get the basic idea, and it's as good as jacquesm cracks it up to be.
i heard most of the editors use Boyer-Moore, somebody please confirm me. :(
As telemachos says, that's the Unix philosophy. The GNU philosophy is to add options to programs until you run out of letters in the alphabet.
Thank you!

> I recommend skipping the proofs. They're not very informative and the calculus gets rather tedious.

And besides that is well over my head anyway, but I should be able to follow your main line of reasoning.
Linux: http://eyedeal.team88.org/node/86 (uses Workrave, http://www.workrave.org/)

Linux + Adobe Air: http://code.google.com/p/pomodairo/
Any nightowls in Paris? Is anything like this organized in this city?
Articles about this never talk about the impact of moving your common keyboard shortcuts. Being physically unable to use Ctrl-S,Z,C,V with my left hand while using the mouse with my right would be difficult to retrain around.
I completely agree with points 2. and 3., but 1. is a myth. It's an absolute non-problem and it pains me to see it repeated again and again.

Any (remotely modern) workstation supports Dvorak. If you type for any substatial length of time, switching from Qwerty and back again when you're done will not be a time sink.

NB: This is not a reason to use Dvorak. It's just a counter to your argument that 1. is a reason not to use Dvorak!
I tried the Dvorak and Colemak keyboard layouts. The day I had to launch Vim again I realized Qwerty was the way to go.
It is still early stages but online marketing and optimization will move from simple reports and metrics to sophisticated modeling of trends and behaviors of visitors. Large ad companies already do a ton of data mining and modeling but increasingly small-medium sized businesses will start leveraging statistics to optimize their businesses and websites.
The biggest question has unanswered in this article

"What's the avg. switch time?"

When can I get back to my speed of QWERTY, 3 days, 1 month?
Not everybody in the world is online, and thus not part of the worlds online population.
Does the web make experts dumb?
(I posted this comment in the article on "Facebook's killer app" article - http://blog.eyesandfeet.com/2010/08/facebooks-killer-app-is-..., but I think it's more appropriate here, so this is a repost).

Facebook's increasing focus on business customers will be at the detriment of regular users, who will be demoted to the rank of mere 'consumers'. It's a subtle - but important - distinction.

Facebook's decision-making will increasingly be driven by thinking like "how can we monetize all this wealth of consumer data" or "how can we introduce tiered fanpage packages to business customers as a revenue stream" rather than focusing on what makes a great user experience.
Currently, knowing that my friend has achieved another 'badge' in Mafia Wars adds zero value to my life. It only gets worse as Facebook focuses more and more on business brands. What do I care if my friend 'likes' Apple or Nike? How does that improve my relationship with that person? People I am really friends with in real life don't care what brands I like, or what isotonic sports drink I drink. They like me because of me. Much as businesses would like to think that people define their lives by the products they buy (this is like the opening scenes in 'Fight Club' where Edward Norton's character tries to pick out stuff from an Ikea catalogue that defines himself) that's not a basis for a relationship. And Facebook used to be all about relationships. Now I look at my Live Stream...and it's got all this random flotsam floating downstream. I care about none of it.

The reason I love HN, incidentally, is because it's the polar opposite of MySpace and what Facebook is gradually becoming. Real people, that I share a lot in common with, expressing their real opinions, no auto-generated crap, and zero bling.
You see comments like "What could cause FB to die?" here on HN. They're so big at this stage, with the power of network effects and lock-in, that external competition is no threat to them realistically. The only way they will die is if they continue exactly the way they are now, making people's experience ever-more spam choked, till people realize "hey this experience is actually quite shit, even if I do have 500 online friends" and start looking for alternatives. We're not quite there yet though.
Don't forget the word "online" in the original statement.
"I also have a rule that anybody that does not want to be reasonable has to sue me"

That might work with the average Joe or the guy in his basement, but a public figure might, knowing that he vastly out powers you in terms of law expertise, follow through. So too a company. That is, if they actually have any basis for it. You can not be sued for opinions, but you need to make it clear that they are opinions, and you can not be sued for saying the truth. If you blatantly defame someone however, again the average Joe might not want to go through the hassle as he would have to pay lawyers, but some other person would have no reason to hesitate. So if you defame someone, just offer them to amend it, if however they are making threats without any base at all, then yeah sure stick with your rule.
Online population: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
(approx 2 billion)
You should put your email address in your profile.
idea: web search that gives the best results, fast, combined with ad space we sell

First of all, that's two ideas.
Second, each of those ideas was far more precise than that-- remember that AltaVista and Lycos, for example, had very different ideas about how to "give the best results" and "sell ad space".

In other words, getting from the vague wish expressed in "best results" to an actual algorithm capable of being executed is worth quite a lot.

For every "Dropbox" you can name, with a "not revolutionary" idea and golden execution, I can name you a "Pets.com" with a crappy idea and golden execution that failed.

I'm not by any means discounting the importance of execution (or timing), but some ideas have the potential to make more money than others is a hell of an understatement, if you ask me.

We don't need to minimize the importance of ideas in order to remind people that the ideas aren't worth anything without good execution.
The media might make them seem like they do not pass the common sense check, but judges are people of many years of real life experience and the system of precedents manages to make the law fairly clear.

Also, if a claim is trivial, or pursued regardless of its merits, the claimant might be made to pay punitative damages.

As for the economy, I think it would serve it well if my reputation can be kept intact and not damaged for no reason.
Thanks. I'm genuinely curious what people think of this, so I reposted it there.

I think the early-adopter types - like you, me and the typical HN user see real value when it prevents itself, and Facebook ain't it. Mainstream users will hop onto Facebook because their friends are there, not necessarily because it's the best social network out there, whereas early adopters will jump onto Facebook in it's early days because

a) it's cool

b) it's useful - for users - not businesses

c) it's not MySpace.

They will continue to stick around as long as these are still true. Whether a) is still true is debatable, b) is fading and c) is becoming more of a reality by the day.
I would like to believe you. I really would. But it's hard to see how your parallel applies.

Being the Mercedes or the Apple of Social Network would be great... but it would be a failure as a social network. The example you give of brand association could make sense for luxury items. Those items' value increases the less people have it (to an extent). But a social network's value needs a large group of users.

For your scenario to make sense we would need a form of open FB: then some people will go for the popular option and other will go for the elitist option, but they would all still be able to link to each other. Diaspora seems to be attempting something too big, so I doubt it will succeed.

We could break down Facebook to its basic constituents, and make those open. Some already exist: a messaging system (email) and IM system (Jabber). We would still need an open notification system (a la Twitter). Webpages are already open and a personal webpage could act as your profile just as well.

The last ingredient would be a way to define your circle of friends. Something like FOAF, but with stronger proponents/backing. Once that's all done, anyone could come up with their own Facebook: these would be a simple wrapper around what all these technologies.
So it depends on what you view as the primary functionality of this app.

If the primary functionality is the syncing between multiple devices, then this rejection is invalid and I understand the developer's dismay since an account would absolutely be necessary.

If the primary functionality is "save this article to read later", then I can understand the reviewer's rejection. In theory, you could implement this software locally for single device, which wouldn't require any registration. And then you would only need an account if you wished to enable the "secondary" syncing functionality. I think this was the reviewer's frame of mind.

So I think this is simply a case of miscommunication and misunderstanding that will be corrected shortly.
I'm pretty glad that he's going to stop putting out books that state every thing from the TED videos and nothing from his own experiences. But I don't think he's going to stop telling people to stop working hard.
"nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded"
Are You Gutting Your In-House Expertise?
> That is, if they actually have any basis for it.

That's the key though.

And in the very large majority of the cases it seems that threatening to sue are a modern day equivalent of baring your teeth. And just like in the animal kingdom, most of the time, showing that you have teeth too, and presumably bigger ones will cause the other party to back down.

Of course you have to weigh your position carefully, but even corporations have backed down when faced with the prospect of someone that would not be scared by this. And in those cases where I threatened to sue and the other party did not back down I followed through each and every time, haven't lost a single case to date.

It all depends on what is at stake and how much of it is simply kneejerk responses. A very large portion of all this is just bluster and threat display, most of the times there are reasonable people underneath the angry facade, and if they realize that their facade has been punctured quite often the reasonable person emerges.

Those times where I sued the business interests warranted the investment in legal fees and the damages recovered in turn covered those fees. If that would not have been the case I would have let it slide, otherwise you're just throwing good money after bad.
Another thing FB effectively fixed, app invites notwithstanding, was spam.

Probably lots of kids these days don't even know this, but there was once a time when your (probably only) email address was supplied by your university or employer. If two people moved, it was easy for them to lose contact with each other until a "chance" encounter (e.g. seeing them post on Usenet or whatever). Facebook solved that problem by making everyone's address book self-updating.
> Instead, you'd make the trie of an encoding, probably UTF-8

There are some new implications you need to account for if you do this, as you no longer have one node per letter, but a path per letter. E.g. subtrees will no longer correctly represent substrings, making autocompletion slightly trickier.
Can you imagine the backlash if Apple raised the bar on what would be an acceptable app? Class action lawsuits and senators would get involved. They knew there was no way to get the best apps without allowing anyone (with restrictions) to submit an app.

As an iPhone developer, I agree with the seemingly too long eight to ten day approval queue. However, the App Store's closed marketplace is currently the only viable solution for independent developers to have the potential for making money. Unless Android decides to reign in part of its anarchist marketplace, the Apple App Store will be the marketshare leader. iTunes is a fuzzy safe place for people to buy stuff - before iTunes it was very difficult for people who wanted to buy music without time-bomb DRM involved. People like the feeling of security - locks on doors are a good thing.

Apple may be banning other languages (with exceptions like Lua) because it is a protectionist policy that benefits them and (to a lesser degree) their developers. Think of Objective C/Cocoa as a tariff that developers must pay to enter the closed marketplace. App makers like Titanium and Phonegap devalue the value of the marketplace because they allow anyone to participate and simultaneously release apps to multiple platforms.

In the long run, Google and Android will get the majority of market share. That is their strategy. It's like Windows v. Mac redux. Commodity against premium.

The reality is that before Apple - you had to court a mobile network operator to get an app on a mobile device. And they took 50%.

If Google cared about its Android developers, they would buy an app maker like Titanium and make it the Visual Basic of the mobile web.
Each Application Should Be Shipped With a Set of Diagnostics Tools
It depends on what your view of a social network is. My personal opinion is that people do not have a social network, they have a series of occasionally overlapping social networks. That all current systems are incapable of reflecting this is what causes so much friction and conflict. A social network's value doesn't come from lots of users, it comes from the right users. Fragmentation of the market away from monoliths towards many niches, with individuals have separate and distinct profiles on each would make them far more representative of the real world.

It is possible a base-level platform will emerge to make it possible for this to happen but I don't think it will - the value for companies is in linking it all together, the value of such smaller networks for the users it that they do not link together.
Computer glitch hits Barclays’ accounts
Also:

You should be aware the the Dvorak vs Qwerty debate is politically charged. If it turned out that Dvorak were superior, this would be evidence for market failure.

A lot of people want to demonstrate that market failure does exist, hence there are many more attempts to show the superiority of Dvorak than you would expect to see in a politically neutral context.
I use Dvorak to prevent repetitive strain injury.

Do you have any evidence that it helps? ("I don't have RSI" does not count. I don't have it either, and I don't use dvorak).
I've recently been working on directed acyclic word graphs. They are a small modification to tries and can be built with (I think) the same time complexity. For each node, count the distance from EOW when building, maintain a list of nodes with the same EOW distance and merge the ones that are equal strings. They use much less space by sharing suffixes as well as prefixes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_acyclic_word_graph
If you think Boyer-Moore is trippy, try to understand the partial match lookup table creation algorithm in Knuth-Morris-Pratt: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth%E2%80%93Morris%E2%80%93Pr...
I wonder: would a system like Apple's automatic corrections for iOS work worse with Dvorak?

If Dvorak really makes travel time for your fingers shorter, wouldn't that also make it harder for a predictive systems to cope with human's error?

(This is not a rhetorical or provocative question, but a serious question.)
I think all this will do, is just get the people to add one tiny functionality that meets this requirement.
Open Architecture Buildings
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Computer glitch freezes Barclays’ bank accounts
I switched to Dvorak for 3 years and became proficient at it. I put up with a lot of annoyances, waiting for it to be worthwhile; it never was.

Luckily, I am blessed with self-doubt, and was able to say to myself "Hey, self, stop being an idiot!", and switched back to QWERTY.
I don't have to 'twist' my fingers at all.

And since he hasn't actually -tried- the other layout, there's no evidence at all that it's better, just some 'logic'.

Don't get me wrong... I'd like to try it and see... Especially if it took it a step further and made it a split keyboard so my hands can line up properly, instead of twisting my wrists into position. Ohh, there's the twisting. And it exists on both keyboards.
The other day I got half-price cupcakes because I was following my supermarket on FB. So now the internet knows I'm a cupcake-eater... So long as there's some value in it for both parties, it can work.
They're about the same amount of trippiness. Boyer-Moore makes the same kind of jump table, except Boyer-Moore starts comparing at the end of the search string.
The Libre Web Application Stack
I agree. I haven't felt the need to upgrade my CPU for years now... Not on my development machine, nor my gaming machine. CPUs are plenty fast enough right now... And if I really, really needed more power, I'd just fire up some virtual machines at Amazon or Rackspace or Slicehost or somewhere. I've actually been wishing I had an idea that took CPU so I could try them out under those circumstances.
Looks like it is for hardware keyboard only, no?
For on-screen you can choose between qwerty, azerty and qwertz
Facebook for iPhone 3.2.2 Has Been Released. Login Issue fixed
Sure, but the same way people have two email addresses, one for home and one work work, they could have two of these bundles.

Say: I am a University student. They could give me instead of an email address, a userid to access my University page. This would be a webmail client, an IM client, a place to put my photos/CV/essays, _and_ they could be link to each other and to other similar services via FOAF or others.

Then I move to work, and I get another bundle. And so on.

The killer feature for me on FB is: it's all integrated so once I got someone on FB I get their email/IM/photos/etc... Plus it helps finding people by searching among the connections in your social network.
I haven't read all of the comments on this yet, but I can would venture to guess that Apple is planning on including their Safari 5 "Reader" functionality in iOS in the near future. Maybe this has something to do with it?
The French seem to be especially uncomfortable with anything that isn't French....
Big Macs vs. The Naked Chef (2001)
Free Antivirus Maker AVAST Gets $100 Million Investment
No love for Firefox? :(
Using the endownment effect in order to sell more to a customer
Seems like an incubator is the wrong type of vehicle for them.

These guys seem to be great product guys...but they don't seem to have been founders prior to Google. What does a product guy at a corporation like Google know about jump starting a startup? That requires a completely different skillset and approach.

As a boutique VC firm, these guys would be perfect...as an incubator...not so much.
The article seems to be focused entirely on typing speed, and the studies cited mostly involve typists already proficient in Qwerty.

The article doesn't appear to mention typing distance or effort. Your fingers will move twice the distance in Qwerty than they would in Dvorak or Colemak. The home row is used twice as much in Qwerty, and whilst Dvorak and Colemak favour the right hand, Qwerty favours the left.

I shift between Qwerty and Dvorak keyboards regularly, and Dvorak is noticeably easier on the tendons.
Is it me or there's no RSS in the site?
Two individuals' experiences is hardly what I call evidence :)

And even if there are studies, I suspect it will probably depend on the individual as well, as do a lot of health-issues.
I don't know any links to hard data, but from what I recall there are a few studies. If it's useful to you, then my personal experience is as follows:

* I used to have RSI badly.
* I read stuff on the internet about RSI.
* One of the suggestions was to use Dvorak.
* I started using Dvorak.
* I took some other mitigating actions like getting a
different chair, tilting my keyboard back
and taking more
typing breaks.
* I noted that touch typing Dvorak was much more
comfortable than touch tying Qwerty.
* I haven't had RSI for ten years.

The cause and effect is not directly obvious, but I'm certain that Dvorak helped me to some extent. The downside is: three weeks of frustration whilst trying to learn it, and occasionally having to switch keymap on an unfamiliar computer.
How is "trie" pronounced? Like "try"?
Patrickk, some thoughts on your points:

a) Yes, it's not 'as cool' as before. But, thanks to the 'friends of friends' effect ypu've mentioned, it has achieved remarkable numbers while it 'was cool' - and at this time, that's all that matters.

b) I think businesses are starting to see value in facebook. Facebook Places (with the automatic creation of a facebook page too) will only catalyze this.

And...with a single destination site seeing 500mn+ users, we're in unchartered territory - history won't help us here.
How to Make Justin Bieber Sound Incredible: Slow Him Down 800 Percent
"Whenever you're told that some existing statistical trend will continue, but you aren't given a hard-to-vary account of what causes that trend, you're being told a wizard did it." -David Deutsch