skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is, in some senses, a sign that programming and computer systems are getting better. You don't want people to have to learn the difference between a browser and the web and a search engine and an operating system - you want things to just work.

For most people once their machine is set up this is the case, and then when they want something different, they don't know what they're asking. This is a sign of success, and not a sign that the users are stupid.

Although it must be admitted some of them are.

So here's the question. If you run a service, how much do you insist your users learn before they can actually use it? Anything? Nothing?

Added in edit:

"What is a Browser" is a similar issue (linked to elsewhere from this thread, and from previous submissions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=662105

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=653962

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=626482

As I say - having people not knowing about these things is a measure of success.
Like I've mentioned before, Google and browser support are hardly the limit of how annotations would be useful. Having a scalable standard for metadata would create a platform for all types of services. To me, what's exciting isn't what it will immediately get you, but what will be possible with that platform of data when it's a well-accepted standard.
No. Unless you define the internet as 'a certain few US-based sites'.

Facebook is not the internet. It is just one site. If facebook were based in Australia, they'd be following Australia's laws and morals more closely. And the same for any other country.
Substituting local data for remote UIWebView requests
people trade all kinds of things for all kinds of things. We need to leave people be.

should prostitution be regulated at all? I think that should be left at the local level. And I mean very local. It should be possibile for neighborhoods to ban it when most people don't want it and keep it legal where people are ok with it, right in the same city.

I believe many people try to control things like prostitution, drugs and gambling because they do not wish to be around it or have it devaluing their property, not because they wish to control what everyone else is doing. We need to find ways to let them do this and still preserve the freedom of others.
great comment - gonna pick up the book, thanks.
That's like being confused whether Pepsi is a soft drink or a company. The answer is: Yes, it is.
The actual question should be why isn't the UI faster and more responsive? Stating a solution as a requirement is rarely a good idea.

We know that the iPhone and Droid (and successor Droid X) has pretty similar hardware, both license the GPU IP block from Imagination Technologies.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3826/motorola-droid-x-thorough...

However, we do have some details missing in comparison with the iPhone. For example, do we know whether Apple's UI is h/w accelerated? If it is, does the GPU have dedicated graphics memory (and how much?) or could a blitter be used?

AFAIK, most if not all Android phones will have a GPU just simply as a function that Surfaceflinger (the Android window compositor) is an OpenGL implementation. It's only the emulator and during bring up that you'd use the software implementation of libagl/OpenGL.

There's also a question that how good is a mobile SoC GPU at doing 2D. As mentioned, it isn't de rigueur that a mobile GPU has dedicated (fast) memory which is completely different in the PC space which has copious amounts. In the Droid X case you're weighing a 1GHz CPU vs 200Mhz GPU with a small number of cores. In fact, consider that we're fairly used to spending as much if not more for the GPU in desktop systems as the CPU.

I do know for a fact that Imagination's 2D interface (PVR2D) has a large setup overhead which makes blitting of small bitmaps very slow, but somewhat ok with larger bitmaps. Add, alpha and it sucks in any case.

You shouldn't also discount that perhaps the Android UI and app. framework is naively implemented compared to Apples.
I believe some rulings support that view, but others have disagreed. It might depend on the judge/district and I don't think it's ever been considered by the Supreme Court.
It's worth noting that this op-ed is by Sudhir Venkatesh, who is also mentioned prominently in a chapter of Freakonomics. So, given his background he probably actually does know what he's talking about!
I've been studying on my own for a few years. I haven't been crazy about it, so I would judge myself to be low-intermediate. As long as I know all the words, I can usually understand when people talk a little slower than normal. When I don't, I can often repeat the words I don't understand to ask for explanations.

I have a language partner in Japan and we talk daily. Unfortunately, I have to say "I don't understand" about every other sentence. It's a good thing she's so patient!
Who says these are their exact location? I'm OK with giving away my city as dedicated searching will let you figure it out anyhow, but I didn't give my address. Dedicated searching will give you a decent chance at that anyhow (though I've moved around a lot in the past few years and I've noticed online address databases are full of defunct entries).
Don't put them in a grid:

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...
These are technical skills and responsibilities I learned working alongside my programming partner. I still can't program anything functional on my own though. I have experiences relating to programming, but I still do not know how to code. Does this surprise you?
@inlineCallbacks make linear code very easy to write in twisted. Have you tried it lately? Here's a snippet of code out of my gearman implementation:

@defer.inlineCallbacks
def gclient(gearman):
w = client.GearmanClient(gearman)
x = yield w.submit('test', 'some data')
print "result:", repr(x)

Pretty straighforward, I think -- you just stick a 'yield' between your invocation and the capture of the results.

As far as who's using in actual comet applications -- it's hard to say. The last time I tried looking for a comet implementation, what appeared to be the canonical "cometd" was written in twisted. I ended up not using it and rolled my own twisted based server that was closer to my requirements. It's been in production for a few years now, but is still a somewhat secret project.

I'm pretty sure you could research their userbase as well as I could.

I'm not saying twisted is perfect and all other technology sucks (though deferreds, once you understand them, are really the only way to do this sort of thing).

When tornado was launched, I started playing with it and couldn't understand why it prevented me from integrating so many asynchronous tasks. I spent an hour or two separating the good parts of tornado from the reimplementation of twisted and built tornado on top of twisted. It was, as far as I could tell, at the starting point, minus 1,297 lines of python.
This reply applies to robwgibbons - thanks for the replies guys.

I had started work on this product before I started working at the company - it just happens that the company had a need for a similar product and had chosen (I believe in the year immediately prior to my joining them) to develop their own.

Also I can't remember the wording, but my contact does explicitly state that any of my own work outside of working hours does belong to me. This was added to my contract by my boss after I asked about their policy during my interview. I should also note that the system that the company developed is not (and will never be) for sale or for use by anybody outside of the company.

That said, nobody at the company knows about the specifics of my side project, only that I work on something in my own time.
I consider mastery of a discipline and genius to be distinct. I'm fluid like that in screen and vim, and not particularly smart. Musicians get it - it can be awesome watching a conductor juggling a weak choir in rehearsal with batton and piano.

People who have it probably have more mental energy to devote to other things - which would be a huge advantage - but that's not the sane as 'unprecedented insight'.
What is a Browser? (By the Google Chrome team): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ
Presumably, everyone on the entire campus is trusted to be there, with increasing layers of security. There are guards posted at all entrances to the campus, where I have to present a badge + window sticker to get on. Once on campus and parked, a swipe card gets me into the building, where I am presented with an X-Ray machine for my belongings and a metal detector that I have to walk through for entrance.

If I am taking any property on or off campus, I have to also present a property pass signed by someone with the authorization to allow that activity.

Admittedly, I could probably sneak a flash drive on if I were so inclined, but that's probably why they do background checks on people before they're given badges and swipe cards and all that.
As an example, a video made by Google that illustrates that point: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ, focusing on the difference between a browser and a search engine.
True, but in this case the asker doesn't know what a soft drink or company is to begin with.
You're probably thinking of this incident:

http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2006/07/18/photos/index.ht...

I recall other vaguely-similar cases reported in less detail in earlier years. The clerks may not have good judgment, and the incentives for the clerks and many of the agencies involved are to err on the side of assuming-the-worst.

The stigma of even having been accused may make people in such a situation unwilling to talk about it even after being cleared afterwards. After all, many will assume law enforcement would only get involved if "the pictures weren't so 'innocent'".
In a sense, you're both correct. It really depends on the user and the UI annoyance. A lot of UI quirks become second nature to power users and they don't even notice them, but things like lagging on a keypress, etc, is probably going to be a persistent source of annoyance.

iPhone users, for example, don't seem to mind life without a back button. It becomes a fact of life and users adapt their usage of the device accordingly.

On the other hand, when I updated my iPhone 3G to iOS 4, the responsiveness of the UI suffered by orders of magnitude. After more than a month of usage, I still found things like typing a text message excruciating. (Mostly fixed with the 4.1 update, praise god.)
Welcome to every day of my life. (Everyone should watch this at least once.)
I thought this would be about getting rid of Google Instant, which is ridiculous and distracting. You can turn that off in search settings.
I would also agree with that sentiment. What you do on a consistent basis more than likely becomes "short-circuited" into your mental perception of the world that you navigate from day to day. Much like not using a programming language that you knew well for six months can, I believe, cause some kind of "mental atrophy" in that particular skill set.
Don't understand the downvotes here. This is exactly what I do — we just submitted at 20,000 word academic grant application with 15 collaborators at 6 sites. There is no way we could have done this in (sanely) in Word. We used our own etherpad instance to edit Markdown, then pandoc to convert to latex. Worked like a dream, and no old profs able to screw up the formatting.
Artificial skins detect the gentlest touch
Out of curiosity (and apologies to the op for steering off-topic), how did you find your language partner?
Thanks for the reply. I do believe I am a-OK in this respect (see my other reply to willvarfar - it was typed as a reply to you aswell) - I'm not directly recreating their system, BUT my system could be used to replace theirs... If that makes sense :)
I remember reading the same thing about "The Clockwork Orange".
I would agree with you, but I think there is something to be said for the kind of mental dexterity it takes to do higher-level thinking while having a detailed view of what you are trying to accomplish. I would not want to give up all lower level cognition though. To each his own I guess.
CommonJS: Bridging client and server; why JavaScript needs first class modules
If I were 20 years younger, I'd be knocking on your door. Japan is a great place to experience and live. And great food.

I'm from the UK, but have lived in France and Spain. I had a fluent Japanese speaking and reading g/f for a while, and since we spent time in Japan, I studied it at Edinburgh University (evening classes) for a year. It's quite a tricky language, mainly because you have to learn every word, whereas, for obvious reasons, there is a lot of crossover in the broadly Latin-based languages..

However, there are plenty of language schools all over Tokyo, often taught by native English speakers, so you easily get started. And, of course, being in the country makes learning so much easier.

The Japanese are great fun too.

What a great opportunity for some lucky individual.
I'm all for requiring sex workers to test themselves for STDs, and requiring them to disclose any that they do have. Kind of hard to dismiss that with "caveat emptor" - I know there are instant HIV tests, but what about everything else?
NO.

My concern is that instead of coming up with a better name, you're here asking if "lol____" is acceptable, which says something about your ability to come up with good branding ideas.

For me, this would immediately fall under the category of "if you have to ask, you probably shouldn't do it" ... unless of course you have a really good reason, but then you wouldn't be asking.

So without more information on what exactly the proposed name is, and what amazing product your startup is promising, I'm going to straight up say no.
Reliable? On any given year at least one of the major stations is fully or partially closed down. Recently Park Kultury was partially closed for several months, Belorusskaya is probably going to be closed for some time next year. The latter is a very high-traffic station so maybe they will just limit its capacity by 50%. 90% of the time I go via subway, at least one escalator (they are usually in groups of two) is not working, reducing capacity by 50%, with people waiting in a huge line. Sometimes the train will just stop between the stations and stand there for anywhere between 10 minutes and half an hour. Rarely, like once in several months, some shit will happen on Filevskaya line and it will halt for several hours. Underground it's always uncomfortably warm and stuffy – both in summer and in winter. More than enough to get sweaty. The Filevskaya (surface) line, on the contrary, was very cold in the winter (maybe it's better now with the new trains, though). Passenger density of one per square foot in rush hour is also not very comfortable, and when random strangers apply considerable force to push you deeper into the train so that they can get in too, it's also not OK (and it happens in rush hour always, not once a day/week/year). The new trains are simply idiotic. They always smell bad to some extent (they probably chose overly absorbing materials for the floor), they have no place for a map (the few places that could hold it are covered with ads), so the map is posted on the window, and is remarkably unreadable because of the combination of bright white letter outline, an otherwise transparent background, and the fact that you have to lean over a sitting person to see anything unless you have perfect vision and the train is on that rare spot of railroad where the train is not tossed sideways because the tracks are so old.

And it's not cheap. One pass ticket costs nearly $1. It was cheaper to take a bus in LA where median salary is several times higher. The subway is so popular only because it's rather fast with the roads being totally jammed in rush hour (and the buses go with them since there are no dedicated bus lanes). Except for speed, pretty much anything else about Moscow subway is horrid, unless you are a tourist who values the beauty of central stations and was brought there once and in off-peak hour.
in a few years you might be able to build an electric car that is this simple. safety standards will still be an issue, but all you really need is a frame, steering, batteries, 4 wheel hub motors, and a computer.
People may or may not respond to your favorite name choice. For this reason, Tim Ferris tested 15 different book titles with Google Adwords when determining the title for 4 hour Workweek. Why not test 5 - 10 names with simple Google Adwords and Facebook ad campaigns to see which name(s) resonates the most?

You could use metrics such as: # clicks, click through rate, and # of email sign ups to help determine the winner. Make sure your landing page(s) are very, very well written and beautifully designed in order to encourage sign ups.
Bing Instant Search
Yes, the down votes on my previous thread confuses me. I am definitely not the larges MS Word lover in the bunch; however, there is no way that the wonderfully intelligent community that is HN is depending on it to format text that is being sent to an otherwise diverse group of people and platforms. One word simply comes to mind, "bizarre."
> Still a "brute force" solution.

That's Moore's law for you.

I sometimes wonder how much more elegant our solutions to computing problems would become if transistors per integrated circuit stopped increasing exponentially.
For those of us who don't have the faintest interest in the game itself, but are fascinated by the things humans choose to do with their brief lives, can you explain why this game is like a spreadsheet?
Chrome 7 beats other browsers in HTML5 Test
I gave up caffeine, my findings
And I support the right of you and your neighbors to do exactly that in your neighborhood.
Interesting :) You should start tinkering with the omnibox API and let us know what you think:

http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/experimental.omnibo...
What I cannot create I do not understand - Richard Feynman
It allows sophisticated checks of your web cache or history, both flavors are available. Thus it renders your privacy an abstract concept. Nowadays by using facebook, you are doing something very similar. From this point of view i can understand your concern. Security is another concept.
This was a few years ago, so my memory is foggy and things might have changed, but I remember how uncomfortable erlang felt in a unix environment. I might have felt the same way about java, since its also sandboxy.

I think the first time I hit the mailing list was because I couldn't figure out how erlang can boot up and change its effective user id. (setuid). The reason being it needs to grab a privleged port as root. Well forget that, it has no idea what that means. The recommended way is to use iptables port forwarding. I think thats how couchdb does it (or one of those nosql things)

Logging also didn't seem to fit well with linux. You can manage to write some stuff to syslog, but erlang really prefers its confusing way of logging. See things like this http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/sasl_app.html.

Oh and if you decide to just write data to the error log in the simpliest way possible, like this error_logger:error_msg("An error occurred in ~p~n", [a_module]). Guess what, it doesn't open that log file in append mode, so it wipes it out every time you restart the
erlang process. You have to write and install your own error log handler to open the file in append mode.

Want to do some dns lookups? Sounds simple. It starts up a
gen_server thread... and starts caching the results! Talk about principle of most surprise. And it doesn't handle mx records. But if you get on the mailing list the guys will tell you there's an undocumented library deep in the distro that will handle this, and probably won't change. So you give up in frustration and just write a port to run dig.

It just went on and on.

You can really tell that erlang evolved to run self sufficient on special hardware and not in a supportive unix environment.

And of course there are the basic language frustrations. What bothered me the most was simply the lack of a 'return'. This meant you couldn't 'short circuit' a function, like "if something then return", and it often resulted in another level of nesting, even for the
simpliest stuff. Yes I know that sometimes you could use function pattern matching to factor this out, but not as much as you hope. Having a 'return' statement in erlang is part of a religious war, which I'm not going to fight, but I'm strongly on the having side.

I found some erlang things worked great for my project, like the server and finite state machine 'behaviors', but when I realized the string processing was so slow I just switched to stackless python, wrote it in a fraction of the time, never used it, and ended up keeping the existing perl version :)

You can write a MTA in any language, so its probably not the best fit for erlang. The best fit for erlang would be something that only erlang could do, and just suffer through it ;-)
Despite the trade protection their firm gets, the money is low, particularly considering outlay, hours and conditions. Yet the quality of the experience is consistently good in a city where service is often poor.

I'm interested to know what causes this: whether it's due to the discipline (the thrill of navigating a puzzle, like a unix operator gets), or the institution (feeling like you're part of something important).

I had a freaky conversation with a driver last winter about messaging systems. He knew all the right questions after I told him what I did, and made comments about the particular technologies. It came out that we were working on the opposite ends of a big integration between firms. He was unhappy with that life and very comfortable at the prospect of spending the rest of his days driving a cab around.
I think we're deviating away from the real topic at hand, but regardless, I couldn't say specifically what the weakest link is... while I know that the tapes themselves have their own procedures, I don't know what they are.

The 'legitimate users' issue is largely mitigated from malice by severely limiting who those users are with background checks, security clearances, layered access levels, and a culture in which everybody reinforces the security procedures and watches for others who might be violating them, intentionally or unintentionally. This isn't 100% of course, nothing is, but it's largely effective I would guess.

Stolen laptops of course happen on occasion, but it's a dramatically different problem than unintentional access to a data center, or all the data therein. Further, most of the laptops I've seen have data-at-rest encryption, remote locating devices (GPS) and fairly stringent security protections on the device. In order to connect to any sensitive networks, they'd also have to use VPN and 2 factor encryption.

Largely, these things have already been thought of... but more importantly, if you're statement holds weight, and they should have stringent controls everywhere to be effective, then why would they arbitrarily allow their data to be potentially compromised in the event that Amazon has less stringent requirements -- and guess what, they do.
Admirable to set yourself a goal and achieve it. Maybe I'm like one of those smokers... I have 1-2 cups a day, no suger, mostly double experesos, I like the taste, it makes me more alert and I get more work done, don't think at those levels it is bad for me.... so why would I quit?
When I decided to get divorced, I had a number of women tell me I could not do that, I was too sick and I needed his money. I felt that said more about their lives than mine, but it also anecdotally agreed with a remark I read once that "there is more prostitution in marriage than outside of it". Unless/until society finds a way for men and women to have financial parity of some sort, quite a lot of women will continue to trade sex for money on some level, whether it fits the legal definition of prostitution or not. To me, the attention prostitution gets really just misses the mark.