skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
ooh, my wife hates that. I typically fix our cars myself when they break. When something starts making noise that I can't diagnose, I do everything I can to make it worse hoping it'll help me figure out the problem. Apparently, that's counter-intuitive.
New Twitter proves the nonsense of “Web is Dead”
I have found that communicating with people in extremely precise ways improves the speed at which they can comprehend and respond properly.

Here's an example:

Problem: When you visit McDonald's they won't supply you with any ketchup unless you ask for it. So after they give you your food, you ask "I'd like some ketchup with that". And then they give you 2 packets of ketchup. That's obviously not enough, so you have to ask again "Can I have a few more ketchup packs please". This can go on a few times until I have the actual amount of ketchup I require.

Solution: As soon as they give your food say "Give me 8 ketchup packs, please".

Bam! Problem solved.
Legal web promotion company
BizLegal, a division of Businessentials, Inc., is a leader in website design and development for the legal industry.We offer a wide selection of low priced, high-end and professional web site designs, branding and marketing collaterals, hosting and Internet marketing packages for attorneys and legal offices.
Other open source social networking projects:

Appleseed (http://opensource.appleseedproject.org)
Elgg (http://elgg.com)
OneSocialWeb (http://onesocialweb.org)

I realize everyone's hyped up about Diaspora, but we have a long haul before we have anything usable by the general public, and there are projects that are much farther along that deserve attention.
As far as I know they're accepting patches through github - fork away :)
Ask HN: Why the splashpage trend?
It seems a trend that every new service has a colorful billboard page with a big sign up button. Personally, I'm usually not in the mood for a product tour, I want to poke around before I sign up.

I'm curious, am I in the minority? Why the trend?
Where Realtime Worlds (a MMORPG developer) went wrong
Writing a test-cases based on business cases (domain knowledge) before any code is a good practice. It is that simple.
In my experience as a father, I'd tend to agree. There is less reason to search if you're primarily using the web for the games and interactive flash that is typically geared towards kids, but there's no reason we can't create more opportunities for kids to search. I'll give an example.

My younger son recently got into pokemon, and he's now doing more self-directed searches on Bulbapedia to learn about stats & strategies. Since this is something I can't help him with, he's learning how to search on his own.

Searching for pokemon stats, game cheats and walkthroughs sounds trivial but learning how to play with search, sort through the false positives, invalid file sizes, fake sites, etc., these skills carry over.
Part 2: http://lukehalliwell.wordpress.com/2010/09/15/where-realtime...
IT Spending Hollows Out Labor Markets
I am currently using it for the Hackety Hack site. It's pretty easy to use, check it out:

http://github.com/hacketyhack/hackety-hack.com/blob/master/c...
I do this all the time. A couple of interesting ones came up while volunteering recently.

Assembly line style processes are just like shell pipes. I get data, process it, another step.

The same project I also got to act as an accumulation buffer. As things were produced I collected sets of 10 at a time of them and gave those to someone else who counted and stored them. He didn't have to walk as much and they were easier to count.
It seems to be just like a 'group,' or an 'interest.' An 'aspect' of your personality that you'd like to share with others.
As with any back of envelope calculation it makes up for its lack of accuracy with speed and ease of use.

It just gives you someplace to start an analysis. It's not an end in itself.

There's nothing preventing the application of additional knowledge about a specific industry or company to modify the basic equation.
Security issues don't belong in a public bug tracker.
You beat me to it, fantastic experimental use of ipad.
A simple answer is because its hard. A slightly better answer I think, is that the current crop of more expressive languages (such as not Fortran and including functional languages) are harder to analyse and even harder (much more so) to synthesize in a sufficiently coarse grained manner (parallelized but now less efficient due to overhead say).

The key is a way of providing non-obtrusive (to the programmer) hints to the compiler - whether by annotation or the type system or whatever.
I had always assumed this just meant that you couldn't inject paid ads into the actual Twitter feed, but reading this in detail you are right, you can't simply mix paid and Twitter content within the display of your app.

Moreover the Twitter API TOS seem to forbid the notion of other sponsorship and advertising for this widget unless Twitter also gets a cut:

> "In cases where Twitter content is the primary basis of the advertising sale, we require you to compensate us [...]"

It sure sounds like this widget is all about Twitter content.
Hell, I just turn off the menu bar entirely -- and the scroll bar and the toolbar with all the goofy buttons on it...waste of valuable screen real estate that could have text in it, if you ask me.

One of these days I'll get around to re-binding M-` to something useful, too...
Place a text ad for a quality Twitter related affiliate product. Start making commissions. A few I know of...

- http://socialoomph.com

- http://sponsoredtweets.com

- http://tweetadder.com
It is interesting that you are glorifying OS/2 as an alternative to "back room deals, legal technicalities, and old fashioned bullying" when it was the keystone of IBM's naked plot to monopolize the PC industry through patent-locked hardware.

There is the technologist fantasy that in a world without Microsoft, we would be have this wonderful diversity of competing platforms. And then there is the reality that the alternatives were in most cases far worse than Microsoft for customers. And this was obvious to the people paying the bills at the time.
Could Arrington seek money damages based on the fact that the Crunchpad very likely would been profitable if not for FG's treachery, or only based on the Joojoo's almost nonexistent profits? I'm not sure how much speculative money is worth in the eyes of the law, but that seems like the real damage here.
There is a big difference between a new (so-called must-have) skills and essential skills.

All knowledge that you really must have is already developed long ago (look at things like SICP or Mythical Man Month, or XP Explained) and remains unshaken.

In contrary, this or that new cool tool to make a dynamic web-pages, or a brand new pile of a useless abstractions in the next revision of J2EE or .NET are third-rated knowledge. Google search is enough in this case.

Take a look at Berkeley's CS 61A course (with that honorable old-school lecturer and a nostalgic 80x24 text-mode console on Solaris 2.7) - all the essential knowledge is here.
The first thing you do in real life, not in fantasy blogger-land, once you are able to is go back and apologize to the guys you stomped on along the way.

I am talking about STAC, Gary Kildall's family, etc.

Also perhaps an effort at MSFT to reverse the culture of lying and deceit that even now permeates their marketing.

I see no evidence of Gates doing that. Self-reflection would be required for that to happen.

In some respects I see Zuckerberg following the same path.
Ask HN: Monthly billing best practices
I'm integrating a recurring billing service into my web app and am at a point where I have to make some decisions on how I want to handle various situations. I don't have much experience with this and am hoping to get your feedback on these questions and monthly billing in general:

1) If a customer cancels their account should you offer a prorated refund for the unused time? Or do you establish a policy that your monthly payment will not be refunded at all when you cancel your subscription?

2) Should you let customers cancel their subscription to your service without deleting their account? In other words, should there be a "standby" state that locks down their account so they have the ability to resubscribe in the future and keep their data, or do you make canceling their subscription and deleting their account/data a single, inseparable action?

And for those of you who have been faced with similar decisions, can you remember other important decisions that you had to make? Appreciate it.
In pottery there’s a saying that if you’ve made something and you’re not sure it’s good enough to sell, then you should just glaze it blue and someone will buy it regardless.
The agile samurai
I would like to see (and if I get the time, or a client who needs it I will look into creating) a dispora plugin for wordpress, as opposed to that dreaded buddypress. It (to me) would have the same appeal as disqus etc with you being able to use the same account to connect across the web, with different "seeds".
Meet the CEO of the biggest company on earth - Mike Duke of Walmart
With a distributed social network, I'd imagine that it's okay if data is a second or two out of date, so it should be cool.

> but then he/she might not see it added to his/her status updates page when the pages reload

Even if it were to happen, you're assuming a page loads when they make a comment. ;) This shouldn't happen until there are extremely high loads, but even then, just don't make the comment box reload the page, insert the comment into the DOM, and make your POST with AJAX. ;)
With such cheap VPSes, do people still use shared hosting nowadays?
After serious amounts of A/B testing, this was the generalized result. A result that is comforting to an user. A result that makes an user agree to decide this is the service they want to try, and be sent to a page with payment options. Resulting in a higher conversion ratio, because the user already has the mindset they wanted to try this service.

Personally, the almost flash looking website portals are really annoying to me. My non geek friend eats them up.
Wouldn't the ability to host GAE apps outside of Google solve the problem? GAE is open source isn't it?

(disclaimer: I have been thinking of offering this but assume others are already doing it; and don't have a "first customer" to build around, which is always a requirement for putting time into such a thing.)
Thanks ! https also helps a lot. Looking forward to using it!
I don't mean that I can't buy food. I mean that I can't trade between dollars and calories. For example, a scoop of premium ice cream costs me $1.25 and 250 calories. The currencies are independant and inexchangeable; if there was an exchange rate between them, I could get that same food for $5.00 and 50 calories.

Any food I contemplate has a cost somewhere in dollar-calorie space, so the currency with which I buy food can be accurately modeled as a two dimensional vector space (or perhaps as the complex numbers, though I guess I don't really use the field properties...).
I wonder why he thought he needed one.
This is a great idea if you want to get rid of all your users. Nobody likes popups, and the people whose sites contain the widget would consider it a dick move and uninstall it immediately, I suspect.
It sounded like the documents had been public (somehow).. so I'm guessing he's just wanting to get out ahead of it.
> For a lot of people, their name’s strongest connotation is Jewish persecution.

Funny, I think of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_diaspora
One of my favorite quotes, from Jerry Jones of all people:

"One of the reasons I'm rich is because I never let my money get mad"

Sounds like good advice to me.
Ah, A/B. I have to wonder if the efficiency can be generalized as much as it seems to be in use.

Are the silly cartoon creatures part of A/B too? :P I do hope this runs its course.
Saw this story on The Browser (thebrowser.com) and loved the blurb:

"Science prides itself on making progress by falsifying past theories. So why do scientists keep on insisting that they are right, when history may very well prove them wrong?"
I would just use hte widget to drive traffic to that Twitter-related site and then just work the site to make more money.
I think the short answer is "no", but check out appscale. They are working on doing exactly that. Though much of the stuff behind GAE is proprietary-- like BigTable-- so these components have to be replaced. Gives some portability but not much.

The idea here is to sorta build my ideal app engine using off the shelf components as much as possible.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhtTU-guW60
Is Anyone Listening on Twitter?
The edit on clicking doesnt work with Firefox 4 beta (I am on Windows 7). It works on the regular firefox 3.6.9 though.
I've had this experience. It took me a while before I realized that a decent chunk of hairy tricky code could be avoided if I just started out with an appropriate data structure in the first place. Starting with a good data structure in the first place is almost like starting with the solution for a surprisingly large amount of problems.

Now, whenever I find myself getting confused I try to think really hard about where I went wrong. Good code is like good prose. If you have to read it six times to understand what is happening, the writing sucks.
Lenovo's Thoughtful ThinkPad Is a Near-Perfect Machine
there was something called "AroundMe" which was at first the usual walled-garden social network software. But then they changed their philosophy to make it like what Disapora is now. I guess it started sometime in 2005. I edited the older version of their software to setup my own social network.

http://www.barnraiser.org/aroundme

Runs on php and mysql.

I did checkout AppleSeed longtime back version 0.2 or 0.3 (on savannah i guess). Clean code.

Barnraiser's AroundMe has plugin functionality built in. It's not the facebook-type third-party app API. So don't get me wrong.
The Story of FireBreath (Cross-platform Browser Plugin Framework)
More involved HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1696396
Nail on head for me:

". . . Twitter Platform primarily serves Twitter’s interests, in stark contrast to the era of API growth . . ."

and his rueful close in "I believe that Twitter as a medium is and should be distinct from Twitter as a business."

Twitter got to where they are based on open standards, dev empowerment, etc.

Thanks to their money in the bank and lack of need for a biz model they had ample time to own it, be the standard, become the medium - what is a Twitter exactly if not a Twitter?

Going to be very interesting to see where this next step takes them.
> URL space for search? That's one feature that Chrome had first

Firefox has had this feature since in 2004 [1]. It's called Smart Keywords [2]. It can be enhanced with an extension called SmartSearch [3].

[1] http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2004/11/65668?...

[2] http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Smart+keywords

[3] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/188/
Hm, this doesn't work for at least the company I work for. Without disclosing too much, he's off by more than half.
One option is to regulate it. You could make it illegal to pick up someone on the street and regulate it so that most if not all meetups would occur either online or by someone calling a number they found in a phone book. I would think that it could be set up so that finding a prostitute goes similarly to finding a contractor, or anyone else in the home service industry. Other than hiring someone from the parking lot of Home Depot you don't generally see contractors soliciting. Additionally advertising could be regulated so that you don't see it happening unless you look for it. That won't appease the religious extremists but it will help prevent parents from having to deal with kids asking "Mommy, what's an escort?"
UGG Infant Boots
The UGG? Erin baby bootie is made from the highest quality plush twin-faced sheepskin with the craftsmanship you expect from UGG? Australia. With a simple hook-and-loop closure, it goes on and comes off easily. Make your little one feel just as comfy as you in a pair of UGG? Australia baby booties.
I would also be interested in hearing what services people use to handle monthly billing as well as plusses and minuses.

For example, is it true with pay pal that on their credit card statement it will say something like Paypal <company name>

I am also about to launch a service with a recurring billing component.
Their app is running on someone's hosted server. You can of course have complete security BETWEEN servers (as these guys say "PGP for you privacy nerds") but ... you still have to trust everyone's hosting company.

A single hosting company hosting 1000 diaspora accounts can compromise details of 127,000 accounts, if each diaspora user has 127 friends on average.

As far as setting up social networks on a server, there are plenty of those ... dolphin, elgg ... and they are quite good. If you want it to be decentralized nodes, you are stuck trusting everyone's hosting providers to not peek at the data you are sharing. Which imho is worse than trusting only facebook in terms of privacy.

On the other hand in terms of everything else, decentralization is a huge WIN! Such as scaling and uptime.
Michael Phelps was born with his flipper-like feet, does that make him any less of an Olympian?

No, but it makes the victory tainted by circumstance rather than hard work. Who would you be more receptive to in a lecture about hard work: Yao Ming at 7"6' who barely has to stick his hand out to make a block, or Charles Barkley who is an entire foot shorter?

And if Michael Phelps didn't exist, someone like Cavic would have won by an insignificant 0.01 seconds less. By the same vein, it is inevitable that someone else would have stepped up had Microsoft not existed.

So why is it a problem to worship these people that have had all these advantages?

The biggest excuse why these people are against taxation is because they feel their wealth was earned 99% by hard work rather than circumstance. Conversely, many of them feel people on welfare don't deserve it, and it is 99% due to their personality.

It is a classic case of the fundamental attribution error.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
maybe they're streams
that's what I felt as well ... diaspora usually happens when a people are kicked out of their land to roam the earth among other people. Not very positive as far as connotations go. But hey, let's see what they come up with.
A statute of frauds defense may also be effected by a showing of part performance, upon showing of one of two different conditions. If the parties have taken action in reliance on the agreement, as in the case Riley v. Capital Airlines, Inc. the court held that part performance does not take an executory portion of contract out of the Statute of Frauds. Each performance constitutes a contract that falls outside the Statute of Frauds and was enforceable to the extent it is executed. But the unexecuted portion of the contract falls within the Statute of Frauds and is unenforceable. As a result, only the executed portion of the contract can be recovered, and the doctrine of part performance does not remove the contract from the statute. On the other hand, the court in Schwedes v. Romain held that partial performance and grounds for estoppel can make the contract effective.

If I am reading that right: Because they used TC office space it is implied that a contract existed and Statute of frauds does not apply to that part.
Actually, we already have custom domain support built in but we turned off the upgrade feature for now while we figure out pricing. It works though as you can see on this site: http://mominvancouver.com/
I'm working on that ;-)
I find their secret OEM agreements banning dual-boot and OS-free systems to be far more egregious. Very few people seem to remember BeOS, and how Toshiba (IIRC) shipped thousands of computers with BeOS and Windows, but because of Microsoft's OEM agreements there was no boot menu, so very few people used the BeOS partition. Had those agreements not been in place, we might see a lot more use of CP/M-86, BeOS, or other operating systems.

It's quite strange that the Criticism of Microsoft page doesn't even mention BeOS.

There's also the incident of designing Windows to crash if run on DR-DOS (they didn't simply not support it, they went out of their way to crash on purpose).

--

Regarding the complaints about capitalism and "ruined lives," I think it might be helpful to decide whether one wants to maximize, minimize, or ignore the worst case, average case, and best case quality of life. It seems that pro-capitalist arguments support the average and best cases (i.e. middle class and wealthy), while disregarding the worst cases (the ruined lives). Anti-capitalist arguments, on the other hand, appear to focus on the worst-case outcomes.
One little thing, in the Design tab on the left it looks like all the closed arrows are open and the one open section is a closed arrow. (All the closed ones are pointing down and the open one is pointing right). Safari 5 on Snow Leopard.
> I love Rails but for this type of app, it might have helped them gain traction faster if it was built on PHP, or was even just a massive plugin for WordPress.

This is one thing I hope they get right: it's the right thing to do to focus on a first implementation, but in the end what is more important is the protocol that emerges from that. If the underlying protocol is solid then you will get independent people writing ports of it to every language under the sun in no time. On the other hand if the underlying protocols are either flimsy or technology dependent (specific to ruby or some other part of their stack) then it's going to really limit how much this can spread and how much involvement they get.
1) If a customer cancels their account should you offer a prorated refund for the unused time?

Yes. You might not want to actually put such a policy in writing, so that you'll have flexibility if you think it's being abused; but only in very exceptional circumstances is it a good idea to piss off your ex-customers.

2) Should you let customers cancel their subscription to your service without deleting their account?

No. If a subscription lapses for some potentially accidental reason (e.g., a credit card expiring) then you should definitely allow the customer a chance to fix this; but if they take deliberate action to close their account, there's no reason to keep it around (and some people will get very upset if you continue to hold on to information which they consider to be personal).
Some people like to use explicit self to differentiate methods from local variables. Also, there are consistency issues. Explicit self is required for attribute writers and implicit self can call private methods on parent classes. Personally, I'm not a big fan of implicit self.
I don't think there's even a Diaspora search. How do you find people?
Puma Men's Cell Tolero Shoes, puma cell tolero sneakers online
HD Starcraft and Painuser at Google Tech Talk
Thanks Tim, whoever you are!

Once a user is part of your group, you can.... click on them to go to their page, where there's a "disinvite user" link/button. I'm hoping that changes to handle individual groups if they're in more than one of your groups.

And that's it.

Their "group settings" link reveals only a "leave group".

So, to summarize a bit on the current state of the site: it's a private Facebook wall for you + your group(s), and that appears to be it.

Before it can become more useful, I think it needs a way of organizing communication. But, then again, I don't find much use in Facebook's news feed, so I may just not be seeing some potential which others do.
I would spell coordination (as in project coordination) without a dash.