skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can tolerate a spinner and don't mind a progress bar, but what I like most of all is a display telling me what it's actually doing. If I see a bunch of libraries that are being loaded or sockets opened then I understand that progress is taking place. I don't actually need to know the specific details, just give me something to do/think about while I'm waiting. It could even be knock-knock jokes if they're funny, but when I see some workings of the program/page exposed as status information while it loads, I feel more invested in using it because the designer/coder is keeping me in the loop.

A progress bar might be actually progressing, or it might just be an animation - and when I see a progress bar that gets to 99% or 100% and then just sits there, I find myself reflecting that the developer or product manager is lying to me in a small way. It's especially annoying when the 'progress' represents a list of startup tasks, without regard to the time they take - it moves smoothly through 30%, jumps to 95%, and then sits there for a long time before disappearing. This is the opposite of informative.
My friends and relatives will wonder why I'm not rich yet.
We're loading the site, and a map, then it says 'Loading Hotels' which takes 5-10 seconds, and displays them on a map, then removes the load sign.
For those interested, there's a book on this topic that is excellent and provides 8 postures improvements (complete with pictures) that will help keep pain away. http://www.amazon.com/Steps-Pain-Free-Back-Solutions-Shoulde... - there's also an Authors@Google talk by the author on Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yYJ4hEYudE) if you want a taste before buying the book.
I've got the opposite perspective, I fly Southwest almost exclusively (for domestic anyways), mostly though their big hub at Midway, I'm hoping for me this just means more or the same, but to more destinations.
IAMA: We are members of the IE9 product team (for real now)
Most of the time people post ideas after they've invested in them. So if the idea is for stock X and you believe it is worth $20 but it only trades at $10, having your argument get sent out to market participants who might have more capital than you is beneficial. You might make them aware of something they missed and bring attention to the company -- which could push the stock price up as more people catch on. That's beneficial to you.

Since sites like SumZero and VIC have a ton of buyside members, which is a rather small community of people who spend a ton of time talking to each other, it's pretty unlikely someone is going to get away with stealing your idea and claiming it as their own. They will probably get called out on it.

The other benefit to posting ideas is you can get criticism and see if your logic is flawed or maybe that you missed something in your analysis.

I will always remember an idea posted on VIC by a guy who ran about $400M in assets at the time. This was in 2007 and it was for a financial company. A few commenters asked questions relating to the company's ability to accurately estimate customer default rates. Rather than defend his thesis, he simply said they should move on because apparently they aren't interested in the company. What happened? Management at the company did incorrectly estimate loss rates and as a result the company crashed. It dropped ~80% and this was close to 10% of that fund manager's portfolio.
How I use a freemium strategy to sell a $1,000 product on my blog
I wrote up how I use freemium strategy -- including a combination of a blog and multiple email lists -- to sell a $1,000 course on my blog.

The course is on freelancing and I also have a book sold in bookstores.

If you guys are interested in this stuff, see some of my other Hacker News comments on direct marketing, pricing, psychology, etc.
Linux phones are selling faster than Apple phones. Why doesn't it make sense to support the new, popular mobile OS?
Its not like that every day, it was just a particularly bad stretch where a lot of problems cropped up in the last day and simply needed to be dealt with (we're a billing company - the deadline for submitting a batch is final).
This is the real team answering, with much less marketing-speak. (as opposed to the other "AMA")

What I've read so far, they have an incredibly tough crowd over there, and they're handling it quite gracefully.
The enterprises wouldn't decide to pay the IE tax. The decision would have to be made by the end-users forced to use IE6. And they wouldn't pay.
First, the response time variation is an important observation, thanks for that. To make sure, that it is caused by V8's CG, we need a GC log from the benchmark.

Second to make this a fair comparison, you need to use a similar sized heap. It could be, that the JVM heap was large enough to run the whole test without a major CG. We need a GC log also for this part of the test.

Sun was aware of the different CG strategies needed for server and client use and let us choose between them. V8 however seems the be optimized for the client side.
As soon as you run out of the ability to do an aspect of product or business development, that's when you need a qualified partner on board. Or, if there is a job that you simply do not want to do, you may want to bring on someone passionate for the position then.

It could be from the outset, if you need developer experience on board. It could be later, if you need a saleperson or marketing person. That would be more of an employee hire though. Basically, there are only so many hours in a day - there will be a point when you can't do it all, and you're hindering growth by trying to do so. That's when you'd want to bring someone on,
This is the way I've approached the issue for sometime, and the analogy I always use with clients to explain the additional cost is one of translation. Most browsers speak english, or some basic dialect of english. I can deal with those dialects. IE6 speaks Chinese. It costs more money to translate the site into Chinese. People seem to understand that analogy.
I don't think so. As a consultant you can always structure your products in a way where the core browsers are always included, but the weird ones are extra. Naturally, the always-included ones will be the more standards compliant ones since chances are that if it works in, say, Safari it will also mostly work in Chrome.
RumpetRoll
A Push to Corral Methane Gas
While we all sympathize with your stance, the author's is more reasonable.

For the client, it's really quite simple: it takes some extra hours of work to support IE6, which costs X dollars in labor. For a given site, not having IE6 support will drive away Y dollars in user revenue. If supporting it makes them more money, they should want to. If it loses money, they shouldn't.

Making this trade-off explicit with a client is good. And I think it's also reasonable to charge a premium on those hours of IE6 support, since they are extra-frustrating.

HOW frustrating it is for you will affect the premium you charge. And for you the tradeoff is more like this: am I willing to lose business with clients because they think I'm unreasonable in my IE6 support fees? Are the dollars lost made up for by happiness at work?

As long as you're thinking it through, do what you want.
"There are actually two sites that exist where you can apply for entry. They are heavily populated by people who already work at hedge funds, so the process is pretty rigorous."

Here's an idea: let HN users above a threshold post ideas into the site. I recall hedge funds investing in startups.

http://www.hackernewsers.com has already devised a way to verify its accounts against underlying HN accounts. Users can also link to a Stack Overflow account, and in theory users should be able to link to freelancer sites for gathering metrics on a user.

I'd have a way whereby hackers can take a YC application form and submit it to sumzero users: either all, a named list, or upon request. Have a way where feedback can be given as well. If not the YC application form, then they can pick from say 5 different submission forms, all varying in detail and types of information submitted.
I guess it depends on how you "research/analyze".

I've found that customers are really crappy at telling you what they want, and product suggestions (and feature requests) should be treated with extreme skepticism.

However: they are absolutely brilliant at telling you what their problems are. Behind every feature request/product suggestion is a pain point of some kind; if you can find it, you usually can come up with a solution that is much better than what they would ever propose.

So: find a group of people who have a common problem. Once you do that, you're on your way.
A SWA that flies more than just the 737 is a pretty momentous business model change.
Great managers, I think, do three things well:

1. They manage your performance. Not just by telling you when you're doing well, or poor, but by helping you set goals that help other people in the company. And this do this so you can do this with your own staff, should you ever get any.
2. They fit you into the culture. This might mean running interference, or helping you understand how your team can and can't impact the rest of the organization. They aren't negative about the culture, but they're honest about it; even when bad stuff happens or is likely too, they're honest and want the team to figure out how to solve the right problems.
3. They're willing to try new things, and they think about new approaches, including things you want to try. This is partly about creating a culture of learning, but its also about creating a safe environment for their staff to complain. Not everything will work, but you won't know until you try it. Their job is to weed out the crazy suggestions from the ones that might be productive. A manager who understands that is worth their weight in gold.
Partnering with Microsoft: a cautionary tale. Also, ask HN: contacts at Yahoo?
Had a negative experience with MS recently. They were very interested in licensing some code for use in bing and we did a number of presentations to the top of the hierarchy which was extremely time consuming. In the end there was radio silence so we followed up and didn't hear back, then things were delayed multiple times on their end. It seemed highly unprofessional of the business development lead to string us along because it burns a bridge for future partnership while only gaining a delay of deployment on a competing property.

In any case, after following up a number of times, they finally indicated they decided to build it internally instead. The funny part was through the demos they kept pushing for a source code review which seemed highly premature considering we had nothing signed at that point. I am glad we didn't hand over the source. Perhaps I am not in the most objective position, but their implementation is incredibly weak. There is a build at all costs culture which leads internal teams to build vs buy even when the PMs see the value of buy.

In any case, take this story as a cautionary note to pursue parallel paths even if things are very far along on one path and the stakeholders are highly enthusiastic.

We have been looking at other major partners and had some success with some; but, for Yahoo we hit a wall of first level routing which seems somewhat impenetrable. I am not wanting to attack the individuals that man the first level email routing since they are just doing their job, but they don't have a technical understanding of what is being presented--we got replies that completely misunderstood the message more than 4 times in a row--and are only able to route requests as secretary would. So we were finally directed to http://add.yahoo.com/fast/yahoo/technology/cgi_form which is no doubt a spam honeypot where submissions never reaches the appropriate team or get reviewed in any time sensitive manner.

So, I would like to ask if anyone has any contacts within Yahoo, ideally within Yahoo Finance on the development side. We actually did our usability testing with google / yahoo / x so we have some good data there.

Thanks for any help you can offer getting in contact with the right team lead at Yahoo!
Why we do not sign NDAs at Makalu
I'm not yet convinced this is due to GC. Sent a pull request[1] to Hannes to use the faster Buffer technique, to at least rule out the interference of v8's crazy slow string juggling under load.

1: http://github.com/hns/ringo-node-benchmark/pull/1
Danm, I was hoping he wrote a virus that upgrades IE.
If you're working on something complicated and interesting, you can't just turn off your interest when the clock strikes 5. It's always with you.

Some people, however, see work as a place where they go to keep the chairs nice and warm during the day, and have no problem "turning it off" at the end of the day.
"In my life, voice calls using cellphones fail more often than they succeed"

Well, thank God I don't live in the desolate wasteland that he does. I haven't had a problem with voice calls in years.
I agree with charging extra. It's a good tactic to see if they understand, as they certainly will understand spending more money, vs supporting web standards.
During my first semester in college I took a course that used these notes. It was perhaps the most valuable course I took in college, as I subsequently became a researcher in theoretical computer science (and honestly taught myself a lot of the rest). The value in this type of course is that it introduces very green high school graduates to the type of thinking necessary to reason about proofs. The time required to build up the theory of groups/rings/modules/fields or measure-theoretic probability (is that what you want CS freshman doing?) would be wasted, as those topics are largely beside the point of the course. A sprinkling of conditional probability will at least give them something to remember in their randomized algorithms class.
IE6 is the new NN4

To be fair though, NN4 support was a massive pain, getting people off it even more pain.

(for those that got into webdev post-2002 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator )
It's a high price. But they also get airports like DCA (I'm definitely looking forward to that)
Reticulating splines..
I run a web design company and as part of the discovery process, we ask questions to figure out whether or not big corporations, schools, gov. agencies, etc, are part of their core target audience. We also look at their existing analytics data if they have it. If they have visitors using IE6, we just assume that we're going to need to support IE6 and adjust the price according. There is no good reason to make the customer feel bad that they have to pay more because their clients are using a dipshit browser (most of them are probably being forced to do so.)

Now if I determine that their core audience won't be using IE6, I explain the issues pertaining to IE6, how it takes more time to make everything work as intended and give them the facts of browser/version distribution. If they want, we'll support IE6 for them (because we are here to help them make money and even though I hate IE6, I'm not religious about the hate) for the extra cost.
I think there's an element of game theory here though: the people putting out the HN equivalent of funny cat pictures (like angelgate or other drama) are going to self-promote, and heavily. If they weren't the type to do so, they wouldn't write content like that. So the defense should be two-fold: encourage the HN userbase to only vote up good stuff, and create good content yourself and promote it. If you don't promote your own content, it'll be overshadowed by the funny cat picture people who do. Ideally, no one would self-promote, but if the guy with crappy content does, the people who write good content should too.

Of course, this supposes that I'm not in the category of people creating funny cat picture content. And the realization that perhaps I am more than I'd like is somewhat uncomfortable. How do you know for sure?
Same here, but I prefer Lua to Perl, and Lua's LPEG (http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/lpeg.html) compares very favorably to common regexp implementations. (There are benchmarks in the paper.)

It's based on PEGs, a different formalism than regular expressions. PEGs are more expressive - they're able to handle balanced, recursive structures, for example. LPEG is a nice middle ground between regular expressions and a full LALR(1) parser.
Vintage Seattle [some old pics]
I don’t like the way Hollywood portrays people in this thing of ours. The typical computer guy in the movies is introverted, socially inept, unpleasant and weak.
I would like to see a cooler, happier portrayal of us. I realize that our reality is actually countless hours of toil. But I wish movies would err on the side of cool rather than "nerdy"
It seems they are still fighting for control through the web browser, and its a strategy ingrained into their very core. I would think they would do everything possible to protect their cash cows (office + os) and limiting browser functionality to the least common denominator (IE) is the easier way.
Fair question. Two reasons (at least):

1. Git is much, much faster than Subversion. A real-life example: merging two branches with about 2,000 commits worth of changes (~250K lines added, changed or deleted) took over 6 hours with svn but <15 minutes with git. It's not just network overhead, our network is plenty fast.

2. Though you push to a remote master, that doesn't mean you can't branch locally. You can and you should; it makes it easy to work on multiple features simultaneously.

Then there are things like `git stash` and `git archive` that make life just that much better.
This shouldn't classify as clever, it should be standard practice. Supporting IE6 is more difficult than other browsers, and the usefulness is highly dependent upon the specific site's demographics et al, so putting the decision to the site owner and making clear that IE6 support translates to either sacrifices in other parts of the project or increased total project cost is very much the correct course of action.
I don't know what they owe me, but I do know what I do and do not trust them to do. And on that basis I decide what I will and will not share with them.

Which brings us full-circle back tot the point of the post:

When a third-party application uses FB as its authentication mechanism, it gives the appearance of asking its users to trust FB with everything they do on that application.

So yeah, I don't put anything on FB that I can't handle becoming public some day. That doesn't mean I want it to be public, but I wouldn't knowingly put something private on there.

And that extends to third-party apps using FB for anything at all. I can't ever imagine using a linked-in kind of application that uses FB authentication. I'm not going to put certain business contacts and my business relationship with them where FB might be able to scrape the data.

I'm not dating, but if I did I wouldn't use a service that used FB for authentication. Or a personal money management application.

And my message to third party apps using FB for authentication is to take this into account. I won't say "don't," you know your market, maybe they don't care. But at least have your eyes open to people who might think twice if whatever you're managing for them might be sensitive.
good points billybob :) I cannot wait until IE6 is no longer in our minds/OS.
This assumes you have readers in the first place. It's very difficult to build any kind of audience without promotion, especially in the beginning.
Actually, the biggest pool of IE6 users are people from poor countries running pirated copies of Windows XP with no access to automatic updates.
"casual Friday" is the worst idea ever. Is working somehow less important on Friday? No? Then why not make every day casual Friday.

(I am personally not bitter about this. I wear whatever I want to work, and if someone has a problem, I'll just go work for the competition instead. Needless to say, nobody has a problem :)
This comment is gold. Strongly agree.
This article is not specific enough. I highly recommend finding an Alexander Technique instructor in your area.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_technique

A good book I've read on the Alexander Technique is How You Stand, How You Move, How You Live by Missy Vineyard.
http://www.amazon.com/How-You-Stand-Move-Live/dp/1600940064
"In fact, they've taken the unprecedented step of putting the reddit team in charge of this entire campaign. This is a great deal of trust for an advertiser to offer, and we should both take it as a huge compliment.

So, how should we do this? If there's one thing I've learned in my five-plus years at reddit, it's that the direct and open approach works best, so instead of marketspeak..."

I think it's safe to say MS should've been aware that this was probably not the best way to respond to reddits questions.
perl -nle is a nice substitute if you need a bit more code or its version of regexps. This proved to be quite useful when working with multiple Unices who all had different awks.

Still, the One True Awk still has my favorite opening line in its "b.c" source file:

/* lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate. */
I have read the first 20 pages. Excellent! Very well done. Great advice. Fun / proven way to learn.
Thanks Zed!!
I was being a little facetious. There are a lot of "startup ideas" that should have been a quick script in the pastebin. Needless to say, they don't get very far, because most people would rather use that quick script they found on pastebin. Because it's free, and easy.
And yet, wireless Time Machines sell pretty well. And that's for backing up hundreds of gigs.

If your sync can run in the background, speed is effectively not a concern.
HP "PalmPad"
What is the price increase to add IE6 support? 100% more? 50%? Does it even matter, in terms of this approach?
It's already hacked according to Gizmodo. Now, if we could get 10.1 flash integration (meaning Frash) past beta 0.2 towards something useful we'd all be smiles.
Hey, can you tell me which ones you got stuck on? I can try give a bit of help either here or in the book.

One thing about those though is that if you can't complete them, then just move on and maybe mark it for later. You should try to figure them out for a bit, but sometimes you just can't and have to come back to it later.

Finally, make sure you have this latest version of the book. I added a small section in the beginning which talks about this, so you might have an older version.

EDIT: Oh I'm assuming you mean the Extra Credits. The lessons you should try really hard to do and figure out before moving on. But skipping Extra Credit is quite alright.
The Ultimate Code Kata [2008]
Taking up lifting as a hobby, especially squatting, has done wonders for my posture (although it is by no means perfect)
You're welcome. Remember if you run into errors, just submit a ticket for it on the learnpythonthehardway.org web site and I'll fix them up.
Interesting thing about this article is the stats are from 2009 census and show just how badly the recession hit American's. Covers income gap (increasing), poorest poor (increasing), commuting (descreasing - less people working) and lots of other fascinating and scary stats.
Most of the time, we use F# on the backend, using C# as little as possible. For web apps, that usually means the ASPX files themselves. For the MVC controllers, writing them in F# seems to work great.

The largest contention point arises when we pass F#-ish types to the ASPX page for rendering. It works, it's just that the C# required at that point can be sort of ugly.

Also, don't forget WebSharper, which provides a way to write all your client-side code (JavaScript) in F#. It handles all sorts of things, including async RPC calls. http://www.intellifactory.com/products/wsp/Home.aspx