skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I was in college, many exams allowed the student to bring in a single sheet of paper with notes. You knew such tests would be hard, because they wouldn't be testing your knowledge (since you had that written down); they'd be testing your understanding.

There were apocryphal stories of years past, when the rule had sometimes been "you can bring anything you can carry" (this was decades before WiFi). Supposedly, one test taker carried in a grad student on his back.
Also, how about translating to other (programming) languages? Would you be interested in people porting the book, Zed?
> `git help checkout | wc -l` vs `(hg help update && hg help branch && hg help revert) | wc -l`

Excuse me, but comparing text readability and documentation quality by line counting is boldly incorrect.
Let's hope future test packets come with a generic, tear-off job application form accepted by fast-food chains and the welfare office.

WTF?

On the other side of the spectrum; Cambridge's A-Level course in pure maths didn't allow us to use nothing more sophisticated than a 4-function calculator. The test authority gave us trigonometric and logarithmic tables.

For English, you're given just three (3) questions. You had to choose two and write an essay response for each. You took 2-3 papers.

Here is the list of subjects, look at the curriculum for your favorite subject and remember this is for high-school students:

http://www.cie.org.uk/qualifications/academic/uppersec/aleve...

I tremble in fear every time I remember those days. I went to prep-school after 2-years of American high school and was crushed by the sadistic priestess that is British schooling.
Startup Weekend gets grant from The Kauffman Foundation
Nature.com blogs:Learn more of the world around you
You get to explore blogs from Physicists,Astronomers,Computational biologists
Some of them seem to be very popular/commented,some are just baits to get traffic..but nevertheless,this sure does give a different perspective of the world around us.. from startup acquisitions, Facebook/Twitter outages, and alleged press leaks!
It seems to me that installing Firefox is easier than risking an update to IE9, yet corporations won't do that either.
End users at large enterprise companies have zero say in the support browsers of that organization. These policies are put in place by their IT organization which in some cases manages all applications and patches that are pushed down to an individual's machines. In those large companies even Windows patches are managed in house and not through the standard Windows update process. I think those companies will easily stomach an additional charge for IE6 since they're used to paying for everything else. That said, I'm sure they'll use their size to attempt to negotiate themselves a better price.
Q:"sure you'll make a ton of money, but is that what you want?"

A: "yes, that will be fine."
Just keep turning up the dial every time you don't want to do the job. You'll make even more money, and have less jobs. The sky is the limit.
If you're testing comprehension, then having a page number doesn't matter. If you're testing recall, then having a page number hurts.

I mean heck, reading comprehension in standardize tests has the entire contents on the facing page! Get students used to the environment in which they'll be tested.
True. It is called GUAS (Grand Unified Arbitrage System) in DESCO. A highly configurable system where quants constantly try new algorithms.
I'm guessing higher capacity => over supply => loss of pricing power => lower revenue and higher costs
Is there a tutorial on learning simple one liners like this? I find myself frustrated after seeing simple and obvious solutions like the above, but can never bring myself to code them as such.
I think we should remember why IE6 continues to burden us. All those companies spending millions adding Citrix and MS Terminal services to their network many years ago need a few more to get their ROI back. In these cash strapped times I can't see an already over stretched IT department putting together an operating system upgrade for 600+ desktops.

I develop a web based app and it's a nightmare adding those awful hacks to get IE6 to play ball. However, many companies are stuck with IE6 and do you want to alienate a potential customer(s)?

Microsoft.. you were an arsehole.
Oh, and it has wifi too. Forgot about that.
The Wright Amendment [1] is a slightly different issue. IIRC the plan was to end all scheduled passenger service at Love Field when DFW opened. Southwest was started after the initial agreement and fought the restriction. Since then the Wright Amendment has been steadily relaxed, and it will be repealed completely in 2014. Additionally Southwest is not allowed to fly from DFW because of the agreement to end the Wright Amendment.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_Amendment
This is a great step for them to be taking as they're getting ready for 1.3 development (for the uninformed, 1.3 is mostly going to be for closing the massive amount of tickets/bugs that Django has accumulated, and generally cleaning up the code base with even more documentation). One of the biggest concerns brought up by multiple people at this year's DjangoCon was the process of getting something into Django's trunk as an outsider.

Great to see them addressing the issue head-on so soon!
TL;DR => Most users in large enterprises cannot get rid of IE6 even if they want to.

I working for a large company (100,000+ employees) in the US and we are stuck with IE6. We cannot uninstall or upgrade it without admin rights, which 99% of employees do not have.

A small minority of tech-savvy employees use Chrome or Firefox, but this is heavily frowned upon. Once when my hard disk crashed, our internal tech support team tried to blame the fact that I use Firefox instead of IE6 as the reason.
Great news, here's hoping one of the new patches will finally be a truncate template tag ;)
I think photos are accessible in http://youropenbook.org/
> Most recent at the bottom: because people read from the top down, I'm sure.

For one, most people is not all people: why not let us set the sort order?

And secondly, I too read "from the top down", but I want to start with most recent emails; and then when I have read them all (if I read them all) I'll know the whole of the conversation -- but I can stop at anytime and still have the most recent status.

If you start reading the most ancient emails, then if you stop before arriving to the most recent ones (because of a distraction, a phone call, etc.) then you have an "open" conversation in your head that is waiting to be completed. That will create a memory leak ;-)
In these cash strapped times I can't see an already over stretched IT department putting together an operating system upgrade for 600+ desktops.

You assume that it is the decision of the IT department. I would imagine that the IT department would have less headaches by updating
I'm waiting for Google to index social networks content.
Yeah, but if you mention Node.js in the title of a Hacker News post you're all but guaranteed to get on the front page.
Office for the Mac doesn't follow standard Mac OS X idioms either ... for example using its own spell check rather than the system wide one. Printing goes through their own dialog which can cause all kinds of issues. Excel's scrolling is not the same as scrolling in the rest of OS X (they followed the scrolling from Excel on Windows which is horrible).

The worst part is that I like to have various apps open in my dock, then when I click on them or switch to them with Alt + Tab I DON'T want them to open a new empty document that covers the entire screen thereby disrupting my thought process, and even if it did that when I open an existing document it should close the temporary empty document it just created (see TextEdit for a good example of that).

In Excel for example the only way to get the function toolbar to show up is to click the "Formula Builder" in the "Toolbox". As soon as I click away from it to format the text a certain colour the bar disappears.

When I am within a Cell in Excel, I can't use any of the Cmd + key shortcuts to accomplish anything, for example, selecting the entire contents of said cell.

Going back to the text editing part, I can't easily look up a word in the built-in dictionary with ctrl + cmd + d while hovering over a word.

Office for the Mac stands out like a sore thumb.
Right, exactly like this.

Though I had more success when showing 3 products (I split tested up to 5 products).
Ok, maybe. http: and // are two different things anyway; http is the protocol and // is the start of the path. (They (the
Chrome team) seem to put them in the same "useless" basket.)
I usually write out a bunch of names without thinking to hard about them and then try to read them. In this instance, given that you've already had showButton and shouldShowButton i'd probably look at:

result = buttonShown()
result = buttonVisible()
result = buttonIsVisible()
result = visibleButton()
result = !buttonHidden()

To a lot of programmers this would seem like a waste of time, but I'm with the article's author (and, I'd hope, other HN readers) in that it's time well spent.
Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site by Yahoo, It is a very useful link for improving website performance.
http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html
I've found that they have done just that at PHL. It wasn't easy to knock US off balance a few years ago and that's exactly what happened - on time, generally more friendly and they didn't manage to lose your luggage. During IRROPS (poor weather, mechanical problem, etc), its a lot easier to sub a 737 for a 737 than have to find a way to cram an A320's worth of people on an E170 or two.

Granted, the dynamics of PHL are a little different from the NYC airports, but Southwest seems to be effectively penetrating BOS.
If we determine that it's in their best interest to support IE6, we don't line-item IE6 support (i.e. we don't say IE6 will cost you $xxxx extra.) We simply quote them a price that includes that cost (i.e. your website will cost $xxxx.)

If we determine that support IE6 will likely not matter, we break it out as an extra line-item cost and give them the option to support IE6 by paying extra. We explain the facts of their situation and let them make the decision.

It's not about making them feel bad. It's just human nature. It's just a more pleasant experience just paying a price and knowing it'll just work instead of having to pay more than the regular price just to make it work.
For the past 2-3 years or so, its fuel hedging has actually had a net negative effect on profit, as their hedged prices were higher than market price for Jet A.
In my upper-level physics courses, where the exams were mostly derivations and intense problem-solving, we had a rough guide to exam difficulty:

* One sheet of notes allowed: expect to take close to the full 2 hours alloted.

* Open notes and book: expect not to finish at all, and recalibrate to 75%==A+.

* Take-home exam: feel free to spend 40 hours on this. No one in this class is going to get over a 50% anyway.
Why Germans have higher productivity and longer vacations
Just because they have a pirated version of XP doesn't mean they heard about Firefox or Chrome.
why does it suprise you? it's coming from a company whose latest operating system still doesn't offer A PROPER TERMINAL EMULATOR (you know, like putty minus the ssh) on the grounds of lack of demand from its customers.
> That's completely disingenious.

Explain how? I wrote down some non-exhaustive list of possibilities (I should have said “there might be” instead of “there probably are”; sorry if you misinterpreted my intent). What is my “preconceived notion”, please? ... Unless you’re suggesting the “tl;dr guy“ was being disingenuous? The original answers were 70%+ marketing fluff. If he was overzealous, well, I can’t much say I blame him.

> First, it does answer the question IMO.

How is “The way to achieve same markup across various browsers and various implementations of rendering engines is through the W3C with comprehensive standards test.” an answer to the question: “why not build on webkit?”

The two are at best tangentially related. (Hint: it’s possible to both work with the W3C and make comprehensive tests and build on Webkit. Look, Apple and Google are both doing it. Ergo they had some other reason not to build on Webkit. Ergo they didn’t answer the original question.) If Mozilla or Opera gave that as an answer, they’d also be dodging the question. If the question is stupid, they should just say “we don’t think that’s a relevant question”, instead of making a non-answer.
Seems like a learning opportunity here. Could this have been handled differently? Maybe something like:

BIGCO asks for info/demo, you oblige. BIGCO is pleased, asks for more discussions, Q&A, etc. At this point, you present an NDA/Non-compete.

Certainly they could say "no", at which point the outcome is the same as it was here. Or they say "yes", at which point they have a little more skin in the game, and you have the law on your side.

I don't know if this is the answer, but it seems like a good discussion.
On the CS course I did we had a few "open book" exams where you could pretty much take along anything you wanted - these were by far the most difficult exams as you were generally given rather open ended design questions where having a set of notes with you didn't really help that much - unless you were familiar with the relevant concepts and strategies involved you were going to fail.
Just like everywhere else, they'll use what comes with the OS.
Improv as a Way of Life
Office Snapshots » Inventionland Offices
I've made the same suggestion to my company and we are going to adopt a pricing policy for IE6 in our future product releases (B2B). The bottom line is that it costs us more to support IE6 and it's a sunk cost. We've eaten the cost for a long time because we care about making our customers happy no matter the circumstance. However, on the verge of IE9 and HTML5, supporting IE6 is starting to show measurable effects on our development velocity, capability, and agility which impacts all of our customers regardless of browser.

I suspect many IT depts and software companies are eating this cost and it reduces the impetus to upgrade browsers. Business cares about the bottom line and they won't consider changes unless they see line items that will affect it.
Take the limit of this scenario and you get a single job that pays more money than you'll ever need, thus leaving time to do whatever you want.
Of course I enjoy various forms of entertainment.

I feel like everyone is trying to drill down into why I feel that having fun is bad or wrong or why I don't enjoy it, when I've repeatedly said I don't feel that way.

kiba: I think building is still a lot better than watching though.

The original point to which I was replying, lest we forget, was that building something (even something which is explicitly ephemeral) was "better than" mere entertainment like watching TV. The commenter didn't say that he liked it more, or that he was more entertained by pretending to build than by watching TV. He said he thought it was better to pretend to build than to watch TV. I merely asked why, but no one has actually offered an explanation.

Why should I regard building this ALU, or building a full-scale mockup of the Enterprise D to pick another Minecraft example I saw yesterday, as a better form of entertainment (presuming the same entertainment utility, I guess) than watching TV? What reasons are there to say, "Playing Minecraft for X hours is a better use of your time than regularly watching television"?

It seems to me that they're basically equivalent (leaving aside the learning component as the original commenter did when he spoke of building), and I'm confused that there seem to be a bunch of people who feel that it's more morally upstanding or something about playing Minecraft than watching TV.
Here's the article I remembered:

http://www.troyhunt.com/2010/08/aye-pirates-be-reason-ie6-ju...

Interestingly, some specific countries (namely the Phillipines and Indonesia) have a much lower IE6 usage than their equally poor neighbours, due to a very high market share of Firefox.
Same for me.

But the upsetting part is the attitude of the Chrome Team, who says "if you don't like it just use another browser".

Well, there are lots of things I like about Chrome; this seems too small a detail to stop using it. An option buried somewhere would make me completely happy.

"Too many user choices are bad", certainly; but advanced options are a different thing from decisions every user would have to make.

For now the only possibility is to download the source, set a boolean somewhere in the code, and compile your own version. How crazy is that?
I believe that's how Mac OS X handles the bootup progress bar.
Watch TV and Movies on any mobile device with ViO
I still want an option to default open the reply at the bottom of the message instead of the top
Careful statistical computing: part 1
The Future of Business Cards.
Reviews of dub, bump, and contxts.
While not good, that is part of hedging. It's basically an insurance premium for a policy they never had to collect on.
Apple's segmentation strategy, and the folly of conventional wisdom
Has anyone made any good stories about their web apps?
Any examples of those that have?
Thanks for the insight. Fortunately, this is not core to our offering, it is really a marketing avenue to have one of the larger sites in the world using something front and center. Regarding the burning bridges comment, nothing negative was done on our side, but the level of professionalism was low on theirs and I don't feel this was just an oversight. We had unreturned emails at the end. My impression was they were incredibly responsive with immediate returns at the start, then at some point they decided to build it and communication stopped. I wouldn't consider it a negative experience if they had simply said at that time that they were not interested, but they dragged things out another month which was of little utility. Will be interested to see if our unique features end up in their offering since the dev team was pretty excited about certain things. It is fine really, everyone copies everyone else and our work is derivative too. But it's a little different if you are seeing something before release. This was not intended as an attack on MS just to let people know what the experience can be like and most importantly to get the right contact at Yahoo which it seems like we may have now!
Instead of the environment in which they'll be living?
Somebody would give a shot at explaining why (most) Brazilians were singled-out in this example?

Most people who don't live in a sedentary society probably still have good posture and maintain their natural skeletal alignment. I don't know if this applies to all of Brazil.
Oh man. NYT exposure (for http://badnycapartments.com ) and their website can barely handle it and/or has no real content...
I often train into the BWI Amtrak station, so if you happen to ever see a tall white guy with a reddit/breadpig/YC/threadless shirt (I don't have a lot of diversity) -- say hi!

And then we can lament the often crappy service together.
That doesn't really address the original question though does it? In any case, you're still not out of the woods. Here are some examples of things we deal with as an international VOD site:

* Multi-currency support (without Braintree helping us it would have been impossible at our volume, customers DON'T like currency conversion fees).
* Non-language localization issues.
* Local legal issues (we couldn't offer subscriptions in France due to their bass-ackwards public policy)
* Global film rights issues
* The fact that films are known by different titles in different countries, even if they are both English.
* 24-hour user cycle, no good time for maintenance, have to think harder about when to schedule email communications/feature launches, etc.

Not that that stuff is so terrible, but it does end up introducing a lot of work you haven't anticipated (eg. what happens to account credit when users move between countries), and you're still not really localized.
The biggest reason I hate voice calls is that they're random and surprising. I like to be ready for them. Texting, email, instant messages let me reply to them when I can or when I'd like to get to them.

Also, rather than say texting is better, as a CrackBerry user I'll call out BlackBerry Messenger as a much better alternative.
The UK Government decided that it will stay with IE6 for the forseeable future:

http://www.hmg.gov.uk/epetition-responses/petition-view.aspx...

Claiming:

Security: "Complex software will always have vulnerabilities and motivated adversaries will always work to discover and take advantage of them. There is no evidence that upgrading away from the latest fully patched versions of Internet Explorer to other browsers will make users more secure. Regular software patching and updating will help defend against the latest threats. The Government continues to work with Microsoft and other internet browser suppliers to understand the security of the products used by HMG, including Internet Explorer and we welcome the work that Microsoft are continuing do on delivering security solutions which are deployed as quickly as possible to all Internet Explorer users."

Cost: "It is not straightforward for HMG departments to upgrade IE versions on their systems. Upgrading these systems to IE8 can be a very large operation, taking weeks to test and roll out to all users. To test all the web applications currently used by HMG departments can take months at significant potential cost to the taxpayer. It is therefore more cost effective in many cases to continue to use IE6 and rely on other measures, such as firewalls and malware scanning software, to further protect public sector internet users."

Pretty hard to argue against without deteriorating into a "no it isn't", "yes it is", which gets us nowhere.

So with the UK government, and it's 'standards' for it's various departments, standing firm, cautious businesses will follow the same path as well.

The more websites that drop IE6 support, the less people will use those websites. Facebook and Youtube are fairly safe in ignorning IE6 since that makes it easier for businesses and government departments to stop non-business use of their infrastructure.

Talk of raising prices to cater for IE6 suit me just fine. I've been dealing with IE6 since it was launched, so I'm fairly fluent in dealing with the issues it has. It's part of my job as a web developer, to build websites that work in web browsers.

Supporting IE6 isn't a big deal. It's all about clean separation of layers, progressive enhancement, and a decent understanding of IE6's foibles. Unless you've chosen to use a framework or code-generation toolkit that gets those basics wrong, and prevents you from fixing the corresponding HTML, CSS and JavaScript layers.
John Mullins describes a lightweight technique called the "long interview" in The New Business Road Test. I've only used this seriously once. The results of my trial provided good insights but were not as definite as I'd hoped.

Another method I heard from a startup marketing guru is that if you have a large number of users running a free or pre-release version, you should ask them, "how disappointed would you be if this product were discontinued?" You have product-market fit when a significant portion answer that they would be "very disappointed."

I've also had the impression that feature requests are not a particularly useful metric by themselves. The fact that you have conflicting feature requests probably indicates that your market is highly subsegmented. It might be useful to try to map these subsegments demographically and need-wise.
I'm floored that Steve doesn't realize people love to complain, and that giving people an outlet to moan about their bad apartment is all the incentive they need.