skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the same vein, this applies to demographics outside the 'Tech' world too. We build several products for a film festival market. Our support for IE is very product specific even within this niche domain and not something you would risk generalizing without testing the hypothesis out yourself.

For example, two of our products are (i) A film submission form field and (ii) A schedule for the screenings at the festival.

With basic IE support for both, we noticed <3% of the traffic using IE for the "Submission forms" and ~40% of our traffic to the "Schedules" use IE for a festival in Phoenix.

In hindsight this makes sense. Most people submitting films are the filmmakers or their crew- think Apple's primary target market, hence Safari and FF is what we see a lot of. We've stopped incremental updates for IE on the submission form as long as it remains functional.

However, people looking at schedules are at their enterprise jobs possibly in Phoenix during the day and trying to figure out what films to catch after work. That might explain the high prevalence of IE.

While it is obvious in hindsight, these are not assumptions I would be willing to make without looking at hard data specific to my product. Regardless of whether it's Tech or Filmmaker centric.

Edit: Clarity.
If the majority of people used IE, would that be a good reason to forget about supporting other browsers?

I'd say it wouldn't; I reckon content produced for the web should always allow people the freedom to choose how they view it.

Not supporting IE6 is something I could maybe understand - but forgetting about IE7 and IE8, because of time constraints, is a maybe bit lazy.

It's not that difficult to use principles of progressive enhancement and a CSS resets script to iron out inconsistencies.
Hi! Full disclosure: I'm interning at Opera now. Site compatibility is a tricky issue, however it is one of our main goals. I'm personally working on OperaWatir, an Opera backend for Watir (duh). That means sites can take their existing Watir suite and run them in Opera. This should really help for sites like Facebook who have large Watir test suites and arn't currently targeting Opera compatibility. Official release date? When it's done :) However, you can read about it here: http://my.opera.com/core/blog/2009/03/06/test-automation-wit...
YouTube Leanback launched ahead of Google TV
I found that interesting as $8b of investments create 8K jobs. That makes $1M per employee, and man, this is construction, not hi-tech. Sure the material costs money. But the correlation of those two eights is interesting in my opinion.
There will always be hustlers a-plenty ready to exploit entrepreneurs.

A few examples from my years working in Silicon Valley from the legal side (where, unfortunately, a lot of this crops up):

In the days when founders were generally less informed than they are today, I would often see them fall prey to "consultants" who would promise to open doors to funding and the like in exchange for a significant equity stake in their venture, only to show themselves to be nothing but B.S.ers.

I have seen lower-tier VCs who cared not a whit about their reputations take control, fire the founders and do a 100 to 1 reverse stock split in exchange for modest additional funding, reducing the entire equity holdings of the founders to less than 1% of the company in one fell swoop.

I have seen founders sell in acquisitions, take their full compensation in the form equity in the acquirer that had to vest over 4 years but without acceleration protection in the event of termination without cause, be told that "we wouldn't do this unless we wanted you to succeed," and then get fired within a few months as the acquiring company took years' worth of work from them for what amounted to a pittance.

I have seen a young founder build up incredible value in a new venture and, after a few years of devoting everything to it and building nice revenues, take in a "partner" who was a "player" in Silicon Valley, only to have that person maneuver him down from an initial 100% ownership stake to 50% to 5% and, finally, when a $30M buyout is about to happen, grant to himself massive amounts of additional stock (all for bogus reasons) to put the original founder under 1% right on the eve of the acquisition.

I could go on and on but the lesson in all of these is that entrepreneurs should always be vigilant to ensure that the deals they do are prudent and do not expose them to this sort of exploitation - it can come at you from all sides.

Very nice piece, by the way, Ryan - I find your posts consistently insightful.
Good point - I guess that is the more relevant question. I'm not sure of the answer.
Direct instruction papers almost universally focus on test scores and not comprehension which is a serious issue.

If you are asserting that the standardized tests are not properly measuring achievement, then why are you critiquing the education method rather than poorly designed tests? It seems as if your problem is not that DI is failing to achieve the goals of the school, but that you disagree with the school's goals.

... the ability to solve problems and think critically in addition to knowing facts and formulas is.

Could you explain what this means, and how I could measure it?

if we are only going to allow scripted lessons...then why even have teachers? Trained monkeys should do just fine.

This is probably why teachers unions oppose DI.
Please write shorter emails
I've never heard of a negative YC experience either. I'd guess I've met at least one founder from roughly 40% of all YC startups. This includes some companies that have failed or been absorbed into other YC startups.

YC was/is certainly an amazing experience for us.
Thx--just Google search actually.
Four ways to build customers into your brand
Good luck getting DHH to code your Rails app...
I'm perfectly happy with the tools I use when programming.

The tools I use to manipulate images and photos on the other hand... they're big and clunky, force me to use constipated shortcuts, are tedious to install, cannot be run remotely (well, effectively), they crash and aren't that easy for me to extend.

I'm, sort of, working on the opposite problem: I'm tossing a few hours towards a way to manipulate images without the "IDE".
I love Opera too, but mainly b/c it's always been fast, and I much prefer their infinitely more flexible Multiple Document Interface (MDI) to tabs. I actually hide everything - the sidebars, navbar, etc, and browse using shortcut keys (mainly Ctrl-Tab to switch through tabs and Alt-menushortcutkey) and mouse gestures. Here's an older image of Opera and FF side by side:

http://imgur.com/R2Wod.png

I'm using FireFox now primarily b/c of Vimperator, but still pop Opera up every now and then to give it some love.
Ah, that's good news. I look forward to not having to launch other browsers!
Thanks. That was helpful. Who can help on how to get started with Linux programming? Is there any one for newbies and beginners?
Great news. Google Chrome and FireFox both are adding support for Web Timing API. This is great for web development community (posted updated accordingly).
>Within two weeks, I was writing code in that language every bit as good as my coworkers'.

Just cause your coworkers sucked doesn't invalidate the point. I challenge anyone to write good code in a new language after 2 weeks of learning it. You can hack, sure, but I've never seen anyone write anything respectable in a language they've only been in for 2 weeks. In the worst case they think it's good and it's hard to teach them how to do it right because they think they know it all already.

Also, if you claim to know the semantics but not the library of a language, you probably don't actually know the semantics. Corner cases matter.
I heard the same stuff in orientation and even as someone who was intrigued (my high school US History teacher was a former lawyer) by law school from a young age I went into it open to leave.

The first year should definitely tell you if you want to spend your life in a law related capacity. Personally I'm glad I stayed but it isn't for everyone and like the guy in the article has found it's a very difficult path to leave.
It does not follow from anything posted to this thread that education can only increase achievement by 10-20%. About the nearest thing to that you can say is that within the confines of the current system, the best teachers inside of it appear to be able to improve performance by 10-20%. But as the article and the movie notes, there are charters that spend 3x that and get dramatically better results.

The point that the article is making is that it damages the argument against teacher union lock-in to observe that the best teachers in the public school system can only produce a 10-20% bump, because it implies that the free-market hiring practices of charter schools won't solve the core problem. Meanwhile, 50% of all teachers, including (one assumes) several good ones, are leaving the profession early because conditions suck.
Disagree. I'm generation X. We all knew that we were the first generation to be worse off than our parents. We entered the economy when nobody was hiring, especially if you were a white male. Most of us were happy just to get a job. I was - get this - happy to get into the army. (Canada)

It's more likely than not that we were the exception to the rule, I'll accept that. But I believe that my generation overall was most certainly more humble than the current one.
There was a bit of discussion about a month ago, but nothing really came up: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1688972
Sigh... my original point seems to be lost arguing semantics with academics in this sub-thread it seems...
It depends on your target market. My start-up, http://www.MORExchange.com, targets mortgage borrowers. Real estate agents are an important referral channel.

We're currently in an invite-only beta. But among our few hundred users, we're definitely seeing a skew towards Firefox / Webkit and away from IE. That said, the combined versions of IE are still 40% of our traffic. And I'm fairly convinced that IE share will grow as our product enters open registration.

That said, we decided to abandon IE 6 support during development. Metrics so far indicate that this was the right decision. We're only seeing 2% of our requests coming from that abomination.

We're also not doing anything special for IE 7 & 8. They get the uglified version of the UI sans opacity, drop shadows, gradients, rounded corners, etc. I'm setting up analytics right now to see if browser version affects our conversion rate. I'm betting it doesn't.

Of course, we're not doing anything terribly unusual. We have no burning need for the canvas element, for example. So supporting IE 7 & 8 hasn't been terrible for us. I'd imagine that's a significant limitation for other start-ups.

We're also a traditionally funded company. So we have the luxury of being a bit more ambitious with our initial product. If we were bootstrapping and attempting to find customer fit, I'd probably just target the latest Firefox / Webkit.
I'm not going to address this point-by-point, because very little of it has to do with ease-of-use for either the consumer or the developer.

I'll give you this - writing for iPhone is certainly easier in the sense that you only have to write for one (maybe two) software versions. However, take a look at Tweetdeck's later response to the comments : that they had a team of TWO to deal with versioning. Sure, it's a bit of a hassle, but there are always trade-offs.

That's also not the only consideration. There are many factors - App pricing, prior programming experience, target market, etc. that play into making an application. Not only that, having one market and one system is not necessarily better, and it's definitely not a fact.

It comes back to the issue of competition; I'm not talking about Android vs. iPhone; I mean the competition between developers in putting out applications that are meaningful and easy to use. Neither system (right now) is inherently better, and I think that casting it in the light of integration vs. fragmentation turns the spotlight in the wrong direction.
I dunno, this sounds like a terrible way to develop. We often say coding is a marathon, not a sprint, but even then, it's a marathon that lasts months or years, not a few hours. And your brain is not a muscle, no matter how many superficial similarities there may be. The boundary between "stretching your limits" and "pushing into burnout territory" is not something you can feel very easily.

An interesting article on its own merits, certainly, but trying to translate this philosophy directly into an approach to mental work sounds to me like a recipe for burnout, not a recipe for extreme performance gains. And by the time you're done tweaking it to actually work on the brain, you might as well have just started directly with an approach tuned to the brain, starting with this stuff will only have hurt you.
I'd spend $700 on a truly good IDE, and so should any programmer capable of doing simple arithmetic. Calculate how much more productive you can be using the best tools available, then figure out how many hours at your bill rate it will take to make back that investment.

For something like IntelliJ ($$$, but awesome) versus Eclipse (free, but crap), most people will find that they break even in less than a week. Assuming you expect your programming career to be longer than that, it's not a tough decision to make.
I agree with you that 'ktsmith's argument is irrelevant; it is not really depressing to see students achieve in school simply because it turns the teacher's day into a drudgery.

I am wary of silver-bullet solutions like DI, though; not only might they not work, but they could also be just as damaging to classroom performance as teach-to-the-test standardized testing has been.
Thanks! We've been working for a while now on this at Urbanspoon.

There's more press on our reservation efforts here:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870369180457525...

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/20/urbanspoon-squares-...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/01/technology/personaltech/01...
It's hard to imagine a nicer compliment. Thank you very much :)
oh of course I'm already on call for the hardware stuff.. but I'm not the one who has to go down to the colo and find another motherboard to swap.

Heroku is really tempting me, but as you say they are charging me for it. $100 a month for SSL, another $100 for email delivery and then add on background tasks.. etc..
One day that guy is going to get laid off, and if his professional social network fails him, he's going to to really wish he spent more time turning his side projects in to successes.
These are absolutely huge issues. The school my wife formerly taught at received Title II funds to provide breakfast and dinner (in addition to the free and reduced lunch program) to 100% of the students at the school due to the 95% poverty level in the neighborhood. Having all of the kids eat breakfast in the classroom for the first fifteen minutes of every day drastically reduced the instances of "my tummy hurts" and nurse visits as well as improving participation and attention levels during the day. I thought it was funny at first because she complained about losing the time in the morning considering how much they have to do each day. By the end of the year there was nothing but praise due to the way it had positively impacted her classes.
Judging by your comments here, I'd recommend looking more closely into Engine Yard and Heroku so you can offload some/most of the sysadmin work. Contact both of them, let them know what your needs are and get price estimates.
I've only ever seen even examples using Dublin Core. I'd be really curious to see anything else.
Mountain View, Ca. Anybots Inc.
We are looking for a rounded web programmer to help build our site, program robots, and be awesome.
Anybots is a fun, casual and exciting place to work. Also we build frikking robots. We are small (<10 people) and shipping product in a few months so it is a really exciting time to join.
The next people we hire will have a huge role in shaping the user experience.
Send a portfolio of cool stuff you've made, and a resume (for the sake of tradition) to jobs@anybots.com. We prefer people who are available soon (product ships at the end of November) and are open to telecommutes (it is a telepresence company after all), but prefer a local person.
Brightcove preparing for IPO in 2011
Summary:

1. Write short well-formated emails
[ed] see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1808059

2. Snooze emails - http://www.followup.cc/
[ed] not a bad idea, but not in love with forwarding my personal/work emails to a 3rd party

3. separate tasks from emails
[ed] I think the wonderful thing about inbox0 is that with an Action/Waiting folder your emails becomes your task list.

4. pick up the phone
[ed] this works great most of the time, but can also be a total time sink.
I agree. And at what point is this ingenious, rather than copying something that's already been done?
In a few years at HN, this is close to the worst advice I have ever read.

I don't want to question the author's honesty when he's saying he's not a anti-social geek who never talks to other people, even though sometimes we're all oblivious to how we look to the world.

But if you follow that advice, you're going to be in real danger of turning into one.
Saying "Streams are built out of subscriptions ('following'), not 'friendship'" is something twitter got right over facebook is totally missing the point. Facebook is about real (meat-space) friends, not random geeky egomaniacs like on twitter. Apples to oranges.
====QUOTE

How come I can still have syntax errors? How come it is
ever possible to have a syntax error in a program? Shouldn’t the IDE at least be helping me to have a valid
program all the time? Finale doesn’t let you write a
measure with the wrong number of beats and then complain
when you push play. It just fixes it for you — “oh look,
you need a rest there.”

====/QUOTE

Oh Luke Palmer, no.

NO. The absolute last thing I want from my editor is for it to be modifying the code without my explicit request. Then if something breaks, I need to worry about whether I broke it or whether the editor broke it. (And yes, yes, I know, the compiler "modifies my code", blah blah.)
I think the author did not go the extra mile here..

He should have made the text/content a program..

For example, I have a recruiter android game that I sometimes send to recruiters when they enter my inbox...answers their questions in a neat way and still
allows me to poke fun at the process....

If I was a hiring manager(and I have been once or twice) I would turn him down without a 2nd glance.
Most of your questions can be answered within a link or two from the postgresql.org home page.

Who uses it: http://www.postgresql.org/about/users

High Availability http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.0/interactive/high-availabi...

It's a bit more complex than setting up a mysql cluster, but it's also less likely to be squirrely when things go sour. Also, having a good understanding of how the replication solution you are using works and why, means you can avoid some of the pitfalls it brings with.

PostgreSQL is a very powerful tool, to use it well requires understanding and skill and much depends on the workload of a given installation. Fortunately it's performant enough out of the box that you can get by with just putting it on a box and using the hell out of it at first. But at some point you will need to dedicate some attention to tuning it.
Google's suggestions sure seem to paint a clear picture though.. Shame the suggestions are at the bottom and not the top in this case:

Searches related to Generational Equity
generational equity scam
generational equity named runner
generational equity rip off
generational equity blog
generational equity complaints
generational equity m&a
Current head of Symbian Foundation leaves
If you mean my personal blog, Chrome is at ~15%, less than IE. It's only been up for 2 months though, so I wouldn't put much trust in my stats.

I think it's bogus because global Chrome usage is around 10%, according to the sources I linked to above. The fact that 40% of their visitors use Chrome now, does not mean that their potential future visitors will match that statistic.

Discounting a lot of future users that use IE based on one month's worth of analytics is madness.
Oddly, I have been thinking exactly the opposite - what aspects of IDE's are missing from graphics programs.

Among the features of IDE's that programs like AutoCAD and Photoshop lack are continuous error checking and validation. They provide little feedback regarding proper document organization or standards and specifications compliance as part of a typical work flow.

In addition, some IDE's offer direct visual feedback regarding user interface design along the same lines (though not necessarily to the same degree) as graphics software.

edit: I'm not saying that these features are impossible to implement, rather that implementing them is not feasible for the typical user(victim).
Well, "Linux programming" is a very broad subject. Do you want to do GUIs with Tcl/Tk, kernel modules in C? Scientific applications in Fortran?
Microsoft software head Ray Ozzie to depart
Did you even read what I wrote? This response is an utter reading comprehension failure from the beginning to the end. Seriously, this is maybe the worst response I have ever got on HN.
Microsoft goes monthly with 'Office 365' subscription deal
Inefficient.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacecraft_propulsion#Power_use...
If you have an faq with more than a few entries this product will make it much easier to browse and search. The search handles stemming and synonyms to help users find what they are looking for. It is also a content management system so it is easy to add/edit/delete without touching html or your website.
On the administration side it also has interesting analytics to show what people are searching on, what categories they browse and what answers they look at.
Can we keep these monthly? HN has been a really valuable hiring vector for us, and I'd like to keep giving it the attention it deserves, but if we put these on an irregular schedule not only am I going to miss posts and have to rush to put together posts at the last minute, but also the attention of candidates is going to get spread over more smaller posts.

(I also agree that it's going to get noisy).

I'm hiring, and I have an interesting new position open, but I'm not going to post about it until the November thread.
First, I disliked the iPad, but the main reason was the weight of the device. Besides the weight I think it is a pretty great device, especially with iOS 4. (Although I don't believe it is a laptop replacement).

So actually it is two devices I've used: The Archos Home Tablet 7 and the Samsung Galaxy Tab. The Samsung was way better. The Archos has a resistive display which makes it hard to navigate and a REALLY slow processor. But in terms of button size and general UI layout, both do a good job.

For me the big app draws are those you listed, videos, reading ebooks, but also general web navigation and maps.

The keyboard on the Galaxy is better than the iPad keyboard. In part due to the size. The same reason I prefer portrait sliders over landscape sliders for phones.

My use for a tablet is almost all consumption. This is in part why I think the 7" form factor is so great. I don't pretend this is a laptop replacement.

And the Galaxy tab fit into the pocket on my jeans, admittedly I have them really loose and they have pretty big pockets. But it will also fit comfortable in an inside jacket pocket or a purse.

But the price needs to come down. Even if I prefer a 7" form factor, I'm not going to pay the same price as a 10" form factor. I'll just feel cheated. But I expect we'll see good 7" Android tablets for $299 in the next six months -- if the Tab comes down to that price, I'd get it.