skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
MaxPhysicalAddress is more readable than all the above. Pike simply had it wrong, IMO, probably from having been immersed in a culture of poor readability for so long that he had become blind to some of it.
From a brief look at the spreadsheet, seniors (65+) much more often "used the internet today" than "use the internet."

Something is badly wrong with this data.
Unfortunately, half the screen (on a typical monitor) is not even wide enough to view a "modern" 1000px+ Web page.
Woah, The iPad Is About To Become A Video Game Console Controlled By The iPhone
The "security" aspect goes both ways. Owing money, which the vast majority of us will if we want to buy a house, is one of the principal insecurities of life. Given the current status of the housing market, that should be obvious to everyone.

Being forced to move out of your rented home seems a lot less severe than having the bank foreclose on your "owned" home.
Fantastic list -- thanks for posting that (stackoverflow link).
It's damn hard to stop using. Pretty addictive.
Gotta love this part: "And really IT, get with the program and stop wasting exorbitant amounts of money on equipment that periodically freezes and allows unauthorized access. Consider stepping outside your personal areas of comfort and the safe purchases dictated by popular culture. This system which you took months and untold thousands of dollars to implement, I have re-designed in one hour."
A great blog post from Tim Ellis on buying vs renting: http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2007/07/16/renting-vs-buyi...
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Politics

"In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely."
Wait. How long is a piece of string again?

10-16px sounds completely arbitrary to me.
I've noticed this even with normal laptops at the smaller end. If you're looking for a 15" laptop, you can find a lot cheaper PCs than the $1,799 MacBook Pro. But if you're looking for a 13" laptop with roughly equivalent processing power and weight, it's hard to find a PC laptop much cheaper than the $1,099 MacBook or $1,199 MacBook Pro. Some are considerably more, because while Apple prices the 13" at the bottom of their range, a lot of PC manufacturers price the "ultraportables" as a premium item.
>What makes you think that people can control their body language, but not their eyes?

I think it's harder to control both, a disparity between the two suggests something is amiss. Also, "the eyes are the windows of the soul" has some basis in human behaviour IMO.
I agree with that. (Well, except for the idea that it's practical to get rid of every last nuke.) We need to work together AND we benefit from having separate countries and borders.
I don't think so, "example.com/#search/lemons/p7" would route to search("lemons", "7").
History of Apple Tablets
>Surely someone would be interested in buying the remains of it for the technology.

...unless it, say, exploded.

Personally, I wouldn't want to pick up an unexploded missile anyway; there'd be no way to know whether it didn't explode because it doesn't have a warhead, or just hasn't exploded yet.
You could do either, but in this case, I'm going for URLs like:

example.com/#search/washington+news/p10

... to make it a bit more obvious that the number at the end is a page number. This is actually a real-world example -- it's the same route that DocumentCloud uses to run searches in the workspace.
Must read interview with indie iOS developer Rainbow Silo
Rainbow Silo was started by a single, independent developer with the goal of creating cool applications and games for iOS. Rainbow Silow apps include Almost DSLR, iPrivacy Manager, and iPocketMemory.
Best captcha ever
Yes. Who would like to eat together at Cambridgeside Galleria before webinno on Monday, Nov 29? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1887868
I think that these threads always end up being more about ideology than hard facts. There are a lot of people that enjoy not being 'tied down' and being 'free and easy,' which things like 'having kids' or 'owning a house' tend to prevent. It then becomes more of a decision to pursue a particular lifestyle than anything else.

That said, the reaction of the people on Hoarders tend to be defensive reactions due to not wanting to deal with the issue at hand (i.e. extreme procrastination). Which is probably why most of them pick up their hoarding habits after the loss of a close loved one (usually a parent). They don't want to deal with the loss, so they are constantly pushing it away, and not dealing with it.

{edit} This tends to bleeding into everything else in their lives. They live for the momentary thrill of acquiring things, while not bothering with 'the boring stuff' like cleaning their house, or sorting their acquired items, or even deciding which items are/aren't worthless.
Added link to the comment about Sammy. Basicly it said you shouldn't organize the whole app around faux-routes.

Didn't understand the downvotes.
Isn't the X-37B still in orbit? Could this have been a test for it (missile detection / destruction)?
It's still a good question: He's asking what extent hard drinking affects memory later in life. You don't need to be snarky about it.

I've read studies in which a brain damaged by long-term alcohol abuse has shown significant recovery after roughly a year of abstinence, though I don't have a citation on hand. You're probably better searching medical journals for that kind of thing, though.
It is often mentioned that it is good to ship early. And all the points obviously stand since we have so many working examples. However, my question is: How many products have failed because they were shipped to early? And does this happen often? Is there a way to found the ratio?

Could it be possible that we only notice the examples of success, and fail to recognize the cases where the product failed because it wasn't polished enough?

Is it even possible for a product to fail because it was released to early, or are there other (hidden?) reasons?
I was an early Twilio user and love the service (and them - some great guys there) but added to their existing ~$4m of funding, that's $16m of funding investors are expecting to get back (with a generous profit on top) sometime.

Can something like Twilio really become a $100m+ company? I hope so but my ignorance blinkers me to how this could happen..
Direct link to the person's contact page in question:

http://www.geee.net/contact.htm
They both limit internal network speeds also. EC2's limits are much higher than RS's.
One UI Doesn’t Fit All
How many businesses are you going to launch this year, James?! ;-) Seriously, though, this is an obvious win for anyone who's been eyeing up Unbounce.com, like me. The single site fee doesn't seem too competitive in comparison but for the multiple site, it's an obvious win if you want to roll out a ton of landing pages to test out ideas.
Russian LIDAR can detect alcohol fumes in moving vehicles
National Film Board of Canada: Start Watching
I'm not sure I like the way this is going.

A large part of jQuery's appeal is its modularity. The address-plugin already exists and seems to do the job very well.

In that spirit I'd prefer to see backbone stay as modular as possible, too, and have it integrate with existing, mature solutions, rather than grow its own knockou^Wknockoffs.
not to be judgemental but it seems like you are new to programming and have a bias towards the new languages because its mainly all you have used.

PHP is based mainly off C-syntax and although the $ sign for variables is something new (and not an issue to me), the "dot" symbol is extremely familiar for those that have programmed in C/C++. It makes sense that a string would use "dot" (think of ...) for concatenation and an integer or numeric value would use "plus"+.

Your points are valid but I think the syntax behind PHP is great, maybe it could be better at OOP when calling to functions (as one person mentioned) but I am very happy with it.
4 posts that shouldn't be on HN.
I think it's entirely appropriate to consider the negative effects of previous decisions even if one is unable to mitigate them. Choosing to ignore them seems like an unhealthy attitude which could contribute to future mistakes.
I suppose it's unfortunate in that a lack of competition won't push companies to develop exciting new search technology.

On the other hand, I haven't used it for many years and haven't heard anything good about it either.
How to think about your email statistics
I'm sorry to read that you've had a less than stellar experience with us. May I ask what happened?

-Sara at (mt) Media Temple
I'm intrigued by Monticello. Is that a source control tool ? Or is it far more than that. The author seems to alude to Monticello as part of the smalltalk package.
There is a lot more in his book, "The Practice of Programming" - http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/tpop/toc.html
Good recommendation - I'm going to link to that from the post as a corollary to the list from a technical/development perspective (vs. marketing/metrics focus).
To Fail is to learn
Waning, perhaps, but nowhere near the end of its life. Despite any waning, it still holds a large enough share of developers and enterprise deployments. Oracle does have the potential to screw everything up (they've already screwed up plenty, imo), of course, and anyone involved in Java right now has to be concerned.
Other than Razor (which is optional), not that much has changed and it is a pretty painless upgrade. Under the old way they used to version software, this is really more like ASP.NET MVC 1.5 SP1
It's just common courtesy to respond to folk who send you a cv. I've always done this and will always do it.

Even when I worked for a Big Name tech co., I worked with HR -- she was terrific and unique in my experience with HR -- to ensure that every candidate received a response. I'm also prepared to talk with rejected candidates if they wish. I understand this is a no-win, but it's just the civil thing to do.

And if any company failed to respond to me, then they'd go into the Little Black Book and I'd never buy their product or service again.

A company should hold its prospective employees at least equal to those of its customers -- they will, after all, have to manage and maintain those customers. So any company that treats its employees in this way, must regard its customers of worthy of lesser treatment, or just be cynical frauds. In both cases, who'd want to either work for them or do business with them?
Boston/Cambridge HN meetup
Isn't there a distinction between letting a single user export the emails of his/her friends and having an API method for this?
Telephony is one of those markets (like health care and education) that is valued over $1 trillion on a global basis -- turning Twilio into a $100M company seems totally plausible.
I was failing to find any of the documentaries by Alanis Obomsawin on Netflix, and was astonished to discover that the full films were available for viewing online by the National Film Board of Canada:

http://www.nfb.ca/explore-by/director/Alanis-Obomsawin/

There look to be some incredible things on this site that haven't seen available anywhere else. Any recommendations for hidden gems in here? Are there parallel sites for other countries?
Why not? Companies make billions upon billions of dollars every year selling voice service to businesses. Asterisk is still too complicated for most businesses, I have to imagine there is a huge market for easy to use voice apps.

They may not end up selling directly to small businesses, but power things like patio11's reminder service that then in turn are sold to the mom and pops of the world. OpenVBX looks pretty neat too, it's crazy how much businesses usually pay for this sort of thing.
it's ok to charge for GPL code! you just can't get mad when one of your customers wants to resell or distribute it for free.
Here's the experience of debugging in Seaside:

1. You reload a buggy app in the browser.

2. Oh noes, you hit an error: the browser shows you the stack trace.

3. At the top of the stack trace, there's a "debug" link: if you click that, the HTTP request causes your dev environment to pop up a debugger. No response comes back to the browser yet.

4. In the debugger, it's as if you had a breakpoint right before the error occurred: you can walk back through the stack and inspect the state of each frame, etc.

5. If you see the problem, you can edit the code - right in the debugger UI - and hit save. The stack will unwind to whatever frame you are editing the code in, and restart from the top of that method or block.

6. As execution continues, the HTTP response finally goes out, and you see the (newly fixed) web page come into the browser.

As someone noted in another comment: although I was the main developer and evangelist of Seaside for a while, I no longer use it or contribute to it (though many others have taken up the torch) but I can't tell you how much I miss this workflow.

(Edited for formatting)
The same was true in Elite. In Elite II you inherited (tax free) from a recently-deceased relative 100 credits plus an Eagle starship.

Despite the game's apparent freedom, it only gives you one option - to take the ship and go. You can't, for example, sell the expensive space ship, re-invest it into the fish processing plant you work in and use the proceeds to live like a king on the poverty-stricken planet.
Heavy alcohol use among teens, even those who aren't dependent on it, has been shown to damage prospective memory well after the alcohol has cleared from their system. The damage lasts for months, at the very least.
> python you can trick generators into turning synchronous-looking code into asynchronous

Example: http://dieselweb.org/lib/ or https://github.com/saucelabs/monocle

Although Diesel2 is much more interesting, with greenlets support. No more messing about with `yield`, since the blocking functions themselves force a context switch. https://github.com/jamwt/diesel
> Keep that in mind the next time you or someone else claims that they
> drive, golf, or otherwise perform some task better with alcohol's
> help.

The only time that I actually believe people about this is when they are
artists who claim that they can perform their art better on {drug}.
Though when it comes to things like {heroine,cocaine,etc} I tend to be
more skeptical.
Can technology end poverty?
If you have something typed up, it may not always come back. For instance, Facebook uses javascript-y input boxes, so if you accidentally back away or close the window, the browser will not restore your content. Also, a Flash game will not save your state, etc.
Interesting. Chris Matthieu gave a rockin' demo of Voxeo's PhonoSDK, a jQuery plug-in that makes building SIP-enabled Web pages stupid easy. Looks like there are some really interesting players in the phone space.
The next step is for a terrorist to put a bomb inside a TSA agent forming a mighty ouroboros of security-theater.
Absolutely true for some apps (and for those apps, in Seaside as in any other framework you can do the extra work to get bookmarkable URLs). For other apps, it's nice not to have to worry about this. For example, when did you last email someone a URL from your Gmail session?
tl;dr version: Apple has the volume advantage because it buys a huge amount of flash memory, displays, etc. that it can make products at price points other vendors can't compete with without cutting corners.
I would hope that the retain sufficient records to do so, and expect that they will. Whether that will get news coverage is a separate question...

And I'm sure that, regardless, some fraction will insist that it's a cover-up and continue to talk about it for the next decade.
Just a point: For that car and what you apparently used it for, a car co-op wouldn't work in any case. I doubt zipcar lets you take their cars to track days, even if they had a car you'd want to take. And at 26k miles/yr, I don't think a co-op would work either.

Rather than "trivially" making it to $1500/month, I think you pushed most parameters to the expensive side.

As a contrast, I have a 2001 Passat that I've owned for 6 years and do all the maintenance on myself. Over 6 years I'd estimate it's cost me $25k total, which ends up being $350/month. But then I've only driven 40k over those 6 years, too.
Google Buys Gizmo5: A Look Back
Belle Robe Style Junction | The Day Times
This has bitten me several times and it really sucks. The "Restore Tab" function doesn't restore the state of Flash applications and it doesn't restore content in some input boxes (like those on Facebook, because they are hidden by JS initially).

If you're in Private Browsing mode and this happens, you lose the whole session forever, and that just happened to me the other day. It was really frustrating. :(
Jet contrails from some angles look like missile trails
Poll: LastPass, 1Password, or other?
I've been using 1Password, but find myself in a windows-infested managed-IT organization (NMCI), Chrome is blocked, so I'm piloting lastpass on Chromium. I haven't convinced myself to walk away from 1Password, even though their chrome support is still lacking. Please discuss your pro-cons.
I really hope you let these morons know why you turned them down.
I could easily see this being like the classic "orange" captcha - block robots by raising the bar to ankle height. Actually testing the "correctness" of these submissions would be far more complex and resource intensive than typical captchas, and could weed out people who simply don't have a good eye for colour.
Press submit and you get a different (and more offensive) CAPTCHA...
http://www.geee.net/contact2.htm?Submit=Submit
Jet contrails from some angles look like missile trails: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1887890
His Life Was A Work of Fiction
Wait until you've done it enough times. As someone who's owned his own home for about 16 years, I'd be quite happy if I never had to replace a faucet, fix hail damaged siding, clean a gutter, etc. again. I look at it as one of the "necessary" evils of home ownership.
Please find the (apparently obvious) problem with the results. I keep seeing articles about how study after study confirms the alcohol/longevity link, so if you can find the common problem those studies all have, (very minor) fame awaits! :)
Probably the highest-profile dotcom providing a solution in search of a problem, I don't think they ever really settled into place.
I think "godisnowhere" is more an example of a straight-up badly chosen name (identifiers should not be complete sentences) rather than a case where caps are better than lowercase.

I'm not against camelcase and its variants, but there are a wide variety of naming standards using caps, it's quite possible to get mixed up between them and introduce ambiguity or worse (referring to the wrong variable).
Thank you, it's never worthwhile reading long-form Gruber.
I'm in Australia and the FedEx drop-off point in my city is at the airport. And I'm lazy and busy enough to not get around to doing things like that.

So after a few months of putting it off, it turned out that I would be in the US (honeymoon) and I decided to just deliver the tubes back by hand for a bit of a laugh. Drove out to their processing facility in LA, wandered around the corridors for 30 minutes completely lost until a woman seemed to know what I was talking about, and handed it over. Told her that I didn't trust FedEx and liked to deliver my international mail by hand.

Couple of weeks later the results were online.

To those considering it: as with those reporting above, it's a little interesting but not all that exciting - I guess that could be a good thing though. For $400, skip it, but if they run another $100 special price it's probably worth it if you're curious.
More than a few. Ribbit is the big one, but not getting too much press these days. Voxeo is for IVRs, but Tropo.com is owned by Voxeo and has a very twilio-ish API.

There are a few more smaller players.

And then there's the stealth project I'm working on with some people. Going to be quite disruptive...
I tried it and learned (something I already believed) that I do not metabolize caffeine normally. I take longer to metabolize.

That and I found some cousins on there.
Love it! Now you can actually have a pair-of-eyes working for you anywhere in the United States. Goodbye Fraud!
How many employees desire recognition for simply doing their jobs? I work with several people who feel that they should be promoted because they have managed not to be fired.
That Ask.com still has 1%-2% of US search traffic is astounding. It must be people using browsers with the default search engine set as Ask and not knowing any better.
Tech trips for those travelling to US (prep, bypassing content filters, etc.)
MVC3 + code-first from the EF4 CTP makes throwing together proof-of-concept apps very fast (and painless!). You don't have to do much besides design your models and you get a functioning site to start with.
Why 'Be Passionate' Is Awful Advice
Yes, it's a source control tool. Smalltalk doesn't store source code in text files, so you can't really use tools like git or svn to version Smalltalk. Monticello is a DVCS written specifically for versioning Smalltalk code.
Ribbit, the first Telco API that I know of, was sold to BT for 105 million if i'm not mistaken. So....I could see that happening again.
Also iPod/iOS compete as devices (a la consumer electronics) as opposed to competing as specs (a la PCs), which makes build quality and design much more important.
Could someone explain how the 'call/cc in javascript' from the article is supposed to be used?

function callcc (f,cc) {
f(function(x,k) { cc(x) },cc);
}
That is likely not intended so I guess it's probably inherent to how Xen and/or their I/O layer do the resource allocation.

I, too, have seen these freezes occasionally on small instances. If you think that is harsh then try one of the new micro's. ;-)

Anyways, I haven't had such a freeze last longer than a minute yet, and the instance would always recover. If yours does not recover then that would clearly be a bug.
At least one more. ;)
I initially liked Twilio but I actually went with Tropo for a small project as the ability to upload a Ruby script kept everything easy. No need to learn another language or even use a RESTful api. Just write the script, upload and you're good to go.
I remember them trying a lot of things, such as the Peek feature that Google is now using. Sad to see them go. But, like everyone else, I never used them.
Debt is only an insecurity if your income is insecure.

A renter with a long term lease holds just as much obligation as a home owner as far as that goes.

I would say that the risk of getting the boot from your rented dwelling is much larger than the risk of getting foreclosed.

The risks associated with foreclosure can be mitigated to some extent by the homeowner. Management of cash flow, pursuit of income security, adequate savings, all of these things are in the homeowners domain. Many many homeowners have secure incomes and live with extremely small foreclosure risk.

A renter can see the building sold out from under him and be out on his ear no matter what he does.

The bottom line is that this stuff leaves the realm of objective mathematical truth and enters personal risk profile and values very, very quickly. For some, income will have wide error bars and they need lots of flexibility. Someone else might have union seniority in a government job and be able to predict their income for the next twenty years.
1Password should work on Windows now: http://agilewebsolutions.com/onepassword/win