skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks Steve! Like I said before, I've gone fixed return and/or cash where I can. And I'm working on the planning constantly.

Unfortunately I have a ton of money in 401k type investments where the selection of investment vehicles is limited (and all are performing poorly). It's hard to know whether to cash out and take the tax hit assuming the portfolio loss will be higher- roll over to funds/management that offers more choices/etc. Or one of the other myriad of options.

I'm a programmer, not a financier- so it's hard to find good objective advice with limited exposure to the field. It's hard to figure out who is trying to make a quick buck with their advice on offer, or to actually help "regular" investors like me.
Good points. However, the benefit of the supplier and customer can coincide. If it's easier for 37signals to make their products, they can lower prices or add extra features or add polish or something.

Maybe they consider ie6 support a feature, and they think their customers will prefer some other features instead.
and as a joke, it makes light of something causing people pain

That's what makes it a joke. If it didn't cause pain (at some level), no one would care enough to laugh.
Umm, yeah. But it doesn't originate from there.
why can't they just let people install firefox, and use ie6 for internal apps, and firefox for external apps?
There is "making a better website" and there is "making a website come higher in search rankings" and the only way to do the latter without the former is by gaming the system.
Google didn't guess your url. So the way you've set up the question also answers it: safe unless you happen to expose a link to one.
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But Evite is way close to "invite" -- and Evite is going to have a pretty hard time showing that it has ownership over all derivations of the word.
http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/cpr-20n1-1.html
The fact that seasteading is more realistic really says something.
How I wish I could do that as well.
benefit of the supplier and customer can coincide

Most customers understand this and are willing to go along for the sake of a valued supplier. If they said, "We need you to upgrade to make life easier for us to provide for you in the future," most would say OK.

But when they say, "IE 6 can't provide the same web experience that modern browsers can," inquiring customers want to know what that means before they commit. My comment wasn't because I disagreed with 37signal's move, it was because they never provided any supporting data.
They are likely banking on IE6 users also often have FireFox installed too. Chances are they won't loose any usage over this and I believe that 37Signals has an amazing ability to generate hype they will see more customers not less.

Myself, I have a lot of nearly computer illiterate people using my system with over 30% IE 6. If I can't get something to work in every browser that people use I just don't use it.
This is just laziness. They should support IE6 until it is the minority of installs on all machines.

37signals has always extolled the mantra of usability. But, this move puts them entirely against that. You need to work within the constraints of the user, and one of them, unfortunately, is IE6.
Those guys are lucky to be able to do that. Our user base is still 35% IE6.
I don't think it's so much a left-progressive thing as a baby boomer thing. They are about to retire, and want to relive their glory days.

As I recall, it was primarily baby boomers describing Iraq as "another Vietnam!!!" 2 weeks into the invasion. "We haven't won yet? It's a quagmire!"

Oddly, when comparing Obama to JFK, they never seem to remember that JFK stole an election, fought one war incompetently and started another one that turned into a quagmire ("the original Vietnam!!!"). JFK does compare reasonably well to a contemporary politician, but not Obama...
Semi-transparent *.png and ":hover" support and lots of Javascript and CSS bugs
While, yes, it probably is more convenient for 37signals than it is for the customers, it would be beneficial for the customer going forward.

There are a lot of CSS hacks that need to be done for IE6, which makes developing annoying and tedious, and takes away time from developing potentially better features.

Also, they can start writing code that capitalizes on better standards support and newer technology that IE6 does not have, giving the users a better app to use.
So there are no GUI frameworks on common-lisp.net/projects? And suddenly SWIG doesn't bind to CFFI?

I appreciate your concern, but you seem somewhat ignorant to the number and quality of software libraries available to most common lisp implementations. There are excellent GTK bindings and Objective-C bindings. I'm not sure about what's available on the Windows site (although I guess I should learn, given the events of this week).

And as for the community, you have me there. The Lisp community is indeed fractured and weird. But, uh, at the end of the day I think this is a wash. People do great things in unusual languages all the time. It's not like EngineYard or I have a massive Erlang community bolstering our efforts on Fuzed and Vertebra, but we're making progress and doing what I consider to be good work.
Doesn't increasing the comfort levels in the workplace to very high levels make people sleepy?
One shouldn't need to include common knowledge as supporting data.
Does it matter which one it is in the end?

If they used the first line, I feel like the customers would be less inclined to upgrade and be averse to the idea of upgrading. "We're the customers, you should make life easier for us."

The new browser technology will never take off if people don't start switching over, even if the use some finesse in their wording.
I wish people included intellectual diversity in their quest for universal diversity on college campuses. There is a good movie about this:
http://indoctrinate-u.com

It's from the guy behind Brain Terminal, whose videos are hilarious:
http://brain-terminal.com/posts/category/bt-video/

Thank god engineering departments exist. If they didn't, I'd question the need for most people to go to college. $200K to earn $25K/yr at a non-profit - doing work you could have done in high school.

I went to a tour of Stanford recently. The tour guide mentioned the increases in tuition. I asked what they went to. He didn't know. I know most research labs are funded by a combination of government grants and undergrad tuition. What about the rest?
Not a groundbreaking idea, but definitely takes the pain out of creating your own framework :)
that's funny, it made my morning :)

In a high school expository writing course I was required to write a parable. As with most assignments at the time, I wrote it during the last 20 minutes of the preceding class. The topic I came up with was 'always check for TP before sitting down.' I think it had something to do with an airplane crashing, and the man in the restroom who didn't check for TP was the only one who didn't get a parachute. I don't know. Anyway...always check. It pretty much solves the usability problem of TP rollers.
I see your point but would argue the foundations of a language should be simple enough to test in a fashion like this. Perhaps this particular test isn't good because numbers are skewed from optimizations that don't reflect the languages abilities. A full application will have many, probably more, design decisions made that aren't necessarily a reflection of the language too.
Clarify this?
Aren't most people here fans of his to some degree? I mean, I don't accept his writing as The Word of Landru, but I thought most people found the site due to his writings and linking to it?
Outside of the safety of URLs (which, in my opinion are not terribly secure); you really should set up a robots.txt file, so that you don't have a repeat occurrence of this.
I kind of wonder if PG/YC would reject the top karma people out of hand as time wasters:-)
Where did you get that from?

I clicked through the links on that page and the most recent month had this:

http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2008/April/browser.php
If it scales yes, why not?

If it doesnt, well no ldo.

How long would it take for Google to implement something similar?
You know, I do not write software for Windows 2000. They are about 10% of my market, but I don't bother testing on 2000, because I choose to focus on the XP and up market. Nobody even questions this policy or finds it controversial. Why should a website not also decide to focus on 90% of its users so that it can make a better product?
Of course it is faster than Java in some specific micro benchmark. That's what micro benchmarks are for!

Now try building something really big on SBCL that takes advantage of that quad core box. Huh. What do you mean half the Common Lisp libraries are not thread safe? :-)
The issue though, is that we had thought that the address wasn't exposed. We're still baffled as to how the address got exposed to google, but we're assuming one of our employees must have done it somehow.

That made me thing though... can you trust your users not to expose their private URL addresses? Aren't you trusting it to them, and if you have a user without internet experience signing up, what happens if he submits his private URL to google and makes it public? Doesn't that create a security hole?
I read this in Reader's Digest: "No matter what people say about the United States, immigration is still the sincerest form of flattery".
There tends to be a very fine line between "laziness" and "increased productivity". Having to spend umpteen hours supporting legacy browsers can be seen on both sides of that fence.

From an operational perspective if they feel that this won't have too extreme an impact on their customers I think it makes a ton of sense from a productivity standpoint.
Of course. We got lucky this time, it was just a robot, which is easy to fend off with robots.txt. But what if it was a user who did the same thing?
A bowl of blue M&Ms, two ponies and a banana.

Am I the only one who is tired of this WhatIsFaceBookWorth discussion? Who cares.
GM: 6 billion
Facebook: 3.75 billion

At least they are more sensible now and dropped it from 16 billion. But it kinda makes sense, youtube had less traffic and was more resource intensive and it went for 1.5.
It's exactly this attitude that has given IT the black eye that we still haven't recovered from.

What's "common" to you may not be "common" to others. Especially your customers. Stop educating them and die.
Which is my point about the safety of URLs... If a user is authenticating to your site, why not use a session to track whether or not they are authenticated?
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Some dial-up users wish to stay that way
Huh.

So do you think it's better for most users if they can fix bugs faster, respond to support requests faster, build new products, add new features (<gasp>) etc? I think it is. And I think blowing off IE6 will allow them to server other folks better.

Time is always allocated somewhere-- the time they save by giving up IE6 support can go to more constructive/forward thinking pursuits.

Only 37s has access to their web stats-- if ie6 is vanishingly small within their paying userbase, it's a smart move.
I feel like the customers would be less inclined to upgrade and be averse to the idea of upgrading

Not my experience. Customers will generally do whatever it takes to insure a good supply from a good vendor.

new browser technology will never take off if people don't start switching over

True. So what's so hard about telling them why you want them to do something?
Yea, I'm wondering if it's actually safe to use URLs instead of authentication.. I guess not
IEBlog : IE8 and Trustworthy Browsing
Thank you. Now we're getting somewhere.
SAML, JAAS, & Role-Based Access Control
There is no such thing as a "private URL" that is hosted on a public web site. You need to augment the URL with something like:
- A server-side authentication scheme; so if the URL is visited, it can't trigger anything important without a password.
- An expiration mechanism; so that after a certain amount of time, a particular URL has no effect even if it is "visited".
- A cookie; so that the URL only works if visitors are people you expect (because they have the right cookie on the client side, and someone like Google would not). Cookies are actually another way to implement expiration, too.
Static URLs? No.

Dynamic URLs? Maybe.

[Edit: When I say "dynamic", I mean dynamic to the current session, as you would see in a continuation based framework. I do not mean dynamic as it relates to a piece of data.]
Why should a website not also decide to focus on 90% of its users so that it can make a better product?

Because some people just don't want to leave a dime from every dollar on the table. That's all.
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Does anyone have an archived data feed from twitter?
This probably exists online but I've been unable to find it. Does anyone have an archived public data feed from twitter? I'm looking for a large body of twitter public messages. I think this would be a useful data set to do research on.
In response to this and raghus, I can't help but think checking where people are moving to is more of a marketing test than relevant information about happiness.
It includes Hacker How-tos as well. It's a great list.
Ask YC: Doing first TV appearance tonight.  Advice?
Just got a call from a local producer to appear on Chicago Tonight to discuss whether this is Chicago's "Shining Moment." (Obama, Olympics etc.). I am developing new news and commentary magazine for the city (not a traditional startup, I know) at WindyCitizen.com. Never been on TV before. Anyone done this sort of "expert" appearance before? I'm a little nervous and wondering how best to wedge in a pitch for my project.
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what's even worse is people thinking current liberalism and conservatism represents the full range of political thought. the democratic-republicans used to be one party, and this party would have strongly opposed the direction of current politics. In Essence, both modern parties have turned into what used to be called federalists.
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Agreed on the customer-base point.

I'd guess their ie6 visitors are <3% - and I'd wager making stuff work for ie6 requires a disproportionate amount of their time, which could be spent serving the majority more effectively.

As a comparison, RescueTime's ie6 visits weighed in at about 3.7% over the last 30 days.
That's why aggregate numbers like this aren't that useful. When a big industry like tech in '00 or housing/finance now have a bust, it throws averages off even if other sectors aren't very affected. Tech in Chicago is strong now and I've turned down great job offers.
Hopefully the winner will be webkit. With iPhone, Android and Nokia S60 all using webkit for their browsers users will become accustomed to better mobile web experiences, like iphone.facebook.com. This may pressure manufacturers to switch to webkit to also let their users use iphone web apps, leading to a more harmonious thingy
They can be made pretty secure for those purposes. Most likely what happened in your case was that one of your clients/coworkers/other posted such a URI in a blog/forum/other that Google spiders. As a rule of thumb, GET requests should never add, destroy, or alter data. Spiders won't* follow POST.

Here are my thoughts on making these URIs secure:

First, always have such a URI on a 72-hour dead clock. You send the URI to the user and it's good until used or 72-hours later. Then they need to generate a new one.

Second, make it two factor. Rather than having something.com/reset_pass/12345, have it be something.com/reset_pass/{user_id}/12345. Just another level of protection.

Third, use base 62 numbers (0-9, a-z, A-Z). It's something any browser can handle with no special chars. Remember, base is more important than length. A 6-digit, base 62 number will go to greater than 56 billion different combinations. If someone guesses from one of 56 billion numbers, holy sh*t do they deserve to break in. If you're paranoid, make it 10 digits and get over 800 quadrillion combinations. No one is going to brute force that and 10 digits is still small to display.

Fourth, you can rate limit by IP address. Set it high - like, 100 attempts per hour limit. Why so high? You don't want to piss off users who are, well, stupid. And to get to 800 quadrillion making 100 attempts per hour would take millions of years - heck, let's say you're so high-profile that they'd put a farm of 100,000 IP addresses on it you're still looking at over a million years.

In many ways, these URIs can be made more secure than passwords since most passwords won't be as random or strong. There are some caveats:

These URIs will show up in browser histories and your server logs. They are one-time secure things. Once the user has used it, the next time they need such a thing, they need a new URI. If someone gets into your logs, they can see these URIs and reset peoples passwords unless they expire on use. Same with browser history.

As I've mentioned, they can be posted. Users post things they shouldn't all the time (including passwords). Have it time out so it's only a breach for a short period.

Don't use it as a replacement for user/pass. Just don't. If the same URI stays good, it is insecure.

Good luck!
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A crossword puzzle maker with an ajax interface.
Of course it creates a security hole! You are vulnerable to 'reply attacks'. It seems to me that you already know the answer to your question, but are struggling in a last chance to refuse believing the reality.

Putting any sensitive information into a url is bound to be exploited sooner or later. Liberally, you can hold the info in urls for the duration of user session but anything beyond that is totally unwise. For the reasons you already mentioned.

Other possibilities for unintentional exposing of your personal ulr include:
- Users who have google/alexa/amazon/etc. toolbars installed on their browsers, they browse to their personal page, or maybe bookmark it, and alexa/google immediately realize that it is not indexed so they start crawling it.

- Other phenomenons like Google Desktop Search crawls and caches all user bookmarks.

You should not use http GET method to perform unrelated operations. If you want to offer a delete option to your users, use http POST method. For authentication purposes, i absolutely recommend using HTTPS with POST method.
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It's exactly this attitude that has given internet forums the black eye that they still haven't recovered from.

Stop being harsh with people, and don't tell them to die.

-----

Sorry for the mirroring; I know it's often done in spite; it's just irresistibly amusing; and seriously I don't think it's good to tell people to die.
Programming parallell systems vs parallell computers
There is so much talk about concurrency and parallelism these days.

Well Erlang is made for concurrent systems right? Not multiple cores.

Clojure

Scala

What other languages are made for programming concurrency? And are they made for concurrent systems or multiple cores?

What are the differentiating requirements between such languages?
Don't get me wrong, I didn't say the pricing is unreasonable, and you are providing features Analytics doesn't have. I'm just saying that it's hard to compete with free, which I'm sure you're already aware of ;)
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I think that activism not political is the keyword. As a current college student, within most of the conversations that I have had with other students, they seem to be heavily opinionated and "passionate" about politics and their ideals but lack any real knowledge over the topics or positions they discuss. In a half hour drunken conversation, you could turn a "hardcore democrat" into someone who believes they are actually more libertarian leaning (which I do believe most inherently gravitate towards when questioned over their positions).

Nowadays (even thought I have no clue what it was like in the past), the youth support politics as a fashion statement rather than a representation of their ideals. They seem to fall in line with the parties and mindlessly support the policy that they believe they should. Their knowledge of politics only goes to the extent of what there five minute glance on the news says it should be, which is quite saddening. I am not stereotyping, but the trend I see most is that individuals fall in line with what ever there social groups expected political stance would be, the "frat-boy" types all tend to support republicans because they support the troops and are against gay marriage, the "socially conscious intellectual" student strongly supports democratic principals (or what ever the author of the book they are reading at the time supports) and so on and so forth. Politics for many at the college level seems to just be an extension of their fashion or lifestyle, or simply what they think they should support because of the image they portray.

The truth is very few actually give a shit and will continue to not care until there cushy lifestyle is taken away or they are oppressed in some way or another. Most likely at that point it will be too late. I know I come off as a cynic but sometimes it is just too easy in this world.
Happier than this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjaFsXOS-y8

Not likely. And no, I'll never tire of posting that--not 'till the whole world has seen it.
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This is really interesting - shows just how little we know about how the brain processes thinks like speech... especially the part about her not realizing she was speaking any different - basically, her "baseline accent" was adjusted to her post-stroke accent.
I just stumbled upon this, and I'm posting it here for 2 reasons:

1) A lot of people like to listen to music when they're coding, and this definitely does the job

2) I think it's an excellent example of something that "just works". I'm impressed with both the concept and the execution.
This just reinforces my impression that Carsonified is more of a marketing shop than a web development shop - they had as many PR people on the project as they did designers and developers combined??
While it's probably not, doesn't this ring anyone else's bells as a phishing site?
I think you misread his post. Pretty sure he meant:

"If you stop educating them, you will die."

At least that is how I read it.
Just an expression to emphasize how important it is to keep educating your customers, especially if you're in tech.

Sorry.
Do you know where to find that data?
if only the math were that simple. Chances are that focusing on 90% of the market != 10% decline in revenue.
Apple will also be dropping IE6 support in their upcoming MobileMe service. A very consumer oriented product.

http://www.tuaw.com/2008/06/23/mobileme-browser-requirements...
"I don't want any upgrades and I don't want to pay for them. It works perfectly now. If I want anything to change, I'll ask for it and I'll pay for it. Why should this be any different that anything else that I own?"

But with hosted apps, you don't own (or license) anything. You're paying for access to something that will change over time, and may go away.

The ability to snapshot your environment and stand still while the world moves forward is dying. Even if you stick with desktop software (where you can install version 4.5.2s1 and stick with it), if it has any connectivity features, a vulnerability will mean you have to upgrade sooner or later.