skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People only want to learn one thing. If there's a default way, and an optional way, most people will use the default, so you'll be able to expect it and learn it. If, however, everyone is forced to choose at the beginning (without a default), there will be a pretty even distribution of people with and without the feature enabled. In a case where this severely affects the usability of the browser for those who aren't used to it (e.g. those who expect to be able to use the beginnings of URLs in the smart bar and can't, and, vice versa, those who expect to use keywords in the "old bar" and can't), this causes problems.

For example, say you wanted to set up computers for public use at a school or library. Which way is it better to set the option? If it were a default/option pair, it would obviously be better to set it to the default, since people would be more familiar with it. If, however, it were just two equally valid options, which one would people be more likely to be familiar with? Multiply this by every possible [add-on on/add-on off] pair, and you have, perhaps, 1000 or more default browser configurations, any of which are equally likely to run into in the wild!

Anyway, on your first point, I think users need to be a little more sensitive to the fact that, if they don't allow themselves to be pushed out of their comfort zone every once in a while, their experience using their software (or anything for that matter) will never improve. If a feature worked crappily, one would never know it until they adapt to the "new way" enough to see how bad it was before. Until then, their comfort with the old way makes them much too partial to be a good judge.
When I find that I visit a site that often, I subscribe to the rss feed. I use keywords for searches: / for google, m-w for merriam-webster, and so on.
You seemed to have missed the point.

If Youtube's future planning involved using it as a distribution and advertising system for movie or TV studios (an actual business model mind you), well that's potentially shot out of the water with Hulu out of the gates with a very good site and team to do that.

Also as a destination site, Hulu has more attractive content, actual licensed tv shows and movies. Stuff that are technically illegal on Youtube.
Hrm. I wonder if PG has IP banning figured out yet.
That and plus to make sure Youtube doesn't ever lose the safe harbor context argument to create the legal precedent that may unsettle quite a few things on the world wide web.
I believe that restriction is due to contracts with screen writers.
Any hackers in South America? Invitation to lunch. Te invito.
Specifically, I'll be in Lima, Peru this week. I love talking to smart people wherever I go. Hacker News self-selects for great people, so I'd love to meet you if you're somewhere in Lima while I am.

If you're in another city down south, I don't think I'll be able to visit on this trip, but maybe on another trip I'll pass through and we can watch play fútbol. Tell me about yourself!

Oh, first a little about me: I like mathematics, I was born in Miami, and I have a blog (jperla.com/blog).
I rinse them off when i toss them in, no food sitting and rotting.

and everything is fairly neatly organized, a months worth of stuff is more compact than you think when everything is stacked and/or folded up. I have lots of storage bins and a large closet.
Firefox is Still Tops
Sergey's wife has a bad day: ordered to shut down by State Health officials
Cool, that's a really neat little site. I posted up my details.

It's slick and doesn't try to do too much. It does seem like it could use a noticeboard, and maybe a place to deposit code ... hmmm, starting to sound like SourceForge.
Bingo! Tables should be used for tabular data.
There is another reason to avoid the defaulting trap that is the subject of the article: you don't want something evaluated if it will never be used.

Python always evaluates the default values of arguments; this is done at parsing time. So if you define a function f(a=x()) and never call f(), there will still be a call to x().

The first work-around mentioned in the article (to assign None as a value, and test for None before setting a default), is the approach that I prefer when the default value is non-trivial.
Did not want to be anonymous in agreement, but felt strongly enough that I wanted to comment and yet did not have time when commenting to go into reasoning (only had a few moments before I had to go elsewhere). Hence, the basic agreement. Was going to elaborate more later (i.e. now) but now don’t think it’s needed as points have been made by others since.

...also, in the same vein one can ask what your comment accomplishes that a downmod would't have? :)
Oh man...this sounds similar to turbo tax online...when I filed my taxes for last year, at the end of the process I upgraded to the next level which was of course more expensive. Then the upgrade did not really help with the return and I decided to downgrade back to the standard personal level...but..oh no...I could not downgrade at all..WTF...and their site says once you upgrade you cannot downgrade...that's a boat load of whatever...but I would never imagine LinkedIn doing something similar...the error is probably temporary..
You don't spend $1.65 billion on a dataset. You spend it on eyeballs.

Eyeballs they got, though they haven't been able to turn them into money.
It's not often I agree with Cuban, but did you even read the post?
+1, and I hate these kinds of articles.

99% of this "profound" bullshit has been covered and recovered for hundreds of years by various philosophers and scientists. Get yourself an introduction to philosophy book of some sort and it will clearly lay out some of the most popular and lasting arguments.
I mean in that it can sold on to third parties.
I understand the reaction, but I have to echo the other commenters who say they've "gotten used to it". This feature annoyed me for the first day or two I used it. Then I began to expect this behavior, and actually began to use it. Now I prefer it.

That's just me, though.
Give it some time, I thought it strange at first but after a few days once it learned what I wanted most of the time it became very useful.
I think programming will come to the people rather than the other way around. the tasks a person is able to do without any knowledge of the nuts and bolts of machine to machine interaction will become broader and easier to use.
I would have titled it "The inherent problem of scientific theories if you think science is to establish TRUTH or to PROVE cause and effect".

This "inherent" problem goes away if you consider science as a process of finding better means to make better predictions.
You should visit Buenos Aires, Argentina too. There are a lot of software companies here, and lots of web 2.0 development too (also big companies have buildings here, ie Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, etc etc etc; Google has its Latin American offices in Buenos Aires too).

Check http://palermovalley.com/ if you are interested in Web 2.0 in BA.
LinkedIn Raises $53 Million at $1 Billion Valuation
I did. It was very linkbaity.
I've been itching for a decent VM manager for my Ubuntu Feisty. Any good recommendations?
and the reddit page says nothing about it being "invite only" like the TC page says. Maybe the writer just thought he was special?
" I think weirdness of "write your tests first" is one reason people initially resist writing tests ("I can't do exploratory programming!")"

That is one of my main gripes with Unit Testing and it still is. Similar to you I practice TDD like what? not even half the time? Well nowadays I do. But I have to practically force myself to do it. Perhaps give or take a few years I'll have it ingrained in muscle memory.
...if I pause to change audio settings, the first option throws away my progress without warning. Happened twice to me, doesn't make me want to keep playing.
Once again I find myself agreeing with you on a lot of aspects. I initially thought Unit Testing was a means to speed of software development time. But in reality it actually slowed me down a whole lot. But looking down the road 6 months to a year from now. As our product grows in design and new features. I can see the wisdom in how a little pain now can save me alot of headaches in the future.
Despicable Valleywag-like headline, hiding an interesting story.

23andMe and a dozen other California-based genetic testing services are affected. They might be able to resume sales in a few weeks. Also, California law apparently requires such DNA tests to be ordered by a doctor.
By not considering a company evil, I haven't said anyone is benevolent. I have a hard time believing nefarious acts are afoot here. I'd prefer not to see paranoia on HN.
They also must show that tests ordered on their sites have been at the request of a doctor, as required by state law

Does anyone else find this to be an absurd intrusion of the government in to the rights of individuals to learn about their own medical conditions? For those of you who live there, rumor has it, California has a pretty effective voter refferendum system....
The awesome bar is less than awesome. Definitely sticking with FF2 here.
Learning new languages: nerd in a nerd store
Firefox 3 Released - Sort Of - Security Fix
Not So Social: Google And Facebook Face-Off
This was custom-designed for the needs of all of the firefox download parties tonight to be projected up on the wall.

There's a party 2 blocks from where I am I could check it out.
http://thegenesherpa.blogspot.com/ has the best coverage on this issue, in my opinion
You know, a person can always CALL on a 'telephone' and speak to someone from LinkedIn in person. After dealing with a short wait period, you will get to talk to someone who will help you, thus avoiding the nastiness in court.
My small team (two network people, one sysadmin, two devs, one manager) gets a lot of mileage out of DokuWiki for project and systems documentation. It's fast, has good plug-ins, and stores pages in the filesystem, which we consider a plus because it makes backups and versioning a snap.

When we're collaborating with larger groups, though, we tend to pick Redmine by default. It offers a nice combination of ticketing, project management, and documentation features, without the learning curve of a traditional wiki or the deployment headaches of something like Confluence.
That only makes it look like FF2. It still uses the same annoying way of guessing what URL you want.
'Oldest' computer music unveiled
40,000 Call Centers Go Down in Pakistan, 1 Million Jobless
Not having any sort of URL defeats the purpose of having a history. There has to be (and already is) an in between. It's what Firefox 2 and every other browser has.

And according to my IRC conversation with someone on #firefox # irc.mozilla.org earlier, Firefox 3.1 will have the option of having. They even have the patches all ready. So why it's not in Firefox 3 is beyond me.
Programming languages worth learning?
If given a choice, which programming language would you choose to learn provided you only have time to learn one of them? C++ or Java?
That's a pretty astonishingly limiting question, but I would recommend that you go for Java, if you're only going to do one systems language. As a new programmer, (which I assume you must be) the "power user" features of C++ (pointer arithmetic, templates, operator overloading) are going to be more confusing than useful.

Really, though, if you only have time to learn one language, make it something you can get some real use out of early on, like Python, PHP, or Ruby. Learning C++ or Java alone could be more of an exercise in masochism than anything else.
I think it is pretty obvious: Reddit is releasing their own distro, where users can mod portions of the system up or down. On most systems this means you'll only be allowed to edit in vi or emacs (sorry pico!). Of course, that could change daily as opinion shifts. Oh, and an hourly cron job will come standard that will remind you to support Ron Paul and/or Dennis Kucinich.
to me this only becomes attractive a few years from now, when Snow Leopard + ZFS is out
Aren't we already seeing this with tools like Apple's Automator?
> Not having any sort of URL defeats the purpose of having a history. There has to be (and already is) an in between. It's what Firefox 2 and every other browser has.

Yeah, which is why that setting is pretty much useless. Also, when setting that property to 0, it causes the screen to flicker intermittently when typing in the address bar (at least on Mac OS X Tiger).
> But then you have to balance that with the overhead of supporting an "old" feature for the sake of old users.

That's the thing actually - supporting the old behavior in case of FF3 wunderbar is trivial as it's just a subset of the new behavior. Just restrict latter as this:

(a) search for a match only among the URLs
(b) match at the head of the URLs; skip "www." when matching if it's present

I'm not an FF dev, but this should hardly take more than a couple of hours of work, esp. if one is familiar with the code.
This reads like a (poor) freshman philosophy essay.
CurdBee - simple billing solution for freelancers
Cease And Desist: California Tries to Unravel 23andMe’s Genetic Testing
I like that Mozilla went out there and tried to change things around. I'm just wondering what the rationale behind not allowing the previous way to be used is. Don't suppose you know or have an inkling?

My problem with "awesomebar" is that while it does bring up the sites I visit often (which FF2 did, and given they're a small number of social/news sites; /., reddit, hn, facebook, nytimes, etc its not exactly difficult to list), the order they're listed gets mixed up every time I try to visit a site.

reddit.com showing up ahead of news.ycombinator.com when typing "news" for example doesn't make me like this new way of figuring out what URL to go to (guessing randomly? I'm sure there's an algorithm behind it but after using it since RC1, it still looks random to me) what URL I want when I'm typing the URL in the URL bar.
Well, it may sound strange and counter-intuitive, but when I am typing something in the address bar, I am typing a URL. Not searching God knows what in God knows where. I know that in FF3 I could be, but that's not what I am used to. So all non-URL stuff that smartbar throws at me is just a noise that I have to filter out.

As I said above - the transition logic for FF2/IE/etc users was not thought through AT ALL.

Given it's a smart bar, I expect it to be more flexible in its configuration, so that I could adjust its smarts as needed. E.g. it could have configurable weights that control how important a match in particular piece of data is. This way I would've zero'ed the importance of everything, but the matches at the head of the URL and happily went about my business without ranting :)

Again, this sort of flexibility is not a hard thing to implement nor does it pollute or burden the UI in any way. Why this or something similar didn't make it into a production release is beyond me.
When was the last time a rich man purchased a lottery ticket? The majority of lottery patrons are within the lower tax brackets. Maybe its because poor people are stupid, or just have poor money sense, (hence, perhaps, the reason they are poor:\) or maybe it is because they stand more to gain from a winning ticket; either way, it has a disproportionate effect on the lower classes and is a quintessential example of hypocrisy in our government and laws.
The Firefox Download Day
What more does a girl need (than a poem about an automated alert system)?
I like the "Paypal plugin". You can generate both temporary long-term and temporary one-time use cards. Very handy, and you have the extra protection of having it linked to your Paypal account, so if you choose to limit your Paypal balance to $100 you don't have to pull any tricks like you would with a bank account.
If your application is so large, it would be good to ask first if it really needs to be so. We favor small methods, which do only one thing. We favor two pizzas teams, which are small. Why large applications are not considered harmful? You might want to move some of your functionality into different modules, libraries or separate applications.

The false premise lying behind the 100% coverage philosophy is that instead of avoiding bad practices and being careful with your every step, trying to make things as obvious as possible, tests let you not to think about it. You can stop worrying. They work like a committee, freeing you from responsibility. Especially if you're a mediocre programmer looking for constant excuses.

Articles about tests are mostly abstract. Kool-Aid's hectoliters why tests are great, yet nearly zero discussion how to get them right. Tests are not created equal. I follow Rails blogosphere, which is a very test oriented community, and I don't remember too many, if any, writings about how to write good tests.

For instance, let's raise confirmation bias again. People usually write tests to make sure the things work as they think they should. I've not seen too many agressive tests that tried to check exteme cases, to, literally, falsify the method. If you deal with things more complicated than Rails controllers, it becomes the real issue.

I also try to perceive tests in terms of ROI. If you don't plan to make your application big, why bother? If you don't plan to do any non-standard things, why bother? If it took five minutes to come up with an immediate and obvious solution, why bother? If you change your frequently ("writing is rewriting"), why bother right now?

I'm not saying that tests are all bad. I just don't get the whole hype, saying "write tests, be happy" without raising all risks involved.
Can't beat free:

http://www.time.gov/timezone.cgi?Eastern/d/-5/java
ASP.NET: ASM to IL compiler
Unless you are signaling quality to potential mates I see no reason for showing status to anyone. Same sex signaling (among heterosexuals) has always confounded me, as well as old people (beyond reproductive years), and people with a ton of kids.

Beyond gene propagation why care?
Ask YC: Did I make a mistake LLC'ing in my home state?
Hi YC,

I'm starting a small online business developing and selling desktop software. I recently filed for an LLC in my home state of California, but I'm starting to wonder if that's a mistake.

Using SearchYC, I found out a lot of people incorporate in Delaware. But I'm not planning on taking any outside investments, this is just a small mom and pop shop.

Other than saving on the yearly $800 fee, I'm not sure what other benefits there are of setting an LLC up in Delaware.

Should I consider changing states?
Thanks!
Unfortunately, Steve has it all wrong. I appreciate his point of view, but his proposed solutions are just not right. To me, this move smells of lobbyists. I like Tom Goetz' response

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/06/attention-calif.h...
Yes; but I only posted the original title.
Recommended reading: Karl Popper. (There is a very good introduction: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/)
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/186-linkedin-just-wont-le...
By the same logic, you could argue mcdonalds has a disproportionate effect on fat people. There'll always be gamblers. Maybe this way some good comes out of it.
Steve takes it to an extreme conclusion, but I think whether he is right or wrong, his ideas are ultimately going to be carved into legislation.

Right now the bigger problem is education about genetic testing and genomics. There is a lot of work to be done in this space.

23andme and Navigenics provide reasonable informational genetic testing. But they are only so useful because they purposely avoid testing for high penetrance mutations. http://www.thinkgene.com/absence-of-high-penatrance-in-snp-g... High penetrance tests are the ones that are really medically important, and in the coming years of genomic medicine, Navigenics and 23andMe can only get so far without high penetrance tests. Unfortunately most of the high-penetrance tests are patented, but the patents will be gone by the time everyone can afford a real genome scan.

If you've had a 23andme test, you can actually dump the raw data and check yourself for some patented high penetrance genes. http://www.thinkgene.com/tell-me-everything-how-to-use-snped...
To my knowledge no mechanical watch even comes close to the dollar store quartz.
If they add a way to downgrade your account they might see a huge drop in revenue :-)
> For $5 you could cancel any one of a dozen major evil fee spammers

And for $50 you could cancel the CancelMe service itself :)
Yeah you're right, it reminded me of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance too.
Linkedin: $53M @ $1BN valuation - 23M 'active monthly users', $100M/year revenue

Slide: $50M @ $550M valuation - "134M global unique visitors/month", ..revenue?

Meebo: $25M @ ~$200M - ~2M monthly uniques, ~$1M revenue (I think - recall reading somewhere..)

What are the main driving factors behind each of the big value investments? The perceived quality/worth of LinkedIn's userbase? The fact that they're already monetising? ($1bn = 10x multiple on yearly turnover..)
Watches aren't really my bag, but some very wealthy people go nuts over them. I can sort of appreciate the intricacy that must be involved in making a mechanical watch that can add in a day of Feb 29th during leap years. But I couldn't see buying that even if I had Bill Gates's bankroll. I wouldn't buy it if it cost $100.

Most Patek's are not that much though. I think you can get a number of them in the $30-$50k range. I think that one is produced in very limited quantities.

But yeah, give me a $700 Movado any day. Looks better, is more durable, keeps time far more accurately.
Hulu also has movies. And YouTube gained popularity largely by hosting the copyrighted material that Hulu now does, though in smaller, less useful chunks that were constantly subject to DMCA takedown notices.

Hulu FTW.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delaware_corporation

theres nothing wrong with incorporating in your home state. there are just extra benefits to doing it in delaware.
I've never hand any of these problems, the awesome bar is brilliant. Sure I'm not entirely sure where the sites I use all the time are but that is what bookmarks and keywords are for. d for digg, s for slashdot, f for facebook. The awesome bar is brilliant as a tool for finding search results you are trying to get back to, you have search friendly URL's that are indexed quickly, I can navigate my web app if I remember any part of the URI. This will be a big call for search friendly URL's as identifying a page by the id number just won't hack it when I'm looking for something by subject. This is the biggest improvements from FF2 to FF3, just let it grow on you. The aesthetics here are following the function, this URL is easy to read.

Brilliant.
exactly, please superimpose a utility function on all epistemological problems in the future.
I use http://yubnub.org in the Firefox search bar for that. It has commands for nearly every search you could imagine. I'm a bit of a command-line-geek, so that likely factors into its appeal for me.
wat i hate happen is when i type in "p" it automatically goes to pornhub! m definitely not going to install ff3 in the computer down stairs.
So following this advice and the knowledge that police can lie to you in interrogation^Winterview (and not only there) I would do this:

1. tell the cop that you will exercise your 5th amendment.
2. tell the cop that you know that the police is allowed to lie to interviewee.
3. tell the cop that you will add the time wasted here to
cost that will be billed to him or most likely sued for in counter claims court.
4. tell the cop "that by detaining me here further you agree
to accept any and all such costs"
5. tell them it is their move.

do 3. and 4. if you got the guts if not do only the rest.

And to fill the silience whistle. (Preferbly the most annoying and catching tune you know).
Why would they need to raise only 53M if they were profitable? They supposedly take in 100M a year. Are they spending a lot more than that???
it's free money... why not?