skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even if you disagree on the exact number of people you need to test with, the key point here is that you don't need to have access to an expensive usability lab to get good feedback on your product. Just looking over someone's shoulder as they fumble their way through the interface you designed can be a huge eye opener.

My partners and I have been building a family intranet service (Kinverge.com). As soon as we had a working prototype together, we each sat down with various members of our family and asked them to perform several tasks on the site (register, invite others, add photos, post a message, etc.)

After the initial instructions, we kept our mouths shut and simply took notes. And this is important -- don't jump in and try to help when the tester gets confused or lost. Seeing the actions users make when they're lost is just as important as seeing how they got lost in the first place.

The notes we gathered during these sessions later helped us decide what changes to make to the site and in what priority.
Early-stage startups strut their stuff at Geek-Out
My brother (through his company) does in fact have a black AMEX card.

It is made of metal instead of plastic, and to his annoyance, does not always fit in machines that take credit cards because it is a little thicker and slightly larger.
I've been playing with GridGain lately. It's Java, but their API is really sweet. You basically implement a simple interface that defines the map/reduce operations and then your code will be copied to the cluster nodes through a peer-to-peer classloader.

In a recent test I validated a million image urls in less than a minute. In a small EC2 cluster running GridGain.

It's certainly worth looking into if you are interested in that kind of stuff.

http://www.gridgain.org
NVIDIA’s dim future
God!

Gojomo, is that really Joshua, the founder of Delicious and Memepool? I just guessed it when u mentioned the username in single quotes. ;) I wouldn't talk a word abt the algo then. :D
Website metrics != sales. Certainly can't be a bad sign for Apple though.
Learning:

You've missed the point. Learning C is not about imperative-style programming. It is about seeing one abstraction level down relative to your favorite programming language.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=235727

Using:

And C is not inferior to Java. They serve different purposes.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=235766
Tropical Island Vacations, Caribbean Vacations and Cruises
Detailed wedding planning advice for the ceremony, reception, and honeymoon
It's implemented in machine language somewhere. Programmers should know what a register is. It's implemented in electrons, too. And, some of the best programmers I've known were EE majors.

Don't get me wrong, it's wise to know your craft. That's never a bad thing. But it's foolish to use a tool that is, frankly, not as powerful.

Saying a tool is "powerful" doesn't mean "you can do lots of stuff with it." You CAN saw down a tree with a screwdriver. But a chainsaw is a much more powerful tool for that job. Yes, a screwdriver can do lots of things that a chainsaw can't, which only proves that it's a more versatile tool. The power of a tool depends on the context of the problem you're trying to solve.

I'm guessing that screwdrivers are used in the assembly of chainsaws. They still suck for cutting down trees. Same with C vs just about every other language. C is a fairly small step up from assembly. An important step, no doubt, but for most tasks that software developers face, especially on the web, it's not appropriate.
"Business isn’t a game, and I think some web entrepreneurs treat it that way."

I like to think of it as a game, a fun problem to explore. Helps to keep thinking fresh and flexible. Just a matter of defining appropriate conditions of success and failure (which may itself be a part of the game ;).
Wow... Linux gained 18% - nice. The numbers still seem pretty low to me. A close examination of Austin coffee shops would suggest that macs have at least 70% market share and Linux is at least 10% while bookstores have 80/20 split of OSX/Linux with Windows laptops nowhere near.

Meanwhile nation-wide numbers for UNIX-derived systems are lower. Damn you, Oklahoma and Midwest... :)

On a serious note, I wouldn't want Linux market share to grow above 10% and OSX - above 25%. Anything above will lead to these systems losing their essential properties: OSX will become bloated with shitty software, trojans and malware, and Linux won't be geeky anymore.

I'd like Linux to stay within 3-5% to ensure that we'll continue getting a decent hardware support, and Macs should stay around 10% to keep Apple hungry. Maybe at some point they'll finally switch default setting to gamma 2.2 and fix Finder, iPhoto, Mail, Aperture and other similarly dysfunctional softwares: kind of hard to recommend a Mac to a Windows-based photo enthusiast (especially Picasa user), he'll laugh to death after glancing at OSX which is supposedly superior when it comes to photo work.
They must know how to eat right in them parts where you live if 350 lbs is "a little on the tubby side".
None of the modern browsers, unless we're counting Epiphany, are written in C, and it uses a C++ rendering engine. Safari is an Objective-C / C++ mix, Firefox, Flock, Camino, Konqueror and IE are C++.
Ask HN: How important is to invest in DB design from scratch ?
I have an app in mind that I want to implement and can possibly do with basic knowledge of a DB. Is it a good idea to go ahead and develop it and come back later to optimize the DB.
PS: Also I was having a hard time to search for a Class being mapped to a DB<p>Example:
Class Person{
String Name;
String Age;
Person myFriends[];
}<p>user_table
name | age | {myFriends[]} |<p>how do you map the myFriends[n] to a DB ?
Good observation. I believe a similar concept is used in high frequency trading (in markets such as foreign exchange). So derivatives are not dt, but du where u is a surrogate for time in ticks.
You're crediting Atwood with saying XML should go away? He is like 10 years late on making that suggestion.
This is the sort of thing I would get yelled at for suggesting in elementary school.

Instead of acting like a small child, I think Google should just stall this in a higher court, or just not give it up at all. Nobody is going to go to jail, and Google has more than enough money to buy whoever they need.

Viacom lost a long time ago. Nobody is interested in traditional television anymore. We want it on-demand online, with comments and minimal advertising. You can sue whoever you want, it's not going to make anyone change the way they think. They can either slowly die, or they can embrace reality.

Have you watched traditional television lately? I made the mistake of doing so; there is about 25 minutes per hour of pure advertising. They play it several dB louder than the program, so you have to constantly play with the volume (I just muted it). Then, you pay $60/month to get it into your house! Why are they surprised that people are going elsewhere for the content? Who want to pay $25/month to watch advertisements!?

Anyway, this lawsuit shows that they are slowly dying. Google's data won't help them with anything other than "hey, people like our content, but yet they won't watch the ads!" They should already know that by now... so I don't see what anyone will gain.
A previous fix for FF2 had been applied after this thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=92629

Unfortunately, I don't think that fix ever worked in FF3 or IE7.

Also unfortunately, after some tinkering, I can't find an easy way in CSS to get the same effect in FF3 as in FF2.

The best I've achieved with a simple change is to cap the expansion with a 'max-width' on the PRE rule, like so:

pre { max-width:60em; overflow: hidden; padding: 2px; }

(And this still is glitchy, compared to the FF2 behavior.)

I think the main difficulty is in how TABLEs expand to the size of their cells -- it's easy to fix with a DIV-based layout, in my tests. (DIV-enclosed PREs are clipped the same in FF2 and FF3; TABLE-enclosed PREs are clipped in FF2 but grow the page in FF3.)

So my long-term suggestion: drop TABLES, move to DIV-based layout. (This might be a simple change in the ARC HTML-writing code.) In the meantime, add the 'max-width' to the PRE rule to minimize the annoyance in FF3/etc.
What do people do wrong in Java? I wonder if I'm making the same mistake with my Java-based Scheme implementation. I never looked into Unicode deeply.
Ask HN: what is wrong with asp.net?
I am new to CS and I don't hear a lot of hackers use asp.net for their web app, aside from hosting costs(win servers), what other disadvantage does ASP.NET has?
Kawa Scheme was already mature at the time this article was written. He definitely could have used it.
Is anyone sick of Opera asking web developers to do stuff?
I officially notified my employer of my side business this year. No problems yet.

But I'd say if you can quit your day job, do.
yay for capitalism
It's great if you want to spend 40k on it. And if you're spending 40k on a 1 seater car, why are you complaining about gas prices?
True, it is virtually impossible to do much of anything in Erlang without using a bunch of little functions. Immutability is a harsh mistress, but one that I've already fallen in love with.
Catalyst Business Talent
Catalyst Business Talent programme will drive recruitment initiatives across the Further Education sector to ensure that staff have the necessary skills to deliver exceptional teaching and training to their relevant sector
Biofuels have forced global food prices up 75% according to a World Bank report
I actually just decided to start learning Closure. I was really impressed by this introduction: http://clojure.blip.tv/file/982823 and http://clojure.blip.tv/file/982957. I've tried to get into Lisp a number of times (largely because of the arguments/enthusiasm expressed for it in Hackers & Painters), but have not found an implementation that seemed worth pouring large amounts of time and energy into. My first impression with Clojure is that it could become the first "mainstream" Lisp.
I just think that it's funny that this announcement comes on the heels of the "features are a one way street" posting...not that IE6 is a feature of any kind of course.
It seats 2, but the passenger sits directly behind the driver bobsled style, which is kind of cool perhaps.
Facebook is some dude's home page. The government is ... the government. I don't see why Facebook should have to open their API. If you don't like their ToS, don't use them.

With the government, you can't "not use them", so they need to make things open. Plus, since the government is something I pay for, they actually have to listen to what I want. Facebook doesn't get a cent from me, so why should they care what I think?
I think hosting cost is the biggest issue, especially if you reach a point where you need to balance load across many servers. There is also the cost ofthe development tools, although I think MS has some programs that allow you to get Visual Studio .NET for free or for minimal cost. Other than that, I think there is just a huge bias against the MS stack in the "hacker" (yes, ironic quotes) community. Having worked with asp.net, django/python and rails, I honestly don't see a huge difference between the three in terms of development productivity, but there is definitely a difference in hosting and software licensing costs. Because of that, I've lately been choosing not to lock myself in to the MS stack for any projects that have the potential to require massive scaling.
Ask HN: How does Amazon EC2 compare to shared web hosting?
Are multiple AMI instances run on the same physical servers? If so, does the load from one customer's server instance negatively effect all of the others on the same hardware? I understand that you can instantly spool up additional servers to dynamically handle load, but do those individual instances suffer from performance issues if they're loaded on busy hardware?
On the picture:
Guido van Rossum (the author of Python) uses MacBook.

Therefore the above comment implies that Python should work on Mac OS X.
This is the direction the automobile industry needs to take. Instead of trying to make the same old cars run on different energy sources like ethanol, electricity, etc., design new cars that will run on existing sources of energy more efficiently.
Richard Stallman on Bill Gates: "It's not the Gates, it's the bars"
If you really think this, then you have no experience running commercial software on multiple platforms. The time spent making software compatible across platforms is way more expensive than the money you gain from selling on that platform.

For example, I have some shareware I sell. Brings me about $3000 a month. When I took Windows 2000 off the list, revenues dropped to about $2700 a month. However, about 50% of support requests could now be replied with "Platform not supported" because I could finally use new APIs that were only available on XP.

Your idealistic dreamy eyed attitude will be tempered by experience at some point.
Well, I'm glad someone saw it, because google seems to have killed it :(
I haven't learned Unicode properly - but I will need to. What do you recommend? Is there a good book you know of, or some other way to go?
When Palm OS developer develops for iPhone without reading HIG (pic)
Poll: Would you have dodged the Vietnam draft?
I don't mean to call either fraction killers or cowards. I found this question often leads to interesting conversations.

(Apologies to the non-American audience who many not relate.)
Problems with C++
> But C doesn't have any mechanism other than exiting or returning a value that indicates "false".

Of course it does, in fact you just said it yourself - long jumps. Back in late 90s I worked with the firmware for the Point of Sale terminals, PIN pads, etc. It was written in C and its error handling was exception-based. Behind the scenes it was just a handful of long/setjmp wrappers, but it did nevertheless implement semantics of try/catch/etc.

Additionally, "exiting or returning false" are not the only two options, nor they even the most commonly used ones. At least in the projects that I was exposed to. Kernel code (e.g. Linux, BSD) routinely uses int as a return value and it still somehow manages to be both readable and functional without being "bloated" or using "weird API".

Yet another thing to consider is that optional exceptions (such as those in C++) come with a non-negligible performance hit, so it is considered an absolute no-no to use them in a "fast path" parts of the code.

> But I do think that C should be dying off now

But it just doesn't. Bummer :)
Will there be an updated ARC tarball drop with the latest News.YC code?
Michael Bay's Rejected "The Dark Knight" Script
A little offtopic, but funny nonetheless :)
Not to mention that the average hacker is usually far better equipped to manage a Unix flavoured server than a Windows server. With small companies who can't afford to have a full time sysadmin on staff, what you know is a powerful motivator. Windows server administration simply isn't the type of thing you pick up while using Windows, while the basics of managing Unixen is something you pick up while using Unix boxes.
This is a little offtopic, but funny nonetheless :)
I must say I'm enjoying OSX and am thinking of buying my first mac of some form soon.

I purchased a copy of OSX off Apple's site and am duel booting it on my notebook just to give the software a bit of a good test run before I commit a couple of thousand dollars into a machine, and so far the experience hasn't been half bad.
Well, my "data" is the same as yours, people I know (including myself).
The World’s Top 20 Public Intellectuals (2008 edition)
The full list of 100 is here: http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10...

or here: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/extras/intellectuals
"Of course it does, in fact you just said it yourself - long jumps. Back in late 90s I worked with the firmware for the Point of Sale terminals, PIN pads, etc. It was written in C and its error handling was exception-based. Behind the scenes it was just a handful of long/setjmp wrappers, but it did nevertheless implement semantics of try/catch/etc."

David Hanson's book "C Interfaces and Implementations" explains how this is done and provides (very high quality) source code you can use/learn from.
I thought the best part was that it was from 2006, that is how long this has been going on between viacom and google.

Its about time google just buys them...
Nothing is wrong with ASP.NET if your problem is building websites the same way you build Windows desktop apps.

If not however, ASP.NET is simply the wrong tool.
Making money at a startup and having fun are (thankfully) not mutually exclusive.

One could argue that the more revenues you get, the more fun a startup is.
I think the end of Frost's "Two Tramps in Mud Time" http://www.etymonline.com/poems/tramps.htm captures my sentiment about retirement

But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future's sakes.
I think this is incorrect for social software, where the dominant user interactions are between users, mediated by the culture. Traditional usability testing bares mainly upon user interaction with software. There are usually a limited set of goals for users, and so a sample of five will test many of them. That's not true for social software.
Music Therapy
Music therapy is a systematic and organized therapy and there are training courses to this end. Off the top of my head I would say that perhaps music would be useful to relieve stress or to put you in a better frame of mind, taking your mind off your problems; certainly it does that for me.
Yan Xuetong (#56) is awesome. I heard him lecture in China and asked him if there were any scenarios where a globalized utopia could arise. He said the only way that could happen is the Independence Day scenario (an alien invasion) but it would give us unity like nothing else.

This is the most recent publication I've seen by him (I have a Google alert for him). http://meiguofeilong.blogspot.com/2008/06/who-will-maintain-...
Well, libraries may be superficial, but I few times now I've started in LISP, needed something that I just can't find, can't build myself (I'm not that good) and switched to Python because I needed to get stuff done. I am slowly but surely assembling all the LISP pieces I need (CLSQL being the latest piece of the puzzle). But the truth is you can install Python, be doing something useful within a day and writing production code within a week. LISP requires much more upfront investment before you (well, me) can be productive in it. That's not a criticism of LISP itself, but the lack of a "batteries included" distribution.

If only ActiveState made an ActiveLISP...
Do college and grad school deferments count as dodging?
Google's C++ testing framework is now public
He could be running linux or freebsd on it.
Certainly creative! Interesting meme, having Michael Bay inspired screenplays that didn't make it.
This is how i feel as well. Talking about hosting cost, I believe with current VM technologies and the pace it evolves, it will become a less problem in the future?
Piet: a programming language in which programs look like abstract paintings
Slaves to The Process
Are multiple AMI instances run on the same physical servers?

Yes. A physical server is probably 8 cores and 32GB RAM, so an instance is 1/Nth of that.

If so, does the load from one customer's server instance negatively effect all of the others on the same hardware?

Not much, since CPU and RAM are not oversubscribed. I don't know about the disks and network.
Greek Food - GN Imports
According to the law, no. But, I think it may be a more complicated question than that. Most people had things they would rather be doing than wading through a jungle full of surly Vietcong.

I think the fact that graduate student deferments were ended in 1969 simplifies the question. At that time a student could be deferred for the term of his undergraduate degree, but would then have to properly dodge the draft afterwards (like President Clinton for example) to keep out of the war.

(Interestingly second lieutenants suffered the highest casualty rate during the war, so their deferments ended up putting them in a disadvantageous position.)
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

By the way, python 3000 will force every coder to at least make a conscious decision about the character encoding and will have no none-unicode strings anymore.'

[update]Speaking of the devil: http://sayspy.blogspot.com/2008/07/trying-to-make-sense-of-u...
I got fed up and decided not to make things work anymore with IE, when I realised I had a folder of little tweaks that I was including in everything called 'IE Fixes and Workarounds'
I'm curious to hear about the people that say no. Duty to your country? What makes me consider yes is the idea that war is an essentially human experience that may not exist for much longer, as we become more and more peaceful as society becomes more globalized. It is certainly not a good or romantic human experience.
Bad links? No way. Can it be true?
So if they continue being acquired and dying at the same rate a YC startup has a 24-28% chance of acquisition (depending whether you count the merged startup as an acquisition or a death).
Doubles as a coffin.
I love programming software and have been doing it for half of my life.

Whether I am or not by other people's standards, I always assume I'm a crappy programmer and never trust my own code until it stands the test of time.

For his list of items, I think it's really rare to find a developer who is as fanatically wanting to jump into those pitfalls. Most developers I know that fall victim to those issues recognize those drawbacks, but are too lazy or don't find it important enough to deal with at the time. I'm not so sure they're really as religiously bad as he phrases it.
Traditional evolutionary theory says that features are created at random, but they are not kept by accident.

I thought you said this was Aubrey's theory, not yours. Perhaps you should quote him or rephrase. Can you also site how lack of default traits also 'win by default' in evolutionary theory?
This article is confused about resveratrol. The important thing is that there is a super-resveratrol undergoing clinical trials, which they mention at the end. It's something like 10,000 times stronger than resveratrol.

Resveratrol itself is not economical to take in such high, effective doses.
Why Can't Microsoft Ship Open Source Software?
I stopped reading after it turned into a rant about how all software should be free. While I understand and agree with some of the complaints about Microsoft, the extreme 'commercial software is bad' position is kind of ridiculous.
Ah, this old chestnut.

First of all, I love the fact that Nielsen thinks you can quantify "usability problems found" as being on a measurable scale. To think you can identify "100%" of usability problems with 15 users has always cracked me up.

I completely agree with his suggestions of small groups of users and iterative design. However the problem with his approach is it's like a shotgun - he admits, you get several users to make sure you find the non-overlapping areas.

What I found is that while it's good running sessions with groups of 'naive' users, a few targeted, repeated sessions with individual users that match personas being designed for is incredibly useful, and produces results that are surprisingly universal. Not only does the usability engineer discover new things about users each time someone comes in, each time the user comes in they find something new too. Repeated tests with individuals is a method that is rarely covered except in perhaps user-centered and participatory design approaches.
Google targets people using screeners that have existing social networks and brings them in to trial new applications that make use of the existing network.