skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Isn't that more of a QA problem rather than a usability problem?

Also the business side of usability is "are we designing for an 80 year old man demographic?" If not, it's hard to justify his concerns.
"In the group one level up from yours, your boss represents your entire group. A group of 10 managers is not merely a group of 10 people working together in the usual way. It's really a group of groups."

one fundamental difference between managers one level up and beyond and programmers is that peer collaboration amongst managers is much-much-much less common than peer collaboration between programmers. This is inversely proportional the higher you go up the hierarchy. it seams to be due to the fact that managers have to deal with that one extra dimension of that programmers don't have to. Apart from managing their own bosses and having peers, they also have the extra dimension of managing their own team or group.
What have you needed that you couldn't find?
Why Silicon Valley Need Not Worry About Increased Regulation
Perhaps a simple version could be implemented in "a few lines of Perl" but the super redundant distributed version like Google's would be a bit more.
You must not have read very carefully, because nothing in that article said anything about "commercial" software being bad. His points about Gates and his unethical and harmful business tactics are right on the money.
It's his religion, and no matter how mathematically intelligent he may be, he's as blind to rational thought in that area as the most zealous Imam.

There are different types of intelligences, and it seems pretty obvious that he is incredibly strong in some and weaker than the average Wal-Mart shopper in a few.
Cool! Seems like I can teach my 2nd grade friends some 'colorful' programming.

Are others allowed to contribute to this language? I would like to do so in a few days... (well... I have my exams going on now, so in the vacation for sure)
Commercial software largely means proprietary, especially in the area of web applications. It can have APIs and interact with other programs much the way Windows does, but it is proprietary nonetheless.
235 MPG.
Web hosting a downward trend?
The interesting thing is that it could be all sorts of things, chat room replacement being just one of them. However, as the article says, they keep disabling the features that make it special, so eventually it is going to fail.
We've found a brief interview where you can ask what they thought of certain things was very helpful afterwards too.

We also do usability on the cheap, using ScreenFlow (varasoftware.com) which is only $99 compared to $1500 or so for Morae, which seemed to be the industry leader in usability testing. I think the analytics side, which was the big difference, is overrated and unnecessary.

We're planning on writing to the ScreenFlow folks to show them the results of our tests, since they didn't seem to know of any users using it for this yet and it could be a good secondary market for them to get into...

I'm also curious about Silverback (silverbackapp.com) but wasn't able to get into an early beta spot in time for our testing. It actually looks really similar to ScreenFlow in any case.
This list has been completely skewed by Turkey; it should be "Turkey's Top 10 Public Intellectuals."
You are asking all of the wrong questions. Learning a proper web framework is the best way to catch up the the community. I recommend Django (visit djangobook.com and djangoproject.com).
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Aim higher: at some point you may want to move a file in Finder or create an email attachment that can be opened by a PC user! Soon you may want to attempt to see photos online without distorted colors and reduced contrast!

Those things are something Apple users apparently don't really do, that's been my impression so far. If you're into photography, try coming in with 4-6GB worth of RAW photos and process them without leaving a million of copies all over the file system in various idiotic "libraries", since Apple doesn't believe their users are smart enough the grasp concepts of a filesystem, folders and files.

And from a programmer's perspective try mounting an SSHFS via Finder's "connect to server..." or try doing anything FTP... Or join the army of hackers combating "acid blue" in Terminal, or meet your new habit: Alt-tabbing through a giant list of running apps that don't even have a window open, like Skype or Adium or always-stuck-in-there Preview.app

Or you could try something truly basic, like selecting multiple non-adjacent files with a keyboard or resizing a window, or switching... ok I'll stop. My list of OSX limitations and shortcomings is about 80% of Windows' issues. When I'm on a Mac I just fire up Safari and hide inside of it, there is no point of using anything else: it's like every consumer app bundled by default was designed for a 4 year old: pretty but useless.

People tend to like bright beautiful objects, pretty looking women, brown puppies and OSX, but watching them doing actual work on a Mac is like watching a tortoise racing.

Some of the issues can be fixed/corrected through obscure or not settings/tweaks or installing/purchasing non-Apple software, but not all. With that in mind, check out Linux/Gnome if you're after getting shit done.

P.S. I'm on OSX right now, enjoying awesomeness of Safari's HTML rendering and coolness of MBP's keyboard/screen combination: if nobody critiques, they won't get better. :-P
List Of People Who Need To Stop Writing Software
... which I consider a major loophole in GPL. If google is using a single line of GPL'ed software in their "Big Table" implementation, I demand to see the source, even though it's not "distributed" to my computer.

Matt, free software is the major reason why PG, YCombinator, YouTube and Google are possible: this is why starting a software company is so cheap these days. Without it you'd be paying "enterprise-grade" fees for shit like a web server, operating system, complier, editor, bug tracker and commercial libraries for reading every imaginable file format or speaking any kind of protocol, plus a thousand other software things an average business needs to exist.

Perhaps Stallman sees something you don't, partly because you take it for granted.
Why? Isn't a two way street between browser teams and web developers a good thing?
He seems to dislike Gates more than you dislike him, yet he managed to avoid personal insults against Bill's intelligence, despite his own limited (according to you) mental capacity.
1) yes. 2) no. 3) no. ...there is a minimum guaranteed performance level for each instance type. for small instances (1 core), each user gets a minimum of 1/N of the system resources. If you fire up an extra-large instance, you essentially get the whole box to yourself, including I/O.

see: http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/2008-02-01/Develope...
I think one reason why a lot of people are hesitant to charge money is that it completely alters the relationship with your users. Paying customers deserve a much higher level of service than free users.

This is probably just another good reason to charge though. Taking other people's money is a commitment to providing service to them in exchange. You can't have too many good reasons not to give up.
This is how I want all opensource project web sites to look…
Google trends is deceiving. I can only assume that the values shown are a fraction of the total number of searches -- according to Google trends, "linux" and "windows" have declined significantly in the past 4 years, while "firefox" has stayed relatively constant since late 2004 aside from spikes when releases occurred.

If I'm right about the plotted values being fractions of the total number of queries, the apparent decline in "web hosting" is probably just an artifact of the internet continuing to expand from the computer-literate to the computer-illiterate: Those of us who would have any reason to care about web hosting are simply being outnumbered.
click on 'joshu' 's user name.
No, I actually like how transparent they are about bug fixing and communicating with developers.... Plus their rant makes sense....
Okay, then it's a matter of word choice. He actually was talking about 'proprietary' software.

"But Gates didn't invent proprietary software, and thousands of other companies do the same thing. It's wrong, no matter who does it."

That is an outrageous statement.
Yep, if you do some background it got a lot of coverage in the Turkish media, so the entire list vote wise got really skewed as far as ranking (the FP team chose who you could vote for, but then it was done the will of the people, or at least the will of the turkish people).

The 2005 list is a lot more balanced:
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/intellectuals/results.htm
In depth: The Pirahã tribe (Number-challenged Amazonians)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=235862 reminded me of a much more in depth (and thusly much more fascinating) article on the Pirahã.

It touches heavily on Noam Chomsky's big language theory as well as the soft Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
I'm with you, but...

I just discovered that the average number of hours spent in front of a TV (per person, nation-wide) has increased again, and not just among adults, but among teens and even pre-teens.

Apparently people like that junk. Perhaps proliferation of HD picture contributes to this, because let's face it, internet-powered video looks like crap, even iTunes' $2.99 multi-gigabyte downloads aren't as crisp as TimeWarner's HD programming.

P.S. Apologies for being unable to provide a source, there were a few links here on HN, actually, confirming this.
Just as a useful benchmark for all of you higher level language fans--- try programming without your C libraries...
Why? Could you elaborate? Just like Stallman actually explains, why he thinks proprietary software wrong.
Australia implemented conscription in 1964.

'65-'69: Probably not.

'69-'72: Yes.

Which pretty much mirrors popular opinion at the time.
So it's lack of faith that is his problem? But yeah I agree with you, the more powerful the language, the shorter code you can write.

Though python is a pretty powerful language in it's own right, it's got a repl console and sweet little list comprehensions and more, so is the difference really that great between python and lisp? Python is not assembler after all. To know that I suppose I should have to learn lisp myself, which I haven't had the time to do yet. Surrounded by java zealots at work as I am though, and that clojure seems to be the best working non-statically typed language on the JVM I just might.

The issue with utf-8 seems to be solved by now from reading the comments around here. But there are always problems working with utf-8 with libraries written by people that have never needed to work on non-ascii text, the code has simply not been tested thoroughly on the problem of working with utf-8 text so while it might be production quality regarding to ASCII there are weird bugs that pop out of the woodwork when working with musical notes.

On a related note: I've written a few programs in ruby where I've really run into trouble not having decent unicode support in the language. With iconv you can easily make it work if you are working with characters that map to an 8-bit character set. But if you are working with characters that map to several european languages at once, and need the euro symbol, you're in the cold. You can have utf-8 strings in ruby yes, but if you pry them apart, or make changes to them, they loose their utf-8:ness and look like shit. This is an issue that should really be solved at language level, if you don't want to have roughly similar the same abstraction level dealing with strings as you have in C. I love ruby, but I hate working with utf-8 strings in it just now.
Only if you ever want to run for high office. High being a senatorial seat or the Presidency. The issue is that there is bound to be a Kerry, McCain, Murtha etc when the time comes for you to run. Meaning you would have to search for a state without Ivy league war heroes, or opt out of being an office holder.

I think in our generation, though, that less heady decisions will impact our future lives and careers. I chuckle at the number of 'political' types that are shooting off emails, sms messages, Facebook posts, blog comments, and having phone conversations that will summarily disqualify them from, not only high office, but any of the nation's meaningful C-level executive suites and boardrooms of note. Certain executive search committees are already starting to sift through that stuff, where national security is involved. This practice will trickle down first to economically important corporations, like large banks or GE for example, and then on to the rest of the economy.

Chances are, your iPhone and your Facebook, coupled with a big mouth, will get the nation's elites to look down on you more than your decision on what to do when drafted will. Just imagine, for instance, the number of 20 year old democrats in 2003 who sent emails that may be misconstrued on the invasion of Iraq. Or the number of 20 year old republican hot heads who sent emails or sms texts when the hurricane Katrina incident happened. Many won't even make the connection when 25 years later they are summarily rejected by executive search committees.

So the next time you see one of those east coast boarding school type, Ivy league educated, lacrosse playing young men of ambition who refuse to use cell phones or email, I wouldn't snicker at them.
It's important to ask whether society benefits from proprietary source code whether it be controversial claims to patents on genetic data or software. Proprietary ownership of code harms society by limiting farmers, scientists, end users from having their rightful freedom and flexibility. The short term benefit to individuals gained by selling licenses does not excuse the resulting restriction of freedom, because it is viable to make money on free software. Stallman is an idealist who bases his demands on what an ideal world should be like. The case for software freedom (including the case for its economic viability) has been made repeatedly, most notably by Stallman. But the anti-freedom argument has never been convincingly spelled out, to my knowledge.
Sure, but first write the application in a higher level language and then, if required, you can re-write the bottleneck in C. Otherwise what you are doing amounts to premature optimisation.
The problem with Stallman's statements here is that he makes arguments that are essentially non-sequiturs. He argues that code ought to be open because it is the best situation for all parties involved, which seems more-or-less on the money (although there are edge cases where it may not be true, as ESR pointed out).

But this leads him to a militant, legally questionable and altogether obnoxious philosophy that all code therefore must be free, because otherwise it will all collapse into some sort of dystopian future and a black hole where all information is censured and controlled.

But this wasn't the case when Stallman started his activist efforts, and it's not the case now. There is lots of free software and lots of for-pay software and some intersection of the two, and the world seems fairly happy with this situation. And there's really no evidence that the GNU approach has been solely or even significantly responsible for this state of affairs! It really seems like the market has understood the value of open source outside of Stallman's framework for it for quite some time.

From a free-market perspective, the two kinds of software fill different market requirements. Often times closed-source software pioneers an approach, makes an initial profit, and proves a demand which open source efforts then methodically fill. This makes a lot of sense, when you think about it.
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I don't agree with Stallman. Like probably most HN readers, I use a lot of Free/Open Source software - Linux, MySQL, Rails... and it's incredibly valuable. However I don't expect all software to be free, and to a large extent many major bits of open source software are 'market distortions' created by the big commercial IT companies. Eg OpenOffice is largely StarOffice, bought by Sun and open sourced, mainly in order to (IMHO) piss off Microsoft.

Writing good software takes time and skill (as we all know) and I don't think it's unreasonable that the people who do it should be able to charge end users for their efforts. Expecting all software to be written by public employees or in people's spare time is unrealistic.
Whether you hate Bill Gates for his business dealings with Microsoft or not is a matter of opinion.

One thing we can thankfully all agree on, is Bill is sorely lacking in his ability to successfully dodge food...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gallery/2008/jan/31/bil...

... at least Steve Ballmer does a pretty good job at it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S30WdoEHCH4
You're assuming it's an either/or proposition. I never said that. I love free software, we use it for many things at Draftmix, and I own a ton of websites myself, none of which are hosted on Windows. I think it's had a hugely positive impact on the world, and I hope that some day my startup can contribute back.

But that doesn't mean proprietary software is evil. There's a place for both, and Stallman doesn't see that. He can't because his religion blinds him to it.

Free software is often better for a given task, and would still be preferable if it were equal. But I like Photoshop a hell of a lot better than GIMP and Windows or OSX (for my laptop anyway, not so much for servers) much better than Linux. Free software still clearly lags behind proprietary in some cases, and always will.

There's plenty of room for both. And it's quite a large error on your part to assume I take it for granted.
I don't dislike him at all. I consider him the computer science version of a communist. Well meaning, but misguided and suffering from a severe case of tunnel vision.

Saying he has limited mental capacity has a little different connotation than what I meant. Perhaps I didn't express it well. He would appear to be genius-level intelligent in certain regards (math/logic type) and the opposite in others (social, if his Craigslist personals and appearance are any indication). The free software thing is sort of a mixture of the two.
What puzzles me is that on one hand in the last 5 years or so most of these search phrases have been on a downward trend, while Google Search popularity and global penetration has increased over the same duration. Shouldn't nearly every search phrase show an upward trend, due to the increase in search users?
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"Indian SEO firms who will submit to 100000000 directories for $10 or whatever"

Redneck blogger.
I stopped reading the second I reached this:
Gates' philanthropy for health care for poor countries has won some people's good opinion. The LA Times reported that his foundation spends five to 10% of its money annually and invests the rest, sometimes in companies it suggests cause environmental degradation and illness in the same poor countries.

I've just lost all my respect for Richard Stallman. He's a total ass if he thinks he can make FSF look good by bashing the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation by spreading what qualifies - by Stallman's own definition - as FUD.

Update: http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/richard-stallman-expert-in-the...
Heroku for Python? Do you know of a Web based IDLE Python?
Do you any web based IDLE Python (GUI)?
Lol. You definitely won't win many points by bashing the guy who is doing more to cure the worst disease in the impoverished world (malaria) than all of the governments of the planet combined. At least, not by bashing him for doing that.
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Completely agreed. I've been doing Euler problems in Ruby/Java, and my friend does them in C. The difference there is very noticeable, and quite interesting at the same time. Obviously our programs are only compared when we use the same algorithm.
The "anti-freedom argument" (which should actually be called the pro-proprietary argument, because nobody sane is against free software) is fairly simple: there can be both and both can coexist peacefully. We can (and do) have Linux and Windows, and use them for different things. The market and individuals decide which is better for what task.

Some people say Ubuntu is finally a usable desktop OS for average Joe. Even if that's true, it took how many decades for free operating systems to reach that mark? They're at least 20 years behind in crossing the line (though perhaps now gaining ground rapidly).

The financial incentive enabled by proprietary software gives us things like Photoshop (sorry, GIMP still sucks) and Illustrator, Flash, Windows or OSX.

Certainly nobody would suggest that the open source community be legally prevented from making a Photoshop or Outlook or IE competitor. So why can't we have both and let the market decide? Why must proprietary be evil?
Stallman Spreading FUD about Gates & His Charity Fund
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Is he still following the regimen, anyway? I must say Aubrey de Grey is the thinnest TED speaker I've ever seen, and not by a small margin, either. The very first thing I thought once I heard him start talking was "caloric restriction".
Without a moment's hesitation, and the same goes for today if the draft were to be put in place for Iraq- I'd likely emigrate the next day.
Twitter is best understood as a "human-powered rss feed".
You subscribe to a few people and you watch the river of links pouring constantly. Twitter can easily keep people connected with their environment.

I do see value in Twitter even if it is solely through Twhirl and FriendFeed.

As Matt mentions Twhirl is a beautiful application. I do not have any followers at Twitter (frankly there would no need since I only updated twice in the last 1 and 1/2 years save 100 updates a year ago from a RSS to SMS app I was having cooked by a friend), but I do follow about 13 key players and I love it when the little Twhirl screen pops up with a fresh title and a link.
now i how what to do with my old gsm
Open your garage door
or switch-on the boiler of your mountain cottage?
>Why must proprietary be evil?

Because rms says so
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Since it's hard for me to view conscription as anything other than human slavery, I'd be pretty much ethically bound to not only dodge the draft, but also discontinue paying taxes and work daily towards an end to the draft. But, it's easy to talk tough when the situation doesn't exist. The war in Iraq is pretty despicable to me, but I don't spend an inordinate amount of time fighting to end it...though I have given over $2000 to pro-peace candidates for office this year alone. It's far less than I could be doing, I suppose.
Shouldn't nearly every search phrase show an upward trend, due to the increase in search users?

That was my point -- I'm guessing that Google is normalizing these values by dividing by the total number of searches. So if searches for "web hosting" went from 1 million to 2 million, but those number are 0.002% and 0.001% of the total number of searches respectively, the graph would show a decline.