skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The State of the Internet: Summing Up 2010
IANAL and looking for other sources, but it's discussed along with many other factors here: http://www.benedict.com/Digital/Internet/Field/Field.aspx

Essentially, the existence of robots.txt and meta noindex has made courts more comfortable ruling that the index of search engines constitutes fair use.
MS Word does ask me all the time to restore previous state. Usually because it crashes more often than I close it.
"Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology" by Ayn Rand
Right, and both of those involve UX tradeoffs. Which was my point and why I gave them both as options in my initial comment. Having read the first half of the article, I was expecting the second half to address the issues which these various options raise.

Sure you can "Just save state all the time", but doing so involves tradeoffs. Tradeoffs which were not addressed at all in the article.

Your MS Word example is exactly what OpenOffice does when it's been closed without saving. It's really obnoxious. I was hoping to read some UX insight into how to make those kinds of actions less obnoxious without losing their helpful functionality when it's needed.

In general I agree with the core idea of the article. But it lacked useful discussion about the hard UX problems involved, opting instead for some easy in-application examples.
You're quite welcome! I hope I've made everyone's day just a little bit easier.
Amygdala volume and social network size in humans
A friend of mine has a little poster by his wall that says, "Stacktrace or GTFO" for all people who give him bug reports. It follows the same mentality as this - the more resources you can provide a developer for a bug report, the a.) faster it'll be fixed and b.) the happier the developer will be. I think you're right though, a pull request is pretty much like spoon feeding the bug to the developer. That said, I think he's right in that it might clutter up the repo a bit with bug examples - if pull reqs for bugs become common place (and I hope they do) it'd be nice to have a way to classify them as such (or perhaps there is a way that I don't know about yet?).
Time and time again I come across studies that show social accountability and image is one of, if not THE most powerful factor in behavioral change.

The Milgram experiment, smoking room, etc. demonstrate we are easily motivated by peer pressure. I think there is a lot of opportunity in creating a company that uses social networks to drive behavioral change. I am sure they exist, but I haven't heard of any yet.
Netflix, a culture of testing
StackMob Is 'Heroku For Mobile' - Potentially Just As Huge.
They won't let me log in, the recover/change password feature doesn't work, and all my emails to them go to /dev/null.

I'm scared by how much data they'd have on my life and it being out of my control how they use it.
The URL should be corrected to http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/07/murder-fast-datacente...
Is it time to return to the medieval way of life on college campuses?
We were driving into SF today, saw their billboard, and it made me happy.
The PSP2 Is Here
I think that with the number of children who have internet, paying simply isn't an option. Before I had a credit card, I would have to have an awkward conversation with my parents about what I wanted to buy and why. If the abilities for children to pay money on the internet increases (e.g. an online allowance service), piracy in that segment will probably go down, as children start to recognize that things on the internet cost money and can be easily paid for.
Generating Fractal Art Using Software (video)
How the iPad Wants to be Used
Startup life in Melbourne, Australia
Privacy & Innovation: A Data Privacy Day Reflection
I am on Teksavvy and a Netflix subscriber. I found Netflix catalog to be quite good, it may not have any blockbusters from the past few decades but it has a very good selection of indie, foreign and old movies. Netflix Canada also has good selection of tv series e.g. Mad Men, Topgear etc. Its definitely worth it for monthly price which is half the price of a movie ticket.
Setting up a free multi channel contact system using KooKoo and Issueburner
I'm not saying I disagree, but I don't think it's a fair argument to compare a non-essential "luxury" item (books) to food, a necessity (especially when the former costs $10+ and the latter is roughly $1 each).
Sorry for the belated response, but for a sense of closure, so to speak, I'll add that I agree with your general assessment. Both languages started with a simple core that allowed developers to take some basic ideas and see just how far they could go with them. It just didn't occur to me to describe that as "opposite".

Interestingly, both languages wound up with a schism of framework enthusiasts (CLOS & "big Forths") vs. minimalists (Scheme & Moore loyalists (for want of a better term)).

As an aside, your bunch of data example would run afoul of Forth catechism. The normal response would be to use a dictionary address or even address and offset to access a data structure. Antagonism to deep use of the data stack is so prevalent that Moore eventually reached the point with his chip designs of implementing the top of stack as a couple of on-chip registers -- if what you want isn't within the top couple of stack entries, so the logic goes, then you've failed to factor your design properly. Perhaps this preoccupation with very low level operations is an aspect where Forth programming might be considered the opposite of normal Lisp programming.
"It is not contradictory to believe that capitalism is the most effective engine for driving human ambition towards useful goals, and at the same time, decry the perverse incentives it creates to manipulate people against their interests and to destroy the environment."

Extremely well put.
The calling feature works only in India as KooKoo is currently present only in India.
You can run stuff like XMonad, but it only works with things run inside X11, yeah. So there's pretty much no point to it -- might as well install Debian.
50 Best iPhone Apps 2011
Ask HN: Browser Plugin that filters low quality web pages
Is there a web service which lets you install a plugin that filters "legal" but low quality sites?

Let's say I'm surfing the web, I click on a link in some blog. The link directs me to a low quality web site. By low quality, I mean people (who also have the plugin) have visited that page before I did, and left under 5 seconds or so. Instead of redirecting to the linked page a warning appears and tells me if I really want to visit that page
as it seems to have a low quality rating (high bounce rate).

The bounce rates of different web pages are then analyzed and user clients will frequently get updated with webpage quality filter list.

TL;DR: A plugin which is like Xmarks but indexes the pages you (and others) don't like and lets you know if you're about to visit one.

Anyone would care to use a plugin like this?
E-Commerce Site Lets Users Buy a Better Life For Girls in India
Webpages are not a complement to Oracle's business model, thus what makes sense for Oracle and Google to open source are vastly different. If you look at what Google open sources, it's all compliments to their business model. Google doesn't open source technology that it makes money from.

As to going above and beyond in regards to open source, you'd have to look at where NetBeans came from Sun. Look where all that open source got them.
Interesting. Are there any pieces of software that can transform ordinary laptops/phones into mesh networks?

A quick search shows B.A.T.M.A.N. (http://www.open-mesh.org/), but it looks a little tricky to setup. Are there any simple ways for non-technical users to run a mesh network node? A "click to install and run" solution would be ideal, but I'd be interested in hearing about other people's experiences with mesh networks.
If you can make your site intelligent enough to stop sending me "you have a lending request" emails for books that I've already lent, I'll switch! ;)
> But look at mobile apps, they never ask "are you sure you want to leave?"

I know your context was about something a little different but just to be nitpicky, most iOS apps we develop prompt the user if they want to leave the app and launch Google Maps to get directions and/or thank them for wanting to donate - Safari will be launching shortly and/or tell them to wait while we launch the e-commerce page.
This is an absolutely amazing idea.
There's no way to compensate for tightening pectorals by weightlifting because the antagonist muscles have no range of motion - the best you can do is push your shoulder blades together. That's why you have to stretch your pecs and consciously work to pull your shoulders back when you're standing. The standing desk is probably a really good idea for preventing "turtle neck," because as far as I know there's no weight exercise where you push your head back and stretch the neck out (again, this is something that I do consciously now when walking).

Lower-body imbalances from squats will depend on how wide your stance is, where you point your knees, and how you use your muscles. Generally narrow and pointing forward you'll use quads, wider and out and it's glutes or hamstrings. I was definitely a hamstrings-dominant squatter and as a result I have tight hip flexors and hamstrings (this is apparently pretty common).
My ISP says I get 15 Mbps download and 2 Mbps upload, and speed tests confirm I do. For sustained flows, I get a solid 15 Mbps when downloading software from Microsoft.

So the 15 Mbps is way above anything in the Netflix graph.

So, the ISP can't always be the bottleneck keeping data rates below 3 Mbps.
In Japan, Young Face Generational Roadblocks
Open wrt support mesh networking iirc.

There is also this:

http://www.wing-project.org/

And a bunch of others.
My initial reaction to the iPad when it was first announced was that it needed user accounts. I mean, your smartphone is yours. No-one else is going to pick it up and use it for a few hours. But the iPad just intuitively seems like a device that's destined to live on the coffee table and be a family's shared machine. The software may "want" to be personal, but the hardware definitely doesn't.

There's really nothing stopping this happening from a technical standpoint. Have multiple "swipe to unlock" arrows on the lock screen, one for each user, labelled of course. Passwords on accounts if users so choose. Everyone gets their own apps, browser history/cookies/cache, music, movies, etc.

Where this gets tricky is when users of the same device want to share things. You shouldn't need to have two copies of the same movie on a device. I also have no idea how iTunes syncing would work.
I bought (but haven't received) an exercise bike with a small desk big enough for a laptop, so I could theoretically work and work out at the same time.

Now I haven't received it, much less tried it out or battle tested it for a few months... and it was more of a desperation move. But it's here http://www.fitdeskbike.com . If anyone has this and has used it, please chime in.
Larry Ellison pays for that out of pocket.
Talent acquisition for a team of 2 developers? Really? I find it hard to believe.
Part of the problem is that we write facebook content as "public" content (i.e. the press release version of our lives) but we tend to process it as "personal" updates that substitute for actually catching up with someone on the phone or in person.

Spot on. That's why I don't use Facebook lately, although I wasn't able to verbalize the reason so well. I feel like I'm reading PRs from my friends, and I feel like I'm compelled to write my own PR, what is time-consuming.

People used to buy expensive clothes or cars to show off. Now they show off in Facebook, posting the pictures of their amazing vacations.

I used to love Facebook when I had less than 50 friends in it. As my number of "friends" grew, everybody's content became more and more like press releases. It didn't happen overnight. It was a slow transformation.
Agree, in my experience it's people who write-only code that tend to over engineer things. If you can't read or maintain code it better be pretty flexible when you write it!
Someone was kind enough to comment on the post with this gem:

Style["( . ) ( . ) ", 60, FontFamily -> "Comic Sans MS",
PrivateFontOptions -> {"OperatorSubstitution" -> False}]
Kindle sales surely would've increased with or without the existence of an iPad, but I'm inclined to believe they absolutely increased faster with.

Personally, I sold my Kindle after a few months because I wasn't getting enough utility out of it; after getting an iPad, I've started buying Kindle books again.
Some developers have a mentality that if not enough information was provided in the bug report then it's not a real bug.

They are wrong.

Just because you didn't get enough information to reproduce and/or fix it, doesn't mean it's not there.

But, it does mean there is nothing you can can do about it. (Obviously try to get clarification and more info, etc. this is assuming you were not able to.)

Nevertheless, in the back of your mind you should try to remember the bug and maybe you'll come across something that will let you figure out what it was.

This doesn't scale so well for OSS projects, but if it's paid work and the bug came from your client then you better track such things, even if you can't immediately fix them.
"Being in a less risky, less stressful position at Google can give you the important insights you need when you really start your business."

You could not be more wrong on this point. Being at google is a recipe for complacency. Quitting your job is incentive to actually figure out how to build something good. Because it's do that or fail.
WxPython: A Wizard Tutorial
I believe Steve McKnight is doing something along that line in the US with some church groups.
In my perfect world, all software, from nuclear reactor software to Angry Birds, would be powered by a learning neural net that dynamically reshapes the interface as it learns my most common actions and foibles. It would interface directly with my brain so that there would be no chance of my mouse slipping and clicking 'OK' when I meant 'Cancel'.

Oh wait... that would be incredibly time-consuming to implement, would very likely only marginally improve the experience for the majority of users, and would be plagued by edge-case pitfalls.
I've used the pianobar client for a long time. (I'm on Linux and there's no official native client.) It breaks every so often and you have to wait a day or so for it to get fixed. A 'feature' of this unofficial client is that it doesn't play any of the ads on free Pandora accounts. So Pandora probably isn't very happy with that.
http://m.xkcd.com/ will show the alt text right below the image. It's easier on my eyes.
You should tell your coworker that plenty of bugs don't cause stacktraces. In fact, most of them. :-)
Steps for Successful Strategic Alliances (and Marriages)
Haskell works well for both declarative and imperative styles. I would make some small changes ('forever' instead of explicit recursion, less duplicate code in handlers), but it would be basically the same.
I think that a more ascetic way of life would be good for many people, myself included -- when I get away from everything, it gives me time to think and refresh myself.

On the other hand, the article seems to be going in a more insular direction, which I absolutely cannot agree with. Universities and colleges need to teach as a part of the world, not from ivory towers. The biggest problem with my alma mater is that it's very isolated geographically and that created a "bubble" where outside events didn't really penetrate beyond sports or a few political interest groups.
Right, what attack causes more of an outage than pulling the plug?
I've tried to talk with them and sadly it just didn't work. I am kind of disappointed as I got different answers more than a few times. I even asked if I could call someone there and talk to them.. they didn't even bother replying to the email.

Our list isn't even a prelaunch, just the newsletter signup on the right side of our site (thepaws.com - shameless plug..). It's just new customers signing up. But you're right it does make for very dirty lists. After the 1st send the list got cleaned up so hopefully moving forward it won't be as dirty, unless we hit a huge growth spurt again, and I wouldn't mind that!
I think the stream that it accesses is completely advertising-free too.

I don't think it has to do with the stream. When an ad comes up it just fetches a new playlist.
Well, then it will obviously never be used because nothing is wrong with the government. </sarcasm>
I’m not following you there, what has the difficulty of implementing undo to do with whether or not it should always be at least suggested as a clearly superior solution?

I’m not seeing any assumptions about the difficulty of implementing an undo feature in that sentence (except that it’s not impossible and that some companies have been capable of implementing it). Where do you find those?

I think your prejudices got the better of you.
"Deadlifts, Rows, Pullups (or lat pulldowns if you must) -- all strengthen the back, and offset the shoulder rotation issues."

They don't because the pulling muscles don't have full range of motion. Your lats pull your arms but not your shoulders, and your traps pull your shoulders up. The muscles pulling your shoulder blades together never get enough work to start tightening and offsetting the pull from the tightening pecs.

Deadlifts are great for most spinal erectors, but don't do enough for your neck to get proper alignment if you sit in front of the computer all day.

"However, a full depth back squat is a very balanced exercise, and will do wonders to increase hip mobility, not to mention strength."

Not really. I've never seen anyone with a fully balanced squat. Either the quads or (usually) the hamstrings will dominate. Squats will probably increase hip mobility for someone who has poor hip mobility and hasn't squatted before, but they're also a quick way to get hip flexor and posterior chain tightness if you don't offset it with stretching.
Genieo now available for Mac, recognizes your favorite web content
This is a legitimate point of view, that perhaps developers don't want to hear. Disclaimer: I'm a developer, so I understand the challenge to undo. However, I also realize that I'm building for normal people (i.e. not myself).

There is no need to be defensive, nobody is attacking anybody. This is just another "best practices" thing.

update: just to add one more note: end-users don't care if the person who built the product like/dislike implementing an undo feature, end-users care if it's easy for them or not.
Um -- have you seen what happens to the newspapers given away in hotels?
Love your website. But as a "new" user having Row Feeder and Export.ly link in the bottom is a bit confusing because the three products mention Excel. Should I register to the three of them ? Why ?
Thanks for the answer, it makes a lot of sense.
First taste of Honeycomb: Android 3.0 user interface preview
Does anyone have a mirror of the site? It's unexpectedly dropping the connection for me.
I think lots of office workers use at least Google Search, which is web software.
Egypt goes off the grid
The problem though is that paper books still cost less money than their Kindle counterparts.
The entire article rests on the assumption that the things which are produced in order to be consumed have no value-- or at the very least, that, as more of them are produced, the total value in "the system" doesn't increase. While this is undoubtably true for many things, is it true for all of them?

I mean, sure, I can't accept that enormous piles of consumerist junk manufactured every year don't really represent the creation of much value. But that isn't everything, and, I'd argue, it is dwarfed by the enormous amount of valuable materials, goods, and services that are produced.

In order for this kind of invective to carry in weight, one has to implicitly agree with the hidden assumption that the trillions of dollars of goods and services produced every year represent essentially no value to human beings.

And that seems to me to be a pretty ridiculous statement.
How's the schools?
What about servers setting the secure flag on their cookies and redirecting to https?
Sony obtains restraining order against Geohot for PS3 jailbreak
is this fiction?
Totally agree. I've seen Caildini's work rewritten, repackaged and resold in numerous books on influence.

Caildini writing style is clear and concise. He neither talks down to the reader or uses jargon
Assange, Manning: Parallels, But Links Unclear
Are you kidding me? Victorian Britain was the most prosperous country on Earth, at the time. Sure, the average Brit had it much rougher than they do today, but that's not a valid comparison. Give me one country that had it better during the 19th century than Victorian Britain!
Not your Father's Semantic Web
Tell HN: Sourceforge servers compromised
Multiple sourceforge servers were compromised, so treat anything in there as compromised (including files you download, etc).

Info:
http://sourceforge.net/apps/wordpress/sourceforge/2011/01/27/sourceforge-net-attack-update/

http://blog.sucuri.net/2011/01/sourceforge-net-servers-compromised.html

http://developers.slashdot.org/story/11/01/27/2059200/SourceForge-Down-After-Attack-Updated
I have. I'm not dogmatic about this.

Part of my other point was that the comparisons in the link to why SMS is ridiculously overpriced, in which the cost of downloading songs via SMS is calculated to be in the millions of dollars, is that that's a bogus argument. If you're sending that many SMS's, get an unlimited plan. If your carrier doesn't have an unlimited plan, switch to one that does. Consumer education is fine, but there's also something to be said about consumer responsibility.
Thankfully the decision of the court [1] suggests that they only believe that a DMCA violation has taken place, rather than the even more egregious claim that jailbreaking your PS3 violates the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act because the PS3 is a "protected computer".

You can find more court docs on geohot.com

[1] http://www.scribd.com/doc/47676628/51-Order-GRANTING-Plainti...
Ah, but do you know what the results of that emailing have been?

Five bots are listed. Perhaps they're the only one who bothered to email. Or perhaps not.
All the traffic seems to follow the same curve, with the same dips and spikes. The Canada curve is different than the US curve, but there is still a curve there too. I'm curious why that is.
Well, good news, it doesn't matter. If the situation has deteriorated to that point, the government will just do it anyhow.

I don't support the bill anyhow, because I'm not really a "let's just give one central authority all the power because why not?" kind of guy, but honestly, there's not much point worrying about that particular kind of misuse of that particular power. Standard martial law concepts would probably be enough to take the necessary actions to shut down whatever networks you like; pointing guns at network admins can be pretty effective. You're actually not being cynical enough.
CLickable:

Info:
http://sourceforge.net/apps/wordpress/sourceforge/2011/01/27...

http://blog.sucuri.net/2011/01/sourceforge-net-servers-compr...

http://developers.slashdot.org/story/11/01/27/2059200/Source...
Thanks for the response! We can definitely do a better job in that area.

We're all about providing the simplest way for you to get to the data and analysis you need without having to buy or even deal with the whole enchilada. But we've still got some things to figure out on how we get people from A -> B -> C when they don't discover us organically, and that's going to be one of our main focuses over the next several months.
"You can't change the crawl rate for sites that are not at the root level—for example, www.example.com/folder."

What if Googlebot starts at a non-root location (via a link from another site)?

Will it always start at root?
Original Lisp Infographics