skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Fragmentation of Web Application Development (aka Usability for Programmers)
Getting back into web dev has been frustrating, and in my opinion, more then it needs to be. This article details various usability issues with the current state of web app development, and suggests an idealogical future to overcome them.
Thanks.

It's pronounced "lanyard" (well, lan-yerd) - like the thing you put around your neck with your badge hanging from it at a conference.

A surprisingly large number of people (at least surprising to us) have told us they don't know what a lanyard is!
Man, reading this stuff is like trying to figure out the US tax code. Every time I get more information on the new app store rules I just get more confused. At first I was really liking the fact that I could purchase apps and have them available on any Mac I use. Now I'm not so sure that the App Store is a good thing at all, for developers or consumers.

My personal feeling is that any contract that has this many rules and exceptions is probably going to screw me over.
On a slightly unrelated note, are there any UX/UI books that are targetted for programmers? I'm a complete noob with photoshopping and can't create a button to save my life. Working on side projects, this is really annoying.
Hmmh. There is a link to the Chrome discussion. Maybe you did not see the link, it's in the third paragraph.
Hedge Fund performance summary - January/2011
The flip side, of course, is that even if you don't make it to the front page, there are probably more eyes on a new submission during peak times.

If your goal is to get feedback on something, comments matter far more than hitting the front page, so the more potential users that see it, the better.
5 Easy Landing Page Tests
The code that makes him say "what a mess," I think is beautiful:

def summary(data, key=itemgetter(0), value=itemgetter(1)):
for k, group in groupby(data, key):
yield (k, sum(value(row) for row in group))

Perhaps that's because I'm a programmer, and Python is a general purpose programming language. But I think that's what his complaint boils down to: the Python statistical code looks too much like Python. Which, yeah, it does. Python is a general purpose programming language, not a domain specific language for statistical programming.

However, I don't think the programming concepts one needs to understand to make effective use of a well designed Python library are too much to ask. I've only dabbled in R, but when I did, it required me to exercise my general programming knowledge to understand list, matrices and functions. I think the author is also falling in the trap of what is obvious to him is obvious to everyone. I'm actually not sure of what the SAS code is doing, and much prefer the Python.
I don't think that a local traffic court, in what's certainly an unpublished ruling, can create a precedent. That's not how the system works.
For us, "what's next" was Pivotal Tracker.
Last I checked, though, Python wasn't a statistical programming language.
I know Intrinsyc staff; they are long-time Symbian developers. What I find most interesting in the press release is not their decision to support Android and Meego, but the absence of any mention of Windows Phone development.
That's the law in Massachusetts, but the cops don't believe it.
OP forgot a -o-transform on the .page class, that's why.
The taming of fire may have been relatively more significant
Bias towards action: release it!

Then fix it based on what people tell you and what your own thoughts are. Find ways to make it so that people want to use it. Without releasing it, you'll never know.

It's really hard to release something that's "Not ready yet!" but it's worth it.

If it's useful maybe they'll say: "I like where this is going, but your design makes me cry." If it isn't useful you won't hear anything from them at all.

Don't worry about copycats - competition is good for you, too. Your competitor will be telling other people about their product which just means there are more people selling your segment, this is a good thing. Your competitors can be your sales staff, too. :)
Of course he's not going to set a legal precedent, he specifically admitted to not understanding it! What's he going to base that on? "I didn't understand what he was saying but that the nice man had a mighty smart looking phone."

Or are you suggesting that he did understand it and was lying? I don't see a judge doing that over a speeding ticket - they tend not to be big on lying, they just make the ruling so specific it can never apply anywhere else or expressly say that they don't feel this creates a precedent.
Love the site and I intend to use it.

The wiki approach would be great if the data was laid out appropriately. Community-edited wiki might lead to a singular view of what a good path would be.

The benefit of a multi-axis rating system is that you could lay out data using different permutations and add/subtract inputs (e.g. rater's experience at time of rating/age/hell, maybe even personality type). I'm sort of modeling this off of robust scientific questionnaires.

It does seem to require some more user involvement, but nothing a fantastic UI couldn't fix.
For many many years ISVs made money in "the Microsoft ecosystem".

Yes, sometimes MS pulled the rug out from under them and/or directly competed with them with unfair advantage. But not really that often.

They certainly never "pulled your app from the store". I'm still having a hard time getting my head around that concept and why anyone would invest development resources into that kind of platform.
That's a good news I think :)

I can't really tell yet, but my guess is that at least around the number of indexed documents could give a more usable subscription.

It would also be nice for people to know what happens if you go beyond the cap: do you offer some tolerance ?
Actually I'd like to see how they implement this before commenting on it in depth. I don't understand the omni bar disappearing though; that wasn't explained well enough for this brain to understand what they'd replace it with.
The parent post already noted that the GPS doesn't know your instantaneous speed, just the average speed since your last reading. If your signal was blocked by trees, buildings, bridges, (not to mention your car itself), you can go at least several seconds without a reading, and what happened in between those points is unknown to the GPS, except for total ground covered. And that's even before you account for GPS inaccuracy, which is ~3m in optimal conditions.
Agree. On any given day I'm using so many devices at work, home, trying out Live CD's, etc. that I need some algorithm that I can just memorize and type in.
Oddly the author finally comes up with

import string
def f6(list):
return string.joinfields(map(chr, list), "")

and never the obvious and shorter use of "".join()

def f8(list):
return "".join(map(chr, list))

which beats all but the array module in my benchmarks.
Good to know it only shares songs that have been played fully.
Harvard "Face Book" creator out to slay plastic with FaceCash
How about using node.js. Bang javascript on the server and on the client. Personally I have high hopes for Sproutcore.
Do you mean hackerbooks.com or learnivore ? (or both ? :-).

I would love to be able to build something like you describe, but I suspect it will be time consuming, that said!
Ok, thanks! :-)
Your health insurance should have this service.

I'm with Aetna and I can get lists of MDs within a 10 mile radius and I can get a price list of common procedures.
Amazon's subtle slam of the iPad
That's not a GWT issue, but an issue with architecting a web application in an all-in-one-page AJAX style. The same would be true with any web application written in that manner, regardless of toolkit.
Can you show an example? I can't imagine what signal it would be calculating a doppler shift on, that could be more accurate than the positional data it computes. Most of the satellite signals -- certainly the strongest -- will be high overhead. Thus the signal path is essentially perpendicular to your direction of travel, and doppler shift wouldn't be significant.
And you pay a yearly fee to develop for the iPhone, do you not?
Short Hairstyles Pictures
Short hairstyle is usually easier to maintain but it does need more regular cutting. It can be cut close to the head, cropped or layered in a variety of hairstyles.
Yeah, he'd need an IPO to offer shares to the general public. And that requires a lot of work (which is why investment banks often take a big slice).

I'm not sure what obstacles there are to an IPO though.
According to Jeff Bezos' note on Amazon's homepage, it is indeed compatible with Amazon Instant Video devices (over 200 and counting these days). Apparently TiVo is an exception currently, but that's the only note:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/video/ontv/ontv
National Broadband Map
As I read the Wikipedia article, the frame dragging effect is hypothesized and has not yet been observed, though experiments have been designed and some are in progress.
I don't believe Tav posted this as an actual fork, but simply highlighting his branches/patches, in the same way that many other Fabric users have code waiting to be merged into core.

When the time comes to merge/incorporate them, we will definitely be wanting peoples' opinions on whether they feel the changes would fit into core Fabric :)
After using GWT for a year as the basic tool for a project, I am not sure if I would choose it again. I would, but only for a certain type of web apps.

I can't say it is bad. Actually, it has been pretty good. But, somehow when I look at all the other development environments out there, some of them look better. ekidd put it pretty well, actually.

The best side effect of using GWT has been a lot of business logic on the client side.

The worst side effect of using GWT has been a lot of business logic on the client side.
Show HN: Remote Jobs (our answer to "Who Is Hiring Remote Workers?")
We're giving away coupon codes for a free month-long posting. Just email me at evan AT remote DASH jobs DOT com. The first few folks win!

I'm one of the founders of Remote Jobs -- also the same shlub who posted the first "Ask HN: Who Is Hiring Remote Workers?" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1857051.
Either way... the original problems don't just disappear. They're with you all along until you completely replace the product.

And even then, they don't disappear. Windows 98 is 12+ years old and it's still lurking around out there. Vista was only the main version of Windows for 2 years and I bet it will haunt our support queues for another 5 years at least..
Re HackerBooks, that’s a really cool idea and seems to be implemented well. Thanks for sharing.
I downloaded this immediately, loved it, then remembered that they don't have Southwest results, so I sighed and realized that I would hardly ever use it. It looks great though!
This isn't Hipmunk's fault, but the lack of Southwest schedules kills the utility for me.
Ask HN: Used Turk before?
HN folks: have you used Turk before? if so, have you done it directly via AMZN or with via some "UI" that sits on top of Turk? have you continued to use it or found the results sporadic and less than helpful? Have you done anything very advanced with it? Love any qualitative thoughts or comments from your experience...
The laying of the first transatlantic telegraph, to pluck an idea out of the air.

Or, the rise of Freud's ideas in society in the latter half of the 20th century.

Or, the change from hunter-gatherer societies to agrarianism.

Or, The Terror in france and the various other european uprisings of that time.

Or, lest we forget, WORLD WAR FUCKING TWO.

EDIT: I'm defining 'great' here as 'greatest change' because 'greatest progress' is ill-defined to the point of meaninglessness.

EDIT2: Here's another one: the invention of the 2" ABS plastic pipe and it's employment in sanitation and irrigation.

Although it obviously depends on how old you are as to whether or not that falls within "our lifetimes."
Basically you're saying do the KISS thing ...
So you're using a custom rom or you're rooted. I thought it was obvious I was referring to stock. You can also run whatever you want on an iPhone if you root.
True, but I was talking about the case where I don't have health insurance and want to price-shop for cash service. =]
Establishing the groundwork for this discussion:

What do you mean by "societal progress"? Do you mean things like reduction of poverty, or production of arts, or decrease in the frequency of mass murder, or some combination of all of the above and more? Or do you mean something else entirely?

What constitutes "technological progress"? Does the progression from a dozen websites to ten million constitute meaningful technological progress - is pushing ten thousand cars off an assembly line twice as progressive as a mere five thousand? Or do you mean actual innovation? In the case of the latter, how would you measure the rate of innovation today with that of earlier periods? (In principle, the number of patents granted per year should give you a rough idea of this, but (1) patents have only been around for a fairly short period of time, and (2) their actual value in measuring innovation is highly disputed).

Finally, you seem to imply in your last paragraph that the "greatness" of an era is a function of its social and technological progress, and no other factors. Is this reading correct? Or is the door open to other measures as well?
You don't have a clue and you should stop pretending that you do
Tech talent wars: SEOmoz ups ante with $12,000 referral bounty
I'm one of the founders of Remote Jobs -- also the same shlub who posted the first "Ask HN: Who Is Hiring Remote Workers?" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1857051.

We're giving away coupon codes for a free month-long posting. Just email me at evan AT remote DASH jobs DOT com. The first few folks win!
Do we really need all these articles that urge people to never, ever rewrite anything? (Classic example being Joel's article, which also uses Netscape as an example: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html .)

Managers and business users hate rewerites as it is. That's part of the reason there is so much horrendous legacy code out there. Often, people who have the authority to make decisions about rewriting something don't interaface with the code, don't understand undetlying issues, don't see what was changed in technological context since the code was written.

In my own experience, most of the rewrites were totally worth it. It wasn't just because the code became better, it was because the understanding of the problem has matured. People were able to understand the problem better, so were were able to write better code to solve it.
This is really cool, but the performance doesen't seem totally smooth, and I am on a 6 month old quad core xeon. Do you know anything about the performance of these css animations compared to javascript?
Christchurch Quake Map (time-lapse visualisation)
"No, shut up. People don’t use that crap." hahaha, ahhh, I love it...
I wonder how much the surgeon is making. I.e. how much is paid to him through taxes?
Google faces new complaint in anti-trust probe
Startup Quote: Ben Keighran, co-founder, Chomp
Love the design and the idea.
Source for this assertion? It seems more likely (to me) that they'd make less due to their smaller and less affluent clientele.
How Competitors Can Challenge the iPad
this would make things even funnier:

message = xmpp.Message(event.getFrom().getStripped(), 'BU!')
message.setAttr('type', 'chat')
C.send(message)
Not friends and family; I try to focus on the site audience instead. So I got in touch with people I appreciate and follow on twitter and hackernews, mostly!

First I made a quick survey, then I released without setting the DNS etc... For a more controlled fashion I would have added a real "private beta authentication".

hth!
I haven't done complete browser testing, but I know you can use a PNG and simply change the extension to .ico and it will still work in some browsers.

Edit: I tested on a domain that previously didn't have a favicon. Putting a PNG named favicon.ico at the root without an explicit <link> worked in Chrome 9, Firefox 3.6, and Safari 5. It didn't work in IE 9.
Creating a Product Focused Startup Culture
Good to hear, hopefully the task decorator will make it in soon because I think it's a much superior API.

The little hack on Fabric I use currently takes the opposite approach -- I use an @internal decorator that hides certain functions from the task list but keeps the default Fabric behavior around for anything else. It's just a few lines of codes that mess with a private list Fabric uses to track internal functions:

from fabric.main import _internals

def internal(fn):
_internals.append(fn)
return fn
_internals.append(internal)
So, if some fringe group sends anonymously posts a letter claiming to be from anonymous, doesn't that make the letter from anonymous? I thought the whole point of a group that is completely decentralized is that anybody can claim to be from anonymous and that is enough to mean you're from anonymous. I agree this group probably posted the letter as yet another way to get attention, but isn't the mere fact that the letter claimed to be from Anonymous enough to make the letter from Anonymous? How can a group without central leadership claim to not be behind an anonymous letter?
What do you consider general knowledge?
Thanks! And I bet that you just made Dave's day, too! ;-)
i presume he meant precedent more literally than legally
I like the visual selector similar to firebug or chrome developer tools to select a div or element in the page. Though, my question is, what information are you saving per bug when you are selecting a "feature" of the webpage? It would seem that on any website that is not static that you would need to save the whole page images included for each bug so that you can show the bug at the time of inception or at least a snapshot of the page transformed into an image.
Tonight - Chris McCann - 7 Steps to an Unsuccessful Startup
Ok, I hear your argument regarding capturing a larger part of the new value.. my sense is that they've gotten a lot better at capturing value and are providing very little additional value. I mean I don't live in the finance world, but in my world, the price of anything does not matter within less than a second ever. And it probably doesn't matter within a minute or an hour either. Commodities probably don't even matter within a week or so. No corporation purchasing a large amount of commodities can turn around a decision in under a week, so who cares if they have subsecond pricing accuracy?

Then I talk to friends who work in finance and I see that insane amounts of resources are being thrown into this stuff. Like, truly insane, you're in this industry, you've probably seen it.

Apple makes an iPad, they get money, consumers get iPads.

Goldman makes a subsecond trading system, they get money, consumers get... ???? If consumers and non-financial businesses don't care about the price of AAPL stock within a second or a minute, then how come Goldman makes so much money creating that price stability? What is broken here? It seems like a tail wagging the dog scenario to me.
I figured out something like that using the Python Linode API last week: http://asktherelic.com/2011/02/17/dynamic-fabric-commands-fo...
Doing that also legitimises fake celebrities, sockpuppets and dedicated stalking accounts. It's pretty fundamental to Facebook's value proposition that the identities (usually) represent a graph of real people and their social relationships and interests (more or less the opposite of the sometimes intentional anarchy of popular internet fora)

I don't think authors and performers who are offered the more appropriate option of Facebook fan pages or domestic violence survivors who connect under a single assumed name have too much to worry about from Facebook policies applied reasonably.
What you Need, America?
Trust works as in the real world: you choose to interact or start transactions with people that you trust. Contracts are indeed used for protection, but contracts also contain fine-prints not meant for mere mortals to read, that's why trust is still so important.

Also in the real world, people that often violate the trust of others are sooner or later marginalized, excluded from the social circles that supported them.

Risk/reward calculations sound nice, certainly within the skills of any MBA, but impossible to do in our industry and whenever I hear people talk about it sounds more to me like trying to rationalize a bad decision.
One clear focus for everyone. Your business needs laser focus on what the next objective is. Execution is key.

- Ben Keighran (@benkeighran)

http://startupquote.com/post/3446492930
I also prefer this python code to the SAS example listed. I have been trying to brush up on statistics over the last couple of years and I think this article points to an issue that occurred to me. Namely that when somebody says they "know statistics" it sort of has to mean that they know one of the big stats packages out there. It doesn't appear that anybody is really doing stats from first principles anymore.
It seems like there are differences in terminology between one author and another and now with the different programing models there is a whole new level of incompatibility.
Windows 7 SP1 (Service Pack) RTM is now Officially available [Download]
Legacy systems are hard. Being able to work effectively with them is something they don't really teach you in school. Probably because it's entirely frustrating, complicated, and a big turn off even for seasoned programmers. It's a bit of a black art and there's little joy or glory in being good at it. Except perhaps that the job market for your specialty is pretty small and will always be in demand.

For a good read on the subject, try "Working Effectively with Legacy Code" by Micheal C. Feathers.

I prefer the term "technical baggage," over "technical debt." This is mainly because debt refers to an economic means of borrowing a sum of future purchasing power. This breaks down when referring to the cost of engineering decisions. The cost of maintaining legacy systems tends to increase with time and you cannot calculate any sum to borrow based on assets or secured revenue. The decisions you make now will haunt your business for a long time to come. Poor technical decisions are simply something you will have to learn to live with.

When dealing with legacy systems from a business perspective, the question one has to ask is, "how valuable is it to maintain and enhance the existing system going forward?" In other words, when will the costs of continuing development of your legacy system outweigh the revenue it generates? For large systems found in banks and insurance companies it can be a very long time. For small businesses it is much shorter than you think.

FWIW, it seemed to me that Netscape simply made the decision to start from scratch too late. The revenue they were generating from their old code base had trickled off too long and dipped below their operating costs before the warning signs went up. I don't think it makes a compelling argument against re-writing.

As someone supporting a legacy system, it sometimes makes sense to re-write the system. Treat the existing system as a prototype and derive the minimum viable product from it to start with. Spin it off as a new product, set an shut-off date for the old software, and convert your customers. Obviously this doesn't work for every scenario; so YMMV. Just be smart about it and use evidence to back up your assumptions. Sometimes simply writing a legacy compatibility layer and porting the most painful bits of code slowly is the key. Re-writing certainly isn't for everyone.
Does Boxee play Video_TS files with DVD menus and the whole nine?
We don't deny the service no matter how far beyond the cap you go. In case the cap is overpassed very often, we just contact the user.
I read it as saying "Spend a little extra time doing things the right way, and maybe you won't have to rewrite your code from scratch."