skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perhaps they should have gone somewhere else where they had time to sleep and think instead of just studying all the time. I know that where I work, the folks who are willing to grind the hardest on assigned work are rarely the ones you turn to for difficult and responsible work. The very best people are the ones who work extremely hard at self-directed work and sometimes push back against assigned work, but they are very, very rare, much rarer than people who are willing to grind day and night on whatever you assign them. The best person for difficult assignments is usually someone who refuses to overwork himself or herself.
Depending on where you look the golden rule for longevity seems to be 6-7 hours of sleep. The interesting thing about 7 being the more common number is that 7 doesn't fit into the commonly held belief that sleeping in sync with 90 minute REM cycles is more healthy/effective. Example of study saying 6-7 hours: http://www.worldhealth.net/news/six_to_seven_hours_sleep_bes...
For at least the last 15 years, there has been no central way to upgrade user software on Microsoft Windows. Today, in 2011, there is no way to do this. Maybe it's coming eventually, sure. But again, these points are seriously minor issues compared to what I'm trying to suggest:

The "mobile" OS space is consistently more user-friendly than the desktop space.

Maybe desktops can catch up. Maybe MS is working magic behind the scenes. Forgive me if I'm pessimistic here. I find it far more likely that there's a slow, worldwide shift to "mobile" OSs on all computers. It'll probably resemble some sort of iOS/Android/webOS future spawn, or something. I don't know.

The automatic software updates was merely an example to show where "mobile" excels and "desktop" fails. There are many others, and even those this example may change I feel my point is still made.
Edge Rails - Custom ActiveRecord Attribute Serialization
Contrary to his claims, his test case seems to work mostly fine in Chrome 10.0.648.127 (beta) for me. I haven't tried the dev channel version though. Firefox doesn't appear to be working well at all, in either 3.6.16pre or 4.0b13 (but those are both unstable versions, so I'll withhold judgment). All of those were tested on Ubuntu.

Regardless, he's definitely made his point well (and my setup showing different but similarly bad results from his only proves his point): support for the <audio> tag is not really as solved as browser manufacturers are claiming, and is not currently a suitable competitor to Flash.

Direct link to test: http://www.phoboslab.org/files/html5audio/
Legislature passes bill to teach U.S. is republic
those pirated copies of windows are probably so dangerous, who knows what kind of malware comes along for the ride, it would be like passing the same women around to millions of men...
I don't use the actual rental service. If I ever have any time at all, I'd generally browse the streaming service to see if there is anything good on. It's more of a luxury service than one I actively got to use.
Programming with Objects - the Fundamentals of Ruby
This is still being used? I remember how easily scammed it was when this first came out. You'd think that massive failure would have meant something to them.
It's slow. Animations and web page scrolling are ~15fps and controls in many apps take ~200ms to respond. Also, there's a problem with the 3g network component that prevents the nook from sleeping unless it's in airplane mode.

A lot of this is due to how the nook honeycomb image was done (it's a mashup of gingerbread+developer preview image components) and should be better once Google pushes out the Honeycomb AOSP code drop. This could also just be related to my install since other people on various threads aren't seeing some of the issues I am. The more polished Froyo and CM7 (Gingerbread) images run decently well but aren't as smooth as my Droid Incredible running its stock image.

That said, I'm happy with it as a ebook reader and web browser and it fits in my coat pocket, which is good for the subway. I like the OS changes in Honeycomb well enough to put up with the screwiness in the image.
Pithy, but I'd be interested in your thoughts on whether a great product is necessary but not sufficient, or simply not necessary. By "great product" here I refer to one that solves a pain point--in other words, great in terms of the metric of customers willing to give you money rather than the metric of developers think it's cool.

More succinctly: can a poor product succeed with good marketing? For the long term?
SEO Forecasting: A Poor Allocation of Resource
...which, assuming you're sending and receiving equal amounts, doubles the amount you can send in a given time period.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplex_(telecommunications)
It's ``hey Apple, move over!''.
Well, to start off with the initial SDK was just HTML5 and CSS. Later the PDK was released to enable actual native level coding, most of the higher end apps are PDK apps.

As a side note, the original iPhone was also all web technology based. It wasn't until a year or so later that a native SDK became available.
Does Broadband Create Digital Ghettos?
What "parts" are you talking about that need to ramp up? The only one I can think of that is unique to tablets is 10" capacitive touchscreens. Everything else is standard smartphone components. I know everyone thinks that "big smartphone" is a clever insult (strangely used by fans of each camp to belittle both iPads and Android tablets), but it's still an accurate description.
Maybe, but your product markets itself when its sold.

If it markets itself as bug-ridden excrement piled on refuse- Well then! you're hosed next time your customer goes looking for a solution.
Amazon's going on the same model though. I agree that B&N is crashing fast, but "sell at a loss, make up on books" is essentially the entire idea behind ebook readers. It is why the main competitors are coming from book stores, not traditional hardware makers.
And yet curiously people don't doubt that he's going to ship it.
How to Consistently Develop Highly Viral, High ROI Products
Bah, she lives in NYC, there is always someone making more.
http://www.thedieline.com/
If you quit your job, but fail and end up homeless & broke you can come here and start another thread like "You made me quit my job now please help me find another one".

This is a very helpful community, so I guess you'll probably do OK in the worst case scenario.
Review my startup tickWell
Without internet access, does it really matter?
instead of treating him like a guy who just happened to get lucky eight times (Apple II, Macintosh, Pixar, Macintosh again, iPod, iTMS, iPhone, App Store, iPad)?

and what about Taligent, Apple Pippin, 20th Anniversary Macintosh, Motorola ROKR (colaberation with Apple), Macintosh Portable, Apple Lisa, Apple Newton, Apple ///?

I'm not saying it's bad, after all the saying is "if your not failing your not trying hard enough" but Apple has had it's share of failures as well.
Dropico Launches Yet Another Photo Sharing App (But You Just Might Like It)
Hoptoad, the cloud, and the pond ahead
Didn't want to get into this, but yeah, in addition to 5 cents' worth of coffee, 30 cents' worth of barista time (fixed), and probably around 50 cents' worth of lease (fixed) and a bit more for equipment (fixed).
White iPhone 4, anyone?
Or you can just create. The beauty of just creating is that when you build something really, really good, the links will flow to your site.

Thought experiment: Ok. I just wrote a page offering to give away 20 bucks to the first thousand people that read it. Let's say I am rich and can afford to give the money away. Can't get any more interesting and traffic-worthy than that, right? Heck, this is the kind of thing you'd want to send links to your friends, right?

So tell me where it is.

SEO is marketing, plain and simple. That means that there is an active component to it -- sharing links on HN, phoning some friends, making some posters for the dorm. Whatever.

The value of what you output has nothing to do with some sort of inherent quality. It has to do with how many people you can expose your content to and what ratio of those people are going to like what they see enough to give you a link.

SEO is not quality. It's popularity. People don't link to you because you wrote great stuff, they link to you because they like you, are a fan, want to look cool, etc. These are all things that you actively have to go out and cultivate.

To say it's all passive is to miss the entire point and to pander to the audience. With all the keyword optimization going on with that page, and the fact that the entire tone of the article is pitched directly to HN and hacker-types, I can't help but feel that author knows better. (I don't mean that as a slam. Perhaps I am the guy in the audience that spoils how the magician's trick is done. If so, I apologize)
Re ``there was no specification'':

Innovation is hard to schedule.
-- Dan Fylstra
I'm surprised this article is at the top of HN. 1) It is not the announcement of a research study, rather it is just referencing previous hbr blogs and sleepfoundation.org's general guidelines for sleep. 2) It offers no unique advice. 3) The title is basic linkbait (ie, its not really about food vs sleep).

Why the upvotes? is it because everyone is tired?
My little site (regional) gets 150k visitors & 2-3M page views per month on average. About 70% of those visitors find us through search. Our goal is to lower that number, but at this point it does not bother us. We know that it is in all search engines best interests to keep us at the top of the search results because we are the most relevant website for our topic/services...all of the search engines recognize this and one of the search engines knows this because they count our page views for us.

We SEO our site to make it easier for the engines to know what we are about...but we do not bother with much of the deeper stuff (all the onsite relational linking strategies).

The goal of every search engine is to deliver relevance. Be relevant.
They're nice and all for not having to use a cable, but neither appear to wake up, see if there is anything new and automatically download it.

This way I wake up in the morning, take the subway to work and my data is already "just there". I dont have to even launch the app before going into the subway (with enough time to sync up).

This is not possible on iOS but a feature I use it daily on webOS.

So not only post-PC, but proactive in keeping my data updated.
Modeling MySQL Capacity by Measuring Resource Consumptions
The comments are spot on on the TC article. Does TC really not think about these things before publishing? If you give me your credit card, I can steal your CC info regardless of whether or not I use a card reader, a camera or a pen/paper. This is just sad.
How to debug long-running transactions in MySQL
The comments on the story, and the first round here, make me worry that people are missing the point. Particularly this one:

> VeriFone's point (albeit a stupid one) is that the path from the card reader itself to the iOS device is not secure, so it's a hardware "problem."

That point isn't stupid at all, and is actually a legitimate gripe. It is my understanding that the Square device is only meant to be used with the Square payment software. Is that wrong? If that's the case, it shouldn't be as easy as VeriFone claims it is to skim a number from the device. I don't follow card skimming, but I would think that the point VeriFone is trying to make here is that Square is making it easier for low-tech criminals to implement a skimmer. While it is possible today, I've never heard it described as easy.

Another of the commenters mentioned that professional card skimmers have their own devices. That's fine; that isn't the problem here. Professionals will always do things better than the entry-level criminals. However, from my reading, it sounds like there is the capability here to write a shrink-wrapped iOS app that talks to the free Square reader, and you have skimming for a total investment of an iPod touch (or lack of investment -- you are a criminal, after all). Which is the problem that VeriFone is bringing up, and I halfway agree with given the limited evidence presented to me. We're way too lax with credit cards.

Does the Square app really need to know the card number at all, aside from transmitting it upstream? What is the vector here? It seems like the Square device should be a black box that yields only some kind of payment token, and the app only gets the cardholder name (from their screenshots).

Square's own security page[1] makes this ambiguous, too:

> Card numbers, magnetic stripe data, or security codes are not stored on Square client devices.

I've never used Square, so I might be full of hot air. However, I think instantly painting this as not an issue simply because it came from a competitor is doing a disservice to the potential (real) vulnerability here. Read the information, not the source...

[1]: https://squareup.com/security
Why would it be a bad idea ? Event servers do not to fall over if there are lot of clients holding http connections open. This is used quite widely. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_technology#Long_polling
According to the following extract from 'Coders at Work', Knuth wrote the first version of Tex using pencil and paper:

Seibel: Speaking of practical work, in the middle of working on The Art of Computer Programming you took what turned into a ten-year break to write your typesetting system TeX. I understand you wrote the first version of TeX completely away from the computer.

Knuth: When I wrote TeX originally in 1977 and ’78, of course I didn’t have literate programming but I did have structured programming. I wrote it in a big notebook in longhand, in pencil. Six months later, after I had gone through the whole project, I started typing into the computer. And did the debugging in March of ’78 while I had started writing the program in October of ’77. The code for that is in the Stanford archives—it’s all in pencil—and of course I would come back and change a subroutine as I learned what it should be. This was a first-generation system, so lots of different architectures were possible and had to be discarded until I’d lived with it for a while and knew what was there. And it was a chicken-and-egg problem—you couldn’t typeset until you had fonts but then you couldn’t have fonts until you could typeset. But structured programming gave me the idea of invariants and knowing how to make black boxes that I could understand. So I had the confidence that the code would work when I finally would debug it. I felt that I would be saving a lot of time if I waited six months before testing anything. I had enough confidence that the code was approximately right.

Seibel: And the time savings would be because you wouldn’t spend time building scaffolding and stubs to test incomplete code?

Knuth: Right.
Google Docs. Make a form. Embed.
When to Change Your Game: The fab.com story & Tips for Tech Entrepreneurs
IE9 to launch on March 14, 2011
I think you mean sarcasm detector
IE10 Countdown
In summary: "there's some profanity ahead because HTML5 Audio is still that fucked up".

My experience is entirely aligned. I was trying to use <audio> earlier this week for an incredibly simple task (occasionally play a 0.5s notification sound).

The only thing that worked reliably was Chrome (9) with a data: URI. FF3.6 (or Chrome with a normal URI) would only play the sound once, and Safari wouldn't play it at all. (These are all the Mac versions, and I didn't test Opera).
Well speed isn't everything. I choose to run a bare bones web browser - without plugins - precisely because it is easier for me to read.

I'd take a kindle over the iPad if it was easier on my eyes. I know that wouldn't suit everyone - but I'm sure there is a market there.
I take it that VeriFone has never heard of a magnetic card reader that plugs into a keyboard port?

This is a very shaky "security hole", if you ask me. When you hand over your card to someone, there is always a risk for them skimming the number. However, they kind of have to know the number in order to get paid... so how is this a security risk that is exclusive to Square again?
The Channel 9 video is at: http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/IE9-RTW-Due-Date-A-Bi...
Can you clarify your point? Is it unethical to make content for adults because children might see it?

I would say it's unethical for parents to abdicte their gatekeeper responsibilities to the clerk at gamestop.
One thing that I wanted to try (but never had the schedule to support) is polyphasic sleep (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic_sleep). The idea that sleeping 15 minutes every 4 hours (on a very strict schedule) to keep your mind close to a waking-REM-type sleep. Granted, every few weeks you would have to crash HARD (20+ hour rest).
Not controversial at all. "Content is king" is almost an SEO standard (with EGOL as its herald). Meta: The proof is the article itself. It's some age-old tested SEO wisdom in a controversial/trollish linkbait sauce. In the world of SEO this article is but an annoying splash.

"Make sites primarily for users, not search engines". Anyway, it is a point that really needs to be repeated over and over again, so for that the article maybe has some merit.

Yet I fear it may inspire another rash of linkbaitish articles linked on sites like these, where the purpose behind the content isn't to inform the user (about doing whitehat SEO), but to get the user to link to it. If these fastfood social links were all that counted for determining quality and authority on the web, icanhazcheeseburger and top 10 lists would outrank us all.
Its not that weird having people over. Its a lot like having friends over to visit, except you haven't met them before. We've never rented the whole place out while we were away, but we give out guests a key and they are often there while we are out during the day or out to dinner, etc.

I figure that if someone wanted to steal something there are much better ways (for example ways that don't involve giving out their full name and credit card information) and we don't own anything that steal-able anyway.

The biggest problem is that we only have one bathroom and it can get busy with showers in the morning.
I don't think we can hang all of those failures on Steve. Some of them, but not all. By my recollection, Taligent, 20th, Portable, and Newton were all released during his exile (if you want to call Taligent being "released"). I think they were all on Sculley's watch, but I might be mistaken.

Lisa was definitely all Jobs, all-singing, all-dancing Jobs. And ROKR... I didn't understand it then and I don't understand it now. You could slough it off as being a Motorola failure. It was about as successful as Microsoft's investment in Danger, minus the six hundred million dollars invested :-)

Anyhow, yes of course Apple has failures. So has Steve personally (NeXT!), and I never suggested otherwise.

My point was that very few people trying to compete with him adopt his methods. This is really the crux of my perspective: here are these companies getting beaten up by Apple and by Google, and somehow they refuse to learn from their opponent.
See your contacts' event plans on Twitter.com with the Lanyrd browser extension
"Why should I have to invalidate the warranty in order to make their product more attractive?"

Exactly, why don't the companies hear us. Why do Samsung and Moto keep putting their Android skin if we hate it. Why don't Apple listen to us when we ask for a better web browser with tabs and Flash and a good notification system. Why do a bunch of hackers can hack t and make it better and the giant corp can't.......... ridiculous !
I've never used the Square device either, but I don't see this as a hardware "problem". This is no different (to me) than a USB card reader that operates as a keyboard. You could scan the card into the vendor software, or into Notepad. Either way, it isn't a hardware flaw.
Another case of well intentioned intellectuals trying to protect the poor consumers from themselves but ending up hurting them.
A pen-tablet is suited for applications which are too complex for an iPad and too simple for a netbook. That's a ridiculously thin niche.

Tablet + pen = 2 hands busy, you've lost most of your comfort and mobility advantage compared to a netbook user.

For the narrow niche of applications which require drawing on the screen, you can simply design a capacitive pen for iPad; you'll never amortize the development of a dedicated hardware, let alone OS.
Hits By Design
I'll do another code review and make certain that I'm not crazy and just missing something, then I'll send a spec his way.
A lot of discussion about the demise of Flash is focused on how CSS and JavaScript can now create equally pretty-looking websites, which is fair enough. But take it from a long-time audio developer: HTML5 audio is essentially useless for creating web applications involving almost any kind of audio. Even Firefox, which has the best HTML5 support so far, offers absolutely nothing like what is possible using the combination of a Flash client and a dedicated streaming server.

Flash might have a lot of bad points (which I'd be the first to call out) but RTMP audio (which also handles both video and arbitrary data) really isn't its worst feature, and for this reason alone its going to be a significant part of the internet for many years to come.
Great idea! I looks like XMPP services are getting more and more popular, and it's a great thing.

I love the bot provided by Producteev to manager your tasks, it's way more convenient than having to open your browser, login to the website, clicking in the right place.

I hope to see more services allowing it's user to interact via a bot.
> I picked the netbook edition for a laptop - thinking it might be optimised for long battery life as well as a small display.

I really doubt that.

There is no real difference between the various flavor except in the packages that are installed by default. It's pretty much like you suggested :)

You can get a normal (desktop edition) ubuntu and turn it into a server by just installing packages from the package manager. I personally don't know exactly which packages are installed by default on the server edition, but the point is that the "Server Edition" is not really that special.

Same applies to flavors like Xubuntu and Kubuntu. You can always install xfce and/or kde from apt-get. You can get Xubuntu then install gnome on it.
Stross: Five year retrospective [2007]
It seems their problem with Square is that it allows you to get the credit card number in plaintext if you use their hardware. Of course, this is nothing new: you can buy a cardreader that acts as a USB keyboard for $20 and use that to read a credit card and output it in TextMate. Square's hardware really has nothing to do with it: if Squary would use something else, you'd still be able to buy one of those reader thingies for $5 from DealExtreme or some other site, and use the same procedure to skim a credit card.

One thing Square could do would be to, say, encrypt the credit card info with a public key, then pass that data on to the app. The app could upload the data to Square, where it could be decrypted and verified. Of course, this wouldn't fit in a $2 reader, and there really isn't a point to do this as long as there are other readers out there that allow you to read the data in plain text.
Unemployed Need not Apply - is it fair to discriminate against the unemployed?
Sarcasm and irony overlap. This was both.