skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And your credentials are? If you expect people to fork over $450 for 20 min of your time, you better be:

1) an expert in usability and have few papers written on it

2) have many years of actual usability studies and design

3) have designed interfaces yourself and have examples of UIs you've designed.

Just getting testimonials for 'reduced pricing' won't cut it. What you need is a resume/cv. All these big usability experts sell themselves first and their work second. You need to sell people on why they should trust you.

This startup is basically just selling of your services. Here's some ideas. Start by writing whitepapers & studies of other sites. Do them for free. Just pick any known site and say what you'd do differently. Do this for a lot of them. Make a blog and do a study every day. Make a wiki with usability practices. Start recording videos of random users using some site and criticize them.

In short, work on your credibility since that's what you're selling.
Undergraduate student and associate software engineer at an embedded systems startup (that just got bought recently). I also do some side work with some peers at my school.
umm why is it blocking firefox 3.0 on linux??
That's a common mistake. Most Mormon's aren't bothered by sodas, caffeinated or not. They are specifically opposed to tea and coffee which gets interpreted as caffeine. No, it doesn't make sense and a caffeine prohibition would at least seem to have some type of logic behind it (some of them do that)... but it's religion it's meant to make you at least a little stupid.
45 Beautiful Motion Blur Photos
Thanks for the input. I should point out that it's not 20 minutes of my time. I spend around 15 minutes recording the video, then go through the site and reflect on some of the issues I initially encountered, and explore the site in greater depth (I realize that this isn't mentioned on my site). Then I organize my thoughts and findings in pages that are meant to be easily referenceable. After that, I talk to the client for 20 minutes as well.

The fact is, I am not a big usability expert. I have given a couple talks on the subject and written a few blog articles on the subject (one of which A List Apart was interested in publishing). I've also done a number of usability tests for companies that I have worked for. Therefore, my thinking is that a more feasible approach in the short term is to show that I actually produce good results. Establishing that I'm an expert is something that will take time. Thankfully, I enjoy usability and will enjoy establishing expert status. In the meantime, if you have any suggestions for otherwise convincing people that they should go with me, I would appreciate it.

It's interesting to me that nobody really cares about the "usefulness guarantee".
Well I don't know it very well, that's partly why I'm wondering. But it is not very expressive.
Is it not possible for example to have higher order functions in a low-level language?
The type-system could be made safer(learn from Haskell).
From home, start with condensing to one command:

git push --all --tags

From location1, if you just want to be able to make your working copy look like origin/<branchname>, you don't have to create a new branch. You can checkout on a tracking branch. You just can't do all your normal work there (i.e., when you want to commit, you'd need to checkout a branch to commit on). If you want to create local branches that track all the remote branches, the command you're currently using (minus the --track option) is what you need.

As for deleting a branch, the simplest way is to not push branches that you're not going to keep. I understand what your context is, so you'll likely be stuck with maintaining branches in your central repository.

There's not a dramatic simplification I can see in your workflow, but here's where Git's strong-suit really kicks in: it's very, very scriptable. It would be nearly trivial to write simple bash scripts to do most of this in one command (you might even be able to get there with aliases).
Using the Zillow API for New York Times Coverage
I have a stronger suggestion: that any branch in the conversation tree (a post and all its replies, recursively) should be able to be marked meta or orthogonal. Comments are supposed to be rewarded with global "comment karma", I suspect, for the contribution they make to the original topic (the same one that the posted article discusses.) Comments that have nothing to do with the article subject (note that the article itself may be a horrible presentation of the subject; it is not the subject as stated by the article, but rather the subject the community extracts from the article that is the focus.)

Anyway, comments (and all replies to those comments) marked orthogonal enough times by the community would have their comment karma removed, and be collapsed and perhaps restyled. To restore them, you could click on a "seperate discussion" action link on the collapsed thread, which would submit the thread as a separate story, to be voted up and down on its own, orthogonal merits (clicking it again once the story had been so submitted would vote said story up.) If that post, then, achieved a certain (low minimum) score, its posts' comment karma would be reinstated.
... or the productive farm where you would be making more than minimum wage.

There is nothing to say that you will get paid more working in the "productive" farm, especially when "high productivity" is defined as "you doing more work for less money with the same tools".

The farmer has all the data, he sets your pay, and he wants you to work for minimum wage. The trick used to boost the amount of work done was to reduce the influence that the workers had on their pay, not to increase their pay.

Doing some quick calculations using the numbers in the paper linked to from the article, (and assuming that the farmer was successful in setting his pay structure so that those working the least were paid a minimum wage of £5/hr), those working the hardest worked harder (from 8.05 kg/hr to 12.16 kg/hr) but got paid less (from £22.45/hr to £12.28/hr).

Assuming you don't care whether the farm goes out of business or not (you're only working there for one summer) which one would you like to work in again?
Check out franz.com for Allegro Common Lisp. It has a native and polished Windows implementation.
Check out the Clojure language. It runs on the JVM under Java 1.5+ SE, so you get cross-platform access to Swing, and to Oracle and SQL Server through the pure Java drivers. It also has great support for concurrency, including STM.

GUI, DB, Cross platform, concurrency. What else could you need?
Teaching Teaching & Understanding Understanding (vid)
if youre doing subscriptions, zuora is the way to go. let me know if you want an intro.
The API is nice - but Zillow has a lot of cobranding requirements that has resulted in my cofounder and I creating our own crawler to get the data from Public Record rather than Zillow.
Maybe you should put it above the fold, or at least before you name your price.

But hey, I'm no usability expert either.
I agree, and I'd link that to why nobody is paying attention to the "usefulness guarantee". You really need to think about who you are selling to. For a corporate client the time and expense and the risk of dealing with you will equal or exceed the $450. Think about the project manager that is going to have to order your service: $450 is not a lot but they are going to have to explain it to others and it's going to look embarrassing if you turn out to be just some random dude on the internet who takes their money and then sends them a bunch of 'duh' statements about their web site. They have a very CYA mentality, which like it or not you have to deal with.

To get started perhaps you could think about a 'first taste is free' model where you do a review of part of their site (say, 1 page) with no obligation and then based on that they can go to their manager and justify the expense.
Masayoshi Son was once the SECOND richest man in the world, after BillG, at 70 billion dollars!

The guy who ran Hikari Tsushin (mobile phones, internet) is even more interesting! He was worth about 40 billion at the Hong Kong bubble peak, and is now worth a lot less. But it's cool to be up there once!

[Edit] Relevance - Son owned a lot of Yahoo (not just Japan) and was worth tons for it.

#618 Yasumitsu Shigeta is the other guy, and is just up there due to being bubble cool!
Enhancing Multitasking to Enhance our Minds
Wow just to think I was actually contemplating using Git for my future projects. Thank you!
Yeah, the order of elements is something I'll have to play with.
Sorry, I should've mentioned. I'm very predisposed to avoiding Java in all forms religiously.
non-free :|
I don't even mean as in freedom, there's only a limited personal edition.
Thank you, that's very helpful.
Apple's Ambitious iPhone 3G Plans
Mysqlgame
I worked it out this afternoon, and its not too terribly difficult to get a nice closed form solution (as opposed to a recursive (or iterative one). Its mostly a bit of geometry with some cleverness moving things around to get a nice closed form solution. The only advanced math is a geometric series that comes up at the end, which gives the final fully closed form solution for the length of the paper given a thickness, initial length, and the number of folds. It becomes easy then to solve for an initial length for a number of desired folds.

The fact that she was in high school when she did this though, is impressive. Any teacher with a bit of calculus would have been able to guide her though, once he saw where she was headed.
>> This startup is basically just selling of your services. Here's some ideas. Start by writing whitepapers & studies of other sites. Do them for free. Just pick any known site and say what you'd do differently. Do this for a lot of them. Make a blog and do a study every day. Make a wiki with usability practices. Start recording videos of random users using some site and criticize them.

I didn't notice this at first. It's very useful advice. Some of it I've already started (writing whitepapers & studies). My friend and I have been talking about putting together a wiki with usability practices.

In the mean time, I have had a few people request the service because their web developer (whom I showed the site to) recommended it to them. Hopefully word of mouth will continue to bring in business and increase my cash flow. Over time it will be great to build my credibility in the ways you mention. In the short term, it's also pretty important to me to start gaining paying business.
Why Quality Matters
It does get pretty silly sometimes. There are only a few things that are "outlawed", and therefore people think that as long as they abstain from those substances, they're in total compliance with what their religion expects of them. The root reason of the dietary restrictions is a principle of respecting the body and keeping it clean, but people misapply it by interpreting it verbatim and then gorging themselves on junk food, soda, or anything that isn't healthy but isn't technically "forbidden".

I think it's a good thing that the church doesn't forcefully regulate which sodas we can or cannot drink, because that would be controlling and ridiculous. However, these slightly arbitrary rules can end up encouraging a group of people who do the minimum required just to remain in good social status. That will be the case anywhere.

Another example of this is R-rated movies. There was a church leader a long time ago who at one time at a general conference warned against viewing R-rated movies. This seems perfectly acceptable, except that it ended up creating an unwritten rule of sorts among LDS members. The principle is that we should avoid movies that don't meet the standards we're expected to have, but it inevitably created a group of people who were perfectly okay with seeing any movie regardless of the content as long as the MPAA didn't put the magic 'R' on it.

It's hard to know where to draw the line when you know that some people are just going to get as close to that line as possible. You just hope that most people are listening to the underlying principles rather than the base requirements.

I occasionally drink caffeinated sodas if there isn't anything else available. I don't consider this to be especially damaging to my health. I think that whether or not I drink a caffeinated beverage has very little or nothing to do with what I consider to be my spiritual standing.
It looks promising...

I wrote the authors and asked them to reconsider the Silverlight chapter, though. I think focusing on Flash/Flex integration (or even something else entirely) would be much more useful to the community. Silverlight has very little traction, and Flash/Flex have better platform and open-source support. Silverlight integration would be a wasted chapter for many, I think.
Amazon FPS?

I'm told this is a cool service, but I have no firsthand experience. We own a payment processing company, so we've never had to deal with third-party gateways before.
The video squeals with a high-pitched noise in the background which makes it very hard to watch. Also, some more editing might be worth it: cut out those uhm's and ah's, get a decent mike and make it sound nice and professional. I like the click and typing effects, although I cannot read the text of the site you're clicking on in that video at all.
What Will Life Be Like in the Year 2008?
How To: Make A Metal Detector
4 12seconds.tv invites available
Post a comment with an email address if you would like one
"When you see what you want, you press a number that signifies “buy,” and the household computer takes over, places the order, notifies the store of the home address and subtracts the purchase price from your bank balance."

One-click online ordering in 1968. The only difference is that the info is stored on the client rather than the server. This makes it pretty clear how badly the Amazon patent fails the nonobviousness test.
JS basics: newElement(), a style(), toggleVisibility() function.
menloparkbum@gmail.com
Jquery form validation
Join us at Hacker News Coffee, Palo Alto, Tuesday at 8:30am
Hey,

Come by Hacker News Coffee and have that caffeine-infused drink that we all love with other fellow hackers.

Tuesday morning at 8:30am.

Hobee's Restaurant
4224 El Camino Real
Palo Alto, CA 94306

Google Maps:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=hobee%27s+4224+El+Camino+Real,+Palo+Alto,+CA&sll=37.409863,-122.118444&sspn=0.011471,0.019462&ie=UTF8&ll=37.413945,-122.121384&spn=0.01147,0.019462&z=16&iwloc=A&iwd=1&cid=37409015,-122122345,12614650498174048130&dtab=0

(if it doesn't work, http://is.gd/1SOa)

If you can't find any of us, call Mark at 617.395.5633.
I agree about the T&C.

If you want/need any help writing that scraper, let me know, I'd love to have access to the info...
Wish I could go, but I'm in Florida...
Thanks for the reply.

Regarding the push command, it currently does not allow both the --all and --tags options to be used together (very strange).

Regarding not pushing temporary branches, this seems contrary to one of the reasons I started using git: it makes branches cheap and easy to throw away when you are done with them.

I can understand the way git works regarding each developer using only the branches they are interested in, but I can't seem scale this philosophy down to a single developer. I want all my working copies to be the same. I want new branches to propagate. I want branch deletions to propagate.

I've thought about scripting some of this, but for some pieces I am not sure how to proceed. Consider branch deletion. The problem here is that I can delete the branch from the main repository, but that doesn't force deletion for each of the clients. Instead, I would need to write a custom "git pull" style command that I run in a working directory before I start my work. Should this command delete all remote branches so that actual deletions are propagated, and then "git pull" restores the remote branches which still exist?

[edit: I've discovered that "git remote prune" will delete remote tracking branches that are no longer in the repo]

Don't other git users have this issue? Presumably there are others who work from more than one location and want a consistent view from each, yet I can't seem to google for any help on these issues.
Wikimedia pegs future on education, not profit
breakfast at hobee's!
I'll definitely be there, that's right across the street
Ditto. I couldn't be much further from Palo Alto all the way up here in upstate NY.
MobWars v 2.0?
ah, first morning back and were throwing a "party".
Yes, I've never been greatly enamoured of Java itself, but the JVM truly is a superb piece of work.

Your loss I suppose, but if you want to largely stay in the MS ecosystem, why not check-out F#? It draws heavily from ML/OCAML and is MS supported on .NET and in VS.

F# seems like a safe choice for functional programming in an MS oriented shop.
She said, "I think I remember the hackers,

And as I recall, I think, we both kinda liked it."

And I said, "Well, that's the one thing we've got."
> I occasionally drink caffeinated sodas if there isn't anything else available. I don't consider this to be especially damaging to my health. I think that whether or not I drink a caffeinated beverage has very little or nothing to do with what I consider to be my spiritual standing.

The point of my story wasn't to say, "Haha. Here are these goofy mormonians." I think you can pick out goofballs from any religion. My point was, "Here is someone going to college that doesn't seem to be able to read the ingredients on their soda can." Or more directly, "BYU is a school that seems to be failing at teaching students how to think and reason."
PG should stop by if hes in the valley :-)
What about us non-coffee drinking folk? :-P
Mountain Dew. The other hacker love beverage.
tons of breakfast food
smoothies
sandiwches
or if youre so inclined... beer!
He's, like, 17. I think that'll be out of the question ;)
http://gizmodo.com/351813/world-of-warcraft-mana-energy-poti...
That's not a bad idea, just make sure that a positive testimonial isn't a prerequisite for getting a free review.
Email is dead. Long live Email.
hoisie@gmail.com
you need to run arbitrary binary code on my machine? the nerve.
Email recovery will outlast Bush presidency
Eventually the legal world will catch up with technology, and those kind of silly patents will be no more.
I still have 1 year of tormenting boredom
yo, dont even go there haha. mazy got sick last time he had that. i seriously may stop by frys and grab some :-o
Sneak preview of the Sweetcron
Sometimes You Just Have To Walk Away
AM? What's that?
yeah, the meetup is before going to bed :-P
I would so be there, except... ya know... got work. Any chance we can plan the next one for a weekend?
darn, maybe I should move to silicon valley
Right now, I use Tree Styles Tabs as a sort of "temporary history", since I got tired of thinking about which tabs I should keep open. I'm also using the Ctrl-Tab extension just like Alt-Tab on windows (can't live without it). With a vertical tab list, I open almost everything in a new tab. My depth first search habits are limited by seeing the tab indentations and knowing where the root is.

My ideal tab behavior would involve merging browser history and tabs into an infinite vertical scroll. Pages with unsaved state (form data, important flash objects, AJAX "state") would stay in Firefox's memory until explicitly closed. All "boring" pages would stay in memory for a few hours, then convert to a URL+scroll-position+selected-text object. Combine this with single-keystroke tab tagging and I think that tabs will finally feel like a reliable part of the browser, not just a taskbar-inspired hack.

edit: Ideally, desktop applications would work in a similar way. Right now I have to keep ~30 windows open because I can't remember which serialize state perfectly, and which don't.
Umm, what? I'll take an Aeron over "here's $200, go to Staples" any day.
Used Aerons on craigslist are the way to go. I'm of the opinion that when you're spending crazy hours in a chair, it's not something you want to skimp on. The extra productivity caused by the difference in comfort level will more than pay for the chair.

Get cheap-ass desks from Ikea or something.
There is the D programming language, but it hasn't caught on.
http://www.digitalmars.com/d/index.html
Unfortunately I just returned to Cambridge today.
Is this the one in Town And Country?
Completely off-topic, but is there a tinyurl competitor that shows the domain? So, for example, something like http://google.tinyurl.com/69buwm or http://tinyurl.com/google/69buwm instead of http://tinyurl.com/69buwm.
Personal data breaches this year already surpass 2007 total
Where in upstate NY? I'm in Syracuse and would go to something like this here.
Avoiding criticism is a good recipe for failure in the long run...
Nope, the one across from where Ricky's Hyatt Hotel used to be. Southbound on el camino after the intersection with Charleston/Arastradero.
I totally agree with the premise. What is the market share of Outlook? Outlook sucks. I stopped using it a few days ago and feel like a crack addict who just kicked the habit. I can think clearly now!
Seems like junk data. Surely most never get included in these statistics.
Tinyurl has a way to show you the domain before sending you there: http://preview.tinyurl.com/69buwm
Anyone in SF want to meet up at the same time? Somewhere on Valencia?
I'll give it a whirl. Thanks for the heads up.
As I said on the post's own thread:

It's really 14 out of 80. You can't count the current batch, because they've just started talking to investors. Plus (a) several of the remaining 66 probably will raise series A rounds in the future, and (b) there are certainly more that could have but either got acquired (Reddit, Omnisio) or made it to profitability on angel money (Wufoo, Bountii).
Wow. I can't believe they don't switch to local languages, as with google.ru.
yep ..makes sense.
i'll try and make it out...
PowerReaders - A Google Reader Mashup.
SICP in other languages
Check out http://www.pequrl.com

It's by a friend of mine and not super pretty, but it works!
I like Tree Styles Tabs, but it seemed to take up too much space for me to consider using. And it wasn't nearly so good at showing the temporal dimension of browsing.

Do you think the proposed system would satisfy your desires? It includes all the data shown by Tree Styles Tab, and merges history and open tabs quite seamlessly, with the 'history gutter' system.
ISPs aren't common carriers now.

P4P doesn't involve any discrimination by the ISPs, since it merely provides hints to P2P apps about which peers are faster. As several people have pointed out, there's no point in providing misleading hints, since it would just cause P2P apps to ignore them altogether.
Googleplex: Google's food perks on the chopping block
Cloud computing - More Storms Ahead
OCaml may be a good candidate; consider the example of Melange which was 1/3 the LOC of equivalent C with the same performance.
I agree, prospective students should be concerned with more than the skill of the gardener. However, there's nothing like some beautiful landscaping to seal the deal on a campus tour.
Has anyone heard anything positive or negative about Penn Foster College?
I'd be up for it.
justin.tv
and life in 2048? Kurzweil predicts the Singularity occurs around 2045.
And if you setup cookies for tinyurl --> it can automatically direct you to the preview page.
Build One to Throw Away