skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have experimented with those kneeling things that have no back, and to my surprise they seem to work ok. I find it best to swap back and forth between on those and a normal chair.

In general, I find hard straight chairs better than the more common padded office style. I think the periodic shifting and squirming you do keeps your back from setting up in a bad way. Wooden kitchen chairs are cheap to come by if you don't care about matching them, but one disadvantage is that they don't slide around as well.

I am currently using a wooden rocking chair for all my office chair needs. It's easier to slide around (I glued felt strips to the rockers). If I were setting up a new office now, I would get only rocking chairs.
Dude! 8:30 am? Ok I'm in!
If the rest of you are interested, there's a Facebook Silicon Valley Hacker News Group:
http://www.new.facebook.com/home.php?ref=logo#/group.php?gid...
How could this possibly surprise anyone? What will kids like more:

1) A TV

2) An interactive TV that completely encompasses the feature set of (1) while also providing endlessly more flexible and varied content
Both is best.
There's a significant difference between avoiding criticism and avoiding public criticism. There'd probably be a whole lot more people asking for HN feedback if the comments were only visible to them. That's a good market to go after.
I think the most accurate description of Farmer Smith's intention would be to maximize the amount of productivity he received per dollar paid. production/cost = x Solve for x, maximizing x. His objective was to maximize x, not minimize cost.
I like this quite a lot. I find I can not work if I have too many tabs open, I wonder if this will help. But even if not, it's still a great idea.
That works because the managers can do the job of their employees. Most tech fields to which I've been exposed, managers might have once been able to do the job of employees, but are either out of touch with the technology of today or their skills have ossified.

Not to mention the managers that could never do the job in the first place...
Same time? What happened to traditional hacker hours?

Besides, we can't have a competing meetup. That, as my friend says, would be divisive...
Aren't there many start up which are not looking for VC Funding. Why is it always, you are good and VC funded else you are bad.
I didn't say the truth was somewhere in the middle. I simply said that I do not think that "the free market will fix everything" is an acceptable response in this case.

> 1890

If I were black, or Italian, or Chinese, or something else that wasn't very well thought of in 1890, I think I would have a vast preference for the public schools of 2008. I happen to be white, but I believe that one function of public schools is to give everyone something of a shot at a better life than the one they happened to be born into.

Note again that I'm not saying things are perfect the way they are, or that there aren't many good reforms that could be done to improve them (I think we'd probably agree that giving teachers' unions less of a role would be sensible). What I was stating is that compulsory education, despite some very obvious defects, has served us pretty well, and that "throw it out!" without suggesting something better is an uninteresting discussion, albeit far less intellectually demanding. I don't really think I'm up to the challenge either: I'd rather just concentrate on hacking and startup.
Ask YC: Frameworks/libraries for iPhone
Let's make a list of frameworks/libraries for iPhone development, with comments on which ones are better or worse and why. I know of three (but can't comment on them as I really haven't yet used anything):

Safire: http://code.google.com/p/safire/

Jiggy: http://jiggyapp.com/

iui: http://code.google.com/p/iui/
Is it MySQL-game or my-(SQL game)? I thought Google App Engine only gave you access to Bigtable not MySQL, so this would imply the latter?
Remember though that their original rates were inflated due to the collusion between the workers. They are taking a pay cut of course, but that's because they can't control the supply as easily.
> ...you would have to watch something like 210 minutes of video and read 21 feedback forms, a lot of it covering the same ground.

How about you partner with usertesting.com (or just quietly use them). YOU watch the 210 minutes of video and give me an edited and analyzed summary report. I'd pay for that. You could hold the record for "Most User Testing Videos Ever Watched by a Single Person". There's your credibility right there! Where your sanity will be by that time is anyone's guess.
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I could do, say, 10:30am. Also, I don't think SF and PA meetings would be competing for people.
I like some parts of it (like how it detects typing activity), but I think it adds more visual complexity than needed. The temporal information might cause confusion: what if almost all the pages in tab were accessed 14 hours ago, but then you clicked a link in it and went back? what time would you show? There's just so many time variables that I don't know which would be useful. In either case, I would prefer a more subtle approach to showing age, like fading tab color.

I think tabs have been broken from the beginning, though. My goal is to traverse information as rapidly as possible, tagging things I like (today I do this by manually with Save Page As). I simply visit too many pages to know if a tab/page is a true "task" or not; this is why I don't see the purpose of distinguishing between currently open tabs and history. And this is why the gutter bothers me: why distinguish between what's open and what's closed (but is still useful)?

I realize many people use just four or five browser tabs, but that kind of workflow is more suitable to the OS taskbar itself. Often times, half these tabs are a stateful application like gmail and the purpose of the tab is to separate workflows. Automatically identifying tabs with stateful activity is the key to this. Right now, users are doing it manually and keeping those tabs open all the time. It should be the browser's job to know what is "important" and what is "just a page". This is one of the true advantages of the iPhone (I haven't used other smartphones) - all of the built-in applications preserve state perfectly and I never have to fiddle with a separate "app launcher" and "window switcher". In Firefox, the tabs are the unnecessary "window switcher". Of course I'm ignoring the behavior of MobileSafari because it's a memory/space-limited device.

This is somewhat separate from your design, I'm just finally writing my complete rant on tabs. I realize I might be browsing the web very strangely. Sorry to thread-jack :-)
The awesome highlighter will do it as well, though we don't have it as a part of the public site any more.

http://awurl.com/d/google/tMrTgrpJS

We had it up but no one used it, so my co-founder took it down to "remove clutter"
Is It Time to Ditch IE6?
IE6 turns 7 years old this week. Its successor is almost two years old, and IE8 is on the horizon. So why do so many web sites still support it? Why do so many people still use it? And is it time we said, "Enough is enough," and dropped support for it completely?
Consider trying the 'full screen browsing' approach. It's not perfect, but it's helped me a lot, and best of all, it's implemented.
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Imagine all the latest TV shows right in front of you? Imagine how much time and money you could save if you knew how to Download That 70s Show Episodes almost for free? No more paying $40 for every TV show season because you can actually download high quality TV shows and movies for free.
Why don't we poll for the time?
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San Francisco is effectively nowhere near Palo Alto (esp. for those of us without cars), so I don't think that competition is a problem.

I think that after 10AM is too late, though. Nine?
http://301.sickos.org/ comes with python source, so you can easily hack it in (might be two more lines of code)
Even better would be something based on open standards with several good implemenations rather than proprietary crap.

Javascript + ???, I would suppose.
> Let's not forget that many of them would probably love to eat at MacDonalds every meal too, but that not necessarily the best thing either.

It would beat starving, I bet.

> The point I'm trying to make, is, yea, call many of the comments "not insightful", but unless you read the article in question, your only displaying flippant ignorance to call it out for lacking insight.

I read some random samplings, and it just seems way too handwavy, and full of random assertions, rather than, say, hard facts, for my tastes.

To take his idea of matching people up for learning: might work ok for adults, but it's not going to function to give kids a basic education, unless they're already in a school, and in that case it's still compulsory education.
Really awesome group. Was at the august meetup a few weeks ago. iamelgringo has done a kickass job with it.
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The same is here in Japan, where Yahoo has a much stronger lead. It's one thing to localize your UI, quite another to localize your approach. The second piece is crucial.
There is also a Bootstrapper Breakfast at 7:30am on the first Friday of the month at that same Hobees: bootstrapping hackers are obviously welcome. See http://www.bootstrapperbreakfast.com/ for more details, next one is Sep 5. There is also an evening "Hackers & Founders" meetup at St. John's in Sunnyvale Sep 18 at 6:30pm http://entrepreneur.meetup.com/1737/
It's somewhat appealing idiotic humor - I've seen and perpetrated worse myself.
The 14 out of 80 number is for those who have done a Series A or later round. I assume that doesn't include additional angel funding (beyond YC) that some of the 66 out of 80 may have received. Is that correct?

It would be good to get gross statistics - without revealing company specific details - of how many got angel funding, average funding etc. It would help hackers calculate their odds ...
Too many cores, not enough brains
/rant

There can be no doubt that Russia has many, many brilliant mathematicians and engineers (poets, writers and musicians too). Everyone knows this. And, individually, I know their people can be quite lovely. The problem is that these people are in Russia. Russia crushes all. How many times do people have to get burned by Russia to realize Russia is a trade - not an investment? How long before the wannabe czar declares "all your routers/servers/data/money/life are belong to us"? "Russians", by and large, are not affluent. A relative handful of Moscowvites are.

Mark Franchetti is obviously on the payroll but why he would write this blatant puff piece about "yet another indexer" is beyond me. These people have nothing Google, Yahoo and even Microsoft can and have put together. The only thing they do have is an advantage in the understanding of native Russian language and society. Ok, so? There is no market for Russian services outside of Russia. The rest of the world speaks English, French, Spanish, Arabic or some version of Chinese with a smattering of Portuguese thrown in for good measure.

Since the Empire struck back in Georgia, international monetary outflows from Russia have been at their highest levels since the Great Ruble Implosion of the late 1990's. Lets face it gang, when the big ugly bear flexes its muscles people run for cover. Nobody wants to be in bed with his highness, the dread nightmare Putin. Who here thinks Putin has his peoples best interest at heart? Who here thinks a goal of Russia is to increase the prosperity of its people? Putin is out for numero uno, Putin. And the main concern for Putin is Gazprom. Who here thinks that Yandex will continue to fly under the radar of the FSB indefinitely? Who here thinks an independent, privately owned and operated company can exist in Russia without connections to their political/military/underworld/secret police?

(off topic)
People in the West love to bitch and moan about the US all day long. 'Hegemony', 'Imperialism', 'Totalitarianism' and, lest we forget, torture. Has everyone fallen asleep at the wheel? If you are from the West and do not have an ancestral connection to mother Russia, you have no idea what any of those words mean. It will be many generations (hopefully that short) before Russia is friendly enough as a national entity to do anything even related to business with.

In closing, if this Yandex knows whats good for them they will pull up stakes, run dont walk and leave Russia with extreme haste and plop themselves down anywhere else. London, Paris, Silicon Valley, New York, Madrid. Pick one, any of a dozen or more cities would be better than the dump that we know today as Russia.

Oh, in the fairness of full disclosure, if it sounds like I am anti-Russia in the extreme, I am. Honestly, which Olympic medalist of any color has defected from the West to Russia? We here in America have Russia to thank for our brand new Olympic individual gymnastic all-around Champion, Nastia Luikin :)

/end rant
Great orange spice tea as well as a full set of Tazo caf and decaf. Fresh squeezed orange juice, a range of smoothies, and the best darn breakfast in town (BDBIT see http://www.hobees.com/textmenu.html )
especially porn
好的, I've been itching for a good arms race. We won round 2 much too easily & everything's stagnated.
How come these meetups are not over weekend?
will be there if i make it out of bed!
I stumbled upon this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:2005education_spending.PN...

Public spending on education in 2005 as a percentage of the top government (USA - $734,893,675,000)

Here is the worldbank report on how much every country top govt spends on education. (an old report but says it all)
http://siteresources.worldbank.org/DATASTATISTICS/Resources/...
No, don't apologize, this viewpoint is absolutely intriguing, and I greatly appreciate the discussion. The goal is to make the best tab navigation system, not to trumpet any particular design :-)

I especially like your point about identifying tabs with state, and identifying tabs that are basically applications. Perhaps we can actually accomplish much of this automatically? We can at least detect the presence of things entered into text-fields. We can at least save a state of the DOM and Javascript namespace instead of wiping everything else out.

If a tab is an application, it perhaps doesn't make sense to bind it to the same horizontal time axis; perhaps instead to do as OS X does, by loading applications into a doc. On the other hand, though, on OS X I just navigate around with Quicksilver, which has a quasimodal 'task-leaping' behavior that's totally supported by this version of FoxGlide.

It's certainly true that it's unclear which time variables are the most important to display. At the moment, I suggest a hybrid approach -- organize the tabs horizontally by order of opening, as is the default in Firefox. At the same time, indicate on the activity ticker, for each time, which tab you have opened, and what you were doing. This keep the horizontal ordering of tabs static, aiding spatial memory, while allowing you to recall what you were doing at any given moment, using the activity ticker.

Regarding the distinction between open and closed tabs, I think that most of the population likes the feeling of 'finality' achieved once they close a tab. They like knowing that they could recover it, if need be, but mostly, they appreciate tabs being "out of sight, out of mind". It's always going to be important to be able to close tabs (for stopping persistent behavior: eg. Meebo, Pandora, Youtube).

I guess you would advocate the graying out of closed tabs, while perhaps lowering their priority more rapidly. Is this correct?

Is it possible that the gutter can be adapted for your needs as well? Say, it only shows up if you actually close something. We need to strike some compromise between people who want closed tabs out of their face and people who want tabs around, like you.
People have more time for leisure activities in the year 2008. The average work day is about four hours. But the extra time isn’t totally free. The pace of technological advance is such that a certain amount of a jobholder’s spare time is used in keeping up with the new developments, on the average, about two hours of home study a day.

Intriguingly, this is probably true. The difference is that 'home study of new developments' actually just takes place at work, and the 8 hour workday is still going strong, if only as an illusion.

The pattern seems to be that the predictions for technology, especially anything requiring complicated physics or engineering, are wildly inaccurate, while the predictions for social, organizational, or behavioral change are either on the money, or too conservative.

Since consumer programs are usually meant to aid existing behaviors, the authors predictions don't overshoot the mark by nearly so much.

Sometimes, social institutions are completely ignored as subjects of change.

"Other conveniences ease kitchenwork. The housewife simply determines in advance her menus for the week, then slips prepackaged meals into the freezer and lets the automatic food utility do the rest. At preset times, each meal slides into the microwave oven and is cooked or thawed. The meal then is served on disposable plastic plates. These plates, as well as knives, forks and spoons of the same material, are so inexpensive they can be discarded after use."

How quaint. What on earth is said 'the housewife' supposed to do? not be a housewife, perhaps?
wow, hope you're not trying to crawl all 3000ish counties instead..
You lost me when the first interesting link starts "http://localhost/"
Firefox Proposal: A Better New Tab Screen
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Are Macs More Expensive? Round Four: The Skinny on the Mini
There's always a strong aftermarket for Aeron chairs. Which means they're always available used, and always more expensive that you'd like. But, ~$700 is better than new prices, and an Aeron is a solid choice. There are only a few chairs in the same league and none that are significantly cheaper or as universally available.
so whats the story with an SF meetup? i'm in
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Multimodal Shortest Path Tree of Bay Area (A graph of shortest paths from public transit)
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The Boston meetup I attended over a year ago was held during the evening and many awesome people showed up. I encourage consideration of evening time slots! (However, unless I have a conflict I will show up to a SF meetup regardless of time.)
Definitely. And it should also be noted that the work in the story is seasonal. I'm not sure that the incessant competition in this performance-pay model would be entirely conducive to retaining staff long-term. However, this may not be a big problem with unskilled industries where staff turnover is high anyway.
I somehow forgot about the true need to close a tab sometimes. This problem is much harder than I thought. But, one thing that I don't think will ever work is a large intermediate screen (as the mockup) as the primary method of switching tabs/pages. Most users (especially those on Windows) don't expect to see large intermediate screens (things like alt-tab are tiny). And I'm wary of two or more methods of switching, such as regular tabs plus the full-screen approach. It would kind of bring the full-screen method into an "analytics" category that most users would never use to their advantage. Is a full-screen tab switcher intended to be the primary method of switching?

The problem is especially tricky because users have already adapted their mental models of browsing to non-ideal tabs. This might require a very slow transition into an ideal navigation method. The "find a tab using location bar" approach is heading in the right direction.

I'm much more interested in improving the usability of existing horizontal (and vertical) tabs, since that's what users are used to. I don't have a compromise yet (if ever) but I would base it on these assumptions, which may not apply to everyone:

1) Just because a page has a tab, doesn't mean it needs to stay in memory (for most pages)

2) Keeping tabs, in-tab page history, and global history fragmented is awful

3) Firefox's history pane is unusable, which partly accounts for tab proliferation (for many users - how many?)

As a side note, one of the reasons I like Tree Style Tabs is that it brings the webpage text closer to the center of the screen. As long as the screen is at least 1280 pixels wide, it's usually better for me. edit: but, it is kind of useless if the visual noise bothers you. It doesn't bug me; I like to see a lot of information on multiple monitors, as long as nothing changes in the background.
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I'd be interested in an afternoon/evening event in SF.
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Sad. I just moved out of Palo Alto.
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N Korea's Kim died in 2003; replaced by lookalike, says Waseda professor
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Twitter, Identi.ca, and Plurk - A Quick Comparison
Ok. Can you point me towards what you were thinking of?
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What Games Can Learn from Social Software
I think a lot of commenters are missing an important point of the article. The whole thing was the scientific process in a nutshell: he made an observation (most blog spam is ie6), made a couple hypotheses (most ie6 traffic is bots, blocking ie6 will significantly reduce spam), tested them out, and shared the results. He was even able to make a different, related conclusion (numbers for windows and ie6 browsing are inflated) based on his work.

Overall, I found the piece quite interesting. I think you will, too, if you read it not as a piece of advice but as a nicely-performed experiment.
Many families reserve time on a city or regional computer to serve their needs.

That looks quaint to us, but at the same time we're busily shoveling everything we can into the cloud.
Yes. The seasonal thing is central. Important assumptions here are basically:

A - Workers have no incentive not to screw the employer.

B - Employing/Retaining staff's not an issue. This is also part of the seasonal work. It's not worth looking for a different job when it's only a couple of weeks.

If this were a more perfect market (infinite time, perfectly informed participants ...), the decreasing marginal rates (to avoid being over generous), would disappear. You'd be better off pinching your neighbour's picker that picks twice 2x fruit with 2 X minimum wage then keeping you 0.9x picker at 1 X minimum wage.
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I agree, I don't use THAT many git commands, but I do have to look up more command line options to be sure I'm not going to blow my own foot off.

I agree, its probably cultural from looking over the shoulder at my git-loving-friends.