skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>and has little impact on the final product.

Depends on the tools you use, etc. It very well may double the time required (as IE 6 support requires tons of testing of all the features, and many software project have huge portions of the projects being testing, not development).

Additionally, you tend to need more experienced engineers, IE6 support is aged out of the current crop of grads.

I think the second legacy browser site is a great solution. Additionally, I think if you're saying "has little impact on the final product", you're not working with clients who open up psds and count pixels on you. Some people are.
We pay pretty much instantaneously too. There's a couple reasons why we're "good" at paying and F500s are "bad" at it (although in MBA terms, we're the ones who suck):

* We don't have a payments/procurements department, so "payment" usually means me, Dave, or our finance person just cutting a check.

* We derive no meaningful benefit from withholding payment (pennies of interest, versus hundreds of dollars of lost cycles).

At giant companies, carefully managing payables probably makes an enormous difference. When you say "operations excellence", stuff like how vendors are paid is one of the first things many people think of.
Does anyone have experience using Balsamiq for large, complex projects? Had success using it for client work?

My company is pushing for everyone to use Axure. I hate Axure.
I recommend reading the whole interview, not just the patent part. They cover a lot of topics and it's very good stuff.
I'm really inclined right now to buy put options on GRPN.
Most rape victims don't tweet about how it's "amazing" to hang out with "cool" and "smart" people after being raped, or throw a party for their rapist.

Nor do they usually invite their rapist to stay at their house 4 days after the rape.

Stockholm syndrome?
Thats exactly what happens. I vote and nothing happens. Refresh the page, no change. If it was just today I'd say no big deal. But this has been happening for at least 2 or 3 months now. I've been an active member for a long time, I'd love to continue being one...
You didn't respond to my point, which is that you're derailing the comment thread by accusing people of saying things they didn't say. That's a perfectly legitimate reason to downvote a comment, and it has nothing to do with being an "Android fanboy".
It has lockup period of 180 days so that the insiders and the major shareholders can't dump the stock immediately..

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1490281/0001047469110...
If you're going to generalize across programming languages and assert that they suck at something, I expect so see evidence of knowledge in many, many programming languages. Not to be a jerk, but I don't see that sort of evidence here. (Then again, I don't have the kind of knowledge that would qualify me to make such assertions, or contrary ones, either.)

"Bad" typography isn't a big deal IMO. Yes, it's slightly embarrassing and ugly, in this Unicode-enabled era, that we use <= for "less than or equal to" and != for "not equal to", when Unicode has given us better glyphs. But honestly, I don't see how that costs us much time to get used to. It's like the parentheses in Lisp: more time is spent complaining about things like that than just adapting to it and making the problem go away. Parentheses wouldn't even crack the Top 5 of my complaints about Clojure (which is, despite some flaws, a great language).

Regarding monospace fonts, monospace is a huge asset. Sometimes you want to align a column of numbers, and you don't want 11111 to be narrower than 8888. Code isn't supposed to be "pretty" in the sense as a word document or marked-up Latex file. It's supposed to be easy to read and understand. Aesthetics are a part of this, but beauty at the expense of clarity is a no-go. Technical book writers could easily use non-monospace fonts for code examples and they don't-- for good reasons.

What matters is how the language looks after you've been using it for months. After 6 months using it, does the language still piss you off on a regular basis (note: no language is perfect and all will piss you off sometimes) or do you generally enjoy working in it? I've found that statically typed functional languages (Scala, Ocaml, Haskell) perform the best in this regard. The worst I've seen are Java and C++. But until you get comfortable with the languages, they all look the same (hideous, confusing, foreign).

We need to get rid of that kind of thinking—not just so that language design can move forward, but so that we can quit worrying about languages and get shit done.

Sorry, but... language differences aren't really about superficial appearances. Ocaml could be re-written with S-expression syntax and it wouldn't be much different. These differences are much deeper than that. The shape of code that emerges in a Haskell codebase is dramatically different (more "foreign" compared to conventional imperative programming, but generally less verbose and easier to maintain) from what appears in a C++ or Java codebase.
I don't think it's fair to say that "anyone can be said to be infringing it". I think if you're a bank that's using scanned check imaging instead of mailing around checks, you're (likely) infringing. If you're building a social network, you won't be. In other words, the people who are (accused of) infringing are precisely those that were the target market for DataTreasury; there's also no accusation that the patents have been enforced against anyone other than the banks.

The US banking system feels pretty backwards in terms of its reliance on checks where Europe has adopted electronic transfers. If the banks actually wanted to innovate here, they'd introduce a real electronic transfer system. The idea of scanning checks and sending around images (and presumably one day constructing virtual check images electronically and sending those) strikes me as remarkably backwards, but nonetheless a very clever solution to a real-world problem.
The Past, Present and Future of Data
Point Out Optional Form Fields, Not Required Ones
Thanks for the feedback, appreciated! I'll try it out. I'm doing more and more mockups tweaks for our coming SAAS product (see profile if interested); it could help us work more "asynchronously" with our designer when needed.
You could always write your own namespaced shim classes if it matters that much to you.
There's also the problem that it's made to be intentionally difficult. I know several very bright people that went to CalTech and transferred to "easier" schools like UCLA, Berkeley, and Brown. These were often students who were considered not only the top science/math students in their class in HS, but in some cases considered the top sci/math student the school had seen in years.
You can't yet.
Thanks how could I forget serverfault :)

I also like: http://www.cyberciti.biz/
for *nix related stuff
It would seem that one of the main arguments against software patents that is thrown around is that "software is mathematics". As a software engineer currently knee deep in learning Haskell, I believe that this argument carries plenty of weight. However, when judging software patents, we shouldn't overlook the reason for which patents themselves were originally invented.

I think the best description of a patent that I ever heard was:

"A government granted use monopoly in exchange for full disclosure of how the invention works."

This is, in my opinion, not a bad idea. It promotes the sharing of knowledge, whilst not depriving the inventor from the spoils of their work, but only if a full, formal design of a working system is disclosed.

In software, patents are granted based upon a technical description of the concept. But the requirement of a formal definition - which in the case of software boils down to either a proven mathematical model, or some code that implements the concept - is absent. Since written language is full of ambiguity and uncertainty, it is very possible and regularly the case that patents are granted on an idea that provides no concrete specification. As a result, the disclosure part of the agreement is not satisfied.
> What needs fixing is the implementation, not the idea itself of the patents, be it software or hardware.

There are two issues here:

1. You assume the implementation is fixable, I have seen no sign of it so far, especially for software and method patents. Even more so as the number of patents applications is skyrocketing worldwide and intellectual propriety offices have neither the resources nor the qualifications (at least in software) to do a good job at it. This is not helped by

2. Patents themselves have little value if there is low risk and investment in what is being patented. That's the case for software (relatively). Even more so because reinventions are very common in software, if you have a given problem there will be converging solutions independently devised. Patents were originally thought of to grant a short-term monopoly to a creator in exchange for that knowledge being public. The goal was twofolds, to encourage potentially costly innovations and to ensure that knowledge gets into public domain at one point, to benefit all.

The second goal is broken by the duration of patents, especially in domains with high rates of innovation (hello software) and the first one is likewise broken in domains with high rates of innovation because patents hinder reinvention (this is made even worse with the new hare-brained schemes of first-to-file as it starts breaking even *pre*invention) or synchronous invention by making them far riskier.

I submit that not only is the implementation broken, but the concept itself is broken for any domain with low investment costs and high innovation rates: for patents to "work" their duration would have to be so low (months, or even weeks) as to make them not worth the time.
I've been using Balsamiq for a couple years, and I've been looking forward to the online product. I have a few project collaborators that cannot install software onto PCs they have to use at work; a webapp is a godsend.
If spending 30-60 hours/week on studies causes medical students to burn out, that's a good thing. It's much better for them to burn out during year 1 of (cheap) undergrad than in year 1 of (expensive) medical school.
Question: Is there are software which can be easily installed on apache or inside app to detect crawlers?

We use ipban but that is not what we want: we want a system which can easily detected "bad" crawler or "abusing" user and ban them for some time.

As of now, we have a simple script going thru apache logs and sending list us list of IP and their activity.
Right, on a completely brain dead obvious idea!
Patents are supposed to be "novel", and non obvious.
It could also be the pace at which the information is conveyed. The lovely information is dished out at such a fast pace that students who would like to absorb the info at a deeper and more intuitive level are left behind while the equation-memorizers win even though they would not be able to describe WHY something is so. Secondly, science has become so compartmentalized that students with a "big picture" view of what science can do get turned off by classes that start off by focusing on microscopic aspect of some part of science.
There are plenty of "soft skills" and it is good to have some academic work done in management, ops, marketing, finance, etc. However, this does not necessarily mean that this knowledge & these skills can't be acquired either on the job or through proper mentoring.

I'm not bashing my degree necessarily, it's just that there are too many MBAs @ the moment. In the end, if you are interested in management you can do better by reading Drucker than attending management courses, or read Porter & Ansoff (side note: Igor Ansoff is great example of what I am babbling about) if you are interested in marketing, etc.
Japanese supercomputer blisters 10 quadrillion calculations per second
I tend to just be lazy and put "the OP" instead of he/she/it, although you could nitpick me on that as well since the author of an article posted to HN is often not the "original poster" in question.
The points you raise on precision in communication are valid, but they are somewhat orthogonal to the question of whether it is acceptable to use colorful language or not. It smells a bit too much of the old accusation that the use of expletives indicates a small vocabulary or that the speaker has poor command of language.

I would also like to add that I think proper swearing is a bit of an art. There has to be rythm and contrast to it. A well placed expletive in an articulate context is a thing of beauty. Not everyone can pull that off.

Of course, for those incapable of elegance, there's always sheer volume. Which is a demanding discipline in its own right. For the past 20 years or so there has been a recording making the rounds in Norway of a bus driver taped while trying to fix a washing machine. In Norway it is, in all seriousness, considered somewhat of a national treasure. (Swearing is such a part of Northern Norwegian culture that calling a police officer a horse penis is legally acceptable north of the polar circle, but not to the south of it).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAeLhoWXcHI

(The recording circulated on tapes in the pre-internet era so the sound quality is pretty bad. But most people of the internet generation will know what you are talking about if you mention "saltdal.wav").
i can't figure out if that's sarcasm or a dumb sheeped down comment :p
I've used Balsamiq to sell business groups inside of very large corporations to sign off on project estimates. It's a fast, easy way to show them what they're getting for their money, and becomes v0.1 of the design as well, with enough fidelity to discover usability & flow without locking into many other design choices.
"Mostly easy" was probably a bad way of putting it. Perhaps a better way would be that, at the outset, some students can handle mathematical challenges, even when they require hard work and perseverance; after a while, a positive feedback loop ensues, where being good at math makes it more enjoyable and finding it enjoyable makes you better at it. (That doesn't imply you'll never hit roadblocks.)

If, early on, math is painful and frustrating (perhaps through no fault of your own), then that cycle never develops and you form an aversion to the subject.
chrome is giving a malware warning on this site...
I really don't understand any part of your argument.
Creating a framework for iOS
From my understanding, the buzz you get from getting funded and who your investors are is actually worth more than they money they get.
There are lots of great products getting built but there is no platform to launch them.
Your average founder's network consists of what maybe a few hundred people consisting of family and friends and most of them non-techy so they wont be the first to try new things.

While a funded VC has access to the extensive network of influential investors, thousands of people and buzz from blogs.
Premise Liability Definition, Stuart, Martin County, FL.
English does have a genderless singular pronoun: They

Just because a book said it was preferred in 1848 to use he when sex is indeterminate (then went on to use both singular he and singular they) doesn't mean that's true today.

The language always used both. Why stop today? Might feel a bit odd at first if you're not used to it, but it's not a bit different than how singular "you" is used ("You are coming today?" uses the plural form of "be").

The book itself used both forms! Shows you that English teachers may have been overly strict with you in the past.

Some more on the topic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
Except that it's not, because there are many good alternatives to Perl that have equivalent, if not greater, power, and require very little memorization. You can be up and running with a full understanding of the syntax for most flavors of Lisp in a few hours...
"Difficult" is a slippery concept for me. Is it more difficult to study to be a CS major or to be a CPA? Because I tell ya, even though I have a BS and MS in CS and a Math minor, the minute I cracked open my roommate's CPA book, I was in freefall.

It was something about the presentation and the sheer vast number of seemingly unrelated rules and regulations. I realized it took a special constitution to digest that stuff. I think I could have gotten it, but I would have had a lot harder time than I did learning about parsers or some other CS-y thing.
It was the soph/jr/sr years where it was very difficult to tie what you are learning to anything real and concrete. The worst part is that you are being asked to remember facts/processes/patterns for a test, then you rarely have to go through them again. So you end up forgetting most of what you learned. Since you didn't know what it was used for in the real world, you end up forgetting about something you didn't even care for in the first place.

SRS are your friend. Remember, you will forget everything you will ever know given sufficient time. It's best to exploit study technique that take into account spaced repetition. Your skills and all the things you learn are like a muscle, either you use it, or you lose it.

Right now, I have minuscule amount of haskell knowledge loaded, ready to use when I am ready to learn or code something in Haskell. Once I learn something, I add new stuff to my Haskell deck.
Possibly because it's duplicated content. They were both posted about the same time, so it's arbitrary which gets voted up and which gets voted down. But ideally only one would exist; voting one into oblivion is the easiest way to approximate that situation. I'm just speculating though.
My experience has been quite difference, but I suppose it's all relative based on what you're comparing it against. The amount of effort it takes to get an A/B in a liberal arts class and an A/B in a math/science class are lightyears apart. The liberal arts majors I knew would (maybe) do a couple hours of homework a night and party on the weekends. The engineering students would spent most of their nights doing homework or working in the labs, with more of the same on the weekends -- to get an equivalent grade. The classes that STEM majors need to pass are significantly harder than what liberal arts majors are up against and therefore require more work and effort.
I thought it was because of the SuperBowl advertisement for their new hot lady.
you need a bank to store the money, if its not physical money
no bank wants of wikileaks or to handle their transactions

and yes, banks control the world, they don't like something, they kill it. simple and easy apparently.
Most ideas are obvious in retrospect. Why was DataTreasury the first to implement this system? Seriously engage with this question. I had just started working in the industry in 1994, when this story started. Why didn't I create a B2B electronic transaction clearing system?

I'm not necessarily sticking up for this patent, and I tend to believe the patent system is completely fouled up for software companies, but we can do better at analyzing the issues than just automatically saying "that's brain dead obvious".
Are Video Games Mainstream Yet?
Our work got blocked as well this week, it seems. I can still browse HN via https though. I don't know if that's intentional or not. :)

Have you tried loading: https://news.ycombinator.com/?
What website is that? Did anyone else go to its homepage (http://www.muktware.com/) and notice an unhealthy obsession with Linus Torvalds and exclusive interviews?
Carol Dweck: Brain exercise boosts motivation
Salaries/Staff Expenses: $500,000

Productions: $400,000

Campaigns: $300,000

Publications Research: $500,000

Technical Information: $500,000

Security: $300,000

Legal Costs: $1,200,000

From their main page: http://wikileaks.org/wlnet.html

Not sure how truthful the numbers are, but it's what they're advertising.
This has already been done with photograghs: one photo per year.

http://www.zonezero.com/zz/index.php?option=com_content&...
Using chrome as well but no malware mention!
I originally tried to post this on the roundtable, but was discouraged by the requirement to "apply for membership". I'd love it if the roundtable just let anybody post, but allowed the moderator to filter/sort/organize the content.

By far the most useful thing we did to prepare for the interview was to build a FAQ. The FAQ had everything we thought the partners might ask. For example:
* How will we get users?
* How do we know users have the problem we're solving?
* What's the rocket science? Why can't other people do the same thing?
* What existing services exist, and what specifically will make our product better than each of them?

For each question, we tried to have as many concrete details as possible, e.g., statistics, research papers, specific advantages we had over each competitor.

The other really useful thing was to spend about $50 to run a small AdWords/Facebook campaign, and measure the click-through-rate we got with various keywords and ad texts. This let us figure out, 1) did users actually want what we were building?, 2) how many users total could we drive to our site per day?, 3) what is the average cost per user would be? If you're building something that requires getting lots of users, I'd recommend doing this. Just seeing the most popular keywords that are relevant to your product will give you a much clearer idea of what people want.
Here are the links:

http://www.muktware.com/blogs/1721 (an older interview in full)

This one:

http://www.muktware.com/news/2855

http://www.muktware.com/news/2857

http://www.muktware.com/news/2859

http://www.muktware.com/news/2860

http://www.muktware.com/news/2861

http://www.muktware.com/news/2862

http://www.muktware.com/news/2863

http://www.muktware.com/news/2864

http://www.muktware.com/news/2865

Also, interesting portmanteau domain name - muktware means free (soft)ware in Indian languages.
I don't particularly like their video intro. I feel like they've tried to fit it under a specific time limit (which is great) by doing everything faster, speaking faster and weirdly skipping animation. For instance, they take 20secs to talk about drag and drop and pressing prev/next to show the next mockup. He said "You can click the previous arrow or the next arrow to go to the next mockup". It's not relevent in an intro video. I.e. if the interface is well made, I'll figure out how to go to the next mockup when in that page.

Better would be to stop saying every little actions and talk on the high level goal. For instance, don't say "I'm gonna select a color to put on the front-end of my project".

Also, seems like the website is really well designed but the balsamiq part is still with the old flash design. Is it from the same company? Did they chose to not change the old balsamiq because clients were already used to it? Or was that too complicated? Is there an html only version incoming?
I may be biased, but I actually prefer the most elusive 4th year labs being done in 1st year, as the projects to be built are much more easier and it is way more rewarding when a teacher hands you a specification sheet and tells you how to use (for example) an AND and OR gate with absolutely no mention of the project.

You can truly call the creation your own, and if you really get stuck you can go talk with the very helpful teacher (or other students) and they will lead you into the right direction without directly giving the answer.