skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have found the Chrome dev tools to be much better usability-wise than anything Firebug had to offer. I also find it suspicious that Firebug is so heavy in terms of performance & memory, compared to the always-enabled chrome dev tools.

Anyway it's good to see Mozilla is investing in this area by integrating tools right in the browser. Keep it up!
>Once deadlines start slipping, it's a slippery slope.

Yes, and once people start doing insane things like working double hours and skipping sleep then the deadline is going to get worse and the finished product will be a train wreck.

I worked somewhere where there was a big push for a deadline. People were put on 12 hour days, 6 days a week for about a year. When they made their release it was one of the biggest disasters in company history (big place). The CIO looked at it and said "we're not giving anyone more time to get their projects done because we've seen that when they have more time the result is crap anyway"....
There are ways around breaking older browsers - https://www.google.com/search?q=html5shiv

However, I agree with your point(s).
It flips it around to begging and belittling the time spent.

A far better proposition is just charging what you think it is worth and advertising the benefits to the buyer. Telling the buyer you're going to get a sushi roll doesn't assist them. Telling them they save x hours a week, or avoid situation y - now that's better marketing.
The Complete Far Side 1980-1994 (2 vol set) [Hardcover]

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0740721135?smid=ATVPDKIKX0D...

Currently $93. Deal price not yet stated[Price discount begins @20.00 UTC.]
Bookmaker Promotions
How can stress induce a skin allergy?
Top 5 FOX Myths To Debunk This Thanksgiving | MoveOn.Org
Wouldn't it make sense if you're writing an article on Zynga to talk to and use as a point of comparison the other giant player in the video game industry, EA? I don't know, feels pretty reasonable to me. If I'm doing a story on Google Search I'd probably want a quote from someone at Bing...
What Coding Taught Me About Life
A simple region growing implementation in Python
But people do this all the time in other parts of their life as well.

They'll drive all over town just to save $20 off their grocery bill by using coupons.

But many won't spend 15 minutes haggling over the purchase of a car where you could gain thousands just by doing some research and getting the best deal for yourself. They'd rather just get the unpleasantess over with as quickly as possible.

The key, of course, is to enter markets where people value their time more than their money. As soon as you start dealing with customers who value their money more than their time, you've hit the treacherous shoals of business.
In visual conditions it would be a total non-issue - GPS/VOR/IRS guidance to the airport (or radar vectors or pilotage), with a visual landing.

For an ILS approach to minimums in hard instrument conditions, it could be problematic - especially if you are off course and don't realize it. There are minimum safe altitudes on approach plates that could be violated if you are way off course (putting you into a TV tower, for example).

I'm not an airline pilot but I am pilot. I'm not aware of anything better than ILS for those types of conditions (very low ceilings and visibility). VOR/NDB approaches are non-precision approaches. The GPS I have access to does not permit a precision approach - maybe the airliners have something better.
Professional translation services
Computer aided translation services (CAT) carefully screened by human reviewers offering language services, from multilingual desktop publishing to website translation and software localization.
I agree that one of the goals of software is to make performing common tasks quicker and easier.

However, binding two different actions to one trigger is pushing the logic too far.

It could happen that I have some text selected and I want to search for something within that text, or that I've selected something by mistake and I want to search something else… In that kind of situation having the search field populated by the content of the selection by default would obviously lead to a less than ideal experience.

I believe the people behind these choices actually ran extensive usability tests and decided to compromise on what they found to be the most common use case: poping a search window and inputing the search term.

I agree this system is maybe a little dumb but I think that is what makes it robust and dependable. Which is in my opinion the single more important attribute of any system.

I don't think the parent wanting more convenience is lazy. But I think that not reading the manual and complaining about the absence of an obviously present feature is proof of lazyness. That's very different and so very common. And I wasn't mocking him, just improvising a pun based on his last line.
I couldn't tell the difference between most LCD screens from a distance, too. But i'm not complaining about it, either.

There is only few ways to make a tablet, which is essentially just a large screen. How should a touchscreen seen from front, off and from several feet away look like? Pink vs. Green?

Again: Ridiculous discussion, nobody cares for the rest of the electronic world. Why the obsession with shiny gadgets?!
I'd say it's true that social games create a wonderful opportunity for people to socialize. That said, there is nothing challenging or cutting-edge about making these games.
4 reasons you still aren't successful
I would bet that same lawyer couldn't have told you the make of any LCD TV at Best Buy if you removed their names either. Should all the flat panel TV manufacturers sue each other for copying because they all do shiny black flat devices with the same aspect ratio operated by a remote control? Or perchance they all settled on what works best for a flat panel TV design.

I did have a smart phone before 97, an HTC Apache in 95. It was a flat rectangle with a large touchscreen in the middle. So goes the evolution of hardware towards a common structure that works best.
Simple and useful service, but please add client location somewhere in the page header (in my case: Belgrade, Serbia). How can I be sure that your web application figured out right location (because of proxy servers and other factors)? EDIT: oh, someone already made this remark.
Site ycombinatored. Please use Google cache.
I think release early, release often works well in some cases, especially for pre-release software. If you're working on the initial versions of something, that quick iterative process is key. Once you've released, however, you have an obligation to your users, so it becomes less of a valid mantra.
Social Media Proxemics
maybe the 4hour work week (tim ferris) is the right thing for you.
(i'm not related to him, nor get provisions :)

working harder and longer does not necessarily make you achieve more. try to stop investing time in actions that make you very little money or have very little benefits for you. focus on the top customers.

maybe you can start by evaluating what consumes so much of your time.

hope that helps a bit, martin
Who spends hours researching a $2 app? I've never heard of this.

The only way I might do that is if the app also requires a large time investment. Or if I'm trying to find a new game to play from among thousands. In either case, I'm clearly getting a lot more than $2 of value from the research.

Frequently though, I will just buy a game after hearing about it somewhere and then spending a few minutes looking at the screenshots reviews.
No, the weather app uses data from publicly funded sources.

In essence, you're paying for the convenience and the UI over the free version of the same data on the internet.

That's valuable, up to a certain point, but not $50 valuable.

In this instance, I know, because I have that same app.
Though it wasn't a Mozilla project, it was written by Joe Hewitt, one of the original Firefox creators.
You are welcome.

You don't have to read the manual to perform the most common tasks. But if you want to perform more advanced/specific tasks, reading the manual is necessary.
You're not going to reach your potential if you tire yourself out beyond repair.

Pace yourself. It's a marathon, not a sprint.
Facebook is selling users’ personal information to advertisers
Spend It or Save It?
Are you bitter about it?
I expected this article to just recover some old material, but it actually raises some interesting points.

In particular, working on games, I believe (like with films), I don't think "release early, release often" is a good idea.

It might work with massive multiplayer games, where users tend to keep re-exploring the same content, but in general with games once someone has played a game once they don't tend to want to play it again.

I tried "release early, release often" with an iPhone game I wrote, and it was a mistake. The biggest problem is that users get angry if you take away, or significantly change, content from users. That's reasonable, but it means once you have added a level it is hard to take it away, even if you have a new, better level to replace it with.
50% of neuroscience papers suffer from a major statistical error.
I'm curious what kind of boost you see just from posting these Developer Income Reports. Is this a Schrodinger's Income Report kind of thing where posting about the experiment affects the outcome of the experiment?
"You pick up your GD leg and keep running..." that is what you do. (reference to a great ted video with Aimee Mullins)
The complaint was not about 'an obviously present feature'. They were talking about Cmd-F searching for highlighted text. That's not there.

The feature you're talking about is not the same as that.

-

What benefits do you think are provided by software that don't ultimately come down to making things quicker and easier to do?
Congratulations for reaching your goal ! . I've been following your series since they started, and they give me hope for starting out on my own.

I'm stuck in a job I've grown to hate, and I've set my own goal to quit in April (with a small economic cushion while I start my own freelancing career).

While I don't think I'll do any Android development, your posts give me some insight on what you can do with effort.
> In particular, working on games, I believe (like with films), I don't think "release early, release often" is a good idea.

Although, as a counterpoint "release early, release often" works well for Minecraft.
Chasing the Blonde: Why the Startup Ecosystem is Sub-Optimal
Haskell is great for expanding your horizons, but when I need to get stuff done (we use Clojure in commercial projects, quite successfully), I use Clojure.
I'm a libertarian and I am in favor of drug legalization. In addition, I'm a big fan of The Singularity and believe that mankind is not going to stay the same biological construct. I experimented with various drugs in high school. I am a big believer of hacking my mind for optimum performance and I take a few nutritional supplements on a regular basis because of that. Finally, I have a sleep disorder and have both a prescription for various neuroenhancers and a traditional reason to use them. So I'm about as big of a poster boy as possible on the benefits of better living through modern chemistry.

But I must advise caution here. The main problem is that your brain is not the thing to use to measure how your brain is doing. It doesn't work. What we end up measuring instead is how good something makes us feel. For instance, Provigil is great stuff; it fulfills a role of addressing wakefulness. But it also makes a person feel really good.

I'd never support further legal restrictions, but I would most certainly caution folks to take a hard look at what you are doing. From what I see, once you start down this road you can never stop. Let's say you took your magic pills and aced your exam. Was it you, or was it you with the pills. Well, honestly, you don't know. Maybe you could have passed without the pills and maybe not. So now it's a few months later and time for the next exam. Do you take the pills again? I don't see how you couldn't -- why handicap yourself when you know the pills give you enhanced performance?

It just continues on like that -- more and more exams, job interviews, dates, parties -- life becomes a series of achievements. As you use neuroenhancers to accomplish each one, the natural conclusion is that you should take them again for the next one. The pattern builds up, and pretty soon you're telling yourself you'd be a fool to do X without the extra help. Note: I'm not trying to describe psychological addiction here. You may be perfectly able to physically quit at any time. What I'm saying is that you become logically addicted; that the most logical thing for you to do is to continue taking them. So now suddenly instead of a kid who took some speed back in college to ace an exam or two, you're the 30-something who has been taking pills on a regular basis for over a decade to change the way his brain works. Is this where you want to end up?

I'd be very careful about heading down this road.
RFC link.
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/httpd-dev/201111.mb...
Algebra is as simple as the syntax of a programming language. Applying programming to solve real world problems is as hard as applying algebra to solve real world problems - and there is also only a very small group of people able to do the latter effectively.
Just focus on doing what you love. I'm a FIRM believer in the notion that working on things you love will help you achieve greater success. If you're not waking up everyday excited to go to work...you need to switch careers.

If that notion scares you, frame it this way: 30 is young, you have 30 years to go before you even think of retirement! You have 3x more time ahead of you than you've worked to date...if you formed a career in the past 10 years, you could create 3 more careers before you're 60! (or one really really amazing one if you focus on what you love doing)

Doing what you love gives you the energy to work harder than your peers. Get up, switch into something that isn't killing you slowly.
You can easily assign a shortcut in "System Preferences" > "Keyboard" > "Keyboard & Text Input" > "Move Focus to next window".
You're about the age I was when I broke-down (physically and mentally) from working the same way. I moved to an island and bought a boat (on credit. I never did get rich). Now I work about 4-6 hours per day on contracts that only barely pay the bills, and spend the rest of the time sailing and fishing with my new family. I'm having the time of my life and producing better work than ever. "The limits of my potential" doesn't always mean what you think it does.
TED Talk: Roger McNamee - Six ways to save the internet
Here's a better readable version of the cached article, thanks to Readability: http://www.readability.com/articles/o9rjarrr
No shit, there's 2 and a half years between them.

Nexus One release date: January 5, 2010
Original iPhone release date: June 29, 2007
What advantage does this have over traditional differential geometry?

I scanned through the linked paper briefly, and didn't see much there, other than what seemed like a muddying of the concepts of a one-form and a vector, effectively always assuming the standard Euclidean metric tensor to flip from one to the other.

Having two directed concepts is very useful, especially once things start to get tricky. My background has a lot of general relativity and plasma in it, though, so my perceptions may be colored by the particulars of those fields.
A few interesting comments from the author:

- Piracy of Pocket Casts on iOS is about 30%
- Piracy of Pocket Casts on Android is about 20%

moving into Android development was a very smart (some might say lucky) move which has enabled us to stay profitable

We definitely need to focus more, but moving into Android was the smartest thing we ever did. We now earn more money there (consistently) than iOS.
It looks that some moderators do not like me. This post was on the main page and suddenly disappeared like many of my previous ones... Little not fair... Thanks...
It gives me a lot of feedback and help from community and increases my revenue from other sources (ads).
I've stayed on vim for the fact that I can use ctags/cscope on pretty much any grand tree of docs and be able to navigate through it all with extreme ease.

cscope is not just for C/C++ projects, btw, you can set it up for any text filetype with ease. So for navigation front-end, I use cscope (find text), while within vim a full structure of detail is available to me with a simple keypress. This ability to navigate text is also one of the reasons, I believe, that Visual Studio is still so popular in spite of the grand cruft it brings with it, as a 'text editor'-derived product concept. edit: outside the edit/make/run/inspect loop that vim+cscope+gdb gives, Visual Studios huge offerings seem a bit 'crufty' to me. Call me an old, over the hill kind of guy, but I didn't mean to insult Visual Studio fanatics, fans, or users.
Note that most ulcers are caused by a bacterial infection, not stress (read up on the 2005 Nobel prize for medicine: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/mar2006/nobe-m06.shtml)

Edit: the point I was going for was not to blame stress on everything, which itself can be stressful. Sometimes, finding a simple cause to an otherwise stressful problem can lead to big reductions in stress levels (and thus, the other symptoms others have pointed out). The most likely cause of an ulcer is a bacterial infection, not the only cause.
Speaking as a 45-year-old - your body will be just as capable 15 years from now. But I would hope that over the course of those 15 years you'd learn that if you've been working 12 hours a day for four years and haven't gotten done what you want to do, you're doing it wrong. (Sorry if that sounds too harsh.) At the risk of going cliché, sometimes you really do have to work smarter, not harder. Analyze what those 12 hours are, and eliminate or delegate whatever you can. And get some sleep.

Now excuse me, I have about 15 hours of work ahead of me today, so do as I say, not as I do.
Stress increases cortisol levels. Cortisol levels influence immune response. Allergies are an immune response.
Expectations from software are lower than other products like cars, televisions. A car breaking down in the middle of a drive to work is far more "severe" an incident than Internet Explorer hanging and crashing. Further, software engineering as a field is very very young, with a far lower barrier to entry, resulting in products and processes which are much less evolved and mature compared to other industries. I think these are important factors why software tends to have lower quality bars than cars or physical products.
A reasonable question, and the answer is that enough stress can create many physical symptoms. Eczema (a skin condition) is frequently attributable to stress.
Maybe you're not defining "success" the right way. It's not just about the money.
I'm not sure many people really spend hours researching a $2 app purchase, but I think the reason you spend more time doing that than buying coffee is quite simple.

With Coffee you know what you are getting and know that at a minimum it will supply enough caffeine to give you a mid-morning perk. Almost all coffee shops provide coffee that is consistently good enough that it won't taste disgusting so the process is an evolutionary one, if you find a better coffee shop that is only slightly further away you will just go there from that point on.

The problem with buying apps, especially on mobile stores is that I've bought several (even well rated ones) that either do not work at all on my device or are close to useless for my purposes.
Since many apps don't offer trials and the android store return policy doesn't give you enough time often to make an informed decision of whether or not to keep an app you do have to do your homework or you risk throwing $2 away.

$2 isn't allot of money but it is for something which is 0 use to me, a $4 coffee even if it's not the most delicious will at minimum provide a caffeine fix. I can think of a few occasions on the android market where I have spent $10-15 just buying a variety of $2-5 apps that supposedly do the same job in order to find one that I actually want to use. I can reduce this cost significantly by doing some research although an hour would seem excessive in most occasions 15-20 minutes may be reasonable.
IPhoto ’11: Avoiding the Built-In Email Stationery
Indeed. That's why 'small increments' are key there: as you say, don't significantly change content.

Blizzard have always followed this philosophy with their game balance changes: they make very small changes each patch. They are so careful that often, the effect they are trying to achieve won't be hit until after several patches. See, for example, druid effectiveness in Player-versus-Player: it's steadily, but very slowly, decreased since The Burning Crusade, as a result of druids being (perceived?) too good at surviving.

I mostly kept my Android game's existing content the same. The only changes I made were to slightly decrease difficulty each patch, as some areas were definitely too hard (the first boss could take up to 10 tries to kill, no matter what you did :).

One thing that users really love though is the release of a large chunk of content in one patch - e.g. a brand new area to explore. I don't think this translates well to websites or webapps - no matter how much of a killer 'feature', users can be very cynical or underwhelmed.

Finally, in enterprise software development, you need to be very careful with rapid release cycles as corporations are very dependent on the stability of your product, even if it's internal.

Horses for courses. The bottom line is to use the best strategy for the job.
Javascript Pong
Or what about Gianni Motti, who created a piece of performance art by walking the length of the Large Hadron Collider?

http://arts.web.cern.ch/works/walking-arts-sake
> That's not the point. The fact that people have items out (and are possibly blocking exit rows etc), and are not fully aware of the events leading up to the situation is likely to have some impact on the eventual outcome.

Books and magazines present the same problems as a Kindle. So does a sleeping passenger. Safety should be taken as seriously as possible, but the inconsistent application of the rules only implies that no one has put any real thought into it thus far.
agreed - is there a way to create a poll on HN?
It took a certain kind of genius to realize that people wanted their phones to fart. I would make a gimmick app if I could think up a successful gimmick, but all I can seem to come up with is deeply interesting games.
Cooliris’s 3D Rich Media Ads Take Mobile/Tablet Advertising to Next Level
If I find a new piece of music that triggers a strong reaction, it can be very repeatable. For example, when I was 12 I had a tape of some Rachmaninoff performances with one particular section in I think the Paganini Variations, only a few seconds long, that would send me into the stratosphere.

I played it thousands of times until the tape finally broke.

It's very different than finding something beautiful or sublime.

For example, this is a stunning work of music, I find myself enthralled with it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZn_VBgkPNY

However, the opening of this piece will cause me to frisson mildly
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KDoz-7IHI4

While the first 3 minutes or so of this will send me into outer space
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uOxOgm5jQ4

Sadly, it'll often wear itself out if I play a piece of music too often. Sometimes I'll "save" certain pieces of music and only play them once or twice a year to experience the "flavor" of the frisson to that music.

It won't happen if I'm extremely stressed. It's actually a way I can tell I'm stressed, if music that should cause me to frisson doesn't. I've worked out some mental exercises and visualizing techniques to overcome the stress and let it happen which has been a great sort of therapy.