skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree it is painful and not right to be downvoted for things like this. You are just sharing your opinion, on topic to the post.

I work for Mozilla and I think that the only thing we are really losing on is the perception race. A frequent trend I hear on forums and comment threads is how slow Firefox is or how much it crashes. People seem to almost enjoy making the assessment that it is a universal constant. I know that it isn't a constant. Even though I have a profile that is many years old and has a dozen or so extensions installed, even though I have run prerelease versions for the last three years, I still generally have a stable and fast browsing experience. Even when compared to Chrome which I install clean and try out for a couple of weeks every few months. There have certainly been occasions that I have run into issues, but because I have been willing to give Firefox the benefit of doubt, I've dug into those issues and usually found something that was either a bad add-on, something bad I was doing, or a bad website to be the root cause.

We continue to strive to find ways to resolve these issues without having to rely on the user or the community to figure them out. That is just part of making a good product. But I know that the problems are not a universal constant that every user must deal with, or a reason to try to get everyone to move to a different browser.

One of the biggest projects my team (Metrics) has been working on lately is a way to enable people to easily measure the performance and stability of their own browser and compare it to the general population. If it turns up systemic problems, that is wonderful because with evidence, it is easier to fix those problems. If it turns out that a person with poor performance is obviously an extreme outlier to the typical performance, hopefully it will make it easier to change the conversation from "Firefox is slow for everyone and no one should use it" to "Firefox is slow for me and I would like help making that not be the case for both me and anyone else who ever ends up in my situation". This would be a paradigm shift that would obviously be great for Mozilla, but I think it would be great for Google or Microsoft or Apple if they chose to follow a similar strategy as well.

At the end of the day, many Mozillians do not hate Google Chrome because it is still pushing to make the web a better place. Maybe not in all the same ways we push, but every little bit is better than none of it.
Dojo has some nice widgets:

http://dojotoolkit.org/widgets
Cool! But how I do I get in touch with you, I don't see an e-mail address on your profile? Mine's ahmed@mrsft.com
I sent a note via the website about parsing Amazon delivery notes for shipment tracking numbers, then pulling in delivery dates via FedEx/UPS etc APIs and displaying it inline in the message list (maybe even optionally in a sidebar widget, list my currently in-transit Amazon receipts).

I think that could be really interesting, and similar concepts applied to various services/notification emails.
Not exactly.

Austin's proposition is that the statement, "I promise," is a promise not a proposition.

But that does not make it a description of a state of affairs [or a picture of reality per Wittgensteinian]. A description would be, "You promised," and that is clearly not a promise.

YMMV.
Neat. Glad there are still people not treating email as a solved problem. I tossed my address in for an invite.. Meanwhile.. Is there a security whitepaper or writeup somewhere? Handing over the keys to your email account isn't something I'm eager to do without some confidence in your product :)

[Edit] Also... please paste the "if sender == 'pg@ycombinator.com':" condition that I want to believe is in your codebase.
Yes, military missions and economic missions are difficult to distinguish.
When Google went IPO their valuation hovered around 30B, compare that to Facebooks 3 times that, now nearing 90-100B in the private markets. Companies are staying the private markets a lot longer so by the time they hit the public market they are already overvalued/valued appropriately. I doubt Facebook will see exponential growth initially until they have healthier profit numbers. Unless a lot of amateur investors buy it because they saw The Social Network.
Gravatar: Growth, Performance, and Pretty URLs
Making it locally targeted is a brilliant idea.

In regards to cost, I told Frank I'd be willing to pay up to $30/mo for a shirt. Personally, I'd rock a Twilio shirt over anything I see on threadless.com.
I'd like to add to your list of Facebook products.
* Facebook Search Engine.
While some app developers put free apps in the app store, they do so with an expected return on the investment, perhaps in the form of in-app purchases, in-app ad revenues, subscription fees, future contract work, or sales of related non-free apps.
I had two rocks. One was down and the other was not available at my security clearance.
The Awkward moment when your dad tells you he reads your blog
Ditto. And that demo was mighty pretty even then. Kudos guys. =)
Still freezes the browser.

Plus they increased the timeout until it's recognised as crashed by about 10 times recently and it's absolutely awful now.
Same. I don't like each and every proposed solution that all the recent email clients have, but I live a life which, like it or not, involves a hell of a lot of email. So against all odds, seeing people trying to seriously tackle email from different angles is exciting.
Generally speaking, you don't want.
if only zynga was so smart to make fun learning games instead of hamster cages
Thanks! I didn't know this project and looks pretty awesome :)
اهداف الاهلي والمقاولون العرب اليوم 28/1/2012 الدوري المصري
Great idea - nice when you've just launched. FYI, GetClicky does this as well as part of their Spy section.
You can also only take it so far in the other direction -- does every corporation have to be a supporter of completely unrestricted free speech? Is it wrong to provide Germans with your service on the terms set largely by the Germans themselves? Do you think foreign companies should also try to circumvent privacy laws they find unreasonable for example?

Of course I would not run a business in a country where innocent people are being intentionally killed by the government. Not even on principle, thought that too, but simply because of the risk to me personally, my employees and general uncertainty.
Not to mention web apps are easier to monetize. Mobile apps are high hassle, little value. Web apps - Less hassle for more value.
They major UI changes started in version 4 when Firefox completly copied Opera's UI. Just by the way, not saying it's a bad thing.
That's OK. I think for hobbyists it's a great time, but for making money, it's not so good out there, especially because of technology-- almost all entertainment is not just free, it's available on demand 24/7 at home, so people don't go out to shows like during the depression.

Just what I've seen from my experience over the last 15 years, and what I hear from peers.

On another note, let me know what you think about what we're doing with Feed-Forward: http://www.feed-forward.net I think you might like it. One benefit is we don't take any cut from your sales (digital or otherwise).

Take care!
-Shoham
> Then again, I've watched Dell and IBM service techs take apart laptops we had on-site support for without ESD protection, so maybe everyone else is simply paranoid.

This is the correct answer. Either that or every single Apple, Dell or UofT tech ever needs to be fired because I've had frequent repair experience with all of them and not once have they ever worn a wrist strap or mat. In fact, most techs mock the idea in my experience.

I would consider it if I was handling literally hundreds of modules like this, but for regular old desktop PC support it's complete overkill. The time it takes you setup an anti-static mat and wrist strap every time you need to swap something out costs you WAY more overall than the occasional lost module, which rarely if ever happens. If you're really so concerned, set aside $100 to cover any potential dead module. $20 says you'll never use it and you'll make more money because you saved time.
HeroEngine Offers No-Cost 3D Game Creation
GRPN: 9.5X sales

ZNGA: 6.5X sales

LNKD: 16.2X sales

P: 8.7X sales

S&P 500: 1.3X sales.

It appears that valuations are very high right now. The stocks are down from their peaks—-in other words, investors are not at a record level of optimism about these companies. But a fair assessment is that they've gone from "Wildly optimistic" to "Optimistic."
Terabytes on a Budget
"I've dug into those issues and usually found something that was either a bad add-on, something bad I was doing, or a bad website to be the root cause."

And therein lies the root-cause of Firefox's perception problem. The average user doesn't care who's fault it is - all they know is it's broken or slow, and as Firefox surfaces those issues, it must be Firefox's fault. Chrome does a better job of shielding users from perceived browser problems.
And of course, the entire social media sector surges on news of the IPO.

http://www.streetinsider.com/IPOs/Entire+Social,+Online+Medi...
I'm looking forward to a good IPO. It feels like the economy is on the rebound for real, and good news out of this could help.
How does it know when I've got a new customer... a new site visitor? So confused...
Agreed! AdSense of high-value torsos could be the new tagline
Not for everybody, but if you are a vim user, Pentadactyl is the plugin to have.

http://dactyl.sourceforge.net/pentadactyl/

Once you are used to it, in my opinion, it puts the other address bar goodies to a shame.
Once I can buy food directly with my 1oz of gold, I'll buy your gold-based-valuation argument.

Comparing one asset (share of GOOG) vs. another, namely, gold is silly when you contrast to assigning currency value.

Last I checked, food hasn't become 4x more expensive, so things still revolve around currency (or currencies), not the value of gold.
It's weird that you critiqued his analysis by using gold, which makes no sense for comparison. You might have strong feelings about unbacked paper money, but that doesn't make comparing with gold a sound financial model.

August 2004:

Orange Juice Concentrate Futures $61
Google $85/share

Now:
Orange Juice Concentrate Futures $211
Google $576/share

211/61 ~= 3.45
85*4.27 ~= 293.25
I am using Lion and had zero problems with gems.
I concur - please put pricing in the FAQ. It's a great service, you shouldn't hide the cost. Maybe I'm missing it on the front page, but I couldn't find the price anywhere (and only saw that the download is free, which is different from the price of the service, and of course holds no value without the service).
What stops me from submitting the form with curl?
I had a long conversation with a friend over lunch once where we both started by imagining a severely improved client, and eventually concluded that once you had traction with that the real benefits would come from a severely improved protocol. A lot of what makes email suck seems pretty baked into it historically.
And the Spanish Inquisition.
The total wealth of the Assad regime and their associates is in the hundreds of billions. You would have to pay them several trillion dollars at a minimum, though I doubt even that would be enough to convince them to leave.
So very true! He was extradited by the same back-room wheeling and dealing that has caused us to sign on to ACTA. But blame in this case is non-zero-sum. I am against the actions of my government in this matter AND against the actions of the US government. I feel exactly the same way about his situation as I did about Sklyarov, when he travelled to the US and was arrested for something he did in Russia.

All I’m saying is that if you take the position that US companies should not be required to comply with the local laws of their users, then you should take the position that foreign companies need not be required to comply with American laws.

Either that, or hope that Twitter’s executives never hop on a flight to China and have it touch down in Frankfurt.
Python? Really? There's nothing you need to do after running the installer. It sets up the path and everything. Most of the popular python libraries that require a binary component have windows installers as well.

Ruby is a bit more understandable, if you don't get DevKit (or if DevKit can't compile something) working with gems can be frustrating. And setting up Git on Windows with an SSH key has been awful in the past.

RailsInstaller takes a lot of the pain out of setup, though.
I don't understand the distinction you're making between "trivially" and "non-trivially". Looking at pretty much any commercial CMS you can see that publishing documents can involve all kinds of business logic.
Awful backgrounds don't give the impression that a site cares about aesthetics either. </knee-jerk>
Clicking on bellbot.com with headphones in... not recommended. I almost crapped myself.
Can you tie two copies of memcached together? One that's small and all-in-RAM, and a second-level cache that's using the VM.
Sanitized for your reading pleasure: http://reason.com/archives/2012/01/26/how-much-is-an-astrona...
The only people who really have any standing to complain would be premium account holders. Everyone else's uploads would eventually be deleted, sooner or later.

And I suspect that MU's TOS made it clear that they weren't really guaranteeing permanent availability to even premium customers.
He means in real people's dollars not Ron Paul bucks.
I started working on my first non-trivial application and having no test suite started hurting me within a few days. Inconsistencies between my local and Heroku environments just feel like whack-a-mole with no easy insights into where along the commit line they broke. `git push heroku` feels blind as I cross my fingers.

Now I'm in the process of applying tests retroactively which is even more painful. I'm doing this "retro-TDD" process of breaking my app and writing tests until they go green when I fix my app.

I suppose this is a necessary journey to actually practicing TDD.
I had to Google that for the reference. I'm still not sure I get it but "Goes dint when there's stuff" would be a brilliant slogan - might have to appropriate it!
In the abstract sense of having an electronic personal secretary that knew me well sort my email for me, yes!!! Absolutely yes and I'd pay $20/mo without blinking.

That said it appears a non-trivial classification / UI problem on a few fronts. Good luck :)
I would like to add to this that none of these companies seem to have a problem with ignoring local privacy laws.
I don't think that distribution is as important as promotion, but promotion is incredibly hard, in reality. Yes, the internet provides the ABILITY to promote oneself, but actually getting through, and capitalizing on whatever exposure you earn is tough stuff!

If you want to reward supporters, I submit to you a project I launched over a year ago to support artists that is continuing to grow, but can always use more support itself: http://www.feed-forward.net

FeedForward (A)Gives incentive for artists to give constructive feedback and positive reinforcement for each others work (helping to overcome what I call "The crabs in a barrel effect" whereas artists often ignore each other, spam each other or troll each other online and IRL, on Feedback the discourse is both constructive and insightful) (B) I take no cut or commission from sales, either digital or physical -- so artists keep their earnings (minus a small PayPal transaction fee)! and (C) FeeForward features artists of all disciplines: writers, flash developers, musicians, visual artists as well as film makers. Artists help support and promote each other, and thereby earn more exposure for themselves, I think you'll like what we're doing :D Check it out, and let me know what you think.

Thanks,
-Shoham
Security is one of our top concerns, and we're looking into different ways to make it as airtight as possible. We'll have more info on security before we launch.

At the moment, we're integrating through GMail through their API, so you can revoke access at any time, and we never see your password.
Philip, just know that the rate at which you put out projects of all sizes really is inspiring.
Even if my disk crashes I can set up a fully configured and working Debian with all most needed software, repos downloaded and ready to do real work in one hour flat.

I can do this with Arch Linux. I can't imagine what you could've had so much trouble with.
Since when can you buy food in exchange for stocks?
"The FBI has them and they could give them back if they wanted to. I'm not saying they will, just that they could."

Can the FBI give back copies of the data? I'm sure pirate party types wouldn't have a problem with that...
Oh, I heartily second super_mario's recommendation. You won't regret it.

I had the pleasure of taking Sipser's class a few years ago, and the man could explain things so clearly. We used his book as our textbook, and it was just as clear.

You should also check out Scott Aaronson's blog[1] if you're into this sort of thing.

[1]http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/
"Robust search" is listed as the top feature. Is that really meaningful for something built upon Gmail which already outshines every other solution out there regarding search?
The 500 shareholder rule requires the companies covered to register with the SEC, but not necessarily to publicly list their stock. They could register and stay private.

However, registration means that they have to publish almost the same information as public companies do and be subject to many of the same regulations. Since there are some benefits to going public, such as liquidity for current shareholders, few companies choose to register and stay private for very long.
It sounds like your place the js file on some post-purchase page. That way when they request it you can be pretty sure they just completed the transaction.
Why? I have never understood this argument. What's so special about "humanity" that it needs to be preserved?

You're born, you live, you die. A species arises, it has its time on Earth, then it's extinct. Why are humans so special that we should bother about eventually going extinct in hundreds of thousands of years?
My statement was not at all about China, but specifically about their attitude towards the United States.
This is not mathematics though, nor science, it's just the meta-mathematical philosophical opinion of a guy (mostly self-taught, by the way, and know for his cool inventions and ideas, not for his deep mathematical insights).

He also use Pi in computers, e.g to draw circles, and computers (and displays) are even more discrete that nature.

Has he come up with something better to use in Pi's place?

That we don't use "all" of Pi to draw a circle doesn't matter, the "Pi" kind of circle is like the perfect archetype. We don't make the "perfect bridge" or the "perfect car" either, that doesn't mean the concept of bridges and cars is useless.
Please do not take this as a personal attack but strike-throughs are typically used to denote a change of thought or deleted information. As I was reading your article the context was lost as I was struggling to understand why that type was "deleted" or marked as incorrect. Again, I don't want to sound pretentious but the first thing you learn in design school is that breaking conventions creatively only works if you don't cause confusion. As a creative, I completely understand your desire to do things uniquely but I don't think it worked in this case.
When you sign up for bellbot.com, it gives you a small Javascript snippet. You embed that snippet in your "thank you!" page (or whatever page your users see after they do stuff on your site).

Every time a user hits that page, you'll hear a beep on your end if you're logged into bellbot.
> How long do you think it would continue to be illegal to mention Naziism in Germany if Twitter, Facebook, Google, et al, decided to boycott the entire country?

I don't know about that, but Twitter has already raised questions over the practicality of English "super-injunctions": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_British_privacy_injunction...

I guess it's less palatable to censor tweets about Ryan Giggs than tweets praising the Nazis, though.
No, I wouldn't be more interested in leaving a job for a week, but there are those working on their own thing (or, shock, not working). My main point was that there are other ways to gauge how well an Engineer can write (and deliver) code.

Its great that you've never turned down an candidate due to lack of a code sample. I think passing on someone over such a thing is a bit unwise.
Agreed. Let me know what you think about a little project I launched over a year ago with a friend: http://www.feed-forward.net

A few things about FeeForward, from an earlier post:

FeedForward (A)Gives incentive for artists to give constructive feedback and positive reinforcement for each others work (helping to overcome what I call "The crabs in a barrel effect" whereas artists often ignore each other, spam each other or troll each other online and IRL, on Feedback the discourse is both constructive and insightful) (B) I take no cut or commission from sales, either digital or physical -- so artists keep their earnings (minus a small PayPal transaction fee)! and (C) FeeForward features artists of all disciplines: writers, flash developers, musicians, visual artists as well as film makers. Artists help support and promote each other, and thereby earn more exposure for themselves.

My primary interest is in doing exactly what you're talking about, supporting struggling artists (like me) :D

Let me know what you think.
-Shoham
> Wall Street made a mistake with Google, since now their shares now are worth 5 times as much as they were at the opening.

August 2004:

AAPL $16

Google $85/share (thought it was $100/share, huh)

Now:

AAPL $447

Google $576/share

447/16 ~= 27.94

85*27.94 ~= 2374.90

So no, Google's shares are not worth 5 times more. Their value went down a massive amount in six years.
It doesn't even require a lot of amateur investors to drive it up beyond reason, just the belief that there will be a lot of amateur investors. Who cares if I paid a stupid price if I can sell to them at a stupider price? Some people call this the "Greater Fool Theory."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest
Heh - you'll have to wait for someone else to make a fun learning game - then Zynga can copy it.
Wait, what? "I promise" is as much a description as "You promised". A description can be made in the first person.
It is certainly the root-cause of Firefox's perception problem with users who are likely to run into these issues.

My question, which I hope we will be able to answer better soon, is whether this is something that actually does happen to the average user or if it only happens to certain types of power users. Either way, we need to strive to do everything we can reasonably do to fix it, but I would be much happier to know whether I was in the outlier group of people who rarely experience problems or if the "average user" does not see those problems but we continue to talk about the problems as if they were the typical case.
What if one started playing with terms close to forbidden ones? For example, will Twitter hide tweets denying that people got killed in Mousewitz or Duckau (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/letters/3595693/Mousewitz...)?

If so, an enterprising group of people will probably be able to make Twitter hide terms that, currently, are utterly unrelated to forbidden terms.
int a = 10;
int b = 20;
a = b;

The new values of a and b are: False!

All that example would really measure is who has had previous programming experience.

This is obviously a teaching failure.

I don't accept that there are certain things people "just don't get." Watch the documentary "Waiting for Superman," about some heroic teachers who didn't accept that either and did something about it.