skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Exposing the steps and having them each have their own progress bar or "reset" the progress bar is always preferable to me as a user, both because I like feeling like I know what my software is doing (even -- or, in some cases, especially -- if it is behind the veneer of plain speech and a nice UI), and also the more fine granularity feeds my boredom and often does "make it seem quicker." If you have something to look at and track, you don't feel like it could take forever. Letting people see the light at the end of the tunnel /always/ makes it more bearable. Giving them "sub-tunnels" helps that further, I think.

Another example of this is online checkout paths. Obviously the fewer pages and fewer form fields a user has to fill out, the better, but even if its just a single page and a confirmation page, I /always/ prefer checkout paths which list the number of steps and number of pages at the top, and indicate how far along in the process I am. It's always so exasperating when online shopping when you think you're about to make a purchase, only to be taken to an unexpected "confirm everything you just did" page, followed by two order confirmation pages. Its not the same as an installer or other crunching process, but granulated progress bars get you a surprising amount of mileage in many linear processes you can put your users through.
I also recommend Javascript. Go through a tutorial manual (yes, because that is how he will learn without you) and then learn stuff about canvas or use an api like jquery.

There is a lot of explanation for any language, but with javascript there is a compiler/runtime on every computer.
My Number One Hurdle: Fear
The problem with the 'sell high' part is that you don't get to, uh, sell. If an MBA usually goes for $120K, and he accepts $80K this year because it's that or nothing, what happens two years from now if the market recovers? Does he a) get a 50% raise, or b) get another job, and force you to hire someone new?
Sling Team Leaving the Building
Yes, I second that the interpreter is easy to show people basic things. The cocos2d stuff with the interpreter are really informative.
The question is - will they pay even in this struggling economy? My friend once told me, if economy starts getting worsened, she would cut down her premium expenses first. That includes branded products, luxurious lifestyle, premium subscriptions, etc.

Yes, people pay for premium content but in this economy, businesses which are dependent on premium features will be the first ones who get setbacks.

My $0.02s of course.
Why necessarily limit it to a physical device? How about also putting it on some sort of web applet? To make this slick, you'd have to keep the virtual/emulated Palm Pre synced up with the physical one. But if the software on the Palm Pre can integrate all of my disparate social networking data, this would be very useful, maybe even a killer app. If you come up with a way to get GPS location data or the equivalent into the web app, then you turn any netbook into an interface for your "Mobile OS" and netbooks in general become a selling point for your phone. Heck, if you do it well, every web browser connected to broadband becomes a selling point for your phone.

Basically, you'd be going one better than MobileMe. Considering the weakness of that part of Apple's offerings, that seems like a good battle to pick.

Some would be afraid that the netbook would prevent the phone sale. If that were true, then people would be buying netbooks instead of phones. It's actually the other way around.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/half_of_all_iphone_usag...
I also apparently really like writing the word "always" surrounded by slashes. What's up with that.
How many of those books are technical books? How many introduce new concepts?
I was under the impression that software, on the whole, has gotten better since the waterfall model was 'kicked to the curb' as the author puts it.
People will pay for quality. Why dumpster-dive for a free bag of not-actually-bad-but-they-had-to-throw-them-out potato chips when you can just walk in the store and buy them for a few bucks without getting your clothes dirty?
Perhaps also you can stress which are languages that need APIs to do GUI and other useful stuff and which have the APIs built in.
That why it's always good to give humans a reference. We have some kind of completeness gene.

It's why we sit through commercials on a program we don't really like -- because they broke to commercial with an unanswered question.

Preloader #5 out of #800. Movie rating: 3 out of 5 stars. Game review: 8 out of 10 stars. Database: 153 records out of 9355.
If you don't want to give it away, make it a storage machine. Keep it off & safe most of the time, boot it up once a week, let it save your important data, and then shut it off.

Pretty hard to hack a computer with no power. Pretty hard to accidentally delete a file from one, too.

But, old computer buildup is why I'm looking into getting a local rack, possibly a bladecenter for home use. I can usually use some more power for long-running/heavy-load programs, but I don't want to have that many desktop boxes under my desk. I'd rather just accumulate a local grid.
Healthcheck: Perl
Tips on Outsourcing Projects Online
He should have some UAVs with speakers flying at lower altitude, otherwise people won't recognize the tune. Also, some heat shielding on the zepplin and a very well-protected cabin -- I'm not sure those things can get out of range fast enough.
I am surprised you would say that. From what I've seen (I've followed him and other candidates a lot during the debates) he showed extreme self control, more so than any other candidate.

I tend to agree with the New York Times:

In the way Mr. Obama has trained himself for competition, he can sometimes seem as much athlete as politician. Even before he entered public life, he began honing not only his political skills, but also his mental and emotional ones. He developed a self-discipline so complete, friends and aides say, that he has established dominion over not only what he does but also how he feels. He does not easily exult, despair or anger: to do so would be an indulgence, a distraction from his goals. Instead, they say, he separates himself from the moment and assesses.

What were some examples of those numerous occasions where he's lost his temper?
10 Green Announcements From the Detroit Auto Show Kick-off « Earth2Tech
Excellent. Classic Dr. Evil. You'll probably need to keep pumping oxygen into the area to make sure it stays on fire.
Thanks, for your experience. Do you think that is what it would be like anywhere you go? Or was it just the person you talked to?
Zzz-mail:Woman goes on-line - while asleep
There's lots of reasons not to want to install a potentially bloated "platform" like Silverlight besides download speed.
Lifestreams Project Home Page
Google Bad For Environment? Let's all just take a step backwards...
Responses to The Problem with STM
I think that if you drop the semantics and take the article for what it's talking about -- new front-end features you specifically want your user to be using, or at least to investigate and become aware -- then he is wholly right, you should give the UI a bump, tiny or big, if you want someone to notice.

Too often a programmer will drop a new button into a list of buttons and then, two weeks later, incredulously ask everyone why they haven't found it yet.

(Of course, A UI bump doesn't always just mean cover it with new gloss. Simply moving elements around, creating spacing, changing up the colors or weighting/priority of items in a list can be all the change you need. Obviously not any one of those things arbitrarily... Any piece of UI, regardless of how pretty or "artistic" it is, should always have an intent, and the intent in this case is to do something that causes people to investigate your new functionality.)

I think the author's Windows calculator example is a great case for this. Over time more functions have been added to that thing, but when its literally another button added to the grid, few people are going to notice it and investigate it. Some will surely come across it because they'll need to perform some mathematical function for the first time, but nobody will actively investigate the calculator for the new stuff because nothing and nobody has told them to.

Conversely, if you crack open calculator for the first time on a new PC or new OS install and see that its appearance has been cleaned up across the board, or that a row of buttons has been newly split out and given its own breathing space in the window layout, you might actually look at them and discover what they do.

I don't think that this article applies to code improvements under the hood, or even really to improvements to existing functions that will streamline the user experience. This is especially true if those user paths are well traveled. If they're already there, you don't need to bump anything to tell them to go there -- they'll figure it out.

It's when new things are added, or when existing-but-underutilized things are beefed up, that adding some new gloss or shifting your design's visual priorities a little bit can go a long way.
high fructose corn syrup.

obesity becomes the new norm. everyone gets so fat they can't walk around, global production grinds to a halt. Nobody can remember how to hunt or farm since its so long since our sedentary society has engaged in such primitive practices.

the irony is that we all die of starvation in the aftermath of our obesity. slow acting doomsday.
How about those book publishers who attempt to milk their printing presses by publishing multiple titles? Or bloggers who attempt to milk their blogging software by publishing multiple articles?
Things that may be completely useless:

* Car without engine
* Bookshelves that cannot support the weight of books
* Computer without processor
* Nonalcoholic beer

This that are most definitely not completely useless:

* Cell phone that can play MP3s and videos but lacks a physical keyboard
3D rendering as functional reactive programming
Oh, and if anyone wants to join in the fun of programming some of this shoot me a mail, particularly controlling RGB LED's is a fun project I think :-)

Might even end up as a startup...
At first glance, it looks really useful. And great job on the documentation. I know from experience taking a passion project and turning it into something other people can easily utilize is a lot of work. Thank you for making the effort and taking the time to share it with us!
The other thing to consider is when will all of our home screens get overly bloated? If developers continue to make apps that are single-serving, we'll have hundreds upon hundreds of these apps that we want on our devices. I don't want it to get to the point where Apple has to add the ability to have even more home screens, where it would then take a couple minutes to find an app!
These are all really good. They're all created by the same agency, too. http://www.bigspaceship.com/

Looks like a pretty solid agency.
They are real big on illustrations (see article for example). There is a good amount of video on the site too, which is useful. You can sign up for a free trial period, though I do believe you gotta give up payment info first (and will be charged if you don't cancel before the trial is up).
I worked for a biotech startup which "elucidated" the proprietary file formats of medical instrument vendors and thus commoditized the vendors.

It's a profitable business, but I'm not sure it's 100% legal.
Cooks Illustrated will probably just get bigger--cooking at home is cheaper than not and is one of those things people start doing when they want to save money.
100 billion / (6 * 800,000) = 20,000 per person. Let's say 25% of that is HW and software that gives 15,000 in training per person. Just how hard to they expect this stuff to be?
Thus, the average car driven for one kilometer (0.6 miles for those in the U.S.) produces as many greenhouse gases as a thousand Google searches.

Honest question: is that correct grammar? ("as many greenhouse gasses")
I've always wanted to turn an old PC into a networked jukebox. Usually, I leave the current OS on it and use it for development testing. A firewall would be good, but don't forget physical security. Many web cams come with activity monitor software...
Did they tell you this during your teens? Sounds like the sort of warning parents might give their kids to scare them from experimenting.
Feeling stupid is not a good sign. Why not switch to an area where you feel rather confident?
Lowering the water level: Do bad economies uncover opportunities?
Well, one thing I do know is that SCORE volunteers are mostly retirees. That of course doesn't mean much in and of itself but there were several people at adjoining desks and they all had similar experience... more of a small-talk type thing.

If anything I would presume New York would be a little higher on energy and a little lower on chitchat compared to other places, so if that's the vibe here...

I think you may be looking at this too broadly/theoretically though. Just break it down to what your needs are at the moment (what kind of company to form, how to write a business plan, etc) and go from there. If you post specific questions, you will probably find better advice here than at SCORE.
Open Wi-Fi Aids Terrorists, Mumbai Cops Say
They forgot about public restrooms. Surely terrorists benefit from those as well.
Bachelor's Degree: you think you know everything

Master's Degree: you realize you don't know anything

Doctorate: you realize nobody knows anything
i'll give you celebrity, but you aren't interested in what types of crimes are happening in your area?
Food is an interesting topic. This is one of those times where I wish I had access to unlimited data; but I'm willing to bet that if there was a choice between buying more music on iTunes and cutting off a subscription to Cooks Illustrated, the iTunes goes first.

People are hard-wired to think about food; since its right up there with shelter and procreation in terms of "things I need for survival". I can easily see people making justifications to keep paying for this sort of access until the bitter end of home budget cuts.
If there is a shooter in my area, yes. I do not care about a woman in Florida who killed her daughter six months ago. I do not care about a child gone missing in California or any other state. These events are tragic, but not important to me.

EDIT: For clarification, if there is something I could do, then I would care. Since I live in NW Ohio, crime that happens anyplace other than NW Ohio is not important to me. There is nothing I can do about a crime that occurred outside of my locality. When the national media reports on such topics, they are simply sensationalizing a tragic event for their own self-interests. It disgusts me. They view death and tragedy as a commodity to expend for the sake of profits.

Take for instance this headline currently on CNN: A helicopter has crashed on the campus of Texas A&M University, authorities say.

Is this tragic? Yes. Is this truly noteworthy as a national topic? No. Why does this receive attention? Do you think that this was the only accident today? This is a prime example of the sensationalization I mention. If you run a search with Google News on "plane crash" several other crashes come up. They are covered by the local stations. Why does an arbitrary helicopter crash in Texas make the national news? Pure sensationalism.

Sorry I have edited so much, but this is a topic that infuriates me.
Most companies charge more because they can. the same reason why if you buy the base dell you get a really good deal, but if you load up the dell with ram you end up paying a lot more than if you bought the parts yourself. The idea is that most businesses want to charge people with money more.

I'll rent you a 32GB server for $512/month, if you want. I'll have an extra later today. dual quad-core opteron (1.9Ghz) with 32GB of registered ecc ddr2 and 2x1TB sata disks. It's one of those supermicro 1u twin dohickies. shoot me an email and arrange things. lsc@prgmr.com I can arrange for a serial console but no rebooter.
Does the computer you are using have a hierarchical file system?
"Was that really how long it took to download the file?" is questioning his claim. Telling him to replace his 14.4k modem is unnecessary snark with a hidden question.
Evidence that newsrooms are bloated, please.
It could be if it meant types of gas (CO2, methane, ...) but in this context discussing quantity of gas, it doesn't really fit.

However, there is a meme of dodgy word endings in use at the moment, popularized by Jeremy Clarkson on top gear talking about cars having x many torques instead of x N/m of torque. This may be deliberately in that style.
eh, some are, some aren't. for $20/month, I give you a gig of ram. (I'm out of space until I get my new server in this evening, which tells me that my prices are low)
I just think there is an obvious distinction between what you expect out of your local newspaper versus a national one.
programming at reddit used to be good, but the noise ratio got a bit too high - but I should check it out again (I was specifically referring to the rest of reddit, which is rediculous - so much so that I find it hard to take any subreddit seriously). I am sure there is a lot of brilliance there, but who has time for it with all the noise?

I prefer the tone of HN - there are certainly less arguments, but I don't think that's a bad thing - there are plenty of other places on the internet to have an argument.

There is no need for HN to become /r/programming when it already exists. HN was previously startup news - so I guess it keeps a bit of that flavour.

I haven't really noticed any website bashing from HN.
BS = B_llSh_t

MS = More of the Same

PhD = Piled Higher and Deeper
Since when is Linux making enough money to survive as a business? They get donations. So maybe you should think again.
Looks great! I tried uploading a pptx and it worked flawlessly. This is probably the most impressive demo I've ever seen on HN.
It's not quite as simple as just adding more ram to the single-socket box that you get when you order a dedi with 1G ram.

see, ram gets more expensive the higher density you go, 2gb modules are pretty cheap, 4gb modules are about twice as much per gigabyte, 8gb modules twice as much again, per gigabyte. (It's slightly more complicated... quad-rank ram, for instance, is basically a way of fitting more ram modules in the same number of slots. Most motherboards don't support it, and those that do don't support very many of them.)

If you can find a single-socket core2 or opteron board with more than 4 ram slots, let me know. this puts an 8GB limit on economical single-socket boxes.

dual-socket boxes, on the other hand, I can get supermicro dual-socket opteron boards with 16 ram slots.

Of course, you can get 1.9Ghz low-power quad-core opterons for around $256 each, so it's still not as expensive as people seem to think. I'm just saying you can't just cram more ram into the box they use when you order a 1GB box.
I wonder if the 'timelessness' of Cook's Illustrated will become more of an issue, as time goes on. Can they really keep coming up with a new Thanksgiving turkey recipe every single year? Or will they eventually end up competing with their own past content?
Use LCARS 24 to turn an older computer into an awesome alarm clock / calendar with a startrek theme. (Geeky, yes, but still pretty cool)

http://lcars24.sourceforge.net/
Douglas Adams wrote "A scientist must be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise, you will only see what you were expecting." (in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish)

I was in school when I first read that line. I showed it to a fairly well-known scientist who immediately put a copy on his office door. The smartest people I have met are also the quickest to admit they don't know.
Took me about 35 - 40 min each way
I do not mean to insult your sister, but there was a study some months ago I think was posted to HN which pointed out that smart, informed people tend to doubt their knowledge a lot more than stupid, ignorant people. From my own experience, I agree. Those who know little seem to jealously guard what they do know and try to overstrech it to suggest they know more than they do.

She was probably just thinking "jeez, who cares how manatees float".
>The record companies have always charged for their music; getting free music has always been theft.

But everyone forgets about radio. Disturbingly this gives record companies more ammo to shut down internet radio (which annoys me as its the only radio I listen to now - and I am happy for it to have ads in it).
Thermite is self-oxidizing
I tried signing up and have Silverlight installed. But it just hung at the sign up stage wanting me to install siverlight even though I already had it installed. I even reinstalled it silverlight to no avail.
most, yes. But I would hope that our most important leaders have good self-control.
Digitizing something that is broken will not fix it. In fact, digitizing a broken system can keep it broken longer. Automation can let people engage in counter-productive activity longer and be "more productive" at activities which ultimately produce nothing of use.

The health care system in the US is seriously broken. The US expends far more per person than any other nation for health care and receive poor medical care in return, with many people excluded almost entirely from basic health care (the emergency ward is the first and last option for those without insurance ).

The disaster that is US health care comes partly out of the adversarial framework of private medical insurance. When one makes money by discovering algorithms for denying care, one is performing an activity with negative social value, akin to building a plant whose sole task is to pipe sulfuric acid into the air.

But the problem is more any particular kind of enterprise. The overall approach of having enterprises that not only seek to profit but seek to increase their profits within the health care field automatically creates abusive situations. Hospital companies routinely add unneeded hospital beds and then charge every patient for the extra beds. Just as much, oversight with that insurance companies have to use to prevent the hospital overruns and the oversight various agencies demand to prevent insurance abuse only add to the total cost which the for-profit system then attempts to pass on the consumer - who is currently less and less able to pay.
Thanks for the link. I thought I'd invented it :)
Why should users ever install a VM? Why couldn't Java be distributed as a meta-environment where the right version just downloads and installs itself, and a particular application only sees the most recent available version of the runtime environment that it can run against?
Why we procrastinate and how to stop
Is there a consensus on how many we've had?

It seems more like we are about to enter another great inflation, as described by RJ Samuelson, except shorter/sharper than the last one.
Cooking at home is expensive luxury. Measure how much it takes you to prepare a meal. Multiply by money you're paid for per hour. Add cost of ingredients, preparation and storage energy, cost of time to do shopping, gas used during shopping etc.

There's pretty much no way this number is cheaper than ordering a take-away chop suey or a pizza.
correction: ec2...
Probably not quite what you meant, but most of the kernel developers are paid to work on it full time (and by most I mean >90%, last I heard).

Whilst that is not a business in the same sense, there is business around enough to make it worth while.
Meetings seem to be pointless. If everyone answered my emails and CCed everyone else, I could go a year without meetings.
Yes, but in this case his comments make it clear that he had no intention of raising such funding.
That's my impression too, tbh. I think the author of this article has been smoking things he shouldn't have...