skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Pretty slick looking, will still need some development to make use more intuitive. Like there's no clear sign that I just click back in the main area to return to focus.

I can't wait to see where it goes though.
One of my coworkers uses only C-[pnbf] for cursor movement in Emacs, and so has mapped the arrow keys to scrolling the viewport.

So: "maybe, if you would have used them for something better".
It's for mobile telepresence. E.g. you send this to the factory in China instead of flying there yourself. It has cameras and audio and a fancy laser pointer they built themselves. You drive it via the Internet from an ordinary computer.

It's much lighter than a Segway. Only 35 pounds.
There are standards. There just not called POSIX. For example the filesystem hierarchy standard.
Honestly I hate Vista. Two reasons.

1) My girlfriend has a Vista laptop that shipped with 1GB of RAM. Its incredibly slow because Vista attempts to cache everything in memory, but then doesn't have enough memory to handle program launches. I know its s a simple fix -- upgrade to 2GB -- but compared to my best friends Mac Book with 1 GB -- who has room to launch iTunes, PowerPoint, Word, Excel, Adium, and iPhoto with no problems -- its insane that a similar spec laptop with Vista would struggle to load Firefox.

2. To uninstall something in windows, since windows 3.1, you would go to a control panel called "Add/Remove Programs". That's been the convention since Vista. That's like a 15+ year convention. Its now been re-named to something complicated like "Program Configuration and Setting". If it was going to change, it should've had a simpler name, like "Uninstall Programs", not a more confusing one.

It seems Microsoft's B-team is just godawful at Design. They're basically the GM of software at this point.
i haven't came across with this..LOL where am i?
Email is not going anywhere soon, it has its place, but for sending messages to friends, social networking has already won.

i think you meant to say text messaging, not social networking. go to any middle school or high school, it's all about the phone platform. the parents of these kids would rather pay $15 for unlimited text plan than $30 for an unlimited data plan.
There are trade offs between reading time and reading comprehension. For example you can skim through a short story in one minute and come away with 75%. Or you can read through the same story in 5 minutes and come away with 90% (made up numbers).

If I were taking a test with limited time and a lot of reading, I might choose the speed reading because it's most "cost effective". If I were studying, virtually unlimited time, and trying to retain the information, I would go with the latter. If I were just reading for entertainment, it would probably be something in between (which might end up being slower and retaining less).

I agree that subconsciously we probably pick up a lot more than we realize.
"If a user overrides a lockout and gets a new password, what is to stop the lockout process from starting over again as the attackers continue trying."

Nothing stops that. However, if the password has to be reset to a random string every 20 attempts before you can do the 21st attempt (say, in a day), then it hardly matters how vulnerable it was originally.
One example of what I'm thinking of is the tarsnap website. Nothing fancy, and Colin mentioned in a blog post he'd rather get the code for his product right first (and from what I've seen it's good stuff) then work on the website. So sure, if you're an interaction designer you have to do the Right Thing. But it's easy to get paralyzed in the face of what looks like an overwhelming task when you should just pitch in, accept you're going to f*ck up to some extent, then rework it.

I failed a project last year through being too perfectionistic, so I'm trying to retrain myself not to be. Frankly, my standards were much higher than the clients' and I could have done half the work and been much more successful.
Everyone I know that does dev work on Win32 just installs cygwin and runs an xterm. It works fine. Personally, despite being a Unix user since 386bsd, I think the Registry is a major win over the sprawl of incompatible picky config files in /etc, /var, /usr/share, and /usr/local. I also think SVCHOST.EXE is a win over inetd.conf and inittab.
Go to reddit and just fight the trolls. Nobody feels bad about criticizing Mr. "It was an inside job" conspiracy nutbag.
The age of the desktop PC appears to be over

Tell that to gamers and I promise they'll laugh in your face.
I do not know if you are right about the laughing. A lot of German companies have "Deutsche" in their name. Take Deutsche Bank for example.
"The greater the competition from Microsoft, the more Apple will bend to users."

Mac market share has only been growing over time. If Apple was going to "bend to its users", they would've done that 5 years ago when they were still struggling to gain market share. Apple seems to have made it this far on a philosophy of "Steve's way or the highway."

Now maybe Windows 7 can change that, but I think it's a stretch at best.
"wal-mart clothes for 3x the price"

Did you ever stop to think that maybe Wal-Mart clothes are 1/3 the price of what they should be?

And I don't think we as Americans needs to worry about other countries perceiving us as unsophisticated because of AA. There is plenty of low hanging fruit in that category already.
I am sorry, I had very little time to post and did not hedge my claim appropriately. I am glad that others have stepped in and filed the gap.

The issue is that the government increases complexity and barriers to entry and therefore raising the Coase ceiling of how large an enterprise can become before being less efficient than a coalition of smaller rivals.
The toddler jumping into my lap is ruining my ability to read a book. :-)
Obama: "They’re going to pry [the BlackBerry] out of my hands."
You have a password reset anyways. Usually, it's email with a long nonce URL; security questions are what not to do. But one way or another, you will end up with password reset, or you'll burn headcount on dedicated CSRs just to reset f'ing passwords.

Don't do something special for lockout; just offer a link to the password reset page in the lockout error message, and reset lockout when the password changes. You've employed a second (also weak) authentication factor when you did the email exchange, so your user attested it's ok to undo lockout.

As for "they'll just lock you out again", there is no solution to that problem. If you're using some funky backoff scheme, the same attacker keeps you out by keeping the backoff high.
Chad said at a dinner that when he and Steve made the rounds on Sand Hill road, they had a working product, and users to prove their idea was good. They didn't bring a business plan or any fancy presentations.
This is an interesting perspective considering the trend these days for creating DSLs. That's really all those different and incompatible config file formats are. Everything old is new again.
Essentially Ruby is not good for the environment.

I agree
Can you clarify what features Windows PowerShell http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/technologies/mana... is missing compared to the shells typically used with Linux?
The fact that Unix configuration files often resemble crappy programming languages is exactly the problem. Most configuration can and should be declarative.
Ask HN: Review my holiday side-project (clipclipsave.com)
So, an idea came to me during the holidays. I was reading an article (NYT I think) about consumers using coupons more–and sites like retailmenot.com ... I'll leave the rest up to the site (hopefully the home page will explain).

http://www.clipclipsave.com

Please keep in mind:
- The admin area could use more styling
- My robot logo will probably get replaced (my kid drew it and our initial name was kouponbot.com)

Feedback and ideas are much appreciated. I do have some thoughts on monetizing this via a paid plan–but I'd love to hear your ideas too.

TIA
My main point wasn't the exact amount... I rather wanted to point out that the puff piece describes their pay as "significantly above minimum wage" while in fact it's a measly $25,000/year. I may be wrong on this one but I live in New York and I know LA is only slightly cheaper... there is absolutely no way one could live in New York on $27,000 (got the figure via a cost-of-living city-to-city calculator). I mean, it's theoretically possible but not without subjecting yourself to Dickensian living conditions.
Everything exept the price-point is good. Netbooks = the Big Mac 'n' Fries of the PC world; this is like going into a restaurant and ordering a super-classy burger, which kind of misses the point of a burger.
What is more ethical; Employing workers for pennies in foreign countries or employing workers here in the US for several dollars above min wage?

The foreign workers are probably elevated much more (in comparison to their peers) because of their job than their counterparts here in the US are, but exploiting this difference in living wage is not ethical in the least.
What does even mean?
When the Monad shell was announced (back in the days when Longhorn was going to have a database filesystem, uber-cool widgets, and unicorns that puked rainbows), I actually found myself seriously considering installing Windows on a machine again just to play with it. The idea of a command shell that could be extended in any CLR-hosted language, with pipes that supported structured objects, not just text streams, was pretty damn exciting.

Then MS delayed it, split Monad (renamed PowerShell) from the OS-that-is-now-Vista, and sat on the technology for a few more years before quietly launching it as an Exchange Server admin tool. Meanwhile, I found myself using IRb and IPython more and more, and never really got around to setting up that Windows box.
There seems to be some tendency of never-give-ups to cluster, but it's not absolute. It's common to have one founder who's super determined and another who is less so.

If the never-give-up is sufficiently convincing, that's almost as good as having all never-give-ups. He drags the rest along. The dangerous case is the startup that has all middle of the road founders. These have to get lucky fairly quickly or they give up.
The razor blade strategy has come full circle. This is a great idea. I'd be interested to see one of the many Seattle-based web companies try something similar in the Market, though. How do you engage a customer on the street about your new social network site or convince someone to start Twittering?
A VC could have one in the office to make sure people are working. ;p
I've been using a modified Dvorak for about 5 years.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=351137

I had never been a great typist with QWERTY, so while I noticed obvious performance gains after some time, I can't attribute them to the layout switch. I got proficiency faster, but if you are already good at QWERTY this is irrelevant to you.

It did feel more comfortable from very early on, and this I do attribute to intrinsic advantages of Dvorak.

My error rate with parens/brackets/braces used to be high until I put them in matching fingers of the opposite hand, in the numbers row, unshifted. Even though this makes numbers harder to type, it's a net gain since I don't type in many numbers when programming. And I make less mistakes with them too.
It breaks horizontal scrolling! That's unacceptable. What's the use case for this?
Blurry, it's great that you choose to live in one of the most expensive cities in the entire world thereby requiring you to make much more than the average American, however most people don't. These immigrant workers are living in and around LA (already) and I highly doubt there are many employers lining up to pay them the same wage.
Wage Cyberwar Against Hamas, Surrender Your PC
Behind the label: Soya
Netbook with a browser that can't run Flash.

Outside this place they're not going to sell many of those.
Exactly. And if you can't hedge at a reasonable price then you shouldn't make the trade in the first place.
Also, if the call seller is covered then he only has a small downside.
LA does not seem to have very different numbers, but I'm not familar with the area so I can't really interpet the data on this page very well: http://www.city-data.com/city/Los-Angeles-California.html
If the lockout is based on IP, there's a very high chance I can hide this from users because there's a very high chance that the nuisance is not coming from the IP the user is logging in with.

If my app starts getting attacked with password guessing scripts every day with correct account usernames, the users involved would need to be constantly doing this email based reset scheme.

Personally, if this happened to me every time I logged in and there was an alternative to the service, I would take my business elsewhere...
there are a ton of people working at burger king or other restaurants, street vendors, bus ticket attendants, broadway ushers, and busboys that make less than that in nyc

Its certainly not impossible. 15$ an hour is pretty good.
I'm not a shell expert, but I wanted something unix like when work dictated that I would be on XP, so I downloaded Windows PS. Maybe I have an old machine, but it was sluggish, it didn't seem to share the same system environment variables to the point of annoyance.
I didn't have any spreadsheets handy, but I think the best spreadsheet you could have would be growth/traction data rather than prognostication. Without _some_ traction (or a gold plated team), I think fundraising for web startups is a waste of time for the most part. I think the data you should have at your fingertips varies wildly based on what biz you're in and how mature your business is, but off the cuff, I think you should be able to answer (with some supporting wag numbers):

- How are you going to make money? What if that revenue model doesn't bear fruit... any other ideas?

- How are you going to reach your customers? How much will it cost to reach your customers?

- Roughly, how big is your market? Is there a lot of demand?

- How big a team do you need to test your initial theories and roughly how expensive is that going to be?

- Are there any other significant expenses aside from people?

- How many sales/pageviews/whatever would it take for you to be cash flow positive?

I don't good investors ask these questions to test your planning powers... I think they ask them to test how smart you are and how much you've thought about this stuff.
It's unfortunate that TdR and others like him are remembered more for their internet comments and less for their contributions. Some of the lamest people I've ever worked with were the ones who were unable to criticize anything and some of the best and most effective people I've ever worked with were also the most critical (and sometimes the most obnoxious) and I've always preferred to work with the latter.
try billboards, capture people's faces. project them into the ad running on the billboard. Kind of scary tho.
Nothing ultimately stops that but I am hoping a per-IP approach to lockouts will relieve my bona fide users from needing to go through a tedious reset process (potentially often).

If you backoff to 5 minutes max per IP that leaves 288 tries a day per IP (well, slightly more because of the part where it backs off). With eight character minimum passwords, someone with a botnet would have to have probably thousands and thousands of unique IPs at their disposable to even being successfully brute forcing...?
> Then again, some people will compain if you speak in uncertain terms.

This is my experience too, especially on the internet.
Sorry I honestly can't, I've never heard of PowerShell, nor have I ever used win 2003 server.

However, the most obvious feature its missing is I can't run it on xp or vista. Why do I need to run a server to have a decent shell? I find having a nice shell handy for various day to day development tasks.

edit: whoops, turns out I'm totally wrong, thanks nfg.
> If a user overrides a lockout and gets a new password, what is to stop the lockout process from starting over again as the attackers continue trying.

The fact that the password reset changes the password. So the brute-force attack would need to start over to be 100% successful. With the rate-limiting, and the user being forced to change the password via password reset, a brute-force attack becomes near impossible.

At least that's how I understood it?
The negative Business Week article you referenced is doing the same thing as the source article, just the other way around. We can cherry pick negatives all day long, and the other side can do the same with positives.

Take the lessons learned from AA and make your company better. Just because Charney is a little nutty doesn't mean the entire company/model/approach is bad. In fact I think the business world could use more people like Charney with an open mind and free (if not overly-sexual) spirit.
I would not say that Musashi disclaims a "desire for something greater." His later life seems to be all about that, as do these precepts.

I think these "precepts at best struggle to transcend their cultural trappings" in our case because the cultural trappings are particularly difficult. After all, most of us do not have real experience as warriors.

* Accept everything just the way it is

I don't think that's the best translation. How about, "You must deal with what is."

* Be detached from desire your whole life long.

How about, "Don't be ruled by your desires."

* You may abandon your own body but you must preserve your honor.

This one is difficult to translate from a warrior context to a non-warrior one. But it can still be usefully translated to the coder's context. Zed Shaw's talk posted to HN recently makes the same point:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=420650

A translation to our context might be "Be true to yourself, no matter how surreal the workplace gets." The same idea is also embodied in the "Just Leave Pattern."

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?JustLeave

A drama program undergraduate classmate of mine once noted that Shakespeare's Hamlet was far from "universal." After all, many places in Africa, marrying your widowed sister-in-law is the right and proper thing to do! To get to the universal, you often have to dig. It strikes me that this is as it should be.
That would be a bit creepy though. Imagine a factory of chinese workers, all sewing and this this silent rolling monster drifts slowly by, and they all stiffen in fear and work extra hard...
Strange when you get that realization isn't it? How could we (and so many others) go so long not realizing that criticism usually has opposite effects? Why do we continue to do so? I still don't know.

Don't be hard on yourself that you haven't changed after just 6 days. Making a major change to your personality takes some time. I suggest re-reading the book every once in a while to keep the goal fresh in your thoughts.

Also I recommend Erich Fromm's "The Art of Loving" which briefly discusses Carnegie's book and gives more of a "why" than a "how" on dealing with people.
I completely agree. I thought that MS stripped every cool feature from Longhorn except for Aero.
Problems where robustness or correctness matters, I'd say.
Who are the scientists of today?
Understood and I agree, but that's not the problem I'm trying to address. If the user needs to know what is going on and needs to reset a password, I want this to be at the very latest possible time (like days or weeks into the problem).
I would love to install ubuntu as soon as i lay hands on one of these netbooks. :)
Windows has had a first party UNIX solution for a very long time: Microsoft SFU/SUA. It's bundled with Windows 2003R2. On all earlier versions, you have to go download SFU 3.5 separately.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc779522.aspx

It incurs no additional license cost. It's POSIX conformant. It comes with both GCC and an MSVC wrapper for use with traditional UNIX build tools.

In my experience, it's considerably faster than cygwin, but software compatibility isn't as good.
Managing Amazon Web Services From An iPhone
Ask HN: Rate my microapp
Hey everyone,

As a quick learning exercise and in wanting to build something I wanted to use I have built a microapp in Sinatra.

You can see it at http://sixmonthletter.com

Please have a look at it and tell me what you think or leave feedback via uservoice.

Please forgive me if you find that there are bugs - I've literally just got to the point where I want to release it for feedback before doing any polishing etc.
You completely missed my point. At the time I played Eve, success for organizations in 0.0 space in Eve depended on the establishment of a logistical infrastructure. It's economics. I've witnessed groups of players hobbling their own economies and logistics by making short-sighted decisions. I've also seen all manner of scams and Ponzi schemes. From what I've seen in that particular simulation, you really do need the rule of law for capitalism to work well.

Killing people and blowing up ships is completely irrelevant. The game could be about planting trees and picking flowers, and the same principles would apply.
Yes you can, powershell is available for both XP and Vista. Google it.
Registry is the single major source of pain and the biggest security loophole, because the registry is essentially a secondary/parallel file system with far inferior performance, inferior security model and most of all, inferior built-in tools to access it or keep an eye on. This partially explains why adware/spyware loves registry: registry for adware is what Tora-Bora was for Taliban.

Wide proliferation of various registry "cleaners" and "doctors" didn't happen without a reason.

Moreover, the way registry is used often calls for complex GUIs to configure/backup/restore anything, denying you a reasonable shot of simple automated scripting: a Windows application of average complexity usually consists of a mesh of various DLLs hooked up together via non-trivial pile of registry entries. Replicating non-trivial configuration of a Windows server onto a fresh box has never been easy, whereas on Linux it's never a problem to write a script for nearly everything.

This is why I also consider Gnome config (registry-like turd) to be a major, major issue: various "Gnome hacks" already painfully resemble Windows in their call for idiotic GUIs where I'm supposed to find some obscure branch in a big-ass tree and change some binary value from 1 to 0 just to disable something, as opposed to editing a simple, plain, sane ASCII file, preferably programmatically.

And finally, starting approx. 5 years ago I've noticed a change in tone in Microsoft's own MSDN documentation: slowly but steadily they're discouraging developers from using registry in favor of your own XML/text files in user's home directory to store application configuration, just compare configuration-related classes in MFC (old school) and .NET2+ (new way).

I have some issues with SVCHOST also but the registry issue alone should be enough for one post.
[OT] Interesting how you and ars make basically the same factual claims (oscillation between slower and faster) but one gets 24 points, the other -9.