skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was just thinking about this one again, and here's a proposed solution:

Create an anti IE6 Coalition.

Here me out - you'd have one central website stating the purpose and all. If you wanted to join the cause, all you would have to do is place a javscript tag on your website. If it detects IE6, a message appears at the top talking about how IE6 hurts innovation, wastes millions of dollars a year, etc. and links to IE8, FF3, and Chrome for quick and simple upgrades. If you got a good deal of bloggers to use/talk about the script, you'd be able to spread the message. The goal isn't the eradication of IE6 usage, just enough demolition of IE6 that people don't feel the need to design around it.

Thoughts?
This may be several problems, but I believe they are connected:

* Some people have to work more than they want to.

* Some people have less work available than is required to meet their basic needs, even if they would want to work.

* Some people would choose to do different work if available, or if money weren't a factor.

* Or they would do the same work under different conditions.
No, its about the new display: table property, which really will make life easier. However, IE 6 and IE 7 don't support it, so in about 5-10 years this book will be relevant.
You proposed the method, which means you should stand behind it's success or failure. It's also likely that your client based his/her decision based on your expert advice (which is why they hired you)

However I know many consultants who simply bill for their time no matter what, even if the path taken leads to complete failure or results in time wasted.
That's what it was like with dial-up modems and monthly fees based on the hours you wanted, you regulated your own use, websites had to be small otherwise you didn't get any traffic. I think I was paying $30 for 30 hours in 1994, the $60 plan was roughly 80 hours or 100 hours, a better deal.

I remember being thrilled with download speeds of 3Kbps and at 4Kbps it was smokin'! Now I download torrents and most of the time (router ports config correct) I get torrents coming down at 4Kbps but the average is probably 40Kbps...with a 15Mbps connection!

A metered system will cause massive changes, probably not at first since human nature will still make people want to do what they did before but then they realize their money is going fast which will cause them to cut back.
What your advocating is exactly the opposite of the beautiful community that TED promotes and nurtures.

Advocating an IQ or net worth barrier of entry for discussion will filter discussion by, in my opinion, by all the wrong values. While I'm not saying everyone in a top position of a profitable company has nothing new to say, there are people who are just hard-working, potentially well-connected and knew how to hack the system for financial gain. Would heiresses and lottery winners be excluded? Where would one draw the line? Ditto for math degrees, would you care what a Chemistry PhD trying to create better ways for oil companies to make money has to say? Who would decide what fields are "worthy"? Is sociology okay? Is botology? Is computer science?

In my opinion, what made TED great is their dependence on the ideas themselves, and not credentials, to present to the world. The mix of people from all walks of life, from rural African villages, to dancers, to PhDs, to poets, to interns, to Nobel winners, to musicians, to Presidents (I can go on and on) is what made TED so great. Academic conferences existed before and will exist after, but very few will have the wide appeal and poignancy of TED.

Hoping that my comment above gets voted down is exactly the type of community I'm afraid of. What about my comment or attitude would you hope to have less of? Is being afraid of a community where potentially empty credentials (IQ, family, race, etc) are valued over ideas really so wrong?
Apple Quietly Updates $999 MacBook with Unibody
> If Obama was not president because he wasn't sworn in yet, then certainly neither Biden nor Rice were president either since they hadn't sworn in.

The argument is that Rice was president due to the succession laws. I understand that this succession does not require swearing in. Then, as soon as Biden did swear in, at 12:01, he became acting President.
The Z Curve and IT Investment
Same experience here. I'd rather look at a list.
Sometimes people can be willfully ignorant. Take doctor's who believe in homeopathy, or CS students who don't believe in uncountability (I know one).
Apple faces SEC review over Jobs health disclosure
Amazon Prime Squeezes Already Struggling Rivals
The problem is that bandwidth is a finite shared resource (much in the way that clean, potable water is). For most of us, there's more than we would ever want or need. We watch some online videos, download a few large files each month, and do use a fair bit, but not an excessive amount. Of course, there are always people that think they should have a golf course in their back yard.

I'm worried about usage caps and throttling as well, but I also know that at my university, about 50 people used up more than 50% of total network bandwidth. If the university didn't give priority to certain types of traffic (small HTTP, Skype, etc.) over other types (BitTorrent, Kazaa, etc.), the majority would have had a less enjoyable experience.

I think the solution should be something that both protects a shared resource while allowing people access and usage of the range of services one can use. I think it's reasonable to say that some services are higher priority than P2P filesharing and the routers than an ISP is going to have can easily handle creating differing priorities. That's an easy first step and it's still neutral to the source of the traffic (Google has argued that the problems with the ISP plans are that they want to offer high speed traffic from site A and slow from site B rather than differing on types of traffic). I also don't think it's unreasonable for excessive users to get friendly warnings that their usage is high along with help on lowering their usage. In terms of what is excessive usage: I'd say that 463GB is excessive in a month. Why 463GB? It's the capacity of a fully-loaded T1 connection costing hundreds of dollars. At that point, maybe you can't use a shared connection because you really need a dedicated T1. The users should be given several months to lower their usage, but there is a point at which cable connections are shared and you might need a dedicated connection. Rather than disconnect the user from service, the warnings could say that if the usage continues for several month, their bandwidth will be limited to 1Mbps (which would limit them to 316GB of transfer in a month) - essentially giving them a cheap T1.

It's never fun talking about limitations, but the world is made up of them. Rather than fight the limitations, we could actually use them to create better technologies. For example, most dedicated hosting providers give you unmetered bandwidth within their data center. ISPs could likewise give you unmetered bandwidth within the scope of the central office you're connected to (and faster than your general internet connection). We could then build P2P tools that would leverage such a system giving us faster downloads while using less resources. Creative thinking and an understanding of the resources at hand will help us to create better things. Ignoring resources and passing blame around just won't get us anywhere.
I have an iPhone and a GPhone... The iPhone's hardware feels vastly superior to the google phone. That being said, I strongly prefer Android to the the iPhone OS (I'm not sure what the actual designation is for iPhone OS X).

I also prefer writing software for Android; it feels less restrictive to me.

It will be interesting to see where the chips are stacked after a couple of years.
You could say the same thing about the iPhone being locked to ATT. Personally, I consider ATT to be a deal breaker so I never gave any consideration to the iPhone. I really don't care how good of a phone it is. On the other hand, I have been with T-Mobile for 5 years and like the service so the G1 was an easy choice. I'm sure there are plenty of others that would say the same thing about either carrier as well. I doubt the choice of carrier had much impact on the bottom line relative to the iPhone.
Shrunk the Firefox tabs with FaviconizeTab
If you find yourself browsing dozens of Web pages at once, this free add-on offers a handy way to manage all those open tabs.
FaviconizeTab is a behind-the-scenes add-on for Firefox 1.5 and newer. It quickly transforms the size of a single tab into nothing larger than the Favicon already displayed on it. Users can simply right-click any open tab, select the FaviconizeTab option, and the tabs shrinks instantaneously. The same action quickly returns the tab to normal size.
Details Emerge On the 2006 Hacking of Congress
with Unibody specs - its still plastic!
If you are afraid to break it, how will you fix it?
I can't say I'm too fond of the color scheme. However, I left the site feeling impressed, primarily because I'm quite fond of the site's purpose.

It might be beneficial to replace the tag cloud with something a bit less abstract and considerably more specific -- possibly even a "recommended games" or "top games" page. Though you could always use the tag cloud to supplement the interface.
This is tricky; since we're a third party it's difficult to know if the tickets were sold or delisted. However, it's certainly something we'll look into.
"Somebody with a wireless device in China should expect it to be compromised while he's there."

scary.
In my opinion, if you don't have money to pay them yet, they're a co-founder, even if you've already been working on things for a year. General rules for finding co-founders apply.
"How to do Research At the MIT AI Lab" is another nice resource: http://www.cs.indiana.edu/mit.research.how.to/mit.research.h...

I remember finding the parts not specific to the AI Lab applicable to my (academic) research.
Sounds like it would be double plus good.
Git Reroot - When Rebase is Too Gentle
The videos by Aubrey de Gray are absolutely fascinating. His solutions are (by design) risky and quite possibly will fail. However, the background he gives on problems is wonderful. This one, on cancer, mostly had the effect of convincing me that we aren't going to cure cancer any time soon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROfCNrBv_00
They didn't hack education until it was free. They raised taxes until it was a shared cost paid for by every tax payer. The same is true for the healthcare systems there. (And everything else that's government funded pretty much anywhere... With the exception of oil-rich countries, I suppose.)
Depends where you live. Some places tmobile has terrible coverage and ATT has good coverage. For me tmobile is a deal breaker but I would happily use ATT.
This is being implemented, http://www.edmunds.com/insideline/do/News/articleId=130108

From the article:
The [Nissan] Eco Pedal is designed to provide a "counter push-back control mechanism" if it senses "excess pressure" on the accelerator. In other words, it does not like lead foots. The premise of this new technology, which Nissan says is a "world first," is to help the driver get an immediate sense that he or she "could be using more fuel than required."
Does anybody use Friendfeed here?
I think you may have misunderstood my idea.

I'm not advocating one site with a meritocracy filter; have as many as you'd like. One for Math PhDs, Chemistry PhDs, just having a bachelor's degree, CEO's, car salesmen, etc. The barrier to entry filter just assures that the community members share experience or ability, not just interest. The extent to which you wanted to quantify their experience or ability is up to you.

I see TED as the ultimate meritocracy-based conference. TED's official website is pretty fluffy about who gets invited to speak, but the reality is that everyone who gets on stage has done something amazing. If you're some college freshmen with an amazing idea to change the world but you haven't implemented it, you're not going to get invited to TED. Great ideas are a dime a dozen; implementing a great idea is what's amazing.

When I referenced "those sorts of comments/attitudes would be voted down" I was not referring to your post. I was referring to the sort of post you mentioned: the "mutual masturbation" posts. I apologize for any confusion.
Since Finger Trees are powered by Monoids, this is also a very good explanation of why Monoids are useful in Haskell.
Lookup "Ion Drive". If you end up on a Star Wars site, you've missed; there's a real such thing that has flown in real space.

You can't launch on an Ion drive, though. (Even if you made it powerful enough, that would mean irradiating the entire launch area with instantly-lethal radiation, not a terribly social thing to do.) The way to a solar-powered launch is that you use solar power to create the rocket fuel, which in the simplest case is simply cracking water into H and O.

Solar panels are orders of magnitude away from being able to launch themselves in real time. Take a solar panel, compute its mass, compute how much energy it can generate in a day, convert that to potential energy in Earth's gravitational field, and you'll get a sense of the maximum speed a panel could possibly rise with perfect conversion of energy to height (which we have no idea how to do anyhow). I haven't done the math but if you get a rise rate of more than a few inches a second during the brightest part of the day I'd be surprised.
Well... I am not sure about Balsamiq, but I am inclined to do so for Django, if there isn't one already.
Well, we've created a tool that a manager could put on an employees machine to see how they spend their time at work. We strongly market/urge managers to expose this data to their employees and allow them to see how they compare to the average on their team, but they don't HAVE to do that.

The "spectrums" of evil that we deal with are:

Open vs. stealth: Right now RescueTime can't be stealthy, but there are certainly settings (academic labs trying to understand utilization) where stealth might be appropriate.

and

Exposure of worker data to managers (customers): How much detail do we expose to the manager beyond the team averages/totals? Due to customer demand, we've exposed some high level individual data to managers.

and

How much data we collect in a workplace. We're not budging here and are sticking with time/attention data. There are services out there that literally log keystrokes, take screenshots, and blindly cc managers on all emails sent (including personal webmail). Yuck.
If the like you personally or not is the crucial factor?

<sarcasm>I am shocked, shocked I tell you!</sarcasm>
Twitter's risk of ubiquity
I've noticed that too. Changing the channel helped somewhat. I figured it was some weird interference going on; portable phone, leaky microwave?
Snowplowing available in Ogden and North Chili (labor/move/new york/298904)
I'm not surprised, the test seemed very subjective.
And in another 10-20 years, you may be able to do with css, what you've been able to do with <table> for years.
Not to sound simplistic, but I think most any coder would work for a modest salary if the work were meaningful or exciting to him/her. My first job (coding) was for a company that made special software for financing insurance premiums. No offense to anyone in that field, but to me, it wasn't a terribly interesting subject matter.

On the other hand, I regularly see offers of people willing to volunteer on iPhone game projects just so they can learn the ropes -- it's just that interesting to them.

So, perhaps you should only offer the equity/money/bennies after you've found someone who's passionate.
Wow! Thanks for sharing. I've listened to many interviews and presentations by famous musicians such as Andres Segovia, Frank Zappa, Joe Satriani etc. But this guys brilliant analysis of Chopin's Prelude op.28 no.4 has to be one of the most inspiring things I've ever heard on music. Funny how after the first five minutes of the presentation I had given up all hope of learning anything from him since he seemed to be more interested in just giving an entertaining talk. I think I've found a new musical hero!
Room temperature superconductors
"We'd probably have a couple more good programmers in this world just by breaking down that barrier."

Couple more mediocre/bad programmers.
Who said it was a story?

This is a 4-part interview with Ira Glass on storytelling. I thought it was pretty insightful.
A Headless HTML rendering engine:
http://www.holovaty.com/blog/archive/2008/05/02/0136

So we can automate screen scraping of sites with a lot of javascript on headless servers, VPS's etc. It should be easy if I knew what I was doing (just remove the GUI part from Firefox, or webkit, no?)
About 15 years ago I was curious about the number of programmers I met who were also musicians. I wish I could remember fully the article I read at the time but IBM had a formal recruiting strategy for musicians sometime around the 50's-60's. The company recognized a relationship between musical and programming ability.

I'm going to speculate that it has something to do with musical composition being akin to software design.

Paul Hudak is another noteworthy person in the field who pursues music and makes it part of his research. His book "The Haskell School of Expression" teaches aspects of Haskell using music composition. As an aside, he also was involved in a new program at Yale called "Computing and the Arts" which looks like a heck of a program for developers with artistic leanings.
The industry may have created that phrase in a conveniently ambiguous way; still, in English, positives are always better than negatives when giving a command. Consider the difference between "I don't eat junk food" and "I always eat healthy foods." The first contains the proposition that you have the capability of eating junk foods; the second does not.

Perhaps "Always Drive Safely" or "Always be Responsible" as the link text would be better?
When you click a tag and see a listing of activities, the headers ("equipment" and "rules") are inline with the text. Where it should read like:

Equipment
foo bar and baz
Rules
blah blah blah.

it looks like

Equipment foo bar and baz Rules blah blah blah.

That is hard to read, and ugly.

Also, the colors aren't so pretty.

Neat site though. Clever premise.
Google Stops Print Ads Program
In the UK, (I don't know if such things exist elsewhere, I'd guess they do), you can go for shared ownership, Buy half the house, rent the other half, things like that.
nope, I simply dont know enough people that also know me to make it worthwhile.
I'd also recommend reading the "Git for computer scientists" linked in this post (http://eagain.net/articles/git-for-computer-scientists/).
I thought I remembered reading about a new LCD touchscreen, coming to an iPod/iPhone soon perhaps, which is also a solar cell... That would simply rock.
I think we're talking about different levels of templates here... balsamiq is just a mockup tool, not a web app framework.
The equity slice in compensation depends on the salary and the stage of the company.

When the company is just a drawing on a scrap of napkin and no way to pay salary, it may require as much as 10-30% of the company to convince someone to come code for you. Based on this equity slice, the person would be essentially a founder.

When your company is a small prototype and can only pay enough salary to cover food, rent, etc, then you're probably looking at 2-8% of the company based on experience.

When the company is a couple thousand man-hours of code and you can pay a basic intro-level salary, then you're probably looking at 0.5-2% of the company, depending on experience.
Hilarious Ubuntu/Linux experience parody
IAWTC.
I would definitely say Jonathan Harris talking about wefeelfine.org http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jonathan_harris_tells_the...

It's a fascinating data-mining project as well as something that looks at how technology can affect people and what we can do to help.
Very non-standard navigation up top, but not so bad, I actually like it since it is so simple.

The site looks nice. What would make sense is that the 1st page is the description up top, then tag clound. Every other page has the description on the side.
Inside a Movie Makers Playbook
Book Review - Programming Erlang, Software for a Concurrent World By Joe Armstrong
The Day Live Web Video Streaming Failed Us
What improvement over HTML tables does display:table provide?
I see none. It requires the identical nested markup, except that all your tr's and td's are called div now. Really, why would anyone even consider using display:table instead of a plain old <table>?
Oh and I'd also really recommend Tony Robbin's talk. I've seen him live and this is a real snap-shot of that http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/tony_robbins_asks_why_we_...

I think his approach is really interesting and think he has a genuine desire to help people work out what drives them and use that to do something good.
Realty's value as a profession is not completely without merit. Just because the true nature of the job has been obfuscated doesn't mean it should be eliminated.
Wouldn't you like to have first few programmers to be interested enough to work for 12 hours a day, all days a week than to let him think that getting a low pay means I can do a crappy work for 4 days?