skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sea change: WSJ moves towards digital freedom
How to read 462 books in one year
Seems obvious to me now! Will sort it out.
To Get on the Web, Turn On Your TV
Hard to believe the list is from 2009...
Yes, that would be a great feature.

Related: Enable links in profile page of users above a karma threshold. Right now, it is disabled to deter spammers.

Example: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=kirubakaran
If it took 10 minutes for you to download the plugin you might want to try replacing your 14.4k modem.
I do that all the time.

I like the Dijkstra quote:
"Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure. "

I also think it is a great way to become a better coder to refactor programs until you think it is perfect or close to rather than just make it work and then leave it because then you will never get better than that.
I get that, but your point was that "UI is only a fiction made up for the user by the programmers". Do you mean that this is true of any interface that doesn't physically link the user to a physical device? If so, the implications of this point to software seem a little thin, since software, being abstract, will always be non-physical...
Since when has HN stuck with the defacto technology...

Ok, this may age me some. But people said exactly the same thing when Java and Flash first came out... if you go back far enough they were also intrusive annoying frustrating bug ridden technologies.

I'm not directly supporting SilverLight. I'm just supporting as many competitive web platforms as possible. They all add something, even the evil Microsoft ones. That being said Microsoft is losing the battle with that horrible SilverLight install. It needs to be as easy to install as Flash. It should be as close to transparent as possible.
How many newspapers or TV news outfits are providing completely redundant coverage of, say, the violence in Gaza right now? They can't at the same time (a) all cover the same exact story and (b) have me feel bad if 99% of them cease to exist.

Don't worry, there will at least be a few newspapers left. But a city doesn't need its own war zone investigators any more than it needs its own cable news channel.
Having watched the XKCD Google video yesterday, I remember a quote about defending yourself from Raptors in the building he was in: "I don't have to outrun the Raptors, I just have to outrun you."

If you're looking to see if Palm can survive long enough to make this product stick, it doesn't have to beat the iPhone. It has to beat the slowest iPhone competitor whose market share will keep Palm alive. Who's that? Android? Rim? One of those really terrible touchscreen clones with no noticeable software stack?

Finally, the fact that it's CDMA first is a huge boost for it. A lot of people I know have the money for a smartphone, but don't care enough about features to jump networks for it. Palm'll have GSM versions out later. In the mean time, I suspect Sprint & Verizon will happily push this model for Palm, as a way to fight AT&T.
Hyperspace: instant-on netbook OS: review by Engadget
Asterisk.

Samba share.

Pluto home (really nifty home automation + media server).
Thanks, glad you liked it.

I started moving to MVVM as the project progressed and I began to see the limitations / issues with using UserControls and code-behind.

To be honest the application grew from just hacking things together initially so there are some older parts that were just me picking up the technology.

As time progresses I'm trying to move more and more of it to MVVM and get everything covered by unit tests - at the moment the majority of unit test coverage is on the server side - the client is a little light in that department atm.

Word document conversion is a nightmare, and is some of the more obtuse code I've ever written. At the moment we convert to XPS and work from there but I'm sorely tempted to go to images and not loose too much sleep over the fact that you then get pixellation as you zoom in a lot.

Thanks for the feedback, much appreciated.
so if you found a great application that perfectly matched your needs, you wouldn't use it purely because it required installing software on your computer?
Give it to someone who has an even older computer.
Ironic, coming from a company whose success is driven by their own fame.
It's definitely from the 'Web 2.0' era:

"...because many paradigms carry data and commands bundled together in the same stream, with only a few special characters enforcing the boundaries. An example is Web 2.0 and other frameworks that work by blurring these lines."

Because Web 1.0 did not carry data and commands bundled together in the same stream?
gut it for parts, add the RAM and HD to your current computer.

Or put it in the kitchen for recipes etc.
do you run OS X? I guess you could just make a browser app (eg, Fluid)

I was just thinking users like having a "desktop" application - might re-iterate the lovely Silverlight experience if the user could "download" a copy.
> I've been back and forward on whether that's a good idea, and whether we should replace the demo video with a flash version. Will definetely think it over again.

Do an A/B test for a month using Google Analytics. That should settle it. Anything else is pure speculation.

This is simple but very, very important : any testable hypothesis should be tested. Long live popperianism.
Arrgh, the physical systems are only an analogy!

With physical systems, you can have fidelity to something underlying, like physics. Layers of abstraction can degrade this fidelity. With completely software systems, there can still be something underlying with which you can represent with different levels of fidelity. There too, levels of abstraction can degrade this fidelity.

Generalize, please. Don't mistake your not getting a general principle for it not being there. (If you are trying to prove the null hypothesis, you use different approaches. Trying the same one N times is missing the point.)

"UI is only a fiction made up for the user by the programmers". Do you mean that this is true of any interface that doesn't physically link the user to a physical device?

What I mean is that the worst sins possible in software aren't even limited by the laws of physics. Often in software, there is apparently nothing elegant underlying the UI like physical laws or mathematics. Sometimes there isn't even "common sense." Sometimes even basic psycholgical principles like Object Permanence are missing or inconsistent.
That's a great answer. I like the "I'm working with the best tools I know" instead of "I'm working with the latest tools to be part of a trend".

Working with tools with which you're the best makes great applications... as long as you keep updating your toolbox.
>> (Java+Flash) "if you go back far enough they were also intrusive annoying frustrating bug ridden technologies."

To a fair number of people, they still are.
I decided that I do want to take a crack at explaining:

game design : fun :: computer science : information

Just like computer science is the study of how to best analyze and manipulate information in large quantities, game design is the study of how to find, create, increase, manipulate, measure, or otherwise "use" the fun in a work. If there were a latin word for fun, game design would be served well by being renamed [that word]-ology. (As it stands, I've found "ludology"--the study of play--used, but it doesn't quite capture the same meaning.)

It's important to make the distinction: fun doesn't only apply to games. A ludologist would be perfectly at home in UI design, for example, or education (and also obviously things like toy and amusement-park design.) You could hire a "game designer" for those positions right now, but people would look at you funny because the branding's wrong.

However, just as there's a difference between computer scientists and programmers, there's a difference between ludologists and the risen-through-the-ranks game designer that we see today, so it wouldn't be a perfect fit. The game designer may know some facts about how to make things fun, and have some theories as to why certain game design patterns produce fun, but they've been "hard-won" on the street; they've never formally studied it, mostly extracting it from their practice in other game-related disciplines (art, coding, level design, etc.) That kind of game designer is half-developer (or artist, or playtester, or what-have-you) working in a sort of cowboy fashion to advance the field.

Of course, ludology is in its absolute infancy (it's about 20 years younger than formal Computer Science) so it's still not even recognized as a separate discipline; thus, the only ones working on it are making their advances in the field, similar to the original computer programmers who had to be Computer Scientists, because no one had thought the thoughts they needed to think to base their work on.

As I said, I'm taking CS and English courses. Tack on a bit of psychology and sociology, some media history courses, and whatever it is that teaches game theory (economics? basically, "fairness" as it relates to fun), and you'd have a good starting program for the actual teaching of formal Ludology. I was always thinking about being a CS professor one day; I might have to change that plan a bit, and perhaps write up my own curriculum ;)
Well, I think an explanation in real-world terms is needed, not theoretical definitions. For example:

1) Does Xia have better climatic conditions? If so, why wouldn't neighbouring countries have similar conditions to become a viable competitor?

2) Do the have better packing and transportation technology? If so, why can't another country develop/buy/steal the technology?

3) Etc, etc.

Hence, my point is that the imposed constraints may not normally exist.
I don't think the brain drain from Zimbabwe is any larger than any other African country, or any country that were facing similarly tough economic times.

The farm seizures affected less than 3000 farm owners, and those people typically did not employ highly skilled labour, so the effect that had was not so significant on emigration of university-level people.

I'm not sure what exactly your point is - are you saying that farm seizures in some way affected the level of education in the country?
Well, I'm a Mac user running Safari. Do I mind installing a free plug-in to get access to an interesting app? No.

I don't see where you (necessarily) get "small subset" from.
The real scenario is: Two companies make similar software that fulfills your need. One requires a download and the other doesn't. Who wins?
A/B testing is definetely the way to go, my only excuse is that up until now I've had my head so deep in the development to even begin to think about much else!
the one thats cheaper
I believe in this case "most people" = some people.
I agree about underlined text, and I found one other glaring error:

At first glance, this makes perfect sense - except for the fact that not everyone visiting your website will be English-speaking, and the word for “information” doesn’t start with an “i” in every language.

Visitors to my sites written in English will be English speaking. Either that, or they'll face much more pressing problems than how I abbreviate the word "information".
I've used Silverlight on Firefox (Vista, Windows 7) with no problems, not even having to restart the browser.

Silverlight is actually pretty good; it's a much easier experience for developers than Flash/Flex. You might hate Microsoft, but you shouldn't hate the tech.
Take "similar software" to mean all things being roughly equivalent, including price. Jeez.
Netscape removed all profanity when making their code open source. Here's it is.
ACTUALLY, I was simply dropping the "my" from "in my reality", since in so many situations you seemed to be inhabiting your own unique reality. :)
This is a feature available on all systems with middle-buttoned mice. Alternatively a Ctrl (or Cmd) + Click will open a link in a new tab.
you know, when I enter a title that is too long on a submission it'd be awesome if it said how many characters it was.
I think "The Manhole" on Christopher St in Chelsea would be an excellent place for a meetup.
Game Developer Layoffs: The Real Story
Rails: problem - who takes care of it - how

1) Input validation - programmer - validates_* and attr_accessible in the models

2) Output validation - programmer - HTML::Sanitize

3) SQL injection - rails - use ? or named_scope to construct complex queries

4) XSS - programmer - do not forget <%= h

5) Command injection - programmer - do not do it

6) Cleartext - programmer - requires_ssl module

7) CSRF - rails - uses authentication_token in all forms

8) Race conditions - rails - single threaded

9) Error info leaks - rails - use production mode

10) Memory - ruby - safe language

The rest are all on programmer - just do not do it.
I do enjoy it, but as I gain more experience in building software for other people I have realized that they usually don't appreciate it. Corporate development sees this sort of activity as a liability. You can break things quite easily when you "correct" something. Poorly-written software tends to have tight coupling all over. Many parts of a system may depend on the "broken" definition of a function. Some things are just too broken to be tackled by this approach.

My current environment is much more receptive to this kind of activity, though.
MIT MBA Student: Amazon and Microsoft Are Hiring, Google and Yahoo Aren’t
My personal pet peeve is when sites don't resize gracefully. Text should wrap, rather than float off the left side of the browser. Many sites, including this one, are unreadable at a width of 500 pixels, which is my preferred reading width.

Having to use the FF web developer addon to disable CSS on page after page gets old.
I think the author is aware of this but his "Don't bother improving..." statement seems to be a result of him trying to add more punch to his post. Seems to be a recent trend with his articles.
OK, here's a solution I would love to see: only after so many upvotes, and only for the mobile Safari browser.

On top of this it would be nice if there were smarts that detected abuse and withheld the behavior for posts that were being upvoted mostly by a cluster of related users.
Social Networking Still the #1 Growth Area in Online Marketing
only for the mobile Safari browser

Dude! What about us Android users?
Has Google Declared War on Legacy IT
Weakened Algorithm Threatens Online Identity
I actually got running the Windows 7 leaked out version on a VMware machine. I suppose the new beta official release has is more stable and has other features but as far as I can see, there is no big differences in windows XP and windows vista
Forgot to mention here. Adrian Holovarty is a judge.
To make my point explicit: Excel being Turing-complete does not imply it being feature-complete.
" I know of several pregnancies that were a direct result of this vulnerability in Microsoft SQL Server. "
Zuckerberg: Facebook revenue growth 'really strong', still hiring
I would be wiling to pay for news if the media produced pieces on things I want to read: science, mathematics, computer programming. Until the media does this on a consistent basis, I will use a tool like HN to weed out the fluff prevalent in today's media and send me to free things.
Thanks. We do not have that polygraphing here in Germany.
Excel's core functionality is great, but many of its extended functions are hard to use and/or limited. In addition to adding functionality, you could revamp some of the functions that excel currently doesn't do well. My list would be:

1. Multi-user experience - Better workbook sharing and editing.

2. Better scripting (already mentioned above)

3. More than 65536 rows!

4. Queries/Lookups - It may be that I'm not proficient enough, but it seems like VLOOKUP and pivot tables can be done A LOT better.

FYI our old company was considering buying a product to extend excel functionality. Probably a possible competitor. Check it out: http://www.businessobjects.com/product/catalog/xcelsius/
> Why are you critical of libertarianism?

I'm a bit confused. The post you've replied to was in favor of libertarianism.
> Facebook had about 800 employees at the end of 2008, up from about 450 at the beginning of the year. That's less than the 1,000 he supposedly projected to end the year with on that same conference call.

what the hell are they all doing?
I knew it!

There had to be a way to spin #8 into something positive.
Fred Wilson Makes $30,000 A Year Off His Blog For Charity
Years ago in Florida, I was with my sister, watching manatees in a huge glass walled aquarium. The manatees were effortlessly floating from near the bottom of the tank to the top. I asked, "How do they do that? Do they have ballast systems like fish? How would a mammal evolve that?"

My sister turned to me and says, "You ask the stupidest questions!"

I was devastated. Only recently have I realized the truth. My sister's just not that bright. (To be fair, she's humanities/arts. Her strengths are in other areas.)
Boxee.
Those costs seem insane. The sad part is it will probably cost more than that and still save money over the next 20 years.
Why I Canceled My CO2stats Account
I'm hopeful that the Silverlight plugin issue becomes less and less over the course of the next few months / years. Microsoft are pushing hard for adoption so (for me at least!) fingers crossed.

Already had some great suggestions from HN on ways to improve in initial experience (flash intro video, html sign-up form).

Shame you don't like the black but glad you found the application positive - I've put almost every spare waking hour into it over the last year, so hopefully there's enough people out there who share your opinion (about paying for it) for it to become a viable business.
On Slashdot, I find that the comments often immediately debunk the article or point out some glaring flaw in the headline / post. I'm so used to this that I'd rather be let down by someone telling me that the article is bogus up front, than to get pumped up about it reading the article then read the comment that debunks it.
If you click comments first, then link, even without reading the comments, now your browser back button is more useful and you won't have to find the story again.
> I could add a button people can click on to say that an article is linkbait, or mistaken, or whatever, and display icons to indicate this.

This is a great idea.

Also, it will help if we can see the sum of comment points on the front page.

1. Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors (mitre.org)
14 points by petercooper 1 hour ago | 10 comments [20 points] <<<<<

Comment link can be bigger.
You can do this yourself, via a bookmarklet such as the 'linkify' bookmarklet on this page: http://www.7is7.com/software/bookmarklets/

Yes, it even works on iPhone or iPod Touch MobileSafari. (You can transfer complicated bookmarklets like that one by adding to desktop Safari, then using the bookmarklets sync option under the 'Info' tab in the ITunes>Devices>iPhone area. Beware, the first sync may clobber previous iPhone bookmarks with those from the desktop.)
Areas other than intelligence, perhaps. Congratulations on being smart enough to ask stupid questions!
What's interesting in this article to me is the clinical services community acting like a nepotistic clique. "There aren't enough skilled people". Bullshit.

Every industry has it's specialist knowledge. That should be some degree be irrelevant to the IT community building their support tools. Not in the fact that the needs of that community shouldn't be taken care of, but that the IT folks don't need to be experts in whatever it is they are building for.

We should be experts in discovering the needs of our clients whatever their industry, helping them figure out what would reaally make them more efficient need and building that.

The idea that medical IT requires some kind of special half doctor half programmer half ninja to get anything done is repulsive. My mother worked for 30 years managing the medical library for hospital which treats around 70,000 people a year. The number of half-baked crap-tastical systems I saw dumped on her was astounding.

I for one would like to see this as a time where the needs of clinicians can be standardized away from these lock-in vendors. Open the opportunities to companies that will supply modern, well thought-out solutions.
NOKIA E63 RED UNLOCKED
Nokia E63 Featuring a new looks phone with multi functions and attractive tremendous look attracts you all. The Nokia E63, designed for people who need to manage their business and personal lives equally well, MP3 music player.
It's called Kindle
Short but inspiring video on successful athletes
You don't mind potentially making safari crash more? You don't mind adding to complexity, disk space used, memory usage, potential vulnerabilities?

I do. The less "installed" software I have to go wrong, the better.
How Cook's Illustrated thrives while others are dying
Yes. I'm betting against installable software.

The whole point of a collaboration type app, is that you can use it from anywhere - your laptop, desktop, iphone, nokia, netbook, internet cafe, library, wii, etc etc

Requiring a user install some software negates the whole point for me.
The pay cut should be a little bit scary. ;-)
That's also untrue. If one was cheaper, but required me to install some desktop software, I'd happily pay the extra to have the better solution.
Although I love this new direction that Rails is moving in (to merge with Merb), it scares me that I have to integrate my old code with the new framework.
I see hybrids and diesels as the next step. Most people can afford only one car, and not a $40,000 one at that. A lot of their trips are under 40 miles, but not all, and those that aren't are not always predictable, particularly not with today's hectic schedules.

A hybrid provides some advantage without removing "conveniece" -- which I would argue most consider necessary features. If it is a plug-in hybrid, all the better. Diesel provides higher fuel efficiency and the ability to use a better biofuel than ethanol.

Small cars would provide greater fuel efficiency with existing designs, but I think that, in the absence of STRONG pressure, there is only so small that U.S. drivers will go.

Electric battery exchange would require an entire infrastructure that doesn't exist. And if there is not a single standard, there is no way "gas" stations would manage it. Further, it would be more labor intensive than pulling up to a pump as swiping your card through an electronic reader.

From the U.S. manufacturers in the U.S. market, the hybrid Ford Fusion (I think that is the right model line) is the only viable next-generation vehicle I've seen. Perhaps the hybrid Ford Escape belongs in the grouping, too, although it's absolute fuel economy is not that great. (But if you still insist on something that big and SUV...)

There will always be niche markets. To me, right now it appears the Volt fits into that category, at best. Although the article does mention a small gasoline engine for extended range. This seems to contradict the "all electric" descriptions I've been hearing. Perhaps that changes the game, for the Volt?
OK, thanks for taking the time to explain :-) I see what you mean now.
I agree. I use the comments thread as a secondary filter if I a. am not already familiar with the domain of the link, b. the story has a very sensational heading or c. feel it might a self-promoting link.