skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Quality of membership(i.e actual use) is more important than raw membership numbers. Those who seek out LinkedIn/Facebook/others are likely to be more interested in using the service than someone who joined G+ because their default search engine asked them to enter their google services password to instantly become a member.

A comparable example is Apple's Ping. Apple doesn't tout Ping as a success because it has millions of members (who were similarly presented with a trivial sign up method in iTunes 10 - Ping registered over 1M users in the first 48 hours.)
Ping, however, is rarely used by the bulk of it's members, as such it's being discontinued. Most people signed up just to see what it was like, they didn't stick around. Facebook/LinkedIn don't have this problem so much, most people already know what the services are for, so they don't need to create a profile just to see what it's like.

G+ is growing, but it's an overstatement to say that it has the same level of user engagement as facebook/LinkedIn/others.

While many continue with the faulty logic that G+ is a superior experience/platform so it should become the dominant service, need to revisit the learnings of Betamax: technical superiority does not equate to automatic or guaranteed success.
I've always changed caps lock to be ctrl. Since it's always by the 'A' key I find it easy to find.

The downside is that I'm always frustrated when I have to use someone else's computer and I'm toggle caps all the time.
No, just try it:

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=Google%20Plus%2CG%2...
LoC archives Twitter because only LoC can archive Twitter. Other projects, notably the Internet Archive, already archive open web sites including blogs. But IA doesn't have a hope of archiving Twitter. LoC arranged this because if they didn't, no one would have a Twitter archive.
Once you have your hands in the right starting point (using the `j` and `f` key cues) why do you need any more tactile help? Isn't the entire point of touch typing that your hands "know" where all the keys are?
I disagree - I use G+ mobile more than desktop, not because it was preinstalled but just because it fits into my usage more, and google+ has great apps.
Fastest growing online jobs for Q2 2012
> Just possibly, there’s the teeny tiny issue of interactive content

And it goes on. You have a communications problem. Don't talk down to your customers, talk to your customers.
And many large ones. I once worked for somebody who previously had built a $400m company. His notion was that companies should have a purpose, be up to something interesting. "Profit is just permission to continue," was something he said more than once.

The mere pursuit of profit is always fatal in the long term because it's essentially a short-term outlook that leaves you rudderless.

Look at the car industry as an example. Toyota has been consistent in its pursuit of customer value, respect for staff, and waste reduction, with profit coming way down the list of priorities. GM, on the other hand, is where the modern increase-shareholder-value school of management originated. Toyota is now the world's largest car company, and GM would have died without a government bailout.
115 points... no discussion... Has anyone donated yet? What is the state of wikileaks? Is it beyond repair? I haven't kept up with it in the news at all really.
Chibi So small JS framework [5KB min, 2KB gz]
"anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity"

Found in http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'd say this definitely gratifies my intellectual curiosity, though I can understand if you don't feel the same.
What frustrates you most about daily deal sites?
The market is saturated with them. Deal sites are everywhere. What frustrates you the most about them? The constant emails? The lack of applicable deals?
Crappy service from the merchants?
In my node.js application I use the excellent Up[1] library along with the Up-Hook[2] plugin.

This allows me to update my code locally, push to github and have my server automatically download the changes (using girror[3]) and update the code, all with zero downtime.

What I like most about it is that it's all nicely contained inside the same code as my application!

[1] https://github.com/LearnBoost/up
[2] https://github.com/LearnBoost/up-hook
[3] https://github.com/node-migrator-bot/node-girror
Arghh, another otherwise knowledgeable practitioner who have chosen a Mircrosoft keyboard, believing that it's ergonomic. (Edit: not that it's his fault: there's a serious "fame bias" here.)

Not that it does no better than the regular dirt-cheap keyboard. It is an improvement over that. But it still have those damn keys slanted towards the left for both hands. We could do better: http://loup-vaillant.fr/articles/better-keyboards

I also hope he started using a Dvorak layout or similar. The learning curve is not cool if he already types fast, but the gain in comfort is noticeable.
Your hand eye coordination must be impeccable then. Especially on Mac keyboards, hitting the ctrl versus command key is difficult.
Auto-playing video, beware.
I agree that cutting off the funding to the cartels by way of drugs will have a good effect, but bear in mind that there are multiple markets that the cartels sell drugs to, not just the United States - they will sell to Australia and Europe as well. Everyone will have to have some kind of legalization, and we know that's not happening any time soon. In addition, they'll probably expand into other forms of nefarious income generation, such as running protection rackets and human trafficking.

That said, legalization needs to happen.
Retention Science Launches With $1.3M to Help Companies Retain Customers
Regardless of the politics, the ridiculous lengths that BMG and the other labels are willing to go to in order to take down content that clearly falls under fair use simply boggles my mind.
another JS shit
"What.. did you think it was only the politicians?"

Nope, it is the system. Funny how DC is still doing well in this economy.
Web App Security Best Practices
Another great resource for OS development information is OSRC: The Operating Systems Resource Center hosted by Chris Lattner (of LLVM fame):

http://www.nondot.org/sabre/os/articles
You know best.
I find most of my typos occur with my pinky. I think maybe it's just harder to hit those outer keys.
It's not so much that I'm oblivious, but rather that I think we're better off taking on responsibility than we are obsessively complicating things that can be simple.

When I was in college we had a sink full of dirty dishes until we had a rule to always wash one more dish than you dirtied. It worked even though the math major refused
to participate. The problem wasn't an individual free rider, the problem was that humans were involved, humans make mistakes, and the errors accumulated in the sink.

Paying more than your share is a good habit that has good effects elsewhere in your life. Can you fairly split all the little schleps among the founding team of a startup? Best results are obtained when each person does (what feels like) more than their share. Both members of a married couple should make (what feels like) more than their fair share of compromises.
As parents we'll make nothing but compromises and be repaid in resentment. But it's one of the most rewarding things we do in life.

Make a game out of finding ways to pay more than your share, sneak it past the anal retentives and militant obsessives. Extra points if they never notice. It's harder than you might think. But it's good practice for the rest of life.
Marissa Mayer - CEO of Yahoo
Only when you want to run it on real hardware. Most qemu targets can boot straight from a binary blob or an ELF image (the emulator initializes the emulated hardware and then sets the PC to the address where the blob is loaded). Those that can't are easily modifiable to do so.

Also, U-Boot can boot a lot of things this days.

So if I were to build an OS for ARM or MIPS I would:

1) Build it on an emulator that can boot from ELF or a binary blob.

2) When it's time to run on real hardware, try to use U-Boot.

3) If that fails, write my own boot loader.

The moral of the story is: bootloaders are not my kind of fun, so I'll avoid writing them at all costs.
I do that too. I use the caps lock for control when I have my left hand on the keyboard and my right hand on the mouse, e.g. selecting with the mouse, then C-c to copy etc.

But when I have both hands on the keyboard, it feels better to use the left control key, maybe because it's more symmetric with my right hand.
Ask HN: Is a free trial a bad idea for my startup?
I'm making a B2B product that I expect to cost $30/mo for eventual business users. I want to increase adoption, so I was thinking that my product would have a 3 month free trial before requiring any payment. Does anyone have any data or anecdotes to suggest whether this will improve or hurt my chances of getting a paid customer? A lot of people lately are saying "charge from day one", so I'd like to hear what HN thinks.
The corporate/bureaucratic symbiosis means that spying on your citizens is seen as necessary to control the populace.
Could someone advise a new name for my Pinterest app?
I am the developer of "EasyPin for Pinterest"(an iPad app: http://itunes.apple.com/cn/app/easypin-for-pinterest/id525296621?l=en&mt=8). It offers unique value for user to pin images without leaving the page he is browsing, also can user pin a Pinerly campaign. However, I received from Pinterest legal team that we can't use 'Pin' in our product name:

"In addition to Pinterest’s use of the word “Pinterest” to represent its services since March 2010, Pinterest also coined ‘Pin’ terminology for posting images in the social networking context and uses ‘Pin’ and ‘Pin it’ as brands to refer to Pinterest’s service."

So I need a new name for the app. I considered "EasyCuration for Pinterst", "EasyDo for Pinterst", "EasyPost for Pinterest", but sounds nor perfect. Could someone advise a name, or how to deal with this case with Pinterest?

Thanks,
Wow, Paypal is ok with wikileaks now.
I mean, DOS works fine. Why should software developers need Windows 95 to write code? So what if most of our customers are already on Windows 95?

We're going to innovate! Blow the competition away! Be cutting edge!
I always thought this was just a publicity stunt orchestrated by Twitter.
I really recommend the irc channel #osdev (freenode). When I was making my os, I get stuck many times and debugging an OS is pure pain (I used bochs) but some people on #osdev help me to find the bugs and learn in the process.
I'd love to learn Dvorak but the problem is not all computers are easily configured to Dvorak. Then when you have to use someone else's computer you'll look like an idiot or have to ask them to install/configure another keyboard layout which is not much better. I've seen it happen to people and it's quite painful. Operating systems should have a trivial way of switching between layouts (perhaps even a physical button dedicated to this).
Finally you can see what’s stored in your Memcached
The revolution will not be televised
So they're pitching as general-purpose solutions things that are fairly specific. (Procedurally-generated maps might be great for open worlds, but many games just need carefully planned maps, for balance purposes if nothing else.) That explains some of the other points, like networked multiplayer without the game maker knowing that its not local.
On the other hand my Apple keyboard is by far the keyboard I'm most comfortable using, the logitech illuminated keyboard coming second. I generally don't like all those ergonomic keyboards, they are all too bulky and take up too much space on your desk.
My friend created a toy OS several years ago (he wrote it in C, then "manually" translated it to binary). He said to me http://www.osdever.net/tutorials/index is a good site. I don't know about it, but if you're interested, chick this site out too.
San Francisco to L.A. in 30 Minutes? Sure, on the Hyperloop
I find this very interesting - having paired quite a bit with the Boulder office, none of them would have ever considered this setup. They where all Rubymine or GTFO...
I'd love a keyboard with braille on top of the keys...
I really want to donate but honestly feel like I'll be put on a U.S. Government list somewhere of nefarious individuals who support terrorism which might have consequences in the future. Anyone else feel that too? I should just mail them some cash anonymously.
I think you need a trial, but not 3 months. How long does it take someone to realize they can't live without your product? Make that the trial length, even if it's only a day.
A Smart Way To Import And Reconcile Bank Data Into QuickBooks
Pintereasy.

You can send me a cake of your choosing.
And the NSA is archiving Twitter and everything else.
Another idea would to stop paying sub-par writers to write the articles that appear on the front page. I can't take a company seriously that employs writers who only get read to see what other facts they get wrong or how badly an article is written (I'm looking at you Chris Chase).

Fixing the quality of the articles would surely have me coming back for more. I remember reading a fitness article about "5 myths of fitness" or some stupid title like that. One of them was that "muscle weighs more than fat". They said it was a myth because a pound of muscle weighs the same as a pound of fat...I was just mortified that it was allowed to be published on a site like Yahoo. By that logic bricks and feathers weigh the same because a pound of bricks is the same as a pound of feathers...
I find it hard to believe that dvorak or any other ergonomic keyboard layouts would have that much impact on my productivity that a QUERTY keyboard.
I would assume they would want to do both. The advantage to using Twitter is it copy's a wider range of conversation AND it's easy. Set it up and add some server-space and be done with it, where to even start on blogs would require 10x the effort and even more space.
Sure, it's great PR. I'd love to be able to put out a press release with my name and LoC on it.

But you really think it is affecting users' actions now months later? I'd be surprised if anyone considers LoC archiving a feature that keeps them locked into Twitter instead of starting a blog. (Notwithstanding LoC's efforts to archive all sorts of digital content... you make it sound like Twitter is an outlier.)
There is http://TrulyErgonomic.com as well, which has the added benefit of being a mechanical keyboard, It would be the next keyboard I would look at buying (since my current Leopold is giving me a lot of strain during extended coding periods)
I hate JNI so much that I would actually go an extra mile to port everything to Qt. Please make it happen!
>you have everything you had in screen

...except for serial communication. Because I connect to various hardware UART devices all day, I need serial communication. I hate minicom and most of the other serial comm programs don't have the features I need.

Since I'm already using screen as my serial communication software, I go ahead and use it for terminal multiplexing and session management as well.
The home keys are all a touch-typer needs; muscle memory can fill in everything else.

For the same reason, a pianist doesn't need to look down at the keys unless he's making a large jump across the keyboard (and even then, muscle memory often serves him well).

Nor does a guitar player need to look at the strings he's picking or fingering. A common technique is to anchor your righthand pinkie on the soundboard to serve as reference point ("home key"). From there, your muscle memory knows the rest.
You can deploy Tomcat apps using a post-commit hook as well. Add your server as a non-origin remote, and it's a quick way to update a Clojure/ring site. For added predictabIlity, you can deploy a specific branch.
My tip for using Jenkins (or CI in general): have your build script produce a single-file artifact. You don't have a .war file, but what you can do is simply tar or zip your project. I recommend having a source directory and a build directory, and writing your build script such that the source directory is untouched and the output files are placed in the build directory. At the end, zip up that build directory and call it your artifact. You don't HAVE to do this but that's my piece of advice.. it will make your life easier.

Once you've got a stable artifact-builder, you can write a nice script that takes that file and deploys it to the location of your choice.

As you point out, some work needs to be done to determine which files are copied in the build process. I'm not familiar with PHP, but I am involved in an HTML application that has a similar need. We're using RequireJS <http://requirejs.org/docs/optimization.html#wholeproject>..., which has the ability to do all of the copying and optimization in one step. In our build.js file, we specify some patterns to control which files are included and excluded.
I do want to keep the trial short, however this is a user-facing product for small businesses and I want to allow for some time for the customers to become familiar with my service before the business makes a decision on buying it.
If you try you will get a form letter basically saying that spying on Americans is not in the NSA charter, so they don't have any info on you. Tried it in 2005-ish myself.
That was my first thought. I actually have a need to partner with a mobile developer on a project, but paying $100 for the chance to find someone who's personality, communication, experience, and rate are compatible is, well, Ummm...
An article that also mentions Wikileaks' current financial situation - apparently they need 1 million euro immediately:

http://wlcentral.org/node/2734
Right, but you've presumably already done it once and thus extracted all pedagogical value from it.
For me, using left-Ctrl hurts so much after using Caps as Ctrl I never ever use it, except for the Ctrl-Alt chord for releasing the mouse pointer in VMware.
It can get complicated, for example this project http://lego.cuusoo.com/ideas/view/13519 used to look a lot more like the Tachikomas from Ghost in the Shell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachikoma#Design but LEGO was not interested in something from that universe (TBH GitS has a lot of sex and violence for a kid's toy). So he reworked the model into something functionally similar but without the branding issues http://lego.cuusoo.com/ideas/view/17553 which seems to have stalled out :(
> I'd love to learn Dvorak but the problem is not all computers are easily configured to Dvorak.

Changing layout on OS X and Gnome (I'm not sure about Win) is quite fast, usually if I need to type on someone else computer for more than 10 minutes I tell them and change it.

Also even if I've switched to Dvorak a year ago I can still type at a good speed on qwerty.
There is always bitcoin.
I'm going to once again praise the Pragmatic Programmers tmux book by Brian Hogan[1]. It's an absolutely amazing book. Short enough to make it a quick read, but filled with everything you could possibly need. It gets right into the meat and potatoes and by the end of the first chapter, you can be using tmux effectively.

I highly recommend the book. Absolutely love it.

[1] http://pragprog.com/book/bhtmux/tmux
+1

Self censorship at work. And your real name is in your profile.
Yeah I felt exactly the same way. I chose to donate anyways, but it was a close thing.
I can't imagine DVORAK adds enough enough value to justify constantly switching back and forth between DVORAK and QWERTY keyboards.
Yes. That seemed pretty deceptive to me too. Nowhere did I agree or appear to agree to signup for a listserv or newsletter. I probably would have, but the surprise email in my inbox makes me not trust this group now.
Those books were the impetus for my first startup: a mystery and math problem solving stand.

I had no customers (something about a 5 year old with a bristol board setting up shop on a tranquil suburban street strikes me as ineffective...), but I've kept the poster I made as a 5 year old kid to stay humble.

Thank you and R.I.P. Donald Sobol... you're the reason I do what I do.
Maybe it works well enough for him? It sure alleviated my RSI a lot. Switching to a MS Natural, remapping Ctrl and using US layout instead of Swedish more or less saved my wrists.

(Not that I wouldn't mind a Kinesis, but those weren't available when I really needed one).
I've known more than a few "architects" worthy of that title.

Then there are the bozos. They stand out pretty dramatically, so maybe that's why the title is a little poisonous in my head. "You're an /arrrccchhhitect?/ I'm the Queen of England, we should have lunch." (<--- not actually said :-) )

My touchstone is: If an architect is unwilling to write code then they belong in the second camp. If they're willing to write code, but don't have enough time, I look at when they last wrote code; if it's been more than a couple of years I start getting critical.

In this industry, I think it's important to stay grounded in code. You can get away without that if you're a pure career manager, but you'd better realize that you're no longer capable of designing systems at that point.
I do find it surprising that the results were identical. Having said that, my experience is that over low-latency connections N+1 selects are not as bad as they are often represented to be. I've occasionally chosen to accept an N+1 for a 5 row list of search results vs. "optimizing" to a JOIN for exactly this reason. Depending on the query plan, search limits, sort parameters, etc, the performance differences can be fairly non-intuitive.

I don't think this explains your case, though, where N=20k. I'm not sure what could have been going on there.
I love the Mac keyboards but those tiny fn, ctrl, alt, and cmd keys all right next to each other do cause errors.
18 year guy found dead after playing Diablo III for 40 hours non-stop
Thanks willthefirst, 'Pin' is still in the name, can we make one without "Pin"? From past communication, it seems useless to explain to Pinterest "this has nothing to do with Pinterest"...

BTW, i'm definitely happy to send a cake to anyone that offers the name.
There was a post yesterday about deploying small sites and I mentioned that svn export was the way to go, not thinking that there really is no simple git equivalent.

You can do a one-liner with git archive but I don't think it's as easy.
My HN username is unrelated to the company NeXTSTEP.
The Deep Web: The Place Where the Internet’s Secrets Are
Study: WikiLeaked Data Can Predict Insurgent Attacks
I don't like Romney (nor Obama) but taking down political ads because of alleged (not proven in Court) copyright infringement is ridiculous.
I'm on a TypeMatrix 2030, but I find the ctrl keys a bit out of the way (emacs... :D)
BTW, who on earth still uses FTP?

I use Transmit to FTP updated files to my web server. Then I send smoke signals to my colleagues to inform them of the changes, and document the updates on a papyrus using quill and ink. Should I be doing it differently?
It has the same bug as the original MS keyboard, the arrow keys are in a cross and not an inverted-T. Not sure if I agree with the placement of pgup/dn, enter and backspace either.
I purchased a QIDO[1] just for this reason. It obviously doesn't work for all situations in which you are on someone else's computer, but it has served me well so far. I mainly use it for when I am on Windows (see next paragraph).

In regards to OS support, the only OS I have really had problems with is Windows. Maybe I just wasn't checking the right checkboxes, but Windows seems to default to "I assume you want a different keyboard layout for each window, so have fun with that!" OSX and Linux have always been very sane, defaults-wise.

1: http://www.keyghost.com/qido/
You would be surprised, I was.