skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tags are not a replacement for folders, and the opposite is true too.

A folder defines a directed graph. Combining tags loose the "directed" part. It may be good enough for some, but it's not the same and will fall short in some cases. This difference is the 1st point mentioned in the article. The article says that it's inflexible. In some cases yes, then use tags. In other cases, it will be exactly what's needed and tags will be cumbersome.

The two other limitations (related to searching and sharing) are bogus IMHO. They're not limitation of a folder system, but maybe of some implementation.
While you're at it - on 13'' screen and 2 year old machine your site is absolutely unreadable and unusable. There is a little bit of text in the middle and vast swaths of space with strange blurred colors occupying most of my visible space. Then the black bar. Selecting text takes forever (some JS tricks? I dunno?).

Generally speaking I find arguments about usability from someone who can't present their own blog a little dubious.
Love with Food Serves Up Referral Program on Referly API
This is the exact path I'm taking with my company very soon (I refer to it as persona based pricing, not sure if that's the correct technical term or not).

We've found that increased usage is not what differentiates our users (no one hits the imposed limits on their plans). So we're switching to plans that users should be able to read and immediately identify themselves with (Solo, Consultant, Agency)

Would love to chat with you about your thoughts and results if you're interested.
> Wouldn't it be reasonable/acceptable to deny support to those that use expletives when asking for it?

People that engage in hostile and harassing emails are the kind of people you won't want to engage at all. This is true for personal communication and also for business. Dealing with that kind of harassment is really draining and handling one person like that won't be the end of it, as there are more such people waiting in the wings to send their expletive filled mouth vomit.

The best way to handle these people in business is to ignore them or to outright ban them from your service. Of course, ditching freemium creates a de facto ban on users won't sign on to a paid service, so there is that approach.
I was expecting to see headlines saying 'RIP Muscaley American Suparhero PAUL STEEVE'... This is the closest thing I've found. I guess SomethingAwful was never as mainstream as they thought.

For those who have no idea what the hell this is about, this will just confuse you more:
http://www.somethingawful.com/hosted/jeffk/cliifyintarview/i...

PAUL STTEEVE, he'll kick yuor shit, unreale
especially when it's trivial to implement

<script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.8.0/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
if (typeof jQuery == 'undefined') { document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='/path_to_scripts/js/libs/jquery-1.8.0.min.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));}
</script>
How One 6th Grade Teacher Built a Computer Lab for Free
I'd speculate that, just as with the Zagat purchase, they were singularly interested in a brand with recognition in those 40 years and older.

(Maybe since they are seeing the Google brand erode in quality and value to those under 40...)
Apple has licensed design patents to Microsoft
If you are targeting non-technical people, I wonder what improvement the change from "∞ users" to "unlimited users" would be.
Are you sure? How many of the clay tablets made did not survive? Just because you have an old one with data does not make it effective retention.

Engraving data on diamonds is probably better...
> I will admit to being driven near raving mad trying to make CSS do things that were dead simple using a table.

Definitely true. I'm usually in the semantic+CSS camp, but for lots of simple projects (which I'd say HN is) those considerations can really bog you down. Use tables -- knowing they're suboptimal in certain situations -- and get on with it.
I live in a relatively wealthy school district in Ohio where the schools generally are well-regarded. Last year, I went to the schools "parents math night". I had expected to be exasperated by, you know, those idiots who will be teaching my children (my older son is entering first grade this fall). However, I ended up impressed with the teachers and disappointed by the parents in attendance. The school had chosen the "Connected Math" curricula (connectedmath.msu.edu) for its middle school math program, and some parents were outraged that Little Johnny wasn't learning long division (or whatever). Their arguments could be summed up as, "Well, that's not the way we learned it." I angered the other parents by playing a bit dumb and asking for a short description of the curriculum. Then, I stated loudly that it "sounded delightful." The teachers barely contain their smiles. I ordered a couple of the books in used form from Amazon to see for myself, and I think I would have found the exercises fun as a middle schooler. I really wanted to ask the parents doing the complaining, "Don't you love your children? You pay more for a house just because it's in this school district, and then you lobby to dumb-down the math curriculum?"
The Quick, Dirty and Complete Guide to Consultants for Your Business
At a start-up many years ago, one of our principals gave a free copy of our ($1000 and up, Windows-only) software to a colleague, a college professor.

College professor tossed it to a grad student, who proceeded to install it on a virtual computer instead of an actual PC. Virtual computers were very rare in these days. The student then complained to us that the software wasn't working right in their emulator. And why didn't we say that our software required a serial port (which was impossible to not have on a PC in those days) in our requirements list?

Give a man a fish and he'll bitch at you it's the wrong one.
The problem with your statement is that it's incorrect.
The founder's comment below implies investors made money in this acquisition.
This is the brave new world of SEO in our media. Once reputable news sources are more than willing to throw all their credibility out the door so that they can be the louder wall of an echo chamber for the sake of impressions.
It's not always so bad. I think a lot of it comes down to UX optimization.

My points of reference are http://colorblendy.com/ which gets +6,000 uniques per month and http://tweepsect.com/ which gets +25,000 uniques per month.

If you look at https://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/tweepsect you can see that the quality of users is... not of the highest IQ, and yet they manage to figure it out. About once every 3-6 months I'll get someone @mentioning me saying "HOW DOES THIS WORK I DON'T EVEN" or something, but those are extreme exceptions.

When I first launched tweepsect, I had a lot more complaints and questions, but I iterated on it and tried to obsolete any recurring issue. It's been up for multiple years now and requires basically a few hours of maintenance per year. I'm happy to provide utility at near-zero effort for free.

That said, I completely agree about paying users. They're the best. When I was prototyping SocialGrapple, I invited +100 of my peers. The feedback was completely superficial and uncommitted. When I looked at how much time the people spent on the site, I realized that they weren't my target users and that the feedback was worthless. I shut down the beta and a month later I relaunched SocialGrapple with a monthly fee membership. The userbase completely changed--people really cared. I got people whose productivity and business was seriously impacted by the usefulness of my product to the point where I wrote custom views for specific users just to cater to their specific needs (until I could generalize it to everyone).
Acid free archival paper kept in a dark, fire proof box is to my knowledge the single best technology we've invented and easily at our disposal for long-term storage.

I think I might totally start 'printing out' photos I want to theoretically have available in fifty years and place them in a safety deposit box…
Can You Tell a Club With a 100 Year History How To Run After One Good Season?
Ten days in the life of one camera’s price
Started to download this. It appears to be malware infected.
This seems awfully irresponsible.
I think a lot of folks are afraid it's a slippery slope to this[1]: http://wekeroad.com/images/koouch.png

[1] http://wekeroad.com/2011/08/18/my-eyes-please-youre-killing-...
For the price, it certainly looks like a good deal. However, the ATtiny85 only has 8K flash, so using 2K of that for a boot loader is a fairly significant limitation.

I'm also curious about the "6 I/O ports" (and have asked the developers a question about it). I'm far from an expert on the matter, but I was under the impression that you could only reuse the RESET pin if you were willing to give up the ability to reprogram the chip in-system.
In my experience full-fledged country guides from Lonely Planet are more thorough, detailed and informative. In the area of region-specific (say, Provence in France) and mini-pocket guides with pocket maps Frommer has much more presence and their guides are very good.

I am as avid user of smartphones and tablets as any other HN user, but there are many places in the world where you certainly do not want to pull gadgets out of the bag or pocket.
How to Use Alt Tags to Improve SEO
How is a company hiring in a different country 'outsourcing'? It would be outsourcing if Aegis is giving work to another company in US.
As I remember it from Richard Rhodes' superb, Pulitzer-winning _The Making of the Atomic Bomb_ [1] (highly recommended for anyone interested in science), it was Edward Teller who had the sudden fear that a fission bomb might result in a fusion chain reaction that would ignite the atmosphere and boil the oceans (page 418). Hans Bethe did the calculations and determined it was not possible.

However, the notion was disturbing enough that a formal report was requested. I believe this was later, in 1945 or 1946, during the development of the hydrogen bomb, but I'm not sure. The report [2], co-authored by Teller, is dated 1946. It was declassified in 1973.

On the night of the Trinity test, apparently with the notion of calming people down, Fermi (to the annoyance of Maj. General Leslie Groves) humorously started taking bets on whether the test would ignite the atmosphere or merely destroy the state of Mexico (page 664).

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-Richard-Rhodes/dp/0...

[2] http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/docs1/00329010.pdf
I wouldn't say it is "eons better than the JVM". The JVM GC, especially the new G1 collector, is probably the most advanced and performant garbage collector available on any platform. Erlang, however, does provide isolation.

There are versions of the JVM for hard real-time applications (Erlang is for soft real-time only), that provide explicit memory management, and a very fine-tuned GC, like this one: http://java.sun.com/javase/technologies/realtime/index.jsp

I know of some defense applications that use it.
Folders work standalone, tags don't.

Tags don't work without a search feature - we might tag religiously but others don't and won't.

If you're implementing a search feature then you no longer need tags.

It won't take off. Especially as these days we seem to be moving away from files full stop.
What's funny is there's no indication from the drawing that the screw would only work in one direction; it just needs a special screwdriver, and you have to spend 10 minutes figuring out its proper orientation. When manufacturers ship non-standard screws, they simply create a market for non-standard screwdrivers. I had to get a three-pronged screwdriver to get into my Wii, and it presented little obstacle. Given the difficulty of actually using this particular design however, a discerning reader, and especially a tech journalist should be able to see that this is completely stupid and impractical. Apple is not in the business of employing technicians to spend half their days orienting screwdrivers.
PyPI migration - Outage for 1 hour
I think you should give them the option to buy at the new price or stay on their current plan. Think about receiving an email from a service you have been paying $99 a month to that says, "Hey, we are lauching this new pricing at $79 - if it suits your needs you could save $20 a month"

Definitely is not the norm from the majority of SaaS sites.
if the pricing page includes "picodollars", it really
shouldn't

I knew that was coming as soon as I read the question. :-)
Workshop on Spacecraft Flight Software
Imagine the change in classroom atmosphere if teachers had the same social credibility as professors did (or more aptly, if high school teachers had the same respect and admiration from students as kindergarten teachers)
Congrats and thanks for keeping the idea up; a noble gesture.
Comments like yours make me wish Hacker News followed LWN's example and provided killfiles. At this point, anyone who is a climate skeptic is so detached from object reality that nothing he writes is worth reading.
There is one! http://www.hnsearch.com/api
This is welcome news. I like tarsnap but really don't like the possibility of losing all my tarsnap backups because I am not around to recharge it within the small window. I might be out on an mountaineering trip and be away from the email alert or something else like that.
They didn't have investors.

This is false.
Is it just me, or does there seem to be a plethora of companies named in the form something.io nowadays? Feels like it's the next version of Flickr and all the diminutives missing that 'e'.
Didn't the Pentagon just say that they want to crack down on their employees who watch too much porn? Maybe they were already doing what you're suggesting.
The funny thing is Apple does make their own screws. When they replaced my back glass at the Apple Store they also replaced the screws so I would be unable to service it later.

http://www.ifixit.com/blog/2011/01/20/apples-diabolical-plan...
The book describes techniques that Stripe could use in developing their own iframed credit card form. I'd only trust a solution from them directly.
A Longa Viagem da Maior Pá de Turbina Eólica do Mundo
Design Challenge: Rethinking the FrontPoint & Alarm.com iPhone App
Obama to NASA: Let Me Know if You Find Aliens
Since they fixed the issue your reported, what are your thoughts on the project they are trying to push?
Do you mean O(n)?
> the existence of a status word

When I'm writing a bigint package in assembly, I can see whether the previous addition set the carry flag. In x86, I even have an adc opcode. There's nothing like that in C.
Hangouts On Air: making live concerts more awesome with Studio Mode
Those of you who are managers, can you tell me how it is possible to have a group which is "not afraid of failure" after 20% layoffs and with everybody wearing name badges with their expiration dates on them???
As a beginner, you won't be building anything big, probably.
Focus on learning the stack, the language, MVC. Get to know the libraries. When you are comfortable with that, learn how to test.

Now, I believe 100% test coverage is plain silly. There are things you don't really have to test, and you are the only one who can tell.

I just started building a new app, and haven't done any testing until I was half-way through the first iteration (what I considered to be my first public alpha). I wrote a few tests to make sure the functionality I'd implemented would still work when I changed the code, then I moved to a more TDD dev style.

I wrote a few (maybe 10) tests for things I wasn't sure how they'd behave, noticed I could fix some of my code.

So, TDD can help you, for sure. But don't get too caught up in writing tests if it's getting in the way of actually writing your code.
Google's headache after patents: what to do with Motorola?
of course, the real problem is that Apple will read this rumour and then get the idea of implementing these screws to lock consumers out of their devices and achieve the utopia of "no consumer serviceable parts".
Thanks! That's helpful.

Odd that HN didn't bounce me to that thread and count it as an upvote.
This is a lovely form. Ideally, Stripe would offer something like this as a way to quickly generate a nice cc entry form with the intention that site owners would put the generated code directly on their site, or that stripe would host the service themselves. After all, you're already trusting them to run the service, might as well trust them to run the form too.

Not that it's terribly hard to build a stripe-compatible form...
I live nowhere near any cool places to code unfortunately, as I live in a little village 25 miles outside of Glasgow, Scotland.
I code in my living room, beside the 50" plasma and all the satellite TV channels :)
I do not disagree with you, but this is not answering his arguments.

Math is the language of science[...].
There are many ways to learn a language, but I think they all have something in common. You have to spend a lot of time learning, reading and writing. The writing is quite important. You have to write the language to be good at it.

He's not arguing that scientists should drop writing math altogether (although you have to admit that they are spending huge amount of efforts making the computers do the calculation for them). He's addressing the more general issue of "teaching math in elementary schools". Why do we do it today? not everyone is going to be a scientist!

The thing about math is that currently to write as it is supposed to look like can only be done most conveniently on paper. Writing a math formula in Mathematica or Wolfram alpha requires a latex-like mini language[...].

Yeah writing math formulas on a computer is a pain. But:

- you and I come from a generation of pen and paper math solving. The idea of markup annotation of your text is still very young, but is it so far fetched to imagine that in few generations, all text will be filled with metadata and tags? LaTeX is a pain because of our current primitive keyboards and screens.

- more people should work towards improving this. Wolfram Alpha is doing good things, they're not the only ones working on this either, but we still need to bring more attention to the issue.

Also, who cares if he sells WA. Let's talk about his idea, not his persona.
Doesn't load at all on two of the browsers I use. Yes, no doubt you'll say "Well, upgrade to a better browser!" but I can't upgrade on those platforms.

So you're advocating making the site genuinely unusable for me.
Reminds me of a proposal I read about once for a time capsule -- the kind intended to survive the fall of civilization and to help reboot it. It would be plain human-readable text and diagrams engraved into a hard disc of some stable material, starting out big and legible at the edges and gradually getting smaller and smaller as it spirals towards the center, until it's microscopic.

The text would start out as a Rosetta Stone type of thing, to try to establish a common language. Then as it got smaller, it would describe how to grind a hand lens so you can read further. Then even smaller text describes how to build a microscope. Maybe somewhat further on it talks about CD-ROM drives, and eventually transitions to /that/ format...
The singularity idea does not care how the self-improvement feedback occurs.
> As Galileo was prosecuted for supporting Copernicus' heliocentric theory (more specifically for championing reason over faith)

Aside from the fact this is factually incorrect, it's also a bad argument, as most people who propose paradigm-shifting theories are wrong.

Using this argument associates you with a lot of crackpots a lot more strongly than it associates you with Galileo.
Regarding the question of estimating the error: I don't know a ton about stats, but can't you use bootstrapping to get a valid sense of the variability/margin of error of your dataset for non normal distributions? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(statistics)
More than a full (unlikely) hack on Curiosity that would potentially allow to hijack it; I would be interested in finding out how feasiable direct signal de-cryption is. Specifically I can't immagine curiosity having too much of a sophisticated encryption system. Just by knowing a little bit about embedded-systems and hardware encryption, it is probably something like 3DES or AES-256 with a firmware stored symmetric key. This means that the key used to encrypt signals won't change too often and therefore I wonder how hard would it be to break it and get a hold on Curiosity's image and commands feed.
>Now, I believe 100% test coverage is plain silly.

Agreed with this for sure. It makes maintaining tests unsustainable and time consuming to write. Cover your bases cases and make sure that important failure cases are covered. Don't try cover every possible iteration under the sun. I find that well written tests should almost read like executable documentation.
Just add a big sign up link to a bar on the top. Your potential userbase is smart enough to scroll up and figure it out.

Edit: I can type good
Currently, I am working on a file management tool that uses tags fairly heavily. Obviously I think tags can be useful.

But the claim that folders can or should be eliminated is seriously misguided.

* Tags aren't enough once your file number exceeds a certain amount.

* File path provides a unique human-readable and human-understand identifier for everyone's file. A system where pieces of data don't have unique identifier is going to be serious drag at some point. Even average people need logical consistency occasionally.

* While folders may be a somewhat hard metaphor for new and casual users to understand, so are tags. A many-to-many relationship isn't actually something people quickly understand fully even if they can quickly get fuzzy understanding it.

* When you throw out the spatial metaphor of folders and files, you've thrown out the guarantee that a file is "somewhere". I've lost and seen other lose files in a disturbing fashion on MACs. Without a keyword for file X, that you just uploaded, you can't "look around" for it.
You should probably start here: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Building-Highly-Available...
If only Paul had a large community of talented developers from which to solicit volunteers to help with this...
Motorola to battle iPhone with military-style skunkworks lab
I was thinking a cool Chrome extension might be to preload all the major javascript libraries (jquery, etc.) and change any external extension references to the preloaded ones. I'm not sure how much of a speedup this would offer but certainly it would be something.
If I were making changes to HN it would be to add a "Nuke From Orbit" button to posts.
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Looks very impressive!

Mouse movement doesn't work in fullscreen mode though, only outside of fullscreen. Tested on Firefox nightly (17).
Why should anyone be surprised by this?
site owners would put the generated code directly on their site

That would defeat the protection which the Same Origin policy gives you (since the iframe would have the same origin as the rest of your site).

or that stripe would host the service themselves

Yes, that would be much better.
One of the most popular password hashing algorithms, bcrypt, enforces a maximum password length: it's algorithm is unable to use extra bits of input and has to throw them out. That said (as you specifically mention SHA512, an algorithm that might be used in a password hash but is not appropriate by itself anyway), a SHA512 is actually 64 bytes long: by an argument as simple as pigeon hole principal, you can then demonstrate that passwords longer than 64 bytes are totally useless (as there will almost certainly be a second password, shorter than 64 bytes, which will be equivalent after being run through the hash); for SHA256, which you will see in use more often, that limit would be 32 bytes. Please do not make such negative assumptions or state such strong implementation assertions based on such little knowledge of hashes. :(