skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Want some unsolicited UX advice?

Watch people use your interface (observational research/ usability testing) and then iterate. They idea is great and the interface looks good but it seems you haven't honed in on the mental model of your users and how they use the interface.

How to usability test:

(Insider tip: Don't ever call it User Testing, you are not testing the User, you are testing your interface. This my seem subtle, but it is not.)

- Develop a test plan

- Choose a testing environment

- Find and select participants

- Prepare test materials

- Conduct the sessions

- Debrief with participants and observers

- Analyze data and observations

- Create findings and recommendations

Read this article - http://www.alistapart.com/articles/usability-testing-demysti...
If they did it only for purposes of market segmentation, they would have long ago made something that about the size of a point-n-shoot but that was as convenient for getting the photos up and out as a smartphone.

They haven't. That doesn't mean they have forced me into buying a fancier camera, and therefore getting more money. Instead they've pushed me into doing almost all my casual shooting with an (inferior) smartphone.

Besides, market segmentation is a good idea only as long as nobody else is going to disrupt your precious segments. If they will, then you might as well disrupt them yourself.

Established organizations have trouble thinking like that, though, because their ignorance of actual use combines with political desire to avoid change. Thus, Kodak.
The piazza forum is for berkeley.edu email addresses only; that's a shame, I would have liked to participate.
Experiments in airborne BASIC—"buzzing" computer code over FM radio
We have a habit of looking for magic pills. Many self-help books advertise themselves as magic pills because they know that it sells. I've read my share of self-help books and articles - specifically on exercise, nutrition and startups. I can say that they have good advice.

Making changes in your life can be difficult. One can also talk at length about the mental state of someone that is only looking for magic pills and how to break out of it.
In my country, ticketing is per-venue. So if I want to go see an act at venue A, I go to their website and book from there. Acts' websites have lists of venues and dates, and direct people to the venues' websites to book. Most venues - at least the ones hosting things I attend - are independent of one another.

This doesn't seem like a natural monopoly to me - a new startup can sign up venues one at a time. Is the situation different in America?
I think that is the original argument behind this post. Let's make it open.
I guess those are not necessarily things everyone has control of. It would be nice if we can all find a warm body to cuddle with.. I know sex is the ultimate stress reliever for me. But for some people, it doesn't come as easy.
If you add &btnI to the end of a query link, it makes an "I'm feeling lucky" link.

I used it recently in a RSS feed I was making for events where I didn't have websites for the events. I made queries with the title, date and location and added &btnI to the end. It's not perfect, but pretty good.

http://www.google.com/search?q=Tall+Ships+Race+2012+-+Day+1+...

The feed for those interested/those in Dublin:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/FreeDublinEventGuide

I had to roll back changes which added descriptions due to the timeouts when retrieving the data. I'll improve it eventually.
NASA used the hashtag "PewPew" in the tweet: See the 1st laser-zapped rock on Mars [pic & info] 1.usa.gov/NQC0bW Team is analyzing data now #MSL #PewPew
More images and info at http://www.msl-chemcam.com/blog/
I saw the same situation happen for many classes at Rutgers... I was lucky and didn't get burned too badly, but I know those who did.
Those are actually a part of a "future reserved keywords" list from an older version of the ecmascript spec.. Safari v1 used to disallow the use of a few of them, but they never actually wound up getting used, and in more recent versions have been removed.

You can see them here:
http://viewvc.svn.mozilla.org/vc/projects/mozilla.org/trunk/...

Search for "Future Reserved Words"
I run a ticket startup (SeatGeek) and thus have some familiarity with the industry. In response to to the proposed solutions:

"Someone Needs To Create A New Ticketing Platform"

Creating it is one thing. Getting venues to agree to use it is much, much harder. Venues usually sign long-term (5-10 year) contracts with Ticketmaster to make them their exclusive ticket platform. These contracts usually include a large upfront payment from Ticktmaster to the venue. Given that LiveNation is the by far the biggest promoter in the US, it would be an enormous risk for a venue to forsake Ticketmaster and go with an alternative.

"Venues/Artists Need To Ditch The Big Guys"

See the above. Pearl Jam rather famously tried this in the mid-1990's, with disastrous results (http://goo.gl/xJItB). Not playing in Ticketmaster venues forced them into the netherlands of American live music venues.

"All-Inclusive Pricing Model"

To Ticketmaster's credit, they're getting a lot better at this, but they still have a way to go. It's worth noting that the majority of the fees that the author complains about are not kept by Ticketmaster; they are kicked back to the event promoter. The promoter does this so that they can advertise low face values (appearing fan-friendly) while maintaining margins.

"Offer More Music/Merchandise + Ticket Packages"

This is a bit of a non-sequitur. The author writes the entire article from the perspective of making ticket buying better, and then throws this in "for the content creators." It will indeed make more money for artists, assuming it doesn't hurt conversion rate (which it does) but strong-arming consumers into buying more stuff when they purchase tickets doesn't seem fan-friendly to me.

"Forget Everything I Just Wrote, We Should All Learn From Louis C.K."

Totally impractical. Louis C.K. could pull this off because he performs at comedy clubs. If you're Coldplay...not an option (see above).

There's no question that ticketing needs reformation. But this is an industry (like payment processing) where considering change from a detached, naive perspective is fruitless. It's important to understand the intricacies before avenues for upheaval can be found.
Well said. Just like facetime vs video chatting apps. Facetime is a natural extension to the phone functionality, something everybody is familiar with and using on a daily basis already.
with google voice you can push it to sms, email or gvoice service accessible from phone or browser, and also falls back to sms if not using gvoice. With that being said I hope Google does unify gtalk and gvoice for a better experience between chat/sms/email
(javadoc) does this in lein repl, but lately I've been seeing results pages instead.
You are not getting it.

James Altucher fills his stories with jokes.

He's laughing at himself, at his readers including you and me, at Larry Page and his wife and so on.
That's really cool. I didn't realize how hard it is to factor large numbers. Looking at the Wikipedia page on RSA numbers, can you believe this number has not been factored:

12462036678171878406583504460810659043482037465167880575481878
88832896668011882108550360395702725087475098647684384586210548
65537970253930571891217684318286362846948405301614416430468066
875699415246993185704183030512549594371372159029236099
So the professor wrote his own book & then forced students to purchase it every year? Care to explain a little more?
In Ruby "for...in" is just syntactic sugar for #each. Try defining your own #each on a random object!
I'd like to have your willpower!
I believe Django on Python3 can finally bootstrap Python3 migration. Huge community and a lot of django pluggable applications with Python3 will make a strong basis.

Anyway thank you for your work!

P.S. Waiting for PostGIS 2.0 support along with Python3 in Django 1.5 :)
This is also the formula behind an entire subgenre of business books, like "Shakespeare on Management" or "Jesus, CEO". I've even seen one like that for Dr. Seuss. I keep wanting to do a business book based on Kafka.
You might be like me and not be particularly good at introspection: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligence...

It took me a long time to be able to recognize things like happiness and love.
The author ACTUALLY said "There are two basic kinds of people in this world.", which would imply that there are variations to these basic forms.

If he had really said what you mis-quoted, you might have some point.
The problem is that it's very hard to penetrate Ticketmaster's market because of the sneaky way they maintain their monopoly. They offer large up-front payments (a.k.a. bribes) to venues in exchange the exclusive rights to sell tickets to events at those venues over the Internet. Ticketmaster than passes those costs on to the consumer. It is not unlike the way in which credit card companies maintain their monopoly by offering "deals" (miles, cash back, whatever, it all amounts to the same thing: bribes) to consumers to use their cards and then extract the costs of those bribes from the merchants who end up passing the costs back to the consumers. Credit card rules until recently have forbidden merchants from passing those costs on selectivey to credit card users, so the net result is essentially that credit cards users are subsidized by non-users, which provides a strong incentive for people to use credit cards, which maintains the monopoly. It's an underhanded strategy IMHO. But it's also quite effective.
The classes will be live streamed. I don't think there are any more "free" seats left.
Fogus: 0th-world Problems
IMessage - IMWiki
I am so glad I don't have to put up with (most) of this stuff at my university (The University of Auckland). We do have some online/extra material from Pearson for a number of courses, however this is provided separately from the textbooks and is included in the course price.
I think you're slightly mistaken there. The merger that created this monopoly was TicketMaster and TicketsNow. TicketsNow was one of the largest names in the secondary market (what most people will commonly refer to as brokers and scalpers), where TicketMaster and LiveNation were both primary ticketing suppliers. The National Association of Ticket Brokers have been lobbying against this as a vertical monopoly, and have shown significant evidence that TicketMaster, when under contract to sell tickets at a certain price, will sell first to TicketsNow and then sell them at the market value on TicketsNow. They've lost a lot of money in law suits as a result and will continue to do so.

TicketMaster and LiveNation did merge in 2010, but that would be more like Apple and Google merging than Apple and iTunes.
We'll invite everyone who fills out the form to Piazza.
Yeah, this matches my experience pretty well.

Buying an access code just to be able to do the homework really sucks. (Trying to input mathematical notations onto blackboard is possibly the only thing that sucks more.)
The top 10 Unity tweaks from The Linux Action Show [video]
I trully believe that one of the most important factors (beside genetics and luck) is staying intellectually active for your entire life and gaining new experiences, learning new things though your entire life (the curiosity mentioned in the article) - and superagers from the article confirm that theory. 83-year old who teaches other seniors about baseball history and travels? 85-year old doing two crosswords daily, reading a lot of books on Kindle and doing a train trek across Canada?

I can tell about most of people I've known for years that they are smarter than they were ten years ago. But I know people in their thirties who I considered somehow smart ten years ago and now they're much dumber. Perhaps it's coincidence that their only activities seem to be get up in the morning to do eight hours of not very complicated work and then watch TV for the rest of the day (the more stupid channel the better).
I'm an experienced Rubyist. Really. I started using it in 2002.

Depending on the context, I will use a for-loop in my Ruby. Not often, preferring the power that #each provides and backs (e.g., all of Enumerable), but there are times when a for loop is absolutely the clearest way to write what I'm doing.

The only place that I'd change what Zed said with respect to this particular example is that, in Ruby, there are some side-effects to using a for-loop instead of #each. Most of the time, they don't matter, but they do exist. (So in using the for-loop to teach programming, I'd have a footnote that says that the preferred way in Ruby will be discussed later.)
Hi everyone, original author here. Thanks for all the feedback! My friend posted this before it was really ready for public consumption.

My goal here was to learn how Lisp works at a really low level. I'm planning to add the features you would expect from a Lisp (e.g. macros) very soon.
The dirty secret is that many of these "fees" are actually from the venues and performers. TicketMaster and others are actually taking the heat as the bad guys on behalf of the venues and performers. We hate on TicketMaster and we can put the blame all on them (and the artists and venues sometimes even guide us to do so).

But if it's so bad then why do they keep using TicketMaster? Surely I'm not buying a ticket to a performance only because I can find it on the TicketMaster web page or box office right? They don't really offer anything substantial over the buying experience I can get anywhere else so the monopoly argument is silly (although they do have a good patent portfolio it's not anything can't innovate around).

It's simply because they will take the heat for them when the artists and venues want to tack on extra fees. That is not say TicketMaster's fees are not high but most of the "extra fees" are extras from the venues and performers.

The same goes with Fandango. You think that extra $1 for buying a ticket online Fandangos fee?? Nope. It's the fee for the movie theatre wants.

I've worked in this ticketing industry in a previous startup so I understand the game well. It's not really crazy the stuff that gets pulled.
I'm not talking about Apple and iTunes merging but Live Nation (That owns the rights to the musicians and puts on the shows) and Ticket Master, who sells the tickets).
It would make a very interesting use case for Bitcoins. Why is it that so many of the possible uses for them make it seem like the world would be a better place without them?
"...but they certainly don't seem to be helpful either."

If people left restaurants hungry, wouldn't you suspect they're not living up to their mission?
I think Zed misses the point of idioms both in programming languages and in natural language.

Consider this snippet from natural language:

Paul: "Hey nice jacket, looks great on you"

Linus: "Word"

Linus used an idiom to articulate his sentiment. Why? Because the idiom, if used around someone who understands it, offers little uncertainty about the meaning while also being concise.

Linus could have said, "Why thank you. You really didn't have to say that. I appreciate the compliment but I'd rather not spend a lot of time discussing my jacket".

The idiom was useful because it added clarity, both by reducing the excess information going over the communication channel and also by clarifying the intent.

If you use a for loop in situations where the variables used by the loop are needed outside the loop, then there is no reduction in clarity b/c of the choice of a for loop. However, if you use a for loop when the variables used by the loop aren't needed outside the loop, you pollute the code with unnecessary ambiguity.

Ruby 1.8 had this problem with block variable scope and it was fixed in 1.9. Now in 1.9 you can write code like this:

x = 5
(1..3).each do |x|
x = 99
end

puts x #=> will print 5
Well, sure. Being love might make people happy, but it's not great advice to give. Someone who reads the article might easily decide to take a walk every night at 9:30. He might have to rearrange my schedule or miss his favorite TV show, but it's not hard to figure out how to take a walk. But if the article recommended having a significant other—or even just getting laid more often, it just opens another can of worms. Most people can't just decide to have more sex, or to fall in love. So including it alongside habits like waking up earlier isn't very useful.
Thanks for the comment, the goal is really to share how I was able to use Migrations/Templates etc. that you need to build any kind of web-app.

Choosing to build a blog was to just avoid writing more about the type of the app I'm building & to skip explaining the requirements :)
I'm guessing Zed first learned to program using for loops so they look "natural" and easier for beginners to learn than functional callbacks. That seems like a testable proposition, but I'm guessing it isn't so. There aren't too many situations in life outside programming and racing where people go around in circles to get something done. Furthermore, the choice of print in the example begs the question. Are you teaching that imperative programming is natural and functional programming is only for "advanced" students? What are you going to teach the beginner when the goal is calculate the sum of the squares of a list of numbers?
Live stream includes all tutorials, Piazza forum enrollment, etc. So identical to being there, save the trip to Berkeley and free soda.
This is a great explanation (greetings from a former founder of Stubtopia - I met some SeatGeek guys at TicketNetwork tradeshows, but can't be sure if it was you).

By my estimation the next big chance for a software company to go after ticketmaster would be in 2015 - a lot of major venues expire, but it would be extremely difficult. You'd have to have an entire ticketing platform already built, which to build one as robust as ticketmaster would be extremely expensive, but then there's no guarantee venues will sign with you.

Venues generally have no incentive to work with anyone other than TicketMaster, especially since the LiveNation merger. Basically all you have to do if you're a venue is plug into the TicketMaster platform and everything else is taken care of - from the ticketing to the promoting and the entire point of sale mess online.

Reality is as a consumer you will keep taking it in the shorts for some time - TicketMaster is a 1000 pound gorilla that will be very difficult to knock off. I've talked with dozens of would-be TicketMaster competitors over the years, and they all end up going after different markets where they can get more bang for their buck. But even in smaller/different markets you have the likes of Paceolan.
You might have some luck with wrapping a web application into a desktop one by using something like Tide SDK (formerly Titanium Desktop). You wouldn't get a proper desktop application, but I think it would definitely work as a file uploader and it should be easier for your team to manage.

http://www.tidesdk.org/

Things like Adobe AIR would serve the same purpose, but the user experience isn't that great, arguably on the same level with Java if not worse.
Ask HN: Why don't I see my post from yesterday?
still new to Hacker News but I'm pretty sure I posted an Ask HN yesterday and I don't see it on my profile. Did it get deleted?
Under the hood, 'for..in' just calls #each. Therefore, it is easy to make 'for..in' work with a custom collection: just define #each. And that is what you would do anyway if you were defining an Enumerable custom collection.
The GPU on the Pi can't/won't support OpenCL. That doesn't stop one from writing a GPGPU program in GLSL.
Why did you move to San Jose?
I was under the impression that TicketsNow had very little market share. Aren't (EBay owned) StubHub, EBay and Craigslist the major players in the secondary market (excluding scalpers at the event)?

I have college basketball season tickets and my online account is integrated with TicketsNow (one click to electronically list my tickets to any game). I've tried using it as a seller and have had no interest in my tickets. The same tickets usually sell within a few days on StubHub.

As a buyer, I have checked TicketsNow on occasion and rarely find any tickets available for the event. One time I did find a great deal: 5th row center court tickets to a sold out game at face value. I think I got them because no other buyers had looked on the site.
There's a huge difference in the context between 3am "late at night" because you've stayed awake or 3am "early in the morning" because you just woke up. Some will hate one but not the other - personally I find them equally useful times for different reasons.
No this only switches the connection to https, but still hundreds of files.
Think Before You Press Send
That was the situation, but they all signed with TicketMaster because TicketMaster had the best point of sale software for tickets. Technically ticketing is still per-venue and they are independent, they just all use TicketMaster.

This isn't always 100% true, as some venues have similar owners, but that's a bit beside the point.
China Is Building an Army of Noodle-Making Robots
Why does this happen:

(def a 3)
3

a
null

a should be 3, not null.
I've never felt that great during those times I've had to regularly be up early school or work. Back when I was on the swim team and regularly got up by 5am, I was not a happy camper.

The happiest time I've had, my schedule was this: I slept from 5am to noon. I generally drank 1.5L of water and did about a 90 minute run right after getting up, showered, put on my suit and hit the office by 2:30pm. I stayed until about 11pm, then went out with my friends for seafood, veggies and beer at a 熱炒 (stir fry?) restaurant. Then, I'd come home at about 1:30 and do some work on my computer until 4am. After that I'd watch a video online, write a couple of note to myself for the next day and go to bed.

I completely agree with the blogger on the impact of exercising, continual learning, and helping others. It's not the most important stuff, though. I've found that having really good friends matters at least as much as any of his keys to happiness. Being in love doesn't hurt, either.
Yeah, 100s of little files doesn't increase the reach of information, to lessens it. My beef isn't with the information but the presentation. Only the most diehard autodidacts will push through these barriers.
Ask HN: Is Capitalism Immoral?
I disagree about the 'each' being a 'social more' as opposed to 'for'.

The most important thing you will ever learn about conditional loops is that effectively they are all shorthand for combinations of compare statements and conditional jumps in assembly. Past that really, none are more conceptually simple than any other...

So the analogy of 'each' being "piece of cake" to 'for' being "easy" doesn't really hold to me. Nor does the extreme list of 'concepts I'd have to teach to show someone how .each... works'. They both effectively are the same level of abstraction from 'CMP' and 'J__'.

As someone who learned ruby as my first real language, 'each' made a lot of sense to me. It uses fewer words and relates more closely to the english language than 'for...' to my mind. I don't want to say this is the case for everybody, and 'for...' definitely at least has one advantage (cross language use - though I'm not sure this should be of major importance in a ruby tutorial).

But to me this page doesn't really present a convincing argument against the teaching of 'each' before 'for...'