skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Registration email confirmation, good or bad?
I realize that a lot of people (including myself) get really irritated when they have to confirm their email address upon registration. The email (mostly) goes to the spam/junk and the user gets annoyed and leaves. Plus it doesnt seem to serve any purpose.

I am recently making some updates to my site and I was wondering if its a good idea to remove the email confirmation upon registration. Are there any disadvantages to this approach?
Did you even bother to read the article?

They're open sourcing VMWare View (formerly called VMWare VDI) not VMWare Workstation. View is thin client software for remote desktop delivery.

http://www.vmware.com/products/view/
Some Thoughts On What The Obama Election Meant To Me
What a well articulated ad hominem flame! So much confidence, and yet, no content. Now that is art!

sigh

http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
I like not choosing what I'm watching. I like flicking onto the simpsons and watching an episode I'd probably have never picked by myself... or you know one that's actually from a new season!

However, with like 40 airings of the family guy episode "patriot games" in the 5 days running up to the super bowl, I seriously wished I had another method of getting TV then.

Again, I don't like watching TV on my computer. My wife and myself can get through a few episodes of a show online, however IMO nothing beats a TV. That's why I watch all my shows through my 360 on my TV. I don't like being able to watch TV wherever I want, because it doesn't feel right, plus I don't feel like ripping my surround sound out and moving room with it!
Bulk data access to the historic archive (other than via the public Wayback Machine) is currently only available by special arrangement with research projects. We don't really have a good system for enabling such access, so it happens rarely, on a case-by-case basis.

If you just need fresh web content, it's not hard to collect for yourself quite a bit of broad material in a short period on a small budget, with an open source crawler.

The data from Dotbot might be good, or potential data feeds from Wikia Search/Grub.
40+ Greasemonkey Scripts For Gmail & Google
Some Days Back we posted 21 Cool Twitter Greasemonkey Scripts and now today am going to post some of the Best Greasemonkey Scripts for Gmail and Google. There are thousands of scripts that you can install to customize just about anything you can think of. But in this list you can find some of the cool one which will really help you to Organize Gmail and Google
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Well, it doesn't have to be official in an operational way--couldn't it be an Official Website like an Official Bird or Official Plant is official? (Hope you're officially semantically sated.)
That makes me picture programmers in sweatsuits jogging around the mall :)
Never heard of this guy before, but considering that he just wrote 3 paragraphs eloquently saying "Joel is an idiot" without saying anything about how they disagree makes me think quite little of him. Ad hominem attacks are rhetoric - meant to influence, not inform.

See How to Disagree, by PG: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
The title is misleading. I get the feeling that everyone who upvoted this submission, did so reflexively without ever visiting the article.

VMWare is open sourcing VMware View, a product intended for thin client manufacturers.
Wired home phones, which do survive without the power, are extinct. I think we have 1 in the house and no one is exactly sure where. It'd be less effort to rip the computer out of the UPS and plug the cordless' station in.
Customers usually want to meet the person they are going to do millions of dollars of business with face to face.

Is Halo failing at cracking that market?
Nokia 1208 red GSM EUROPEAN VERSION UNLOCKED 
The handset is incredibly user friendly which makes this design popular for those users who want a phone to be a phone & not a highly technical communication device. The Nokia 1200 is a lightweight mobile phone which feels good to hold with its 102mm x 44.1mm x 17.5mm sized casing.
Keep the confirmation but go ahead and let them into the site... If they haven't clicked the link for a few days send a couple reminders... after a week just disable their account.
I'm never opposed to paying for a service or product that I truly benefit from or have a real joy using, TweetDeck being one of them. I pay for Last.fm subscriber status, and it quickly pays for itself in worth.

However, what I think the web needs to realize, specifically those who want to put their goods out there is how to weigh in the expectations of people using your software if it's something built for convenience; there are twitter applications out there by the dozens, $10/year while yes incredibly cheap I don't think is realistic or fair. Some people barely keep up with their twitter accounts for a week, much less an entire year.

Paying for goods and services: yay.
Poor payment implementation: nay.
It depends. I have an industry website with a very narrow focus, and get about 80% verification rate.

I'm considering dropping email verification, but I believe that 80% I get now is a very good rate.

Biggest thing to consider is your MTA. You have to have SPF at a minimum and domainkeys is getting pretty important too. Outsource your email if you can.
I'd like to see Kent respond to Joel's specific points

Psht, why do that when you can just ad hominem for 3 paragraphs?
As far as HBS articles go, I thought this one was pretty good.

If you've ever tried to push a new idea onto a group of disinterested people, you'll know that you'll generally get apathy or pushback, no matter how much you extol the virtues of the idea. Giving people ownership of an idea actually works (at least in my experience) in engaging them and getting them thinking about the idea. Though the caveat is that the final result may not necessarily resemble your original idea.
Because I've had a pretty bad experience with godaddy when it comes to domain names, that burns them as a supplier in my book, possibly they are 'better' when it comes to certificates but once bitten twice shy.
Engadget - who you think would know about these things - keep saying it's definitely a BlackBerry, rather than the NSA-certified device that was originally planned.

But then again, maybe they are indeed full of it. Do you have a ref for the Certified Digital quote?
Uh, designers might not realize that programmers have to generate and modified HTML, not just hand-craft it.

Yes, and this is one of the areas where tables can get really nasty really quickly.

But the limitation that have been incorporated into CSS are just worse the "imperfect", they have screwed the ability to produce exact, reproducible results.

My point was that the idea that tables produce exact reproducible results is flawed. They just are more straightforward at the very basic level.

The ultimate solution is something beyond both present CSS and tables.

It's a nice thought, but god is not going to come out of the sky and simultaneously upgrade everybody to the something better.

People complain about all the flaws of CSS and the slow pace of progress, but seriously, considering this is the first truly cross-platform, cross-medium technology in the history of mankind, and looking at where we were in 5 year increments (2004, 1999, and 1994), progress is doing just fine.

Another thing... it's easy to pick apart CSS. But the domain of problems it has to address is HUGE. It's much more complicated than any one individual can fathom. No one is going to be able to turn around and create something that solves all the problems without being extraordinarily complex.

Yeah, but I can predict that each item on the row will be on the same line. Divs are harder than that.

CSS does have a learning curve, but it's not bad for what it actually provides. 90% of the hassle is just browser issues (which are getting better all the time). And FWIW, CSS supports table layout rules as well as float and absolute positioning, browser support just needs to catch up.
Entrepreneurship Corner
There is an alternative here :
http://collabedit.com/

(seen in a slashdot comment on this page : http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/21/1626208 )
Get the book, it's great
Epic rebuttal fail.
If the user's email is not important for your application, then you could just insert a captcha to prevent spam and remove the email verification.
SortHN: Easy-to-customize Greasemonkey to reorder HN items by (e.g.) (points - comments)
I find (points - comments) or (points:comments) is a good heuristic for story quality on the front page.
Joel dragged him into this by name. Clearly he thinks Joel is attributing ideas to him that he doesn't hold. Therefore it's not a matter of disagreement--he may well fully agree with Joel's thesis--it's the demonization of his work by misrepresentation. In that light his response seems measured and appropriate.
I wasn't saying it was the right thing to do.

Just wondering.
I'm thinking there may have been just a pinch of sarcasm behind the choice of the word 'classy'...
Can anyone explain to me what relevance this post has to HN?
Where can I find Free Ringtones Online 
Voice ring tones are recordings that sound like celebrities and you can also download free ringtones. Usually when someone calls or sends you a text message, the phone will ring, beep, play a song, or vibrate.
1) What's [land] cost in Manhattan?

~$100-1,000/sqft (from Harlem to Midtown, respectively). (At the $8,500-10,000/acre price-range you cited, farmland is $0.195-$0.23/sqft.) For a 100-story building, that works out to $1-10/sqft of floor space, not accounting for walls and columns. Would you choose to locate food factories on the most expensive land in a given urban area? If so, why?

Farmland at $0.20/sqft is 1/5th as expensive as 100-story Harlem floorspace. Since the Harlem floorspace would be 1,000 times as food-productive, the farmland would have a relative cost 200 times that of the Harlem floorspace.

2) instead of shipping beef in, you're shipping feed in

Why ship feed in, instead of producing it onsite?

2) you're shipping [...] manure out.

Manure can be dehydrated. That makes it less expensive to ship.

3) How much corn can you grow in that 100 story building?

A 100-story 1 square mile PhytoFarm facility could feed 25 million people. * The New York metropolitan area's population is only 19 million and covers 6,720 square miles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area

3) What's the opportunity cost

A 100-story Midtown office building would rent for $8,500/year/sqft land area ($85/sqft floor area). http://www.crainsnewyork.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/2009... A 1 square mile (28 million sqft) factory would cost $238 billion/year in opportunity - if it could attract renters. Midtown currently does not have any 1 square mile 100-story buildings, and in fact does not allow them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setback_(architecture)#Setbacks... That much office space might not currently exist in the entire New York metro area, not to speak of all of Manhattan.

4) pig farm [...] the lovely midsummer scent.

Exhaust air can be filtered. This is standard operation procedure for urban cannabis grow operations, and such grow operations are notoriously smelly.

* http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/TCHAR0...

At the current efficiency of PhytoFarm, the entire
present population of the world can be supplied from a square area about 140 miles on a side [...] This represents only about a thousandth as much land as is needed for agriculture at present [...] you can immediately cut the land space by a factor of ten: just build food factories ten stories high [...] You could economize even more and build a hundred stories high [...]

PhytyoFarm techniques could feed a hundred times the world's present population - say 500 billion people - with factory buildings a hundred stories high, on one percent of present farmland.

140^2 is ~20,000 square miles to feed 5 billion people. With a 100 story building, that becomes 200 square miles. Scaling down to 1 square mile scales down the number of people fed to 25 million. 1 square mile is 28 million square feet. At land costs of $100-1,000/sqft, that works out to $2.8-28 billion in land costs. Outside of Manhattan, but still in the metro area, land might cost as little as $10/sqft, bringing the land cost down to $140 million. For comparison, a typical supertall skyscraper construction project costs over $1 billion. http://www.google.com/search?q=freedom+tower+billion
I think what Martin and Kent are really objecting to is this (from the same podcast):

"They've just gone off the deep end, and I don't think these people write very much code if they're coming up with these principles, to be honest, it doesn't even make sense."

It probably wasn't meant that way, but it was taken as an unnecessary personal attack (despite Joel's frequent 'don't listen to me' implorations)
OK so Ubuntu has 32 bit and 64 bit flavours. Different flavours for different architectures does not seem objectionable to me.

As for desktop and server, they are not different OSes (unlike Windows where the cheaper editions are crippled in some way). You can install server and add the desktop (apt-get ubuntu-desktop) or install the desktop version and uninstall the GUI and install whatever server software the server version includes.

It may be a better illustration of your point that there are a lot of versions of Linux out there, but then again, they are from different vendors.

Ubuntu is not aimed at a small niche. It is specifically meant to be a general purpose desktop OS. See bug #1: https://launchpad.net/bugs/1

In practice I know a wide range of people who use it from developers to ordinary home users.
Why wouldn't I just feature eBay auctions on my apps and get paid that way? I don't remember if it was directly from eBay, or from some other startup, but there was a way to copy & paste an iframe to your page that would target auctions based on keywords that you give, and you could get a percentage of sales.
Tracking Friends the Google Way
Actually, I think the best advice to let it happen as quickly as possible. Otherwise resources will be misappropriated thus making the problem worse.
I don't work at Internet Archive, but I've found Heritrix is great. Crawling is all about crazy wonky edge cases and it deals with lots of them.

Use the version 1.x series, not the new version 2. 1.x is less convoluted and easier to use. There might be some http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect I think.
It was posted here because I thought it was interesting hacker news, I am in no way affiliated.
".. and I don't think these people write very much code"

and why is this objectionable? Joel Spolsky thinks some agile "gurus" don't write much code.

Fwiw, I know at least a couple of these "guru" (note the quotes) folks who don't write production code and haven't done so in years and make their living telling other people how to write their code !

The correct way to counter this is to point at (open source) code they wrote (Bob Martin does this by pointing at the Fitnesse code base, so he got this part right imo), or if it is not possible, just calmly assert that Spolsky's thinking is wrong and leave it at that.
> Also, your counterexample uses different CSS for the "in order" and "out of order" proofs-of-concept, which defeats the purpose - the point is that the CSS needs to stay exactly the same with the presentation not changing upon changes in markup order.

I already addressed that; see the new URLs in a comment above.
ComputerWorld thinks it's a Sectera Edge. I submitted the article earlier:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=450680
Again, you're after something totally other. Why should I waste my time trying to demonstrate something that has nothing to do with my original aim?
If you are:

* selling software people pay money for

* writing software people install -- that is, /not/ web stuff

Then under what circumstances would it make sense to ship untested code? When is there a difference between code that has unit tests, versus that with only end-to-end tests?
Query for content inside of <script> or other similar tags which Google and all other search engines I have encountered ignore.
I can also recommend comodo, fast approval and great customer service!
Microsoft can get away with this while OS X and Ubuntu (and other Linux distros) can offer 'advanced' functions for free is because of their massive business base. Out of the box a Mac has a full RSA keychain service, encrypted VPN, file and printer sharing, hard drive encryption, and the ability to remotely install programs (although it does require a separately priced admin program). I bet that 99.9% of the people don't care about those functions on their Mac, but they're there. Even if for the sole purpose of supporting said enterprise features just so Apple themselves can use it in their office.

Of course I think Microsoft is just milking their business customers while most people will just get the Home Premium that Dell gave them because the general public really doesn't care about the above features.
If anyone needs a cert (including the OP if he hasn't purchased yet) and help setting it up on pretty much any server/device/platform - email me. My address is on my profile.
Mention HN and this thread, and I'll make sure you're looked after ;)

[Disclosure: I work for a CA.]
I didn't realise most puzzles change, I just answered the Meaning of Life three times and assumed I was cheating.

As for the sickle balance, I did find it, but think having username and balance on the top right works well on HN. Somewhere near the top would be an improvement on having it in the footer.

I didn't have any trivia questions in mind, I just figured the kind of people who like puzzles are probably mostly the same as those who like trivia. Maybe that's too easy to game though.
You got his message too?
See where your friends are with Google Latitude
From the title I would guess this is rather targeted on drive-through managers.
Did you test it in IE before you made that comment?

I ask because I'm now at work, and have access to a windows box with IE6 installed. Lo and behold, my examples work EXACTLY the same as they did in FF3.

No nightmares involved. :)
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119]
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.txt

From that RFC:

SHOULD This word, or the adjective "RECOMMENDED", mean that there may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a particular item, but the full implications must be understood and carefully weighed before choosing a different course.
I'm sure VMware has been studying netscape vs microsoft with a very good spyglass and they've decided to let this trial balloon go up to see if they can harness the oss community to help them out.

It's very much appreciated that they did this, let's hope that they will do more!
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It depends upon the application. I run a semi-popular forum, so I require email addresses to keep the ban evaders, trolls, and spambots out. If you think you're going to have problems with the former two, keep the email requirement. However, if you're not doing a community related thing where everybody has to play nice, like a service app like Basecamp, feel free to not require it.
Brooks on the Second System Effect
The Muddled Tracks of All Those Tears
As someone who is relatively new to the world of testing, I think I finally understand the point of stubs/mocks/etc. Thanks!
No, FOSS developers will not help much because the product is VMWare View. It's specifically for thin client makers.
It works in IE6 too.
Learning from 37signals is overrated.
option to "work from home" occasionally, at the developers discretion. But yeah (as Colin points out) the biggest "perk" is interesting work.
They are when you use a good CC company. I've had AMEX charge-back numerous deadbeat merchants and automated payment BS. They even got me $1,500 back from Paypal, which is basically a black hole for your money.
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It wasn't funny, but once upon a time this site had a tradition of not voting down silly/stupid stuff quite so much:-/
I've used namecheap to set up a cert for my site. It's the only one I've set up so far so I can't compare them to other vendors but I had no problems and would happily use them again.
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Are there any disadvantages to this approach?

Only that it's the most common method of recovering or verifying an account if something goes wrong (e.g. forgotten password).

Doesn't necessarily mean it has to be part of registration though.

Have you considered using OpenID? You can get the user's email from that.
If there are money involved (I'm thinking about Basecamp), email address should be required.
The title is clever, yes.
The real insights of the post amount to appreciating how important it is to elicit participation from the end users. ...which is the essence of the Web 2.0 world: that the community's wisdom is greater than any expert's.
Bergman also also provides some useful examples of how to respond to complaints or "issues" so as to maximize users' readiness to offer feedback.
Nice article!
Kiva is great - I've used it a few times.

This year (xmas) I convinced my family to invest in Kiva instead. Each year we'll add to the pot and roll any investments forward.

This approach seems interesting - Really hope this initiative gets traction.
re: point 1 - I've always been told not to use persistent connections. Anybody have a link to a good article on when a persistent connection is more appropriate?
Already posted:

Here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465458

Here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465359

Oddly, they're both by the same person.
I have the deepest respect for you and your writings, but exactly how much maximum code coverage have you achieved and sustained for at least a month using automated unit tests ?

Just wondering how long you've visited the region you're writing a travel review about.

Unit tests are about confidence in the software. Automation is the mechanism for sustained confidence. Engineering (and / or fad as you put it) is a vehicle to get there.
Yes: doesn't seem like it's going to be very "deep web", does it?
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It depends. If you have a pre-existing relationship with your users (because of a large free portion of your site) and posting privileges require registration then you'll see a good conversion and people won't mind much. It also helps if you explain why you need their email address, in general I find that is one of the key elements in dealing with users, communicate clearly and frequently.
If you're serious about this and your webserver turns out to be a part of the bottle neck have a look at varnish.
Posted earlier by the same person here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465359