skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
9. And/or An editor once told me, "And-slash-or means 'and' or 'or,' so pick one, unless you have no idea what you're trying to say, in which case, by all means use it."

I think that to some people this could seem misleading and/or incorrect.

8. People manager As opposed to "Goldfish supervisor?" Seriously, this is a "try not to offend anyone term," that makes managers of people and non-people (whatever that is) feel less like managers or people and more like guppies.

"Manager" is a very wide term. You can manage processes, you can manage inventories, you can manage people, you can manage documents. Is a document manager a people manager? No.

5. Take Away You take away food in a paper bag with a clown on it. Period.

Sometimes "What's the take-away from this?" can be a good quick synonym for "What are the important conclusions and insights we should get from this?" You might dislike it, but it's hardly ban-worthy.

Certainly, some of the examples there are pretty annoying, but I don't get the whole "words to ban" thing... seems like a pretty weak article for a publication by a prestigious university.
British Government Attacks Facebook Security Risks
Is Quantum Mechanics Controlling Your Thoughts?
Windows 7 is nice, but it trashed grub
Ajax Fancy Captcha: Drag & Drop CAPTCHA (jQuery plugin)
You guys should offer a daily or limited time use rate. I would think many sites dont need to load test every month. But instead when they are first building an infrastructure or making upgrades.

One of the sites I am working on now is moving to a new codebase. We wanted to load test for a few hours but found everything we looked at to be too expensive.
Are there any good videos online for learning the statistics behind R? Most of the R videos I've seen have been focused on the tool, not the statistics behind the tool.
very cool -- this would have taken weeks/months to do, without Twilio...
"Hey, uh, guys? Could we build a hanger to, you know, put the drones in? You know, just in case, uh, Google takes a picture of the base, or whatever."
because there is more opportunity oveseas now. India and China will each have more internet users than USA within a few years
You might have a good time meeting people at Northeastern University. Every wednesday we have a speaker come in and talk about something they're interested in. It'd be a great place to meet geeky students and faculty at NU. http://acm.ccs.neu.edu/?q=videos has some videos of past talks, but they haven't been updated in a while.

Next week we've got Foy Savas giving a talk about Ruby.

You're welcome to join us.
Online Dating: Analyzing the Algorithms of Attraction
YouNoodle on BBC News
Google AdSense now include Font Options
The graph is pretty flat, which indicates the test is not really putting any stress on your server. The load added does not make much of a difference for improvingtheweb.com. One thing we need to put more effort in, I think, is to communicate these things. What can you learn from a graph, what are the prerequisites for getting good test results (in this case, more load would be a good thing).

I think there is a lot we need to do to explain things better. That is the most difficult part of all.
I disagree with you on both points.

First - the people on $3 /mo shared hosting are not in the target market for this service. If you are on shared hosting, you don't need loadtesting.

Second - I think subscription is fine. As a subscription, I recognize that I -should be- load testing on a regular basis. As a-la-carte, I am much more likely to say "umpteen dollars?I can do my own loadtest for cheaper then that."
One problem with the kind of markers mentioned in the cited article is that they are not subject to selection pressure and not likely to be correlated with any phenotype of interest.
Get best links of london quickly and easily at affordable prices from Steffans.
Steffans provides guaranteed links of london at an affordable prices. Guaranteed products with shipping.
I've seen this / experienced this myself. It may sound cynical, but it is so, so true.

Addendum: On the other hand, many of the people in those roles were quite nice and willing to help, if you treated them like a human being. If you made your case well, layers of bureaucracy could sometimes "jump" right out of the way. Not always, but sometimes. Often, there was another layer of interaction unofficially built in. Something to be aware of, when you automate. There may be more going on than you realize, some of it offering real business value, perhaps even making the overall workflow practical where it would otherwise flounder and die.

Nothing, I guess, that hasn't been said before. I hate to see people labeled "redundant". Often enough, they've been the ones effectively working around a broken formal process, as best they could given the constraints applied.
That is actually on its way also. We're going to offer a "single test" option, where a user gets to use the system for an hour. But maybe we should make it 24 hours instead?
This does not necessarily imply innovation happens there.
Except this is an actual post-mortem. The company's folded.
If there would be a way to create a hardlink to that inode you could really recover the file (lsof will show you the inode number).

Is there some arcane unix command that allows you to do that ?

If the file is large enough there may not be enough space to do a copy, so that's why it would be nicer to actually restore that inode...

jam@jam:~$ touch z

jam@jam:~$ tail -f z

^Z

[1]+ Stopped

jam@jam:~$ rm z

jam@jam:~$ lsof | grep /home/jam/z

tail 19192 jam 3r REG 8,17 0 821339 /home/jam/z (deleted)

jam@jam:~$

The 821339 is the inode.
Really on target!
I have the same issue, generally preferring text over video, but I make an exception for espn.com. Usually I want to pick and choose game highlights to watch (such as seeing what kind of freakish dunks LeBron unleashed last night). I don't even get the ESPN cable station, but I find the user experience of watching highlights of any game played whenever I want, and switch back and forth between highlights, write-ups, and box scores, to be a far superior experience than just watching Sports Center.

Now, watching the talking heads instead of just reading a write-up, I do not get at all. It always confuses me to see a lot of the talking head videos near the top of the "most watched" lists.
Hackers target Xbox Live players
For anyone not familiar with the term, "Conceptual Designs" ignore technological limitations and often the laws of physics.

Imagine a unicorn. Now sheathe it in white plastic. Conceptual Design!
Do you really think our software for detecting voting rings is this primitive?
YAiLLP - Yet Another iPhone "Lessons Learned" Posting
Now that's funny, LOL
Scientists have studied race and IQ. The foremost scientist who has looked at the issue is James R. Flynn, who discovered an important phenomenon, increases in IQ scores over time, that had not been noticed by psychologists in data sets that Flynn reexamined. As Mackintosh (1998, p. 104) writes about the data Flynn found: "the data are surprising, demolish some long-cherished beliefs, and raise a number of other interesting issues along the way." His book, by the way,

http://www.amazon.com/IQ-Human-Intelligence-N-Mackintosh/dp/...

is the best first book to read about IQ testing. The best second book to read about IQ testing is Flynn's latest book,

http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Beyond-Flynn-Effect/...

and the best third book on IQ testing to read, after the other two books have given you a conceptual foundation, is Keith Stanovich's latest.

http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-Psycholog...

A more complete annotated bibliography

http://learninfreedom.org/iqbooks.html

lists other books, not all from the same point of view.
No, I really just want the text.

What you describe sounds like the Clippy-fication of Google, a terrifying thought.
great article, although i don't think it quite counters the original.

multitasking is working on several things simultaneously. like watching TV while you program, or having a phone conversation while you play video games. swartz switches rapidly between tasks, which is different, and only when they are light tasks. he says he really benefits from blocks of undisturbed time for something like programming.
thats the point, those countries are just starting out. You can just copy paste proven ideas from the states and make millions.

Like Mint? Angry that you missed the boat? Good news! Invest overseas in the same type of company, and watch it grow to become a market leader by having a monopoly. And you have a guaranteed exit lined up, when Mint enters your market and decides to buy you out.

Sure the core innovation will still come from the states, but the first innovator is rarely the guy who profits from the idea.
How do you know your test code is testing what you need it to test without actually testing it? If not by TDD, then are you really using TDD or simply saying that you are?

Like I say. Cut to the chase. Incrementally write good, clean, well designed, application code. Then inspect and manually test. THAT is the ONLY thing that really works. Stop pretending you are doing something that you aren't. Especially don't use it as an excuse for writing lousy, poorly designed, and poorly implemented application code.

TDD is still one more attempt to create a sacred Silver Bullet that gets good results without knowledge, skill, understanding, thought, discipline, or effort. Its at best a very feeble tool in a quiver of feeble tools. It takes a good, well trained brain, paying attention to get good results. Without that, nothing will work.

PS: Writing good code is never easy. It only looks easy when done by someone who really knows what they are doing.
Google Ocean: Is this Atlantis?
Maybe charge a similar way to how you are doing monthly... 1-5 tests are X dollars 5-20 tests X more dollars. A single test is only useful if you want know what your system can physically handle. If you are trying to tweak settings to get the most optimal configuration, multiple tests will obviously be needed.

Can you handle very large sites? I assume your system is in the cloud and scales as needed?
Everyone was amazing yesterday (Birthday Paradox)
What should really scare Quicken is that I could actually see paying $5-$10/mo to use Mint. With 17 accounts and over a year's worth of data I've found it more convenient to use than any Quicken solution. I could never get all my accounts to sync in any of Quicken's products.
As others have stated, the email in your profile is invisible. I am curious about your 'main' startup project (I work at one in Boston right now that could be construed as being in the music industry).

My email should be available in my profile.
Or simply add a way to claim a server by uploading a specific file to verify ownership.

You probably don't want to do this because it would make the process much harder, but you can allow it in reverse; claim to deny load tests for a domain.
We have found that some people like using the service as an optimization/development tool. Starting a load test is painless enough that they can write some code, test it with our service, change some things, test again, etc. and sometimes get huge performance gains. Buying another server gives you a 2x performance increase, but it will cost you forever. Optimizing your code can give you 20x performance increase and only cost you while you're working on the optimizations.

But I guess it depends on how you use the service. For people who just want to verify performance occasionally, what you write makes sense, and we're going to create a one-time (or maybe "one-day") offer also that you can buy every time you need to run a test.
Under the "Need help interpreting your graph?" section all the graphs lead to the same explanation! Need to have a different explanation for each one.
"challenge". So many people have installed this regex in their speech centers I wanna cap 'em with a pipe wrench:

s/problem|issue|difficulty|flaw|bug|shit don't work/challenge/g
This does a 302 redirection to 127.0.0.1 ... ? Tried from multiple nodes.
Each test you write is a value-add. You get increased safety that what you're testing works the way you think it does, and that it will continue to do so as people modify it.
Not all cases need to be tested; "test to your level of paranoia" is our motto. In the case of tests themselves, the value add for testing individual tests has never been worth the ROI. There are, however, tests for the testing _system_, insofar as that's possible (which it is, for the most part).

As for the "I happen to view TDD as a completely obnoxious and unnecessary exercise" objection, I'd be willing to bet you've never tried TDD. It doesn't take long for proper TDD to _save_ you time. Each iteration cycle is slower, but the marginal cost for adding new code to a complex codebase doesn't increase nearly as much.

Without TDD, you soon have to spend time on manual testing, and then you've got humans in QE basically practicing TDD for you, as the walk through script after script doing things that could be done faster by a computer. The only time it's appropriate to consider skipping TDD, IMO, is on tiny one-man projects.
The basic crux of the article is that VC != technology investors, and that money spent in emerging markets on relatively commodity businesses can yield returns similiar to those seen in the 90s with tech businesses here, while here tech businesses are maturing and not returning the same as they used to.

I think this is a good thing for the world overall, the more people that come up to the middle class, the more people that will have disposable income to spend on products. I just think that there are plenty of promising ideas here to invest in as well if they start looking past Web 2.0 in favor of more concrete businesses.
great piece
Lots of these designs are cool, I'm not sure how many of them I actually care about existing.

One conceptual design I wish existed is the Ford Nucleon. We wouldn't be worried about green house gases and you'd never need to refuel it. Shame all the hippies protest the one thing that can save the world.
I think I've clued in to something, the prosecution is doing it's very best to try to establish more than just an advertiser link between Oded Daniel and TPB crew, they are trying to make it out as though Oded Daniel is the owner of TPB and the guys they caught are employees.

The reason for that is probably because they can't imagine that a bunch of gifted young people would be capable of such a feat, they have to invoke the 'guy behind the screen' in order to make it more believable for themselves.
Find the lowest airfare (and have fun doing it) [Tripeedo - YC 08]
>"The trouble with "race" is that it's pretty meaningless biologically;"

One of the things that shocked me about taking my first Bioinformatics class was how casually the professor talked about race. It seems like the concept of race is well accepted in the field, at least as it denotes large haplogroups of the human species. If you gave me the mitochondrial DNA from an Indian, then I am pretty sure that I could tell you it came from an Indian.

Also, I think well-designed statistical studies would easily meet all your objections.

As to whether or not such studies would be useful - I think they would. A common public policy problem is the disparate performance of students from different racial groups in school. As long as public policy sees racial groups as meaningful, it is probably useful to study them.
Black Hat DC 09 Marlinspike Interview (SSLstrip)
Ask HN: What do you wish to track on your website?
If you could track something specific related to your startup, what would it be? What do you wish you could optimize?
Interview with Moxie Marlinspike:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=488817
Keep feeding the monster, folks.
I don't remember where I read it, but diffuse light from the back of the screen is the way to go. Kind of like the Phillips TV "Ambilight" that was advertised on TV a few years ago.

I do this and IMHO it works well. It takes a while to get the right amount of light for your room size/configuration but I feel my eyestrain has gone down significantly.

Now if I can only get them to turn off half the lights at work...
I'm not sure I wish these designs existed.

Billy May's Hindsight seems like a good idea, but I think the brain's visual cortex has its hands full processing what your eyes see as is. I'm not sure you can add more information just by using lenses, shift it maybe, change the view, but I don't think your brain will process more. You're probably better off driving slowly and paying attention.

Thomas J. Owen's folding bicycle looks extremely uncomfortable, and a lot of people I work with are bikers and they all keep their bikes in the cubicles and in their cars, bikes are already pretty small, do you really need them any smaller?

Juke Brick by Yon-U Cho - not for me, plain old speakers are good enough for me. And audiophiles... does to the Juke Brick come with monster cables?

How is Diego Moreno's stool different from any other rotating chair? Is it better for your back, like those ball chairs? Nope, but it looks cool! If I was 12 I would totally want one.

Paint or die also looks cool, not very practical, I can't imagine moving it or putting much weight on it, or not constantly running into it's legs. But again, if I was 12 I'd want it.

An electronic musical instrument by Petr Hampl - it's like a theremin only not original.

IC3 High tech cutlery - it's like a spork, a digital spork!

PEBBLES stone grill - it's an electric grill for your cubicle or your lap, because you can never have enough burning electric heat in your lap.

Sand+Time watch - the creative design pool runeth dry.

Magic Spheres wall - neat!

Lane Light - I want one.

Flying Stick Camera - because your pictures are never too shaky.

Dual Music mp3/CD - imagine yourself at a future archaeology dig, naturally you're digging in a landfill, someone comes across a CD, one of those ancient Frisbee sized ones. And you can listen to it right then and there, awesome!

Toast Messenger - Post it notes not doing it for you, do you have too much money? If so, then we've got a toaster for you.

Sorry about the buzzkill list everyone, but blogs with lists of things just rub me the wrong way.
cf. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=487028
He says at the end that the tool can be downloaded at his site but I don't see it there yet:

http://thoughtcrime.org/software.html
If that's what you think, then you're not thinking this through. Look, I don't like Zed -- especially the jackass persona he adopted -- and he doesn't like me, either. (I've had a few run-ins with him for various reasons.)

When he's not ranting like in the Rails Rant, or his odious performance "art" (insulting friends of mine when they weren't there to defend themselves) at RubyFringe this summer, Zed's an intelligent guy who deserves a lot of credit for his positive contributions. His essay about statistics is an absolute must-read (and he's right). Zed's essays are worth reading because they are well-considered, even if I disagree with the conclusions therein.

I personally look forward to his non-ranting on-line personality.
I find Bill Simmons writing on sports excellent. He kind of disguises the quality of his writing with the references to crappy pop culture and the sophomoric behavior of him and his buddies. But in doing so I think he reveals a lot about who sports fans really are, not some idealized version. He often talks about whether or not he has wasted his life by devoting so much time and effort to following sports and making jokes about how pathetic his wife thinks he is for agonizing over his fantasy teams (she calls his fantasy league "The League of Dorks").

I find it hard to get into other sports writers now, partly because Simmons does such a good job skewering them. When they try to make sports into something epic or sacred, Simmons is quick to point out all the frailties of both the competitors and the poor saps who devote too much time to something that doesn't really mean all that much to their lives.

And then he dives right back into reveling in the joy of being passionate about something that is ultimately meaningless, capturing the essence of being a sports fan.

(I have no idea why I just wrote three paragraphs about this. Must be infected by whatever gets into Simmons when he does one of those day long live chats.)
Yes. But isn't this just a corollary of a (small) group being more than the sum of its parts? IE, A group of 4 should be more than 4/3 productive than a group of 3. The right comparison is to compare a group of 4 with one bad apple with the productivity of a group of 3.
I would drop by. I havne't had much luck in meeting people like you describe, the only drawback would be that I might not know enough myself. :)
Pirate Bay Supporters Hack IFPI Site...
No Lunch Left Behind
Ah but are you buying because the price is $25 or because it's half the price of $50?

I buy all my games when they go below $30, so it makes no difference to me if the game goes on sale or simply drops in price because I'll grab it anyway. Most times I'll grab the game used as I get a disc in excellent quality, usually $10 cheaper than the original game. I'm already watching the used Fable 2 and Fallout 3 games for when they hit $30 because I'm snatching them up.

Edit: I'm an exceptional bastard when it comes to used games, because I always look through them because there's often a wrongly priced copy that they have to honor the pricing on. I got Bully: SE $10 cheaper and just a few days ago Mass Effect $8 cheaper because of the mistake. I was actually waiting before getting Mass Effect as I wanted to complete Bully, but when I saw a huge stack saying $33 and then in the bottom row one saying $25 I couldn't resist, especially considering Mass Effect used prices are going to start going up through this year with ME 2 coming out in the spring of 2010.
Thank you very much for the catch. Fixed.
Hmm.

I don't think the natural language input is a very good idea. It's very error prone and only works correctly if you actually know what language it supports. I tried it and it got confused. Also it didn't correctly recognize a three letter airport code that I used.

To be frank I've found that Kayak has the best interface for doing this and there's no need to select which sites to search, etc. The interface here does not seem like an improvement.

And maybe it's just me but when I hear 'peedo' I think paedophile and so this company sounds like its name is 'try paedo' to me.
We don't want to make the different subscription offers too complicated, which is why we've stayed away from having people pay per number of tests executed, or similar. I agree that people will want to tweak and run several tests, but a 1-day subscription sounds pretty reasonable then, I think, no?

We currently simulate max 5,000 concurrent users on a site and that is something our own servers can handle, so right now we're not using cloud services. We do have support for running the backend on a cloud though - we've been testing it and it works very well. If customers start asking about running larger tests, then we will probably implement a cloud backend mode that will feature a much, much larger traffic-generating capability (but also be more expensive).
Give it another ten years [...]

Uhm, try, "for at least ten years already".
We actually have that feature also :-) Although it doesn't kick in until you try and run a test with higher load levels. Then you need to have a "loadimpact.txt" file in the root of your server, or the test won't start.
One of the sadder examples for me is Polaroid, they were doing some strong work in digital imaging but supposedly it didn't receive internal support because "it would undermine our film business". It's one thing to turn a blind eye to upstart innovation, it's another to intentionally stifle it within a company.

Any examples of companies that have done this right? Succeeded at replacing their own obsolete technology with upstart technology?