skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my humble opinion, this is simply a command line with defined shortcuts.
It may look all great when he uses it, normal, he designed it, with his words, his sentences. But honestrly, after trying this ubiquity for a while, i have difficulties finding it "user-friendly".

It's like calling a unix-shell "user-friendly" because with all commands, and pipes, and possibilities to combine them you can do everything. It's possible, sure, but who really can, besides like 1-2% of computer users ?

I get the same feeling from this thing. It's supposed to make you feel like you only ask your computer for something and it comes naturally, but basically, it's only typing a command to make an action. And the main flaw of it, is that words that are obvious to one person, are not to another.

And last point, I know, it's still alpha software, but not everyone does everything with their keyboard. I do, i'm quite a big fan of utilities like Launchy, for example, but most of people prefer to use a mouse for their actions, they want a flow of action, they want drag and drop.

Basically, this ubiquity, it's just a unix command line adapted to a browser, but i can't see that becoming very useful to most people.
I signed up and contacted a seller. In spite of all the java script the site was pretty fast. I'd still get rid of it.

Two points:

1) You need to get people using the site, and I have to second the observations that requiring someone to sign up to contact a seller is too much hassle. Most people used CL without an account for years before they signed up in order to post somethign.

2) Your search is broken. I listed books and searched on exact words in some of those listings, I never got any search results.
Yeah, I don't think I made the point I meant to make. Previously, I was under the (silly) assumption that folks who were trying to brute force passwords were running their own rainbow set ups, generating them as necessary based on whatever per-site hash was being used. But the fact that services exist for cracking this sort of thing implies that there are plenty of sites that aren't using salts at all, and by using a per-site salt, you are not the softest target.

None of this matters if someone is trying to crack your site in particular, but sometimes you just have to be faster than the slowest gazelle in the herd.
Max,

I know what you are saying is 110% true. RSS works best when it just works and people don't need to know "how". We are trying to make the feed integration part as easy as we can for each specific scenario.

Some people want to know how it works, so how would this work for you...

Simple step-by-step instructions that have no clutter to sift through, but a "?" link at each step for people who may want more information.

Would that have reduced the barrier to installation?

And yes, this is only posted here. I am glad you got a kick out of my placeholder copy :)
I didn't come here for insight, I came here for entertainment. ;-)

Of course that thread is running through the community. We're a community that (largely) works by choice. We're privileged because we have skills you don't, and you need us. Isn't that basic supply and demand?

The things that I take issue with in your original post is the attitude that this somehow breaks us or that there's a lack of innovation because of this. Here's a secret: this isn't new. Steve Jobs was saying Real Artists Ship in the early 1980s. People who call themselves writers have talked about the ideas buried in their heads for generations.

Programming is a creative art, and generally speaking the people who are good at it can pick and choose the work they do. If you want good people to do work for you, it is your responsibility to make that work attractive.

I also disagree with the assertion that it is somehow or societal obligation to do shit work. Yes, taken to the extreme there wouldn't be any janitors but point out a time when there has ever been a dearth of janitors? Taken to the extreme any generalized behaviour is counter productive for our society. Taking things to the extreme is only good for marketing to teenagers.

It's not a one-way street. Listen to the common complaints from the community (not HN in specific, although it's there) though, because there's plenty about flaky business people who change requirements or who take advantage of the fact that there's a limited range of employment opportunities in some geographic regions.

If you want practical advice, next time you look to work with someone, look at their history. Do they ship? What have they shipped? How late was it and how long did it take to get the first minor update released afterwards? Ask them when in the past have they busted through the boring slog and what it was that motivated them to do so.

Or hey, do what most people with boring projects do: find someone who isn't (or doesn't know they are) great, and exploit them. They will stick with you through any shit you throw at them because they are rabidly afraid of losing their job. Pay the great people to design the solution and pay the mediocre people to do the mediocre work. The work will get done and the end result will be good enough.
It's still very much relevant, considering the recent news that content distributors want to force ISPs to violate net-neutrality.
Retail stores are basically warehouses. The consumer has to waste some time looking through all the inventory and some of it may not be there, etc.

Amazon, on the other hand, hides its warehouses and gives you a clean interface to the inventory.
Very cool. I love how some software is approaching the point of almost transcending the UI. If you combined something like Ubiquity with voice recognition I think you'd basically have a real version of 60s campy sci-fi tech: "computer, cross reference joker's last known whereabouts with..."
First of all, Vice-President Gore invented the Web, not this doofus. (OK, just kidding there!)

Secondly though net neutrality is immoral by Objectivist standards because it regulates free enterprise and crushes healthy competition. If my DSL from ISP 1 doesn't give me the bandwidth that a DSL from ISP 2 could give me, I have the consumer choice to switch to ISP 2. Ayn Rand would roll over in her grave at this notion of net neutrality which is pretty much close to socialism, because it ruins consumer choice and competition. If ISP 1 and 2 are forced to provide the same bandwidth then my consumer choice goes out the window, and if I am a shareholder for ISP 1 or 2 then my opportunity as a shareholder to profit from different DSL packages gets reduced to. This hurts the consumer by destroying competition and thus choice, and this hurts the shareholder by hurting profit potential by undue regulation.

Think about it this way, as Sen. Stevens of Alaska mentioned, the internet is like a series of tubes, with finite carrying capacity. I don't want to have to wait until Monday to get a video emailed to me on Friday because the government has forced my ISP to adhere to some arbitrary standard of how my ISP can utilize the tubes of the internet. No, I want my video on Friday, the same day it was emailed. I want the choice, the freedom, to choose an Internet Service Provider who can pick the biggest tube out there to use to send me my video. I do not want my ISP to be forced by the government to send me my video via a smaller tube, where it has to wait in line behind a bunch of other videos in that same tube. (Note: I am using the loose terminology here for clarity, but I actually work in tech as a software qa engineer with a background in unit testing and gui automation, I am A+ and Network+ certified, so I do understand what I am talking about, just to be clear.) I want the consumer freedom to have an ISP that chooses the biggest tube out there to send me my video and I don't want the government telling my ISP what tube to use. Period. Net neutrality hurts me as the consumer, and it hurts the shareholder. An ISP should be allowed to operate however it likes to provide value and choice to the consumer and profit for its shareholders, and big brother should not get in the way. Ayn Rand would be ashamed of this conversation. I hope for the sake of Western civilization that net neutrality is rejected, or else we will all be singing the Internationale before long.

I realize this might not be a popular sentiment, and I also realize my "karma" may be affected by it, but Ms. Rand would not let fear of karma reductions keep her from speaking out on behalf of truth, justice, and the American Way, and neither should I. :-)
It's some sort of special display that was created just for the OLPC. It has an adjustable backlight. When the backlight is turned on all the way the display looks like a regular laptop display, but when it is turned off all the way, then the display looks like an e-Ink display.

Unfortunately, it does not compare with the e-Ink displays in terms of low power usage, but it is good enough for long reading sessions without straining your eyes.
I find that a very repugnant attitude.

No, you don't live in a vacuum. Newton was indeed standing on the shoulders of giants. But to go from there to saying you don't deserve responsibility for what you've done is a grossly illogical step to take.

You could argue that Zappa did everything because of circumstance. You could make a good and utterly meaningless case because of that, that everything is responsible for everything. It's good because it's generic enough to be obvious; it's meaningless because if everything causes everything it's the same as nothing causing anything.

In Zappa's case particularly: I know of no other musician that learned music through modernist composers and then translated that into rock music, who started off playing drums in a small band, took control of that band, taught himself guitar and became a virtuoso, and produced 90 albums in about 30 years in every genre imaginable. Nobody even comes close in that regard, and nobody has ever done anything like it. So, who's responsible for that genius? The record stores, for selling albums that caught Zappa's eye? Zappa's parents, for letting him buy records? The band members who ducked out and let Zappa take control? Those aren't genius acts. The genius is the thing that Zappa provided that came from him and him alone.

Most historical genii I know of attribute their greatest work to something outside of them. Is there a good counter to this observation?

Shakespeare didn't. Joyce didn't. Beckett didn't. The author of my favorite novel, Daniel Handler, is quoted as saying something to the effect that the only sacred thing about his writings is that he took the time to revise them. Bach wrote for the church but I've never read something saying that he was merely writing for God. The attitude stated here, that genius comes from an outside force, is incredibly rare. I've never heard anybody who's made anything truly extraordinary crediting anybody but themselves. The act of creation requires ego above anything else.
The second thing is to fix the password problem. They should force users to create more complex passwords when they log in.

Seen from a security perspective this adds to the overall security of the site, however most users simply find an easy password that fits the bill. blink182, 123456qwerty, qwerty! - which is almost as easy to bruteforce or keep in a rainbow table as normal dictionaries.

You should be aware, however, that password requirements detract from the user experience. When users pick a password for a new account they are at the most crucial part of a website: The sign-up. This is where you can lose people that were otherwise ready to sign up.

So it's a trade-off. If your site holds credit card numbers, or other vital information a certain minimum requirement for passwords is certainly in place, but if your site is something like HN, where no valuable information is held, you should probably just let users pick whatever password they like. Worst case they will lose a few comments and some karma.
Breaking down the walled garden
huh! Very neat. I'll have to look for that and see how it works.
if you want to get caught up and get all of the background on network neutrality, feel free to read a paper i wrote last november on it: http://jtame05.wordpress.com/2008/10/21/network-neutrality-w...

it covers as much as i could think of in <20 pages: history, the problems, the facts, the evidence, the technology, the culture. the takeaway: it really is a serious problem.
I see.
Is it not possible to submit the same URL twice? (serious question, I've never tried).
The customer is always wrong
You can always print it at home and have it bound at Kinko's... although that probably wouldn't save that much more. Used book stores are also a good option.
This has absolutely nothing to do with the point he is trying to make. He's concerned over traffic shaping and giving preferential treatment to various sites/traffic.

What you are concerned with is false advertising.
Because they are both startups and they both get coverage from the same tech news media. Which makes the inequality of coverage relevant given the amount of users.

Let me give an example to try to explain it better.

People always complain that Celebrities like Lindsay Lohan get far too much coverage by the mainstream media while important Government issues like the Stimulus package get too little coverage. The media's excuse is always "we're delivering what the public wants to hear." But if someone could somehow prove the public wants to hear about the stimulus package more than Lindsay Lohan it would make for a great counter argument against that menatality.

That's what this comparision is (with Twitter being Lindsay Lohan and StumbleUpon being the Stimulus Pacakge)
Facebook Status Versus Twitter - Not The Same
People are getting the difference between an public network and private one confused. Get with it people.
Me neither :(
I think you have a good point that most people prefer to use the mouse, and commands that may seem obvious for some people may not be immediate for another. A clickety pointy UI would make it's affordances more immediate for the user, and I bet that they will look into that in the future. (In the lastest version, you can call ubiquity actions with a right click on the text. That's a start)

Given that, I do find ubiquity much more user-friendly and useful than commands in the terminal, for the tasks it was designed to use. For example, you can select a whole page, just alt-space, write 'translate to chinese' and it substitutes the text in place, fast. In your email, you can select an address, write 'map' and insert it in the email almost instantly. You can save many seconds and mindshare with this tool.
I just mean that on the iPhone, the white borders take up a ridiculous amount of space that could be used for text. It's my only complaint about viewing this site on the iPhone.
I'm surprised that Robert Graham, who is not ignorant of computer security, has mired his password recommendations in the 1980s. These are the same weak recommendations your Unix manuals would have given you 10 years ago.

What you should be doing is using bcrypt, tuned to take several hundred milliseconds per crypt. /usr/share/dict/words --- a pitiful dictionary --- with even the most basic set of permutations will take weeks to test a single password under this regime. Bcrypt is free and available for every major web platform. I didn't write it; the guys who did, David Mazieres and Niels Provos, are much smarter than me.

Computer science has solved the brute force problem on passwords, and we should stop dithering and adopt the solution.
I really applaud they're effort, and I'm an incredible fan of Alan Kay, but I think they're jumping the gun. They weren't required to change the stack. It's helpful, sure, but I think they should have waited until they hit beautiful enough technology that would require such a change (as beautiful enough technology will).

And focusing on code size is possibly misleading, as code size does not exactly equal orthogonality.
I really wanted to dislike that essay - I was annoyed at how she treated writing like a sacred task - but it was good and definitely worth the few minutes it took to read. Thanks for the link!
That was my favorite TV series of all when I was a kid.
Htc Touch Diamond 3700/3490 Windows
Htc Touch Diamond 3700 & 3490 Windows has refined the form of the touch phone. This unlocked HTC Touch Diamond has introduced a new menu system called Touch FLO which emphasize getting to the most commonly used applications with a flick of a finger.
Thanks for pointing this out!

How well is Ubiquity doing? I haven't really heard much about it except for one time on techcrunch a few months ago. Seems like this type of thing should be getting more attention...
Ask HN: Is it essential to have personal websites?
Ask HN: Is it essential to have personal websites?

I work on freelance projects (thru referrals) for around 3 months in a year and during the rest of the year I spend the money I made on some personal projects (and attend college). This is what I've been doing for the past 3 years.

I have a blog on Tumblr, which I use to take notes and to share stuff incase someone else is going to find that thru search engines, coz I sometimes come across really different problems (happened just twice though) during to my random working pattern. I work on random stuff, so I just post the solutions them on my blog hoping that someone else would find that useful. And sometimes have thought about getting a domain name for my personal website with a profile and recent work etc. When I sit to design some mocks for the site, I begin to wonder if I really need one.
Security - Unlike Fingerprints, Brain Patterns Can't Be Faked
Bankruptcy Alternatives
What are/were your startups? I find this and some of your other comments interesting and would like to hear more about your path.
Francine has spent thousands of hours volunteering and building up the community around her (most likely above some higher paid contracts).

I'm not really talking about the situation (which sucks, and is happening more than we think, and yes, is bringing down major pillars in tech communities) but am thinking about how this impacts us all.
You hit the million dollar question.

The problem is that the "subscriber count" metric is bullshit.

First I will explain what that count is. Then I explain what we think people want from the subscriber count and how we are working to address that need.

The subscribe count is based on the feed reading tool and the IP address (if it is a desktop client like NetNewsWire or FeedDemon). FeedBurner has explained a fair amount about this number and this post provides some good background (http://blogs.feedburner.com/feedburner/archives/2006/09/a_pe...).

The problem is that "subscriber" is supposed to equate to "person", but it does not. In email marketing this works because we have a person identifier (the email address). There is no similar identifier for feed. What that means is that out of TechCrunch's 100,000 subscribers, I as an individual represent 5+ subscribers (once on Google Reader, once on bloglines, once on NewsGator, once with NetNewsWire at home, once at NetNewsWire at work). I am a pretty typical TechCrunch subscriber so it is possible the number of "people" is actually 20% of the number of "subscribers".

The converse is that many corporations and Universities have only 1 outgoing IP address. So all FeedDemon subscribers at Belmont University here in Nashville show up as 1 subscriber.

Why this is important is because of what people want the "subscriber count" to be. They want it to be an apples to apples comparison to compare popularity across blogs. It is just too inaccurate to be that measure.

We initially had this count and as we looked at the data we felt that it was inaccurate at best and sometimes completely misleading. This was the driving force in our decision to remove this feature. It is a risk, but I think it represents an intellectual honesty that our customers will appreciate.

The other reason people like the "subscriber count" metric is to measure growth and decline in their individual blog. This is why having the number fluctuate so wildly in FeedBurner is so frustrating.

We have not solved the apples to apples comparison yet, but we have some promising progress.

As for measuring growth, once you break that out as a goal it is easy to see that there are other ways to answer this question.

As you said "The fact that FeedBurner has such a struggle with accurate counts hurts their credibility". Hopefully our willingness to find a better way, even if it may be perceived as a shortcoming in the short term, will help our credibility.

What do you think about our strategy here? (I really appreciate the feedback we are getting from HN. This is such a valuable resource!)
Technology is Heroin
I am taking a course that revolves around this book. Most of the material is freely available for anyone that is interested:

clgiles.ist.psu.edu/IST441/index.html
Is there a difference between IoC and callbacks? In any case, I don't think it can be said to be -quite- that recent.
I use the Google G1 and I love it. Everything is seamlessly backed up for free, everything works, and everything works integrated. I get the multiple applications running of a blackberry with the coolness of the iphone with out the "trendy"
That doesn't mean you should never try to make your UI/UX as good as it can possibly get.
Facebook | Battle of the Bands
We should suppose? This is not scientific.

Please don't fly too high, keep your feet on the ground. We are not talking about theoretic fantasy, here we talk about practical, real world things.

What I really can't stand is this believing in human capacities as if it were some kind of god. We all are very, very limited when it comes to create sophisticated things, just look at how long it took us to create the first computers (see note 1). And we already hit many limits, and this is why current hardware is evolving so slooowly...

(Maybe your misunderstanding is quite fundamental?)

1) note: millions of millions of years, if you believe 'evolution' theory; thousands of years, of you believe 'creation' theory
Yes - depending on how well it's executed of course ;-)

I'm currently thinking about the exact same thing, links to small help-boxes scattered around the place where users might have trouble, for my own project.
i wanna catch up fast!! how?
I'm going to check milw0rm constantly now and try to avoid/update services. The Google Chrome and VNC vulnerabilities look particularly bad.
The "infinity" metaphor is the best description coming to mind in such cases...
Not only have many ISPs responded with a no, that is also news from a few months ago. So why post/uprate an article that was written 6 years ago that is loosely tied to news from a few months ago?
Pixar is an incredible company.

"If you don't create an atmosphere in which risk can be easily taken, in which weird ideas can be floated, then it's likely you're going to be producing work that will look derivative in the marketplace. [...] Those kind of irrational what-ifs eventually lead to something that makes you go, 'Wow, I never would have thought about it.'"

"The university's primary purpose is to build morale, spirit and communication among employees. 'If you could create good filmmakers who would work here for 25 years, their first five years of film would be really good; their next five years would be amazing. By the time these people worked together for 25 years, you would just not believe the things that would happen.'"

Pixar University: Thinking Outside The Mouse

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive...

Also: whacking Ed Catmull with a balloon. Ed I-coinvented-computer-graphics Catmull. Whack on the head with a long thin red baloon.
11pm PST or 7am GMT. Not everyone lives in EST (although I do).
Probably nothing. It's a waste of time. The place is a black hole.