skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is, in fact, the same size as any other button, and the only text-labeled button in that pane. I struggle to comprehend how it is arcane for a file sharing option to be found by clicking a button labeled "Options..." in a pane labeled "File Sharing".

That's assume that you even have to navigate to it. It's much easier to type in "windows file sharing" in the System Preferences search box and hit enter. It takes you right to it. Can we agree that typing words in a search box is not arcane?

I agree that having a hint indicating that Windows needs SMB would be helpful to people who have no idea what they're doing, but it certainly isn't a "secret code" when SMB is the actual name of protocol. In any event, the original question was about excessive automation. Defaulting to the native file sharing protocol can hardly be considered excessive.
Apple has less than 1% the number of developers working on OS X than Microsoft has working on Windows. Im sure the problems are a lot easier to deal with.
USB -> VGA adaptor?
Jeff, sorry to hear the news. I'll always remember you pitching Devjavu back in 2006 in the stairwell at STIRR in SF.
Microsoft is not capable of making the world's best calculator or the world's best notepad.

That's the real problem.
> consider the equation (x+3)/(2x+4)=1

My first step was to replace the / with = and ignore the =1 since the numerator and denominator must be the same. I like to come up with ways that keep the main parts of a problem near each other, rather than separating them by bringing 2x+4 to the far right.
This isn't the real Mark Cuban, he's over here: http://twitter.com/mcuban
Cronologia web
I have some similar thoughts.

For example, when people learn about 2-space and 3-space (or 2-d and 3-d arrays), the most common thing to do is to draw out the spatial analogue: a WxH table, a WxHxD cube. And so the examples always stop at 3.

But in math you don't stop anywhere. I have wondered if people who have extreme finesse with math at arbitrary dimensions change strategies when dealing with higher dimensions, or if they never did this spatial conversion all along and deal with it completely symbolically.

Then I tried to think of what certain things mean symbolically. In integration it's always the area. But in symbols it's just a cold, unfriendly product. I'm sure there are merits to doing it this way, but I have trouble seeing intuitive meaning in it. Perhaps the better mathematicians simply calculate and don't care about what sense it makes?
Seconded! Though OMGUW might have you think otherwise, I rather like the university.

On the topic, here are some Waterloo startups: http://wiki.watstart.ca/LocalStartups
If you use Linux or some other Unix, you can also do it with standard Unix tools:

wget -O- news.ycombinator.com | grep -o http[^\"]*

Personally, I prefer curl because it writes to stdout per default:

curl news.ycombinator.com | grep -o http[^\"]*

(After posting this, i noticed that HN cuts * signs at the end of a message. So I have to add this text here, or the last * would not be displayed.)
I completely disagree. I started programming in BASIC when I was eight. From the first lesson on, I was always after my parents to give me more - a computer, programming books, etc. If the kid is truly into it, all you will have to do is get him started with a real programming language. His natural desire will (hopefully) take over from there. Baby steps, by starting out with a markup language may also work, but it won't necessarily be better.
This was a beautiful written and very compelling essay. I enjoyed every word of it and thank HN for sharing this with its readers.

I recently experienced a little dust-up online, where a blogger posted my Tweets and Twitter profile in order to retaliate against me (long story). I wanted to crawl into a hole and disappear - shut down my Twitter account, remove my photo from my blog, and change my privacy settings on FB.

After a week, that blog post was buried on the second page and the RTs stopped. Suddenly, I felt comforted by a false sense of anonymity again. Back to my old habits, I guess... but perhaps with a temporarily heightened cautiousness in what I share.
> Additionally, lawnmowers generally use 2 stroke engines which are inefficient and extremely noisy.

I can't find any 2 stroke mowers at Home Depot, Lowe's, OSH, or Sears. (The vast majority use Briggs and Stratton engines. B&S makes a few 2 stroke engines, but AFAIK, they're only used in snow blowers.) Where are you finding "generally"?

The trucks driven by lawn service folks generally get around 10-20 mpg. They don't spend hours on most job sites - most jobs are much less than an hour of mowing, with an hour or so doing other stuff. Then it's back in the truck for 15-30 minutes. The mowers less than half a gallon during that time and the trucks use about a gallon between jobs.
For musicians other than pianists, a common way to memorize a piece is to pay it repeatedly, each time moving the music stand farther away.

I once was an orchestral musician and I'm from a family of orchestral musicians, including one who is a pro, and I've never seen or heard of anyone doing this.
Good job. This is what 'visual programming' is supposed to be like.
Of course the dialogs like that are silly but why judge Win7 based on that.

Because the dialogs are part of Windows 7, and they represent a distinct user interaction paradigm that exists throughout the operating system. Why shouldn't you judge an OS that you will be using regularly based on how it is designed to interact with you?
the performance didnt live up to the demand -timeouts and 503s were frequent when users subscribed to the feeds. I needed a plan for scaling and success and i wanted to pay.
I've been coding PHP for ten years and I still have to look up the argument order for array_key_exists() and a few others.
I think you could describe the structure as being a directed graph with labelled edges and stuff inside each node. You build it up by inspection, debugging, documentation (when it's around), experimentation. You know who calls x. You know what x does. You know what x touches. You know who else touches those things too. What does that one do? Hrm. gasp (literally). There's the race! :) "He fixes radios by thinking!"

But again the graph idea is a formalization. It's more fuzzy and messy in my head. The graph is not perfect and requires care and feeding to stay alive. And you don't actually see the whole thing at once. You can move around inside it but there is a focus. It's something your subconscious operates on as much as your conscious mind. And it's the subconscious that generates the intuitive flashes.
and I thought it was referring to the odd image format: http://djvu.org/
It's not a bug, it's a feature. I actually mean that, it strikes a balance between 'sure, do your thing computer' and 'no, I would like to specify exactly what should happen'.

This approach has been built into Windows for a long time and I like it. I have a mix of hardware in my computer and some I configure automagically but some I need to set up manually. I suspect the blogger cited in the OP has never had to do technical support for a living.
He's not trying to be funny.
Interesting article, and one that brings to mind one of my pet peeves: when people say "I'm a visual learner" to use as excuse for not understanding a point or concept. They then usually need someone to literally draw it out for them.

My main problem with this is the fact that, as humans, we are all visual animals. We are not bats (aural), dogs (olfactory), snakes (tasters) or some creature that relies primarily on our sense of touch. We are humans and we are all visual learners - everything is easier to learn for everyone if it's drawn out.

What this article pointed out to me is that our individual abilities to visualize concepts differ. While some people need it drawn out for them, some are able to draw it out for themselves in their mind.
Its not like each and every dialog you get in Win7 is meaningless.
When you hear us talking about how fast we can move, we neglect to point out the years of moving slow that got us to this point.

I have 10 years worth of C# and Javascript libraries that I've written to handle just about any situation I can come across, as well as a home-built data framework that's more powerful than Rails, and an automated build & deploy setup that can get a new project up in minutes. These are the reasons why I can crank out a new database driven site in a matter of hours. No matter what it is, it's mostly already built.

So my advice would be to simply do your job and put in the time. Pay attention to the things that slow you down and write libraries that speed those things back up. Build yourself a set of tools and constantly improve them.

Five years from now, you can crank out a one-day clone of whatever flavor-of-the-month billion dollar site is popular at the time, and everybody will thing you're a genius.
It's about giving potential consumers information so they can make informed choices.

For a long time now advertisement has been about manipulating people's emotions so that they seek fulfillment in the product being advertised. When was the last time you saw an Apple ad where the purpose was listing the specs so the consumer can make an informed choice?
My recollection of Encarta was that it didn't have nearly enough information to satisfy my curiosity. If I wanted to get an explanation that was actually satisfying, I needed to turn to my grandparents' ancient Britannica. I suppose I'm part of a niche market, but if only they actually tried to have more information on the subjects they covered than Wikipedia, instead of just consistent quality...
All you've done then is replaced the login process with the "forgot password" link. Every time this user logs in, you'll send him another random password, which he'll forget again immediately.

Worse, systems like yours usually ask for a new password when you log in again, but complain when the user supplies "password" or "letmein" because it doesn't have enough @ signs. And then it complains again when the user picks a password he's used before.

Maybe that's fine if you're a bank (though all it does is shift the plain-text password storage from your database to a sticky note on the front of your user's monitor), but if your site is just another URL shortener or whatever, I simply don't care how you store my password provided you can give it back to me intact when I ask for it.
I'm surprised to hear they weren't giving Pipes enough horsepower. But maybe it's a different story when a Pipe was as popular as yours. Still, your Pipe has only had 500,000 runs in over a year. They should be able to handle that many calls in a week.
Are SHA-512 and Whirlpool considered acceptable?
That's the single best reason to use a good IDE live VS.NET + ReSharper. There's simply no reason to ever pull up the documentation because it is all right there.

Need to do something with Sockets? Type "sock"+SHIFT+CTRL+SPACE and a list pops up with everything you can do with Sockets, even if it's stuck way at the bottom of some obscure namespace you never would have found (let alone thought to import). All the classes have descriptions and constructor info. All of it is hooked into the docs and examples with F1.

I've done Django in Eclipse recently, and I'm currently doing a bit of PHP consulting, also in Eclipse. Even with all the right plugins, I still find myself on Google constantly, just like you describe. It's frustrating being expected to memorize things, especially when you know that you wouldn't need to if only you had better tools.
Surprised no one has mentioned how men consistently outperform women at spacial ability tests. Perhaps that would explain why there are more male hackers. Or is that just too logical ;)

eg http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/133575.php
Merck Makes Phony Peer-Review Journal
I'm not sure if culture has anything to do with it. But there is something seriously wrong when well educated people go about reproducing without even thinking about it.

No wonder India is bursting at the seams with all the population overload that it can't really support.

http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/ipc/idbpyrs.pl?cty=in&out=...

This picture scares the hell out of me.

contrast that with this:
http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/ipc/idbpyrs.pl?cty=us&out=...
Military.com is another company that stores their passwords in plain text.
> How is that? It's my browser running on my computer. Shouldn't I have final say over what I do and don't see?

You're free not to use a site. But if you are viewing a site, why would you even expect to use it without also helping to provide for its upkeep?

> Nobody has a right to show me advertising, just as I don't have a right to read someone's content. If publishers have a problem with it they need to find a way to not display content to clients who are blocking ads.

Attempts which would be blocked by ABP's author. That would be an arms race. Maybe we should start fighting it, though. It would be much harder to maintain that they're not trying to screw over site owners with the extension.
Map of World Arms Imports 2007-2008
Usana
4)Digestion and absorption of food appear to be well preserved as aging occurs. However, aging does affect some digestive processes. Saliva production decreases, which may affect how food is broken down in the stomach to prepare for digestion and absorption in the intestine. USANA was founded with a mission to manufacture the highest quality products without compromise, products that people can trust.
Excellent point. There is a gut reaction with coders to throw away code when they should try a bit harder to work with whats there already.
That may be but you did not answer my question.
javascript. Everyone has a text editor and browser. Plus young kids can use it to screw around in school.
I don't get it. Why ask HN a question on a webpage?

Anyway, to answer your question. yes, get one. I got a Sony PRS-505 and i got it mainly to save cost on the technical books that become obsolete very quickly. Having said that, ebooks are still a bit too expensive considering the distribution medium savings.

On the bright side, some publishers are already starting to see the light and providing their books in some digital format. And the reader devices are getting better and better. If only Amazon would allow international customers(by convincing the publishers) to buy kindle books.
I'm not one of the better mathematicians so I cannot know, but I suspect you are right. And if you think of physicists, much of what they do is finding out what space is in the first place. So for them to rely on spatial metaphors or visualisations could be downright destructive to their thinking. And I believe the same holds for much of the logic we create in software.
Don't send them a random password. Send them a one-time login link (which is kind of like a random password, but it's embedded in the URL so you don't need to type it in to anything). The first screen they see once they're in asks them to reset their password.

For my own projects I don't set any limits on passwords that people enter - if they want to use an insecure password that's their problem.
I liked the idea in the comments about using MRI.
The end of personal finance
agreed. a couple slots for your own black boxing of a component would enable fairly complex ideas to be quickly demonstrated. Could be a great teaching tool.
stop reinventing the wheel. if you run into a problem chances are hundreds of others have run into the same problem and a reusable chunk of code is available.
If the creator of the tool is reading:

1. Please add support for sequential logic with flops.

2. Minor bug: the "input" and "output" labels are reversed on the left pane.
agreed. NQC is better than the various forms of BASIC that I and many of my friends learned calculator and basic robotics programming on.
It is 100% the point. If you want a specific tool, go use that tool. There are probably more lines of code to handle indentation in emacs than in all of notepad.

Fwiw, since '98, notepad gained keyboard shortcuts and calculator had its backend rewritten to handle higher precision decimals. Both are simple utilities for simple tasks.

And you know what? The best calculator in the world, it has physical buttons. Or, it is Mathematica. Answering which is best depends completley on the question, and totally misses the point.
It's been a while since I read the book, but what's the obvious parable? Maybe for me, it's a victim of an uncanny valley: it's neither stylized nor plausible.

I may not have given it a fair reading, because (personal preference) I really didn't like the book; the cyber stuff seemed more like unoriginal shiny tech than a way to provide insightful commentary on what it is to be human - unlike Tine pack minds, for example.

I haven't done a survey of fulltime writers; and I'm sure exceptions exist as you've noted. Larry Niven knows many more writers than I do, and so I think his observation probably has some merit. But really, I'm just expressing my frustration with Vinge's output, and noting that it coincides precisely with his retirement. I miss his old stuff.
It only it works in a few browsers but doesn't seem like it would hurt anything to add it. Thanks for the suggestion!
it's easy to look like you know what you're talking about when your boat is rising. and all boats are rising when the tide is coming in. It's during the lean times that you can tell the good from the bullshit.
True, but I'm more interested in a link being genuinely useful than in knowing whether the motivation for providing it is genuinely altruistic.
I find it a bit disappointing when people, even on HN, argue on such topics like they are a method of opinion or life experience. If you read even a couple of books on evolution, even at a science popularization level (Richard Dawkins being a good example) it's pretty clear genders are far from identical. And that has been so since the first living things separated in genders. Everything, of course including behavior, is influenced by gender.

This of course doesn't mean we should "let things be" and trust mother nature. Some evolved behaviors are better then others in modern society, but it's really surprising how few they are compared to the mass which still apply.
I wrote the first version of my app in 2 hours - but it took a year of iteration to become a salable product.

(1) the first version worked, but it was the minimal feature set you could imagine. That's one way to code fast.

(2) The 2 hours doesn't include thinking about it, designing it and using other tools in the same area. So I really just typed it in 2 hours. The lack of bugs just showed that I understood the problem, and that the design of the code was simple enough to be trivial to debug (and having minimal features). This is another way to code fast.

I use google, docs, etc for sample code. I use it in two ways: (1) to help me understand; and (2) if it's not at the core of what I'm doing, I'll imitate how others do that part (e.g. how to use an API). The idea is to carefully apportion my time and energy - it's easy to waste heaps of time understanding something incidental to my task, when that time and effort is needed for understanding the important things.

Understanding is the difficult part. That's what programming is really about for me - not the looking up docs/typing/debugging.
First thing, don't underestimate kids' ability to learn new things, it is important to keep them challenged.

I would recommend,

http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/thinkpython.pdf

Python got the turtle, so no need for logo.

Videos makes things easy.

http://showmedo.com/videos/python

Games are also a great motivator.

http://www.pygame.org/

When (s)he gets more advanched, older (think: upgrade path) I would recommend things like,

http://www.sagemath.org/

http://www.scipy.org/

http://www.diveintopython.org/
If I could ask only one job interview question
I would ask "What are we looking for?"
A correct answer requires great insight and pretty much compels the candidate to continue and explain how they fit the description.
Txt apps - plurk, netflix, gmail, tada-list, evernote
> Where'd it go?

I know you didn't mean it like this, but this is actually an interesting question. On Windows, the files probably went into the Program Files directory, but if you try to go there in Windows explorer, you get a "these are system files, keep out" warning. Which is quite correct, you wouldn't expect an end user to open an application from Program Files, there will probably be a bunch of unrelated exes to distract you.

So where is it? I guess the answer is "in the start menu". People probably believe that abstraction, to the point that MS had to put a "this is just a shortcut, you need to use add remove programs to actually delete the application" message.

Package managers, much the same story. Where are the binaries? In a versioned repository somewhere, on mac ports somewhere under /opt/local. How do you run them? Type their name in the command line, often you ignore where the files actually are.

And finally, back to OS X itself. How do you install an application? Drag it into the applications directory.

Where is it? It's in Applications. How do you run it? Go to Applications and double click on it.

The only case I've pointed to where the answers to "how do I install it", "where is it" and "how do I run it" end up in the same place, the Applications directory, is where you point out a usability issue. User interface design is hard!

My guess is it comes down to expectations. "Go to the Applications folderand click on the application I want to run? It can't possibly be that simple!" and then spend 15 minutes looking for a pull down menu to launch the application.
Creating A Fully Encrypted Para-Virtualised Xen Guest System Using Debian Lenny
I have a PRS-505 and am quite happy with it.
(b) most of the code came from existing libraries, APIs, etc

In my opinion the "X in Y hours" articles can be useful. If they can make a fully functional service in a short time due to libraries, those APIs and libraries might be of use for others.

If someone made an article called "Copy of Google Reader in X hours" that used a good JS and feed parser library, it would be interesting to many that would otherwise not know about these libraries
I never understand things from textbooks or from other people. I have to work it out myself. (I've come top of my class at uni, so it works for me).
This is in line with the article's internalization point.

I'm also wary of reducing my understanding to code or even written notes before it is settled, because it is much more malleable in the mind. This is in line with the article's transformability.

Interesting point about gestures. My thinking is very kinesthetic, so I might try that.
Interesting. Do you have a source for those numbers? I can't seem to find data about this anywhere.
Do You Speak HTML?
We're splitting some major hairs here, but my point is that placing and misnaming this option, an extremely common task you'd want to accomplish in this pane, in a second-layer dialog, when a majority of the options are in the first layer, is unequivocally user-unfriendly. I would mock up a better solution, but Apple already has (see above). You're looking at this from a developer's perspective; to the average user, SMB may as well be secret code. And it has everything to do with excessive automation, mostly because it's hard for a novice to 'un-automate'.
I can't reproduce the problem... it won't let you hook an inverter to itself, but a ring of three inverters works fine (but generates inconsistent output).
You can simulate a flop with a pair of cross-linked NOR gates.
I don't think that example proves anything - although I like Knuth.
I'd recommend a couple of days browsing over at http://www.mobileread.com

They've got opinions and facts on all your questions.

My take: for tech/PDFs, bite the bullet and buy the iRex 10 incher; fiction, take you choice of the 800x600 6 inchers (or wait for the new 800x600 5 inch readers: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=588353 )