skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
2009 Finalists of the Best Visual Illusion of the Year Contest
File Managers for the web
For most sites, I don't imagine it would be a boost, for sites with lots of avatars like Digg or large forums, it might be a boost.

Oh, I didn't say that you couldn't think of an example where it wouldn't have a use, I was thinking perhaps some sort of photo gallery application would find tremendous use in this... if it worked in ALL browsers.

However, the fact is, that IE is the current dominant browser and IE7 doesn't support this... so the point is really moot.

Besides, your average Digg user doesn't read past the first 20 comments anyway (just look at the weighting in diggs for comments), does it really matter how long it takes for the rest of the avatars to load?

Cool idea in theory, limited use - Digg could have spent more time working on profitability instead.
Verified Extortion
The Publisher as a Digital Concierge
The Ticketmaster Alternative
Yeah. The data is pretty barebones. But from what we're able to get out of the White House, it looks like there will be more feeds coming out constantly.
SolarWinds, First Venture-Backed IPO In Nine Months
Reposted many times but it's one of the best stories that has been linked to on HN (has everything: Apple, Jobs, boot-strapping, cutthroat competition, highs/lows, enterpreneurial journeys)

Note: Click on the images. They're worth it.
It may just be because I have the same mental filter installed, but I see those two statements as equivalent. If something affects business processes, isn't that another way of saying that it changes, in some small way, the way we do business? (The "forever" is just fluff—every change is forever until the next change, in the opposite direction, that's also "forever.")
A) Not always

B) I think they're just making the point that all this occurs before the brain can register what's going on to begin with.
The advantage of this little computer over buying a slice of a slice of somebody's EC2 box would be had in cases where IO had to happen in a particular physical place. And, this is primarily limited to cases where one wants to monitor/control physical things and pipe that data to/from that physical location. So, monitoring one's swimming pool temperature might be a good use case, but why would anyone want a small network server, especially in a future of more ubiquitous connectivity? I get the whole mobile use case as well, but I think it falls into the category of wanting IO close to a physical thing (in this case, yourself).
Five open source projects to help you write better code
Accuracy of Netflix's recommendation algorithm is the wrong place to focus if you'd want to increase sales:

1) It is only perceptible after someone is a customer.

2) It is not strongly perceptible (people suck at precise measurements -- that is why we have computers tell us when the root mean squared error is 9.63% instead of just looking at our slice of 4 movie recommendations and saying "HOT DAMN that is better than last week -- you gave Saving Private Ryan 3.5 stars -- a strong improvement over your last rating of it at 3, which didn't quite represent my interest.")

3) It only affects a portion of the customer base. Netflix is a service for delivering movies, not for rating them. The feature is doubtless useful to many and of intense interest to a few, but there are equally doubtlessly many Netflix customers who don't even know it exists.

Now, there might be some bonus for having the perception of having better accuracy (or, for that matter, geek cred) from having the Netflix prize... but that wouldn't be tied to the objective reality of whether the algorithm actually improved or not.

It is likely that A/B testing on the call to action in the signup button would moev the needle a lot more, for a lot less work. (Please don't stone me too harshly.)
The old BSD license is not compatible with the GPL - I assume that if you are allowing proprietary re-use, you would also want to allow as much open source re-sure as possible.
I know Twitter is desparately cool and widely used. But It seems fairly rubbish as a primary back-channel.

It's nice to be able to vaccum up tweets going out of the conference and not directly meant for people in the session/conference. But for direct feedback there are several chat alternatives which would be better, including IRC.
OpenTable IPO ($600 million market cap)
Yeah, well, it doesn't do much good in 2009 if you are on Windows (or if you have to use Windows at work). I used ThinkTank and More all the time in the 1980s (yes, I used a Mac back then - and I still do now at home at times). Now, I'd love to use an outliner like OmniOutliner (true outliner with multiple columns), but there isn't anything I can find (by the way, I want it as a desktop app, not on the web, sorry). It's a shame because my brain thinks in hierarchies a lot. It seems so strange that there are many good outliners for Mac, but none for Windows. Why is that?
This is a big problem with free software. Just like everyone else here, I used to believe that code was everything, and if only I wrote beautiful code, the world would come to me.

Then I discovered the dark side of business, money, marketing (and meetings, partnership negotiations, etc.).

You need both. But if you are an independent open source project with no backing from Sun, Intel or IBM, you are pretty much stuck with the "happy geek" problem.

Usability is one of those features that geeks tend to be most blind about. My favorite recent quote from such a geek: "the iPhone is nothing new, there are plenty of phones with the same specs".

Some people are trying to solve that problem as we speak you know ;-)
Recently, as in the past 2 weeks, I've been listening to more J-Pop.

Yes, it takes more time to enjoy a 3 minute Irish tune you play yourself than bringing up iTunes and hitting an internet radio station.

Sorry for the disagreeableness. I'm going to go and brew more coffee.
Fair point, but I try to avoid second-guessing what's best for companies other than my own to do. For all I know, the bandwidth savings are greater than the cost of the engineer who implemented it.

That said, there may be a workaround for IE7 via MTHML. http://www.phpied.com/mhtml-when-you-need-data-uris-in-ie7-a...
An Entrepreneur Three Core Values
I texted it to myself, i'll read it at some point.
Your favorite pictures on vi.sualize.us
MS Word has an outlining mode, and since it dominates the Windows ecosystem, there's very little economic incentive to build a world-class dedicated outliner.

I still love MORE as well :-)
IIRC, iPod support was part of the problem, thanks to the DMCA and friends.
Between this and the latest 2 PhD Comics, we pretty much have a complete picture of the sorry state of science communication by the mass media.

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1175
Yeah, I'd love to use a nice modern MP3 player on my Mac, but I guess no one will be making one again.
My response "back in the day:"

http://weblog.raganwald.com/2004/11/sharecropping-in-orchard...
Today's procrastination cure: The African Hacker (2005)
This is an oldish article, but really got me motivated to stop _thinking_ about coding and start _actually_ coding. If THIS guy can run a successful software business in a developing country with little resources (human, capital, etc.) then there really shouldn't be any excuse for the "rest" of us.
I've been working in the music/touring space for 5 years. There is no alternative. TicketMaster/LiveNation is remarkably evil and I can't wait to see them perish, but it won't happen by traditional "alternative ticketing" websites -- they are a dime a dozen. You have to have contracts with venues or pass legislation to prevent it. I'll be the first to dance on ticketmaster's grave. The vast majority of these venues are built by taxpayers and then ticketmaster essentially steals the venues away from the community.
I played music at a wedding for a family that's doing this in rural Louisiana, where land is cheap. (It's the 3rd world.)

They have a barn out back and a pool of 3 1980's Mercedes 240 Diesels, and they do all the work themselves. The house started as a 120 year old wood-sided cabin, and they built additions to it to make it much larger. (The additions look like they're part of the original, though!)

The wedding was a dance. No wedding cake, just 500 of the most delicious cupcakes, baked by the bride, her mom, and the rest of the family. Party favors were home made jam. Lots of food that was grown by them.

It was "Consume the Minimum, Produce the Maximum" all around. Replace money with knowledge, attention, and time.
That's the difference between using a simple, straightforward framework and "magic" framework. A well designed framework should expect that its users are going to need to dig through the internals and should design accordingly. It also should not force you to use any particular abstraction if you don't want to. Don't need an ORM? Don't use it.
In 10 Years, Your TV Will Only Get 20 Channels
Greenspun: Ruby on Rails and the importance of being stupid
Air-fuelled Battery Could Last Up to 10 Times Longer
Not completely, but it's a big part.
Highly agree - let's have an "official" feed that links to the comments.
This one and the "Graphing Calculator Story",

http://www.pacifict.com/Story/

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7497796873809571567
Why successful entrepreneurs are persistent
This is what I've done for years. A nice green tea or a Chai after dinner will make you feel good but won't give you the buzz coffee usually does that'll make you stay up too late. :-)
Here's the article's doppelganger ('Cha': Tea-Drinking for IT Developers): http://www.simple-talk.com/community/blogs/philfactor/archiv...
Pirate radio stations have been operating for a while and people are rarely charged with a crime. This guy from Corpus Christi handled it like hell. When he talked to the FCC agent he admitted that he was running the CB station. The agent never had to enter the house to prove it, this guy was free and clear until he said 'yup, that's mine alright'.

As far as I can tell the article is saying that this could turn sour. The FCC is reserving this right and it could have disastrous consequences. If the EFF is really worried about it I'm sure they'd be glad to defend someone and hopefully set a positive precedent. (If not the EFF, possibly the ACLU.)

In short: avoid talking to cops. When you do, don't say much.
NetSuite and former "partner of the year" locked in ugly legal battle
Ask HN: Web Dev Toolbar/Firebug "in the cloud"
The past couple of weeks I've found myself wanting a better way to make and save complex changes to a site in the browser.

For example, I often use the Web Dev Toolbar to make a prototype of what a redesign/new feature might look like on top of the live site itself. That way someone can actually load it up (WDT has a save and load CSS/HTML feature) and use it in their own browser with the changes made and the site actually working.

It seems to me a natural step to make from this workflow would be to save this updated CSS/HTML (and possibly JS) on a server instead of locally, taking advantage of versioning, sharing, etc.

So 1) anyone know if something like this already exists and 2) if not, would anybody be interested in having something like it?
Part of the answer is in your post: it's been done for hundreds of years. The reason those stock plans have load calculations is because the engineer has to certify safety. In earlier times it was known safe by experience: in this area the roof joists must be "this" thick and there must be "this much" insulation to keep out the cold.

I live out in the country and have been thinking of building a "man cave" into the side of the hill we live on. This is MUCH more extreme than I had in mind, but it's added motivation :-)

It'll have to wait until I finish the clay pizza oven though...
If it was only three months ago, more likely this service was already in development and you were customer #1 without knowing it.
Maximize Your Company's Exit Value - Video Series
The commercialisation of open source has added an instrinsic reason for suckage.

With closed source software the most common model is the license fee. Support calls and interaction with the user is a cost and something to avoid if possible. You polish your code and your interface until the users leave you alone.

With the rise of support-supported open source, the converse is true. You make your money from support, so typically the more polish, the less revenue. This is a fundamentally broken feedback loop IMHO with an intrisinic tension between product quality and cash. You want the product to very nearly work perfectly, but require work to integrate.
LG KF900 Prada2 Unlocked (5MP)
LG KF900 Prada2 allows for a full QWERTY keyboard which allows for easy text messaging. This unlocked phone is a fashionable substitute to other bulky phones on the market. A 5 megapixel camera is just the beginning with this world phone.
Craigslist boss in counter-claim
I wouldn't disagree that merely increasing information content is not enough. Adding noise would do that. But I think a lot of the reason traditional Japanese houses feel comforting is that they do not, in fact, compress well. Close up, they're not simple: in the textures of the natural materials, the details of the handmade joints, etc.
RMM Will Never Be Able To Leverage Collective Intelligence; Ruby Toolbox Already Does
Inside scoop into one-women/one-website business
It seems like many people have problems with their french presses. When I first got my french press, it tasted like any coffee I had ever had from Starbucks. Recently, things have started to take a turn for the better - I can make a damn delish cup. This is what has changed:

A lot of it comes down to grinding your beans, right before brewing. How much do you put in the grinder? Usually I use +1 to however many cups I am making. The average mug can hold around 2 cups - so that means 3 tablespoons of beans.

Pour slowly some boiled water (usually you want to wait a moment after it begins to boil) over the beans. Stir briefly and let it sit.

What you should see is basically a foamy rich bit (kinda like crema on espresso) going on at the top of the brew. I've heard a friend call this 'the bloom', though I don't know if that is a technical term for it but I like it.

You wanna keep this bloom going, which means stirring intermittently for the next 4 minutes. Usually I stir a single brew once at the start, twice during the steeping, and once right before pressing it.

Place the cover and press on top and press down slowly. Try to press down with uniform pressure and keep it straight. I know my press is kinda jiggly when you press down. If you favour one side too much, you might let some grinds slip through the other side.

Pour and serve.

If you still find this dull, try other types of coffee. Try drinking it black (I know, this is daring for people who prefer 'sludge water' aka 3 milk 3 sugar). Personally I am a big fan of Ethiopian and Kenyan beans. I find they have such strong undertones. It is like drinking expensive wine!
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=617385
Wow that's an amazing way of looking at the computing power and speed of modern processors. Maybe Intel should start marketing processor functionality this way!
Wooing the Geeks: Smart Hiring Strategies
Tax rates are determined by something like trial and error now, but the test is not whether they produce equality, but simply how much you can extract from each group without causing social disasters. You can take away about half the money rich people make before you start to break your economy, but if you took half the money poor people made, they wouldn't have enough left to live. Hence you get progressive taxation.
So... are you sure you want to try to build crypto into your application based on your dog-eared copy of Applied Cryptography and a couple of Coding Horror blog posts and comment threads?
Thanks for the link, bouncingsoul :D
As patio points out, this won't really affect sales because it doesn't measurably alter the top line (revenue).

What it does do (assuming) is modify that bottom line (profit) in a number of ways:

1. Given the same $1M expenditure on product development, nets better results.
2. Free advertising (reducing expenses of that department) with all this indirect marketing.

Additionally, a better algorithm helps them to secure their position in the market, which is really more of a strategic move; hard to measure.
I'm just glad to see Ford doing engineering.
This looks like it would have been accurate 7 years ago when it was published, but a lot has changed since then.

I don't mean to say that OSS doesn't continue to have usability issues, but certainly the role of usability folks within the major desktop projects has changed very significantly since then. Usability in OSS started gaining traction right around the time this was written and has in the meantime and it does show.
I apologize now if this comes across as a rant.

Actually, I think yours is the best comment of the entire page.
People building free software generally have themselves as the target demographic

People building free software generally have themselves as the target user, which is not the same thing.

Advanced users benefit from straightforward design and simple workflows as much as anyone else. The programmer may want every facet of functionality to be readily available, but the majority of users, novice or otherwise, will not care. The user should not be forced to have the same depth of understanding as the person who made the software, even if the user is perfectly capable of attaining it.
I think optimism is an essential core value (or characteristic) of a successful company even though it might inhibit the "fail fast" methodology you speak of.

Optimism when kept in check can be the fuel for passion in you and your co-founders.
Tell me you told them we've got a Mac app now where you can make (and theme) your own custom clusters, to your heart's content? :)

http://twistoridesktop.com :D
Read Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior with a skeptical eye
I am. Order not crossed up at all; this is just divide & conquer approach; figure out what end goal is, then divide it into smaller problems, and solve each of those. :-)
But that's my point--playing it yourself is what takes more time, not the obscurity of the music.

It's possible to listen to J-Pop, outside of Japan, for almost as little effort as it takes to listen to local pop on the analog radio. I'd count that as part of the long tail (at least from an American perspective).
Awesome "Make Stuff" t-shirt
Kick ass t-shirt, it's a “Homage to bedroom makers, engineers, musicians, programmers etc...”
As someone who moved from Europe the US, I can tell you I envy Americans who have never tasted anything other then standard US food. Ignorance truly is bliss.
Also: A videogame running at 60 fps has to calculate everything associated with rendering a frame, and get the image on the screen, in 16.6ms.
I think its mostly management/strategy consulting positions. They are big in software consulting and have been trying to expand into management consulting for a while. Good time to move in, when there could be plenty of Wall.St laid off consultants.
Vim editing for MS Word and Outlook
Sorry, but you are just repeating framework marketing fluff. Have you read what I said about generalisation at all?

Frameworks _must_ generalise further than I do in any particular project because they cover a much wider range of cases. It's not just "magic" frameworks or badly designed frameworks, it's simply the logic of what frameworks are.

Therefore this claim you make is just not true: "but if you didn't have the framework, you'd have to learn all that just to get your app off the ground"
The routerstation pro has a 680 MHz processor with 256 MB RAM, which is okay for certain applications. But for many uses, 680 MHz is kind of low. The SheevaPlug has 1.2 GHz processor and 512 MB RAM, which isn't too bad considering the cost.
Put the pedal to the metal with a faster Google Chrome
Agree. In a way, passion should bring enough optimism into the mix.
North Korea's Ryugyong Hotel: Ugliest Building on Earth?
I just recently got into biking and am super excited about it that I wrote about it http://www.krishna2.com/blog/2009/05/eb2b-biking-from-east-b...
I'm amazed Amazon did this. Even casually reading the spec, this jumped out as a red flag. Another example of Rule 5, I guess:

http://cr.yp.to/qmail/guarantee.html
Crypto, in general, is really hard to get right.

With 'normal' code, if it's broken, something doesn't work, and you know to fix it. With crypto, if it's 'broken', all the valid requests still work, and you don't know that anything's wrong.

In fact, as far as I know, the only way to know if your crypto code is 'working', is to prove it ... in the form of, if you can somehow break my crypto, you will also be able to break problem X, where X is a problem the crypto community has generally accepted to be hard to solve.
This is just a blasted advert. Crap.
Faster is better on Google Suggest
There's nothing wrong with AWS's signature version 2. Nate is a smart guy, so I can only assume that he's being disingenuous rather than dumb; he should know perfectly well that the purpose of a message signature is to ensure that messages cannot be forged, and that figuring out what to do with the messages after they have been authenticated -- including verifying nonces -- is not the job of the signature scheme.
> How do the interstate highways increase the cost of living?

1) It killed the railroads. Rail is a fundamentally more efficient form of transportation than the truck, and thus adds less cost to pass on to consumers.

2) It allowed long commutes to become expected.
These things are very difficult to get right, and very hard to check. Sadly the protocol model checking work of people like John Mitchell at Stanford is not close to being a plug in tool implementors can use.

I had the (mis)fortune of having to implement something similar and it took me quite awhile to make sure it was correct in both design and implementation. Do you want to run cryptographic tests for randomness? Do you know how? If not, stay away.

I really agree with tptacek, avoid implementing crypto like the plague.
I've used ActionOutline and it seems to be pretty good though I'm certainly no expert. It's a desktop app for Windows.
Dave Winer's later creation, Frontier, has been open sourced: http://frontierkernel.org/ It works, but I wouldn't try to edit code with it. Other than its built-in language, which is actually sort of fun, but a dead-end technology now. (Still, being a language built for an outliner has interesting consequences.)

I've been working on a Frontier-descended outliner for a long time (really just the outliner, not the whole stack that Frontier represents), but up until recently, open-source toolkits couldn't do a slick outliner as the text widgets were too weak. Now I lack time to finish it, but I'm still cranking away in my spare time. (To crap something out is easy; to make a useful outliner is a harder problem that it appears.)
Huh. This is a pretty straightforward vulnerability. The fact that it took anyone this look long to notice makes me skeptical that it's really this simple. I'll make a note to toy with this and see if it's actually exploitable.
Yes, thanks - I've hiked quite long stretches of the Inca trail... I reckon you can get a wheelbarrow along without too much trouble (pulling it, anyway).
JIT system
Personally, it doesn't bother me (I'm 25) when people do this to me (though I don't usually do it myself mostly due to not owning an iphone or ipod or any portable gadgets other than a basic cell phone) but I'm really interested in why it bothers some people.

Do you know why it annoys you? Is it because you find it's a lack of respect? Is it just because you yourself have nothing better to do while your conversation partner engages with something remote?
Okay, a holodeck. Yeah, seems like we could be almost at version 0.1 beta of that
Try http://editor.opml.org/