skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Justifying your design decisions shows that you have good communication skills and that your design was thought through, not just mindlessly designed to be "prettier".
I think being in a city you're still pretty far from disconnected. I go camping for a week in the deep wilderness with no electronics. Feels amazing.
Trees are Air Pollution Sentinels
There are good thorough discussions of these topics in David Anderson's "Agile Management for Software Engineering" http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Management-Software-Engineering-... and similar concepts in Software by Numbers http://www.amazon.com/Software-Numbers-Low-Risk-High-Return-...

I think it's odd to suppose that fixing time and budget as opposed to fixing scope/requirements needs to result in different management practices from a PMI, SOX or any other perspective. It seems that fixing scope would be more dangerous from an accounting perspective, because it is so difficult to estimate cost to complete.
I love 'Bitstream Vera Sans Mono'. I've tried tons of fonts, but always fall back on that. I use Ruby a lot, and it complements the language nicely…
One thing to remember is who your target is.

Lets look at an example that I had to deal with about a week ago: The company I work for is having a pretty large event coming up, something that our customers would most likely be very interested in. My boss's reaction was that we should grab the email addresses that we have harvested from our website (signups require an email address), and send those people an email telling them about the event.

I'm sure that the majority of you can predict what my reaction to this was...something along the lines of "No, that is spam, that is bad, part of my job is preventing exactly the type of email you want to send out from making it onto our network. By harvesting email addresses from our website you are violating our customers trust; spam spam spam, BAD!" Naturally, the PHBs did not understand this and, despite my best efforts to stop them, they ended up sending the spam (although I forced them to use a different mail server than we use for sending mails).

After much anger, and much thinking, I have come to a conclusion about this. I have changed my mind. Now...I, as a geek/admin, DESPISE the sorts of mass mailings that they sent out, but why? I hate them because I hear "mass mail" and immediately think "0mG G3t V14GRA N0W!", something that I hate. I know the sorts of slimey tactics that spammers use to evade spam filters, and actively fight against them.

The "problem" is that the majority of my dislike for "mass mailings" are technical. I hate them because they are not what the email system was intended for, and because they are a pain in my ass. You know what, though, they're things that most of our customers want to hear. Looking through my email box, I see that there are some things (mailing lists, google's newsgroup summary emails that come every day telling me what happened in comp.sys.ibm.as400.misc that day, emails from a website called steapandcheap [like woot, but for outdoor gear], backup confirmation emails etc.) that are automated, and might seem evil at first (the commercial stuff like steapandcheap especially) but are actually things that I WANT to see.

Where am I going with all of this?

There is a good chance that your hatred for the sorts of tactics he describes here come from your nature as a geek. The unfortunate reality is that the majority of users just simply don't care. Look at things like myspace, look at success stories like that 15 year old girl that is making 7 figures with her website that does myspace layouts (err..I think she is like 19 now...she was talked about in the 30 woman web entrepreneurs making big $$ article the other day), look at facebook applications like honesty box, these things are HORRIFYINGLY bad from the perspective of a geek. But to a normal person, to the type of person that is keeping the "Click here for a FREE iPoD!" advertisers in business, and to the type of person you're probably trying to attract, these things that we might find "obnoxious", they find useful.

It is a sad reality, but it is a reality nonetheless.
It's been consistently shown that there has been no decline in the sale of 'paper' books, and the e-book sales are currently an entirely independent market with no effect on sales in the traditional market.

While I agree that his hyperbole was a bit over the top I also think that you're playing it down a bit too much.

The e-ink technology is making its first babysteps just now but it's already clear that we'll have true e-paper (bendable, rollable displays) in the near future.

Ten years from now you may still be able to buy dead-tree books. But I'm pretty sure they and especially newspapers and magazines will be on a sharp decline, in favor to just downloading the content to your personal reader device. Twenty years from now our kids will shake their heads about that past era of dead-tree books, just like today they wonder how we could ever exist without cellphones. A common, parental dialogue in 2029: "No search-function, no hyperlinks, no updates, no dictionary lookup? Are you kidding me, daddy?"
I've been proud to be on the first page of google results for 2 years on the query of "maven sucks", not quite as proud that it remains on my top ten most visited pages month after month. Most people don't have a lot of interest in making their build process non-deterministic.
No one really cares about "We more clearly delineated required fields and section groupings."

And I think many of the explanations are really recognized subconsciously which lead us to favor one design over another. What you said reminds me of the article about the Googlers who asked for reasons why they should use 3 pixel borders instead of 2.
All I want is CTRL+C and CTRL+V, and to not have to type I before I can edit anything. Is there any way to tell the thing to simply behave like Notepad so that I can edit some text?
What's new in web2py 1.62.1
Hello everybody web2py 1.62.1 is out

http://www.web2py.com

Here is a video of some of the new features:

http://www.screencast.com/t/OH8Uc5ab6

New features:
- admin interface reads web2py twits
- deploy on Google App Engine directly from the web based admin
- commit your apps to mercurial repos directly from admin (requires easy_install mercurial)
- every app has its own ajax shell (allows multiline commands and database interaction)
- when files uploaded in database are downloaded, original filename is used to set content-disposition.
- new "welcome" scaffolding app has Authentication, Role Based Access Control, CRUD, and Menu turned on by default
- choice of third party authentication mechanisms including BASIC, GMAIL, LDAP
- new .w2p file format for distributing zipped applications
- new MENU helper for pure CSS popup and cascading menus.
- WingIDE support
- Better internationalization
- runs with Python 2.4, 2.5, 2.6.2 and some of it runs on Jython and IronPython (the database drivers and web server do not).

The rest is backward compatible as usual.

IMPORTANT:

web2py includes the only Database Abstraction Layer / ORM that works on both the Google App Engine and relational databases (sqlite, mysql, postgresql, mssql, firebird, oracle, db2). You write once and it runs everywhere. You DO NOT NEED to use the Google API to access the Google Datastore as you do when you use other web frameworks on GAE.

web2py writes SQL for you (and you don't even need to see it) and automatically creates a web based interface to your data.

web2py includes a web base administrative interface for installing, creating, editing, debugging, testing, deploying and managing your applications. You only use the os shell if you chose to.

web2py includes a ticketing system that logs all errors and issues tickets to visitors.

web2py runs everywhere python runs including iPhone, Windows CE, N800 and of course, Windows, Mac, Linux.
So if the internet is the greatest invention ever, I guess Al Gore is the greatest inventor ever - more important than even Newton.
Yes. My wife and I went camping in the Mojave desert a couple of years ago, where we were isolated enough that we actually had to worry about having enough petrol to get to the next gas station some times. I can thoroughly recommend it. Although I do love startup life, I'm very much looking forward to having the freedom to do this again one day.
If you want to use Vim without learning how to use Vim, you're probably better off not using Vim.
More likely, the "programming language" is going to be about programming the universe. Here's some inspiration:

And then there's the weirdness beyond M31: According to the more conservative cosmologists, an alien superpower – maybe a collective of Kardashev Type Three galaxy-spanning civilizations – is running a timing channel attack on the computational ultrastructure of space-time itself, trying to break through to whatever's underneath.

- "Accelerando" by Charlie Stross
When I think about social software (which is the context in which "virality" lives, anyway) I think you have to build for three things - in this order:

1. Utility - it must be high utility, even if nobody else is in the system.

2. Network Effect - As people are drawn into the system, it needs to scale in value more than linearly

3. Residual value - Value taken out of the system, sometimes as revenue. Typically ads.

I think that it's not good enough to do these alone, however. You must construct something that isn't just viral but that makes it such that the fact that some person is not on the system is PAINFULLY ANNOYING to the actual users of the system. Consider the growth of email, in general: "Please just go sign up for an email address somewhere so I can email you!"

If you construct it in this manner, you do not have to spam people. Delicious, which has a lot of users, never emailed anything other than password resets, for example.
For whatever reason, I can't stand how Windows or FreeType anti-alias Inconsolata. But on a Mac, it's dreamy.

It is, however, somewhat annoying when I exuberantly recommend a typeface, only to see it become rather unusable when rendered by another system.
Book giveaway - 'Mashup Patterns: Designs and Examples for the Modern Enterprise'
Steve, please continue blogging. Nobody's figured it out yet, or if they have, we probably have few ways to confirm their correctness.
The efficiencies found by automation and commoditization of labor are lost in the waste of trickle down economics.

Just because less money changes hands doesn't make the system more efficient. Poor people buy a lot less with a lot less.
I was a frequent United flyer and agree completely. Massive route network, customer service and huge schedules are critical for business travelers.

What is most striking with the legacy carriers is the different level of service offered between a 100k+ flyer and someone who flies twice a year. This is where Southwest, JetBlue, and the LCCs are really strong. Consistent service is nice.
All I want is for my car to behave like walking. How can I replace the ignition key with tying shoelaces?

Vim is really a crude programming language for text manipulation, more than anything else. Trying to use it like notepad throws out more or less all the reasons you would have for using it.

(As a side note: there are wrappers around it that try to do what you want. see 'evim' or 'cream')
I often wonder about whether the constant connectivity with ubiquitous Twitter use and all is really a good thing, and whether we should just go out and play soccer and breathe the fresh air all day. I definitely find myself caught up in the craze at times, reading/commenting on HN included, and feel as if I'm missing out on a whole world of more rewarding experiences outside. Not to say I'm an antisocial person, I consider myself somewhat the opposite, but a lot of my life has definitely been used up in computer/internet time.

Let's do an experiment and take HN offline for one month. It'd be interesting to see what happens.
"I want to be human again. Even if that means isolating myself from the rest of you humans."

That's a contradiction, humans are social animal and the rise of telecommunications and the internet is just the current technological advancement in that direction.

Isolation is about as non-human as it gets. What this person sounds like is that they need some major therapy, not isolation from the real world.

There's nothing wrong with paper and books, but they should be understood as the exact same concepts, in their time as email and the internet today.
Wow, I am a hacker on my computer 60-80 hours per week and my lifestyle is 179 degrees from yours.

I have no land line and a cell phone, but it's not a smart phone. I carry it to work or out of town, but nowhere else. If I visit someone else, run an errand, or go out to eat, you'll have to leave me a voicemail. Sorry about that, but I devote my full attention to the people I'm with.

I have a laptop, but it leaves my desk once or twice a year. If I'm on the road, I probably have a file folder full of papers and a thumb drive, but no electronics.

I check email many times per day and I visit hn many times per day, but only when I'm already at a computer. I never IM, Facebook, Twitter, or text. If you want to communicate with me: if it's important, call me, if not, email me. Either way, I'll get to it when it's convenient for me, and I'll respond fairly quickly.

I went out to dinner with a group including my 22 year old niece. She texted the entire time (under the table, but we all noticed). How sad, I thought. What was so important that she ignored the rest of us for an hour?

I almost feel sorry for you, Aaron, but then again, I know better. I'm curious to see how the next month will affect your lifestyle afterwards. Hopefully, I'll be able to welcome you back to the real human race (by email, of course.)
Growing on trees: A profitable rainforest
It’s like a constant stream of depression. A day without it made me feel like I was human again.

I had the opposite reaction to a weekend without internet a few months ago: I felt lost and bored and didn't know what to do. After a while, when I got used to this feeling, it dawned on me that this was what I used to feel like all the time before the internet. In that light, it's no wonder I was unhappy and bored with only limited exceptions from the early 80s through the middle 90s (when I got a dialup connection).
Example 1 – To have a public debate about the relative merits of email as a form of communication versus other forms, both older and newer: Discussion Forum.

Example 2 – Assume a decision was made to design a new system to supplant email. A metaphor for a whiteboard would be ideal to have multiple people involved in the design of that system: A Wiki

Example 3 – Assume a mission critical time sensitive deployment of a new system. Involved parties are geographically distant, but need to be kept up to date on a minute-by-minute basis: Yammer (private microblog platform)

Each of these can be solved using email, but the tools I've outlined are much better at performing each task.

I'm not sure if you're making me jump through these hoops just for the sake of it or if these examples really are not obvious. If someone like yourself, for whom I can only assume these tools are familiar, don't see these benefits, then it's no wonder that the general population don't see their utility either.
More than a (month of) life offline, this sounds like a life just off.

If pressure and constant stimulation has you down, how exactly is ignoring your friends and the outside world going to help, I wonder?
let's not impose our will on others, ok? You just not visit HN for a month and leave the rest of us that can handle the online world just fine...
I have wondered lately if living in the weird information landscape of modern communication isn't sucking the joy out of my life to some degree. I think next time I am unemployed, I'm going to take a few months and similarly pull the plug, just to see what it feels like.
I don't think VA's website is any better than any other airline site. I'm constantly waiting for the red circle progress meter to go away...

Inside the planes are nice, but I've been noticing that they aren't handling wear and tear that nicely and a lot of the TV channels don't work.
Well this isn't just about what you as a user like, it's about what works. A small annoyance on your part may be what makes a product go viral and become successful. It's a fine line of course, but marketing is about pushing a product to users. Not about not being annoying.
In the past, we’ve had to decide between tiny monospace fonts or jagged edges. But today, modern operating systems do a great job of anti-aliasing, making monospace fonts look great at any size. It’s not 1990 anymore. Give your tired eyes a break and bump up that font size.

No, thanks. All the anti-aliased screenshots in his post look blurry and some make me outright cringe.

Also he missed my personal favorite:
http://www.netalive.org/tinkering/triskweline/
Creative Commons Releases Facebook App: Choose a License for Your Content
I was cautious to come to the comments and offer my opinion, but I'm with you here, not only specifically regarding stocktwits, but this type of funding in general.

When I read that StockTwits uses WordPress which was also funded by their investors, I got visions of investing pyramid schemes. Fund a company that pays for and uses products from other companies you fund and do this over and over to build up the pyramid of investing.

I have to admit that I am not that savvy here, so perhaps that is why it doesn't make sense to me, but my personal anecdotal experience indicates that these types of investments are becoming more and more common and I am highly skeptical of their validity in the marketplace.

There is a lot of skepticism about whether or not Twitter can be monetized, so shouldn't there be even more difficulty monetizing a service built entirely on top of a difficult to monetize service? Are tweets going to have a little embedded ad from twitter and from stocktwits?

Plus, the investors are increasing their risk by investing in a company that uses a service that may itself cease to exist. The apparent trend in this kind of compounding risk from venture capitalists is not a good sign for the future in my view.
Facebook’s fbFund ‘09 Names First Batch Of Winners
> No one really cares about "We more clearly delineated required fields and section groupings."

I care.
Complete baseless conclusion in the article and the HN submitter has manipulated title to create false interest.

- Indian numbering system: it is not a problem with short range or long range because even if you consider the smallest number 8.64 trillion is huge.

- Given the active internet penetration in India (note most Indians don't/still cannot access internet from home) 3L hits per second on one of the internet sites is way high a number.

- That leaves us with bots of all the election oriented websites that would have popped up and the election commissions' website failed in configuring for how frequently can bots hit, better couldn't they have exposed feeds or API's for this.

Beyond all this is the India journalism which is constantly looking for 'breaking news' or <create> 'controversial news' or anything that can raise eyebrows.

So the editor here must have made the mistake of reverse mapping 80.4 million to 2800 without using "avg" in hits/sec and the mistake with extrapolating 3L to 80.4 trillion. Note that the actual headline on the article is appropriate.

Server capacity is spoken in number of concurrent hits it can handle at its peak not over a window. Possible that the EC spokes person too did not understand this.
"Steve Guttenberg," unless there is a much more intellectual seventh _Police Academy_ sequel uncovering his secret time traveling invention, probably didn't contribute very much to the printing press.

"Johannes Gutenberg," in spite of not appearing in _Police Academy 7: Mission to Moscow_ or kissing Sharon Stone in _Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol_ (the true highlight of the series, as many aficionados will readily attest), probably deserves our thanks instead.
Then we should go all the way back to papyrus and stone chisels. Information storage, while not unique to humans, is definitely more prolific in our species.
If I may ask, where?
If you look throughout history the only monopolies that exist are those granted by the government. Sure standard oil captures a huge chunk of the market (by lowering prices over 90%), but they lose that advantage, by the time antitrust action was taken against them it had already lost a large chunk of its market. Antitrust law was originally passed because of the government involvement in the train industry.

Also, regulation increased under bush and so did oversight. We currently have the most regulations we've ever had, decelerating the rate of new regulation isn't actually removing it.

Back To Hacking :)
You got me! Edited. Thank you.
I gave up both for Xtorrent, but YMMV.
and I though I hated maven :), so glad to hear some people don't like it!
I don't really know whether I should even bother responding to this, because there's no way that 'pg' would shut down HN for a month based on kyro's philosophical musings. And for taking kyro's comment as a threat, you ought be downvoted. Besides, there's noprocrast.

However, if kyro is serious, then he really should take a monthlong retreat away from HN, crank up the soccer-times lifestyle, and get away from it all.

I will say this: I've spent a lot of time both online and in the social world. And I don't know how to properly answer kyro's lifestyle query.
For someone who is angry about the UI of the AA site, the UI of your own site could use some work. I can not click on any of the pictures, and instead I am forced to click a giant "See the redesign" button. I also can not click on your logo to get back to your homepage, even if I wanted to hire you I have no idea how to get to a page that will tell me how.
Self inflicted (essentially) solitary confinement: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_...
About that high-wheeled double bike:

Why would someone use it? Seems uncomfortably large and clunky -- not to mention the tumble off of it must be epic.
I'm a fan of his and I think a lot of what he writes about is pretty poor. I don't mind because he is a good writer and he doesn't pretend to be an expert about most of what he writes about. I do mind that he thinks it's not important a lot of the time. I can't fault his record though, he's a successful in his field, and his latest ventures have been really wonderful. I disagree on his views (I don't know C well but I understand why you might want to learn it Jeff!) and I don't think we should see every article of his here, but he's hardly the worst pundit out there.
Failure is good
I wish that I had the space available to build this machine. I would love to play with it.
So why even use it? If you're on linux grab Gedit or Kate, on OSX just use the built in textpad, and on windows, you've obviously got Notepad.
It's a generation gap thing. Most people I know will text at the dinner table; it's socially acceptable among peers.
Hi massimo,
I have just downloaded the new version and i must confess to you that i am really impressed by the new admin interface, its cleaner, more cohesive and reinforces my resolve to go the web2py way.
This part bothered me a lot. R2 of 0.9997! Thats ridiculously accurate. Unless he is measuring meters with an electron microscope I don't think he could ever get that close to accuracy.
I can only suspect they are texting about popularity. Makes me thing is there is a market in there - relieve them from having to text all the time by showing them their popularity in some other way.

Or at least give them a popularity meter according to their text frequency ;-)
Note that this "Act" does not exist; it is proposed by the article.
Sounds like holidays.
Big Brother in Japan? University tracks students via free iPhones