skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a really good point about customer service. Google's customer service is awful (AdWords & AdSense) because they're so insistent on not involving a human. In the same way as 90's MS they've used their monopoly as an excuse for bad customer experiences.

Testing indicates its not the result quality that makes people like Google's results better, but the brand. So I agree - going directly after the brand makes a lot of sense.
Maybe I want to keep my private and public conversations distinct, or my synchronous and asynchronous communications distinct. Doesn't it follow that I'd want specialized tools for each?
I like it. Reminds me a little bit of go2web20.net and usefultools.com but it's different enough. I've been looking for sites like this so I can add a listing for my company when we officially launch.
Xmarks search is indeed a cool concept (much like delicious search), but I don't bookmark everything useful I find on the web - so bookmark-based search will never be quite as comprehensive.

In a way, search engines already account for up-modding by factoring in which links you click on when you are given a page of search results. But you are more likely to click on results already at the top, so I wouldn't give too much weight to that information.

The SearchWiki concept has a lot of potential if Google decides to go down that path though.
Anyone remember Paul and Jamie?

If we reconsider Bing, Bang, and the Boom then this seems to be pretty far away from Boom.
Ya I agree is hard to define a webapp. If the site is useful and have functionality other than just displaying images and content, we would consider it.

Our goal is to make AppUseful straightforward enough to market to the mainstream users. There are already a lot of resources that target the geek community. About half of my friends still don't know about popular sites such as Yelp.
Kinda neat. Name/star ratings overlap logo box border in FF 3.0.1. App category link is well placed but maybe too small, ditto under the toolbar; my first impression was 'bunch of random apps, how do I sort these?'

Too many featured/recent/popular; how about only 4 in each, and rotate/fade them in and out, let me then go to the relevant page to see all recent or whatever.

Logo/tag cloud section is a bit too big IMHO. It takes up 1/3 of the window on my work monitor.
Good point, I was trying to figure out the naming.
PHP isn't really involved because this is only "like" PHP. It has no PHP in it. As far as I know from a quick skim.
Why micropayments are (still) a terrible idea
Using similar techniques as Gmail and Blogger, I suppose.
I realize its just a demo but that UI looks horribly crowded to me. Regardless of how useful it is, I think staring at that all day would give me a headache and send me back to my "old" email.
We will get rid of the background hover effect. It was something we were just playing with. Will consider getting the getting rid of website title suggestion.
Not AIR. Is actually a native app (OSX / Win) used as a Flash wrapper.
They explicitly state they don't use SearchWiki to influence ranking right now.

From http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/11/google-searchwiki-l...:

"At this time we aren't using SearchWiki to influence ranking but it is easy to see how that could happen in the future," says Marissa Mayer.

I suppose they are going to wait until they get a meaningful amount of user data before they start using it.
The logo isn't over dramatic. The lame full-screen pictures behind the initial search screen.
With something like this, you don't want to overtly advertise. You want word of mouth to develop. I think the advertisement will sometimes work against them. I know I'm wary of ads for search -- most things advertised for search have been a disappointment to me.
Why do they think we want a big, dramatic image as a background to our search page?

The logo is a good inasmuch as it departs from typical Microsoft logos, BUT it's still ugly.

Especially since it's not live, all we have are these 1st impressions. And frankly the design choices are lame. Will this have an impact on it's success?
I totally agree. I really love imagining a filtering/triaging feature being a part of Wave. If incoming messages were automatically (or with just some amount of learning) given an importance rating, that would make my mind much clearer.
we will ajax the featured/recent/popular so users can scroll from left to right.
I'll have to take a look at Io. I was just thinking of making contexts into semantic contexts by having users specify what the verbs mean, not just the nouns.
Transaction costs are a killer. It hurts on cups of coffee which I sell a lot of.

Merchant services are bastards.
I don't think he was focusing on performance. Bill Buzbee, of homebrewcpu.com, built his the same way, with wire-wrapped TTLs. He did it because he wanted "touch the magic" of those early machines.

I imagine there is something very satisfying of individually wire-wrapping thousands of connections and dealing with the minutiae of a complicated electronic device that prototyping a FPGA just can't give you, especially for a pet hobby.
CVS is MLK?

ClearCase is Robert Mugabe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Mugabe

SourceSafe is Charles Taylor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Taylor_(Liberia)
While it's very true cats can kill more than they need, they'll often donate the catch. My cats frequently brought gifts, when you find a 2-3 lb rat on your doorstep in the morning and a cat looking all pleased it's often quite hard to reward the critter.

I think the very nature of domestic cats largely exceeds our understanding. The question of morality in a species specifically bred as verminators is complex. Especially when cats are one of the few species that is commonly seen adopting other species. One of my childhood cats even taught the puppy we got how to hunt birds, although ten years older and he's yet to catch one.

I think the study of morality in other creatures, especially our domesticated species is a key philosophical and ethical question. I think proving morality in our domestic pets would help give more power to the SPCA's to protect species from the immorality of us. I don't know the effect it would have on the food production industry, but as a whole I think we've largely ignored the moral and ethical issues there for long enough that we'll still manage to ignore it for a lot longer.
We are trying to keep our identity a secret because of a hard launch scheduled for the end of the summer. Our website helps people learn foreign languages with the help of captioned videos. We provide tools to help our users understand content, like one-click dictionary look-up, grammar notes, and flashcards.
You're kidding, right? SourceSafe is terrible.
sure i can help with these question. Whoever interested can msg me on http://twitter.com/rebelvc.
Sorry, but a "solution" that involves embedded JavaScript from a 3rd party site is not a solution people will actually want to use.
...mere act of writing it organized our thoughts

So true, I just applied that yesterday.
Microsoft are officially doing "lots of stuff" re: the HTML5 Canvas.
Swedish/Iraqi teen tackles centuries-old Bernoulli numbers challenge
Except that's not really what you said.

You said "This is silly, it doesn't account for the many, many axes of communication".

Then you listed these axes without explaining how they weren't accounted for.

Then you reduced the product to "screw email, it's a chat! With Widgets!".

Then you listed out a bunch of existing products that actually don't account for all the axes of communication.

And then admitted towards the end of all that that you actually "have no idea how it fits well into the framework of communication types".

All without having ever used the product, or having any exposure to it besides reading two short articles about it.
You can maximize the conversation box to fill the page if you want. I expect it wouldn't be hard to tweak the client to do that automatically.
People tend to do just that on Facebook and Twitter. To really take off, this is crying out for synergy with one of those two.
In this case, the value added seems to be the ability to use a remote.

Browsers should probably eventually have some way of detecting and using specialty hardware on the host. It's a pretty apparent limitation right now.
I totally agree with you abossy. I just wanted to mention that some people might actually "like" having information overload. People who are information addicts/junkies, or people who have attention deficit disorder, or people who are unskilled when it comes to "focusing" on a single task. There might be two sides to this...

I'm also curious if there's a pattern between introverts and extroverts when it comes to info-overload like this. Assuming spam isn't a problem, an extrovert may enjoy interacting constantly online, with many many different people, over the course of a day. An introvert may be the exact opposite. This would correlate well with "offline" introvert/extrovert behavior.

So the term "information overload" would have a different meaning for an extrovert and an introvert. For the former, it would be spam, or unwanted conversations. For the latter, just too many conversations which have little obvious value (small talk, etc...).

I've not seen any studies comparing introverts-to-extroverts when it comes to online information usage patterns (if anyone knows of one, please post it! :) ). So I'm totally theorizing here without any data.
Be sure you actually understand the limitations to the existing solutions and what benefits convergence such as Google Wave may offer before you dismiss it out of hand.

The merger of email, IM, and twitter into a new messaging system has tremendous potential.
Your comment reminded me of this experiment where two groups of elementary students were asked to create a bowl for art class. [or vase or something] (I can't recall the specific object of the experiment)

The first group was prompted to create one bowl with quality in mind. The second group was asked to create a finite number of bowls, for this case lets say 10 bowls, disregarding the quality of each bowl. In the end, the second group's 10th bowl turned out better from an aesthetic standpoint than the first group's single bow.

Qualitative measurements are tricky, which is why I have a hard time listening [or believing] to any expert from any school that constitutes as a `social science`
What are you going to do with it? I mean, I understand the tie-in with plenty offish, but aside from being a platform to serve their ads, are you going to do something else with it? Maybe do a 12seconds.tv thing where you have people submit their video pickup line or something?
I think Twitter and Facebook are the key here. I think that those two sites and others are crying out for a unification of all of these axes of communications. Right now, your blog, your Twitter stream, your photo streams, the dozen different Facebook things, emails to friends -- unifying all of these in a way which lets the user navigate instantly to an appropriate level of detail, appropriate level of sign-off, and/or the appropriate kind of communications would be fantastic.
I don't really buy his argument. At first he says that most online purchases are too big to really be considered "micropayments." Well, duh -- there's no micropayment infrastructure, so no true micropayments. The business models that exist today are the ones that somehow get the customer to cough up a couple of bucks.

Then the main thrust of his argument is that consumers won't accept micropayments because there's a big difference between "free" and "very cheap." I think this has some merit, but the success of not-very-micro payment services like iTunes shows that consumers are willing to pay for content while the value proposition is right. They just don't want to be hit with a continuous stream of charges that can add up to a massive bill at the end of the month. That's why metered data plans were such a PITA: it's hard to see how much you're using when you're surfing, and there were a lot of horror stories about people getting bills for thousands of dollars at the end of the month. Nobody wants that.

What a micropayment system needs to succeed is to drop the transaction cost, so that very small payments (maybe even fractions of a cent) are feasible, and then they need to be transparent to the user. The charges can't just happen silently and then end up on a bill at the end of the month; that makes (smart) people understandably nervous. You need to show how much money people are spending so they can see that it's a comfortable amount to spend.

I think if you had a system that let you toss virtual pennies around, people wouldn't hesitate to spend them any more than they hesitate to spend real-world pennies (which is to say, not much). As them for a few bucks and they will stop and think, but a couple of cents? I don't think they will. People just need to get used to spending money again, rather than the false sense of "free" from ad-supported services.
Meh, not going to argue with you over a product neither of us have ever used. You're right, I took stronger than needed stances, and it's most likely that this will be a very cool technology. I am just pointing out that all-in-one tools don't really solve communication problems, and that there is a ton to consider when talking about how information is presented, stored, and discussed between people.
just a matter of time till Navify replaces everyone's use of wikipedia
And, of course, the PC market is so enormous, that 4% means millions of machines.
I think the point of the gold standard is to remove flexibility in Government monetary policy. The government should not be able to reduce the value of your wealth, or do you think they should?
I wonder if this new functionality would entice more people to learn touchtyping over time, since the difference between slow typists and fast ones would be directly observable. Right now if someone sends IMs slowly you're never sure if it's just a case of the other person doing other things or thinking or rewriting... (even with a "is typing" indicator).
It doesn't run in PHP, but it borrows function signatures from PHP's core library. One of the most common complaints about PHP is that the core library is messy and inconsistent.

edit: I didn't mean to sound so negative. I think this is pretty cool if taken for what it is. Despite the messiness of PHP's libraries, they are well documented and cover a lot. The string, date, and array libraries in particular are quite useful.
Another thing we often forget to consider is that for Linux to remain as powerful as it is, it really can't be popular. Before most people would start using it, it needs to be a lot simpler and a lot stabler. That's a hard thing to achieve without sacrificing some of the freedom it currently gives an experienced user.
call and apply only let you change the meaning of the this pointer in Javascript. You can't change the meaning of other bound variables. In Io, you can take a Block and set the scope:

makeOriginalScope := block(name := "originalScope"; block(writeln(name)))
block(name := "newScope"; makeOriginalScope call setScope(thisContext) call) call
//newScope
Ask HN: How does Pandora's rating system work?
Does anyone know how Pandora's rating system works? Specifically what algorithms are in use?
That's one line, yes, but what a line! That's 20 tokens or so, many of which are weird and hairy (the ? operator, multiple assignments). And in Lisp style you'd have that as multiple lines anyway.
Sunlight Foundation is doing tremendous work, and Data.gov is a step forward.

But we're winning the battle while losing the war...in the last 10 months the government has created a mult-trillion dollar array of bailout programs-- PPIP, TARP, TALF, Fannie/Freddie conservatorship, Bear, AIG, Citi, GM, Chrysler, etc. All of these new "emergency" programs are highly opaque and lack real oversight-- in sum they are a stunning departure from the normal functioning of our economy and democracy. (A panicky Congress has delegated unprecedented powers to the executive branch and the Fed). This is the real transparency challenge. Bloomberg News is actually suing the Fed for some this information:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aatl...
Io has no "nouns" or keywords. Everything in Io is a verb (a message send). Also, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=630906
When does a website become a 'startup'?
YouTube - The Vendor Client relationship - in real world situations
Threading. Which is what Wave is trying to offer.
I've figured out what actually supports the internet: the cloud is actually a large piece of hype that escaped sometime in 2001 and now is running its own operating system and sending out press releases.

Seriously, that article was a little too breathless for me. I certainly hope that it is really that cool because that would be awesome. But I've read a lot of hyped articles over the last few years.

Is it too much to ask for a reviewer of a new product to be on a bit of a critical hat? After all, this is a large company coming up with something new that they are going to own. We've got Google Gears, HTML 5, Google Maps, Google Mashups, etc. Would you like Google fries with your Google shake?

It looks great. I hope it is great. I worry about things like identity management and levels of friends with such tools -- not sure if they've solved that. I'm also not sure how other parties besides Google are supposed to own the data, which might be important for some folks.

It's cool, no doubt. But it's not the Apollo moon landing. It's more like Outlook on steroids.
Why @Techcrunch Writes About Twitter So Damn Much
Genetically Modified Glowing Monkeys
Google Waves Goodbye to E-Mail, Welcomes Real-Time Communication
Your summary [this article] is recklessly subjective but +1 for making me chuckle. Giving the tabloids something to write about versus giving a film critic something to write about is my central concern with this logic.

Comparing how an actor works [how a version control application works] versus how an actor lives [what else does a version control application do bedsides work] doesn't really add up in my mind.

NOTE: These statements were made prior to reading the article
That's not aif at all. In fact, you can't even do it for "most cases" in C because you don't know what type expr will evaluate to, but if we could cheat and assume it will be an int:

#define aif(expr, code) \
{ \
int it = (expr); \
if (it) \
{ \
code; \
} \
}

But this is still not close because in a Lisp, if is an expression that returns a value. We can't use the ternary operator because then there's no place to declare the "it" variable. You can't have an expression that declares a variable local to that expression in C no matter how hard you try.

And the above lacks the "do {} while (0)" weirdness needed to make a cpp macro behave syntactically roughly like a function.
The Palm Pre syncs with iTunes
Ubiquitous web font embedding just got a step closer
exactly -- timing usually plays a very important role on most things in life - getting to business is definitely one of them...

launch products too soon and you'll be maybe too much ahead of your time to sustain a business without sales until it picks up. Launch it too late and the market will be flooded already.
I agree, context is important, and humans are better at separating context if it's "physically" separated, eg. a different site or window.

However, if you look at the Gmail+Gtalk use-case, the fact that all conversations that go through Google's Jabber servers are automatically indexed and searchable in Gmail alone is a killer feature (this also works if you use a desktop client like Adium, the point is, it makes sense to use Google as your IM provider for the indexing).

So the point is, keeping as many docs/conversations/etc in some centralized Google app may be worth it just for the search/indexing.

My final conclusion then is that other companies, in the long term, may have to implement Google-like search functionality (and storage), otherwise Google will suck up their application's users with search as a killer feature.
Just hide the levels of complexity, but make it easier for the user to delve into what they want.

If they can make a web app that can let users unify their various notification/collaboration streams (Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, delicious, Flickr, IM, email...) then they have a winner. Especially if they can make a slick mobile version.
This guy is a very smart person. He & his 3 buddies have done amazing things for the state of rich web applications. Either Google or Apple should be acquiring 280North.
I've never understood this viewpoint.

Would a mathematician be ok for dismissing physics since a physics experiment is not as rigorous as a mathematical proof?

Calling "medicine" garbage because it is not as precise as physics is so silly that I don't really know how to respond. I am imagining a physicist who just had a massive hard attack saying to his doctor: "I'm sorry, please let me die, I don't believe your technique is based on sufficiently precise data."
Not only are fingers very low-resolution input devices, but they're opaque and attached to a big meaty human hand, obscuring your view of whatever you're manipulating. The visibility problem worsens with multiple touch, since you may have both hands between your eyes and the screen.

When manipulating something small or fine on the screen with a coarse fingertip, it can be difficult to know if you actually have a 'grip' on it, or precisely which face/edge of it you're pushing/pulling. (In the physical world, we receive tactile feedback through our fingertips that helps us grasp things.) Frustrating, since much of the promise of multi-touch systems is in modeling physical-world manipulation.

Also, PC touch screens can quickly get greasy, worsening visibility even when your hands aren't on it. I developed for a PC-based multitouch environment last fall; by the end of a debugging session on the test system, its screen would be difficult to read. If I ever do that again I will buy silk gloves and learn to type in them (and hope that they are fine enough not to block input on a capacitive touchscreen).
At first he says that most online purchases are too big to really be considered "micropayments." Well, duh -- there's no micropayment infrastructure, so no true micropayments.

Exactly. There is no data in his argument - you can argue that people wouldn't want to pay a little versus nothing but how can you know? There is no real opportunity to test this on the Internet. In real life, there are people who make a living from busking, which implies that there is no universal psychological barrier to tossing a quarter in a tin can for a snatch of a tune that put a smile on your face. (You can argue that there are people who never give to buskers, but that is not really the issue).

As for the transaction cost - well indeed, this is why the micropayment problem has not been solved. This isn't really my field, but I imagine the way forward is to somehow "warehouse" and broker payments until they are no longer "micro". For example if I make 10 micropayements of $0.25 to 10 different recipients, i am debited $2.50 once, and all that debit goes to one recipient, with everybody else's money shuffled around until all recipients ultimately get their money in as few transactions as possible. Nobody said it is an easy problem to solve.
Fortunately I did not need to do this, it looks like google just did.
jzellman, eweaver, and I sat around one night last summer and made a grid of these things, for others like twitter, newsgroups, etc. Looking at it, it had holes in it, and we half-joked that all someone needed to do was pick some unfulfilled combination of communication axis, and they'd have another startup.