skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>So please think hard on this, before you dismiss this as stupid or untenable.

I have. This is stupid and untenable.

Problem one: Right now if I encountered a login form that didn't mask the password I would probably attribute this to incompetence, not usability. I don't think I'm the only one.

Problem two: Right now all login forms work the same. The top field is the username and under that is the password field. This would break that consistency by adding the "show (or hide) password" behavior. In his description he even suggests that some sites default to a different behavior based on some notion of degree of security. Now logging in with someone looking on becomes quite a bit more nerve-wracking because you need to figure out if the password field will disclose your password. This is less usable.

Now, where I think this may be useful is if it is added as part of the "invalid password" behavior. Offer to give the user help only if they need it. Provide them a button to show the password they entered, and allow them to try again underneath it to fix any typos or verify that they correctly entered the password they were thinking of. This helps the user without changing the way the login form operates in the default case where a correct password is entered (a password that's probably in the user's muscle memory because they use it for everything). I know I've actually seen this done somewhere, although I can't remember where.

Mobile is a bit different. I’m completely behind the times in using a mobile device to access the web, but I know that my terribly slow phone running its gimped browser (netfront, I think?) on its tiny screen quite a few years ago provided the option to display masked fields in the editor window it would switch to whenever filling out an input field. This seems like a better solution to this problem to me (and was almost a necessity on that device since it didn’t have a proper keyboard).
"This is like, at the exact same moment, two identically-sized meteors hitting two people in Henan and Helongjiang, who coincidentally have the same height, weight, and blood type."

No it's not. It's like if every single day millions of meteors are constantly slamming into the planet and then two hit people in those two places at the same time. Millions of people buy lottery tickets every day - of course two are going to match up at some point.
One of the most annoying offenders of this is the windows wireless configuration utility.

It refuses to let you see the WEP key that you are typing, but insists that you type it twice.

If it were something like "what is your favorite flavor of popsicls" and not "type this random 58 character sting of hex", then that might be acceptable, but it isn't. Really, who is going to be standing over your shoulder and memorize that?

/drives me insane

//iwconfig ath0 essid "blueberry struedel" key $foo ftw
Proof: http://tinypic.com/r/2uym3is/5

Of the two hours it took to create that, most was spent making a video, learning gwt 1.6 and downloading images from 280north (they make it hard).
Heres one I just built to show how easy it is. http://tinypic.com/r/2uym3is/5
Dont forget many people use the same password all over the place (silly I know - but it is something every site should assume and plan for!).

So in essence if you leave a password field open then your potentially exposing the "global" password of your user to anyone walking past. That seems an even bigger consideration than just exposing the pass to your site. Your taking away any security the user expects when typing a password in :)
I was once typing in my password on a box I forgot I had converted to Dvorak. I was almost panicking because I was so sure I was entering the password correctly.
Ah, that would be specific to the job. If your doing a sum, maybe 0, or if you're building a list, it'd be an empty list. I suspect that a good default would just be whatever the first value generated by the mapper is, in which case the first value of any key wouldn't be folded, but rather just set in the hash table. But that is all job specific. If you can recommend a better solution, I'm all ears.

Furthermore, I should have explained the types better. As described, the HashFold framework would require the output of the map, the arguments of the fold, and the output of the fold all be the same type. This isn't as limiting as it sounds and if it turns out to be limiting for some problem domains, there are solutions to each of those.
flash does not run acceptably on my quad core xeon on mac os x. whatever they supposedly got running on an iPhone is not flash as we know it.

not to mention the flash mentioned in this ad (not really an article in a journalistic sense) for android is not set to be released until the end of this year.

It gives an example of the potential of the Android and Flash combination and the threat the duo poses to the iPhone

insipid. flash on some android phone is not a threat to iPhone. it does not even register on the "threat" measurement devices. the only thing that has been interesting since the iPhone was first released is the Pre, but it is still not a threat. just interesting.

the articlemonkeys love throwing out "iPhone killer" or "threat" as if every goddamn product is competing with it.

also, yes, the iPhone is too slow for flash.
I use monit, but honestly on my 256mb VPS (non-mission critical) it threw a ton of false positives. Granted, I configured it wrong. The web UI is pretty neat, albeit basic, and if you set it up to allow restarting processes that can be handy in a pinch. Just be sure to check your configs, otherwise Apache might be restarted every time a rails app gets launched due to memory constraints. ;)

As a disclaimer, I am definitely a neophyte sysadmin so I'm certainly not using the tools correctly. I ended up turning monit on just for checking if my processes are running instead of checking for memory issues. Seems to be running fine, and I haven't heard a peep out of it since I changed the passenger module configs.
there's some truth to this. As a child I recall being taught that some scientists thought hormones could treat homosexuality, as it was considered an illness.

It's amazing how ignorant we were just 50 years ago, and likely still are :)

What's particularly sad about Turing was that he was such a great war hero. We make movies about famous spies capturing machines behind enemy lines, when the reality was largely Turing and I believe a group of polish refugees slaving away in basements building computers.
Hm. Well, the domain/site name is fantastic. But I don't feel any attraction to the place; it's like Digg with a filter that the stories have to mention Chicago. There is no consistency. The top 10 items go from sport, political gossip, and food reviews to tech CEO arrests and an article about an upcoming museum exhibit. Is there anyone who would be interested in more than one of those things? Who is the target user? There is no focus; it's just random noise to me.

I have one suggestion, even if it's a bit evil: decide the kind of articles your target user is interested in, and then once in a while, go in and vote the crap out of them. Yes it's cheating. But you need momentum and you need to create a positive feedback loop. Seeing a whole page of near-random articles all with 3 or 4 votes is a turn-off and a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Enabling Compiz Fusion On A Fedora 11 GNOME Desktop (NVIDIA GeForce 8100)
Take a look at EveryBlock.com. They do a lot of location-specific stuff right. Might be some concepts you could adopt for your site.
Just left a comment on his post. Thanks!
"Of course, a truly skilled criminal can simply look at the keyboard and note which keys are being pressed. So, password masking doesn't even protect fully against snoopers.

"More importantly, there's usually nobody looking over your shoulder when you log in to a website."
Successful Startups Put Some Distance Between Their HQ and Their VCs
"Just email it to me."

For the love of science, put a textbox and a submit button, and let the gnomes do their job.
Thanks jganetsk, words of encouragement are always appreciated.
I wonder how did the "conventional intelligence" so grossly overstate the production of German tanks. If the conventional analysis were true there would be ~350,000 tanks produced for two years of intensive warfare! Which is really funny considering that Germany invaded the Soviet Union with something like 4000 tanks if I recall correctly. 246 a month is the statistically estimated data, which is both close to the real number (245) and common sense - no matter how much you militarize a country you still need raw materials and Nazi Germany was no Soviet Union.

the source for this in wikipedia is the Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/jul/20/secondworldwar.t...

addition: such a feat of production was possible, but in the Soviet Union and at an extraordinary high cost of human lives and slave labor.

addition2: In fairness the Germans could produce more tanks if they wanted to. But they built some pretty useless ships thought - Graf Zeppelin or Bismarck, for example and oversize guns like the famous Dora. But still.. there is a limit to the number of tanks realistically produced and Allied intelligence must have been aware of the availability of raw materials in the Reich and the construction of Bismark and Tirpitz and all the other huge ships (their construction began before the war).
Agreed 100%.

In this instance, the apology is to stop discriminating based on sexuality.
Which Language Combination? Thoughts on Selecting New Skills To Learn.
Well-taken. Though isn't that counter to the idea of letting the readers decide what belongs? Their votes make the front page what it is, which is admittedly all over the place.

Your deeper point seems to be that horizontal aggregation doesn't work, i.e. several topics from one place.
Faye is a Ruby/Rack implementation of Bayeux/Comet
Everyblock's a great site, but they're addressing a different problem in a different way. They're scraping rather than letting people post to the site, and they're not interested in what's interesting in Chicago, but what's happening near you. It's a little different. My goal with the Citizen is to have a front page that represents everything you should read right now to know what's cool and relevant in Chicago.
Note that a "company" can exist without registration (which I took to mean incorporation or the creation of some other legal entity). A sole proprietorship, where the "idea guy" personally owns everything, is one such type of company. Partnerships can be another.

In short, I probably shouldn't have asked what company. Or, I should have been more paranoid and asked if there's actually a legal entity and it's just not writing any contracts with the help.
http://www.wufoo.com
Docs Are Old-School, We Need PageRank for People
Thanks. OT: How do we protect from such snooping? I thought that recording the keys was harder for the cameras since the keyboard would be masked by user's height or a partially closed tray. E.g. in a cyber cafe, the keyboard normally is below the tabletop in tray. This is also true of many companies in India, where they use desktops.
>how did the "conventional intelligence" so grossly overstate the production

Probably 1 word - fear.

Or more explicitly fear of underestimating the figures; that kind of thing can be fatal! The human factor in this example is huge (nearly a factor of 8 I think for some months) but you can see the same happening everywhere. No matter how precise the statistical estimates are a human will always think "yeh but they could......"

:)
Invisible Browsing – Secure and Anonymous | TechJaws: Internet Security and SEO
The Devil Is in the Digits: Evidence That Iran's Election Was Rigged
The same way that U boat captains overestimated the ships they sunk and pilots overestimated the planes they shot own - every plane they took a shot at was counted a hit.

It's the same way you estimate how long a bug fix will take, every line of code you touch is 'fixed'.
"Clixpy`s Demo" -- wrong quote.
Tanks and math! Best way to start my morning. Thanks subby.
Widespread understanding of the effect could increase your prior credence that you've been given a placebo.
> We're no more competition than Twitter of Facebook is.

If you're running advertising or have viewers, you're competition.
I like the way it works now. But I like the ranking idea a lot-- giving awards to top journalistic reporting.

You could even have a People's Choice voting for different areas each year and perhaps those journals/editorials/etc will ask people to come to your site to vote for their paper/publication.
Double-posted
So...you want to remove the added legal protections homosexuals have?

EDIT: No, really? Is that what you want, because that's where the discrimination is.
Given the current problems the British government are having holding the country together, an apology to Alan Turing is NOT something I want them to be thinking about.

Don't get me wrong, I am 100% for gay rights, laws against discrimination, etc (my mum is gay, and is 'married' to her partner), but I think priorities should lie in making life worth living for those still with us at this time.
> My goal with the Citizen is to have a front page that represents everything you should read right now to know what's cool and relevant in Chicago.

Umm, what was it you wrote above about not being competition for local media?
MindTouch Takes Aim at Stagnant Corporate Portals
Thymer: Task Management With Extra Spice (useful tools review)
This has been posted about 5 or 6 times - the situation has since been resolved and the city has ceased this practice.
By saying "we're sorry" and then handing over taxpayer dollars to interest groups. It's amazing that people don't know a racket when they see one. The same crap is happening in the US. Here are some members of congress opposing an apology for slavery:

http://www.startribune.com/politics/national/congress/485634...

Those caucus members say the disclaimer is an attempt to stave off reparations claims from the descendants of slaves. "Putting in a disclaimer takes away from the meaning of an apology," said Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss.

Yes, the "meaning" of the apology is step 1 in a mass larceny underway. This garbage needs to end. Everyone who actually owns slaves, I really do believe, should apologize for it. Everyone who doesn't own slaves should put their collective middle fingers in the air concerning the matter.
Introduction to RDFa
When reading this all I could think about was Glamdring and the ancient's insistence on the soul of a warrior being embedded somehow in their weapons.
I've always had a deep love of circus skills including Staff and Sword play, and remapping my "physio-spatial" model is second nature. The eerie part is when you can actually feel it happening, it feels like the sword/tool forces it's way into your consideration. I can only imagine what it must have been like for the blades and tools of old, with all their might and "magic"!!
Instead of cheating, maybe an "Editor's pick" above the number 1 would do.
Geez, stop overthinking it already.

Pick whatever language seems interesting to you. Read a few book chapters about it (or a few tutorials, whatever suits your style), then start building a few small apps to start, move on to bigger and more complex apps until you tire from the language and then move on to the next one.

Stop worrying about learning languages in the perfect order! Stop worrying whether to learn Lisp or Scheme! Stop worrying whether you should stick to Haskell because the cool kids do it, even though you don't enjoy it at all.

Pick a language -- any language --. Move on to the next one when bored. If you do this for a couple of years you'll automatically discover all programming languages known to man. When you're bored with Python and Ruby you'll have much more fun learning Haskell. And when you tire of high level language hacking assembler will be the most fun you've had in years.

It's that simple. One last time: stop overthinking it.

[ not aimed at the author specifically, but at obsessive programmers in general ]
Well, looks like Shaun can update fever from his end, and has version 1.0.1 has been pushed to my install of fever; in this update, Hacker News works!
Interesting. On trying it, I didn't try to stretch my left hand any further, but I did automatically curl my right arm much more to "make it fit".
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I love your totally positive, proactive attitude. When I see a post like this I can't help but smile.
How to Decide on Your Next Programming Language
I'm having a hard time figuring out why /could/ hasn't been replaced with /am/. Apparently you can make the linked to wind generators for $100 so you're only looking at $200 total investment.
They did dose me with some stuff to calm me down... but I was still quite worried (not beyond control or anything).
It would be great if there was an online demo of your product - I clicked around for a bit looking for one before realising I would have to /download and install it/ in order to try it out! Just running an instance against a PostgreSQL database that gets wiped and reset once an hour by a cron job would be enough to give people a taster.
Revealing Design Treasures from The Amazon 
Great article a friend sent me.
Ask HN: Are you in Miami, FL?
I'd like to get in touch with other like-minded HN/YCers in the area to discuss ideas, projects and maybe help make Miami another hub for startups.
Cake Toppers and Wedding Cake Toppers
FunDeliver.com offers custom sculpted wedding cake toppers and cake toppers made from your photo to resemble you. Perfect personalized cake toppers for Wedding, Birthday and Other Occasions
How to use the authorize.net API
It's not really a good idea is it? The people who perpetrated this are dead, it was under an earlier Government. Further more the whole situation was likely whipped up by the right wing press, Sir John Gielgud's treatment was another appalling example of this. The general populous at the time were not really bothered either way about a person's sexuality.

The best way is to remember him would be to create a large research institution in his honour. Apologizing changes nothing in this instance.
For a counterpoint: http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/06/last-digits-analysis-of-uk-a...

Use more detailed results from the Iranian election and you don't see this effect.
Tens of thousands of people die every year from car crashes, should we outlaw driving? I could rattle off dozens of things that are stupid, dangerous, and totally legal, but it'd be rather pointless. Something being dangerous is not reason to not allow people to do it in free country.

You're ignoring my central point, I didn't say it wouldn't be dangerous, I said it's not the governments job to protect a person from himself. People would learn fairly quickly that it's stupid to just buy a bunch of stuff and mix it, and as I said, doctors and pharmacists can still inform people of what they should take and what not to mix stuff with.

Our current system artificially makes doctors into an extremely overly paid government sanctioned artificially limited monopoly. This keeps the price of health care artificially high, it's a protection racket using people's own health against them to forcefully take their money. Being a doctor should be a way to help people, not a way to become a millionaire. People should be enabled to treat themselves, doctors should be a choice we have, not a requirement forced upon us by the law.

The fact is people already self medicate, that's how it's always been and that's how it'll always be, but they shouldn't have to go to Mexico, Canada, or their local drug dealer to get what they want, they should be able to just go to their local pharmacy.
Markets are giving the devil his due
Test your Internet Connection Speed with SpeedTest | Tricks Machine
true - i try not to do it right before bed as i have discovered the same thing - usually i'll do it shortly after dinner, leaving myself time to get some things done around the house in more relaxed fashion before i do go to bed
How Terrorist Groups Resemble Manufacturing Firms
That and people put too much emphasis in petty junk. Nice cars, big house, expensive clothes, fine dining...That's all fine and dandy if it's how you want to live, but I'd rather have a simple life and little stress.

I definitely will be taking my kids to see the world in the future, something we never did when I was growing up, family business kept us pretty busy year round.
Make a speech, invite the press and physically say "Sorry"
A newspaper? Creating an actually functional value-added seed funding firm? Well, I was about to snark a mighty snark, but I guess crazier things have happened.
What usage does this have other than for learning purposes?

I don't think "Tower Defense" games are that complex that you can't roll your own using something like pygame, and it seems like whatever you could do with a "framework" like that you could just as easily do by modifying an existing open source TD game.
Hmm. Odd. I blame Discus. :)
First of all, it is not his positive tale that annoyed me, it's the implication that things are equally easy for everyone and that if you don't accomplish them, it's your own fault. Your last paragraph is the perfect example of that kind of attitude and I get annoyed with it for a very good reason.

I live and work in a developing country, where those 10 grand are rather hard to come by and even when you have them aren't enough to make a family of 4 live like kings. I came to this developing country from an even worse country (economically speaking) where I grew up knowing what poverty really is. Please excuse me if I'm "too in love" with my "precious little middle class lifestyle", because that lifestyle means that I can buy a book AND take my kid to the doctor in the same month.

I hope I made it easier to see why assumptions like yours are particularly infuriating to some people. At least the author didn't make the same assumption, as I can see from his comment, for which I am deeply grateful.
I find it quite galling that most "official" advice on the subject of sleep quality boils down to "simply get more sleep." This is a distinctly "let them eat cake" attitude - not at all unusual, however, coming from our medical establishment. I would like to thank the submitter, the author of the article, and the builders of the featured gadgets for creating something which might actually be of use to those who haven't the wealth to buy back their time, and must fight the effects of sleep deprivation without having the option of lying in bed to their heart's content.