skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That .NET 3.0 has been around since 2006 is a red herring. What really matters is the percentage of Windows machines that have it installed.

I know a few companies that write desktop .NET software, and they can't use WPF unless they add ~50MB to their download (or in the installer). That would be bad for their growth rate.
The real problem is most samples are not random. So, you are bound by the bias of your methods and you can't really get all that accurate. In theory when you double your sample size you do reduce your margin of error by a reasonable degree, but reality does not mesh until you start taking a large percentage of the population.

Think of it like a coin, that has a 1% bias you want the percentage to some accuracy (say 4 digits) how many flips do you need?. Now what if the problem is not the coin but the person doing the flipping. At some point more testers help more than more flips.
Don't ask teachers 'Why?' They don't know, and they act like it's not important
I'd like it both ways: I want a checkbox to show me my password if I chose. Feel free to leave it off by default.
Entertain and Impress for less
If Clojure is getting reactions like this, it must be doing something right.
No, I know he was a big proponent of separation; that's why I said "unwittingly". :)

First, here's what I mean by separation of church and state: http://bit.ly/Xy9le (Warning: It's a bit long, but not as long as it looks.)

I suggest finishing that before going to the second link: http://bit.ly/133aMi (Notice especially the first word in the text that starts with the letter p.)
What's impressive is that this whole episode took only 5 hours from start to finish. Sometimes, it seems like it takes that long just to get talking to a real person.
What problem was Seesmic purporting to solve that justin.tv, stickam, and various others weren't?
i don't think it's too niche, because as many web apps as have come out in the last year, i think there will be way more in the coming year. good, thought-provoking comment, though.
Happy Birthday, Barcode
I just realized something odd about this oft-repeated billing scenario: the very few people who could realistically pay $11k overage bills also always have the means to fight it.

Does anyone ever pay these bills?
This is slightly off topic, but I feel like soccer in America is being poorly represented by American media companies due to their shitty camera angles. When you watch the English Premier League coverage they offer nice, high angles that make the field seem huge and the plays more impressive. It's kind of a minor detail, but I really think it's a subtle change that could change the way people feel about watching the game.
Execution is absolutely more important than vision because everyone can be a visionary if he has even a little interest. For example, when you look at Google giving you search results in one fashion, you think "I wish they had a good design." But only bing.com could prove that search can be better organized and designed, and I 'd say they have executed just fine. Ideas can be generated even in the bathroom.
I had exactly the same thought, word for word, when I read the comment, but I wasn't, um, inspired enough to post it and take the downvotes. ;)
I retain a great deal of affection for environments like Squeak, like Emacs, where you can stand as high up or as low down as you like in the system. Emacs has primitives written in C, of course, and Squeak doesn't cooperate real well with the rest of the world, but it's still a very powerful idea.

It makes me a little sad that one cannot learn Java programming by e.g. loading up Eclipse and saying "what's the code for this thing?", in the way that Squeak, Emacs, many Forths, R, and yes Symbolics Lisp permitted.
That will largely become a non-issue as more people migrate from XP onto Vista or 7; all installations of Vista come with .NET 3.0, and 7 will probably come with 3.5 or maybe even 4.0 if it's out in time. Perhaps they could make two downloads, one for XP users and another for Vista/7 users?
These studies come out like clockwork. Every few weeks we hear about the new discovery of a food or ingredient that will kill you. I say if you're not obese and in reasonably good health, eat what you like. Nobody escapes death because they don't eat Wonder bread.
Create a page in the manager's name, photoshop a couple of pictures of him and his donkey-friend.
It has to help that he's semi-famous. I remember the exact same thing happening to a Verizon customer a few years back, and it certainly took longer than 5 hours for him to get his money back.

http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/2006/12/verizon-doesnt-know-... (the audio link has gone dead)

These companies need to learn math.
You go to church without wearing a disguise - that doesn't allow somebody to not hire you because of it.
Hackers here would probably be interested to know that the MLB releases the pitch tracking data nightly (http://gd2.mlb.com/components/game/mlb/). It's fascinating and while I'm sure the clubs themselves have programmers working away at crunching the data, there are some interesting uses of the data publicly available:

http://labs.dataspora.com/gameday/

http://www.brooksbaseball.net/pfx/index.php

I've been trying to think of something awesome to do with this data (since it seems amazing to me that it's available for free).
Ok, first this is Guido and there is the obligatory "we're not worthy" stuff but this is a pretty bad argument. UI development for Windows in .NET WinForms is not that difficult and you do not generally have to dig into the guts of UI subsystem.

Secondly, Guido brings out the old whipping boy of "clients are dead long live the Web." I think this is not a good view. Why is it either Web or Clients. Personally, if HTTP/HTML the best we're over going to do then I think it's a pretty sad state of affairs. It also seems like a big waste to have these powerful computers with many cores that do nothing but allow you to have more tabs open in your web browser.

The web is a great platform but there must be a world beyond HTTP/HTML/Javascript and the occasional Flash application.

Lastly, I think Guido is either being naive or coy treating HTML as if developing UI in it has no tedious aspect to it.
Really??? I need to get a job at Google, apparently. :)

I've found that the difficulty in dating in the Bay Area isn't necessarily the shortage of women, but the overwhelming majority of men. The numbers probably dictate that they're equal, but this is an disadvantageous situation when the South Bay self-selects older, wealthier men and less young, single women.
> More eyeballs are viewing the RIP Michael Jackson thread, thus resulting in more potential up-votes

That suggests an idea to take that into account, but I think PG said he'd rather not complicate the algorithm.

Edit: Huh? I'm being downvoted, which is fine, but why? I meant that there might be an interesting way to take eyeballs into account to weight a vote, but IIRC, PG wanted to see how long we could go without vote weighting.
Poorly edited and lit video with bad content is not better than no video at all
Pretty exciting. I've been working on the prize in my spare time. Got to #162 (.8838 rmse).

The algorithms involved and the solutions from past years have been very interesting. I highly recommend that people check out the forum posts on http://netflixprize.com

The winning submission was made by a combination of the top 3 teams. In my opinion, if they win it, it's well deserved! It will be very interesting to see Pragmatic Theory's method published.

Teams BellKor and Chaos Theory published their methods when they won the 2008 Progress Prize.
I was actually lucky enough to see Rich Hickey go through the clojure code for that live (http://blip.tv/file/812787).
That is a great comment. I did start this to "scratch my own itch" as you say, because I could not find what I wanted/needed. Specifically it is very difficult to get multiple rounds of feedback on a site at places like HackerNews.

I do not think web startups in the launch phase is that much of a niche. There are often times 20 "Ask HN: Review xxx site" posts on here a week and that's just on HN. I'd be perfectly happy with just those 20!

I fully agree that the site owners may not have much reason to return to launchly after their launch is over and they no longer need feedback BUT new launches are constantly happening. A (hopefully) big audience for launches will be web development shops that are constantly putting out client web applications. They would be able to include a launchly launch as part of their "package" to the client.

I think the returning visits will be from the "general audience" that is just interested in seeing the latest web apps and having a chance to give their valuable input... just like people do here on HN.

Thank you for your thoughts!
Well, almost anything is possible; your argument is specious. Drug tests shouldn't rationally tell you anything more than marital status because any reasonably intelligent drug user can beat a simple piss test. If anything, a drug test is testing for stupidity more than drug use, it just so happens that those have a tendency to go hand-in-hand with respect to low-wage workers.

But programmers? If Google drug tests people I'm sure they do so for liability reasons, not because they care what Johnny Genius does in his free time.
Well, I agree. Guido is hardly giving a charitable interpretation. Now if we want to shame a Microsoft creation, I think it is fair to start with IE.
I'd like a typical GUI browser to let me right-click a password field and use a "show secret text" option. But it should never be the default, at least not for people like me who present on laptops too infrequently to form defensive habits around what my colleagues are about to see.

Why oh why can't we just carry around certs on USB fobs? Isn't it the future yet?
I've been on a low glycemic index diet for the past 8 years, combined with regular snacks and exercise. The background to this is that I had trouble concentrating at university. Went to the doctor, who sent me for tests that confirmed I'm hypoglycemic.

Today, I can still notice the drop in concentration and the intense desire to take a nap after eating the occasional high GI food. But my mind is very clear when I eat correctly, so that's enough motivation to keep it up. Of course, the health benefits are a nice side-effect - I became quite skinny from losing what little fat I had, so I had to work out to pick up some weight.

A few points to address some of the other comments: It's not necessary to go extremely high protein, and increasing your fat intake may do more harm than good if you don't work hard to exclude saturated fats. Don't limit your total carb intake, but choose the right carbs and spread them out across meals / snacks.

And some very important points the article doesn't mention: Never skip a meal. Eat breakfast within an hour of waking up. This will help prevent spikes in your blood sugar.

I would suggest googling the glycemic index as well as the glycemic load of foods before making any changes to your diet. Apart from giving preference to food that's higher in fibre, healthy fat and proteins, there are some surprises.

Once you've passed through the proverbial dip, your taste changes. The cravings for sweet or highly processed carbs are similar to the cravings when giving up smoking. They do pass.
In theory, yes. In practice, they never seem to test people for alcoholism even though that's likely to be more highly correlated to job performance than recreational use of cannabis. It's mostly an exercise in, "we are a government contractor at some point in our business, and some regulation requires us to help enforce anti-drug laws".
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Top 6 Basecamp iPhone Clients: Collaborative Project Management Applications
Firefox 3.5 Will Arrive Tuesday June 30
And indeed, it is fun to imagine those jackholes dying of koala meat poisoning.
No, because religion is one of the six(?) things you're explicitly not allowed to discriminate based on. Musical taste isn't.
There exists a mysterious group of HN members, appointed by PG, who have admin abilities. They kill submissions, edit titles, etc..
Sounds like a great accidental pre-interview question: how is this person at disagreeing with people online?

If you're going to have a presence online, you're going to have to have a public presence. I know lots of people would like for it to be the other way around, but I honestly just don't see that happening.

META: I'd love to upvote this article for the comments, but the article itself isn't that good. So no upvote.
I've found that novice users often associate hidden passwords with encryption. They think that because they can't see the password nobody else can.

These users are often more likely to use a less secure password in visible prompts out of fear of compromising their more secure ones.
Technically you don't burn a flag during a retirement. It is cut into quarters first. Or at least it was when I was doing these ceremonies with the Boy Scouts.
have you heard of http://www.standoutjobs.com
They help employers create online solutions to engage potential recruits. It's an innovative idea and may be a good fit.
I hope not. Our descendants should hopefully live in a world where everyone recognizes that we are all human beings. I don't think it will ever be prudent to say What You Can't Say publicly, but a little bit of humanity will be allowed.
Given the tech-savviness of the Bay Area, I actually think how well OKCupid works out here almost makes up for the fact that it seems to be harder to meet girls in the real world here than anywhere else. Given, you won't always "spark" with someone you meet online, but if you do, at least it means you probably get along with them on a deeper level than just "you're at the bar and look cute."
I wonder what happens if you have an auto-deduction from your account. Not a problem for the monthly bills, but it would suck to find $11k taken out of one's bank account with the deduction done through a process that, although extremely unethical, is technically legal.

If I ever had the intention of using a phone for data, I'd turn off auto-pay immediately.
Teenage 'baby' may lack master ageing gene
many people here still vote by agreement, rather than for comments that are interesting, insightful, contradictory, terse, and so on

Given up and down arrows next to a comment, the overwhelming majority of people will always vote based on agreement, no matter what you tell them to do, because the user interface practically begs people to do that.

If you want people to vote based on something else, you'll have to redesign the user interface (and even then I suspect it will be difficult).
if your routine doesn't involve doing all of weighted squating, deadlifting, and benching every week, it's a bad routine (for beginners).

Do you have any references for that?

I'd have thought barbells aren't necessary for beginners. Barbell deadlifting seems a bit dangerous for someone untrained.

I have been using dumbbells myself. I gained quite a bit of muscle in 3 months, and perhaps I could lift a barbell now, but certainly not 3 months ago.
Considering that we probably won’t see this kind of ad used in any kind of widespread way – it’s probably more about winning awards or getting linked from sites like this one – I’m not all that sure whether if this kind of ad works in the field or not is really an interesting question to ask. That is probably not its purpose.

I recently attended a talk from Markus N. Beeko, Director of Campaigns and Communications of the German section of Amnesty International, and he sort of hinted at that. TV ads or poster ads are expensive to run. The second are also very limited in their reach. With a agenda as busy and particulate as AI’s it is moreover impossible to have any sort of huge centrally coordinated and closely monitored communication strategy. Being responsible for communications at AI means warming up to the idea that you cannot and should not want to control everything.

So instead what they do (well, obviously among other things) is doing stuff like this. Stuff that spreads on its own. He showed three TV spots produced by AI and guess what: I had seen every single one of them before on YouTube without ever following AI closely. This seems to be a useful way of doing this kind of thing.

Concerning your comments about the appropriateness of the content and placement of this ad: I don’t know where you get the idea that this ad is placed in a bus shelter in a middle class area. There is a Saturn in the background, big electronics retailer in Germany, so I guess there are either no (middle class or else) houses in the vicinity of this bus shelter or not the best ones.

And, as it was already pointed out, this is a ad for Germany.
Just so you know,

there's no such thing as targeted weight loss

crunches (alone) will not give you abs

resting on the equipment makes you a jerk

you do not need weight lifting gloves (ever)

you don't need a weight lifting belt for upper body or most lower body exercises

leave the sleeveless t-shirt at home

also the short shorts

establish a routine and stick to it; don't skip workouts and don't skip breaks (you'll use it to justify slacking later)

Grunting isn't OK unless you're dealing with more than your body weight
I'm doing all my current work in Flex and think it is great; If you apply some Cocoa-style discipline to structure, you can achieve stunning results while remaining nimble.
So, are his VCs going to fire him for his honesty?
We've known for decades that the western diet kills people (and increasingly so) and that traditional diets don't, yet nutrition science seems to be stuck in a reductionist view of food, obsessed with finding the precise chemicals responsible for heart disease, diabetes, and all the other Western Diseases.

Maybe this new study really has gotten to the bottom of heart disease, in which case we can all eat the newly re-formulated Low Glycemic Index Wonder Bread and carry on as usual. We'll be healthier, Food Industry will make another fortune, everyone's happy.

Thought this would be a good opportunity to pimp the book: In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan. It's quite extraordinary if you are interested in your health (in the broadest sense of that word), food, and the history of Nutrition Science and the western diet.
Big difference between "I don't think has bearing on the job" and "is illegal to ask about". I wouldn't work for a company that wanted to drug test me either, out of principle. On the other hand, if I'm an EMT, it would be arguably reasonable to drug test me, but still illegal to ask if I'm married.
JavaScript speed test: iPhone 3G S whips Palm Pre and Google G1
Please note slide 2 of my presentations:

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/1857261/Whiner-Jerkins-All-Hands...

I told you so.
I tend to agree with the article here. There might be some immediate, apparent benefits to just showing the password, but in the long run a hidden password is helping the user more.

It's frustrating to mistype a password and not realize it, sure, but it's much, much worse to have your password fall into the wrong hands just because someone happened to look at your screen at the right moment.
I think that's great. It's cool as a feed for new stuff happening too. Congrats.
Agreed (obviously haha). There are so many web apps coming out every day it's almost too much! How do you keep track of all of that? Launchly! :-)
How many people died from cold? How many from heat?

Note that I'm not restricting my query to Europe. Feel free to explain which people should count and how much.
I read one of your previous comments about being able to scale Tokyo Cabinet up to 1TB. I'm having trouble even uploading wikipedia dataset. I seem to run into a wall anytime my database exceeds the size of my ram. This is after I set bnum, xmsiz, and other properties. I would love to get in touch you with you about how you tuned TC..
When you're writing Clojure code, you generally are supposed to prefer Clojure features and idioms. Functions like proxy and gen-and-save-class exist because sometimes you have to create classes to use other Java APIs.
Don't look a gift horse in the mouth. Personally, raganwald is a much better writer than me, so I look forward to the opportunity to fork his blog and claim it under my own namespace.
I don't really know much (anything) about this service but based on it being the "twitter of video" I would like to point out that video requires more of my attention so the content they offer would have to be dramatically better to interest me. I can read an entire page of my Twitter feed in about 10 seconds skipping the stuff I don't care about easily. I doubt I can watch 10 seconds of Seesmic and get any value out of it. Of course the other obvious problem is you can post video to Twitter by pasting a URL in. Whoever dumped $12M into this company didn't anticipate users were intelligent enough to use URLs to point to videos or assumed that any video content automatically appeals to users more than text. Either way, wrong.
From Neilsen's article: But password masking and Reset buttons are not something users actively seek out.

Reset buttons might not be, but password masking sure is. There's nothing quite as startling as seeing your password in plaintext. Not having the bullets is just going to make you look insecure, and appearances matter in the psychology of security. You don't want your users feeling insecure.

Even if this wasn't a daft idea, he's beginning to contradict himself, anyway:

It's therefore worth offering them a checkbox to have their passwords masked

contradicts his claim on his "Reset buttons must die" piece:

The extra choice requires extra thinking, and the time saved by using an optimal interaction technique is often smaller than the time wasted on having to think instead of just moving ahead with a single interaction technique that is always used.

So for all the time you save by seeing your password in the clear, you lose by having to deal with the extra checkbox.

Also worth noting: browsers have autofill these days. Just loading a page on one of these browsers would be enough to disclose your passwords. Forget shoulder surfing, just create a diversion, browse to a few sites on the victim's computer, and you've got the lot.
I remember hearing about an ants simulator done in Clojure but didn't know the full scope of it. Thanks for that!

Speaking of this, the Sync video on TED is pretty cool and touches on complex behavior arising from simple rules: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/steven_strogatz_on_sync.ht...
The feeds link to this copyright statement:

The accounts, descriptions, data and presentation in the referring page (the "Materials") are proprietary content of MLB Advanced Media, L.P ("MLBAM"). Only individual, non-commercial, non-bulk use of the Materials is permitted and any other use of the Materials is prohibited without prior written authorization from MLBAM. Authorized users of the Materials are prohibited from using the Materials in any commercial manner other than as expressly authorized by MLBAM.

http://gdx.mlb.com/components/copyright.txt
Read the starting strength book (has 147/154 5 star reviews on Amazon, the other 7 are 4 star): http://www.amazon.com/Starting-Strength-Practical-Coaching-B...

Barbells are only 45 pounds. I can't imagine that anyone would start off deadlifting or squatting less than that. The only exercise that you might need to start with dumbbells with is the press, maybe also bench if you're really out of shape or female. Doing the dumbbell variations of the major exercises is ok, but the reason I didn't mention them is because most people can do 45 pound lifts.

But you're right, you need to be careful to do the lifts right. The SS book is several hundred pages only devoted to the exercises in the program (squats, bench, power clean, press, and deadlift) and is an excellent guide to make sure you're doing every exercise correctly.