skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For me, at least, I think "pickup" (and "pickup line") has something of a negative connotation. An "ice breaker" seems more neutral. It's about getting things started, not "sealing the deal".

I also think "pickup lines" tend to be ascribed more to men. Maybe "ice breaker" would also be a bit more gender neutral (if you are interested in marketshare in both genders).

P.S.: I'm both a bit older and a bit of a wallflower, so my perceptions may be off.
Some rough figures:

IE7: 0% (base, 1x)
IE8: 24% faster (1.24x)
FF3: 73% faster (1.73x)
FF3.5: 183% faster (2.83x)
Opera 10: 196% faster (2.96x)
Chrome 2: 354% faster (4.54x)
Safari 4: 427% faster (5.27x)

Personally I use Safari because I prefer WebKit (it being fast is nice too), but I'm very impressed with Firefox 3.5. It makes a very good development environment with all the extensions available for it! :)
Indeed. Simple formula for minimizing car expenses: Buy a used (3-5 yr old) Honda or Toyota sedan. Drive it until total annual cost of repairs exceeds the cost of another used Honda/Toyota, and/or it falls apart. Repeat.
Haven't read the full paper, but this caught my eye: The world economy, which now doubles in 15 years, would soon double in a week to a month

According to the book "The Birth of Plenty" by William J. Bernstein, the world's wealth has been growing at a steady rate of 2% since 1820. Not sure where the disagreement comes from. Maybe the author of the article doesn't make a correction for inflation?
Venture Maven: Venture Capitalists and Angel Investors on Twitter
Agreed, but the quote was from when you are already filthy rich. But it applies to many people in this country, since getting a new car every 4 years is so popular.

Personally I'm a fan of finding a good deal on a used car, buying it, driving it for 1-2 years, and then selling it for the same amount I paid for it. Pretty much the only cost this way is a) insurance(which you can save a few extra bucks by getting only liability) b) gas c) 2-3 oil changes.

And since you are owning the car for a short period, you won't get hit by any costly repairs.
And then we can have headlines such as

* "Is <this> the <that> killer?"

* "Look out <that>, here comes <this>!

* "10 reasons <that> is dying"

and so on.
Argh. I want to love Firefox 3.5. Really, I do. Modern web standards. Faster. Smaller memory footprint. Native Aqua widgets (effing _finally_).

The problem is, compared to Chrome and Safari, it's a dog.

I've been running the nightly (Shiretoko) for weeks now, and, like everyone else, I'm hopelessly addicted to various extensions during heavy browsing sessions (development, etc).. but when I want to pop up a browser, check something quickly, and move on with my life, Safari is the browser of choice. The initial launch speed and JS performance are orders of magnitude faster.

Gecko is a great layout engine, but my gut feeling is that XUL and friends are holding it back. Agree? Disagree?
Entrepreneur or Startup. A list of top conferences you should be attending.
What economic model are you referring to?
It is this result of "good lazy" app developers that has helped move FOSS in the right direction, IMO. Aptitude and GTK are the best things to happen to Linux since Linus.
You might offer a way for users to get backup of their images on some media. They might feel more secure knowing that they can get hard copy of their data by courier if they wish.
I don't even say it, usually, and when I do say it, I'm sure my tone reflects the fact that I'm eternally dissatisfied with my efforts. You can't win. If you're satisfied with yourself, you're obnoxious, and if you're dissatisfied with yourself, you're implicitly criticizing anyone who does less.
I find the notion of getting rich in order to write poetry kinda silly.

It does not take a million dollars to write great poetry.

It takes a pen, a piece of paper, and a poet.
It's even worse on Linux. FF performance on Ubuntu/Gnome was pretty bad. Starting up, scrolling and even window resizing made me feel like I was using a Pentium II. I want back to OSX+Safari. I only fire up FF when I need Firebug.

On the other hand, FF on Windows is blazing fast. So I doubt it's just XUL.

Edit: wow, they did Safari-like pixel-precise touchpad scrolling (OSX). Very nice.
Online music education 
Online music education will let you experience a new way of learning through the help of instructional music dvds. This will let you learn to play musical instrument in a fast and simplest approach with help of online music education and dvds music instructions.
Same here, I've been running the Firefox 3.5 RC's on my Gentoo x86 system for a few days now, and it just keeps crashing, at least once every 5 minutes. Opera, even the 10.00 Unite Alpha (which is what I'm using), is just so much faster and stable.
But even if we did it in this naive way, the total execution time is still a very reasonable (48 3 ms) + 260 ms = 404 ms*

I can't read things like this and avoid wondering why people keep reading him. He is so wrong so often I ... it's just beyond me.

Query execution time is just one part of performance. You still have to create the connection and transfer all the data across the wire. Sending N records in 1 big package is much more efficient than sending N+1 records in individual packages.

Run a performance measure on the actual code execution and I am almost positive you'll get worse performance than would be indicated by your query execution times alone.

From now on, I'm flagging every codinghorror post.
As mentioned, OSS projects often lack the "unifying cognitive model". I've also found that with iphone apps, users expect a high level of polish on an app. (A little drop-shadow here, a little shine there, move that button 1-pixel to the right, etc.) It's tedious and fiddly work, and I only bother because I don't want to lose a sale. People often say about 80% of the app is interface - with the iphone, i'd say it's closer to 95%.

If OSS projects were able to motivate developers to work on the boring stuff like graphics and layout, the apps would look a lot better and adoption on the desktop would certainly shoot up.
I know that one example does not a complete refutation make, but:

http://adium.im/
The electronic gift economy. People collaborating and working for free to produce electronic goods.

The point of the article is that, so far, open source only works when there's a company behind it, and companies are structured the way they are, I would argue, because of their profit motive.
That's the conventional wisdom, but I'm not sure I believe it. It takes (much) longer for an app's usability to mature without some central arbiter, but "you need" it is far too strong a statement.
Review of Stanford Programming Methodology Lectures
"So it is just a theory."

As in Theory of Evolution, or Theory of Gravity? I think you meant "hypothesis" or "conjecture".

I don't want to put words in your mouth; I'm frustrated by the widely varying possible meanings of the word "theory" that makes some discussion more confusing than need be.
Now I start to understand better why HN readers oppose CH.
...but could still have Dad work a blue-collar job - and still have a nice (small) house in the suburbs with a picket fence

Fallacy. Home ownership in the population has increased by ten percent since the 50's. Your dad had less of a chance at home ownership then than you do now.
How about we limit it to 1000 application/utility/developer notification to 1 Celebrity passing away notification?

And honestly - Firefox, Wireshark, PHP, Virtualbox are pretty important, do not get released frequently, and the _only_ place I heard about them being released (and I"m a major news junkie) was at HN.

Would you believe me if I told you that I seemed to have note of MJ's death on other web sites (and we still felt it necessary to post it here as well)

Techcrunch, who _specializes_ in discussing App Launches didn't mention these four (that I could see, they might be buried somewhere) primarily because they are more hacker related, and don't apply to their general audience.

Let's not get too hyper critical here on HN like some editors do on Wikipedia and decide that the only relevant content that should be posted is that which meets our own approval, and realize that there is a broad hacker community for whom the release of Firefox, Virtualbox, PHP and Wireshark should all be important events.
Automatic load adaptation tends to require more smarts about this sort of stuff than you can assume in the general case. See the complaints about amazon ec2 auto-scaling for examples.
I haven't verified that Digg does this, but most big sites that do logins over http do some sort of hashing on the client side so that the actual password isn't sent plaintext.

As has been mentioned, there are all sorts of issues with using https, and for sites where security isn't a huge concern (it's always important, but not as much for a site like HN vs. a bank), hashing client side and sending the data over plain http can be enough.
unitasking - also known as do one thing and do it well
Truly, this is a novel and intriguing opinion.
Welcome to the same life that everyone one of us has lived, all the way back to your parents. The particulars of your concerns, worries, feelings, and fears may be different, but the fact that you have them is not.
Wont they be working at Oracle soon?
Having a central repository that handles version dependencies and upgrades ... is great.

But let's be honest here: whenever a newer version of a software package is released, it can take months before it enters sid on Debian, or in Ubuntu, and these are the better-maintained distros.

And if you want to distribute proprietary software, maintaining multiple packages for multiple distributions and multiple versions, is hell-like.

And regarding interface guide lines, I do not agree that Linux apps have a standard. Quite the contrary.
You can also get great usability from a lead developer with taste, and people that are actually interested in using the software.

Profit is certainly not the only incentive that drives people. Saving time and effort by fixing problems (usability and otherwise) is also a great motivator.
I haven't worked in a Windows-based environment in a while, but I do recall in the Fx 2.x days that it was significantly faster on Windows. Perhaps this is just a case of Mozilla catering to the largest audience.

If that's the case, then I applaud the effort, as getting the masses moved from IE[6/7/8] to Firefox 3.5 is certainly a more valuable effort than besting Safari performance on Mac OS X. There's just a big part of me that hopes they can achieve both. :-)
The End of Flamebait (Might be Upon Us)

Am I the only one who is getting tired of, "I found a new thing! The old thing is dead!"

Pretty much everything I've ever needed to do was easily accomplished with a DBMS with alternate indexing, either BTree or bitmap transaction. If I run into a jam, I'd be glad to take a look at additional options. I won't get rid of my DBMS any sooner than I'd get rid of my car just because of the advent of the personal helicopter.
The one feature I've noticed so far is that the page renders much faster than it used to. I guess this is the "speculative rendering" changes made to Gecko (FF's layout engine). In fact, it made me realize that a lot of page loading time is probably due to slow-loading ads or scripts, not because the actual website or my connection is slow.
"My mother’s are the best rice and beans ever."
Jeff is really doing us all a disservice here. Now I'm going to have junior programmers fighting me, citing published evidence that running a thousand queries is actually faster than running a single query with a thousand rows returned.
There are so many levels to the performance that measuring the surface and making a generalization is practically useless. I find the comments on the article even more baffling. Here are a couple relevant questions:

1. What is the scope of the data context used for these queries? Caching that is keyed by id is done within the scope of the data context:
http://blogs.msdn.com/dinesh.kulkarni/archive/2008/07/01/lin...

2. Is the code being run co-located with the database server? If so, this is atypical and these times do not include network overhead.

There are many more questions...
This talk may shed some light (see from the 34min mark).
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-70340283662490833...
The resulting Global Digital Elevation Map covers 99% of the Earth's surface, and will be free to download and use.

Who'll be first to integrate this, google maps or bing, or somebody else? Who ever it is, I can't wait.
We're certainly on the same page with some of the celebrity stuff.

I also agree with you that they are important to the broader hacker community. I'm just convinced that the volume of important events will become overwhelming if trends continue. It is not my intention to minimize the importance of the software.
I've been running firefox 3.5 release candidates for the past couple weeks, and its been pretty fast and it hasn't crashed at all
Coordinating The Onehub Cloud
And yet it never works out that way on very many projects. Why is that?
During my high school years I delivered dry cleaning in my neighborhood in upper Manhattan. Great exercise. :)

I learned a few things about business, also learned how to use a steam presser for assorted fabrics. (Watch out for silk!)

Tried to learn some Chinese from the owner, but I failed big time. :(

I got to listen to assorted Chinese music when pressing clothes or working the counter. It was interesting, but it never really grew on me as something pleasurable.
The ubiquity of Coca Cola
Without a central arbiter, an app's usability never matures.
I graduated in 2002 and got a "crappy" programming job for 38k. I mentioned I only made that to a friend who said she had worked for 30 years and never made that much money. A few years later I was unemployed for 6 months and I still made far more money that year than she did.

It's not that we can't get waitress just so much as it's a drop in the bucket. Heck, my unemployment check paid more than an entry level job for far less effort.
It takes more than that. It also takes a lack of other concerns, like how you are going to pay the rent. Stress kills artistic creativity, for me at least.
Startup checklist cartoon
Programming in Lua [free book]
GIMP and Inkscape are not ready for prime-time. (And as always at this point: They lack proper support for CMYK, Fonts, Color-Management, Workflow in big publishing and printing shops.) Never mind the usability desaster that the GIMP represents for anyone who is accustomed to PS.
Yeah - I'm seeing this as well.

The real thing I've noticed - and this happens every time that a major new rev comes out - is how much my browsing experience depends on various extensions. Sure, stock Firefox works, but in order for it to be the incredible tool I'm used to I need five or ten separate extensions there. It's almost as it Firefox is more a browsing platform (which allows others to develop extensions that work for me) than a straight-up browser.

In other news, where's my PTTL and Google Gears!
But that's the philosophy of those distros such as Debian, Ubunutu and Fedora: Don't upgrade anything except security patches between releases.

If you want the bleeding edge packages, you need to install it yourself from an add-on repo (once you set it up, its just as easy as `apt-get install newpkg`. Or, pick a rolling-release distro that caters more towards having the latest packages available, such as Gentoo or Arch.
Being rich is half about having more money and power than others and half about having freedom to do pretty much whatever you want. The latter is absolute. So possibly a richer society in the future will have a higher standard of living, better health and lifespan and greater possibilities for how an average person can live his/her life. Not being obliged to work is probably the greatest improvement that can conceivably be available to most people.

But the relative "richer than"/"more powerful than" thing will never disappear - it has been here through all of human history and has to be there pretty much by definition.
Interesting. Could this central arbiter be a set of rules an principles, an algorythm? That would be a very complicated program, why not take a human mind? It's faster.
This is amazing...though I'm sure we'll quickly hear something along the lines that this 'Might cause cancer'...
Joshi, when I need a howto then I go and google for it.

And if I was particularly interested in getting everything from howtoforge then I'd subscribe to their RSS feed.

There is really no need to flood HN with random howtos. Please find other ways to promote that site. (For the record: all of his 201 submissions are howtoforge links).
"I just eyeballed Ruby and C, and I think you're better off not knowing a lot of this, and just keeping a whiffle bat next to your desk to use on any teammate that uses them."

Some of the Ruby things are quite useful and not all that obscure for many of us. Others are fugly, or clever for the sake of it. In any event, it's good to know why these things work, even if you don't use them.
I disagree. It certainly does happen, and there is plenty of usable open source out there, and lots of patches from users that increased usability. The problem is that it's hard to find people with taste. But this is true no matter what development model is used.

Toss in a lower barrier to entry with open source, and you end up with junk at the bottom. I suspect that if you took the top N proprietary and open source apps, you wouldn't find a usability difference. The average would only get dragged down if you include the half-finished releases of open source stuff that would never have made it to market in a proprietary environment.
There's nothing in this blog post that's blatantly wrong. There's also nothing in it that's news. It's not written better than other sources that have made the same point, which sources include several famous blog posts from usability and UI experts. The author isn't a usability or UI expert. In fact, I'm not sure who he is.
At least for me, usability isn't the point of free software. I want my free software to be usable, yes, and usability should be a goal for the development teams, but the overriding benefit of free software is that it is free. It puts the power back in my hands as an end user. Even if I don't have the technical skills to make use of that freedom, the freedom is important. This is something that "closed-source" applications don't have. If Microsoft made Office free tomorrow and it were easier to use than OpenOffice (it is, though that isn't saying much), I'd use it. But Microsoft Office has vendor lock-in problems and platform compatibility issues, and I'm not free to make it better. If people value usability over freedom, that is their choice. I don't begrudge them the headaches of a different sort that they are incurring.
I have a hard time reading an article about why CDS instruments are to blame when the author doesn't know what they are. CDS = Credit Default Swaps, not Credit Derivative Swaps. All it takes is putting CDS into Google, five seconds tops.

I also take issue with the fact that the unconcern for subprime risk was the insurance--that ignores the risk model they had that showed real estate value going up. They didn't care if subprime defaulted because they'd get the property which would be worth more than the note and they'd make even more money. They knew the gig would be up if the CDS had to be executed en masse, they just didn't think that would ever need to happen. It's not that they drove drunk because they had insurance, they didn't know they were intoxicated (only had one drink, I swear!).

So much for child prodigies.
There are some hilarious tax laws. I remember reading that PST was required to be charged if a web site was delivered on CDROM. If you delivered it digitally there was no PST.

The distinction here is whether you are selling software or working to build custom software. Clearly your clients are involved in the design, so it's not the same as buying a copy of Photoshop. So, no PST.

You should register for a business number with the feds and charge GST. Any GST you spend on expenses (e.g. laptop) will reduce how much GST you have to submit.
Here's what I did (using andyn's method):

Download the linux version of firefox 3.5 from http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/products/download.html?product=...

Untar and unzip firefox-3.5.tar.bz2:

tar xjf firefox-3.5.tar.bz2

Move the new firefox 3.5 directory to /usr/lib:

sudo mv ./firefox /usr/lib/firefox-3.5

Create a shell script to run firefox using andyn's params. Create a file (I called it firefox.sh) in /usr/lib/firefox-3.5/ with the following contents:

#!/bin/bash
/usr/lib/firefox-3.5/firefox -no-remote -P <profile_name>

Note: Substitude <profile_name> with whatever you want to call your Firefox 3.5 profile; just make sure when prompted at first-run you create a new profile with the same name.

Make the shell script executable:

sudo chmod u+x /usr/lib/firefox-3.5/firefox.sh

Simlink the shell script into the /usr/bin dir, or somewhere on your path:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/firefox-3.5/firefox.sh /usr/bin/firefox3.5

Run the script from the command line using:

firefox3.5

Enjoy!
This explanation is practically content-free. The metaphor it uses doesn't even properly model the problem. Also, DNS cache poisoning isn't an "arms race".
'math' killed? or stupid assumptions made by the analysts ?
I've also noticed that my FF instance uses a LOT less memory. Where the usual 60 tabs would take 400+ MB (and a max of 1gig+ sometimes) of memory, it now hardly goes more than 350 MB and an average of 275-300 MB
Exactly. Ten years ago a lot of people would have told you that you need central control of code and full-time work from paid developers in a central office with careful managerial oversight to build powerful software. And all those people, many of them "experts," were laughably wrong.

I think the concept of designing for usability has just been slower to enter the FOSS world. Only now are open source projects starting to grapple with how you do interaction design on a open source project. But throwing up our hands and assuming it will never happen just because it doesn't always happen right now is silly. How about we start recruiting non-developers to open source projects to run simple usability tests and report on their findings? It's not that developers will never work on usability, it's just that it's a difficult and foreign field to most of us, so we avoid the issue altogether.
Wow - that's incredibly cool. Thanks for sharing!

However, I don't want to roll my own - I have enough stuff that I've built and, for this, I don't want to write/maintain anything else. I just really want to pay someone else.
OSSEC version 2.1 released
High school (16 or so): McDonalds
College (18-20 or so): summer internships at Johnson and Johnson
It could be. But it has to be central, because the cognitive model must be cohesive. This is a productive line of thinking.
Beware of the significant differences between Kindle 1 and Kindle 2
The general announcement provides a page on which we can start threaded discussions on specific features, which can be quite useful, especially since many of the features significantly impact one another.
I guess what I'm saying is that something major would have to change for this to happen. The current FOSS processes can't produce good usability on their own. I am not personally aware of any FOSS software that excels at usability, without a central company driving development.

That being said, my knowledge is not exhaustive... maybe there are examples that I am not aware of.
I was a sophomore in college. I took a job at a small web development company writing PHP. I made minimum wage, about $7.25 at the time.

Not the greatest story to tell, but those roots got me where I am today.

:)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_default_swap#Description The terms are synonymous, apparently.
Solution to Deflation: Abolish Cash