skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But they'll go to the Flash website to install the new plugin when it tells them to.

I think it's the difference between a little dialog helpfully pointing the way to the software they need to use (and the icon that they click on still being the same) and having to actively seek out an upgrade.
The way you feel about new software releases taking up the top spots on HN? That's the way I feel about comments arguing that something doesn't belong on HN.

(See also http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
Most Dead Newspapers Not Doing Well Online
I'm still running Ubuntu 8.10, anyone get the release running there yet and want to share how they did it? Ideally I'd like to avoid trashing my old 3.0.11 install or profile...
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There's no way fetching IDs then fetching each row one-by-one is faster than SELECT * with the the same WHERE clause, especially taking into account roundtrip times and whatnot. His measurements are wrong (eg. due to caching) and/or he's confused.
I think one reason Linux user interfaces have been catching up with Windows (if not Mac) is that for the past ten years or so, desktop-app usability has remained stagnant (or, in the case of MS Office, regressed).

Twenty years ago, Apple and Microsoft had to convince non-geek consumers that personal computers were worth buying, and so they had an incentive to make their products as usable as possible (given the constraints of cost and technology). Now that consumers see personal computers as things that they have to use whether they like it or not, there's not as much incentive to use the UI. Instead, people shell out their own money (or, if they're lucky, their employers' money) to take "how to use Microsoft Office" classes.
Now that Thrust Vectoring (OWNS THE SKIES! THIS THING TURNS ON A DIME, MACROSS ZERO STYLE!) is more common we should see an upsurge in new aircraft designs that are of a flying wing style then, right?
Yeah, but the HN community follows the development of browsers, internet software etc., with special attention. So it is essential that we discuss our thoughts about the software that matters to us most.
Ask HN: Virtual PBX recommendations?
So I need a virtual PBX for my company - any recommendations? I've tried grasshopper.com and I'd like some other options.

Any suggestions?
"If I had my time again, I would dedicate myself to making just enough to live comfortably (say £30m or £40m) as quickly as I could, hopefully by the time I was 35. I would then cash out immediately and retire to write poetry and plant trees. "

I thought this was an interesting remark, particularly as it would 'only' put him in the "lesser rich" band defined at the end of the article. It makes me wonder why he picked that particular amount, whether it marks a decent balance between effort and reward, or just a decent income off the interest for savings.
"::" wouldn't work, because it's ambiguous at compile time. Personally I would have preferred ":::", but at some point it turned into a [bike-shed discussion](http://www.bikeshed.com/), and then a few of the core developers made a judgement call. I don't think they realised how controversial a choice they'd made, or perhaps they just didn't think it through, but once the pick was made, there was really no turning back, because of the politics. That's php core for you, and honestly I think it's a major flaw of php.

It's sort of the same way that GOTO entered the language too.
Comments aren't even comparable to stories in terms of signal to noise ratio. Also, I'm not happy about the fact that I violated the guidelines, but I felt it necessary.
60 Minutes covers present and future mind reading technology [vid]
Probably when the developers are so rich they don't need money for food or rent.
Canada has also one-tenth the population of the United States. Which is confined mostly to a 150km corridor on the United States border.
you can post custom javascript on tumblr. That means you can do pretty much anything you want.
this is fun ! let me think

I had a job as a cleaner at a shopping centre which i did at night times, i had a friend who was doing that full time and he asked me if i wanted to help, pay was good cause i was 13 so any money was good :P I first used those scissor sweeps, then i did some of the mopping then finally i got to use the buffing machine.

Then i worked in dominos pizza. I was making pizza's and chopping and boxing them, never did counters for some reason.

Then i worked at a call center as one of those annoying people that call you in the middle of the day to sell you phone plans and phone deals. Wasnt to bad a pay. This was during uni summer holidays between 1st year uni and 2nd year uni.

Finally between 2nd and 3rd year of uni i got a job as a developer coding perl cgi's. I was coding online shopping carts and delivering dynamic content for this small shutters company ....

Once i graduated then it was real world work ... consulting firms, systems engineering, realtime stuff, architect etc etc, been like that for the past 6 years and now hoping to graduate from this 9-5 cycle to the one finally owning the company :)
Good - that makes sense then.

Other thoughts:

#1 - things almost always take longer than you expect despite what others tell you. It takes 3-6 months to close a round of small financing. It will probably take 1-3 months to find the right people to pitch to. It probably takes a month to find good attorneys+auditors+etc.

#2 - Leave time between pitches so that you can tweak. You will learn something from each pitch and you want time to add features/slides to your pitch deck/presentation.

I'm not trying to dampen the experience; I'm just making sure you understand that building a business takes time. Good luck to you both!
Allergies are not the only non-ethical reason some people choose to avoid certain foods, and it's also not a all-or-not situation. Those who are concerned with high levels of "bad" cholesterol, risk of colon cancer, too much "high-quality" protein, etc... may look to decrease or eliminate certain foods such as meat, milk or egg.

Also, I wonder if you think that "what you don't know can't hurt you" applies to other ethical concerns. If you're government tortures people but doesn't tell you, does that insulate either them or you from any ethical responsibility? Would you also believe, in that hypothetical case, that a journalist who brought the story to light only served to weaken the people's faith in the government, or is there value in uncovering deception which prevents people from exercising their ethical choices?
the new firefox is pretty fast and the new tab design looks good. I think I'll pause google chrome for a few days.

update: if you have issues with old addons in firefox 3.5, John Resig suggests you to do the following: Open about:config, right-click new boolean 'extensions.checkCompatibility', set false, restart. (via http://twitter.com/jeresig/status/2404695608)
IPhone 3G S: Hot or not?
Snapple Outsourcing Deal May Aid American Workers
The plural of anecdote is not data. They teach you that in edumacation :-P
Strangely enough, I'm using Linux precisely because proprietary software is painful to use. For example, searching for software with google to download it, trying to determine if the source is reliable, and clicking through a manual installer is way too tedious - it should be at my fingertips.

Also, at least when compared to Windows (where everyone and his brother seems to feel the need for a custom and flashy toolkit, even within Microsoft), Linux apps have mostly standardized on look and feel. Very few people seem to feel the need to reinvent the GUI toolkit and make something that looks completely out of place on Linux (except for the proprietary vendors, like Google, who seem to be ignoring the established human interface guidelines and completely inventing their own look for Chrome)

Finally, as a developer, being able to delve into the source of libraries when debugging is invaluable.
The Wireless Future of Energy Tranfer
China Limits Use of ‘Virtual’ Currency Used In Online Gaming
State surplus in south carolina does not take servers any more. they are junked even if they have warranty on them. They cant sell them to other agencies much less the public
Windows 7, Snow Leopard, and revisionist history
Crikey. And I thought that baby-boomers were self-obsessed and whiny... I guess their kids are even worse.
I have to run various versions of Firefox for testing purposes. What I've done is to download the binary from their homepage and then run them with the appropriate command line:

/path/to/firefox2 -no-remote -P ff2

/path/to/firefox3 -no-remote -P ff3

-no-remote allows me to run separate profiles at the same time, -P specifies a profile name. So they don't run updates on, or ruin the other profile.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Command_line_arguments
To an extent. But if you assume that "constitution" or its parts is heritable to the degree that most IQ and personality traits are (roughly 60%) there is still a lot most people can do to improve their situation and abilities.
with late static bindings, hopefully the php-activerecord project will get more attention and users since 5.3 is out of release candidates.

http://github.com/kla/php-activerecord/tree/master
Ask HN: How do you evaluate web design firms?
A friend who will be running for public office in a US state recently asked me for recommendations on web design firms. I could not suggest any that are known for designing for political candidates, and am wondering: What do you look for in a web design firm? Are there any specific things to look for or avoid?

Thanks.
there appears to be no content here. it's just a post with some links.

probably shouldn't submit EVERY entry from your blog.
(Figured a third edit might be inappropriate.)

Aside from TraceMonkey and the new Gecko, my favorite new feature (in theory) is probably the DNS Prefetching:

https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Controlling_DNS_prefetching

I say in theory because I haven't run any objective tests, but, subjectively, things do seem to load a bit faster.
I'd say it also applies to new cars too(leasing). if you plan to replace your car after 3-4 years, I found out that you end up losing the same amount of money, and in many cases you actually save money.

i.e. you lease a car, you end up paying 10K in payments. But if you finance it, you end up paying 25K in payments, and get 15K back when you sell it privately. And the number is even less if you trade in, which you might consider since selling a car is a pain in the ass(unless you are sell it way below market value)

But when you lease, you don't have to worry about selling it, you just turn it in. And even if you ever end up going over the limit, pretty much every dealer will forget the overcharges/damages, if you lease another car from them.

And even if you plan to keep the car, leasing is the best option, since essential it's a 3-4 year test drive. You pretty much get to find out EVERYTHING about the car, before you decide to keep it long term. And in the end, you will be able to see what the market is like...in many cases when you lease a popular car that keeps it's value, the buyout is less than the current market value of the car.
Body-hacking: Tim Ferris's next book & request for help.
Ask HN: Sites using pop-up login windows without HTTPS? (e.g. Digg)
Am I missing something when I see sites like Digg not using HTTPS for login and passing plain text passwords? I thought you always needed HTTPS for login form submission.

The reason I'm asking is to figure out if we should be doing this for our startup. Any insight would be appreciated.

Here is a picture I took with FireBug showing Digg's login window:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2488/3674881101_b946ecf39f_o.png

Thanks in advance!
If you don't like it, flag it.

It IS an unpopular opinion, because whining is always unpopular.

I downvoted your comment. It is not well reasoned, or even properly contrary. It's whiny and weak. Please don't do this again.

I prefer to see these articles. Apparently 40 or so people agree with me as of writing this comment. I'm not "rewarding these users with karma", I'm expressing my desire to be alerted of new Firefox versions when I check HN.
Click-able link to the picture: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2488/3674881101_b946ecf39f_o....
The point that really drove home with this presentation was the malleability of Ruby. Rails really has made a web dev DSL out of Ruby. Rake has done the same for automation, and I think you'll soon see MacRuby become an exceptional DSL for making OS X apps.

This, I think, is the what makes Ruby such a bag of awesome. It has familiar syntax, and has borrowed a ton of great ideas from a variety of different languages to make it powerful. I've learned more from fooling around with Ruby (and the concepts it incorporates) than any CS class I've taken so far, props to Matz for making a fun language.
At first, when you viewed the spreadsheet, you saw a richer interface that:

(1) popped a little message when others started viewing, with their logged-in Google username

(2) offered an expandable chat sidebar

(3) showed each others' active selection-area via different selection colors (correlated with colors in the char sidebar)

The warning was fair but it was actually kind of interesting. I think the best case mixing fairness-of-disclosure and options-to-viewers would be a link to the static doc, but another link on the static doc allowing upgrade to the interactive interface (perhaps with a hint of what you'll see and reveal if doing so).

Dug up from my browser history, this was the original link, which reveals your logged-in Google username to other simultaneous document viewers:

!!! http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=rC4oeGjG_04iG63oBJvy2...
Shouldn't your central location be your rss reader? Most of the projects you mention have low-traffic announce feeds that only post on release.

You are basically demanding that a scarce public resource (HN front page) be used up to satisfy a need you could take care of on your own.

It's kind of humbling to see the tragedy of the commons playing out so clearly here.
Since your posting this on HN, you might be interested in rolling your own. This site outlines how to setup a VPS with asterisk and connect it to a VOIP provider:

http://www.pbxer.com/
I downvoted your comment. It is not well reasoned, or even properly contrary. It's whiny and weak. Please don't do this again.

Obviously I don't believe my comment is whiny and weak, but I'll take whiny and weak over condescending and abrasive any day. Whatever makes you think you deserve to talk about my opinions in such a way, you haven't earned it. It's also not what this site is about.

I will say however, in the spirit of your comment, I've removed the part about downvoting.
PHP: goto - Manual
Cracking the Autism Riddle: Toxic Chemicals,
To get great usability - you need paying users clamoring for it. To implement it, you need central control around a unifying cognitive model.

Open source is bad at usability because FOSS projects are controlled by committees that can't even assign tasks, let alone create and enforce coherent cognitive models and elegant interfaces that express them.

You could have good FOSS usability - if you had a central company driving the development. As in Firefox. It just hasn't happened many times so far, because people are willing to pay for good closed-source interfaces in most problem domains.
When will you be writing a book? Everyone knows you have one in you; and I bet more than a few people would buy it.
The iPhone 3GS: Should You Get It?
These articles are getting really fashionable lately, but the thing is that for many applications, a relational store is what fits your model. And RDBMS systems scale for most purposes. The things that don't scale are basically things that other systems don't have as features.

Key-value stores: you can only query by the key. So, you can say "give me article 7", but you can't say "give me articles by author 5". That's a huge limitation and doesn't allow you to make many applications. Now, key-value stores definitely have their place. For some purposes, they allow you to get better speed and scalability. However, I wouldn't want to be running my whole site off it alone.

Column based databases: these are wonderful for data warehousing and map-reduce like operations. However, that comes at a cost, namely random access. If your data is stored as 1,John;2,Adam;3,Samantha;4,Amanda you're easily able to grab all the columns for a person. However, if it's stored (as in a column database) as 1,2,3,4;John,Adam,Samantha,Amanda it becomes difficult to reconstitute a random row since the data isn't stored together. And what are you likely to be doing with your web application? Sure, I might want to analyze all the values in a column sometimes, but more often than not, I'm going to want to get the data for a row.

This isn't the end of the RDBMS. It's just more useful and a better tool for a lot of what we do. And we don't just have to use one tool. We can easily use key-value stores to supplement an RDBMS where the key-value store is a better tool - like caching. There's a reason that RDBMS systems are so widely used on high-profile sites including to power Facebook, Wikipedia, and WordPress.com (the 4th, 7th, and 20th most visited sites on the web worldwide). An RDBMS isn't the only tool they use, but it's good at data storage that needs to be accessed randomly. Sure, it needs to be supplemented by other techniques when you get to high volume so that operations that don't need an RDBMS don't use it, but there's a reason that Flickr, Craigslist, Twitter, Digg, LinkedIn, del.icio.us, LiveJournal, StumbleUpon, and many more of the largest sites use them.
This operation has the loose, fly-by-wire feeling that startups do, and it's also trying to do something very technical (and illegal). You get the feeling from reading the article that, while they have a great vision, the actual execution is tentative, start-stop, and incremental. It sounds like fun.

I think they could really help advance research in this area. They are doing something necessary and very helpful, and there is tremendous upside.

But heck if I'd want to be doing it.
Not many people use https (security certificate hassles, etc.) for login, unless you really need it. Depends on the app right? For a bank it makes sense, for HN/Digg not so much.
I completely agree. Unless the database is doing something odd (ok, not out of the question I guess) like ignoring an index on the id column, it just doesn't seem logical that performing 48 more queries would be faster than allowing the database engine to run it all at once.
It's fine. I use it to run Solaris 10 and Windows XP on my MBP.
Look at their portfolio to make sure they are capable of doing the functions you need. You'd be surprised how many of "web design" firms can only do very basic things.
The math that killed Lehman Brothers
Perhaps I'm unusual, but I find the dicussion is often as interesting as the link (perhaps not for this item :-). And you don't get that on an announcements RSS feed.
Radio Waves Now Can Travel Faster Than Light.
You're not technically required to use SSL for login forms, but it's a terrible idea not to. To say it's trivial to capture plain text login information might be the understatement of the millennium. It's basically a step up from not using any password at all. It can be tempting not to bother with an SSL certificate on a site that does not store personal information, but you're really doing a disservice to your users by not providing secure logins.
Sneak Peek: What's On Tap for Firefox in 2010
If your priority is to always drive a new car, then leasing might make sense. If your priority is building wealth at the expense of looking flashy, it is a terrible, terrible, terrible idea.

My priority is to make my first $1M, then worry about the model year of my car.
Hackers blamed for wave of fake death tweets
The Pirate Bay sold. Users urged to become capitalists.
In my experience if you plan to keep the car, leasing is a horrible option financially at least. My girlfriend recently bought out a 2006 Honda CRV after a three years lease, and she ended up paying more than $10k above the nominal price. [To add insult to injury, in CA when Honda gives you the buyout quote, it doesn't include the sales tax and (I think) the registration fee. Once the transaction is finalized you may realize you have to pay a few more k to the DMV.]

If you want to drive a new car every three years, then I'm guessing leasing could be better or similar than buying if you finance close to 100%. Whether you should change cars every three years if you can't afford the downpayment is another question.
Court clears way for Cablevision to offer remote-storage DVR
Wouldn't it make more sense then to have a post about a specific new feature/change/bug of the software in question, rather than a general announcement?
Apparently this used carbon dust in the glue of the laminate to act as a radar stealthing material:

http://www.newlaunches.com/archives/the_retro_horten_229_ste...
OCD is one problem that is more common among Aspie's than in the general population; probably because some quirks in autism already tend that way (like flapping, rocking, and obsessive interests).
It's not about being dazzled. When you go on a road trip, you rotate the tires, check the brakes, wash the windows, change the oil and fill it up with gas - and not because it's dazzling, but because you need to be prepared for the road ahead. Not to mention you must be able to maintain the pace with the other vehicles on the road.

"Dazzling" will come (or so the rumors say) but right now it's about being competitive, useful and functional.
There are many niches looking for different kinds of people. That is an easy way a majority can stick out. They don't all stick out to the same people.
Firstly, open source does (or can easily) have one big usability advantage: installing things, assuming it's on a repository, is much easier. Or, at least, it's very close to there; I haven't asked a lay user how useful they find the "Add Application" menu in Gnome. But assuming it's not already done right, once it is, that's a huge advantage.

Secondly, so we've admitted that non-company-backed open source projects can have good code, making for a good backend. So the economic model does work. What we need now is for more non-developers (UI designers, artists, etc) to join this movement. I think that it's slowly happening. Tech savvy ones would be more likely to join, and as it becomes more and more inviting I think the less savvy will join as well. I can't think of any specific reason this economic model applies to developers more than others, so I think that over time, UI will become good for the same reason the code is good.
Isn't the main problem for OSS adoption advertising? If you are a graphic artist and don't give a rat's behonkus about computers do you really dig until you find the GIMP(and the continual slog for documentation and understanding) or do you read graphic artist monthly with big color Photo Shop ads, Photo Shop books on B&N's book shelves, and training courses. The choice is just about made for you, in their world Photo Shop exists the GIMP doesn't.
DNS Cache Poisoning Explained
I ran VirtualBox on my MPB for nearly a year. It was a fantastic platform to run XP under for web development testing. It works very seamlessly.
I agree with you, I don't understand what point the author is trying to prove.

I truly think that mixing code and requests is acceptable only for small projects. Not a single word about stored procedures, which are in a way an abstraction of your database logic.
25 Incredibly Useful WordPress Cheat Sheets & Checklists
Here are 25 general and theme-based WordPress resources that can turn even the most novice webmaster into a WordPress guru.
Podcast interview with Peter Sunde from Pirate Bay about their unusual exit
Why Not Try A Scientific Approach To Science Education?