skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Law Five: Finish the job -
Hopefully not your program: "Update has been downloaded. Have fun installing it. Bye!" -
Dunce: Wordpress

Law Six: Stay alive -
Hopefully not your program: "Software updated. Go have a coffee while I tear down all your work and restart myself." -
Dunce: Firefox, Windows

Law Seven: Get with the times -
Hopefully not your program: "You can't install that, it's brand new! Play it safe and use this two year old beta with many known vulnerabilities." -
Dunce: Ubuntu

(I gave up on the formatting, sorry)
It is for me, and has been for the better part of a decade now, but I have to admit that it gets harder and harder to squeeze the lemon as time goes by. Competition is fierce, the only thing that I figure that keeps us going is customer loyalty.
I take issue with much of what was said in this article. Many, if not all of the examples the author refers to are explicit in there statements and not being vague. Additionally, the results of the studies are available for review and carefully explain the reasons why some deaths were not inluded in the results.

The author is picking apart chosen pieces of text and apparently has not read the actual study results.
Why would someone think that in the age of multiple layers of compile-time optimization, jit, and in such a high level language of c#, this can make some difference?
What's the total profit from Xbox? Considering the complete package - total investment etc from start to finish? Quite a large loss.

There's been one clear winner and that's the wii - unless you're looking for something other than cold hard cash profit, and I suspect number of units in peoples living rooms.

In terms of hardware, the xBox absolutely sucks. I use it rarely because the thing is so loud with its 100 fans. I have a quieter washing machine. If MS were going after the 'living room multimedia device', they failed spectacularly. The large HDD is also rendered useless, since you still have to put game discs in for 'copy protection purposes'.
Not if the browsers implement it (which seems the best solution)
I'm reminded of Stallman's argument that holding prior art in reserve is a more useful tactic. Judges generally won't reconsider prior art the patent office was already aware of, even if they had failed to weigh it appropriately.
A good reason to make sure your nightly (or whatever) build process generates deliverable installers as early as possible, and then conduct all deployments (test, demo, beta etc.) via these installers. Stress points soon get removed.

Throwing a finished executable over the wall to some poor sod at -1 week away from ship date may deliver a poor experience.
sounds awful. So now you're putting a checkbox next to any password field?

Designers have to be aware that in some browsers there'll be a checkbox next to password fields.
Don't make it optional. Security over convenience.

I blogged about this here: http://is.gd/1wVja
I still crack up every time I see the "master programmer" part, which uses COM. The joke here is the ridiculous overhead that the COM boilerplate is putting in isn't even exaggerated -- most of this stuff would actually feature in a real-world program. (Of course, in a real-world program it would be a relatively smaller.)
Getting things done with Linux to-do list programs
Funny, how that is turning out, eh? What were your thoughts when you started kiko -- was it the thought of a sustainable business?
The simplicity of BuySellAds is the secret. It works without fuss. This posting may be biased but it's true nonetheless. The system works very well, at least for publishers. I haven't advertised et.
How a tiny button inside the password field like the "Browse" or "Choose file" in file upload field?
So, effectively, there is some sort of "what should be here" standard. It is not just "anything goes" as per the guideline.

This kind of article completely fails the "of more interest to hackers than other people" test, which I think is more relevant.
You can run the simulations on your computer as a screensaver:
http://www.spiderland.org/screensaver
I'm a lark in summer and a night owl in winter. I need to wake to daylight.
No, by now domain age and authority are most probably the single most important ranking factors of Google, among 200+ other so called "signals". I can see it in my SEO work. No domain age and authority means you can't rank in results even with substantial PageRank.
I missed the name too, but I took a guess it was a woman. I was with a Jewish friend today who'd mentioned that the jokes Sasha Cohen makes about Jews could only be made by a Jew or there'd be backlash.

I've had some decent discussions with feminists in the past, and their work on identity is really pretty interesting and valuable. But their numbers are totally screwed up - you know that "1/4th of all women have been raped" statistic? It's actually, "1/4th of women surveyed had sex that they wished they hadn't". I'll guess just as many men have had sex they wish they hadn't later.

I wonder why people cook up statistics to make their group's position look worse than it is. Do they think it helps in legislation or funding or education? The health people do it with STDs (greatly exaggerated risks), the drug people do it hardcore (I don't do any intoxicants, but alcohol is way more deadly and dangerous than half the illegal stuff in the USA), racial issues, ethnic issues, gender issues, sexuality, immigration, labor, etc, etc. It seems like tremendously many causes want to exaggerate their positions as worse off than they are, or the effects of choosing the other side as much worse than they are.

I think that'd be tremendously damaging to credibility in the long run, but I guess not many people check up on the science they read in the paper or see on the news.
Arthur Benjamin's formula for changing math education (video)
Untraceable Digital Cash, Information Markets, and BlackNet (1997)
That's true but you can make Google crawl your site even without PageRank. Think XML sitemaps and blog pings.
Charitable sub-sector and fund raising issue
Interesting psychology's site for students perfect analysis
> It's ok though. The BBC is happy with their set up

Who says we are ?

No everyone within the organisation agrees that Glow is wanted or was even needed. Certainly not everyone is happy with how this has come about.
Good. Been waiting for GOTO.
Sparkle is just awesome - and I really wish Apple had the guts to roll this sort of thing (if not simply roll Sparkle in) as a standard recommendation for all apps.

The problem isn't so much that apps are rolling their own updaters, it's the fact that these updaters are often extremely heavy-weight but aren't justifiably so.
I would think trusting the owner of the hardware is the big security problem, not switching to the secure versions of the protocols the apps use. Does Cisco expect people to buy hardware to conserve cycles on cheap cloud hosts?
Andy Rubin is the sort of deadwood that will spell Google's doom. What he says is no different from what already had existed on the mobile marketplace for years. It is called Windows Mobile.
You're kidding, right? Obsessing over (potential) micro-optimizations is a timeless programmer pastime. It will never go away.

Imagine something worse: suppose it had made a difference, in the current iteration of the compiler and the framework. Can you imagine the damage done by people who will now spread the word that "you must write the empty string this way and not that way", which would then continue to waste time forever, even after it's been rendered irrelevant?

This issue always arises when a language gives you two (or more) ways of accomplishing the same thing: naturally people will want to know which is the best way. Best in what aspect? Well, performance is the easiest one to objectively evaluate, so let's go with that. Cue an endless stream of benchmarks and criticism of said benchmarks, and very little reflection on how much it actually matters in terms of both programmer and user productivity.
Nonsense. There are people out there who have the goal "kill large numbers of people." Their motive is sometimes political, sometimes simply sociopathic... but the motive is irrelevant. If a fourteen year old boy can hack the train system and cause some minor damage (i.e. expensive train derailments) what could a motivated, fully grown adult do if they had that remote control instead? I suspect the answer is hundreds dead - maybe thousands with sufficient coordination and vulnerable systems.

A security hole like this is extremely dangerous due to the magnitude of its ignorance. Systems like mass transit should HAVE good engineers that spend time evaluating security risks and testing systems for robustness et cetera.

I doubt the hole would have been patched if someone called up their local Mass Transit Authority and said "Hey, uh, I've got this 0-day..."
A 14 year old boy exploiting it, on the other hand, is probably going to draw some attention to it, and that attention will likely get the hole fixed, potentially saving hundreds of lives in the future.

If GM built a car that killed its inhabitants when a radio station played a certain song, GM would be to blame, not the radio station.
Care to give some examples of things you learned?
"I wonder why people cook up statistics to make their group's position look worse than it is."

It's due to the fact that such groups by the nature of their lower status can't get through with their message. Nobody cared much for slavery in the US until Uncle Tom's Cabin came out back then among other gruesome real life accounts.
The average plight of downtrodden peoples just gets overlooked.
Compare the global hunger crisis to the swine flu scare. Nobody cares for all the food riots and tens of thousands dying of hunger daily etc. but people go crazy about a few flu deaths.

So basically you need something shocking to get attention, whether it's a statistic, story or whatever.
Someone on the Joel on Software discussion board noted that it would cost by hundreds of dollars ($600?) to paint a single wall.
I agree that this article straddles the line, but like you point out, it's a big fuzzy line. I think it's best to just flag and move on.
it's ripping stupid people off left and right

It's not ripping off if people clearly know what they are getting into.
checkbox? if the broswer implements it you dont need a checkbox (icon in the field, menu option, context menu option - plenty of neater ways to implement it than a checkbox)
I think there is a usecase/market where you offer an HTML-Interface to the form and save/send the results as pdf.
Imagine a job-application form at a big company where the applicants can fill the form online but the HR guys get mailed a pdf (which they are used to).
Maybe its out of scope for this site, but if you have the technology you may start another one.
It's not clear that storing data on physical devices which may be stolen is worse than storing it with a hosted service that is definitely accessible by a third party, some or all of its employees, and anybody who slips through their security, of which you have limited knowledge and control.

The common practice of storing data on internal servers is generally the most secure approach, and is also what "cloud computing" is primarily trying to replace.
by far my favourite:

http://www.animatedengines.com/vstirling.shtml
Good thing for kindergardens or elementary schools :-) Can't imagine it'll spread elsewhere though. Looks too messy.
Next time Yahoo hands over Chinese dissidents to the police we will be able to tell them that their "obeying by the laws" point is not valid, they don't abide by random laws elsewhere either.
I would expect most larks who frequent the site would miss this poll.
XXXL - Why are we so fat?
could have links to their diet

Replace that with could have been caused by aliens to see how ridiculous that sort of claim is. There is no reason to suppose that dying under anesthesia is related to the diet.

Also your analogy doesn't make any sense. Perhaps if they removed bikers that died in traffic accidents while not riding a bike. And then you could argue 'bikers behave differently in traffic, so perhaps biking was the cause'... yeah, and perhaps we should also take the phase of the moon into account, just to be sure...
Tanning Lotions
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Image slicing and CSS – Best for Designers to know aobut image formats.
TeachStreet Launches Payments Platform For Teachers
Another point, I think no matter which model you pick the best way to manage it is to have it in from the start and stick to it.

People may have no problem paying $10 a month for a service, but when that same service was previously free or at least free at there usage level there is going to be a backlash and if you are in an ultra competitive area like this one that could be a big problem.
Python vs Ruby « Lennart Regebro: Plone consulting
How to Protect your Personal Information
Identity theft is one of the biggest issues in America, both in digital and physical world. Actually, most of these incidents take place when people do not pay attention to specific points.
I don't know what slavic languages you have in mind, but in Polish, Scala does NOT mean a rock, it means "combines"
An Illustrated History of Failure (Paul Fenwick : OSCon 2008)
Javascript boolean interpretation
Electronic Health Records: A Texas Model
> but this study says nothing about the quality or intensity of the early birds vs. night owls.

Yes it does. Sleep length was fixed at 8 hours, and they acquired polysomnographic recordings of both nights spent at the lab and scored the sleep quality. ==> No statistical difference.

They controlled most controllable parameters. Read the paper and the supporting materials.
ScheduleOnce: Scheduling Software With Full Google Calendar Integration
Loux/JS-Kit CEO: Twitter killed comments
Flagged, this account was created yesterday and already we have 16 'kossovsky' links submitted. It's simple spam.
Ipod touch app reviews
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The New Wizard of the West - An interview with Tesla (from May 1899)
I've been a customer of the technology company behind this for a year ("Earth Class Mail"), and love their service -- scanning postal email is the equivalent for me of google voice transcribing voicemails.

I have used mail forwarders for about 12 years now -- starting when I was in the caribbean to do electronic cash development and it took ~6 weeks for mail to get to me, then when I lived on a tiny artificial island off the coast of the UK (Sealand/HavenCo), then with the military at APO/FPO around the world, and other remote sites.

Just forwarding mail adds one level of indirection, which is nice, but being able to scan/email or scan/portal the mail is the killer app -- often forwarding is high cost, high latency, and 90% of mail doesn't need to be forwarded, or if viewed first, can be forwarded with much less time sensitivity. Plus, there are a lot of vendors who ship none (or only some) of their products to APO/FPO/overseas, so being able to reship packages is great.

(there's also the whole cover order issue; basically traffic analysis for mail, without a warrant. Using multiple jurisdictions for this kind of thing might help, but it is irrelevant to many users)

Postal remailers are also great in that they let tiny startups have 24x7 mail coverage, let you appear to be local to a given market, etc. The combination of postal remailers and something like google voice is great for a distributed, small enterprise.
Ask HN: Best approach for taking on well funded competitors ?
I recently started a new project in a niche and have reached a stage where I am ready for release. But now I've had a look at some competitors and there is one company that has received $5m in funding and is in an identical space.

Their service has more bells and whistles, but mine is much simpler and quicker to use. What is the best approach to take on the competitor who receives about 100k uniques a month?

Given than I am only working on this project part time, I'm a bit wary of releasing early as I am developing alone and my approach could be mimicked quickly, even if I release often.

Has anyone else been in a similar situation and what approach did you take?. :)
Bah, looks like Cooliris to me. :/
SV Startup Palantir Software Blocks Illegal Gov Snooping
There was a recent study online, about how moderately overweight people have a slightly lower mortality rate than those with "normal" weight. The problems are with the morbidly obese end of the spectrum.

I can't find the study (anyone recall it?), but it seems compatible with the implication of this submission, that while being overweight might increase "age-related" deaths, it protects you against the others.
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I haven't read the studies. Still, why isn't it reasonable to think that a monkey that eats too little will die more readily under stress? You can remove clearly unrelated causes (e.g. monkeys run over by bicyclists), but it's not nearly so clear for anesthesia.
I've been in that situation, but we were 'all in', so, no part timers, just full timers.

Our competitor was funded with 30M and had two major brands supporting them through bundling deals. If it had not been for major mistakes on their side (fancy office, some idiot MBA as a CEO, out of control burn rate) I doubt we would have survived.

As it was though, we won the battle by simply outlasting them, as soon as the big money was spent and they still couldn't turn a profit the investors refused a second round and the company was shut down.

I recall one conversation with that CEO during a talk about a potential takeover and he told me that 'You are going to lose this, because we are playing chicken on the highway and we have just thrown out the steering wheel'. Not six months later they were history.
Online business strategy come to... Harvard Business Review
I think if you gave folks some public way of indicating their complain, instead of an anonymous/invisible flag, it might help. Sometimes people are just driven to do something publicly. After all, flagging might be the way HN works, but it's not necessarily the way people work.
The End of 3-Teared Architectures
Wow. WebKit is on fire. They're starting to make Mozilla look Microsoftishly slow.
The unstoppable Google
Franz Inc. Github Repositories
Trying to get everything ready for our recently announced launch in August (www.psonar.com)
Peer Pressure (misperception) boosts college drunkenness
Kinda makes me nervous: Whoops. Sorry! I thought I was in my office....

If you redefine common things, your expectations diverge from the norm eventually. This is a problem only in proportion to the consequences of error, so it's one argument for strict standardization of safety measures.
-"but still, nobody's forcing you to buy Madden games either."

And no one is forcing someone to bid on a Swoopo auction as well.
$5m funding means someone thinks the idea might have legs - so outrun them!

Difficult to do just part time but with a simpler approach you might just be able to do it but only if you release - then you can keep releasing with each step putting distance between you and them.
Just out of interest, what happened with your business? Are you still working on it or did your team exit?
Motorola VE75 Black
Motorola VE75 Black is going to rock the modern mobile technology world with its amazing features and attractive look. Motorola VE75 is the simple and amazing phones that have more attraction towards its beautiful dimension of 112 x 51 x 20 mm. its enormous screen resolution is of 240 x 400 pixels with huge size of 2.6 inches and having weight of 137 gm.
Looks cool, so I feel churlish complaining, but I'd prefer it if the speed was varied by changing the distance/rotation moved, rather than the time delay between frames. i.e. like true slow-motion from a high fps camera.

EDIT unfortunately, the approach he used precludes this: http://www.animatedengines.com/howto.shtml I guess it illustrates how rare it is to combine domain expertise (like that guy has), with an unrelated expertise in animation. If you have both (or access to them), you can make difficult things much easier, and so create value.
There was a bit of a backlash in Sweden for hype from feminists.

I'm enough on the fence that I voted you and the GP up. I do see where this is coming from.

A bit of the background:

Part of the local backlash was when a woman's house organization's boss stupidly came out as a heavy man hater during an interview. Now, some feminist arguments are exaggerated propaganda, but consider what kind of men she had interaction with daily... I can understand her opinion.

(A relative of mine has volunteered for a woman's house for a few decades and have some shocking stories. After those discussions, I realized how people e.g. can turn racist.)
It's still running (ww.com), it makes some money but not as much as it used to. Our 'exit' was on the table on 9/9/2001, events beyond our control caused that to be put on hold.

After that the person that was going to be CEO and that had brokered the exit left the company to move to Spain and I continued to run it up and until the present.
Essential laws?
According to the site, it already works in Safari on Snow Leopard and on the iPhone. I would expect it to be part of the regular Safari release within the next two months.
The genetic origin of the variation in circadian phenotypes are well documented, and have been for a long time.

You can work against your predispositions, but if you remove social constraints, your natural pattern will quickly re-emerge.

Furthermore, your subjective assessment of your productivity along the day is not really meaningful in this context.
and the slashdot story when it broke:

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/11/1719222
It depends. Once I stay up late a couple of days, then I'm a night owl, and I need to make a special effort to sleep early to break the trend. Almost similar pattern applies to waking early; however I find it a lot easier to be a night owl than a lark. Both are stable states but Night Owl happens more easily :)
I can't answer for plinkplonk but my guess is, for CS learning purposes, Forth paired with Lisp is a combination like pizza and beer (as opposed to pizza and sandwich).
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That's because the specification instead defines the manner in which HTML5 documents should be parsed. In theory someone can provide an XML schema which defines the rules for the XML serialization of HTML5, but parsing HTML5 as HTML isn't something which (so far as I know) can be expressed in a standard machine-readable schema format.

The downside is you don't have "drop this file into an SGML parser and it works". But since that never worked with real-world SGML-based HTML anyway, the upside is that you get a parsing mechanism which actually handles the sorts of things you'll encounter in the wild.
Working full time on a new version of http://xp-dev.com/ - the new platform should be out in a few weeks and should do everything that everyone has been asking for (will be easier to use as well). Git hosting will be coming up as well (Mercurial later on).

After the recent debacle with stolen code and what not (took my off for a week), I'm back on full steam working on it, and having fun! :)

(Nice to read what everyone else has been up to. There's actually quite a lot of interesting projects/products being worked on here).
Loosen web restrictions, employers, to keep younger workers
Sorry, but I still think that checking what a very old person is drinking is stupid, no matter how much notation you add to it.
Neat ! More competition for the stuff that I should be doing :)
Agreed. Having PageRank in your product is one thing, but using it well and scaling it up (like Google has done) is a way different (and probably much more difficult) matter.
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