skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It was the IT dept of a consulting company. The IT managers jested that watching Office Space was an occupation requirement, as the whole company was a bunch of the Bob & Bobs. This place tried to pitch themselves as a smaller and older (mis)management consulting company, in the lines of McKinsey, E&Y or KPMG.
Re: Re: @newsycombinator

No, if it's interesting enough (which is most of the time), I'll actually visit the site again. But you're right, I do wish it linked to HN first instead of sending me directly to the article.
Chinese activist [Xu Zhiyong] arrested for tax evasion
I offer this as a follow-up to the previous HN article here, "Where is Xu Zhiyong?". I make no insinuations about the legitimacy of the charges; tax evasion is the catch-all last refuge of the prosecutor, just ask Al Capone.
they pulled those tricks because widows and orphans money was regulated so it had to be in 'AAA' products, and the widows and orphans demanded higher returns because 'everybody' else was getting higher returns or they were going to invest they're money elsewhere.

look, by no means am i blaming 'widows and orphans' for this mess, it's just the reasons for it are very complex. even regulation that seems like a great idea, grading investment products, ended up playing some small part in the chaos.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=770121
Thanks for enlightening me.
Similarly, it's a good thing dangerous chemical kits are outlawed in the US. Who wants to have their house burned down just because they happen to be living too close to someone who decided they're more important than everyone else around them?

update: Hey, why am I being voted down? Not trying to be a douchebag here. I really do view EM freedom as strongly correlated with normal-speech freedom. "Pirate" radio stations anyone?

Clamping down on "rogue" EM radiators is like clamping down on "rogue" anything else. We need a broader definition for "freedom of speech". EM is speech, too.
If the graph data is correct, there is a very interesting intersection between European and American usage about 4 PM (First graph). What I read from this is that we align our usage with each other. Europeans stay up late to interact with Americans, which also explains the early American peak.
Value of Apples
You are interfering with the ability of others to communicate, it is the same as gagging everybody around you, which is about as rude as you could possibly get.

When somebody wonders out loud why their cell doesn't work, especially if the call they need to make is an urgent one and you whip out your 'gadget' be prepared for nasty stuff to happen to you.

Interfering with any kind of communication is about as low as you can go in my book (other than doing violence to other people), doing it on the sly makes it one step worse.
The iPhone is not easy to use, as compared to what other device that currently exists?
While I'm not begrudging, it should be noted that DX links ending with ~r. and a number are affiliated to a particular user's account.
Jumping on books marketed at airports to harried executives isn't really valid. There's plenty of actual business research done by professionals (and they've heard of "survivorship bias, along with all the other threats to validity). It's like looking at all the "For Dummies" books in your local book store's computer section and deciding that CS research is poor.

And Harvard Business School Case Studies are meant for teaching, and their function is analogous to science textbooks that leave out all the dead ends and fruitless research for pedagogical reasons.
She failed to show sufficient deference to the VP (who in other posts I've frequently called "crazy french lady"), who had on occasion gone to the board of directors and gotten other VPs fired.

As developers, we like to pretend that we're above office politics, or that our tools are our own, and other things like that. Nope. To managers, we're all as interchangable as furniture. And it wouldn't surprise me that much of the offshoring is due to the combination of 2 facts: that they have the power and we don't; and that the jocks are pissed off at the nerds because we don't kiss their asses enough. Just look at the title of one of the latest fad articles and books to come out of the Harvard Business Journal: does I.T. matter?. Remember what PG says about mental fads? "What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good."

http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?PlugCompatibleInterchangeableEngi...

http://www.nicholasgcarr.com/doesitmatter.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
How do you scale your web application?
Be it software techniques or off the shelf products what do you use to scale your web applications?
My eyes are crying because of this green background.

Why did the author choose such a background ?

If he wants to be different, he should focus on content rather than unergonomical design.
When it come to anecdotes... I've got a powerbook and an ibook both still alive and kicking after close to 5 years and apart from the battery that I had to replace, they haven't had any problems (despite using them a lot)...

On the other hand my 2 years old macbook is starting to make some strange sound (the fan probably needs to be changed)...

I think that anecdotes are only that and in my experience once you have a problem with a laptop it's usually going to be more than one problem...
I'm guessing you're on the G1?

I picked up an HTC Hero (More or less the G3, but I don't think out in the US yet) yesterday. The way it's going, I think I may love this phone more than my child.

Most of your problems are gone with this generation. It even has a standard headphone jack.

Android is catching up, fast.
Not too soon: Moonlight 2 finally reaches beta
"A stock iPhone "just works" (syncing, videos, etc) without needing anything extra. "

Depends on what you're trying to do. Syncing with my iPhone required plugging in a cable and doing a manual sync. Syncing with Android doesn't really exist: it's just always up to date, and doesn't need syncing.

The default Android video player could support more formats out of the box could be better. Then again, there are about 50 useful, everyday things I can do with Android that I couldn't with my iPhone - see my contacts on the map, not lose data when closing apps, publically stream video direct from my phone to the web, copy files to the device.

Also iPhone Safari crashed constantly when reading large engadget articles on every iPhone firmware from 1.01 to 3.00. Android's browser is far more reliable.
I'm not a fan of frameworks, if their particular philosophy fits with the way you think, they're probably great. For me, they just don't seem to fit and provide a lot of bloat.

I prefer to start small, and add libraries as I need them.

For example, for my current project I was at the point where I needed to add authentication/authorization, preferably with openid support and fallback to a simpler system for development/test installs. I've been able to implement most of this with very little effort by using repoze.who and repoze.what (python). They're flexible enough to do a few things which would be harder to do in a framework where components are written to interface with other parts of the framework, instead of being really generic.

Apart from those two libraries I use beaker for sessions, werkzeug for dispatch, couchdb as a database, mako for templating, my own forms library, etc..

Basically I put together my own framework from already existing components, with a few components of my own for those tasks where I feel the existing solutions aren't good enough or don't solve my problem.

With this approach it does take longer to get up to speed, but you're not tied to any particular way of doing things and can replace any part as needed.
You can track trade by watching the density of radio traffic from the shipping lanes. This is in some ways a better indicator than the Baltic Dry Index.

I was trying to do what these guys did 10 years ago - but the night images data was expensive and came off a defense meteorological satellite. Found a guy at NOAA who had done the work before me and was distributing it as a lights at night study. He thought this technique of estimating GDP had issues because different regions have rules and special conditions that cause a broad difference in light levels (e.g. Denmark has particularly strict light pollutions regulations) that do not always compose at the national level.

I'll be interested in these guys results to see how they addressed the problems.
Google links Apps to Groups for quicker sharing
The 'People' app in the Hero also dolves a long running prob I had with my iPhone.

Say I know Jeff sent me a website to look at. I can't remember whether this was via SMS or email.

* On iPhone, I had to open SMS, find messages, close SMS, open email.

* On Android, I just find Jeff's entry in people and look at everything he sent me - SMS, email, and calls.
Mint.com starts keeping an eye on your budget
Also the rounded rectangles for the tags drive me crazy.

I thought that I liked their graphics designer, as I liked the visual appeal of both stackoverflow and serverfault. Now it feels like they did not pick the right combination on http://kuler.adobe.com/ this time :)
There was no such comparison in the article. It merely provides good examples of the usability price paid to achieve its generality (lack of any affordances, etc.) and points out inconsistencies, lack of visual cues, etc.
Probably beyond the abilities of a typical hobbyist: http://www.ladyada.net/make/wavebubble/index.html but since this is Hacker news.
It's official: NASA is a jobs program.
Microsoft: Friends don't let friends use IE6
Thanks for your response. Interview went very well.
I agree about the statistical issues he highlights, but his anti expert stance is kind of odd. I mean we listen to this guy because he used to be a wall street trader. His books were published because he was accepted as some kind of an expert himself. So is he wrong because he's an expert?

He says: "We replaced the heuristics of the elders with arrogant (and incompetent) beliefs, breaking, in the name of science, the chain of knowledge."

In europe we had fascisim and stalinism within the past 100 years. That's three or four generations. Before the dawn of liberalism, capitalism, enlightenment and the industrial revolution we had 1000 years of depression caused by religious fanatics. We had to break that chain of "knowledge".

The heuristics of the elders are little more than mature, cultivated cliches of what past experts and ideologues told them. Taleb is correct, it's incredibly difficult to make predictions in a complex system. However, I don't see how a blanket condemnation of science and a blanket approval of crude traditions helps us to become better at that.
How is the transformation into bytecode before execution not a translation? Yes, the bytecode format is perl-specific, but you can't easily get at the real original source code again.
note: If you're already a StackOverflow user, you can bootstrap your account with some reputation points by associating your Super User account with your StackOverflow account.
Very amusing discussion. In particular regarding front wheel braking. You guys really have a sense of humor.
The man who digitised his entire life...receipts and all
I honestly don't know what memes you're referring too (nor the books) but outlier and tipping point have basic meanings without interpretation: tipping point is a cusp or specifically the point at which the force vector originating at the centre-of-gravity passes outside the foot of a body causing it to tip over. Outliers are statistical anomalies or unexpected results that are usually ignored as if they are insignificant.

Black swans on the other hand are birds with a particular pigment.

Now what are the additional layers of meaning, we see black swans referring to apparently unlikely events that nevertheless will occur (that's possibly not the definition given by this guy), but what about the super-definitions for the others?
Add in that the color for tags and the title is nearly the same. And the more views the more of a "warning color" the count gets. Seems rather opposite.
I sync music to my Hero with iTunes using DoubleTwist on my Mac, since I came from iPhone and have my playlists in iTunes.

My wife syncs music her G1 using Windows Media Player, because she's used it for years and likes it.

People who use Linux plug in their phone and Banshee syncs to it.

I don't think iPhone does WMP or Banshee. Sure, it's made by Apple, but my wife doesn't really care: she just want's it to work with her computer, without having to change all her software.
> it happened only once that I missed default parameters in C#

I actually missed it lots of times. You can work around it by overloading the method, but that's boilerplate for a simple concept.

I also miss named arguments (in both Ruby and C#). When reading the code, when a method has more arguments than one I often forget what the arguments are or their positioning, and it is a lot more readable to specify the arguments by their names ...

lockfile( path = '/var/run/script', timeout = 60, on_timeout = handler)

Ruby doesn't support that. It only has syntactic sugar for the case in which the argument of the method is a hash, but then the method definition becomes less clear.
Found: first amino acid on a comet
Sure it does - get DoubleTwist. It also works with WMP and Banshee out of the box.
So who is gonna be the first to write the application that solves this guys problem? I mean, he just laid out an interesting problem. I'm not even an iPhone user but I'd be willing to bet you can't man most iPhone apps; here's an interesting idea, unlike man, how about an application that takes the user on an event-per-view tour of the application. I mean is there not a way to dig into an existing applications events, am I missing something here, or is accessibility really this big of an issue?
Same here - iPhone user for two years, got my Hero a couple of weeks ago. I'm in love.

Tip: make sure you get a Class 6 SDHC card if you're going to use a lot of apps at once.
I have a relative, old and nearly blind, who has a Jitterbug phone. It has about seven buttons total, but three of them are the big buttons: a green one labeled "Operator", a red one labeled "911" and a yellow one with an arbitrary label (often marked "Tow" in the pictures). You can think of these as the "call someone", "call the squad", and "call my best friend" buttons.

You really only need the big green button to make calls. You press it and you get a human operator who offers to complete the calls, either by accepting a number, or a name, or (most likely) a name from the contact list that you or someone else has set up in advance.

You can find the buttons in the dark. You can operate the phone without vision. You don't need fine motor skills beyond finding one big button and pushing it. You don't need to read numbers. You don't need to know how to read, period.

That is a device designed for usability. Of course, most of us don't want one, because it is too boring and would make us feel kind of silly... which is exactly this designer's point.
Battery life on HTC Hero is about the same as a first gen iPhone: one day with my usage (heavy web browsing and games).
To me it seemed like the author was just fumbly with his fingers. Triggering undo and such. This information can be found online or in the manual so if he would just rtfm it would be obvious how he caused the delete button to show up.

Also, the other glaring example here is the one about the mail client refresh-vs-reply arrows. Aren't these two icons the exact same icons used for pretty much the whole history of the internet? Circular arrows = refresh; Left arrow = reply.

New things sometimes require just a bit of effort because you aren't familiar with it. In other words, easy-to-use != just like every other phone out there. It's pretty close to a 'fundamentally new UI' - just because you don't grok it within 5 seconds doesn't make it hard to use.
Huh? How exactly did you conclude that it would take less energy to build a fully functional mobile cell phone tower that supports a variety of incompatible protocols, all of which are secured with non-trivial encryption?

Even without the encryption, it is extremely difficult to demodulate a GSM signal
The iPhone app that could change public radio's future
Brain Is a Co-Conspirator in Repetitive Loops during Stress
thanks for the mention, don't know if it's really a hack though :D
Then what would you call it?
TJX breach suspect linked to new thefts
I'm in the UK, we have dinner at 6:30pm but then we have a pre-schooler. Sometimes it's closer to 8, 8:30pm but rarely that late more than once a week. In countries with a siesta I'd expect this to push back at least an hour. In short, I concur.
This is a very good essay that reminds me of my favorite passage of Jacob Nielsen's, from "2D is Better Than 3D":

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/981115.html

Note that 3D works for games because the user does not want to accomplish any goals beyond being entertained. It would be trivial to design a better interface than DOOM if the goal was to kill the bad guys as quickly as possible: give me a 2D map of the area with icons for enemy troops and let me drop bombs on them by clicking the icons. Presto: game over in a few seconds and the good guys win every time. That's the design you want if you are the Pentagon, but it makes for a boring game.

The guy does undersell the iPhone's usability, though. In particular, the key phone feature -- dialing the name of someone on your contact list -- is far more usable than an old-school dial telephone (where you have to remember a number) and likewise far more usable than on a cheap cell phone (where you have to do a lot of button-press scrolling, or use a numeric keypad to type the letters of someone's name... which means you have to remember the name in advance.) Indeed, the iPhone has exactly what the usability folks have been agitating for for years: A big flat list of people's names or pictures, where you touch one and it immediately dials them.

I think the moral of that story is Pareto's Rule: if you nail the usability of one common feature, people will praise your device's usability in general, even if the rest of it plays out like an adventure game.
Edge Media TV: Peake and LeMarcs
Perhaps you have a different meaning of the word energy? It will certainly take less radio energy to do what I suggested.

And as for GSM, have a look at http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/09/08/17/0014235/Open-Sourc...
Ladder theory
How do we model the semantics of generic functions in pure languages?
Do the easy stuff first:
1. Enable caching & get the HTTP-headers with e-tags and stuff.
2. Get DB schema with proper indexes & tune database settings.
3. Buy better hardware where there are bottlenecks
4. Fix the software ;)
1) Unless you're really trying, it's pretty difficult to burn down the neighborhood with a science kit. When using a cell phone jammer it's pretty hard not to affect all the people around you. That's kinda the point. Now, if you don't want cell phones used in some place that you own, then paint the walls with signal-blocking paint.

2) Have you tried to buy a chemical kit lately? They took out all the fun stuff years ago.
I view the NASA spaceflight program nowadays as a monolithic company with so much bureaucracy that its impossible to make substantial changes without huge efforts. Going along with this analogy, back when they first started they were a startup, albeit one with a huge amount of funding, but one that could try and fail a lot cause the technology was new.
From the article: Since Adobe releases Flash runtimes simultaneously on Windows, Mac and Linux, the minimum that Microsoft needs to offer to be credible is the same simultaneous release schedule.

This statement is erroneous to some extent. Flash 7 for Linux was of dubious quality, Flash 8.x for Linux was skipped altogether, and Flash 9 wasn't released simultaneously with the Windows/Mac versions.

Linux is a second-class citizen for Adobe ... of course, they have reasons to not consider Linux. But there's no guarantee from the history of the project that this level of support will be continued in later versions.

Also, Moonlight is not a Microsoft project. It's an open-source project sponsored by Novell and it is in a better shape than any Flash-clone available. This is very important to me ... it means that it's portable to any platform available (you don't depend on Adobe in any way), and it also means that you have an open community willing to help. Also, some of the features in Silverlight 3.0 are already in Moonlight (like the pluggable codecs).

I must warn the curious that Moonlight currently has some stability/performance issues.
I have been finding more and more that things which are obvious to some are not necessarily obvious to others. Not everyone is a guru in every skill and everyone has to start as a newbie with all new skill you learn.

What about for people who are not working with Ruby but are curious about how it compares? How about those who have just started working with Ruby and are just learning? Think back to the first time you started reading about Ruby, was all the info you ever wanted freely available and clearly laid out? I am betting no.

This is why these days whenever I learn anything new (or think of something I know really well), as soon as i get it straight in my own head I go and write it up. It helps me clarify it even further for myself plus, since the information is out there it may end up helping others who are learning about the same topics.

Anyway, that's how I feel.
He completely ignores commute times. I think that's likely the cause of the dip during "dinner" time.
After the easy stuff: move your database to its own server, add a load balancer in front of additional web servers, implement memcached, start splicing your database to multiple servers, continue to add web servers, serve your static files from a cdn
User account | Design Bump
This reminds me of the talk Robert Bussard gave at Google a while back, mentioning the relative efficacy and nimbleness of fusion research programs: his own small-scale, Navy-funded, evolutionary on-the-cheap effort versus the absolutely massive, multi-billion dollar ITER project. He describes the ITER project as a gigantic "rice bowl", whose primary goal is not to discover anything but rather to give a large number of people jobs.
Check out:

http://highscalability.com/

About 20-30% of stuff posted there is worth reading, which is pretty good =)
A music for the space traveler: http://www.bluemars.org/
The front wheel does not need to lock to cause the bike to endo (back wheel raised). Simply preventing the wheel from locking up won't cure it IMO.

However, I can readily imagine using some gyroscopes to check that the bike is not flipping and if it's approaching a flip to release break pressure momentarily to keep the back end down. This would need to be very finely tuned as you'd rather endo into a stop with your tyre touching a truck than you would ride with two wheels down and hit the truck at speed. The amount of back-wheel air that you'd cope with will depend on the driver and conditions quite a bit.
Rogue Facebook app harvests user credentials
Ah caching, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
6 Awesome Apps Begging to Be Developed
I think you have to divide the functionality by ease of use. Something that has 1000 features is going to be more difficult than something that only does 10. But if they manage to contain the complexity so that it's only twice as difficult to use, then they've done a good job, even though in absolute terms, some people will still prefer the simplest solution, rather than the best ratio of features to usability.
Signs not to Work for a Software Company or Startup
A very broad question. The answer for most people is yes, all of those.