skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not quite -- there are plenty of other layouts designed for modern use, some of which were designed via genetic algorithm: <http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?full_optimization>. Colemak is, however, one of the best I've seen which maintains most of the "standard" keyboard shortcuts.
What if you're depressed the entire year?

and the next year?
45 Favorite Designers and Developers you must follow on Twitter
In this post I am sharing a list of some popular peoples that every designer and developer must follow. These following list includes categories like art direction, web design, graphic design, illustration, typography etc.
And so why does this deserve a downmod?
As far as I can tell, there's no obscure corporate rules required to put an Android app in the Android Market. Also Android users don't have to jailbreak" their phones to load apps directly without going through the Market/App Store.
Currently, parts will only be manufactured in one shop. We're big proponents of the 'release early, release often' mentality. So we're starting small, getting feedback, and improving. Getting bigger jobs done across shops is one of those things that is on the to do list. For that to be efficient, we'd have to be producing a fairly large batch of parts, and so we'll tackle that problem once it happens.

Well, we're accepting sellers, as well, so we'll have a pretty wide range of equipment. As of right now, we have equipment of average precision. I'm not sure if that helps, so I just grabbed an average printer from Dimension to give you a ballpark figure, and it has a .010" layer thickness. We're trying to encourage those with MakerBots to sign up, and they have a .1mm resolution.

One of the greatest blessings of 3D printers is also the greatest weakness, right? You can basically make anything. So the problem with examples is that one can make total sense to someone, and be totally foreign to someone else. To give you some ideas, I'd say check out Thingaverse, or this interview with Bram Cohen, inventor of Bittorrent: http://www.shapeways.com/blog/archives/268-Shapeways-Member-...

Thanks for the questions. We have some bigger things in the works as well. More on those later.
"A deep funk" is a far cry from a clinical depressive episode....just saying.
I came here looking for the 1-2 / month option.
I also experience these lows quite often, about once a month. They usually don't last for more than 3 days, and all my energy and passion come back. It's still tough to deal with, especially when you suddenly feel like there's no purpose to the things that just yesterday gave so much meaning and excitement to your life. I learn to cope with them by training my mind to take a moving average of my feeling. This way I'm constantly reminded of my overall long-term sentiment.
That's not quite how I read it. Agree with it or not, this guy seems to be a fan of Comcast. The complaint is that these companies often treat new customers better than loyal customers... which is a huge and short sighted mistake - but also one a lot of companies make.
I've never tried DVORAK but from what I know, QWERTY was specifically designed so mechanical typewriters don't jam due the speed of typing. And if true, this reason alone means DVORAK is faster. Anyone can confirm or debunk this theory I've heard?
It's been de-bunked before. The only studies suggesting that DVORAK was faster were done by the people who created the DVORAK layout. Their study was apparently also flawed.
Looks like people will be tweeting with the hashtag #ycmelb
http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23ycmelb
Thanks Tom et al.
Quantum Entanglement Visible to the Naked Eye
Also for us not on Facebooks; can you give us the time and location?
The point of offering a discount is to increase conversion rates or decrease churn.

The churn among 9 year customers is miniscule and, to the extent it happens, is largely out of your control.

(They've successfully resisted all temptation to quit for NINE YEARS. Crikey, your commercial relationship is already more stable than many marriages . Typical events precipitating a cancellation sound less like "Found a better deal" and more like "I'm moving outside your service area" or "Dear Comcast: Dad died, please cancel his subscription.")

Thus, offering 100% of 9-year customers a discount to influence a fraction of a sliver of those customers (the number who are seriously considering cancellation who could be motivated to not cancel if they were offered a better price) is just throwing money away.
He isn't real. Nobody is a fan of Comcast.
Interestingly, doing the alternative (as suggested in the post) never seems to get tried in large. Tivo, for example, curtailed their beloved lifetime subscriptions, which was a bit like a reward for long term customers.

I agree it is a huge and short-sighted mistake, but I can't come up with an example to show it. It jsut seems to be conventional corporate wisdom with little to base it on.
On a practical level you could probably extend the analogy to illustrating the effectiveness of using "us" against "them" rhetoric.
Hey, I was careful to say that my experience of Comcast has been good, and it is clearly an atypical experience. Still, in the vacuum of my experiences, Comcast has been good.
Oops sorry,

3pm, Sunday, October 4th

The Order of Melbourne - Rooftop

401 Swanston St Melb
Actually, OS X includes "cu" -- not that feature-rich, but it's been sufficient for me.
never since the blue pill... ;-)
As one of those framework people I can tell you that CSS as it stands is not up to that job yet. Some very basic features are needed on the CSS side, but I'm going to reserve my thoughts on that for a future blog post when I've thought about more thoroughly.
QWERTY was designed to prevent jams, but did so by physical separation of the keys, not by slowing the typist. In fact, separating keys increases typing speed by distributing the load over both hands -- try typing "fewer seats are west" to see how annoying placing letters together is.
I really don't think 99 bucks a year is much of a deterrent to anybody who is serious about this. It's a drop in the bucket, compared to all the other stuff you need to do any kind of development at all, really. And according to the comments in jwz's post, there is a one-time fee to get stuff listed in the Pre app store as well.
LessCSS also does this. However, LessCSS lacks the capability to do macro expansion which greatly limits its usefulness as framework implementation language.
If a young person is depressed for days at a time a few times a year, that young person has a clinical case of depression

That is far from obvious.

The medicalization of depression is itself questionable. There are eloquent dissents by informed critics. It's certainly the majority view right now, but is more a paradigm than a proven truth, and these things are notorious for being subject to fashion. It wouldn't be surprising if, in a decade or two, the pendulum swung the other way.
Resist the urge to over-medicalize things: if it lasts longer than two weeks and affects your ability to enjoy life, it may be "depression". If you get dumped by your girlfriend or yelled at by your boss and the next three days really suck, it is "life".

My brother once told me: "There is a support group for people who hate their jobs. It is called Everybody, and we meet at bars starting at about 5:30."

Adjust by about six hours and it is equally true for Japanese salarymen.
How To Get More Twitter Followers Using The TOP Twitter Directories
If you want more Twitter followers your going to have to put a little work into it. This is a fact in anything you do online when it comes to building your business. So what’s next with getting more Twitter followers?
Booo!

A friendly troll on behalf of NSW :-D
I think "fewer seats are west" is great fun to type, and not all that slowing. I also like typing "hardware stores are great".
I've learned that exercising on a quasi-regular basis 4 times a week and spending an hour by myself once a week cures all psychological ills.
Yes because Apple chooses all the ship dates for their OS updates based on rinky-dink legal cases. Actually Snow Leopard original scheduled ship date was 3 weeks AFTER it actually went on sale so they didn't 'delay' anything.

But you're completely right Apple "fucked itself" by releasing their new operating system ahead of schedule.
A for programming the system
B for maintaining the system
cool.. like a real hackers conference.. you have to engage in social engineering and pick a lock to gain access to the rooftop?

oh, you mean the Rooftop on Swanston.. um, ok :]
FDIC expected to ask banks to prepay $36B in fees
Incidentally, the corollary: if you want a better deal, threaten to quit. You'll find Retention has many options for rewarding you for your loyalty.

(Sidenote: you know you have been in Japan too long when you spell it colorrary and wonder why the spellchecker flags it. sigh)
Exercise: absolutely. I wish someone had told me when I was younger how dramatic an effect it has. (I mean mentally and emotionally, not physically, though obviously there are physical benefits too.) It still amazes me.

spending an hour by myself once a week

Man, I'd go insane if I only got an hour's worth of solitude a week.
Precisely. I guarantee you that there is north of a billion dollars worth of research into _precisely_ how to manage customer loyalty. If there was a profit advantage to rewarding customer loyalty, you'd see it. There isn't, so you don't. The parent has it nailed - Why incent people not to leave _when they aren't going to leave anyways_.
Plus the awesome follows of @tomhoward and @ycmelb naturally.
I have no doubt that Dvorak works better for you, but I wonder if it's not so much the layout that makes a difference, but rather learning to type all over again while paying close attention to your hands allowed you to break bad habits.

I took a few typing classes in school as a kid, but of course didn't pay attention. Like a lot of people I learned qwerty by osmosis, not through proper training, and so I accumulated all sorts of terrible habits: reaching across, shifting with the same hand, etc. I got to be really fast but this was just amplifying the damage. Right about the time things were getting really painful I picked up vim. For me at least, it wasn't so much that vim (or Dvorak or whatever) really makes all the difference, it's just that it forces a clean break with your old muscle memory. And because the pain is the reason you're willing to put in the effort to re-learn, you're damn sure to learn it properly this time. That's all it took for me. No pain since, still on a standard rectangular qwerty keyboard.
Why is it a huge and short sighted mistake? Without data, this statement is unsupportable. As a numbers guy, I'm inclined to believe it's a smart decision. In most jurisdictions, the cable operator has a monopoly. That's why cities offer franchises. If your current customers can't easily switch, then why on earth would you give them a break?

Now, as we start seeing competition from telcos, these "for new customers only" deals go away - everyone becomes a free agent when their contracts are up. We see this in the relatively competitive cell phone market: once your contact is up, you can get a new, fully subsidized phone from your current carrier.
Ummm, I use Opera on my Sony Ericsson W995; works like a charm.
Did anyone get their invitation yet?
It's not the machines I'm criticizing, but the marketing.
Mac OS X mistakes and malfeatures
You might be interested in reading up on the Loyalty Effect by Fredrick Reichheld (and associated books Loyalty Rules and other). He used to be a partner at Bain consulting but the premise of his books is that consumer loyalty has value and it's worth the time of organizations to measure and maximize that value...

He makes similar points you have that it doesn't make sense to charge new customers more than existing clients because existing clients add more value through things like referrals, they buy more services at lower cost, they no longer incur acquisition costs, etc. An example of trying the alternative would be places like my gym which happens to be a national chain - whose membership services I hate but I bought a while back and they don't up membership costs for old clients but they do for new ones. My membership costs probably about half that of new members because I joined a good 6-7 years ago which makes it rather unlikely that I'll ever give it up.

Personally I think the reliance and dependence of a lot of service companies like Comcast on the value of their infrastructure is a dangerous game given how much the cost of infrastructure has fallen and continues to fall.
Well, according to jwz they have two potential advantages. The other being ease of development.

"This is the subject of an upcoming post that I haven't finished writing yet, but let me just point out that the WebOS port of Dali Clock -- a program that does some moderately complicated realtime graphical tricks -- took me a couple days to do, but I've been dicking around with the iPhone port of it off and on for, like, a year. Note that I know ObjC really well, and I have already written a Cocoa version of Dali Clock that runs on OSX, and porting that version to the iPhone has been such a monumental pain in the ass that I keep giving up on it before I finish.

"So yeah, WebOS is easier.

"Certainly less powerful (no OpenGL, for example) but holy shit is it ever easier."
for a long while i thought jwz was female. just thought i'd throw that out there. (the "he" pronouns here and in other articles set me right. not sure how i came to my previous conclusion or why it lasted so long)
The line breaks didn't help me much there...
It's at The Order of Melbourne, at 401 Swanston St, on the rooftop level
Well -- after guys turned all of Sydney YC-orange the other day, I guess they felt they had to top it...
Not sure about being depressed but there are days that I feel really down mainly because of my job situation.

It usually lasts for a couple of days but could easily be alleviated by hanging out with friends. There are times though I tend to make it worse by spending time just by myself.
Cool thankx for that. A few more questions:
1. In the case you didnt get paid, what did you do? Did you send them a lawyer?
2. How did you get your first gig ?
Thanx
Not a referral link...I am not that smart.
Sydney turned orange the very night Fenn and I rocked into town. Co-incidence? Hardly.
Companies aren't concerned about churn, they're concerned about next quarter's posted results. (Churn is just one of many things that can be tweaked to produce better results).

Once you realize that the issue with pretty much every larger - public - corporation is that it is subject to the demands of short term results, you can see that the way they act is entirely rational and expected.
Funny thing. I have had DirecTV for about 6 years. Over the years, I've gotten a few upgrades in equipment (HD), but didn't really take advantage of an initial deal. Overall, I've been pretty happy with them.

All of the sudden, this summer, out of the blue, they give me Showtime for free for 3 months. They just sent me a letter to let me know. They even sent me an email, just to make sure I knew. I don't know how many people got this bonus, or how I was chosen, but it worked out great for me, since the 5th season of "Weeds" had just started :)

Then while I'm setting up an older TV, I need to redo some setup. I found I could do it on their website, and sent customer service an email to thank their devs for making it ridiculously simple to do. Boom... Starz/Encore free for 3 months.

Now, DirecTV tends to run at a bit of a premium to some other providers, but I like their HD a lot. I've looked at switching to cable or AT&T's Uverse, but ultimately just stuck with DirecTV. I suspect that a lot of people these days have been re-evaluating if that premium was worth it.

These little bonuses this summer made me like my decision more. Sure, it was a pretty cheap thing for them to do, and free premium channels is a common lure for new subscribers, and I really appreciated it.
Building an Erlang chat server with Comet - Part 1
It states on the web page that they will issue acceptances by October 8th.
You consistently provide very logical advice in the freelancing arena, no doubt from years of experience. I would like to see your version of this book.
I understand why having a place where users can get verified applications installed in one step is a good user experience. From my point of view, one of the biggest advantages of modern Linux distributions is that most software installation is handled through a common package manager with an integrated update system, dependency tracking and a large repository of software.

That said, I don't see how making it difficult for developers to submit apps, or preventing users from installing apps by other means makes for a better user experience.
great point ErrantX. I also believe his simple, humble approach to communicating is genius! He gets his points across to a wide audience and lays a foundation to open-minded, constructive discussion.
Because even if there isn't an incentive, it's the right thing to do.

It's been one of my gripes about business for a long time that they offer more attractive options to people who aren't their customers than they do for people who have been their customers for a while.

So, now that I'm running my first bits of advertising for my consulting/I.T. business, I put a "10% off your next invoice" coupon in the flyer -- for my existing clients.

After all, if it weren't for my existing clients, I couldn't afford to be advertising for new ones.
On the other hand... I recently called Speakeasy for some reason or another and they gave me a $25/mo discount on my service. I've been a Speakeasy fanboy as long as I've been a customer, but WOW.

Yeah, Speakeasy costs more than most DSL and the setup process blows, but their customer service easily makes the cost worth it. Internet should be like water and air: guaranteed and zero hassle.
"I really don't think 99 bucks a year is much of a deterrent to anybody who is serious about this. "

A developer shouldn't need to be "serious" to code a small app and deploy it on his device. By this logic, I couldn't write an app for my Linux laptop without paying Linus & co a "development" fee, or my Windows machine without paying Microsoft, or deploy a J2ME mobile app on my Nokia smart phone without paying Nokia.

Apple is just greedy. Soaking developers is sick. Asking annual (vs a one time) fee is pure evil. It will eventually be their downfall.
Why Tablets Will Succeed
You're forgetting they'd have a bunch more 9 year customers with this discount structure.

Edit: Sorry for being direct? Let me be more cautious:

It's plausible that, under the proposed pricing regime, the 9 year retention rate for customers would rise more than enough to offset the higher margins enjoyed today at the current retention rate.
I've had this problem too. I'd rather it not present the ability to login rather than make it look like it's going to work and then not. I assume it's a bug.
I have heard so little about Android development that it leads me to believe it's nonexistent or extremely painless. The only main stream story I even remember hearing was the malware Google had to use the kill switch on.
Startup Legal Docs From TheFunded.com
Cool site... Looks like they are using google app engine for the site. It uses google login for authentication..
I worked in a lab for a bit that was doing this sort of thing, and it's worth saying that Martinis is a genius. The stuff he's doing is far beyond what other groups are doing, and he manages to pull it off in incredibly elegant ways.

Coupling two qubits like this is impressive, to say the least. Planar qubits have the advantage of scale when it comes to fabrication, so if this group can figure out how to push entanglement to 3, 4, or more devices, they'll have a huge advantage over other technologies (e.g. ion trapping).
Classy headline. Misleading. Jackasses.
Informative, balanced and very well written.
Incidentally, if you're funding rather than hiring, you generally want A. That's one reason I'd rather be an investor than a boss.
I really love your app. Simple, effective and very well executed.
Is there any chance of getting a pronunciation button? I had a few words that I knew but wasn't sure on exactly how to say them. I ended up looking them up elsewhere but it would be nice if it was included in your app.
Sunshine? Gotta love that entrepreneurial optimism there Tom!
> It will eventually be their downfall.

We can only hope.
try www.hndir.com if you're an undergrad at a united states school.. i haven't built out the support for non-edu e-mails, as i built the entire thing and user registration around the assumption that you had an .edu address and i'm tied up with my start up work. but yeah, high quality coders interested in start-ups on the site.
Just remember that with read committed isolation, certain access patterns can silently trash your data.

People are afraid of transactions aborting for some reason, as they think that's an error. It's not; you just retry your transaction, which will now be using correct data. "Read committed" opens you up to race conditions in exchange for transactions rarely (never?) aborting themselves.

I think the default should be "never trash my data without telling me".
"Study subjects who drank sugar-sweetened lemonade, which raises glucose levels quickly, performed better on self-control tests"

Great. The diet for willpower (grazing) makes me fat.
Apple purposely delayed the release of Snow Leopard so that the discovery period had ended

This is claimed, not proven.
This seems to be mostly about iTunes and a little about quicktime. Hardly anything about problems in the core of OS X itself.
Where is the check box for eeyore?
"What differs most is the teaching style. CS has far better lecture notes. Of course, the stats people wrote a very good book; but better lecture notes win because I can access them later and send them to people for free."

So very true. When I was a freshman in high school, we had mandatory "study hall" periods where we just had to sit in a room and be quiet. I spent most of them doing crosswords and sleeping, but I also spent a lot of time looking at printouts of these notes:

http://rutherglen.ics.mq.edu.au/wchen/lnentfolder/lnent.html

It's really important to realize that not everyone who is interested in a field has access to a library full of relevant publications.
I don't think it is weird to assume Jamie is a female name.
I haven't done cold calling before building a product but it sounds like a good idea. It's never too early to get some feedback and to make prospects aware that you exist. Having them involved from day one could help you end up with a better product and an initial group of customers who feel a real sense of ownership of the product they helped create.

That said, cold calling is really tough work so I don't hold it against anyone for not wanting to do it. I've done it. It's difficult unpleasant work.
> If Michael Arrington, Steve Ballmer, or Ashton Kutcher wrote an article about "duct tape programming", you'd have no trouble recognizing the dissonance.

I suspect that Ballmer is reasonably good at recognizing programmers who ship. He may not know why the things that he triggers on matter, but he's had lots of opportunities to discover such triggers.
Can A Startup Attract Crowdfunding Via Twitter
beyondblue.org.au:

Is depression common?

Very common. Around one million Australian adults and 100,000 young people live with depression each year. On average, one in five people will experience depression in their lifetime - one in four females and one in six males.

That's out of a population of 21m.
There's a book at my local Barnes & Noble about Android development. Maybe you should cruise on over to the book store and see if there are any hints in the book about how the submission process works, if you're that curious.

If not, you're in the same boat as me -- sitting around waiting to see if some developer's going to pipe up with a story.