skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, two people of equal intelligence, wealth, ability to work long hours, etc. are in a field... who is more successful? The one who spends a lot of time doing repetitive tasks or the one who automates those.

As I am pointing out now, the stories of great things being done by people with insights about automation are absolutely overwhelming. Eli Whitney, Cyrus McCormick, Henry Ford, Jeff Bezos ad nauseaum.

That's anecdotal, but then you dismiss the science behind using automation and productivity enhancement to become good at things elsewhere in this forum.

Sure, if everything except hours worked are equal, working longer hours helps, but if everything except intelligence is equal, the more intelligent will win, and if everything except wealth is equal, the wealthier will win. In real life, all other things are never equal and assuming they are in order to prove your point is a strawman argument.
And looks a lot safer than downloading an executable and trusting your computer to it.
Definitely second this, my grandfather was 98lbs wet, and the kindest person I've ever known.

Quiet, calm, assertive and wise...he's the reason I can't shake this desire to start my own business. He started a business in the 50s with minimal resources and grew it for 50 years before it was sold in 2000. I still remember him and my father paying me less than minimum wage (at the time was $5.15ish maybe?) to sweep the floors and handle trash and pick items....I miss that building, and I really wish I was older and could have talked to him more seriously before he died.
Apple quits the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over opposition to EPA
This is a pretty misleading title. The study talks about households, not individual people.
Extending ltrace to make your Ruby/Python/Perl/PHP apps faster
I find it particularly interesting that words that end in hard consonants (like T or D) are represented by very high-pitched keys to create the percussive sound (especially noticeable at the end of the video). This is too cool.
Just to set the record straight, it could be done with any *nix-ish OS such as BSD or OSX.
The Woz for being the hacker he is and being different from other Steve.(I'm not sure. Few people came in mind, RMS, Linus, My friend geekaholic, But Woz was strong.)
Is DRM a technology by their definition? If yes, we can twist the argument and state that copyright doesn't need DRM because DRM is a technology.

Hey, it's a twisted hack of "logic", but it might work.
I'm guessing he would have rather had a link to the website about the app instead of the iTunes link.
Great tips - reminded me of a post on beating writer’s block: http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/8864

Note: It's a FUN post, not really practical for coders [eg: "Graham Greene wrote exactly 500 words per day, even stopping mid-sentence if necessary"] but a nice distraction.. just what you need when you're battling procrastination.. :)
George Foreman....because without him I'd have to use my barbecue ALL the time
is this the same termie from back in the flock day? http://www.flickr.com/photos/foolswisdom/43145184/
There are certain assumptions in that article that was, as far as I've understood it, simply wrong. For example, They assume that the streaming is done mostly server to client. From what I've heard, from people directly involved in the company is that the spotify client usually gets most of the data from other spotify clients. Also, songs are cached on the local computer. The bandwidth will still not be cheap, but it will be manageable.

Not that it makes the conclusion of the article wrong, but still.
This is really tempting, but my guess is that the answer is going to be no. Users want something that just works, and they would probably rather dig through a pile of stuff to find that one thing that just works rather than script it themselves. Elegant solution > pile of features > elegant scripting > source. Or you can do it all, like Excel. Even Word has scripting.

I think ahoyhere has alluded to the reason why the pile of features tends to win, and that is because it is better at leveraging the economies of scale in the shrinkwrap software business. It is so cheap to distribute software that you are much better off building for the mass audience. Now the hot thing is webapps which do not scale nearly as well (but avoid most of the junk that comes with shrinkwrap scaling, like having to deal with a strange machine and a crappy OS that deluges the end user in spyware, or pushing updates to users you don't know much about), so there is more incentive to meet the needs of a niche audience. And Apple is having some success sort of splitting the difference (vertical integration from the hardware up, and attempting to exert more discipline on developers to increase quality, all at the expense of distributing software to mass audiences). Microsoft, of course, is still in a pretty dominant position from exploiting this scaling to the max when IBM so graciously made the hardware into a commodity mass market item.

So far, the most successful web app (Google) is the one which has made web app discovery scale like nothing else (every page with useful content on it is a web app - code, data, it's all the same). The brilliance of Google is that it captured a mass end user market with a minimal user interface. They did it with math (maximal leverage of plain text queries plus the structure of the web, and similarly with ads which have simple interfaces at both ends and are backed with sophisticated algorithms), and scaling by imposing unusual amounts of internal discipline on the best developers they can get (and they can get pretty good ones). All this just to get to a position where they might be able to compete with Microsoft as a platform, and unseat the power of shrinkwrap scaling. I think the only way they can do it is by attracting a lot more developers than Microsoft, and the only way they can do that is by taking a lot of Microsoft's developers away. They might be able to do it, but there are all sorts of challenges. My guess is that what will happen is that they will draw a lot of developers away from Microsoft, and in the process they will lose a lot of their external cultural influence as far as being able to promote clean interfaces. Web apps will be even more dominated by the everything in one place aggregators (exemplified by Amazon and eBay) than they are now.

The problem with nice UIs is that there just aren't enough good developers to make it scale.
Is there any software or standard methods for helping to keep track of symptoms, tests and hypothesis and identify causes of problems, when there are too many symptoms and too long a time period to hold it all in working memory?
I can't find the link, but I remember reading an article a while back about utilizing the opening/closing of the CD drive to manually push the reset button on a server.

It was a sysadmin's story of how one of the servers needed a manual reboot every so often and it could only be done with someone physically being there to push the reset button. He set an old computer up with the CD drive directly facing the server's reset button. From there, he set up a cron job to send the "eject/close" command remotely whenever something went wrong with the other server.

Story ends saying that they no longer use that server, however that other computer just sits in the corner, faithfully ejecting/closing its CD drive to this day. Hopefully someone here can provide the link :)
I'm sorry I'm coming to this with the thread dead. I was on a boat for a team-building offsite most of yesterday.

People also overlook the great benefit of fork(2) for static languages: it's like GC for your address space. In a long-enough-lived multi-threaded C/C++ program, heap fragmentation will eventually eat you just as badly as a memory leak would have. Since there's no GC to compact the heap, the only real solution for memory-intensive servers is scheduled restarts.

A good, old-fashioned fork(2) resets the address space to a known-ok state; after the client connection is done with, whatever fragmentation the request has introduced disappears with its container process. The canonical, ancient structure of UNIX servers (fork after accept) was what enabled those servers to stay up for months and years at a time, but very few people made that connection. When processes were the only concurrency primitive available, we saw only their costs, and assumed threads would be better, since their costs were lower. In some ways, processes were the devil we knew, and threads an unfamiliar devil; in addition to all the usual complaints (e.g., about how hard it is to synchronize), threads mean that the global heap lives forever.
Palm Cares About Developers ... Valley Developers
Yeah, emacs and vim would never have gotten where they are if it weren't for their simple, intuitive interfaces.

The Simple UI camp is wrong: It's not complexity you want to minimize in a UI -- muscle memory will take care of that -- it's time and exertion.

Reminds me of:

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/apple_introduces_revol...
Prolog is a pretty neat language. It feels really strange at first, but as you grow used to its weirdness, it becomes much more enjoyable.

I learned Prolog in university using the book "Prolog Programming in Depth", by Michael A. Covington, Donald Nute, and André Vellino. Frankly, I didn't use the book all that much. It was a handy reference now and then, but it wasn't essential. Perhaps there's some good tutorials online?
Ignorance of the law was no excuse when the laws were roughly the ten commandments, or my personal golden rule, passed down to my sons: Don't be a douchebag.

Now, even professional lawyers can't keep up with what is/isn't may be/may not be illegal. It's insane.

It's like I mentioned in a previous thread -- if we write laws such that everyone is a criminal, then obviously we won't be able to enforce them on everyone... then it becomes a matter of staying in the good graces of the enforcers.
Webapps and x86 have "won" too, but if you think nobody writes code for anything else you're awfully sheltered.
Little Things (Joys of Hacking)
Use the (really) minimalist Google front page.
If you think the Google front page is a little ... cluttered, try this cookie hack to see the uber-minimalist, fading front page that Google has been experimenting with.
Brand Community: Creating differentiation through consumption
Worth noting that while you can have content below the fold and signal to users to find it, that's not true with branding and identity features - those should be prominent and above the fold.

Further, as a commenter on the article pointed out, there's benefit in identifying your audience. Someone on NYT is obviously willing to scroll. Can the same really be said of someone shopping for a luxury car and looking to be wowed?
I disagree in a large part due to different use cases. Developers often "live" in their editor, using it all day. Because of that, a non-obvious interface is ok, if the benefit is faster processing. The same reasoning applies to the old school text interfaces for insurance agents. They can fly through it and get you a quote very quickly.

But, I know that I don't use my time tracker application often enough to allow it to become super cluttered and non-obvious. Same with my bank's website.

Different use models require different approaches to usability.
Ask HN: How do you concentrate?
Recently, I've found my concentration is becoming increasingly bad. I blame this mainly on co-workers and the internet keeping me from things that I need to get done (it's hard to program when I can only keep focus for about 10 minutes at a time).

What are tips/tricks you use to help "build" your concentration?
Alan Kay, for constantly inventing the future.
1) For most of history, humans and their ancestors didn't live very long. When you die at 30, there's not much selection for biological mechanisms to fix the problems that happen in someone who is 60. Natural selection is looking for genes that are good at reproducing themselves, not genes that are good at giving an individual long life. Once you have sexual reproduction in place, it is much simpler to just have lots of offspring than to evolve even more repair mechanisms to extend life (at no great benefit to genes).

2) That's the whole point of SENS; repairing the damage for which we DON'T have repair mechanisms because of point #1. For example, our lysosomes (the "garbage collector/incinerator" in our cells) accumulate some molecules that they can't break down because they don't have the right enzymes, so they accumulate throughout our lives and end up affection cell function all around our bodies (lysosomes are full and can't do their jobs anymore). SENS has found other organisms that do have these enzymes, and are looking at ways for us humans to use those enzymes to clean up that "long-lived garbage".

> Cell damage is allowed to happen.

Yes, because your genes don't care about you (so to speak - read Dawkins's The Selfish Gene). After you've reproduced, there's no pressure to fix damage that only affects you after reproduction age.

Nothing causes more suffering in the world than the diseases of aging, and curing those diseases should be priority #1. Living longer is just a welcome side-effect.
Too bad you have your own false certainty.

I'll point out that patio11's bingo card creator gets more conversions for every single order button he's added, even as they get to the point where they're "above the fold". Your own criticism is much too 'black and white', but I'd say that it is also MYOPIC!
Why is everybody falling over the choice of words instead of reading the intent ? Clearly putting your life on the line is meant metaphorically, and a 50% chance to fail is probably generous.

Give the guy a break, he's gone the distance, put his money where his mouth is and his future is riding on this, on top of that he's open about it.

Kudos from me, if half the armchair entrepreneur-wannabes in the world would be doing what he's doing it would be a good thing. You really shouldn't discount the emotional roller coaster that a start-up is.

Idle words indeed.
Gentoo: Ten Years Emerge
Yes, especially since traffic on the web is not zero-sum. I can visit both, or neither, and a visit to one doesn't mean I didn't go to the other.

Although I think that the data supports the general trend in people looking to social media for information before looking for brand sites, I would throw out there that people also google brands and use blogs and review sites for information, which could account for lower visitor counts.
"...be sure to check the URL. If it’s something like http://74.98.30.203/ebayaccountverify.php IT’S A SCAM!"

How hard would it be to write a virus that changed a victim's browser (say FireFox or Chrome, which are both open source) so "paypal.com" appears in the address window when the real URI is something else? It's a scary question.. just throwing it out there.
one of the best texts around is "the art of prolog, advanced programming techniques" 2nd edition, by leon sterling and ehud shapiro.

however, by now, it seems a bit dated (e.g. on the constraint logic programming side), so there is another recommendable text "programming prolog for artifical intelligence" by ivan bratko

so if you can afford, i would recommend both texts for self-study.
Did you see this? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=868967
Any of Amazon's APIs - Product Advertising, AWS, et al.
You and 'toadpipe' are probably correct. I'll argue the point anyway, to see if it could be made to work:

Consider that the scripts would run on the web server. That means they would be published and used by other users... (After a bit of analysis, so they don't do anything destructive.)

And charge money from users that really want their scripts to be private.

Just make certain that there is a script language defined for the web app framework -- and an extensible object model for the local web site's data. (Again, Applescript. But not that syntax!)
I'm not in US, so I may not have the full picture. Am I wrong in some evident way?
"one of the best texts around is "the art of prolog, advanced programming techniques" 2nd edition, by leon sterling and ehud shapiro."

Seconded. This is a really good book, though a bit hard to find, the last time I checked.
That was a lesson from The Daily WTF:

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/ITAPPMONROBOT.aspx
Django templates derived from the view docstring for rapid prototyping
if statements and loops in prolog oh man
More if macruby worked and was significantly faster.
"My wife, fortunately, is a Director at a major research hospital"

Holy cow, you're fortunate (all things considered).
Is it enough to build a business?

Well, considering they could probably charge $100-200 for such an IDE, and that there are now a very large (100K and growing) set of Cocoa developers (thanks to the iPhone, mostly) who can be immediately productive in such an environment, delivering apps on Web, Mac, and Windows, ...
Marcus Aurelius - relentless in his quest for self perfection even while ruling one of the most powerful empires in the world.
Indeed. Good Movies should be expensive and the crap movies could just as well be free.
Very very amazing!

On another subject, I want some kind of 'piano player' with pistons like this piano, and you attach it to a non-MIDI instrument and it plays the keys via MIDI data, without having to retrofit it electronically.
For those without iTunes: http://www.kevintom.com/

http://www.kevintom.com/ycnews didn't render properly in Safari or Firefox...
The Guardian has got this utterly wrong. The MCPS/PRS fee for on-demand streaming is absolutely the least of your worries.

You also have to pay money directly to the labels for the right to stream the recordings, and this is massively higher than the performance royalties. And let's not forget that Spotify has given the major labels a 20%+ equity share.

If Spotify becomes profitable, it will be because they are the company to finally convince the record industry that their royalty rates are untenable. I very much hope they succeed.
How to Build a Million-Dollar Business
If I really need to block out everything I use http://simplynoise.com/ and turn the brownian noise all the way up and turn on oscillation. It both calms me and lets me focus on what I need to do for extended periods.
Right, 280Atlas.com became 280Atlas.app.

From what Francisco said, it sounds like they may still plan a web-based version.
Stream your media to XbOX, PS3 using TonidoPlug
Kulturzeit is probably the best program on german TV..
I think the point is that they're still expanding (and hence hiring). See this paragraph:

"Though Google is expanding into multiple areas such as operating systems, applications, online books and display advertising, more than 90 percent of company revenue comes from keyword-related search advertising, acknowledged Schmidt, who is also the chairman of the company."

To me this seems smart. If you still have the money to expand and you realize the recession will eventually end it's smart to continue expanding. That way not only will you not lose 2 years but you'll essentially gain 2 years that were lost by all the other companies that slammed on the brakes because of recession fears.
In the context of tackling a niggling problem that really could be dealth with in minutes, but appears to be taking forever - I find that a short nap (about 15-20 mins tops) helps me focus and gather my thoughts.

If you're in a crowded and/or noisy work environ, noise-cancelling headphones are useful for zoning out, and are more obvious than earphones, so people around you can see the reason for you not responding to them.

But as for "building" concentration because 'co-workers and the Internet' keep you from getting work done? No amount of mindhacks can help if you want to continue 'blaming' them for your distraction. Hard to fix a problem you claim to not have control over..
I think he filed the patent and then got the patent classified.
It is the norm.

I pay twice as much for my insurance as I would for identical coverage from the HMO branch of the same insurer, simply to make it harder for them to deny payment. This is totally worth it, but not everyone can afford to do this. I still have to fight them at least two or three times a year over coverage of something.
Indeed, the guy was really a genius. He pushed the whole of humanity towards using alternate current and it saddens me to see that he didn't (and still doesn't) get the credit he deserves.
In my mind he's the only true genius.
I'm sorry to hear of your father passing away.

Recently I have spent quite a lot of time with no right hand movement.

The impairment, pain was negligible compared to the frustration of performing everything so much slower.
The only thing staged about the demo is the richness of the widgets they already have available.

Other than that, it's just like Objective-C + Interface Builder (or better; more dynamic, more portable, no compile/link/go slowdown).

So you can expect generally the same amount of work to build stuff as you would expend building with Cocoa on the Mac/iPhone.
I think you misunderstood me - I'm not talking about policy/legislative changes. I'm talking about having their office fight, as your wife does, with the insurance companies on your behalf. This is what "constituent services" does.
Shut the fuck up douchebag.
He has written a few pieces about doing your own low-budget user testing, yes, but he doesn't encourage it after making his claims about specific things you should or shouldn't do.

That is, he doesn't say "These results are for our site, you should test it yourself for yours. Our findings may not be relevant for your situation." after he's talked about findings or made recommendations.

And he doesn't address situations that are directly in opposition of the findings he does report -- e.g., he has never covered sales letters as I described.

When he does write about "do it yourself" user testing, he does it in separate articles that are only about that topic. They are not situated in the broader context.

He is obviously a very smart person so I don't think that this is accidental.

And he only writes those DIY pieces once or twice a year. Generally speaking his company sells 3-day usability testing workshops for $23,000.

So, let's be realistic here.

Here's an example of one of the rare times when he discloses the actual test data: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9710a.html

Usually when he makes claims about, say, readability, no examples are offered. I was shocked to find this one.

You'll notice that nowhere in his explanation of the findings does he conjecture that maybe reading comprehension is low because it's bloody boring AND poorly written, and nobody gives two shits about Nebraska's dubious tourist attractions.

He says maybe it's because the language is "promotional." But, again, deathly boring and irrelevance to user's lives doesn't come into his analysis picture at all.

And he doesn't tell you to test your own content, either.

I have all his books and I've read the vast majority of his articles, too. You can dismiss me as somebody who merely has a "perception" problem, but that doesn't change the effort I've put into it.

PS - He reviewed a book on manipulating customers, through fiddling with neuroscientific knobs, thusly:

---

I highly recommend that you read this [book] for two reasons:

* The book's indispensable design advice will grow your business.

* You must teach your children to recognize this new class of manipulation.

---

So, it's cool when you're only manipulating OTHER people's kids.

I don't know why people think of him as if he's some kind of folk hero.
Google recruiting is notoriously slow. A few weeks to first acknowledgment is not unusual. Also, if you've just submitted your resume, there are multiple stages of interviews between you and an offer.