skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Get More Twitter Followers On Auto-Pilot Using This Twitter Software
I was once sceptical about Tweet Adder just like you but now that I have the facts, I am delighted to use this amazing software. Tweet Adder is a terrific software product in regards to both value and price. Read on to find out what I have to say about it.
I can see the creationists already: where is the transitional form between rock and human?
Missions To Mars
I think the desktop is critical as a system-integration point for users. I find it hard to integrate the silos of web apps, but on my desktop I can drag-and-drop from one app to another. At least on the Mac, many desktop apps are really good at integrating with the OS, which means they integrate well with each other.
The future woman will be Catholic
Whoopee. Wake me up when you an interesting story to report.
Not true, most countries offer both carrier-locked and unsubsidized (unlocked) iPhones.
Poll: millionaires vs billionaires, who's more efficient at investing?
I had a curious discussion with a friend of mine. We argued whether a billionaire having, say $10 billion, would invest them at least as efficiently as 100 millionaires each with a $100m. I suggested, that statistically it is more likely that 100 millionaires would have a lower chances to fail, because they would at least have 100x more time and experience. So here comes the question, if the society really benefits from having billionaires? What do you think?
1 billionaire with $10 billions
100 millionaires with $10 millions
I guess that was the other half of the story I forgot to include. Apparently kids in Finland don't resent reading and developing basic competency nearly as much as kids in North America do. As the norm, they read by choice instead of coercion.

That said, I guess the major difference is that the thing that was holding the kids back there really was just an inability to click with the material instead of what could almost look like a straight aversion to learning, which is what I found with a lot of my peers. And in situations like that, where you're working with people to see how things can fit their existing mental frameworks, I think is where the peer tutoring can really help, not just because its more about helping things fall into place, but because it grows how you look at the problem at the same time.

But regardless, its all hazy at this point. I just remember it being an interesting read: struck me as a nice parallel to cashflow normalization (getting the bulk of your revenue in november, december and january doesn't help much in making monthly interest payments unless you can smooth your earnings out to give you money to play with all year round, and thus take on higher debt to finance an even bigger revenue fall next season)
The term "global cooling" has a dominant usage in public discourse. So does the term "global warming".

These guys are trying to weasel out of having written what they've written by claiming the words they use don't mean what everyone else uses them to mean. Which is funny, because not knowing the language of your field is arguably a sign of worse ignorance than getting facts wrong in good faith after doing serious research.

These guys are pandering to the market for global denialism because that market buys books. Nothing wrong with that, but people who know their stuff are dead right to eviscerate them in the NYTimes because it's a bad faith pollution of the public discourse. So bring on the down-modding guys, I've got plenty to burn.
Could the differences in physique also stem from number of births?
There also aren't that many things to do with your life once you're out of school that don't involve the bottom half of the bell curve. Being able to work with a wide range of people is a huge asset to anyone.

Intellectually bright kids who struggle socially are often told that it'll be better once they get to the next level: don't worry so much about grade school, it'll get better once you get to middle school. Don't worry so much about high school, it'll be better once you're in college. And the greater freedom at each level does help, but no one will ever tell you that the politicking, the popularity contests and the pettiness don't go away at all in the working world. Figuring that stuff out at a young age with less severe consequences for mistakes is the best thing a kid can do for their long term success.
And finally I can comment...

http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2009/10/taiwan_ohd_...

I probably shouldn't comment much, but there is one thing I really want to say for me, not the company. I hope we've done some good in the community, and despite this mistake I hope that people will remember that. A bunch of us in the office I work in, in California, do our best to promote women in tech (http://www.flickr.com/photos/yahoo_women_in_tech/3799977956/...). I hope you'll judge us (Yahoo!) by our actions, and that includes our ability to say sorry when things aren't done right.

Tom
Hmm. Because it's steaming pile of shit, perhaps?
I'd quibble a bit with #8, page titles. In my experience users rarely if ever look at the page titles in the browser; they don't really impact usability.

If titles are important, pages should have a title banner or heading in the page itself, and not rely on users looking at the title up at the top of the browser window.
Their averages are nice, but they say nothing about how their system works for the students who can perform above average in their sleep. Unless you've got evidence to the contrary, I assume that the Finnish method isn't magically successful, and it looks good on paper at the expense of not enabling the best and brightest to reach their full potential. Given what the Wikipedia article says about the obstacles to establishing alternative schools, I'd say that being a highly gifted student in Finland is likely to be quite frustrating.
Here it is offered by most carriers.
One of the biggest mistakes with Windows Vista was the product strategy. Most consumers probably recognize that the latest version has improvements that will make their experience faster, more secure, etc, but get bogged down when trying to make the purchase.

Since most people don't use the features of their operating system anyway, why would anyone need to compare "home basic" (reads: worse than what you have now), "home premium" (for better homes?), "business" (what kind of business? filmmaking or accounting?), and "ultimate" (320 bucks for windows?)

Can't I just pay you for the version that works like what I have now but better?
Moving Away from Subsidized Clean Tech
The Tim Ferris way of testing ideas and how I did it.
Scott Adams: I credit MBA program for my success with Dilbert
There used to be more women in the field apparently. Coolest compiler researcher ever is Fran Allen who worked at IBM. Her interview in Coders At Work is great.
But I think that statistic approach does not work here at all.

Billionaires can be more effective with their huge market share (up to monopoly), resources and R&D potential. I have to mind that billionaire-owned Google and Microsoft have top revenue per employee in IT. Apple with billionaire Stee Jobs is at third place AFAIK. Can you add some other millionaire company to this list?

Besides, billionaire tends to be a succesful millionaire in the past.
I have a brilliant business plan. Parents give me 30k per year per child and in exchange I will say that their kids are gifted.
Peer tutoring can be great when the issue is a mismatch of learning styles, which is inevitably common when the student:teacher ratio is high. But that doesn't really have anything to do with gifted students. It works well for pretty much any population. On the other hand, peer tutoring is not a good way to make up for differences in raw intelligence, and asking a gifted student to help a student that really needs a remedial class is insulting to both students.
For future reference: billionaires and millionaires.
yeah, already edited this, thanks. Obviously, I haven't come across those words often enough :)
Mob Rule How Users Took Over Twitter
I agree, sports in HD is nice but I find it acceptable on standard. For movies or anything else, it doesn't matter. VHS tapes are good enough for me, and in fact preferable because they are so much more user friendly than DVDs.
djb wrote the code that won the EngineYard SHA1 challenge. His code was processing 800 million sha1 hashes per second. He wrote CUDA and C implementations. His sha1 implementation was 12 times faster than OpenSSL.
but regardless of whether the username is a correct one or not (in the database) - it should still persist in the UI.
Unintended Consequences of Fighting Child Labor
The Fun Theory: Bottle Bank Arcade Machine
Quantum computer chips now one step closer to reality
Take a look at the second and third picture again.

I can understand (if not agree with) the argument that dancing girls are a culturally acceptable form of entertainment in Taiwan.

However, judging from those pictures this was more akin to lapdancing than dancing on a stage.

I cannot believe that anyone would try and say that isn't associated with sex. That isn't wrong in itself, but it does mean that it's a form of entertainment aimed at a specific gender preference. While I do not preclude that many female developers are attracted to females, statistics show that on average a (much) greater proportion of males prefer females as a sexual partner than females do.

That means their entertainment was primarily aimed at men.

I believe that Yahoo should not discriminate based on race, religion or gender, and this bias is a form of discrimination.

QED

(There are other genuine concerns about the objectification of women as sex objects at a technology event, but I believe that the above argument is sufficient to show that it is wrong)
Zoho Projects Integrates With Google Apps
Did anyone else notice "About 1 in 5 (3,231) scored in the 90th percentile or higher, qualifying them for neighborhood-based gifted programs, and 9 percent (1,345) made the 97th percentile"?
Okay, try getting through Shakespeare without the discipline of being an active reader and you'll get nothing out of it but boredom. Listen to jazz and classical without actively listening, and you'll mistake the music as being relaxing.

An activity is engaging when you are a participant; that's the difference between reading Twilight and 100 Years of Solitude. If you want to accomplish something to its fullest effect, you cant do it passively, as this article seems to suggest is okay.

Did I miss something?
Apple is currently run by 'marketing department.' It's just a good one.

'Marketing department' doesn't mean the advertisers that have nothing to do with anything else any more then 'engineers' doesn't mean techies in the back room that have never seen a user and only work when you can tell them exactly what to do. That's just what they seem like when they don't do a great job.

Deciding not to have any competitor below the 30-40th price percentile. Deciding to always have a coherent product line. The decision to focus on users wiling to pay outright for things instead of focusing on companies. These are all marketing decisions more then they are engineering ones.
Interpreting what someone says by dropping 4/5 of their argument isn't really grappling with it in good faith. Try, "I disagree that anything short of military force can accomplish meaningful international action on emission reductions."

In which case, assuming you actually believe this, you would be contradicting yourself and agreeing with DeLong that it isn't totally futile to expect concerted action to achieve significant emissions reductions.

All that being said, there are many cases of international efforts reducing the emissions of environmentally damaging substances (i.e. acid rain, ozone depletion) without resort to armed conflict. So I don't think your position holds up to the scrutiny of the real world. It feels more like an ideological reaction to the existence of global warming (which no-one seriously disputes these days) than an attempt to think through the underlying issues.
And earnings of $1.82/share, way above analysts' predictions of ~$1.42.
Why Email isn't Dying
Snow Leopard shipped a version of Flash which (may) have been vulnerable and which was the latest version available at the time the Snow Leopard GM was pressed, yes. And then they updated it.
As I recall, the value of SCO stocked rose and dropped quite a while ago and in a predictable way, even before the trials began.

I also recall it being impossible to short SCO since said stock was not available to be borrowed and sold, ie, the stock may have gotten up to $12/share but not very many shared were actually sold at that price.

I also recall that, at at least point, SCO was able to maintain their operations primarily through an investment by Microsoft, an "investment" which just about everyone could see would not turn a profit but would provide MS value in "other ways".

This is just my memory, so corrections are welcome...
It does mean that there are limitations on using it in the advertising of a competing product, however.
I am blinded by your sparkling wit =/
For Immediate Relief: Speaking Like a Human
Who uses bookmarks still, and who sorts them alphabetically?

Most people I know just remember the URL or search for the page on Google if they want it again. Googling "Doctor Who" gives the BBC site as the first result.
it's up ~$12, or ~6%.
The Fun Theory: Fun as a way to Change People's Behavior
I would argue that page titles are less important (and less looked at) for the page currently displayed, but as soon as tabs come into play they become immensely important. Titles are then the only way to identify the pages (plus, much of the time, favicons).

And in that context I also do not agree with the suggestion in the article. Displaying only on which page you are currently will be good enough much of the time but not always. Finding a (short!) way of denoting which website you are on seems sensible to me.

Now, honestly, this doesn’t apply to the page he mentions. You could indeed cut the BBC out. “Doctor Who” becomes the important information – but that identifier should definitely be preserved. Now, having titles like “Contact” or “<Title of Article>” – that would be a bad idea.
Useful page titles are absolutely crucial to tabbed browsing. For example, all the page titles here start with the string "Hacker News | ", which is completely redundant given the favicon, and could just as well go at the end of the title. As things stand now, my tabs seldom show more than the first three or four characters of the actual article title.
Safari doesn’t display favicons on tabs. (Edit: It’s true! It really doesn’t!)
There are a couple of things I disagree with.

Colours have very different meanings depending on where the culture. The go-to example is how red is percieved in the U.S. (danger/bad) versus China (happiness/luck).

With regards to website names in titles, URLs aren't displayed in some history lists. It's also important to remember the sizable chunk of the population that Googles everything and has no idea how to read a URL.
Pengertian protokol - Telusuri dengan Google
Open Letter to the Micromanaged
PEOPLE. downvote != disagree.
It also strips out common prefixes among tab titles that would cause the tab title to become abbreviated. It's pretty clever, I think.
So? There's a selection bias in who attempts to qualify for gifted programs, and the quoted percentiles are relative to the general population. These kinds of tests aren't re-normed with every administration. The magnitude of this selection bias doesn't seem at all surprising.
> I've never heard anyone say "oh, yeah, that paper, too bad it's authored by a woman."

I have, if you substitute "book" for "paper".

Now that we've traded anecdotes, where does that leave the discussion?

> ... the problem won't be solved if you run around trying to make special rules for the girls.

What special rule do you have in mind? I would feel uncomfortable with partially-unclothed dancers of any gender at a Bar Camp or hack day regardless of cultural norms. I suspect I'm not the only person who would feel that way, and I'm very comfortable suggesting that conference organizers should avoid hiring said dancers.
I'd agree that pages without a title banner or heading are probably making a usability mistake, but I disagree that titles don't impact usability. When done correctly, correct titles make a site much more usable. Usability doesn't just apply to the page that a particular user is on, but to the site as a whole. For starters, I thought the article's example of bookmarks was a decent one.

Maybe I'm not the typical user, but I personally find page titles extremely useful when using a back button. I get annoyed when I expand the back history and just see the site name for every entry. I've also noticed a trend in browsers like Chrome that use the title as an autocomplete hint in the address bar.

Also, beyond the SEO importance highlighted by the article, if you have multiple pages indexed in a search engine, it makes it much easier for an actual user to locate a particular page of interest. As a side note, I am actually more inclined to click a search result if the title looks like it was made for me, seems to match my intent, and looks like it was not just constructed for a search engine.
Thought experiment: early stage startup A, which consists of 3 males throws a private launch party at which there are female strippers. It's unprofessional, but at this point it doesn't matter because it's just a group of friends who happen to be running a company. Startup B, consisting of three females, same situation with male strippers.

Later A and B merge and, to celebrate, throw an event called Hackers and Strippers, which is open to the general (adult) hacking population and features male and female strippers and a guitar shower room. Hard to imagine any hacking gets done, but a good time is had by all. The actual logistics of such an event, and whether or not it would offend their customer bases, are left as an exercise to the reader.

AB grows to become the 3000 employee AB Corp. When they IPO they throw Hackers and Strippers Worldwide. Same kind of party on a larger scale. Unprofessional? You betcha.

Independent of sexism, at what point does unprofessionalism become a problem?
Terms Never to Use to Market Technology
If that's Microsofts strong suit, they really don't have much going for them. Upgrading to Vista was horrific!

As a user and developer, I much prefer annual/biennial releases because in both cases, I get an continually improving OS, but also upgrades are far easier to deal with. And anyway, you'd have a hard time finding any OSX user in 2007 who preferred using OSX 10.0, whereas in the Windows camp, everyone was in that situation, using a 6 year old OS. Well, 8 year old now…
If you put gold in wharehouse and they say that you can retrieve it at anytime, and then turn around and give it to others -- how is that not fraudulent? It only works because they hope that not everyone will demand their gold back at the same time, so they can give you other peoples gold.

My issue is only with demand deposits; if you put the money in an account like a CD where you agree to take it out in X amount of time, then they can lend it out.
> I assume that the Finnish method isn't magically successful, and it looks good on paper at the expense of not enabling the best and brightest to reach their full potential.

Here's some supporting evidence. Let's compare it to a country of similar size, Singapore:

http://www.imo-official.org/country_individual_r.aspx?code=F...

http://www.imo-official.org/country_individual_r.aspx?code=S...

We can see that Singapore does much better.

Of course, IMO scores are not exactly the most important measure ever, but I suspect, nonetheless, that smart Finnish students spend more time playing computer games than their counterparts in Singapore.
I read this twice and I'm still confused as to what this has to do with the OT?
I've been itching to try this for some time. I would appreciate any war stories HNers could share.
That's not the lesson I take away here. Yes, breaking encapsulation is occasionally necessary. Yes, abstraction sometimes has a performance penalty (but sometimes it doesn't).

Mostly I've learned that we had a mountain of technical debt we have to remove before we were in a good position to produce huge optimizations. What Andrew didn't write is that despite losing some speed with recent changes after 1.4, we've added a lot of optimizations. We'll probably lose a bit of ground after 1.7, but we're in a much better position to gain it back and more after 1.8.
Hmmmm. I would respectfully disagree.

I'm somewhat conflicted as I have interests in a rival product in the twitter app space but IMHO it's not clear to your "average Joe" user what is going on. Further more, from my own experience, once you tell someone who's using an app that has Plura running what it is doing, people tend to be quite concerned and certainly not wanting to have it on their system.

JDRock: I also believe you work with/for 80legs but can't see any disclosure in your posts.

Not wanting to be a d*ck but if you are going to say that it's obvious and easy to turn off (and de-karma me for my comment) I think you should state whether that's from a NPOV or whether you're actually involved in the product.
Iridesco, the company behind Harvest (a time-tracking app), also made something similar, called Coop - http://coopapp.com
Give them a mirror.
Rant: Compilers != Parsers
Clicking through Google gets rid of the pay wall:

http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Far...
"The day Apple is fully ran by MBA's and the Marketing department is the day it peaks."

And that day was sometime in the early nineties. Fortunately their descent from that peak was reversed before too late.
I think one of the most loathsome and ubiquitous UI sins is the "show more" style of navigation, where some ajaxy cruft goes and makes the page longer, propagated with more data. Paginated navigation (ex: flickr) is much friendlier and lends itself well to digging deep into the past whereas services such as Twitter, Brightkite, facebook and the like have practically solidified their role as platforms for ephemeral and trite chatter with one simple UI decision.
Can anyone link me to (or provide themselves) a comparison of Clojure to Groovy?

I might regret admitting it but functional/dynamic programming is new to me, but I'd love to learn more about it. Groovy and Clojure sound pretty similar to me, minus the Lisp part, so I'm curious what some of the other major differences are.
Barnes & Noble ‘Nook’ e-book reader out Tuesday
Ask Mac Devs: How do you track downloads+host your app for download?
Starting to dive into some Cocoa programming and making an app for fun. I can easily throw the .DMG file up on S3 Cloudfront, but wanted to know if there was a simple app that lets me upload new versions/tracks download analytics of the app?
Like I said in my blog post, it worked pretty good for me.

From here, I basically went on and created a Minimal Viable product.
Hopefully you end up needing to use them a lot someday. :-)
That seems hard to believe. I did the same testing strategy with my Job applier software (http://fastjobapplier.weebly.com/) and first of all I only got around 30 ad clicks total, and no one filled out the form. (I was thoroughly disappointed.)

Granted maybe I just suck at sales copy, or perhaps there just isn't demand out there for software that helps you apply for jobs.

Still though, a 10%+ conversion rates seems too high.

Do you find you're still getting a similar conversion rate now that you're actually selling the product?
And that is perfectly fine because those who do want will reproduce more and soon your gene's will be gone.