skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A marketing professor was picking on stupid products, like Heinz gravy, when a student in the back offered, "I was the product manager for gravy at Heinz. It made us $60 million last quarter. If you'd like to use it for a case study some day, I'd be glad to help you with it."

This particular story is a great synopsis of business school. You are encountering people who may not know what they're talking about, opening yourself up to new data and new thinking, and being polite and constructive about it. Note who is playing each role in this case, too.

And for the cynics in this thread: you only get to complain about MBA's if you can do their job better than they can. I'm not saying you can't, I'm just trying to be fair.
I just had a play with this in a local shop. The bottom of the pre keypad is knife like in its sharpness and the interface is cricket ball like in its sharpness.
Writing serial port interrupt handler in linux 
I got a new problem with the following interrupt handler code with respect to
serial port 1. I have a cable connecting two serial ports of two computers
with linux on them. On one computer there is minicom installed and on another
I have compiled and successfully insmoded the below shown module. But when I
type on minicom, it doesnt show anything (by the command 'dmesg') on the
other computer where my module is loaded !

Kindly help !!

#include <linux/kernel.h>
#include <linux/interrupt.h>
#include <asm/io.h>

#define PORT 0x3F8

irq_handler_t isrSerialPort (int irq, void dev_id, struct pt_regs regs)
{
printk ("\nThank god !\n");
return (irq_handler_t) IRQ_HANDLED;
}

int init_module ()
{
outb (0x01, PORT + 1);
outb (0x83, PORT + 3);

// Set Baud rate - Divisor Latch Low Byte
outb (0x0C, PORT + 0);
// Set Baud rate - Divisor Latch High Byte
outb (0x00, PORT + 1);

// number of bytes to read
outb (0x07, PORT + 2);
outb (0x03, PORT + 3);

int h = request_irq (4, (irq_handler_t) isrSerialPort,

SA_SHIRQ, "God", (void *) (isrSerialPort));

// Interrupt when data received
outb (0x01, PORT + 1);

return h;

}

MODULE_LICENSE ("GPL");
Actually you're probably right on the mark..

Acceleroto's blog post about their experience with developing the Pre version of Air Hockey tells the full story:

"Memory management (aka Garbage Collection). WebOS is allows users to run multiple apps at once. Users beg for multitasking. You think it impacts game performance? Absolutely. Even if every app behaves nicely, they all consume memory. Memory management is handled by the OS without any direct say of the individual applications. Whenever the OS decides, it does a Garbage Collection. Currently, this takes about 300ms (about a third of a second). Air Hockey contains specific code to lessen the impact of these pauses, but developers can’t turn them off. A lot of time was spent making sure objects weren’t needlessly allocated to minimize the frequency of the Garbage Collections, but you’ll see the pauses. That may change in the future – we don’t know."

http://blog.acceleroto.com/2009/10/06/the-first-paid-app-is-...
This webpage has a redirect loop.

The webpage at http://filmvsfilm.com/ has resulted in too many redirects. Clearing your cookies for this site or allowing third-party cookies may fix the problem. If not, it is possibly a server configuration issue and not a problem with your computer.
"Growing from 10 - 15% is admirable, but not as hard as growing from 70% to 105%." I just emailed this around the office. Hilarious.
Na Internet ficou mais fácil trair e muito mais ainda descobrir a traição
Hacking the Tower: Jelli Crowdsources FM Radio
Fedora 11 (Constantine) Beta release announcement
I got my Pre last week. I really like the UI and the idea of multitasking. However, I already sent it back because of the spacebar and the power button not working properly (aparrently not only an issue with my Pre). From my experience from using it for a few days all I can say is that the battery life really sucks. You can't get through a day with moderate use of email, twitter, phone...

I am also a little disappointed by the build quality. It just does not feel smooth when you slide out the keyboard. I, however, did not experience any issues with the calendar. It takes some seconds for every app to load but I did not see a big difference in the loading time of the calendar and the other apps.

Now I have to wait two weeks before I will get it back since they would not just give me a new one. Reading this article really makes me wonder if I made a bad decision buying the Pre.
The Hidden Cost of C++
I paid $5. I have an 8 yr old who likes Wii Sonic and Mario games. I didn't know if I could interest him. I didn't know if I'd like it. The $5 was what I was able to gamble. Now that we've both played it (I like it more than my son), I'm going back right now and adding another $10. I think it's worth $15 given the length of the game. I'd pay more if it were longer.
Nice, but to keep me interested for longer, I think it would have to have a bit more to it.
For low-level performance-critical stuff you can always go down to C++, though I believe that's limited to operations on your own internal data and does not extend to system-level programming.
I think it would be interesting to run an experiment with this model where some buyers were shown what the last buyer of the game paid and another group of buyers were shown what the average price paid for the game was. My hypothesis is that the group seeing the average price would pay very close the average and have a tight distribution of payers. I think the group being shown what the last buyer paid would have a very wide distribution of payers but I have a hunch that they would see a higher average price paid due to some people seeing a high last price paid and saying, well I should at least pay X (I could comfortably get by with paying this much less) or seeing a low last price paid and saying I'll at least pay Y (I'm a good person for paying above that). Regardless, it would be an interesting experiment.
What a lot of people missed during the Courier publicity push, is the brilliant way the two screens are being used. With two screens and some simple gestures, you have a very implicit, obvious, but powerful subject-verb-object language!

"I'm taking this from here, and I'm putting it there."

Drag and drop can mean put this into exactly that there. Flicking can mean to put this in that collection with those things over there.

This is a user interaction language which is very minimal, yet very useful. It's enough to immediately cover 95% of what I imagine such a device doing, and yet has the potential for many other things I haven't thought of yet. In other words, it has emergent potential.

The minimal part is also especially good. It means that they can implement a lot of very slick stuff without exorbitant amounts of effort.

I think the folks behind Courier are onto something. If they can do it right, it will be a game changer. If they do it right, they could steal Apple's thunder.
I'll admit that I didn't read this article particularly thoroughly, but how did he get through an entire overview of 'Table Oriented Programming' without mentioning Lua?
pokerai.org
Startups:  How To Build A Barrier To Entry With Inbound Marketing
I think it's fairly obvious from my posts that I work for 80legs.

If you try out the latest Digsby installation, you'll see that they've changed the install process. So while I suppose I am biased, it's also a fairly objective thing to observe. Lifehacker even posted a follow-up article applauding Digsby for the change, if I remember correctly.

What I've seen is that if people are told about Plura up-front and have the option to turn it off from the get-go, they have no qualms about it. Digsby didn't do an awesome job about this initially, but they've corrected it.

Also, I wasn't the only that d-ked you.
That's the one I was thinking of. Thanks for finding it!
Two screens = Screen a for main content + Screen b to access data related the main content. For example accessing the wikipedia, a reference, a map or simple a word definition.
It's Time for Obama to Come Out for FOSS
If there were more people writing this entertainingly and concisely about security testing, there would be a lot more CISAs.
If you have to choose between company A with lousy engineering but good marketing and company B with great engineering and lousy marketing, history shows company A is a no-brainer.
password recovery? Pretty please? With sugar on top?
I wrote this - a little out of date, but hopefully a good and short introduction. What was fun about writing this book was that many Lisp heavy hitters helped out with ideas and corrections.

BTW, I am working on another Lisp book, specific to Franz AllegroGraph (RDF, SPARQL, etc.) I plan on releasing a free PDF, with a print book also available.
A process resembling this has actually been measured. Scientists wired electrodes into the brain of a rat, and ran it through a physical activity while recording nerve signals. They left the recorders going afterwards and accidentally noticed that the same signal patterns were being replayed in reverse order.
Most people can drive their cars for years and years, because they give it the right maintenance and fuel. But somehow, they give their bodies almost no care, terrible fuel, and expect equivalent mileage? There's no replacement for prevention.

"An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."
Google was probably giving a limited license on the collection copyright, which is much less protective than "normal" copyright.

It's harder to google for that term than many other copyright terms, but here it is from the horse's mouth: http://www.sacred-texts.com/sect103.htm

Google does have a copyright on the collection as a whole, even as they do not gain any extra rights on the underlying public domain material. It's sort of weird, but it does make sense.
I like to convert my money to silver dollars and stack them on my desk, while complaining about the cost of coal to heat my office!!! rubs hands together maniacally
Contrary to claims that usability professionals operate scientifically to identify problems in an interface

Who claims that? I think usability testing is one of the most subjective practices out there.

Oh right, the author of this article (and the authors of the previous studies too!) is muddying the waters of what is "usability testing" and "usability evaluation".

Usability testing normally implies testing with a user. This sounds like all these studies were heuristic evaluations. If everyone had the same set of heuristics/best practices, then yes, it would be surprising for there to be a difference.
Sounds good to me. Thanks.
That's a really clever idea. Ultra-capacitors are by themselves a very neat technology, this kind of ingenuity in the transportation industry is a small step in the direction of letting go of the oil addiction, sooner is better in my opinion.

The way the system is described it has clearly been engineered to maximize cost savings, but I don't think the passenger will be too happy with a bus that stops for several minutes every couple of stops. Better to do that charging in smaller gulps at every stop, it will cost more (because you need more charging stations) but the public will be much more accepting of a technology that does not right away contain a very visible drawback.
Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All
We've known this was coming for a while. Fake Steve and John Gruber are blogbitching each other about it.
The MAC-MAE Checklist
At least someone here on HN understands client work. While 6 months is a bit long for the lower end, thinking you can design and build a site for a client in 3 weeks is a pipe dream. I've been doing this (client web work) for 10 years and have only had a small handful of sites launch in under a month.

Small business owners are busy, un-responsive at times, fickle .. you name it. It all adds up to additional time no matter how fast you are or how many all-nighters you pull.

And to give some advice to young aspiring web hackers; pulling all nighters and delivering client work at 2:00 AM does not paint a very good picture of you or your firm to the client. It shows that you're unbalanced and that you're not effectively managing your workflow correctly. It will also catch up to you and your health if it becomes routine.
Here's a link to Happy Cog's: http://www.happycog.com/contact/contact.zip
In my experience with mobile development, disk I/O is especially slow. So the calendar load time might depend on how much data you have saved in your calendar.
This is an entirely superficial comparison. There is none of "this is how the language affects how you design your software" and there is plenty of "oh, here's a quicksort, big and scary. And looking at the table at the top: "object oriented", "statically typed." Is that all the author has to say? You could substitute C# in place of Scala and get the same point-by-point comparison.

What the author completely misses is Scala's entire type system. The evil genius monster of a type system. I can't think of any reason why I'd want to use Scala other than the type system -- oh, sure, anonymous functions -- and the fact that not a word is said about traits or type constructors as type parameters or existential types or things that use the word "implicit" is depressing. Scala is not so much object oriented as it is the best strictly evaluated form of Haskell that lives comfortably in the Java ecosystem, that, hey, happens to have classes and traits.

And I think it fails to do justice to the good parts of Clojure, too.

Also, the benchmark, computing factorial(5000), is nonsense, since it's really measuring the performance of the BigInt implementation.

Also, not surprisingly, the one demonstration of the power of macros is the typical body-wrapping kind that might as well be a higher order function.
Good name! We could never come up with a descriptive title for this at
http://www.greatmovieexperiment.com/
The name seems so obvious now. Our goal was to create a list of the top films by showing all the pairings of films randomly. I presume a "top fights" page on yours will be forthcoming?
Agreed! Also interesting would be to see how many people from those two groups dropped out of the sale after seeing the last/avg price paid. (And the drop-out % vs. what price was shown relationship, by group.)
Neither IM nor Facebook is dying. Email's not dying either, but your countersuggestions are absurd.
I did not think it was neutral. While the code comparisons and one benchmark come about similarly, his characterizations of Scala seem biased to me.
Do you have a link to this research? I'd be interested to read more about it.
Got me hooked.
I just kept clicking until I realized... hey what are you doing? Stop clicking!
So that part is done.

But then what happens?
Misuse of "unacceptable" and other tech support woes.
I guess we could switch to Japanese-style stoveaway futons, but I like sleep way too much to make any kind of compromises there :)
Do you know where I might read more about this? Do you remember what they were studying?
Tell that to the silent movie stars.
In theory, you're supposed to think "hey, I've got a great idea for a match-up" and then head over here:

http://filmvsfilm.com/make

In practice, most people don't seem to discover that part of the site, or aren't interested.
"# Ask yourself if your contract is bulletproof to begin with. Be sure to work with a lawyer...
# Make sure the contract you’re negotiating has plenty of wiggle room for revision work/iteration during the project..."

Not only do these two points contradict each other, my advice for web guys getting into the game is to take the advice of the latter recommendation. Small business owners hate contracts and don't want to see every detail spelled out. They see it as a trap, and will think of you as someone who's just looking for a reason to upcharge.

Your contracts should be just specific enough to make the client think you've thought of most everything, and include enough wiggle room if things get hairy, but shouldn't spell out every single little item. And stay the hell away from your attorney when composing this, they only make it worse and of course will charge you an assload for their work.

If your game is medium sized businesses or any corporate work, sure go ahead and write up that bulletproof contact. That's stuff corp and enterprise love to see so they can justify the expense to their higher ups ("look at this 20 page contact boss, it covers everything!").
Was there a point to this? With that Title I was expecting results of some kind but the whole post is a bunch of "Maybe it did, Maybe it didn't. I don't know"
yet another kitten war? http://kittenwar.com/
I am curious. As plenty of business people use gmail/docs, what are the subpoena implications of that?
Undead invasion game in cities around the world
Justice Department Will Not Prosecute Medical Marijuana Use
That is the standard Apress contract now. Mark made his initial contract with Apress quite a long time ago when it was a far smaller company where special deals could be made.
I wonder if part of the success is that World of Goo is relatively well-known. I'm curious if the pay-what-you-want model would work for an unknown game from an unknown company.
Why do the images from IBEX take 6 months to be composed?
Maybe the user interfaces totally sucked, and the teams only had time to uncover and report on a percentage of them. Having seen the old Hotmail webpage, I think this is likely.
Apparently Nintendo has a time machine because my daughter and her friends have had dual screens for years now. There's a lesson here somewhere.
Didn't say Facebook is dying.

Traditional IM is suffering, IMO: Twitter, Social networks and Skype ate its users. And, paradoxically, even Email.

Maybe it's just me who use them less and less? No idea.
Gravity - collaborative BPM prototype on Wave
How has this made it on to the front page of Hacker News?
Thanks for not calling it startup. No offence to anyone, but I genuinely like it when people call their projects as projects.
Who the hell is downmodding thristian's comment?

You're pretty much spot on. You don't just get the right to redistribute, though, you also get the right to modify. If you do modify, and distribute your modifications, you're obligated to release them under the GPL as well (this is what FUDers always cry 'viral' over).
Very cool explanation :-)

I have several little writing projects that I distribute, but I chose the Creative Commons 'no commercial use, no derivatives' license because that was what I felt good with.

People who create stuff have the right to choose the license.
Using Human Wetware to Control Robots
The Beatles Rock Band Becomes Leading Music Video Game in First Month
Rock Band For The iPhone
Huh! If you don't count Skype as IM then I agree with you. That's my primary IM at the moment. But isn't that IM?
Apple To Launch iPhone in China End of October
Newsy: News Aggregator But Shows The News from Multiple Sources in One Video
Magnum is a pure python HTTP server that is fast and efficient with resources.
Thanks for writing this good book. I've dared to link it here.
No mention of libraries (yes, they both can use Java's libraries, but some native ones would be useful).

And therefore, no mention of the document of said libraries (which I'm now convinced is crucial).
Very biased. I've read some pro clojure stuff from the author before.

I can't understand the point in spending time slagging off another open source project that simply has a different point of view.

They're all tools built to solve a problem. Maybe you can't find a use for a 5 headed hammer, but the person who created it found one.
Laika, a dynamic typeface
I just had an Apress book published, and the contract gives APress the distribution rights - fine with me since they effectively paid me to write the book: their advances allowed me to have a really good time and spend most of my time writing for 4 months. (I enjoy consulting, but writing is even more fun.)
Because, at the time of this writing, 13 people appreciated it.
It's an interesting question though; such a contract must specifically remove any rights the GPLD gives Apress.

Otherwise it's hard to see how they couldn't wiggle out of paying royalties?
> We're missing out on 50% of the people who could be good engineers.

Much as many of us would like to believe it, where is the evidence for this statement?

Decreeing a politically-correct gospel and punishing heretics for denying it doesn't make it true.
I have a sony ebook reader, and I have to say, the main draw for me is being able to treat it as a book first. I suspect that a dual screen format will have some novel uses, but it will never be able to replace a dedicated book style ereader. The addition of the color lcd screens will probably be distracting to most users, as well as to have a profound impact on battery life.
"One guy asked me 'Havent you ever passed arguments in the wrong order and expected a different return than what you got ?" and I'll be honest: No, I haven't. But for people who have a hard time getting arguments order and return types right, this system is a great help. So it has it's place, I must say."

Trolololo.
No, you're hungry, they sell cookies .. done deal.

I commented on this dude's blog but basically he's turned off by a rather soft sales technique. If he ever had to survive in a sales world .. he wouldn't.

People in business want .. more business. Just like people who are hungry want food. If you make a product that serves a need, you gotta get over that whole "I don't want to offend anyone" and get to it. Otherwise your competitor will.
>>First off, a REPL IS a CLI.

drscheme, allegro lisp,squeak,dolphin smalltalk,idle. Most of the REPLs I use aren't CLI and are the better for it. I certainly don't see this as a discoverable vs expressive debate. It is expressive(the app) vs expressive(the user) debate. A GUI allows the App to be more expressive. CLI has only one way of expressing anything to the user, slabs of text.
Windows 7 XP Mode
Windows7 "XP Mode" hilarious virtual machine trick. Also, how to sell XP licenses to windows users not on Linux or Mac.
Some markets require billions of dollars to enter, like buying frequencies from an FCC auction, so I think that's and interesting an relevant discussion point.
The Best Platforms Evolve From Applications
This is not neutral, the guy works exclusively in Clojure as freelancer, so it is fair to assume he is sort of biased.. as others mentioned here before he misses some important aspects which Scala has to offer.
Average of 50 page views is great, but whats the % of returning visitors? I think u've gota find/create a reason for users to return. Neat idea nonetheless.
That's not true in the case of C – just reported in the case of Ruby. And only in some cases.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_you
How many people have MS, Apple and Google burned? I think as a percentage it's quite low but does Bill G or Steve J give a crap about the few who hate them?

Just like meeting girls, the assholes usually win that battle and while 'taking the high ground' might mean you sleep better or have better karma, it also means you'll have to make due with a lot less (which for some is okay, we all have our threshold).

It's a balance between being that asshole sales/marketing guy who lands the project/sale/client and the guy who actually cares about the customer and their needs after the sale.
Introduction to Information Retrieval (online edition)