skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just confirmed this one with one of the founders...

"that puts quite a bit of work on the delivery service."

This is exactly what has been done - the barcode translates to a consignment number that is useless without access to myHermes' database. This is in virtue of them having recently incorporated new barcode scanners that link them into this system.

[EDIT: dunno about the https overkill, though]
every advertiser i've worked with requires IE6 compatibility. so, theres that to keep in mind.
How to murder a business
Obama Wants Computer Privacy Ruling Overturned
That's not really accurate. It would be safer to say that people who respond to that poll on HN self-report having NT intuitive thinking traits at about seven times higher than the usual distribution would predict, assuming no one voted multiple times.

Which is to say, it's really silly to draw much of anything meaningful from an internet poll.
Are You An Entrepreneur? My five traits of an entrepreneur.
MIT geeks seek "ugliest man on campus"
More importantly, you might not need those features ever...
Years ago I met the CEO of a company that wanted to hire me at SFO. He had bought himself a coffee and didn't offer me one. I bought my own and he didn't seem to notice.

Said everything I needed to know about the guy.
They are:

Self-Motivation

Persistence

Plays Well With Others

Attention To Detail

Quick Thinking
Still, if the point of using the Random object is being efficient, instantiating an object for just one nextBoolean() call is likely to be more inefficient than just calling Math.random().
IPhone Killers & Letting Problems Pull Your Strings
Erlang/OTP R13B03: native implemented functions API
Hands-on with the Roku Channel Store
WakeMate Helps You Get a Good Night’s Sleep
New Twitter office: fabulous design by Sara Morishige Williams
I agree that without a very frank up-front discussion about IE6 limitations, you'll find yourself redoing PNGs as GIFs and writing some conditional CSS hacks the night of launch when the client's sister boots up her Compaq to check out the cool new site.
A tutorial: http://www.davispj.com/2009/11/23/erlang-nif-test.html
Agree, Dropbox is amazing. Cheap version control for the rest of us. Made my USB drives useless.
"And Dropbox ... says it will offer tools for corporate collaboration in a more formal fashion early next year."

Any Dropbox folks here who could comment on what those tools might be?
If it's difficult to find a good job* straight out of uni, then graduates must work hard at /finding a job/ rather than at something society values (e.g., engineering). If we're imagining better worlds, I think it would be better to have a superabundance of worthwhile things to do than to have a superabundance of people chasing a smaller number of worthwhile activities.

*(or found a startup)
Yep, and I love it. See my comment above: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=960532
This is the same policy we keep at my firm. We support IE6 on all sites, I don't see it as an option.

Part of being an expert is making things look easy. IE6 is frustrating, but its our problem.

The exception is web applications that aren't public facing. In those cases I think its reasonable to specify that the app will be run in a specific browser, and to charge more if it needs to run in many.
My brother played sims online on a demo and joined the mafia. The requirements were 1. own a tuxedo. That's it. Things got interesting when his sim girlfriend stalked him to mafia HQ and was shouting in the lobby to see him in the middle of a mafia staff meeting. The don was a little less than pleased.

Even though it made the game a lot worse, it's probably the most interesting example of emergent behavior in a game I've heard of. Maybe if an Eve online corporation has an IPO.
Five reasons Google Chrome OS Security Wins
NN 4.x stayed around forever BECAUSE we supported it, and IE6 will do the same. We have met the enemy, and they are us.
all this analysys falls flat in reality beacause people buy the mac to be identified with this traits. (and not the other way). So have to say, Invalid.
Google apologizes for offensive first lady image
The tagline is "Send anything Anywhere". Yet, from the pricing page I get the impression this is only valid for limited values of "everywhere"...
(The FAQ doesn't contain info on coverage).
I think you are spot on. But maybe you should not look at the visitor profile but at the revenue profile. Maybe the typical IE6 user has a higher probability of clicking on your client's advertising.

After all, if your gain from supporting IE6 is higher than the cost of supporting it, it makes no sense to abandon IE6.
I generally just make sure that the website is functional in IE6. If an element is bumped/ aligned or distorted in some way (and is still usable) it doesn't get fixed.
The saddest thing is likely that this poor fellow actually may have consciousness and some better form of communication would be wonderful for him if that's the case...

But is being exploited by "FC" yo-yo's who are either naive or corrupt.

Unfortunately great numbers of naive and corrupt are readily available.
Being an expert is about knowing how to do something not about making things look easy. In fact, things that aren't easy take more time so the last thing you want to do is make them look easy because then your customers will have unreal expectations as far as how fast the work can be done and how much they should be charged.

There is a legitimate argument for charging more for IE6 compatibility and I don't see what's wrong with telling a customer that. If it were me I'd offer a basic option for free (no graphics with a link suggesting the user upgrade their browser) and then offer full compatibility for an additional charge.
Ask HN: Please review our Start-Up: Twitalbums.com
Hi guys!

We have just release our app in "alpha" and would like the HN community to give us some feedback:

What does it do?
Twitalbums lets you share files on Twitter by creating "albums" which are "Social Venues for the crowdsorcing of media, by invitation only". Albums provide a simple and powerful way to have control of what you share online.

How is it different?
Different from Twitpic o Yfrog, Twitalbums is "intimate", not public. Only the people you invite to your album will see what's inside that particular album.

Twitter?
We use Twitter as an identification and notification platform. Comments, invitations, etc, get published on your Twitter profile so the people interested can be notified of our activity within Twitalbums.com

We have a business model:
When you log in for the first time we give you 50 "seeds"

"Seeds" are Twitalbums credit system. Each seed allows you to upload one file to an album. Once you run out of seeds you can buy more. You can find the seeds option within the file up-loader inside any album.

Thanks for your time and I hope you guys check it out and give it a spin

http://www.twitalbums.com
Clickable http://www.twitalbums.com
SHODAN Firefox Addon
Sockpuppet for insomniamedia, crenk.com spammer
http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=insomniamedia
http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=insomniamg
This is a good point. I work for a non-profit and it's my job to maintain the web site. We notice users who click on our banner ads the most are IE6 users and AOL users (who use a newer browser but who you can identify by the IP).

The less savvy users are the more likely they are to click on ads in my experience
A minor irritant: using "the DNS" rather than merely "DNS" (but NOT in the title!). I find that somewhat distracting. Examples:

" It's hard to observe the DNS..."

"Using the DNS is often compared to..."

When should "the DNS" ("the domain name system") become "DNS"? Should it?

I'm currently reading: Steven Pinker's "The Stuff of Thought". My apologies for unshouldering this heavy linguistic burden.
I simply can't take any Wikipedia criticism seriously.

The mainstream media isn't going to publish anything about Wikipedia unless it's got a hook. "Online Encyclopedia Still Surprisingly Useful" just isn't catchy enough.

For non-mainstream criticism, it generally seems to be, well lets say, "kooks". I actually seek out new criticism in the hope that it may be enlightening. Most recently I saw a blog comment from someone who wrote a column in the Guardian newspaper about Wikipedia's problems and how it is a cult. I literally just remembered this, and Google'd for it and found this:

"I'm on Wikipedia, get me out of here" : an article complaining about his own Wikipedia article.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2006/sep/28/wikipedia.w...

Which has a link to all his articles (which seem overwhelmingly to be Wikipedia criticism):

http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/sethfinkelstein

And a couple of results down a story about his conflict of interest in this particular story:

"Seth Finkelstein, The Guardian and Wikipedia"

http://blog.shankbone.org/2009/04/20/seth-finkelstein-the-gu...

You really couldn't make it up. I'd love to read some actual thoughful criticisms but just can't seem to find them. Links are appreciated if you're aware of any.
The irony in all this is that the company that the apparent gambit was made with is actually called "Gambit".
Now you know that liking Star Trek is non-random. You could then try and understand what the basis and rules behind this liking is. You can then apply that understanding to things like this:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ellen-ladowsky/pedophilia-and-...
and see if any useful conclusions can be reached.

The question is whether MBTI _is_ a measure. If you're saying that it's a measure, but not one you care about, then that's fine. If you're saying that it's not a measure, and that the results are purely random, then you have to explain why there are correlations between said random data and non-random data.
The solution is very simple. Pricing.

Give your client two prices: one with IE6 support, the other without. Give honest prices based on the genuine overhead of working with IE 6.

If the client is willing to pay for IE6 support, fine, do the work you are being paid for. Let the cash decide the future of IE6

...but this is another example of developers making decisions that they should be making. For example, a software developer that decides to build a system with full database independance (hibernate for example) COULD be doing the right thing, but could simply be driving up project costs for requirements that never existed.

Developers - DONT make these decisions, price the options and ask the client.
I'm no expert, but: MBTI criticism - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator#Cri...
Is it the problem that school teaches how to follow directions instead of think for ourselves? What does most of school consist of, even at the college level? Following directions. Make sure you paper is exactly 20 pages long, get the right answers to the even number math questions in the book.

Not until you emerge in the real world at age 22, do you finally get a chance to think for yourself. You lack street smarts but a lot of (questionably) valuable information on Political Science, Western Civilization, Algorithms, Data Structures and Cobol.

Most of my liberal arts education could be picked up (much cheaper) with a library card or a Kindle.

I think internships and apprenticing are a much better option.

How much did my computer science/economics/poli-sci education help me in the real world as a programmer/software developer? Not much.

On the job I Learned how to research and experiment on my own, while questioning everything (while being allowed to, without some crusty know it all prof shutting your down). Corporate culture is actually a little better for pushing the boundaries than academia.
Uh oh. Irrational as it seems, seeing this decreased my estimate of Twitter's prospects. It has same kind of overdoneness you used to see during the Bubble in the late 90s.
Our IE6 support policy was tell all our paid up clients 6 months before 1st Jan 2010 that we'll be dropping IE6 support. We have a 6 month lead on changes.

The only complaints we have are from people with heavy Citrix on Win2k investments as IE7+ isn't supported on Win2k and some people who are so poorly invested that they don't want to upgrade (bad client indicatorpotentially)

The basic outcome is that we won't do anything crazy that destroy it intentionally, but if it breaks, you will have to pay us extra to fix it.
To use story points, you would have a linear model of some sort so that you could calculate how long, on average, a story point would take to complete.

If you know how to do that (the model), you could apply the exact same technique to the "estimated time" numbers to get a more realistic "expected time."

Changing from time to points won't improve the developer estimates at all; instead, it will further obfuscate them and reduce accountability, in my opinion.
We're a product company, so it's a slightly different stance. However, we made a conscious decision early on not to support IE6 for the following reasons:

1. Our app is very interactive, and we didn't want to have to deal with incompatibilities.

2. Our target market is (primarily) software developers working for small companies. The only people that use IE6 are people who don't know any better or who are forced to do so, and there are few of those in our target market.

We know that we're probably losing some sales due to our lack of IE6 support, but for the reasons stated above, we're going on the assumption that the additional sales wouldn't offset the cost of development and testing.

I think for a consulting company, it depends on the project. If you're writing something for general consumption or enterprisey software shops, it's much more important (unfortunately) to support IE6.
I wonder if history will repeat itself and lesser geographic locations (like narrow alleys or something) will get deleted from openstreetmap because they're not deemed important enough by the ruling elite.
Hell of a poem there by Kipling. Thanks for the link above as well... that would certainly be a tough blow
We're down to 37% IE these days. Only 8% are IE6, for a total of under 5% IE6 usage.

I don't really know what the difference is between our site and the sites that say they have 65% IE still... it's not at all oriented towards techy type people. We have 45% FF and 15% Safari.

It's a significant enough number of people to test new features with IE6, but not enough to go wild trying to make it perfect. If I was developing sites for clients, I'd go for option #1.
Guestlist (http://www.guestlistapp.com) does not support IE6 even in the slightest (except for the public page where you buy tickets, that works in IE6). We support IE7 and higher, and that will probably stay that way for the foreseeable future.

As for contract work, I do whatever the client asks. I do let them know that IE6 support will probably cost them an additional 20% in my time, and it will not be identical to modern browsers. It will work and that is about it. If they want to spend the money it is up to them. They do know their customer base better than I do.
- somewhat independent

- money earned outside of employment forms the basis for day to day life

- looks towards creating value in equity or goodwill rather than take-home pay

- long term view

- re-invests a substantial portion of proceeds of previous successes in to future projects

There are probably as many definitions of entrepreneur as there are entrepreneurs!
Original article this is pulled from (uncited in submitted post) http://buildingreputation.com/writings/2009/10/the_dollhouse...

It's a little ridiculous that you can quote the meat of an article from another blog, write a short intro sentence, not cite the original and post it as insightful. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he just forgot to post the link to the original
Free web contents
So long as they release code to be able to implement this on your own projects and not just the big names it might catch on to have browsers do more login management like the post talked about.
simple solution: personal reputation that accrues over time, and have each vote be worth a set fraction of your reputation, and nonrefundably deduct it from your total after the flag. or something similar.
I think one of the worst gaps in a college education is the preparation for finding a job. I graduated with no clue for what to do next, having rested in the thoughtless assumption that it would all just follow. No one had ever told me that the search for work is the most important job you'll ever do.
I love posts like this and can never get enough of the good ones. Even if they say a lot of the same things, they are so important that they bear repeating.

The more I read them, though, the more I realize that these "traits" are not really the cause of anything. They are the result of something bigger, something I describe like, "when you absolutely, positively must get that thing done".

Once you adopt the attitude that you have to do something, you change. Sometimes you even surprise yourself. You find yourself doing things you couldn't previously imagine. You find yourself with much more energy when you least expect it, becoming the person you have to be to get done what must be done.

The sentence that best describes this attitude is, "I am willing to do whatever it takes to get what I want."

And the metaphor I love is, "At what point do you give up trying to teach your child to walk?"

I believe we get Self-Motivation, Persistence, Plays Well With Others, Attention to Detail, Quick Thinking, and whatever else we need as soon as we decide that we have to do something. Then these character traits help us get it done.

Personally, I can't imagine not doing my start-up. It's that important to me.

Others have criticized this attitude by saying that you won't know when to quit when you should. Fine. I can live with that.
It is almost certainly a bug.

Fact: mAutoCommit has a setter bean property.

mAutoCommit looks like it can be toggled to true/false to enable automatic updating of some configuration inside the setValue(Object) method. I'm 99.9999 percent sure that the author of the code did not intend to toggle the mAutoCommit option to 'true' each time a configuration value is set.

I will agree, however, that this is almost certainly written by an inexperienced developer. It's not a stretch to think that the inexperienced developer who might test a boolean with x == true might also forget an equals sign.
Self motivation could simply be greed or envy.

You can be an entrepreneur just fine when you think slowly, are sloppy and do not play well with others.

I don't even think it is a measure of success.

For me that leaves persistence.

Another one that is hard to define is 'start-up', I've seen it used here from one end of the spectrum (where I would use 'hobby project', 'trial balloon' or something like that) all the way to million dollar+ in turnover, funded and now self-sustaining entity (something that I would call a mid size company).
Quake 1 port to silverlight: http://www.innoveware.com/ql3/QuakeLight.html
You’ve been hacked. Now what?
I agree and congratulations to the whole team. I have been a huge fan and loved their free service. However, as soon as I moved to the paid service and increased my backed up data to 10GB my computer became extremely slow. Dropbox is using 98% of CPU both on windows XP and Mac. It has been a week and not everything is backed up yet. Moreover, if I move a directory within my dropbox folder, it takes it as a new folder completely and tries to delete and back it up again which is completely opposite to their philosophy. Also, if you want to back up 2-3 computers at the same time everything screws up. So, a word of advice while using dropbox, be patient, dont get too excited after using their free service and jump the gun from 2GB to 20GB, do it slowly and carefully and hopefully things will work out great.
How To Run A Beta Test... Or Not?
I'm also intrigued that people are voting up the comment which is a sarcastic attack on the people who believe something, while voting me down for attempting to discuss it in a logical manner rather than, say, engaging in discussion of the topic.
Let your competitors eat the cost of IE6 dev then

Always charge as LEAST as much as is required to make you either not care or actively want the client to buy a feature

So if IE6 makes the site 2x as difficult, charge them for the site using modern browsers, and line item (basic IE6 testing for at least limited functionality) at whatever price makes you not care.

Charge for them to maintain an outdated site, charge a lot. Then you won't care if they want IE6 support or not
Well, pretty big, because it has to override all the signals sent from the actors that wish to perpetuate the status quo, such as the Ivy League schools themselves, who are not interested in admitting that their education has lost value. This, plus social inertia, is delaying recognition of this new social status.
I don't get it though, why does 'plays well with others' make one an entrepreneur ? Jack asses routinely score big. Sometimes bigger than their 'nice' counterparts.

What about attention to detail ? The perfect is the enemy of the good, if you spend lots of attention to detail you'll never ship product. There is such a thing as 'too good'. I would say that there is an optimum level of attention to detail. More and it won't pay off, less and you will give the customer a less than good experience.

Quick thinking ? I'd rather have 'good' thinking than 'quick' any day.

Persistence is an absolute must, I can see that one. To keep going, especially in the face of disappointment or adversarial circumstances.
I believe Live Mesh has an OS X client now. I tried it (on both OS X and Windows), and while it has most of same basic functionality as Dropbox, I found the interface off-putting.
Yeah, it bothered me too. :) I was trying to get across that I was talking about a singular world-spanning entity instead of some abstract protocol. I'm not sure of the real grammar rules.
Only 20%?

Wow we charge more like 75-125% more for that browser
In no way can you be greedy, sloppy, slow, and not play well with others. Those are all traits that are going to lead to your eventual downfall. They're all negative traits that will prohibit your company from growing and ultimately being a success.
I'm assuming it's an accident but it is pretty sloppy.
Why It Matters Now
IKEA's brilliant Facebook campaign
This would be HTML + CSS only. I don't do Javascript and if I did, then yes, it would be a lot more.
"Playing well with others" is very important if you're trying to build a large scale business with lots of employees. From my article: "If you want to build something large and successful, you'll need to know how to delegate tasks, step aside for others that know more than you, and generally be more of a leader and less of a know-it-all." Basically, I could have more crudely phrased it as "Don't Be An Asshole". Nobody likes working for one and it'll lead you down a path to failure.
I was reminded of 24 Hour Party People and Factory Records swish designer table (somewhere around £20k iirc)
This kind of thing is bound to make people like the 37signals guys angry. It is truly sad that a non-business can afford to spend money like this.

Life is unfair. Time to work.
After all, if your gain from supporting IE6 is higher than the cost of supporting it, it makes no sense to abandon IE6.

Although is you abandon full support in IE6 and users want to stay and so use another browser then you've kept their continued custom and saved your extra dev costs. That is, it's not a given that removing full support will impact your profit.

Also, the improved design that could be purchased with the extra dev costs could net you more customers using a browser made less than 8 years ago or indeed convert more of the same.

People can have a non-profit motive too.
What courier company are they going with in the states? Any word on other countries? Canada?
Powerpointless