skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Your engineers are running the aslum."

This is always the cliché, but I'm sure it's much more likely that some product manager in charge of "community pages" has their own idea of how things should work and insists that the devs make it work and the devs are just doing what they can to please the different bosses.
Just a quick google search:

http://www.w3.org/2009/05/DeviceAPICharter

I only found out about this a few weeks ago, from another hn link. It's coming :)
Gsource - Git, Hg and SVN repo visualizer
Code here: http://code.google.com/p/gource/
A hit in efficiency of the user when scanning the search results.

And you're right. People won't leave Google over this. But Google has done extensive testing on page speed in the past and measured its long term impact on pageviews per search. I'd argue that a change in scanning patterns like this one affects the perception of speed of the interface and might impact the aforementioned metric.

Overall, it should be a change for the better and i'm sure that Google wants to increase the efficiency per search to increase the overal number of unique searches a user might do -- while caring a bit less about the number of pageviews per search.

As for Bing, in interface design for a company like Google --a company that effectively dominates the market and sees marginal loss of users-- the competition is irrelevant. Especially for simple UI changes such as this one.

When doing a change such as this one Google is its own competitor. It needs to find a way to transition their user's habits to what they believe is a more usable one. This is by far always the hardest part and really what we are discussing right now :-)

It's awesome to see though. I'd imagine it's incredbily hard to convince a board of such changes, especially in an engineering minded company such as Google.
control of this company is worthless. anybody could have picked it up in bankruptcy court. Its not worth 1 billion let alone 50
For me I don't need anything to do my taxes. Quickbooks requires way too much effort for me. I have a hard time sticking to a budget when I need to put forth a lot of effort to do it. Thanks for the feedback though.
Have you tried Emacs with AUCTeX and MiKTeX?
Android Now Running On iPhone 3G
Starcraft 2 Start Up Challenge
The question is where do we draw the line?

Ok, we disallow 0.01% of price,penny bids. However, should 10% of price bid orders be left standing, how about 20%, 50%? Certainly 75% of price bids should be honored?
Ours is the greatest industry of all, in part because there is no way to predict that far into the future.
I run browsers at 1200 x 1050 viewable.
Squatting is fine if it is paid for. I think repeatedly renewing 30 day free trials is a big issue. Companies will "own" thousands of domains for free until they expire. If you show interest in it they will try to sell it back to you for an absurd amount.
Yes. C.f. Mother-in-law.
I hate the left bar! Perhaps the biggest reason I never felt home with Bing, Yahoo or etc. was because of the extraneous crap (I don't need pretty pictures on my search engine homepage). Google just felt right because it was minimal yet functional and just straight on hard on the pedal fast. Sure, it is just as fast now, but it's amazing how a slight "improvement" like this has actually changed my perception of the search results being slower because it takes me a good second to realign my focus to the right.

And please infovis-wiki, that criticism with just Inbar et al. seems pretty lame (their subjects were 87 students - not a good sample at all for something about perception!)
So does Windows vista for the first few hours till you do not install anything on it
Bring back AOL keywords!

Seriously though, the DNS system needs to be exact, not a heuristic guess of what the user wants. A guess would make winners and losers out of equal competing sites; kinda like search engines do, but worse since there would be no second slot.
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its a great idea, but i'm afraid the restructuring process alone is simply impossible.

what do you do with whitehouse.gov and whitehouse.com who gets what? and even though one is porn why do you get to choose to take away the name?

again... great idea. impossible. too late in the game. (unless chrome removes the .com next)
I agree. I don't use software for personal finances. My point is that you can get a lot of tool for $120 a year.

I too would probably use a tool like this if it were simple, very mobile and cheap(er). But I would definitely want to be able to do something with all of that data since I've taken the time to type it in. What about having a few export formats? It would be easy enough to dump it to xls or csv on demand.
I can imagine it possible to require a commit-style comment, visible only on a user's profile list of comments.
"Does anyone know how to get rid of this new left bar?"

A couple of ways to do it.

(1) On Firefox install the stylish plug in (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2108/). Then go to http://userstyles.org/styles/29418 and install the style.

After installation, if you are not using google.com(say google.ca or google.co.in), edit the css (left click on icon at bottom right, select manage, select the style edit) to reflect whatever google engine you are using.

(2)In Chrome the Hide Google Options addon works perfectly (http://www.seotools.com/hide-google-options/#Chrome). There is a firefox equivalent but for some reason it didn't work for me so I went with the above (stylish) option on FF.

No idea about any other browser. Sorry. But I guess there is always GreaseMonkey?
The way the stock exchanges are set up, they can cancel trades that are considered "erroneous". It's in the contract, and it has been done before. Either party can trigger a mediation attempt [1], but in this case the exchange itself determined that they made a mistake in generating trades that shouldn't have actually happened and was only triggered by a glitch in the system, and made a blanket declaration. Since any trade on their system is actually just a contract to exchange the stock in the next 3 days, they don't have to take back any stock, they just have to declare the contract as invalid.

Last I heard, the Nasdaq was going to cancel any trades that were during the glitchy time window and were more than 60% away from a baseline price (an amount people were "willing to pay for it" when the system wasn't glitching). I don't know how they came up with the number, nor how deeply the SEC and other agencies were involved in setting it. There will still be plenty of winners and losers coming out of this, just not the ones who thought they bought or sold Accenture at a penny.

I'm not saying this is a "good" fix, but it is well within the Nasdaq's authority.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1325574 - notes that broken trades are fairly common, and that they're usually quickly mediated
I don't think this analogy works, given the significant differences between investing and product adoption. Just because a product has become mainstream doesn't indicate that the "end is near." In fact, I would argue the contrary, particular in this case. There are significant network effects in social networking. As the number of Facebook users increases, the value of Facebook to existing users (those already on the network) increases. Now, not only can I use Facebook to communicate with my college and grad-school friends, but I can use Facebook to stay in touch with my extended family, more distant friends, acquaintances, etc. If I want to maintain these relationships, I'm forced to either stick with Facebook, or rebuild my social network elsewhere. If I wanted to rebuild my network elsewhere, I would have to convince most of my social network to defect to the new service, otherwise the new service is of little value. Facebook's recent moves around privacy (and changes in functionality) are clearly unnerving its customers; however, this alone won't cause the collapse of the service.
Yes, but I would expect that the low and high for the day shown on the finance websites does show everything down to tick level. Not real time of course.
Good idea. I hadn't really thought of that. Although I was going to add some analytics. Exporting to csv would be even simpler. Thanks a lot.
What has Apple got against Eastern Europe?
You make an interesting observation amid that sarcasm. Google's persona may be fun (in some ways, sort of, I guess), but their products are not. At their best, they're unobtrusive, minimal, and super functional. That's much better than "fun". The stuff people produce when they're striving to make something "fun" doesn't wear well.

One other thing Google have been good at in the past is rolling back mistakes. I bet this one doesn't last long.
BP turns to social media on oil spill information
Facebook: "helping advertisers learn everything about you"
You know, as much crap as Apple gets, they really have revolutionized the way people use technology. My mom, who a month could do nothing more than open FF on her computer, has been asking me for weeks when the 3G iPad is coming out. I have never seen her so excited to buy any sort of product. And that's why I'm not quick to judge Apple when it comes to their strict policies. They've shown time and time again that they know what they're doing, and they reach out to new, previously non-techy people with every product, inciting within those people a desire to use technology. This all might sound cultish, sure, I love my Apple products, but they hands down have the best computing products on the market for every day people. And I think it's their desire to control and perfect every level of the user experience that has gotten them to that point.
How is this program (for the iPad or Mac)? The screenshots feature silly graphics-heavy stuff, but would this thing be for making E-R/schema diagrams, family trees, etc.?
Wow --- Dieter is a visionary!
Or you can use existing SSH or VPN apps in the AppStore right now to connect to any server running your dev environment.
There are some basic code editors [1] with built in FTP or similar protocols. Basically they're intended to let you edit scripts and web pages on servers.

A more interesting scenario is when Mozilla's Bespin works properly on the iPad. It doesn't yet, but the developers have mentioned interest in getting it working.

[1] http://smokingapples.com/ipad/markup-gusto/
As screens are now coming in a wider format i.e 16:9, there is generally a large amount of wasted space at the sides in a lot of webpages. Adding the sidebar is making better use of that space.
That's odd because I haven't had had a similar experience. The ergonomics feel the same as a book, magazine, or notepad to me.
What about the ergonomics of a book or magazine? Aren't those effectively the same as an iPad?
Clearly you have more laptop users, while endtime is getting more desktop folks. Interesting.
LaTeX Lab
Google actually tested this, you didn’t. So while the reasons you listed might be valid and a good reason to scrutinize the redesign with the literature in mind, I have a very hard time believing that Google didn’t do just that.

I would argue that there are consequently very good reasons to believe that the problems you described are not a issue with the redesign or that there are certain advantages to the redesign which make up for other disadvantages.
Some friends and I have the following Starcraft 2 challenge: We're all going to purchase it, install it and immediately play a game against one another without reading instructions, playing tutorials, or whatever. The first one to figure out how to play the game, wins.
IBM is actually trying to build a business around that through Lotus Connections and related products.
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/connections/
And, by the way, I'm not criticizing IBM for that. It's a useful product and can add a lot of value for large enterprises.
When movies and music are not available in an iTunes store, isn't it due to licensing issues with the studios? I'm in Singapore, and we never had iTunes store, just the App store.

Edit: English.
Open Source Communities and Customers in Pictures
A bit, yeah. Granted, given their size and cash in the bank they'll hobble along for quite a while longer - decades perhaps - but their days as a fast-growing industry leader are almost done (if not so already).

One of their two cash cows is doing well, the other (larger one) is losing market share rapidly to a competing desktop OS, as well as having its profitability absolutely shredded by low-cost computing (read: netbooks).

Their cash cow is almost milked out, and their desperate forays into other fields have been met with little success. The Xbox division is the only bright spot in a long, long, list of failures (even that has profitability issues, but at least the product is winning) - Zune? WinMo (though we will see how the new version does)... Seen any Surfaces around lately?

Their domination of the internet browser has not been so for years now, and keeps slipping ever further. For now, their customer base seems to be heavily reliant on the stickiness of existing institutional installations - this historically does not bode well for the company, when a large portion of your income is from customers who are legacy-locked into your product. It seems peachy until a more agile startup comes and eats your lunch.
Graham's number
Most pointless link ever. BBC is the place to go http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/election2010/results/default....
I think it really depends on the gym. In my area, I would estimate that around 90% of visitors are regulars (that is, have an ID card/monthly pass).

The ones I've been to have a range of climbs: from a small section available to beginners, to routes and bouldering that require a much higher level of technique and endurance.

From personal experience, I've already spent an embarrassing amount on courses, memberships, and equipment.
That is my exactly response as well. Mechanical Engineering really interests me, and usually what I say is this: "If I can get an ME undergrad/masters degree AND self-teach myself CS/programming (effectively getting a "CS" degree) on the side and handle client work, etc. that should be twice as impressive."

Recently, I read an article here on HN which proclaimed that the best use of CS/IT knowledge is in non-CS positions. Use it as your secret weapon; use it to gain an advantage in your everyday life. Now, most ME majors nowadays have some rudimentary functional programming experience but I'm hoping that sentiment will still hold true.

As far as client work goes, all my development work is through the Facebook Platform (apps and whatnot) so I've built up a reputation on their developer forums and can pretty easily secure work based solely on that. I think the main hurdle with web development is that nearly everyone has a website these days. You might consider checking out some of your local companies and seeing which have poor websites and going from there. Otherwise, try to become a well known and reputable member somewhere online.
Is The Government Stimulus Doing Anything For Entrepreneurs?
Why would a company's purpose ever be smaller than their product?

Isn't purpose really just a way of articulating the company's ideal long-term vision?
By skipped 1/4 of the way, I take it to mean he skidded 1/4 of the way across the intersection (or, alternatively, 1/4 of his car was in the intersection).

If your pads are worn through you can wear grooves into your rotor surface. Grooves in your rotors reduce braking friction and are very bad.
I predict FB will continue to ignore the cries of hackers and other internet enthusiasts - we are a tiny minority of their user base, and nobody will ever believe that the world will revolt against Facebook just because of a bunch of in-the-know geeks said so.

I also predict Facebook would be wrong on that point... hackers and other "hardcore" insiders are most often, as another poster has said, trendsetters. It's well known, for example, that hardcore gamers drive an impressive portion of sales to casual gamers - they're the ones that spread the buzz, or in this case, anti-buzz.

Time will tell if this is the beginning of the end for Facebook (I suspect not), but this whole privacy fiasco is going to be a bit more than a blip from a tiny vocal minority, that's for sure.
It has also been shown that people will be more likely to give you money with a gun to their head than when kindly asked.
Isn't the real Starcraft 2 startup challenge spending launch day intensely focused on how to beat all of your competing startups, who are spending the day playing Starcraft 2? ;)
Holy hell, that screams dating site unsubscribe system. I didn't realize Facebook was that low about account deactivations.
Mission statements are always going to be iffy. See Scott Adams' "Mebert" prank.

http://www.mit.edu/~jcb/humor/scott-adams-mgmt-consultant
"Google actually tested this, you didn’t. So while the reasons you listed might be valid and a good reason to scrutinize the redesign with the literature in mind, I have a very hard time believing that Google didn’t do just that."

And yet it moves! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_pur_si_muove!).

Google "testing it" isn't an iron clad guarantee that the feature doesn't suck.

Anyone who has worked in a large company can well imagine how "tests" can support predetermined positions of higher management (say). I suspect the reason is simpler - these days Google is fat and slow and infested with mediocre MBA types who love nothing better than to "launch an initiative" like this. Never attribute to malice etc.

Irrespective of how well Google tested this, if enough users say "And yet it sucks", then that's that.

You could argue about how many users are "enough", but "Google tested it so they have to be right and everyone else is wrong" is a very fragile argument.
10 Marketing Resources Every App Should Provide
Aak HN: Spelling erors in a blpg post?
For me, spelling errors can ruin an author's credibility. Forget, for a moment, the ubiquity of spell checkers. That an author wouldn't take the five or ten minutes necessary to reread and correct obvious mistakes indicates a carelessness that I can't help but suspect permeates their thinking as well as their expression of thought. (Remembering spell checkers makes the inattention that much more perplexing.)

I grant there is not always a case for the language harpy to nag: one or two misspelled words do not necessarily indicate a deficient intellect; improper punctuation is irksome, but not sufficient per se to indict the author's ideas; ESL authors can't be expected to know MLA-approved grammar, punctuation, and style backwards and forwards (nor can all native speakers, even), et cetera. But when I come across an HN link that's littered with misspellings, I wonder what readers are thinking.

How do you react when you see a pattern of misspelling on a blog?
wow, that's a very good name! Especially if you thought of it in minutes. Oh, and I just checked it, it's taken now, hope OP's the one who got it and not someone else taking the advantage..
Finally someone noticed. I've been ranting about this for years now. And there are two parts to it: media companies having stupid dinosaur-age licensing policies and Apple not treating all markets equally. One is often a smokescreen for the other.
ARM awarded EE Times Company of the Year
I'm pretty struck by the irony of them getting the award for staff development and retention after making several of their European sites (including where I worked) redundant last yaer.
A Few More Conjoined Twin Hypotheticals
These hypotheticals are additional thought experiments pushing on the law’s assumption that an actor is an individual. Each case considers how the law would treat dicephalic parapagus conjoined twins (like the Hensel twins) as presented in the earlier piece entitled Half Guilty.
I make a lot of use out of it - that being said, Facebook is a whole lot of fluff these days. Nothing they have done recently is really compelling from a user perspective, all of the really useful/interesting stuff was done ages ago:

- Writing on people's walls, was there from the start.

- Status updates, was there from the start.

- Event invitations, have been done forever.

- Using as an address book, has been like this from the start.

- Photos/tagging, has been around since forever.

What has Facebook added in the last couple of years that's really made the site more engrossing and compelling? Chat? Nobody uses that, almost. Applications? Most users I know see them as annoyances more than features. Gifts? That was a completely flop too.

The core use of Facebook has barely changed at all since it launched - there's a very small core set of features that make the site what it is... I'm convinced someone can come along and do these core features better.
I'm struck by the irony of them getting the award for staff development and retention after making several of their European sites (including where I worked) redundant last yaer.
I live in Ukraine and just use a jailbroken iPhone with pirated apps.
There is a lot of space between "don't agree" and "rubbish".

I don't complain about this system. But I can imagine sometimes it would be nice to have an explanation.
Tufte's data ink is too extreme in my opinion. Human perception might be too messy and complex to handled by simply mathematical calculations.
User behaviors might be a more approperiate approach to evaluate the new design.
25 Excellent iPad Apps for Scripture Study
I'm on a 24" monitor at 1920x1200. However, I never ever maximize my windows, especially not my browser.

The latter is because as an interface designer I want my viewport to always be the width of whatever a user has at a maximized window on a 1024x768 resolution, as this is currently our lowest significant resolution used on the website. Also, I feel it's a nice width for consuming content on the internet.
Accessing the site with Javascript disabled, I click Download and nothing happens.
I never said anything about anything being “iron clad”. PG could be right but I think there are good reasons to believe that this redesign might work. Probably.
I'm generally pretty understanding about typos and occasional grammatical errors in articles, but this entire post is pretty ridiculous. I'll take that back if this person is a non-native English speaker, but if not, I really find it difficult to take anything he says seriously.
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A magazine is a lot lighter than the iPad, so that makes a huge difference. Also you don't have to continuously touch the pages of a magazine while using it, which is another significant difference. Finally a magazine is bendy meaning you can change it's size and shape if and when the need arises.
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Want to help map the oil spill? How to do it with the Verizon Droid Incredible
Tell HN: appspot.com blocked by ICT Ministry in Thailand
As of a couple of hours ago the entire appspot.com domain has been blocked in Thailand by the ICT Ministry.

I'm guessing this is because they block proxy servers and there are a number running on App Engine.

I'm personally pissed off because I've been using App Engine as a CDN and now a couple of my sites are broken.

Does anyone have a contact at Google SG? They don't pick up their main line and they must have a direct line to the ICT since they censor some search results and youtube videos to comply with Thai laws.

If you have a contact, please ping me at mbenjaminsmith AT gmail DOT com.

Thanks
Related issue is becoming an Apple developer in many countries, which used to be almost impossible or just take months. In many cases they did not accept credit cards issued in most countries of the world, when signing up. In other cases it was just delayed for months and months.
Facebook will die, but your profile data will live forever in some company's database.