skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I was a TA in grad school, I had one student who couldn't double click. To double click, she'd take her hand off of the mouse, hover her palm a few inches above the mouse, then stab down twice with her finger. Doing this, she'd move the mouse while clicking the button, so her double clicks never registered. I kept telling her to leave her hand on the mouse and just press twice with her finger, but to my knowledge, she never tried it.

This was the same class where I tried to use the theory of evolution as an example, and about half the class laughed, because to them the theory was just a ridiculous idea. Gotta love the Bible belt!

EDIT: I think there's two keys to the true intuitiveness of an interface that many people overlook. It's easier to make an intuitive interface if you narrow the domain of an interface. It's also easier if you narrow the effective bandwidth of the interface -- show the user more data and they tend to be more confused, show the user less data and they tend to be less confused. Apple seems to apply this in Front Row and in iOS.
My take on X is a professional job is this: it depends. If you have 20 developers in your team, one or two better be good at UX, one or two better be good at low-level coding, one or two better be good at SEO and so on. If you only have two developers, they better be good at the core product and be mindful of everything else. The third developer is never going to be a tester, QA, or UX if your first two developers can't keep up with the core.

In a large pharmaceutical company with 10,000 employees, you have people with job titles like "Quality Assurance Lead II (Wound Management)". In a startup with 3 people, people call themselves CEO, CTO, and CFO. As the startup grows, it will need people. Eventually you'll hire a "QA Lead II" or "UI Editor (Web-Apps Division)". The main question is who do you hire next? Do you need a graphic designer more than a helpdesk person? Do you need a project manager more than an AP assistant?
I was really surprised by how much I enjoy Marvel's iPhone app. I was concerned that the small screen size would detract from the experience, but they managed to make it into an asset by carefully scripting the transition from panel to panel. In particularly large panels with important details, they start zoomed in on the detail and then pan out to reveal the full frame.
That'd be a horrible idea. Actively looking for patents to try to avoid makes you more guilty since you can't prove you didn't read the patent you infringed on.

IANAL, but I've heard/read that as an engineer it's best to avoid looking at and reading patents at all so that when you ultimately get sued you can claim, "I didn't know about it."
Yet another reason amazon has won the eBook battle....
IPad sales are growing fast
Ten Most Uninsurable People on Earth
IPhone Terms & Conditions: 3 Times As Long As The US Constitution
Reading patents is a very bad idea. If you can be shown to have most likely known about the patent you have infringed, the penalties are substantially higher than if you didn't know.
I think I meant what I said :-), which is that closing over a lexical variable in Lisp, using LET, more clearly, to my eyes at least, show which variables are hidden/closed over.

For example, in CL, this guy's example would take the general form:

(let ((counter 0))

(defun tally ()

(incf counter)))

So, in this form, I know that TALLY hides/closes over COUNTER, without needing to inspect the function body (either before, or within a λ that might be returned from within the function body).
It's also relative. Certainly, a GUI + mouse is closer to intuitive than the command line. The iPad's multitouch is a little closer still. Reactable strikes me as yet closer. (Granted, it's domain is much narrower.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vm_FzLya8y4
That could be done; WebDAV introduced several new methods to HTTP. The drawback is that your clients lose the ability to use standard HTTP libraries to talk to your service because you're using a non-standard set of methods. The 'Uniform' in URI and URL doesn't just apply to the resource identifiers; in a RESTful system the methods and representations both need to be uniform as well. That allows general-purpose clients to be able to interact with the service, and that was what made the web take off when earlier FTP and Gopher systems did not.
I can't help but think of this article on Study Hacks. In particular, scroll down to the section called The Insider Advantage. http://calnewport.com/blog/2010/03/26/how-to-get-into-stanfo...
There are many career paths which are pretty bad for family. By that logic something like a job in the defence force or as a sports star or travelling reporter would all end up in the same boat. Their families have every right to decide it's not for them and leave but equally the person being employed has ever right to choose what they want to do, it's their life.
This is quite good advice, but most of it is not specific to bootstrapping.
Polywell fusion is a step further from this, and is more promising as an energy source. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell
Also see:

http://www.reddit.com/r/geek/comments/ci5bg/askgeek_is_this_...
Sensationalist title is sensational.
what a country
This Pecha Kucha format is really great!
That's personal preference.

I lived like a college student for years after graduating with an EE degree. I just don't care much about material things, so for about 3 years I had no car, no furniture except a nice mattress, no expensive clothes, cooked my own meals, etc. Pretty much all my money outside my share of the rent & utilities went into a bank account and paying off student loans.

If you're comfortable living with very little, it's not hard to do. Honestly, if I could sell my house right now I'd totally restructure my life.
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I don't think they can grow up in a war zone and not being screwed up if the war is real enough (the US is technically a warzone with Iraq, but it isn't something that is ever going to matter).
Maybe it's just me, but I enjoy titles where the entire meaning is only fully understood after you have read the book/article.

Think of it as a puzzle maybe? Not everything is what it seems, but there are clues out there :-)
We're all Google's customers. The majority of us just don't write them a check.
Media piracy and fake Kevlar vests are completely different issues.

But it's pretty easy to conflate them without any objections from the uninformed American public.
The sup even times how long it takes each employee to read the email, and makes various character judgements of them based on this time. It was an awesome scene.
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Apple introduced in-app purchasing with iOS version 3 (if memory serves). So this sort of thing has been possible for about a year. Not sure why Amazon hasn't taken advantage of this.
You can forward .ppt slides around in larger groups and help provide the context for the product. Also, while investors/partners seem to not always believe the slides they help visualize your thinking on the market opportunity/product e.g.

1. Team - Are the founders going to be able to grow the business, what have they built before.

2. Market - What is the market and how do you frame it. How big is this opportunity? Who are your partners, where are you distributed?

3. Economics - Sales projections, unit economics, how money would be spent (Hiring, marketing, etc.)

4. Competition - Are you aware of the competitors and what is your strategy to compete? How are people solving this problem now why are their solutions not good enough?

5. Pipeline - Your MVP is likely rough, how are you going to improve it? What is the timeline.

Obviously not needed for all projects, but if you need investment or to hook a 3rd party these questions are going to come up and are hard to communicate via product.

Definitely the case where software is part of a solution not the end all product. Key to have a deck for biz dev and other commercial situations.
I was an Apple intern
I own you, and you're easily replaceable.
What I find most troubling about this 'dilemma' is that the reach of broadband nationwide is unknown. There is no comprehensive tracking of broadband service, including which neighborhoods, towns and cities have it and which don't. No federal agency or private group keeps track. To date we have relied on outreach efforts like the Pew Internet and American Life Project and the 2007 Census of Agriculture to measure rural broadband penetration. If we hope to fix America's Broadband Dilemma we need to know where to best target our efforts.
"In the UK, his books sold for $6 each; in America, they sold for $0.06 (or so)"

I wonder how much this fun fact is skewed by the fact that the pound was worth way more than the cheap American paper money during the time (not to mention that a lot of states printed their own money, so it would be quite difficult to compile a relative exchange rate).
A search resource generally isn't going to be a good idea in a RESTful design. What does it search? Your service will typically contain more than just one set of resources, so you'd end up either creating a separate search resource for each set or passing set identifiers of some sort as a query parameter to the search resource.

The typical model is to have 'container' resources. For example, if /articles/9001 is a resource, /articles is the container. You can POST to the container to create a new resource, and you can GET the container to find out some information about it, such as the number of resources it contains and a list of them. For this part of the design I'll typically return a list of links to the first N resources in the container and a navigation link to the next N resources. That navigation link uses the same URL for the container resource, but with a query parameter that tells it which resource to start on. I'll typically also implement search/filter query parameters to allow further control over the list of resources to include in the container's representation.
> "We have open APIs that permit applications to export this
information. However, we don’t allow exporting of content that is created by others because it
doesn’trespect the decisions users make on Facebook about how to sharetheirdata."

Pot, have you met my friend kettle?
The End of Verifiable.com
From what I've seen, casual (iPhone, Facebook) game companies are far more open to hiring general programming talent than the mainstream. (Which, IMO, can only be a good thing for the industry.)
How many types of programmers are there?
Perhaps. What also seems to work nice -- at least for me: Prototype in, say, Python, and then translate to C (either the hotspots or everything, in case you need to have a solution in pure C only).
Aubrey de Grey speaking at MIT
It is an arsurd article. I can point you to web devs on LAMP from the same era that were equally ignorant of other languages or paradigms. The real question for developers isn't, "what things, do I consider important, do you know?", but rather "what have you shipped?" If the only language you know is C++, but you're the lead dev for the Halo series, that gives me a lot more respect than if you know 20 languages and your great contribution is a website where you criticize what other people don't know.

And I think he doesn't understand the difference between language features making it to your production language and the feature existing elsewhere (especially if elsewhere is an obscure academic language). I can be sincerely interested about lazy evaluation showing up in language -- but that doesn't mean that I hadn't used it for the past 20 years in toy projects.
LOL I used to work with this guy at Gucci, hes a bit off his rocker. I'm really surprised how much attention hes gotten from this project that really doesn't have much technical merit.
Well said:
...Each generation learns things and most of it is not passed on to the next generation. Every single one of my peers got squat from their parents in terms of "this is how it works, pay attention".

Blade Runner is an excellent choice for this discussion.
A really good movie, something that remains with you long after. In terms of scary violence - that early tense scene where the android is being tested might be over the top - but the rest is just Star-Warsy gun battles where no one gets their head blown off...

Is it really that much more violent than prime time TV?

Lots of murky,scary suspenseful scenes.

I guess the counter argument is always - 'there will be time to watch this in the future'. But it is an individual decision not one for the esrb. Depends on the kid, I think.

On overprotection. I ran across a reference within the last year to 'free-range parenting'. Didnt read the book but got a good chuckle out of the amazon review and the idea in general.

I live in a NJ city about 1 mile west of the Empire State Bldg. So I am in the crucible of NYC-metro competitiveness which insinuates itself into everyday life. Kids taking 2 or 3 different language classes, multiple sports, music - all before they are 4 yrs old.

And insane over-protectiveness at times. A neighbor with 2 boys 9 and 7 yrs old, lets them walk 6 blocks to school. Which I somewhat agree with. Not sure I will be able to do that at the time but it has made me think about this issue in general.

The biggest problem with over-protectiveness in general is that I think kids absorb the fact that you dont trust them.
In fact you are thinking of the murderers and molesters and drunk drivers but the kid thinks you dont trust him/her.

The movie/ novel "The Road" deals with this on an extreme level

I think this will inevitably happen in adolescence - some kind of "I'm old enough" / "No you're not" discussion. Seems like it is better to develop alot of trust before that happens.
That's a big part of it, but it's also the experience. I lined up for the iPhone 3G when it was released in Canada and the experience was great. I felt like I was with "my people" - and spent most of the couple hour wait talking with the other geeks in line about our Apple products, BS'ing about rumours/news.
I agree that the article is lacking in nuance, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The "piracy" that Biden, et al, are speaking of here is not individuals downloading torrents, but bootleggers (largely in China) reproducing and selling works. And, in this case, the similarities are strong.

When you buy an item-- be it a Xanax, a Kevlar vest, or a Pink Floyd CD-- you want to know that it is "authentic" (i.e., made to the proper spec) which implies "authorized".

That's not such a big stretch, is it?
In order to buy shares in a private company you must be an "accredited investor" (make over 200/k for 2 years or 1M in net worth). In order to sell shares to the public I think you need permission from the SEC. And once the SEC gets involved it gets messy.
8,000 Community Votes Design New Geekware
Another thing to note is that many truly intuitive things are not necessarily easy at least at first. Riding a bicycle is in fact intuitive, but many find it difficult in the beginning. Snowboarding and skiing are also intuitive, but people often experience a significant learning curve.

Heck, flying a plane is definitely intuitive, but it takes a large number of hours to be considered good enough to do it on your own.

EDIT: The ultimate example is flying a helicopter. All of the parts of a helicopter are so dynamically linked, a simply described operation like "move to the right" is going to take a bunch of simultaneous adjustments on several controls at once. There is actually no way to fly a helicopter, except intuitively, and it's definitely not easy at first.
I see same issues with Chrome. Infinite redirect, slow gmail.
Last week Google's jQuery hosting went down: http://www.seangw.com/wordpress/index.php/2010/06/google-cod...
I don't remember exactly, as I was borrowing a friend's copy, so I read it pretty quickly.

They cited all their sources, though. I'm assuming that trivial of a mistake wouldn't be made.
Sat Image of Oil spreading northeast from Deepwater Horizon leak
Wow. I've been waiting for a way to buy some Vertigo comics since I bought my iPad. I'm thrilled that they decided to go with Comixology (makers of the Marvel iPhone app). I'm going to grab the first copy of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman as soon as I get home tonight!
Could you be more specific about what kind of device you want to track or why you'd want to track it? What use would you have tracking a football?
I agree and being the father of a five year old I experience every day how little idea I have about how he understands things. As an example he is currently struggling with the idea of things being relative, so while I watch the world cup and say that one of the teams playing are a good soccer team, he will respond that then the other team must not be good. For some reason he really needs this to be true for his world to make sense.

There are just so many learned realities that we as adults assume but which kids have no idea about, to the extent that we have no freaking clue about how they see the world.
I'm leading a startup that does visualization, among other things. So I found this article to be a useful assessment of the challenges involved in doing datavis-as-a-service.
Nope, I just can't afford TV or newspapers and don't find this sort of news reported on places I look on the web, thanks for the info.
"Piracy hurts, it hurts our economy," Vice President Joe Biden said in releasing the 61-page plan drafted

61-page draft and ask him to sum it up and he will go nuts!! He has no idea what he is speaking of..just a beau talk
Why Multi-Core is a Dead End
For 3 days, Google Buzz mobile loads, but the Ajax refresh just spins, and never loads new content. Posting also fails. Mail works fine mostly. This is on the iPad.
A football is a bad example. Say you wanted to track a toy. And allow for check in's or have your movements tracked?
Google Docs export functionality was also broken all yesterday, resulting in an infinite redirect loop upon download.
If I remember correctly, music on the iTunes store works similarly. They charge you at download and you had better back up your files. The operational concept is that the user downloads the content once and then syncs that content among devices (iPhone, iPad, whatever) using their desktop computer.

From http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4059:

"Can I copy my books onto other computers or devices?

Books downloaded from the iBookstore can be placed on up to five computers you own that you’ve authorized with your iTunes Store account. You can sync your books to all iPads, iPhones, and iPod touches you own.1 Audiobooks, PDF files, and ePub files you've added to iTunes will appear in Books under Library. To sync Books to your device, connect it to your computer using the cable it came with. In iTunes, select your device then click the Books tab. Choose the books you would like to read on your device then press Sync. Books will sync to iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch even if iBooks is not installed; to read synced books, download iBooks from the App Store."

"1Requires iPhone and iPod touch with iOS 4 or later. iBooks is not compatible with original iPhone or iPod touch (1st generation)."
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My understanding is you can't use the app store if you don't click through agreeing to the policy allowing data sharing.
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Nokia N8 to be final Symbian N Series device, all MeeGo from here on out
>Where do they go? Bigger screens?

They go every direction. I think you're just amazingly confused about this.

>More megapixels in the camera? Sure, but at reduced quality, on an already bad part.

Yes, of course. Until the iPhone does it any competitors must be somehow worse, right?

Remember back in those olden days when the 3GS had almost comically bad resolution? Remember how that was no big deal? Funny how big of a deal resolution is when the iPhone gets it.

>You are right though, they iPhone 4 doesn't have a 5 inch screen, 12 megapixel camera, 2ghz processor, slide-out keyboard, which the next Android phone will no doubt have.

Yes, and of course those are all negatives for the Android device, right. Amazing how that spin can occur no matter how deficient the iPhone might be in a certain area.

Groan. Seriously, guys, this is bloody pathetic.
I can understand not bringing up that Alan committed suicide but I don't see why Wolfram just passingly mentions that Alan was gay but doesn't mention at all the UK's treatment of him because he was gay. Maybe Alan would still be alive if the UK hadn't convicted him of, basically, being gay, and forced him to take hormone injections...
Mwahahaha, this is delicious!

But seriously, what now guys?
One quick tip for describing things to non-technical customers: tell them everything three times. Don't tell them to click the "sign in link". (Don't ever use the word link. You'll regret it. "Button that says...", "picture that says...", "underlined blue text that says...") Tell them to click the

+ purple button

+ which says Sign In

+ near the top-right corner of their screen.

You will be amazed how much more effective that makes them at carrying out directions. (If you can only pick one, go for color or similar visual distinctiveness. Your users have long-since stopped reading everything on their computer because "none of it makes sense anyhow.")

In my experience it is worth overruling your designer's desire for visual continuity and having your most important button(s) be uniquely identifiable by color. (Strictly speaking I use purple for two things, but if they try to sign in by signing up for the free trial they'll be signed in like they intended.)
I walked into a BestBuy at lunch time on iPad launch day and was out the door with an iPad in 10 minutes. There was a huge crowd at the Apple store and people who camped out. I slept, had a nice breakfast, got some work done and then got the iPad along with other errands. Priorities I suppose.
There's no SPOF unless you create one. So the sentence should be more correct this way "ZeroMQ follows a brokerless design so that doesn't enforce single point of failure."
In this context "The Evolution of a Python programmer":
http://gist.github.com/289467
R does have quite a bit of financial libraries, yet I don't remember R has any good support on parallel computing, hmm?
There's a great cartoon in "Don't Make Me Think" that captures what is essentially the committee approach to UI/UX. Its a great book, and basically makes the same argument.
Longevity science: debating the merits of various slow boats to China
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I'm guessing you're not married and don't have kids? In general, children don't have the right to decide that their parents' lifestyle isn't for them and leave.

But the bigger point is that the kind of mindset you're espousing ("It's my life, I'll do whatever I want without regard for my family") doesn't really work.
Absolutely.

Sometimes I think about what the difference between an 18 year old and a 24 year old's brain is. Or, perhaps the difference between a 30 year old and a 50 year old person.

I think we have an intuitive understanding of it and it shows up in a lot of public policy debate. People talk about ageism and old people "not getting it" and older folks have a similar "kids these days" feeling. I wonder what part of that is simply due to differing world views caused by differing brain capabilities. Nobody seems to talk about that when we debate these things. I'm sure its being studied.