skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The current Macbook Pro trackpad button is a dream to use, they've found the perfect amount of pressure required to click in my opinion.
"Everyone is nervous during tests and interviews."

Yes, but what you're missing is the degree certain people are nervous. Some people lock up completely due to performance anxiety, which has nothing to do with how difficult the problem is. Those people are also more likely to be found in the computer engineering profession due to the nature of the job.

So if you want a charismatic person with strong social skills, then you're just going to have to accept the bullshit artist who is more PR than talent over the painfully anxious and shy person who knows how to program.

That, or deal with hunting down the very few people who are both social and vastly knowledgeable. Good luck with that.
I'm not sure about the 3G(S) but the iPhone 2G switch actually had a tendency to break a lot. The problem was prevalent enough that people came up with software solutions to override it: http://www.iclarified.com/entry/comments.php?enid=1468#comme...
But you could have bought at $18 and made %33 which isn't bad for a day's work.
I wouldn't say it's because of the ads, but the convenience factor of BitTorrent and other sharing solutions is HUGE. Hulu is a very good step in the right direction, though they're still nowhere close in the ability to watch series from the beginning. (Netflix is much better in this regard).

Seeing ads at the movies and in other things I pay for does really burn my ass, though.
Yes I noticed this too. I tried to contact customer service about my damaged kindle all day and their order db is down.
He talks about how awesome audio and video quality on Facetime is. Yet, these are supposedly just SIP and H.264/AAC, or am I missing something there? Does Apple add some magic juice to these open protocols/codecs?
What has Gruber developed for Apple, exactly? His "projects" page shows nothing Apple-related: http://daringfireball.net/projects/
South Korea stops requiring ActiveX for online banking and shopping
Thanks for the compliment. Regarding the age limitation. Just working out the legal information for the younger audience. I plan on opening up the site to all ages once the applicable legal policies are created.
It's not so much "love" as it is obsession; and obsessive people tend to be at least colorful, if not interesting, just given how much time they're willing to devote to a subject seemingly so minute. This article is the 1st I've read since the initial batch of reviews that I didn't stop reading after the 1st paragraph.
Math remains an essentially irrelevant niche according to your definition of relevance - no of exponents. Lisp remains a great vehicle for exploring ideas and writing algorithmic code. Also in response to your other post, comparing Naggum to Xah is doing Erik a disservice in my opinion.
David Chalmers, in his preface of Clark's Supersizing the Mind :

"A month ago, I bought an iPhone. The iPhone has already taken over some of the central functions of my brain. It has replaced part of my memory, storing phone numbers and addresses that I once would have taxed my brain with. It harbors my desires: I call up a memo with the names of my favorite dishes when I need to order at a local restaurant. I use it to calculate, when I need to figure out bills and tips. It is a tre- mendous resource in an argument, with Google ever present to help settle disputes. I make plans with it, using its calendar to help deter- mine what I can and can’t do in the coming months. I even daydream on the iPhone, idly calling up words and images when my concentra- tion slips.
Friends joke that I should get the iPhone implanted into my brain. But if Andy Clark is right, all this would do is speed up the processing and free up my hands. The iPhone is part of my mind already."
"This is the result of a new manufacturing process Apple has pioneered. No other company gives a shit about things like this."

Samsung is doing this for their new displays. And they were out before the iPhone 4 was even announced. But, to Gruber, if it's not Apple, it's automatically crap. No sense acknowledging its existence.
There's a distinction to be made here though. The reason it's not ready for YouTube is because HTML5 doesn't support things like content controls (e.g. DRM). Most of the videos on YouTube don't have that.

It's disingenuous to say that HTML5 isn't ready for YouTube; it's far more accurate to say that HTML5 isn't ready for content providers. I mean, I can't blame them. HTML5 video in its current state would turn YouTube Rentals into a free movie download service within minutes. Still, the core of what's being uploaded to YouTube is perfectly satisfied by HTML5's current offerings.

Perhaps what would be needed in that case is some kind of encumbered meta-format, one for which codecs could be installed on the local system that would provide the 'content protection' that copyright holders want so badly, without needing Flash as a bloated overlay. It wouldn't be much better than Flash, but it would be a start.
Thats like asking do great mathematicians enjoy the description of a great proof.

"The overall quality seems impossibly good. The proof is beautiful to behold and there is a timeless nature to it. It’s like a love letter to Pierre-Simon Laplace."

Sure its a little corny, but F#ck, for the majority of even moderately wealthy designers the iPhone 4 is probably the most well designed item they have ever touched. Yes, the average person could care less of the design quality, but for those who do care its a big deal.
I am conflicted in regards to situations like this one. For one, I am interested in invested in vehicles like this not just for the profit potential, but for what I feel is a genuine social / environmental good; at the same time, I hate the idea of being burned by putting principles before money; I continue to search for ways to make socially responsible investments that don't have the same risk profile as equity.

Thoughts?
Growing up in Boston, all my russian friends would joke of such things as this, or other connections. And here I was thinking it was but schoolyard bluster!
Man what an amazing coincidence. He lives out in the Los Angeles are near me now. Considering getting rid of the email signup flap. Thanks for the encouragement.
I've found that, as a general rule, if you're tempted to ask, "Why hasn't anybody thought of this yet?" you're too late. I was frustrated the other day as I was reading in the newspaper about yet another non-tech-origins group filing for patents on old ideas with new technology (in this case, using a Wiimote to control the playback of a MIDI score). Naturally, the "inventors" were wondering why nobody'd ever done that before, and yet solo performers and Arduino-type digital artists have been using various types of sensors to do the same thing for quite a while.
They likely hope to find a hot girl (or guy) who is turned on so they can fantasize with her.
YES! and they have been for a long time.
Suggest reading: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Gonzo-Marketing-Winning-Through-Practi... Marketing</a>

But of course, the big accounts only want to deal with the big agencies. So the smaller, really creative outfits only survive if they have a couple people on the board who come from the big end of town. Going after small business is just as (if not more) time consuming and the payback is far smaller too. Selling is the biggest chunk of effort and costs. Creativity is the fun part but the very poor cousin.
Great story. I agree passion is very important. I believe that is why a ton of companies fail after making a pivot point. I believe it can remove much of the original passion for the project. Good luck with your site and thanks for the kind words.
On the iPhone, signal-strength bars are not a reliable indicator of your local usability. My iPhone 3gs regularly shows 4 or 5 bars -- at the same instant it can't initiate a call or send an SMS. It's either showing some abstract measure of signal strength, unrelated to whether traffic can actually be sent, or it's been programmed to lie.
He isn't saying that hackers shouldn't try to solve problems. He's just saying that they should go about solving them with more understanding and in a more intelligent manner.
Do you have a job for money or to feel satisfied and useful? If it's the former, then you can't complain about being made to do menial work or how you're treated. If it's the latter, then you can't complain about being underpaid. Because, yeah, life is full of false dichotomies like yours ;-)
What's wrong with that? People love cars, architecture, sculpture, jewelry, watches, clothes, and all sorts of other objects. There's also nothing wrong with a purely utilitarian view of the world either. I don't see any good reason to judge either way.
Thanks Mike. I will be uploading around 600 clips in the next month or so. Keep a look out. I hope I can start generating enough money to up the quality even more. It might take a while though.
I like reading it because it's interesting. I can read a hundred reviews where the author says 'The build quality is good and the phone feels solid in your hand.' Those reviews are typically as exciting, fresh, and captivating to read as a first-generation Blackberry is to behold.

It might be a little over the top sometimes, but that's part of what I like about him.
Or maybe "Of course Ford did forget to include tail fins on this particular model".

I don't think I've seen oblique, sans serif type used in an iOS user interface. Content, sure, and Helvetica is there for you, but this is the system user interface font. I think the clarity demanded of the system user interface argues against the subtle change afforded by slanting the font.

Oblique sans serif fonts are generally sort of an apologetic placeholder for: "Here is where I would have used a nice italic font, but my type designer couldn't pull that off in this clean, minimalist font, so please imagine that he did."
I think this article is a great demonstration of Poe's Law.
They are trash to me too.
a great API like twitter. facebook is still far from good for developers: always changing their apis without notice, slow response times and limited functionality (do they already have any type of search api that works across all the website?)
Twitter cuts its default rate limit from 350 to 175
Could Ruby be Apple's language and API future?
Slug, Thanks we take much pride in developing the quality of the production and instructors so it's nice to be commended for that. For now just planning on focusing on guitar, drums, bass, percussion, keyboards, vocals, music theory and ear training. Hope to expand out to many more one day but decided it best to focus on those for now. Anything in specific you are looking for?
I might be mistaken, but I believe he's referring specifically to bonding the LCD display to a capacitive piece of glass, rather than just regular protective plastic.

(Does Samsung use glass in their displays? They all look plastic to me.)
I believe that the guys actually had a different idea when pitching to YC and they were "redirected" onto this idea.

Interesting you say that, given how well the idea matched the first RFS. [1]

For better or for worse, I got the same impression about NowMov.

[1] http://ycombinator.com/rfs1.html
Is is truly surprising how the company that took the mouse mainstream now can't make one that's simultaneously aesthetically pleasing and a joy to use.
Yeah, a lot of our engineering effort is going into performance right now, rather than new features. But here are some of the HTML and CSS features in Firefox 4:

- HTML5 parser (SVG/MathML in HTML, new semantic elements)

- HTML5 forms (only partly implemented so far)

- Web Sockets

- CSS3 transitions

- CSS3 calc()

- IndexedDB (schemaless client-side database)

- WebM (VP8) codec for HTML5 video

- SVG backgrounds and images in CSS and HTML

- ECMAScript 5 features in JavaScript
Three Conditions Required for the Mental State of Flow
For some reason I thought this magazine would be from a parallel universe.
- incredibly noisy

- requires too much force to depress

- the travel distance is too far

- the hinged design means that the necessary pressure varies at different locations

I've noticed there is a bit of variation between machines, but most seem to exhibit these behaviors in my experience
Just like old times! :)
I find the hardware to be very delightful, in most respects, and I appreciate the thought and efforts that Apple puts into creating a unified software/hardware 'product solution' even if I disagree violently with some of the philosophical assumptions baked into that in both physical form (hold it differently, buy a case!) and software (you'll like the software we offer you, and we know best what you might want!).

All that aside... I can't say I really enjoy reading daring fireball, for many of the same reasons eloquently described in this thread. Substance (of a sort), but without soul.
This. Every so often something blows up at 2 am and we have to troubleshoot an unknown problem while our employer loses $3k/hour and everyone in charge wants to know WTF. Thankfully it's rare, but I don't want us to have to support your code if you aren't up to offering useful help at that moment.
I was thinking of Gabe's persona and that equation as well when I formulated this one. Gabe's distribution of photographs of his own genitalia through the social infrastructure of online games is a recurring comic theme on Penny Arcade.
Analyze Gold Demand and Investments using R
Send it out and then give them the option to "unsubscribe".
Thanks for the book recommendation, added to the reading list.
Advertising is often mistaken for marketing. Marketing identifies the need, the target audience and the USP. Advertising is the means of delivering the message about the USP for the product/service to the target audience.

"Branding" is the "feel good" about spending obscene amounts of money which generates no sales only to justify the existence of the VP Marketing.

Clarification: USP = Unique Selling Proposition, the statement of why your product/service is the one to choose.
While I sympathize with your feelings on the matter, there's no need to be snarky about it.
You know, there _is_ penis-detection technology.
Do speed tests count as a measure local usability? http://www.cultofmac.com/the-iphone-4-death-grip-is-real-but...
versus
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYmVpoccPnc
Actually, the parties are pretty freaking amazing at MIT. Just sayin'
Seriously, I think you guys should pick another name.

PG has worked very hard to build his brand with YCombinator. A lot of people benefit from it financially and otherwise. Naming your startup BCombinator, seems to me like naming a startup NewMicrosoft or 2Google.

If you guys have a good idea, come up with unique name for it, and work to build your own brand. Then if you hit it big, your own brand will not be diluted.
There's an interesting edge condition i ean into during user testing. If you created a paypal account in the past, associated your credit card with it and then forgot how to access it - you cannot pay with your credit card. Paypal forces you to login with your old account. This along with paypal strongly encouraging people to create an account no doubt contributes to the "paypal requires an account" confusion.
It's definitely a subjective thing, but I think it just sucks. I set my machine to "tap-to-click" within a few minutes.
For me, the Magic Mouse gets one thing horribly wrong: ergonomics. I use a computer at least eight hours of the working day, and potentially much more than that. If I can't be comfortable using a device, it doesn't matter how awesome it is, I can't use it.
It seems like the title is because the article is being written specifically to Java developers, to say 'Hey, you know all those apps you write with Java web frameworks? You can write them better in Django. Here's an example time-saver.'
Email an attachment to go@mail2brain.com and a real person will turn it into something useful
Without knowing more concrete information either way it's irresponsible to go too far in either direction.
Say what you will about the volume and lock buttons, but the new silence toggle is great. About once a day I would accidentally switch my phone from ring to silent (or vice versa) with my 3GS.
You need to give a programmer a task, then let him get back to you in a day or two. Give him something that you can't find a solution to on Google, but isn't so hard that it couldn't be done in an hour or two.

Sitting there putting pressure on the programmer working is just a prick move. If you gave the same test to a carpenter and asked him to build a bird house and the outcome would decide whether he could pay rent this month, he would cut his damn hand off. Guaranteed.
I can't use the Magic Mouse because it doesn't fit my human-sized man-hand: it has no palm support. And this strikes me as odd because how it looks should be extremely secondary: the only way to effectively use a mouse is to look at the screen not at the mouse, and even if you were to look at it, your hand is covering it up.

For those reasons, I find it neither aesthetically pleasing nor a joy to use. It's unfortunate that aesthetics have been merely associated with how something looks when it's just sitting there and doesn't take into account a pragmatic, active angle (not saying that that's how you associate aesthetics, brianwillis).
I dont see any concrete evidence that suggests Apples shift from Objective C in the linked article. Can you point to specific information that points to such a move. fyi pypy has a LLVM backend, as does haskell, I believe python is supported in Xcode too. Hence a similar article could have been written about Apple moving to python.
step one: solve it in LISP

step two: tell a C compiler how to do it

(although the solution I would write first in LISP isn't actually what I would do in C; in C, I'd start with stack/cons-like linked list and do a slinky-queue shift)
A perl script running via cgi could do it, no?
my favorite point:

"I think Apple is going to be able to get the price on such an iPod Touch below $200 before Cisco is going to create iMovie-like editing software for the Flip."
The original report is here: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/6/29/880179/-Research-200...

What I find most interesting about this is that the statistics used here really aren't complicated at all: the missing zeros are a pretty classic case of the human vision of random not matching up with reality, and the other issues they found are also pretty easy to understand at a high level. They go (a bit) deeper to show exactly why the problems they found are problems, but it's quite easily apparent that something is wrong when you look at the raw data. Problems in plain sight indeed.
There is plenty of discussion of the signal issue, the proximity sensor issue, and the potential fragility. It doesn't gloss over them or overplay them.

Is that sufficient? This seems at least as balanced and credible as the Ars Technical review.
Suddenly the 1977 movie Telefon sounds a lot more plausible: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Qg0w8qbBQo
Neither does Wikipedia, but at least Wikipedia doesn't have "cold" articles.
I didn't know, but I'll consider taking a look. I find it's far too expensive to be worthwhile though, at least at the advertised prices.
It doesn't make me feel bad for him, but it doesn't make him sound like an objective source of information. Which is 100% okay.

Writers don't have to be objective, so long as they point out their biases clearly. Gruber does. More and more I don't want to read blatantly pro-Apple stuff, but that doesn't mean Gruber's wrong to write it.
Even beyond the psychological effect, goals affect strategy.

In an elimination match, when you go a point down, you NEED THAT POINT. You have to start playing a more aggressive formation - you've gotta have Everyone on offense. Because of that, any break by the other team is suddenly FAR more dangerous, which is why the momentum went as badly as it did.

Generally, I agree that GER was better than ENG and I liked ARG better than MEX, but they weren't THAT much better.
The fact that you like what a company is doing should be a major factor in whether or not you invest in them, in my opinion.

Investing money is putting it to work. You can get monetary returns on an investment, but you also help the company do whatever it is doing, which is a sort of return. There's really no bright line between charity and investing. You just have to be aware of what kinds of returns you are looking for.
He's speaking of the call quality compared to a standard voice call.
I haven't used it, but Mixergy uses Wistia for videos. Here's Andrew's blog post about it: http://mixergy.com/my-video-stats-new/
By Apple of course.
I feel that way a lot when reading Gruber. He has the same kind of unwavering fawning praise for Apple that Rush Limbaugh has for the Republican party.
Wait, what? Your wife is forever. Your employees, your investors, and your company are not.
The founder lacked experience. It was purely luck that brought this about. He has no clue what he's doing, or he would have already done something to make the site better. He's done virtually nothing.
BBColors, CSS Syntax Checker for BBEdit and TextWrangler, Apache Configuration Language Module for BBEdit, bbdiff and the Tiger (i.e. Mac OS X 10.4) Details Report are all Mac-specific.
Pipes:tags::physics:syntax::plumbing:HTML (Anyone want to learn HTML?)
I understand the anger/outrage towards him for what on the surface seems irresponsible. But is it necessary to completely rip him apart repeatedly on Twitter, write a long, harsh blog post, and post insulting comments to hacker news?

He seemed to have screwed up. Big Time. I get it. But come on, be a little professional or at the very least, wait for the full story.
The silence toggle on both the 3G and the 3GS gave out on me. It was the most inferior part of that model.

I know a lot of people who have problems with super-flickering vibrate mode.
A love letter to Dieter Rams

Except its less durable and the unsymmetrical breaks in the steel band take away from its clean, minimal aesthetic. The band's function as an antenna is compromised by conductive fingers.

I normally would not be so critical, and I do not know I have designed it better... but when you gush like this for Ram's style of functional industrial design, the criticism is a comin'. The 27" iMac I'm writing this on however, may be the truest object to Ram's style that exists.

FYI Dieter Ram's 10 principles of good design:

Good design is innovative

Good design makes a product useful

Good design is aesthetic

Good design makes a product understandable

Good design is unobtrusive

Good design is honest

Good design is long-lasting

Good design is thorough down to the last detail

Good design is environmentally friendly

Good design is as little design as possible
I think it's more that the registry and filesystem get bloated and crufty. You can defrag an older installation and it'll still be slow.

It happens on new systems too. I've done it dozens of times, install Windows and be happy about the fresh, fast installation. Install some apps so you can use the machine and it slows down. Office was always the worst, even on a brand new install.
Too awesome. Really, too awesome.
And this is exactly the crux of my problem with reviews like this:

maybe how a button feels to an individual is a bit subjective?
Exactly. There are great essayists. Then, there are great debaters. Both types are great at the art of persuasion, which is the ultimate goal. I used to believe in interviews like this. But after stumbling through poor results, I came to the realization above.