skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Apple mice seem to be the canary in the coal mine. If Apple starts designing mice we all want to use - it is a sign their engineering practices have turned upside down and their products will not have the same minimalistic qualities that make them incredibly popular.

Apple mice suck. Period. They're practically unusable, poorly tested, unreliable, overly expensive garbage. Problems with their pointer devices are noticeable to anybody withing the first 5 minutes of using the device. To make matters worse, the way mouse inputs are handled is similarly bad. Unusable and unpredictable acceleration curve with no exposed configuration to tune it, and decades of trying everything possible to avoid having a second button has created all kinds of nonstandard ways of handling right mouse clicks and all kinds of legacy keyboard gyrations for simple actions that could just be handled through a right-click context menu. Option-Shift-Command-Delete really, so I'm modifying a modification or a modifier key? Wow, that's totally discoverable. The semantics of such a command astound. (it's slowly improving, but right-click context menus are not really in the Apple culture).

It's bizarre because Apple is really the first company to design their devices around non-keyboard input, even going to far as to remove arrow keys off of the keyboard in early devices to force people to use the mouse, their touch devices have reinvented mobile computing, and their interface standards are extremely high, why is it then that the mouse I had with my original single body black and white Macintosh is more usable than anything the company has produced since the ridiculous hockey puck mouse in the 90s? Does nobody in the company actually use their products? Is everybody just walking around with MBPs using the trackpads?

One lesson to be learned though is that there simply is a certain amount of complexity you have to deal with in modern computing. You can shift that complexity around (eliminate the right mouse button, but then you have to have awkward and non-discoverable four key combinations), but it's very hard to eliminate it. Trying to find the optimal balance point that allows the best possible management of this complexity is hard.
Forgive me for this sort of post, but am I the only one that felt like this article ended without a conclusion? Did I miss something like a second page, or did this really end on 'and Google responded to the charges by missing JavaOne' when the article was on Oracle's OSS stance?
Leaving features off the table and just talking about semantic cleanups, here's a few:

* Switch statement doesn't fall-through by default.

* Variables don't need to be declared with "var", and can't ever become global accidentally.

* Equality is strict, using `===`, if you want coercive equality, you coerce the object yourself.

* Loops that are used to generate functions close over their index variables, so that all inner functions don't share the final value of the index. This is the same problem that ECMAScript Harmony introduces "let" to solve.

* Splats largely replace use of the "arguments" object, so you don't get bit by "arguments" only being a faux-array.

* Comparisons can be chained, as in Python -- so you can write: "100 > x > 25", and have the answer be correct.

* Multiline strings are valid without having to escape the newline.

* And the big one: everything in CoffeeScript is an expression. Without having to use temporary variables, you can return the result of an if/else from a function, pass a comprehension (loop) directly into a function call, assign the result of a try/catch, and so on.

I love JavaScript semantics as well. I think it has the cleanest object/function model out there, in terms of scripting languages -- but that's not to say there aren't parts that can use a little touch-up.
"Attempting to measure the performance of a political party statistically and without being influenced by the personalities involved is interesting and new."

I've been presented with these exact same arguments back in High School, which was in the early 80s. You can skew the numbers to favor Republicans by just choosing the data ranges from when the politicians actually joined office.

In over two decades of being involved in politics in some capacity I've found that the only difference between the two major parties is how they want to legislate control of my life.
I like the sound of this app, but it doesn't seem to work with IE7 at all. I tried searching for my state and it gave an error and if I try to pick the state I see the select a city briefly appear and then it disappears.
Ask HN: Are there any sites like MenuPages with an API?
Does Menupages have an API or is there any other site that has restaurant menus that could be accessed via an API?

I am starting to learn Python and then Django and I had an idea or two that I wanted to implement to make the learning process interesting. Thanks.
[video] Facebook: Unfriend coal
I completely agree with you. Today I found myself using a search in another tool and sat there for a moment after I typed, waiting for the results to come in. Once I realized the results weren't going to come until I press enter, I found myself a very tiny bit frustrated that I had to exert additional effort for me to see results.
Oh irony of ironies. You call someone a zealot and then go on to show how much vastly more of a zealot you are (but it's not clear to me that the OP even is a zealot).

If you're going to go preaching on the free market and such you should bloody well learn what it is. Go read a book on market theory (if Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, Palin or any of those people are on the book, put it down and keep looking). I'm serious. This "passionate ignorance" movement is doing more damage to the US than anything else I can think of. Do you even know who Adam Smith is? He would have been very anti-Microsoft [1].

I apologize to everyone else on HN for this post, but this kind of ignorance needs a major slap down every time it's encountered so hopefully these people will either educate themselves or at least stfu and stop framing every debate around insanity and ignorance.

[1] http://www.pcdf.org/corprule/betrayal.htm
Partially true. While you can't directly test for frustration or confusion, what you can test for is the important (to your business) effects of that frustration or confusion.

Higher bounce rates, lower conversion, changes in dominant navigation path, lower average order value, etc. can be determined from A/B or multi-variate testing, and a lot of companies are much less interested in whether a user is confused than they are in whether any potential confusion is causing a reduction in CR% or AOV.

If the article's rant had argued "A/B or MV testing is a hill-climb and incremental changes backed only by test data virtually assures you'll find a local maxima, but only a daring design decision is capable of moving you to a different, higher, hill," I'd be more inclined to agree.

As it stands, it reads to me like a designer who is frustrated by not being able to scratch his own personal itches, without regard to the underlying business results: http://www.artlebedev.com/mandership/140/
LUXr
1. Yes, it's interesting to have a curated place to get good developers, even if it's more expensive. However, I think you might need to do more than the things you've listed so far.

2. Make sure your clients have a really good experience and then help them promote you.

Since this is a marketplace, you have to stimulate both supply and demand. Supply: contact good coders and ask them to sign up. Demand: work very hard to get clients into the system, and follow up with them.

Also: the name "canyoucode" is aimed at developers, that's not very good, should be aimed at clients. And finally: having the site full of dummy date is kind of crap. I would go with a closed beta. Again, you have to stimulate supply and demand: you need to make sure that your first coders get good clients (and then blog about that), and that your clients get good coders (and then blog about that). I would make it closed beta at first.
check https://jottit.com/
Microsoft launch Internet Explorer 9 web browser
"I swear, if he says 'The power of IE9' one more time, I'm gonna..."
The most irritating features of iTunes on Windows are its constant attempts to persuade you to download QuickTime and Safari and the fact you need to use it at all to "activate" a phone. Neither of those are a prerequisite to run on the platform. The dreadful initial release of Ping also has a lot more to do with Cupertino than Redmond (and they say Google doesn't get social networking!)

An integrated iTunes as an all-in-one media file manager linked in to the iTMS is also pretty integral to Apple's desire to drive people to that store - they _want_ people to think about buying more music and movies when they go to update their podcasts or back up their phone. Much like an instant search that serves more ads or an unnecessary password prompt when downloading a free app update, it makes a lot more sense from the perspective of encouraging particular consumer behaviour than from enhancing their productivity or enjoyment.
Analytics and Journals
> My dive buddy took a minute to realize what I meant and then another minute to fumble for his spare regulator

(emphasis mine)

Yikes! Why didn't he let him share his main regulator while he was looking for the spare?? What if he couldn't find the spare?... (they often become entangled in the tubes in the back and are hard to get)

This is really bizarre.
Wow, I didn't know someone at Robarts was doing this stuff( I work for McGill another University in Canada ;p)

I'll have to communicate with him.

I've managed to get some full volumes loaded in my app. It was a scan of my brain. That work ok (slow and takes a few minutes to load) but when I loaded the brain or a rat, my app totally crashed. To be fair the rats brain was at a higher resolution :)
IOS 4.2 on iPad preview (video) (updated) -- Engadget
Thanks.

This is one of the things we plan to do.
In fact, our backend lets us make pre-filled developer profiles which just need to be 'activated'.

edit: You are probably right about the dummy data. We could try a closed beta. This has been up for just a few hours.
Node.js For My Tiny Ruby Brain: Keeping Promises
But they probably did it by mistake or at least inadvertently. If they had known what would occur they probably won't have done it.
Antacids Can Cause Osteoporosis - Health and Financial Freedom
Fantastic design! It can really set you apart from the more "corporate" designs of Elance/oDesk. It's a great idea to have the marketplace have a good design and aesthetic to position yourself as different from the kinda sketchy RentACoder-type sites.

How will you distinguish your review process and qualifications from the certification tests that oDesk offers? Arguably your internally-reviewed approvals will be more valuable than "User X passed the HTML Level 1 test" but how will you communicate that to clients searching your site for freelancers?
No one is calling her a hero.
Redis is rock-solid. If you make sure you've got enough RAM for your data, there's no downside to using Redis.
Why? Look at Heroku; they us all off the shelf software for 90% of their components.

People will always pay for convenience.
I would fully expect a higher percentage of "fanboys" in the population of IE9 users, given simply that IE9 is just a beta. The crowd is basically limited to technophiles running Windows. Not that this is the same as "fanboy", but I would expect a significant correlation.

And you don't have to believe MS is evil to know that they are still pulling these Windows power-grabs. Windows promised Mac compatibility with Silverlight, only to yank our PowerPC support in v 2.0 just a year later (leaving ~half of Mac users in the cold).

I don't think MS is any more "evil" than any other tech company (just worse at PR maybe), but until they demonstrate they've changed their ways, you can't blame people for expecting them to still be up to their old games.
To me, as a Jew, “Diaspora” just means “outside of Israel”. Of course Jews live in so many different countries outside of Israel because of our history of being persecuted, but when I first heard of the “Diaspora project” I did not have an immediate reaction of “what an offensive name”.

Your mileage, of course, may vary.
Ignored for explaining your vote, not for the cheap attack. ;)
I know that laws of suppply/demands are at play here but it is strange that Groupon would attribute their success to good copy yet pay writers only a merger salary of $35k.

source: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0830/entrepreneurs-groupon...
Different Forms of Competition – The Assassin, The Ghost and The Priest
Even when iTunes was OS X only it felt awkward and unlike most other OS X programs. The problem is that they bought an OS 9 MP3 player (SoundJam) and have been hacking at it for years without doing the rewrite needed to get things like platform-standard UI, non-blocking I/O, etc. Any time you see a modal dialog, remember it started out on an OS which barely multitasked. Cross platform isn't an issue - Windows has equivalents for every single thing on your list, whether native or something they already ship like Apple Software Update.

As far as package management goes, the problem here is that Apple simply does not care. The Mac sysadmin community has been asking for better solutions for years but it's just not a priority for Apple - even App Store updates, which theoretically are more important, have been broken[1] for something like the last 4 major iTunes releases but since it's merely clumsy and doesn't prevent sales it obviously hasn't been as important as a new version of some non-standard window controls.

[1] The process is now: click on Apps. Click on "Get Updates". Click on "Get All Updates". Wait. Dismiss erroneous "The information on this page is outdated and must be refreshed" dialog. Click on Apps. Click on "Get Updates". Click on "Get All Updates". This from a UI powerhouse? The phone almost gets it right except for the gratuitous password nag.
I myself have set up a site with a woothemes template and it was easy and painless and it worked across browsers too. It will take me forever to learn enough html, css, js to make the site look this good and also cross browser compatible, if I did this by myself from scratch. And gravity forms(http://www.gravityforms.com/) rocks too, for contact, download or sign up forms.
Back in IE6's day browsers were on the desktop, and that's about it. Now that browsers run on a whole host of devices, dominating the desktop browser market isn't the whole ballgame.

It feels unlikely that anyone will ever dominate the browser market like that again.
Carrier pigeon versus broadband in data speed race
Thanks.

The review is something we hope to figure out soon (as we reach volumes that we cannot handle ourselves).

We are looking at how the quality on HN stayed sane over the past years. And how we can include crowd-sourced moderation and ratings without people gaming the system to their advantage.
Simple enough isn't it?

They don't benefit now from using it over Safari. They benefit from it just as a promise from MS that they won't screw up the web just to sell more Windows PCs. As long as it's relatively easy to obtain IE for Mac, it's not a useful tool to sabotage the standards in a platform lock-in grab.

However, I agree with you that it seems totally unrealistic to expect MS to do this. Not because they're evil, but just because why bother?
An Interview with Dr. Alan Sill of the Open Grid Forum - Cloud Commons
If your a technical founder and building the product yourself I don't see why you couldn't spend a couple thousand to do it right, cutting corner in design is one of the top mistakes technical founders make. Spend a week consulting and it will cover the design and more.
This brings up what has been bothering me about OAuth 2 as well. Signing is important! With FireEagle, we used SSL for everything, but we still required signing. That's because often client's don't check SSL certs.
New PlayClaw alpha release with cpu overlays and ingame benchmarks
The total size, although smaller than 10KB, could definitely have been squeezed down much further. But since the limit was 10KB it was hard to find the motivation to do so.
There mice may suck but I am in love with the multi-touch track pad. I don't use a mouse at all anymore. For me at least they have killed the mouse.

The 2 finger slide to scroll, 3 finger slid to page up / down, 2 finger right click make it an amazing tool. My productivity has skyrocketed on the track-pad. They have now released a peripheral track-pad for desktop machines. I recommended to a friend of mine that I freelance with and he was sold almost instantly. It is night and day.

Anyway, the point is I agree mice may be the one area where I prefer Microsoft's offerings to Apple's. I have never met an Apple mouse that I liked, but for me the mouse is dead I could never go back after using the track-pad.

Link for those of you unfamiliar with it:

http://www.apple.com/magictrackpad/
Skyhook sues Google over location based patent infringement
Google ... Do no evil?
i am not into programming but can give you suggestion regarding design element. consider changing the "panda" in orange at banner area. just my personal observation. otherwise your site looks very good.
I think we have different interpretations of "testing". I'm talking about testing in general, not just testing incremental changes.
> But they probably did it by mistake or at least inadvertently.

Agreed.

> If they had known what would occur they probably won't have done it.

Huh?
Just because it's meaningless the day it hits the shelves doesn't mean it will be meaningless forever. As the XP users are slowly forced to upgrade, the market will lose IE6/7 users and gain IE9+ users. It's not a license to ignore IE7 right away, but it's still progress.
Thanks for the feedback on design elements, it's important too! What color would you put the "panda" in? Green like the "shining"?
All right, but apart from the railways, what has the Empire ever done for us?
I just open the links in a new tab, then once I have several open I check to see if they are what I want. If they are not I close them and go back to the search tab to refine what I am looking for.

Slightly different topic, but I like Wonder Wheel for searching as well. I start with something intentionally vague if I don't know the exact phrase I want for describing something. Then I select the best choice from the Wonder Wheel.
It's not a conspiracy theory, it's exactly what happened with IE6.

You can debate whether IE6 was a good or bad thing in this regard, but it still happened.
Sounds very exciting, looking forward to your private beta!
Reddit kicked Digg's ass because Reddit is designed as a feedback loop that benefits all users. Digg only rewards elite users.

Look at a random Reddit submission. If it survives the first minute, it makes some user's frontpage. If it is "good," it gets votes and is seen by more people. If the username is popular, it gets upvoted faster. But it turns out this is not necessary for success - I have submitted successful articles without any possible benefit of name recognition, or help from friends.

Reddit's comment section is a great feedback loop: Reddit is designed for discussion, and discussion is great at generating more discussion. Large comment threads form on popular articles, even if they're only lightly inspired by the article or vapid. You must check your recent comments to defend yourself, since the risk is high that someone will strongly and persuasively disagree with you. After all, it's Reddit. Good comments get trophies. Really good comments make /r/bestof.

In contrast, Digg is a feedback loop that benefits the best users. Within a few years of Digg's launch (especially after they dropped the technology-only focus), it was almost impossible to get an article on the frontpage without a friend network, or the blessing of a poweruser. The various sections of Digg were littered with hundreds of high-quality articles with two Diggs. To successfully submit articles to Digg, you needed to focus energy on gaining a network and voting on articles that they submit, and using this network to gain a larger network. The last time I was there, the comments section was also a nightmare. It is designed for single-use comments, and not for discussion. At one point they introduced nested comments, but it seems like they've either done away with it, or don't have enough comments to nest.

The best website designs act as feedback loops. Reddit has polished theirs.
A great example of begging the question. The basic assumption is that Google's UIs are unpopular without any evidence that this is true; given the wide popularity among the people I know (even the designers) I think it'd be more accurate to say that Google is successfully producing clean, functional designs and not even attempting web design contest entries.

UI is more than looking pretty - gmail is popular because it stays out of the way and lets you focus on content, which it handles quite well; in contrast, iTunes increasingly feels like a train-wreck because they swap icons without fixing any of the quirky behaviours and non-standard interface conventions which users must memorize. It was also a confusing comparison because a UI for managing a tightly-curated, highly-structured list containing on average a few thousand items pre-selected by the user isn't obviously relevant to arbitrarily searching across billions of unknown items.
HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1624038

The experiments are quite impressive.
I don't like the arbitrary minimum rate but I do see how it would differentiate you from the rest of freelancing marketplaces. I think it would be better to have different minimums depending on category and type of work. There is no reason why data entry or similar should start at $35/hr, It just shouldn't be $3/hr. Could also have different minimums for different countries, freelancers have different standards on what's a good hourly rate, many of them can do fine with $20/hr.

Other pain points to address:

It's very tiring having to bid on dozens of projects and never getting any work. This is a major problem for new freelancers. You have to lowball dozens of bids in hopes of getting your first ratings.

Something like Odesk's tests for freelancers but higher quality.

Buyers should also be reviewed not just freelancers. Putting money into escrow before accepting a bid should be mandatory, at least for new buyers.

I've used about five different freelancing websites in the past but it's been a while since then and I think a lot of problems are not coming to mind now. I'll let you know if I think of more pain points I would like to see addressed.

EDIT:
I tried signing up but my current address is not in a country listed in your dropdown menu. I don't see why you would limit Europe to a handful of countries. If you can do business in one EU country, you can do in all of them thanks to the economic union.
Everything that Go has is already in Java.

In fact, Go looks like Java with an ActionScript 3.0 syntax.

Is there anything going on for it that Java doesn't have, or do better?

[Edit:

By the way, I keep hearing Go is an excellent language for writing daemons. Why is that? when it doesn't even have anything resembling exception handling, much less a condition system?

This is the Go spec: http://golang.org/doc/go_spec.html

]
Tongue-Eating Creature
This parasite enters through the gills, and then attaches itself at the base of the spotted rose snapper’s tongue.
I'm having a hard time understanding what role ShiningPanda would play in our deployment process. Is this a hosted Capistrano type service, but with testing? Or, is it more like Heroku but with EC2/GAE/etc?

Something like "it's the [Heroku|or whatever] for Python" would be much easier to understand how to utilize your offering.

Or, is there really no other comparable service?

Linked: http://www.shiningpanda.com
cnn is a readership business, not a news business