skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem I had with the article is he didn't prove that these interfaces impede functionality. I don't know the market well enough but you seem to be a user of Reason and the interface obviously appeals to you.

Same with iBooks. I know people who love the faux-3d book pages and who swear it enhances the experience for them. Perhaps the author has a point about them not being proportional but that would be a suggestion to make the effect more useful. Not a reason not to use it.

Skeumorphic design elements are, by definition, decorative elements that CAN enhance functionality. So even if they don't enhance functionality they're still acceptable as long as they don't impede it.
> And even if you've built a really secure system all it takes is one user with their daughter's name as their password to make it all moot.

If your security design allows anyone to SSH in to obtain significant system access using only a user selected password, it isn't "really secure."
Just because the line is fuzzy doesn't mean there isn't one.

(I'm not sure if you're trying to weaken my argument by challenging the idea of childhood altogether (which would be weird), or if you're just curious. If it's the former, we're probably not going to have a productive discussion. If it's the latter, I'm open to suggestions, though it probably deserves the attention of an educational psychologist or someone like that.)
I have been there for the last 2 years, and I was able to pre-register this year. I go for the talks and the awesome energy that the event irradiates. I am pretty sure the quality of the talks and the energy will be just better than last year.

Developers like conferences and free gadgets, yea there might be some people looking to get some "free" $500 gadgets, but I don't think that will ruin my experience of awesome tech stuff and meeting the teams from all the different technologies that work on stuff I use every day.
Sorry, but you sound like a shallow prick and possibly a sociopath.

If I can see my (future) children grow up happy and healthy, keep learning my whole life, earn my living solving interesting problems, etc., that's not just quantitatively worth more than a yacht; it's qualitatively a better life.

To answer the actual question, of 1973 vs. today, I'd take today. The Internet is, frankly, awesome. Not having the entire world living in fear of nuclear winter is also kind of nice. I don't think cryo firms like Alcor existed in 1973. Those are just a few things off the top of my head; I'm sure I could come up with a much longer list given time.
This site looks great. Seriously, well done.
So, pray tell, what would you do as a troublesome young bloke hanging out in Harlem or Kansas City today?

I'll submit that some aspect of keeping kids in school is an attempt to keep those kids out of small trouble now and big trouble later. Paternalistic laws/rules very often rub the most responsible members of society the wrong way when they apply them to themselves. Moreover, applying rules for children to adults will also push your intuitions in a certain way.

Believing in a kid's potential to be a productive member of society, I'd argue, is an even more edifying way of acknowledging their status as a human being. Your version when applied to poor city kids is basically, "sure, it's cool if you want to go become a vandal/drug dealer/future inmate; whatever."

Also, you're giving kids too much credit. Kids will almost always maximize short term payoff at the expense of long term success (hyperbolic discounting?). And good parenting is about balancing those inclinations. In the absence of good parenting, schools can pick up some of the slack.
Yes, CDN costs a lot more than I had initially expected (but it is still not a large % of total revenue)
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The number one health problem among America's poor is obesity and its related illnesses. The American poor mostly own cars, TVs, and air conditioners, and often live in residences bigger than middle class homes in Europe. Sorry, poverty in America is nothing like Third World poverty where survival is a daily struggle.
I got a receipt from Google Checkout and a confirmation email from 'googleio2011@google.com' about 30 minutes later.

My checkout receipt doesn't have my IO confirmation # in it.

In your receipt email, click on the 'Get up-to-date information about #' link and see if it charged OK. If it did and you didn't get a confirmation, I would try to contact them to see what's up.
I imagine that the scalpers will take that opportunity to sell their spots, instead of opting for a refund.
If the vast majority (all but one according your post--and I have no data to refute that claim) falls within the set and he leaves out the one--is that cherry-picking or simply discarding an outlier? I'd argue it's the latter.
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I go to Penn State and major in Political Science and Telecom.

I'm pretty comfortable with web development using Rails, and other than an introductory database course, everything I know about programming I learned outside of the classroom. I've put that experience to good use, as I've worked on a startup for about 1.5 years.

Despite some pretty notable startups coming from Penn State (eg, Weebly), there is not much of a startup culture here. The School of Information Sciences and Technology seems mostly interested in landing jobs for its students at companies like Boeing, Ernst and Young, and Lockheed. There's nothing wrong with that, but I'd like to see faculty and the administration take more interest in startups.
So you are arguing that the US should actually be rated a 'poor' country by central/western European standards.
I believe this year you will have to attend. Last year they sent the Droid or (Nexus One outside the U.S.) prior to the conference, there is nothing auguring to this early giveaway this year.

I'm attending this year again and I'm flying from Canada. No way I would attend just for the freebies. The plane is currently at close to 800$ and my hotel will be probably at least 600$. If I wanted a phone, I would buy one, it's much cheaper. And I would not miss 3-4 days of work. I love the freebies, but they would be awfully expensive if the conference had no intrinsic value for me.
I do not think it is as simple as you put it; there are situations in urban public schools where student behavior would be beyond the control any teacher or any single person really.

That being said I love your point about not blaming an invsibile system. Every teacher I talk to blames someone else for all the problems in his or her clasroom. The public school system in this country is far from perfect but I believe many of the problems brought up in the original article arise from teachers who are unwilling or unable handle their students appropriately. Stop blaming everyone else and start solving the problem on your own.
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It shocks me to this day we never once discussed version control in any of my CS classes.
I find it more disturbing that your coffee table needs energy at all.
Did you find one?
I use Reason every day, and while I assure that its design was somewhat appealing at first, the sheer insanity of having to deal with virtual instruments and sequencers as if they were the "real thing" grows tiring extremely quickly.

Even during my education, wherein I dealt with more than a few individuals in Reason's "target market" (see: aging film composers who have spent their fair share of time plugging real cables into real sequencers) found it appalling and difficult to use.

The only reason I still use the program at all is because it has a few excellent patches built into it. The fact that I have to wade through the swamp of illogic that is its user interface remains one of most frustrating parts of my job as a media composer.
Google fails me. Where is that quote from?
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I forwarded this on to my father who did some excellent source fact checking. I just had to share with HN.

An interesting editorial and comments. I think the Boston Globe is a legit publication, but I was not familiar with Jeff Jacoby. Although he writes well, I became wary at his first reference to the American Enterprise Institute, so I did a little research.

I must admit that my suspicions were confirmed. The sole purpose of the AEI, and similar type organizations on both sides of the political spectrum, is to espouse and promote an ideology. The introduction (Message from the Chairman and President) to their 2010 annual report state, “AFI is showing that liberty, opportunity, and entrepreneurship are not only good economic principles, but moral imperatives.” I have learned to beware whenever anyone claims to know the Truth and talks about “moral imperatives” Such rhetoric has been used to justify the worst atrocities and most hateful acts of terrorism in human history.

I was also unfamiliar with Mark Perry, one of the moral authorities cited by Jacoby. In addition to being a “visiting scholar” at the AEI, Perry is a member of the Board of Directors of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, an orthodoxy right-wing “think tank” based in Michigan.

According to the Michigan Education Association, "The role of the Mackinac Center is to change public opinion and move public policy toward the political right. The Mackinac Center does not conduct neutral or objective scholarship. Rather, it provides the media and government officials with publications designed to promote and advance its conservative agenda." If any doubt remains about Jacoby’s objectivity or the reliability of his sources, a visit to the AEI website reveals their Board of Directors includes none other than The Honorable Richard B. Cheney.

Based on what little I was able learn, Jacoby, a rightwing taking head who was recruited by the Globe to add balance (or the appearance of balance) to their otherwise liberal editorial page, would feel at home in the company of the former VP. In fairness to Jacoby, he is neither a journalist nor a social scientist. His writes editorials that express a point of view. His job does on included conducting scientific research with the intent of objectively depicting reality.

In other words, consider the source. There's nothing more that the captains of industry would like to peddle more than American manufacturing is great. The real story is the jobs have been sent over seas and the executive pay has been increased at the top for efficiency.
Only if the buyer intended to publish the report, in which case it would be the protected intellectual property I mentioned. But if the report were leaked before the private-eye was able to sell it, there is nothing he could do legally to prevent the potential buyer from acting on that information (which is usually why people hire detectives). In particular, the FBI would legally be able to investigate and prosecute people using HBGary's info without paying HBGary. Professional courtesy and/or conflicts of interest might prompt them to pay for it anyway, of course.
> My question is - how far back would you go?

If seriously confronted with this proposition, I would probably not take the risk. My father died of cancer, as did one of my aunts (from my mother's family), so, I would be weary of being too far from more modern treatments and/or diagnostics. It would be tempting, of course, to be able to witness some key events in our industry first hand (maybe even nudge them in a better direction). I would, certainly, be at the homebrew computer club meeting when Woz presented his Apple I. About a year later I would talk Woz into (or help him with - I still remember 6502 well enough) integrating floating point into Apple's BASIC. Then, I would try to persuade the IBM execs not to ditch CP/M-86 for PC-DOS. And then I would call it a day and head back to a much nicer 2011.

I could also lobby for Thorium reactors in the 50's...
One of my friends is a graduate student. His research work with a professor does use version control; the prof set him up with a brand new CVS repository the day before he started.
I recently finished reading start small, stay small. After a recommendation like that I'd love to read Eric Ries's book.

Do you have a link? A quick google search only turned up java dev books and a book to be released in September.
Be Open from Day One, not Day N.
> No matter what year it is it's always better to be on top. That's where most of the human pleasure comes from.

You know you will be happier if you enjoy what you have, not the fact you have and others don't.
What are you talking about? Clearly it has to 'work' in the sense that when you upload your code and go to look at it you get a result back for the initial people. This guys app did not work at all. Are you saying GoDaddy has a product they sell that doesn't work even in the slightest? If this one guy noticed something broke it is not unreasonable to think that if it is across the entire product that more people would complain and it would escalate. It may not be true but it's not unreasonable. But this discussion is almost full retard.
Google gives the freebies away so that developers will have devices at hand to make apps for. If non-developer freebie seekers are going, that obviously defeats the purpose. Maybe they should have some sort of coding exercise that you have to complete to be eligible for registration.
Definitely. When classroom discipline is solely the teacher's responsibility, the teacher ends up spending all their time enforcing discipline and no time teaching. My girlfriend did Teach for America in the bad parts of Washington, DC and there were veteran teachers there who didn't have as much trouble with discipline because they were basically glorified babysitters. They didn't really teach anything, but they made sure students showed up and didn't kill each other. Works great for keeping things under control, but the kids are completely screwed as far as their education goes.

I don't think the commenters saying that discipline is the teacher's responsibility understand the circumstances involved in some of these schools. We're talking about kids pulling knives on each other or throwing desks, not passing notes in the back of the class.

The teacher also has no control over how much the parents (or in many cases grandparents) will help. My girlfriend had one kid who had to be suspended for throwing a chair at her. When he came back, he said that while he was suspended his dad took him out on a boat and got him ice cream. Suspension was more fun than going to school, so is it surprising that his behavior never changed?
Perfectly put. That is what I was trying to say ;-)
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Why Apple’s iPad Competitors are Hopelessly Lost
Start Parsing in Clojure: fnparse
Well, if you could somehow get more energy out of it then maybe you'd be able to get it to preform some other tasks. Of course there aren't many tasks a coffee-table might preform, and there certainly aren't (enough? D:) mice in my house to keep it fed, but the idea is sound enough.

Perhaps some sort of fancy bird-feeder that eats squirrels...
>Unlike what [iPad] competitors are still doing (which is bullet-pointing tech specs and saying what the competition can't do), Apple gives a very simple and crafted message about what you can do and how easily you can do it.

The Xoom ad goes that direction. Wish it cost less than $800, though.
It was back in 1990 that I set out on a project in memetic engineering. The Nazi-comparison meme, I'd decided, had gotten out of hand - in countless Usenet newsgroups, in many conferences on the Well, and on every BBS that I frequented, the labeling of posters or their ideas as "similar to the Nazis" or "Hitler-like" was a recurrent and often predictable event. It was the kind of thing that made you wonder how debates had ever occurred without having that handy rhetorical hammer.

So, I set out to conduct an experiment - to build a counter-meme designed to make discussion participants see how they are acting as vectors to a particularly silly and offensive meme...and perhaps to curtail the glib Nazi comparisons.

-- Mike Godwin: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/godwin.if.html

1984 may be the most successful memetic engineering project in history. He developed viral antibodies for totalitarianism and then injected them into our culture. It worked so well that people say "Orwellian" to mean "totalitarian-esque" in the same way they say "Kleenex" to mean "facial tissue".

Making ideas as simple as possible, but not simpler requires some amount of creative genius. Nuance is not viral.

EDIT, a thought experiment: Your job is to write a short book that if it could somehow be read by the population of North Korea would cause the Kim Jong-Il regime to collapse. Could such a book be written? I think 1984 would do it.
> "it's not acceptable to give up on them as products of the system."

But what about moving them to an alternate system that addresses their basic, fundamental issues with school and education?

It seems backwards to allow the minority to prevent learning for the majority. It also seems backwards to address these kids' issues in the same way as kids ready to learn.
Several co-workers and myself are road tripping it from Oregon and splitting hotel rooms. We're all self funding to go. I can't speak for the others but I'm interested in the sessions, though without potential freebies it would have been a much harder decision.
The hope would be that Google makes transferring tickets sufficiently hard that if people don't really want to go they just take the refund.
Agree. As for the proxying: Vodafone uses a transparent proxy on their UMTS network[1], other mobile companies might, too.

1. http://www.yetanotherblog.com/2007/08/20/vodafone-transparen...
That sounds like a great idea. The event will be streamed live [http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/faq.html] & I'm sure one of the co-working spaces would be able to put something on a big screen.
In most Teach for America schools, the choice for some families isn't between parents working to pay for college vs being involved in their child's school. It's a choice between parents working vs the family not eating. When the parents are struggling with subsistence, it's not surprising that they're less concerned with their kids grades.
Or your mind could be running on some cloud somewhere. Perhaps, a dozen instances of you could be forking and merging all the time.

2031 seems a bit early for that, but, if you go back to 73 knowing what you do now, you may be able to pull that one off.
>If I can see my (future) children grow up happy and healthy, keep learning my whole life, earn my living solving interesting problems

If you're rich you can still do these things. Whether you're rich in Ancient Egypt or rich in 1973 you'll have access to this stuff.
This is insane and should be cause for extreme suspicion.. As a sysadmin if someone asks you to do this, the correct response is "haha not likely", and at the very least confirm their identity - call them or something. Don't sent the password over email.
Usually the reader has a local log of the last few cards read. If it detects the same card again within a certain time window it assumes it either read it twice - or two people are sharing a card - and ignores the second read
@paras: I was surprised when I saw your ad running on Drudge Report. What does it cost to run an ad on a very high traffic site like that, and more importantly, did it covert well?
> For a while they had a Unix some wanted

True. I wanted it.
Bravo! I'd help you out with this but don't have the bandwidth at the moment, so the least i can do is I upvote all your comments to contribute hehe...
I wouldn't be enjoying what others don't have.

I would be enjoying what I DO have. Which is the ability to pay others to do whatever I want.

I want massages and blowjobs and chefs and chauffeurs and butlers and servants. Who doesn't want these things?

A rich person can get these things no matter what year it is. A poor person will always be denied these things no matter what year it is.
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because limiting that misdemeanor to people that bought from dealextreme.com a $20 RFID duplicator kit instead of a $500 phone makes the world so much more secure.
Ask HN: What's the best way to organize stock photos and fonts?
I'm looking for a great way to organize both fonts and stock photos. I'd like to classify each according to the terms I searched for in the first place - ie, "Cowboy font" or "tennis player illustration". What solutions do people here use?
And for seeing if someone has the knowledge and imagination to come up with such a purpose, I think I've found a good filter.
You know, often I see these long speeches, always in retrospect about how one technology won over the other with a myriad of reasons.

In almost all of these cases, the winners had one thing in common: They had better user interfaces. Not quality, not specifications, but user interface.

All the google vs altavista, facebook vs myspace, iphone vs android and so on, always seem to end up with the simpler and more effective user interface winning. The post-analysis always points to a huge confluence of things happening, but for now I'll stick to my simple rule:

Software that is easier to use and gives the user what he wants faster (and has the same feature-set and price) than another equivalent software will always become more popular, given enough time.
It shouldn't be too hard, though. If I have a ticket and something comes up preventing me from going, I should be able to give it to a friend.
The coffeetable doesn't strike me as practical but I could see an insect-eating lamp being useful outside.

You'd probably have the same issue as most "bug zappers" do, namely that they kill more beneficial insects than harmful/annoying ones, but perhaps it could be tuned to kill mosquitoes? A mosquito-killer that powered itself (and didn't require propane or CO2 or electricity, as most current ones do) would be pretty cool.