skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Usually you see blog posts with the latest success or the code you are proud of

I'm observing the exact opposite. While the official project sites show indeed only success stories, I'm observing a trend that those sites increasingly add a "blog" section where the developers talk freely about their experiences and mistakes.

> I'm dreaming to see the academic papers where instead of all the wonderful results you'll see the errors path to reach the final result.

This would not only be great, but should be mandatory (maybe by law) in order to get rid of the publication bias. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias)
The service is mostly Javascript. All code runs on the browser before being sent to the server. The Javascript is viewable.
TheFind.com gets labelled content farm. Its a product search engine, direct competitor of Google Products.
fully agree. unfortunately systems are as perfect as the people that run them, in this case the rotten judge, attorney, and even the victim really did this man great injustice. you wonder what ever happened to the victim and the real felon.
The fact that the appeals were denied is eye-opening. Maybe that shouldn't be allowed? But I'm sure there are tons of non-legitimate appeals too.
> The government eventually rescued the private sector by building railways to no-where. That's still causing problems, as they have to spend tax revenue paying interest, not paying for healthcare or research (or tax cuts).

Did that "rescue the private sector"? Or did it rescue the folks who worked for railroads and their dependents while causing greater problems in the rest of the economy?

Bad capital allocation, by definition, means that you got less for your investment than you would have gotten otherwise. A "train to nowhere" means that you couldn't do something that would have produced greater benefits.

Yes, building that train benefitted the folks who built it, but that ignores the costs.
Right, marketing is doing research to understand the needs and wants of consumers. Marketers then deploy advertising channels to supply the demands of the consumers.
But how, as a design idiot armed with a recently downloaded copy of Gimp, do I tell whether or not my fine edit has "botched" your design or not?

Here we come to a fundamental problem of FOSS economics. There are three forces which protect the software from the work of well-meaning but clueless people:

A) Physical reality. The software has to work. If I take an ax to the internals of Apache it will quickly become apparent that I screwed up when the web pages don't load. There are automated tests. There are well-defined criteria for performance: specs, stopwatches, size of memory footprint, number of crashes in N hours.

B) Community. Patches don't get accepted without buy-in. If you make a mistake that is bad enough you won't get enough other hackers to sign on to your patch. It will get debated to death until you make the community happy.

C) Governance. In any FOSS community, all contributors are equal in the eyes of the gods, but in practice some contributors are more equal than others. If everyone but Linus Torvalds likes your patch, your patch still might not make it into Linux.

How do these map to design?

A) One problem with design is that, almost by definition, it is the part of development that can't be done by a machine. You can't write automated tests. You probably can't even define "wrong" in any objective manner. Trying to do so will drive your designers straight up a wall:

http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

So to answer the question "hey, did my nifty new color scheme screw up the design?" you really have no choice but to ask a design team member. But:

B) The problem with design is that it doesn't scale well; it depends on a consistent vision and a consistent sense of taste. It is very hard to get more than three people on the same page here, and that's if they are trying to cooperate; mix in a saboteur and you are in big trouble.

So the right size for a design team is small. Small, and select: You need to earn your way onto the team. Add more members, or more voluminous input from nonmembers, and the team quickly spends more time bickering than building; if half those members are volunteers who have no experience and haven't read the style guide you are doomed to perpetual gridlock.

The established way to break this logjam is:

C) from the top. What color is the Ubuntu default theme? Ultimately, it is what Mark Shuttleworth wants it to be. And Shuttleworth has some taste, thank god.

Unfortunately, very few project leaders have taste - not just in FOSS but anywhere; this is why every piece of gear I own is gradually being replaced by a box with a little Apple logo on it. And if you are one of the rare people with excellent taste and the ability to lead a big technical project you probably have much more lucrative things to do than FOSS. Unless you are an idealist and independently wealthy, like, ahem, Mark Shuttleworth. There are precious few such people. It's a problem.
Have you considered using 'screen' instead?
One of the major problems in the U.S. is the one-size-fits-all mentality. Thousands of kids are sent to enormous mega-schools and are expected to be stamped through a unified educational process like a piece of mass production. The result is that the public school system becomes more like a holding pen than an educational opportunity.

While the U.S. does do a pretty good job of identifying gifted students and herding them off to more specialized education, it does a very poor job of identifying students for more vocational training.

In many systems, students are segregated early...perhaps middle school...and receive very different educations depending on their chances of going to college and getting a degree or vocational school and learning a trade.

(of course I say this now with a handful of degrees under my belt when I would have been an obvious High Schooler for the vocational education...so it's not a perfect idea by any stretch)
Privacy Amongst Clouds - A must read on privacy in the cloud computing era
How about removing "startup" from the title and just call it "tools"?
> when asked if they would rather make $50k while everyone else makes $25k or 100K while everyone else makes $200k (the costs of goods and services being the same) people overwhelmingly choose the former. why?

I'd like to see the cite, because most behavioral economics research that I've seen is crap.

But, even if that's true, so what? It's dumb to act as if pi = 4 even if "everyone" wants it to be.

Yes, I realize that you're not arging that we should act as if envy is better than greed, you're just saying that people think that it is. So, what do we do about that?
This is an interesting turn up for the books. While I use some universal binaries here and there, I don't run any PowerPC code on any Mac kit.

I wonder though, if Apple were to transition to their A4 chips for Macbooks whether we'll see Rosetta come back in an ARM compatible flavour.
Found a few aspects of this article frustrating.

First, the linked "study" isn't a study at all, it's a summary written for public consumption.

Second, we get no information about how the figures were derived- were these people presented with a multiple choice survey? What choices were available on that survey?

Third, the whole study is built on people's self-reported analysis of their own motivations. While valuable, I know that kind of data isn't fully reliable.
I understand what you're saying…but as an open-source contributor I certainly expect that my code can be modified for various reasons.

I guess a “work of art” would feel more personal, and (unless given a tight spec of elements that must be included) is more of a candidate for either rejection or admission as-is. For changes I'd certainly expect a request “can you add a wizard hat on the ninja?” rather than someone modifying it themselves.

That said, I don't think it's a one-way street (and good design is sorely lacking). The designers should have or take an interest in the general operating procedures just like they would for any paid work.
I guess the first thing to do is to actually care about it to begin with. I have tried submitting suggestions for improving UIs (and even more trivial bug reports like some element is not centred properly or a text box is 1 px too tall) and it seems like many developers simply don't want to hear about it. They don't have an eye for it, they don't think about how other people might approach the interface, so it just doesn't bother them. They consider your criticisms and suggestions to be nit-picking or pedantry and they either get defensive or they just dismiss them outright. Even if they don't resent them, they often consider them to be so low-priority that they're not worth putting much effort into.

The second thing would probably be, like others have said, just to ask -- and part of asking for help is making sure that you are able to actually receive the help. Perhaps partially because of the above, and also because i am not really a programmer (yet!), i have come to be hesitant to even try submitting anything. The process is too complex. I feel very uncomfortable with patches and pull requests and test cases, so please don't make me deal with them. Offer a 'dumbed down' way of submitting our contributions, or, perhaps, make somebody a liaison between people like me and people like your developers.

Large open-source projects in particular -- Firefox, GNOME, KDE -- are ones that i have the most interest in contributing to, but they have extremely high barriers of entry for people like me. (To a relative outsider it kind of seems like the design direction of these types of applications/suites is strictly controlled by some high-up cabal of developers, though, so perhaps that is intentional.)

edit: wording
Unlike the Dropbox method you mentioned, Passwords.cc encrypts the data. Last I checked, Dropbox does not encrypt user's files but I may be wrong (I am an avid user of Dropbox myself). The benefit to Passwords.cc over 1Password is mainly sharing - we created a system that is best used between people, whether it be a married couple or a group of developers. We plan on adding browser support (plugins and extensions) and a desktop app.

Thanks for the input on the site design.. we will work on it, but we spent more time on the UI after you log in.
Contrapositive is the rule that takes "if A, then B" to "not B, therefore not A". The contrapositive is true if the initial proposition is true. But the grandparent posited "we shouldn't work hard on getting our proofs correct" as the correct negative to "we should work hard on getting our proofs correct". If it were a contrapositive, then it would be true when the article's proposition is true; but that's not the case (one can't simultaneously work and not work hard), so it's not a contrapositive.

A contrapositive to "we should work hard on getting our proofs correct" could be "if we're not working hard on it, it's not a proof" - though it depends on how you interpret the statement as a proposition.
Holy. Crap. I've been using GitHub for a while and I had no idea about this.
It wouldn't be hard for Apple to stick an NDA in to stop these guys from releasing bug info further down the line.

Of course, I hope the guys who received the CDs are at least getting paid - otherwise I imagine we'll see a few bugs go the other way but some may choose to wait till the final release anyway.
Travel Tips
This is my own theory but I would guess the price of education goes up with the average wages for a country. In the US there are a lot of high paying professional jobs . I suspect this is one of the reason many communist countries seemed to have decent educational systems(compared to how many things they are bad at).
All they would have to do to comply with this rule is to allow people to install apps not served from the App Store, much like Android already does. Seems like a simple enough request, and would only benefit users.
>at least one is believed to have been found on a beach in Scotland

can't believe it. it was carried to the Atlantic manually.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Blackstone%27...
I would like to disagree here - in my experience, maintenance coding means working on pieces within existing overall architecture. And if that arhitecture sucks, well, too bad - not often you can allot the time necessary for proper fixes when working on what appear to be minor bugs. And when you are writing workarounds instead of the beautiful code floating in your mind, it's a long way from meditation.

The challenge in decelopment coding is "how can we make this happen?" - both coding skill and creativity involved. The challenge in maintenance coding is "how can we get this to work without breaking everything else" - lot less creativity, lot more patching of a leaky boat.
Surviving C++
New Blackberry Logo
It's looking likely that the EU will issue some sort of regulation on power-meter data, though I agree the likelihood of that happening in the US is fairly low. Here's an interim report by one of the EU's working groups: http://ec.europa.eu/energy/gas_electricity/smartgrids/doc/ex...

The main things that seem likely are: 1) consumers will be guaranteed some sort of free access to their own usage data, partly in hopes that increased information about one's power usage will encourage people to use less; 2) there will be some sort of restriction on how personally identifiable, non-aggregate data can be used, e.g. the power company won't be allowed to infer things about your lifestyle based on power usage patterns, and then sell that data to advertisers.

Tricky areas are what counts as "aggregate" data (there are a lot of potential pitfalls there, both intentional exploitation of loopholes, and accidental leakage of identifiable data into aggregate data), and if there should be some sort of distinction between internal-to-operations and external data mining. For example, perhaps it would be okay for power companies to infer more specific things about individual lifestyles, if that information is only being used to optimize the power grid.
Yes, see www.hdtracks.com for a pretty big selection. (I am not affiliated with them, but am a happy customer.)
I really don't see how these are connected. You could easily have one screen window open and type a command into it absent mindedly without realizing it's not your laptop's shell.
This. And what goes along with it: Not pushing everyone to the same end.

For example, learning math has many valuable aspects. However, learning advanced math is not valuable for everyone. In fact, it becomes detrimental to the student who struggles with it.

Rather than find the subjects that are interesting and worthwhile, students are in situations where they perform poorly and will never benefit from it.

The school system (from the state on down) thinks that requiring more is the solution but they should focus on doing less and doing it very well. Rather than adding more advanced classes to students who already are not benefiting from them, a solid basic foundation should be given and then move the kids into trades and vocations that suit their interests and abilities.
Looks like I'll be repurposing the quad and dual G5's here onto debian PPC, when I can scrape up enough for an intel big-mac /cries/
The background story is that he was trying to beat the odds from being cheated at a casino using shaved dice; the presumption that dice not even on all sides would land more favorably one way than five others. This was before his foray into statistics. After he went into statistics, he discovered that millimeters shaved off a complex shape landing on a rough surface was something very hard to account for. A more simple problem was coin tosses.

The first thing that popped in my head was that if the coin tossed was to hit a "rough" surface on the ground, all bets are off again. The article doesn't specify is the experiment was tossing a coin and catching it (which I myself can reliably toss and bias it to the side i want, catching it in my hand, w/o using stats to prove it), or if the coin was to land on a surface of some sort.
Make the project appealing to designers.
For instance let the application have themes/skins and have a marketplace where designers can sell their themes on their own.
That way designers dont have do deal with the developers and can work on a complete consistent design.
Wordpress and others are doing similar things.

If a designer has created multiple layouts he could also make one for free to get people interested in the other "premium" ones, so its not that every design has to be a payed one.
I am all for consumer choice, but if Apple complied with the rule, that would only give consumers more choice when it comes to applications on the iPhone. Imagine people being able to install applications without Apple approving them. Yeah I know, crappy apps, security, blah blah blah. Giving people the choice to install 3rd party applications is a good thing, for consumers and app makers.
Spotlight on Awesome: Design Company Filament Group Donates Source to jQuery
Lion may pack Find My Mac, Mobile Documents cloud folders
Yeah, they'd have to be unlocked (does it also need to be rootable?). But they already allow pretty much any app from being installed. The apple app store rules could be contrived into protecting against apps which might be dangerous for the network but that's far fetched and would soon be attacked.

It won't be hard for Verizon to find an android device to meet the rules. But iPhone is definitively a challenge if I understand how the rule is interpreted.
I like this service. I have been thinking about doing something similar myself. Though, I think it would have been better if it was marketed as a secure place to store private information.

Also, it would be great if this service had its code audited on frequent basis by a trusted 3rd party.

An iPhone app to synch my personal information locally would be awesome too. This way I could access my information even if I am not in front of a computer or don't have net access.
I find a prompt better than a status line for reminding one of where one is, much like including the CWD in the prompt.

I use a similar style:

[alfie] ~$
[rupert] ~$

etc. for my SSH connections, but not for local shells, even though I also use screen. I also use color-coded prompts for selecting particular PATH and other environment variable setups for different branches of our corporate dev tree, to remind myself which compiler etc. I'm using.
Designers should contribute to projects they care about and use, adding the project to their portfolio should not be the sole reason to join the project. If you care only about portfolio, then designing a killer wordpress theme might be the way to go.
Dropbox possibly doesn't encrypt user's data but 1Password does. You already have to have two layers of passwords to even get to the encrypted list of passwords stored before hand.

On the shared passwords, I haven't found much use for that ever. Generally speaking, I would just have people create their own accounts or some services allow for sub-user accounts. I can't imagine many use cases having to give someone your password and I'd imagine that the of use of the service is focused on the primary user so whoever they choose to share their password with will have to find their own way to remember the password.

On the note regarding the plugin support, that still doesn't change it's web-base. As for desktop app, unless its a true local machine service, if you're calling back to a server somewhere, it doesn't change the security issues raised in my original post or that of others here.
Do you draw out your UI/UX first? Do you use paper? Balsamiq? Anything like that?

All I'm saying is that if you're comfortable in Photoshop, it makes a pretty good mockup tool. I forego pen and paper, and jump straight into Photoshop, and that's what works for me. Squares on a paper just doesn't give me a good picture of what I'm doing.

I'm impressed that you can visualize a site layout in code, but it doesn't work as well for me. To each their own.
By designing a killer Wordpress theme, you are contributing to an open source project...
Is SOLID A Good Idea? (video)
I recall reading an article saying that the latest intel chips had 4-5 billion transistors, this article doesn`t have any transistor counts higher than 600 million.

Something must be missing.
Translation of PR-speak to English of RIM's reply to jammur's open letter:

We are responding to criticism just as we respond to competition: We announce that we're working on something wonderful which will ship Real Soon Now.

Actually doing something about our development tools and process will be prioritized with the same business processes that are responsible for doing something about Apple and Google fighting over our lunch in the tablet and greater mobile space.

My prediction:

Some time after it is far too late to stop independent developers from defecting to other platforms, RIM will discover that even their corporate strongholds are looking at switching to Android or iOS, and will get feedback about their tools from their existing customers.

They will then make something just like Blackberry Storm: It will have the surface appearance of a slick, easy to use developer process that will satisfy the CTOs playing golf with RIM salespeople, but will somehow be unusable in ways that make the actual developers cringe.

I think that senior RIM management should start visiting old folks homes and talk to people who worked in the disk drive business and the cable-actuated construction equipment business. They may find they have a tremendous amount in common with people managing those businesses.
All governments appear historically do have been designed by a small group of people with coherence of vision. All of these systems, based on idealism, fail to account for the complex requirements of administrating a functional society. As a result, our "democracy" is incessantly patching itself -- ask any law student. Despite being currently the most popular ideal, democracy is a terrible design. The result is that countries like the United States are definitionally socialist, despite what we prefer to beleive.

I have no criticisms of any form of government. Criticisms have the net effect of polarizing people, which is counterproductive at best. Unfortunately, any discussion of the political component of any dynamic is perceived as criticism, if not an outright attack. The intensity of the reaction to perceived criticism varies greatly from culture to culture. This is horribly unfortunate, because it discourages critical thinking and contributes to these 'psychosocial factors' that retard progress.

Of course, the author assumes that his concept of progress is what is desired. There are a thousand ways one could pick this article apart.
Actually the whole mentality that this was just a work of art is the problem.

When you do design for applications there are functional and conceptual components to the design. If people are taking your work and buggering up your intent, that's a problem, just the same way it is when someone takes code and alters its behavior without consideration for the code's intent.

The experience the designer had, and this conversation just belies the remaining gulf between the two groups.