skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Why do OSX applications look more polished than Windows/Linux?
Not to start a flame war, but can anyone shed some light on why most applications in OSX looks way more polished/beautiful than in other OSes? Is it because of the target demographics? Few examples from the top of my head:

http://www.git-tower.com/
http://versionsapp.com/
http://macrabbit.com/espresso/
http://www.panic.com/coda/

/Obviously this excludes cross-platform apps like Eclipse, Chrome etc
Good point. I think it should be mandatary for every site to offer content that degrades to an useable version when used without JavaScript.
…except for the boats it sinks. Namely, the long tail that they cleaned up. I'm not sure I understand when you say "SEO creates value" if you mean the so-called good/relevant SEO or the low quality/sketchy SEO. I assume you mean the former.

SEO can mean "help make my site easy for google to honestly evaluate and judge the quality of my content" or it can mean "game google into thinking my content is what people want to see even though they probably don't".

I can see how having a better index creates value but I'm not sure how SEO contributes to a better index. It seems like google changed the rules, some companies are doing worse, some are better (zero sum) but hopefully the index is better and people can find what they want (unlocking value). Is that what you're getting at?
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And it's not exactly original. Streakly used it few months ago and I remember its author saying that he in turn borrowed it from some other webapp.
They have 95 remaining employees, please read the article.
Between American Tobacco (where I lived for 2 years before moving to SF) and the Warehouse District, you've got most of downtown covered. Then factor in the restaurants and bars up and down Main and Ninth streets and that's a safe and clean downtown. Durham's a great town and it's events like this that keeps raising its profile.
Apropos, but not directly pertinent information: male Gorillas range in weight from around 200-400lbs. The Wikipedia entry on Gorillas says they've reached around 600lbs but those were very obese Gorillas in captivity.

I certainly understand the idiom, but it's probably useful to remember it in context. You never know when you may need to know the approximate weight of a gorilla, and relying on a faulty idiom may just bring you into harm's way :>
I actually made an online course with some of my basic "tech knowledge". Now if a friend asks me, for example, about the process I went through to create a Facebook application, I send them to my course. I obviously won't charge my friends for the course.

I still get questions like this and have recently started to refer my friends to Quora.

Ultimately, as you mentioned, the overall lesson is to learn how to say 'no'. You can do this with respect and tact.
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OK, this all makes sense. But why does it matter? Am I as a programmer going to make mistakes if I try to write programs in a "what" manner instead of a "how" manner? Is there some other, better distinction that I should be making?

Are you really saying that what matters is abstraction, and that we would be better off thinking about higher vs lower levels of abstraction instead of the more subjective what vs how? I think I might agree with that, but then you do get into the problem of deciding which of two pieces of code is more abstract, and I think you are going to end up with the same problem all over again of it depending on your assumptions.

Oh, and thanks for the interesting comments!
Perhaps, but as far as I understand it...they are compensated at a pittance with the hope that after 3 - 5 years they can leave with a nice payout and move on to 'bigger' and better.

I guess my point is, this is why you should be careful who you commit to slave for (e.g. a boss that expressly says that they expect you to work like a slave) because at the end of the day - if the business ever turns down you are just a number.

It's unfair to ask salaried employees to give the same as the founder, because the founders won't be first in line to be cut when revenues turn down.
Boxee gets $16.5 Million Injection in 3rd VC Round
>I get bored easily and feel the need to switch projects often, especially when the project enters maintenance mode.

Points for honesty, but I'm wary of any dev who says that. How do you know what maintainable code is if you never stick around for the maintenance?
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Actually, there is another startup that recently released a similar online TCG called Shadow Era:

http://www.shadowera.com/

Both games seem to borrow more from the World of Warcraft TCG than MTG. Shadow Era is still at an early stage, but IMO quite enjoyable so far.
Hehehe ... with a close second perhaps being "using deceptive public relations non-sense to get ink any way possible"

Good things happen to good people.

The opposite is also true.

Congrats Jason! :D
>Why the hell is this getting so many upvotes?

Concision is valuable.
The very short answer is the type of person drawn to open source projects. Apple (I imagine) spends a ridiculous amount of time on user interface, paying experts to go over their UI and making sure it sparkles. Whereas the programmers who donate their time to open source are a lot more involved in their projects, and don't spend as much time on the "useless" end sparkle.

To be fair, this is a very broad statement, and thanks to projects like Ubuntu focusing more on user interaction it's starting to make headway, but even just looking at what a mark of pride it is to be using something non-intuitively difficult (vim, emacs, cli interfaces, hand-rolling operating systems and packages...), the realm of UI design on open source projects is vastly underpopulated.

As to Windows, that's anyone's guess. It may be they're just relaxed enough in their market superiority that they don't feel the need to bring as many designers to the table. Or it may be the other way around: Apple knows that one of the only things that sets it apart from other companies (and Microsoft in particular) is snazzy design, and they've chosen that niche to run with as far as they can.
Why We Switched from Subversion to Git
In that vein, all three members of the J. Geils Band were engineering students at my college (WPI) ;)

And apparently the lead singer/guitarist/keyboardist for OK Go (although I think that was after I left)
Note example (1): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_abstraction
HTML5-compatible videos jump from 10% to 63% in the past year
For someone so obsessed with education sites......

s/Kahn/Khan from both your posts.
Perhaps it was a bit obnoxious :/ I guess I was just a little excited due to the coverage. Didn't really want to come off as flaunting it as such. Sorry if it came off that way, that's definitely not what I wanted to show
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This videos are brilliant.
Thanks for that link - exactly what I was looking for

btw I know that at Techmeme, Gabe spent years perfecting his story parsing for the 50k+ sites he tracks. Even something that would seem simple such as parsing the date of a story from a webpage has a ridiculous number of permutations that you have to grep for.
I agree with all of your points, but I think it's important however to note that there have been successful entrepreneurs who have offered similar products/services as the 800 lb. gorilla and have succeeded by being better than their competition which of sometimes means improved customer service.

Taking an example from the article, when Richard Branson joined the airline industry and took on British Airlines his main leverage was better customer service. They installed seat-back televisions in their planes and focused on hiring attractive and friendly stewardesses. Their product wasn't all that different from British Airlines, but they packaged it in a better way.

I think it would have been interesting to see if WePay was in the merchant-oriented business and see if they could have beaten paypal at their own game. It might sound crazy, but I think with the right marketing and company mantra it could be done.
If there was, I expect its website would be nicer to look at...
People defend Apple too. There's a strong free market mindset behind this. We do have choices or at least the ability to influence the market by our own choices. I don't see any problem with these folks raising some valid issues, even if they do it in less than tactful fashion, but ultimately they are fighting a losing battle. Android, in its most accessible form, is not going to be the open platform some people envisioned. Google is not going to magically become as adept as Apple at selling things. Google isn't doing these things because they want to piss off developers and neither is Apple. They're doing it because they either just don't get it or they are putting their own best interests first. I think most of us relate to this because it's the same basic choice individuals make managing their own personal/financial affairs. I'm not going to hold Google or Apple to a higher standard but I will be happy to vote with my dollars if they challenge my best interests or if some new player happens to do it better.
this shows the monopolistic power of Google and how they can hurt individual companies

Changes like this hurt most if you depend on spam-like SEO.

For example, Stack Overflow hasn't lost anything from this recent algorithm change - they actually gained from it.
Jesus guys, take it elsewhere.
I actually meant third party applications. Sorry for causing misunderstanding, question updated.
"Some web-applications can't work like that. Mine has instant messaging, and I want the IM windows to be there when it loads."

There are already internet protocols for real-time notifications, like XMPP and a whole host of non-open protocols. Re-implementing messaging on a platform that isn't by it's nature a push platform will always be inferior to the real thing.

Wouldn't it make more sense to implement a web-like application on-top of a real-time messaging platform instead of the other way around?

(Though, it's not clear what a back button should be doing in an "instant messaging" interface - will it undo the a conversation? Does a user bookmark a message or a conversation so they can edit/refine individual messages later?)

"Which of these are you suggesting developers do instead?"

I'm suggesting developers use the right tools and platforms for the job.
Boxee Gets $16.5M in Funding, Reveals Box 2.0 Plans
Applications communicating via Unix pipelines indeed do frequently combine, albeit rarely without great amounts of awk/grep/sed glue and reimplementation of parsing machinery in every link in a chain.

I don't say that pipelines are bad, it's just sometimes we want more structured data format than flat text.

Also, Unix pipelines are currently in decline, and Unix itself is less Unixy than it used to be.
not very close.

couchdb can only run javascript functions on json objects, and really only to transform those objects into other objects. last i checked, it has no way of interacting with the erlang node it's hosted on.
Shoot me an email. If you plan on staying in Indy I know quite a few of the people you'll need to talk to: from investors to lawyers.
The privacy stuff looks good, and is of course very important.

A few notes/thoughts FWIW:

1. Typo - "Newtiny stores all your web history allowing access from [anywhere] and makes it easily searchable."

2. The screenshot doesn't do much for me, maybe you could use that real estate better? Some other page in the app?

3. Can the Sign In / Sign Up not be two separate links going to the same page? That was confusing. In fact, might be even better to stick that on the front page.
With a highly profitable paper card business, Wizards has always been concerned with cannibalizing paper sales and pissing off the physical card distributors. MtGO players are largely also paper card players - in particular, the intensely competitive ones who are willing to pay $4 per virtual booster for an online venue to test out competition decks - so matching the paper rules was essential. At the same time, the way they avoided problems with the paper distributors was to cater to the hard-core players and ignore the casual market.

TL;DR: Wizards is too dependent on paper card sales to design a next-gen online TCG.
One more copy edit - "Now, you don't have to worry about clicking on any buttons or [deciding] which pages to save. Newtiny saves all your web browsing history."
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True; but you can recognize maintainable code when working in a larger team and ownership of modules changes a lot, which it should for any healthy project.

There are several universal things you can do to ensure maintainability, which are a no-brainer, but don't happen because of various compromises that have to do with time and money - like code-reviews, having no module with a single owner, automatic tests, up to date documents / stories, etc...

If you don't do any of that, it's a no-brainer again that the project will not be maintainable; but it can still be beaten into shape later if the original devs weren't totally insane :)
I have heard that issue raised by colleagues during the hiring process. At the time I was suspicious about this kind of generalization, but had not been particularly sure how to evaluate the impact.

Subsequently my experience is that developers who have been in the same job for a very long time, have a higher chance of being totally clueless. And also generally not confident with new ideas, not aware of alternative ways of doing things, not exposed to the culture of the broader profession etc.

I am wary of any dev. You could go through this during the hiring process. Most programmers end up doing some maintenance even in new jobs.

But bottom line I suspect this hiring principal is essentially backwards.
You don't have to supply OpenId to leave a comment there. It's completely optional.
So true. The mobile photo sharing space has been around for 5+ years, it's just that most users only caught on with iphones and other smartphones becoming more popular.

To claim that this space was 'created' last year and that 'sharing your cameraroll' was a brilliant innovative idea then, is just wrong.

Not knowing about BuzzFeed etc. and why they didn't catch on might explain why this attempt didn't catch on either. Remarkable that they didn't know who's shoulders they were standing on.
Patrick, can you elaborate on what "scalable content generation" is?
At least the phrase gives you a point of attack if you disagree. You get to say "it isn't ad hominem because of reason X".

I find this far better than responding to arguments that deliberately attempt to obfuscate avenues of attack by couching everything in terms of "opinion" or "I have opinion X, but".
Japanese Phone Makers Look to Ride Android’s Surge
More College Graduates Take Public Service Jobs
The clause was not simply "no non-Objective-C". It allowed for C/C++/Obj-C development as long as Xcode was the tool used to produce the binary.

If they had banned C and C++, a lot of games would have had to disappear, considering how many games use external libraries. Not to mention a lot of non-game apps, like those that use the SQLite package (raw, not via Core Data).
Bla bla bla. Everyone just says whatever is in their best interest for others to believe, because really no one has clue one.

Hey maybe peak oil will be way worse than we anticipated and it'll turn out that this whole capitalism thing was in fact a huge bubble.
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The content related to the title is half one down the page but the entire interview is gold.
because they will eventually have a superset copy of all this data, which these companies are building a business model on. eg. Facebook API access is for Facebook apps that use Facebook credits. Twitter API access is expensive (Gnip charge $10k+ a month plus just for a slice).
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Here are several reasons why they might look more polished:

1. Their font anti-aliasing algorithms are different.

2. Macs are less bumpy. Windows windows have draggable edges on all four sides. Windows toolbars were originally designed to be bumps. Now in Windows 7 the more polished looking toolbars look like a bunch of hills. Windows in Windows have their own menu bars, too. You can't just take an app designed to use draggable toolbars, remove the lines dividing toolbars, and have it work. So the APIs are different because of decisions made long ago.

3. Making an app pretty is more deeply ingrained into the development culture on the Mac side.

4. Windows applications just have more text, and fewer icons. There is always more text on the screen than a Mac would have. The desktop has the application name under each icon. They put shortcut arrows on icons.

5. Windows is skinnable.

6. Apple sacrifices utility in favor of being shiny.
FOSDEM is also a good example of how things could be organized.
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Anyone who's incensed at a 30% cut for Apple/Google, when they offer a turn-key merchant solution and a huge potential sales base, has probably never heard of the publishing arrangements on other console platforms, like Sony Playstation (or Xbox or...). Small devs get absolutely raked over the coals by the high costs associated with getting a game pressed onto discs and onto a store shelf. 30% is a laugh.
We'll work at the Zürich office. We are not (yet) allowed to talk about what we'll be doing.
Why does it always have to be "bubble or correct valuations"? Can't it just be a somewhat overbought market?
It's impossible to provide a server-side fix, since the URL fragment (the part after the hash mark) does not get sent to the server.
I think where this gets annoying is when it becomes impossible to discern when Gruber is just "explaining what Apple is thinking" and when he is putting forth his own opinion. Its tiresome to criticize his Apple apologism and constantly run into the counter-argument that "he isn't really saying that its OK for Apple to engage in X practice, he's just explaining it", because it is often difficult (if not impossible) to discern if that's the case.

I do think Gruber intentionally blurs that line to insulate himself from criticism. And I think that's pretty dishonest and petty-- much like his irritatingly self-satisfied one-off comments aimed at his opponents. (Technology related and otherwise).

EDIT: Minor grammatical correction
> Video is the future, and we're going to be the largest
> creator of educational videos this year.

Oh no. I cannot wait for the video be the past. It may be the best way to teach some things (mainly involving physical activities or physical manipulation of some sort), but for programming topics it most often just waste of time and bandwidth. Why would I want to spend a minute watching someone to type a line of code with all mistypes and corrections, when I can glance it in a second? Why would I want to fiddle with video controls to get replay of particular section when I can reread it much faster whenever I want?

Seriously, I am starting to see this tendency to do anything in video as some sort of DRM
scheme for content sites. I recently unsubscribed from thinkvitamin.com because they started to push everything to video (with annoying intro at the start of each video).

I did check your guitar lessons… Sorry guys, but with "amazing videos" you have you will never ever beat this guy: http://justinguitar.com/ (check out his beginners course or intermediate method; http://www.youtube.com/user/JustinSandercoe ) — take a look if just to see how expert teaching looks like.

I will chose the best over the largest every time.
Interested in the code for a Firefox extension that does the same thing as your Chrome extension? I made this exact service two years ago, while also saving visual snapshots of every webpage. The database which stored text from webpages quickly became massive, but nobody was willing to pay for the service so I shut it down.
He's being lionized on HN for making money, while he's polluting the written heritage of the human race. Not a chance I will take it elsewhere. He needs to be called out, to his face, as does anybody who thinks he deserves HN's respect.
Users don't want hashbangs. They want faster loading content. Hashbangs are a kludge to get it. This is just one example of the issues that we're running up against with trying to extend HTTP, HTML, and browser technology into an application platform. It's just not suited.

HTML 5 is the right answer to the wrong problem. The problem is not how to make HTML more expressive and more powerful. The problem is how to serve applications to users. We need an open standard for WebStart/ClickOnce, not a hack on top of a hack on top of HTML to make web pages appear like applications (with every web designer's own notions as to how to render UI elements and display notifications and control flow, etc.).

Next time you see a JQuery modal dialog, ask yourself, "why did someone on the client level have to write this code? Why wasn't it part of the platform?" Why do we have competing implementations of modal dialogs on web apps, in today's day and age? And it's often represented by a severely nested DIV in a section of code that has no meaning to the modal itself. Semantic markup, for sure.
Elizabeth Gilbert's talk is on that list and it's TRULY AWEFUL.
@maxbrown

Thanks a lot for the feedback. I think I'll incorporate all the changes you suggested.
He's not losing anything, except a few minutes' time to sign up, so how is he being made a fool? For being excited enough about their product to want to be invited to use it? There's nothing foolish in that, especially if they have an interesting product.
More like a list of sentence fragments. I was hoping for something to add to my sig list.
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It must have been some "popular" article. 99% of things I consume are classic hardcore CS papers in the classic LaTeX>PDF format. I don't see how somebody might edit such articles without being an expert in the field.
You've got to be kidding. This isn't pedantic, it's just stating the facts. The internet and the web are conceptually and physically different things.
It's never "correct valuations" either. It's always "bubble" or "bust", sometimes both at the same time.

Sensationalist headlines always grab more attention. "There's no story here" isn't a particularly good story.