skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Another good book to read along this vein is The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman. He talks a lot about designing things which afford being used correctly; that is, you can't help but use them the right way, just based on the way they work. His favorite anti-pattern is the "Push" door with a "Pull"-handle on it, or a "Pull" door with a "Push"-plate on it. The door, like the programmer's interface, exposes more options than are relevant to the actual use case.

This is actually a very empowering mindset: If you push a "Pull" door, or pull a "Push" door, you are not the moron! In fact, it is the person who put a "Pull"-handle on a "Push" door! This viewpoint turns PEBKAC on its head. If a user runs a script that he thinks will configure his bootloader, but instead it erases his filesystem, who is the moron? The user, or the process which produced a script that can be run in a way that will erase your filesystem?

The worst offenders I've ever seen in this vein are Atlassian. The admin interface to their products, particularly JIRA, is basically a glorified database query GUI; there is no indication how each of the parts fit together, and 9 out of every 10 possible configurations you can create are actually broken.

The problem is that you can't design a better interface without thinking about how other people will actually use your app, and that's extremely difficult. However, it's useful to look out for signs that you are Doing It Wrong. The "programmer's interface design" from the article is one of them. Another is the phrase "Well, at some point, somebody might want to..." If you hear this phrase repeated frequently during discussions about feature or interface design, panic! It means you don't know what your use cases actually are.

This is one of the ways I think Agile development can be extremely helpful, but no one seems to practice it in a way that leverages this type of benefit. Thinking about things in terms of user stories forces you to make these kinds of decisions, and you almost can't help but design the interface better.
This happened on the LES. Grand and Allen. It is lower manhattan, but that neighborhood is not the upper east side.
Weird that they have an option to choose a language rather than just detecting the language of the browser and automatically translating the button.
I also know the owner (http://twitter.com/jmk) - it's definitely real, and not an ad campaign :), though I do appreciate the skeptic instinct.

He's been posting off/on to his personal FB/Flickr accounts about the stolen laptop saga for a few months now, and mentioned setting something like this up to try and get some attention after he pretty much exhausted all his other avenues. Looks like that part worked :)

Hope someone recognizes the scumbag (if he turns out the be the thief that is...)
Is it possible to be convicted for a crime without being accused? Someone is accusing you of committing a crime- the plaintiff, in court. Isn't that all he's doing?
What advantages are there for using twitter rather than RSS for this purpose?
I think that's a very valid point and don't understand why it was downvoted. This is hacker news after all - a hacker can be productive with an ssh terminal
Whats your model for folks who have proven mental health issues? I have little faith that a clinically depressed, or worse, person would fit the same profile.

And there's got to be enough folks with mental health problems to destroy your margin of error, this is the lonely internet afterall.
It may also have something to do with the high salt intake that accompanies many of those pickled vegetables.
e.g. soundcloud.com
Yes, but I wonder how often that really happens. Maybe I'm naive, but these women sound like terrible people. These women seem to be the exception, not the rule.

That being said, a man should never EVER have sex with a woman who refuses to allow the man to wear a condom. It's just as bad as a woman who gives in when the guy says "oh no, condoms feel crappy, let's go bareback." So, the man also shares the blame in that respect. I'm not even mentioning the risk of STDs.

The exception is, of course, a committed monogamous relationship where the two partners trust each other.

I'm not saying that male birth control isn't important. It is, but it takes two to tango (or more precisely - have sex).
Sweet jesus, please kill this background: http://launch.is/storage/launch_bg.jpg

I scratched at my monitor for a good 15 seconds trying to figure out why a stain wouldn't come off.
Perhaps this a Mac-only issue? In Vista and Windows 7 Chrome seems to use subpixel antialiasing. See here: http://screensnapr.com/v/nSW3Zz.png
Judging from the car's leather interior, it looks like an older-model midrange-or-luxury sedan. Lighter leather with that texture usually cannot be found on lower-end vehicles. The rear window exhibits low visibility and the rear seat has a pop-out armrest. Furthermore, you'll notice that the rear seat does not have an adjustable headrest, but is fixed (an indication it's probably not a VW). The seat belt clip also looks kind of unusual, but I can't make a good guess what this car would be (maybe a 90's Mazda 626?)
Smart Syndication Service Wants Journalists to Make Money
Thanks, that's a really nifty insight.
The Follow button uses Twitter's "web intents" that have been available for a while now (http://dev.twitter.com/pages/intents).

You can also use web intents to do things like compose, reply, retweet, or favorite a tweet.
I don't see any evidence that Person B stole Person A's laptop or that Person B is even aware than the laptop was stolen. Or maybe that was the point you were making?
Have there been security-related incidents before with their slugs?

Absolutely. http://daverecycles.com/post/2858880862/heroku-hacked-dissec...
"do anything to succeed" - Isn't that also a hallmark of sociopathy?
Yep, I have backup plans galore. I even have a backup plan to my backup plan.

All good here.
Clearly the unethical part of this discovery is that Airbnb used 'shell' gmail accounts to do their work. Instead they should have found a way to present themselves with honesty and integrity to future members.

What are the good reasons for Airbnb's success and valuation? Are there any stories about their actions that inspire both confidence and congratulations. (aside from their Obama O's and Capt'n McCain flash success).
As an Argentinian, here are my two cents on this matter:

1) From reading this article, one could asume commercial
and financial regulations change by the hour, while in
fact is the opposite.

We have a gargantuan commercial code of byzantine
complexity that has not really been modified in the
last 50 years.

We also have a terribly regressive and unfair tax
system that includes 21% VAT even for food products
and wealth tax even for salaried employees with
more than 1400 dollars of monthly income.

2) It is my sincere wish, from the bottom of my heart,
that "entrepreneurs" (I doubt they deserve the honor
if being called that) who operate "en negro" rot in
jail.
They are bringing all of us down with their disregard
for the rule of law and they are increasing the costs
of doing bussiness for those of us who pay taxes.

Regardless of the recurrent crises, starting up a
successful tech company here is possible, as proven
by Globant, OfficeNet, MercadoLibre, et al.
I hope by this point you have a TextExpander shortcut for that URL. It's amazing how frequently it's useful in discussions.
As I said in the comments on the blog, I don't think it's the tools, it's how you use them. This extends to languages too.
This is beautiful. I like how they got rid of Varnish. The problem with Varnish was that you couldn't test it in your local development environment. (Heroku wouldn't give out their Varnish configuration, so you could only make an educated guess as to how their Varnish was configured.)
Really? Leaving a macbook unattended in Oakland for about 5 minutes doesn't seem that hard.
A single punch killing you is so unusual, you had to back it up with a link. Gunshots do not share this condition.
WebCL: GPU computation in the browser
Funny, I have the exact same book (find it to be one of the better intros on this topic), and happened to pick the exact same app to do my first project. BTW, there are a few memory leaks in the Weather app code as given in the book (though an excellent book otherwise).
Do they really have the infrastructure? Which other datacenters besides the NC one have they been building? (I think AWS has many more datacenters, both in the US and outside).
On Failing at Hackathons
I assume that you are talking about this? http://meshing.it/ the new sharing society?
Which is precisely why modern civilized societies have a judicial system. To reach a verdict based on actual facts and evidence. Not some "what ifs".
[edited for typos]
No. Tropical.
This. I used to think they were clever, but now we know they're such repellent scumbags willing to abuse public resources for private gain that it's actually a black mark against Y Combinator to have been partly responsible and holding dirty money.
The original poster clearly respected this right. The page clearly says "this guy has my MacBook," not "this guy stole my MacBook." Which, presuming the original poster isn't outright lying, is clearly true.

I think making all reasonable attempts, including creating a webpage, to identify that person is well within his rights.
Deliver faster, don't be a super hero
Seen a lot of stories like this coming out lately. The best one being when a guy showed up at a bar to reclaim the stolen laptop:

http://gizmodo.com/5801592/twitter-vigilante-reclaims-a-stra...
I count more Heroku articles on HN today than Bitcoin. I just ignore them. It all depends on where your sensitivity adjustment is set today, I guess.
Nobody uses RSS. I know because I struggled for months to build a more understandable feedreader (http://readwarp.com).
From the HN guidelines:

"Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them."

I really doubt there's anything new or interesting to be had from rehashing the gun politics argument over again.
Seattle. This was the corner of Pike and 6th - so by no means a sketchy part of town.
Correct, Twitter in fact did a lot of work on the Lucene core specifically for this. The OP was talking about standard Solr though.
In this case it seems unlikely but bear in mind that it's possible to be in possession of stolen goods without knowing they're stolen.
establishing a truth and proving it 'without a reasonable doubt' are different things.

if you personally saw a murder you don't need no trial to know who is the killer. trial is to convince everybody else.

In this case, trial might be required to charge this guy with anything, but you can see him driving away with the laptop just as it was stolen. might not be enough to charge with theft, but pretty much enough for me.
Apple releases security update that removes MacDefender
> "It's amazing how much harder it is to shoot something with a pistol from ten feet than it is from two."

Not to mention how much harder it is to shoot something moving, compared to something that isn't.
At that point, you could of just done a bit of identity theft and bought yourself a new MBP.
I've been wanting this for a long time, seems like a no brainer to me. It'd be nice to add some of the nice syntactic sugar that other languages have.

Kinda strange that they have both readable and unreadable listed as both pro and con...
According to an IARC link Aaron Swartz posted on Twitter, it's the nitrosamines in fermented pickles.
> (Maybe it's a perfectly acceptable trade-off, if it happens fast enough. Or maybe I'm just not there yet.)

You are not there yet. Here's why. In pre-fluency stages of language acquisition, the taxing part of language parsing is memory retrieval, iow, mapping meaning from language A to language B. If you are well-versed at this, it can happen sufficiently quickly. For example, "a machine with four wheels that brings people places" --> car. After enough practice, you "bypass" the "machine" and retrieve "car" without consciously looking up the word. Imagining that happening for every single word, and every single sentence construction. That's when you're "there".

As for coding, there is an easy example: iterative looping vs. map/reduce operations. These can express the logic but are conceptually different: one is to repeatedly track states across some number of times, the other is to apply a transformation function to a set of items. To reuse the car analogy, a looped factory would be like taking parts and assemble 100 cars, and a map factory would be like taking parts and assembling all the wheels, then all the engines, then all the doors and so on.
Ask HN: How much is working from home worth?
Assuming a company made you an offer less than you were hoping, but you can work from home 99% of the time (aside from quarterly meetings and visiting client sites for meetings) -- how much is this worth?

Given the obvious zero-commute-cost, how else have any of you HNers measured this benefit?
Not the same Dan. This is just some guy who read about the 10,000 hour thing and decided to test it on himself.

Regarding how good can one get -- the term used by the research is expert. But, at least in the papers I read, they don't make it clear what expert is. For example read:

http://www.ida.liu.se/~nilda/Anders_Ericsson/Ericsson_delib_...

But in my own personal theory... you become Michael Jordan by doing the 10,000 hours+ and having innate gifts. You get a basketball scholarship (D1-D3) by doing the 10,000 hours.
PunkThis: two PCs in one
Since when is stolen computer hacker news? A clever marketing campaign on the other hand would be of course quite an interesting submission
I've found that many companies use RSS as an organizational format behind-the-scenes, but no consumers actually use it.
Not quite true. You can - and people actually are - be shot multiple times and survive, yet one blow from a hammer can cave your skull in.

Remember that you are dealing more likely than not with a psychopath; it's as psychologically easy for them to knife you as to shoot you. The issue is that a gun is technically harder to use than a knife. Even at 10 feet, trained marksmen regularly miss moving targets.
I would venture a guess that the person with the glock tucked in their waistband was either an idiot, or more likely, carrying illegally. I live in an open carry state and unless you have a concealed carry permit you can carry your gun on you at all times in most places so long as it's in plain view. Tucked into the waistband would require a permit and anyone that's been through the concealed carry classes should be smarter than to just tuck a gun in their waistband.
$confusion = ['pro' : 'readable', 'contra' : 'unreadable']

-edit- beaten to the punch on that one!
if you personally saw a murder you don't need no trial to know who is the killer. trial is to convince everybody else.

I don't think you know why we have trials. We don't have trials to convince everyone else. We have trials because your eyesight alone is not sufficient evidence, you need to consider all of the facts, not just what you think you saw.
It might be true that functional programming is difficult to learn for programmers not well versed in mathematics. My response to that is: Toughen up, princess.

It's not that bad. To make an OO comparison: You didn't have to invent MVC (or any other design pattern) in order to use it. I don't have to know how to invent a monad to model the next 20 effects just to use the state monad today.

FP gets its design patterns from many brilliant mathematicians and logicians. The pipeline to the math/logic world is wide open in FP. And you can just have a sip if you want.
I am an idiot! I meant to divide by 80 - but did 40 instead.

Point taken, that is a reasonable amount. :)

Still - I'd like to get a feasibility study done as I mentioned.
1966 prediction of the home computer [video]
There's a great Quora page about this topic: http://www.quora.com/What-distinguishes-a-good-software-engi...

The top answers on Quora offer a lot of food for though.
That seems very believable in a general sense, and I have vague memories of other studies that suggest similar things.

The remaining question for me is whether and how EffectCheck's results have been compared against actual measurements of these subliminal effects.
Google +1 Button For Websites Comes Tomorrow
Hehe. So typical of Calacanis, yet funny:

Side note: Yeah, I got problems with Arrington, but I can’t deny that his prose can be compelling. Not as compelling as mine, mind you, but he’s in the top 10 of tech writers
Clojure on Heroku Cedar stack
There's one detail ignored here. You hint at it when you say that, regarding yourself:

> I don't leave the "Find on Page" box open when I'm normally using a page.

(emphasis mine)

When you have the find UI open and you click on a link within the page, the find UI disappears when it navigates to the new page.

This allows you, for example, to open the find UI and use it until you've reached your goal, then promptly drop the find UI from your mind, focusing on your new goals. It's not necessary to focus back on the find UI to consciously close it. Eventually, it gets "garbage collected", to use an analogy.

But under certain conditions, this isn't the case. The conditions are when one of the page elements you would come to interact with—without otherwise ever needing to bring the find UI back to the forefront of your mind—is obscured. You must now focus back on the find UI, close it, then switch back to whatever you were trying to do.
True, but a lot of these changes are for no reason. One month you go to 10,000 G visitors from 4,000 the next you drop to 2,000.
Ctrl-Tab behavior frustrates me pretty much every day. Add-ons to work around it are really kludgey.
Not only is there zero commute cost, there is zero commute time. If you normally have a 30 minute commute, that extra hour a day of your life is like a 12.5% bonus by itself.
The original poster clearly respected this right. The page clearly says "this guy has my MacBook," not "this guy stole my MacBook." Which, presuming the original poster isn't outright lying, is clearly true.

As I acknowledged elsewhere, this is an excellent point, thank you.

I think making all reasonable attempts, including creating a webpage, to identify that person is well within his rights.

Ah, now this is another matter. It looks like the author of this blog has this other person's GPS location and Google credentials. I am not an expert, but I am also not sure that publishing these pictures in this context is solely a question of identifying the person.

So even if he is careful to avoid a blatant accusation, I still don't like the implication and I don't think that identification is the purpose. If it was, it would be easy enough to get in touch with this person without explaining what this has to do with a laptop.
Contra
...
Not searchable through search engines

That's a ridiculous argument.
I don't think that a concise method of working with arrays should be thought of as syntactic sugar, not if you mean it in a pejorative way.

I found array_map, array_filter, array_key_exists, array_this, array_that painful to write, but never felt that I was gaining any sort of readability for it.
What I don't get about these programs (for desktops/laptops) is...do you guys have passwords on your user accounts? And if so, they must have somehow cracked them to get access.

In that case, I know if I was going to steal a laptop, the first thing I'd do is format it. Do any of the programs remain after a hard disk wipe?

Also, for those using the Prey panel - why does it have an option to save your password? If you're still logged in when the thief makes off with your laptop, and he has any knowledge of these kind of programs, they'll just log in and deactivate your account or change settings.
So many context clues in the pictures.

Guy's probably Muslim, for example. Looks like he might be of Arab descent. (Third pic has "Muhammed" and "Allah" on the wall written and framed in Arabic).
You're trying to win a lottery. With everyone racing to create a "solution" that fits the difficulty criteria there's no guarantee that you'll even win a block if you throw enough horsepower at it. A newcomer with a 900Mhz Pentium could find the correct solution on his first cycle.
I know what's your point, but I do use rss constantly and I don't find your page very usable, so maybe that's not the problem with your app.
Fabric Python library for streamlining the use of SSH for application deployment
Effective 1 July 2011, the Kermit Project at Columbia will cease to exist.
This is an interesting approach. It seemed to me that the OP would agree with what you are saying, up to the point where the police said they couldn't help. He certainly doesn't explicitly say anything about why he is posting the photos... that said, I feel like there are two possibilities:

1.) He doesn't care whether the guy is the thief. He is publishing the photos in an act of non-vengeful vigilantism, with the hopes that someone will see or recognize the guy and contact the OP.

2.) He is assuming the guy is the thief. And, he is publishing the photos to harass/humiliate that person.

Personally I am comfortable with #1 but certainly not #2, for the reasons you cited. In #1, the guy's innocence (or lack thereof) is irrelevant to the OP's motivations.
Reminds me of "All you have to do is ask" by James Altucher: http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/05/all-you-have-to-do-is-a...
Be careful to compare apples with apples here. He told us what GPU he has, but not what CPU. Depending on the CPU, the comparison could be skewed in either direction.

A Radeon 5770 apparently uses 108W[1] when fully loaded. Newegg's cheapest non-open-box Radeon 5770[2] costs about $120. The price is the same as a 3.0-3.2GHz Phenom 4-core, and the power usage falls right between them[3].

If he has one of these (or a similar Intel), it's roughly comparable. If he has a cheap or older CPU, the result is closer than it looks. If he has one of the high-end six-core CPUs, then it's an even larger gap.

[1]http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-5770,2446-15.h...
[2]http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE...
[3]http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103...
I'd do the same thing, since I wouldn't want him to dump my computer after realizing he's being tracked from tips sent to his GMail account by random internet folks.

Sure, we have his photograph, but we can't contact the guy nor do we know his identity... only very few people would know that and hopefully they mean well.
Lodsys Responds to Apple, Files Lawsuits Against App Developers
That was my other hypothesis, but it didn't really correlate well with the growth in the site's user base. HN has experienced an exponential growth rate, but your comments show a linear decline in negative impact. I went with the "better life" theory because it seems like personal prosperity and happiness would be more likely to show gradual, linear change. This is also supported by the trends I saw in other famous top HN users, particularly those that I know have experienced increased financial prosperity.
Indeed. I would imagine a lot of drug dealing goes on outside normal working hours while most parking fraud happens during the working day.
I disagree with most of these, but on the other hand I don't use a Mac; perhaps Chrome's UI is more consistent and coherent from the PoV of a Windows user.

However, he's right about the font rendering/antialiasing. It doesn't bug me too much on web pages, but I read a lot of densely-typeset pdfs, and Chrome unusable for anything longer than a few pages.