skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We software authors certainly deserve the great majority of the blame.

But this user test, while fascinating, is somewhat artificial and it's probably not helpful to exaggerate its importance.

Joe was not a clean slate, he clearly was bringing in all kinds of baggage. He was ashamed he didn't already know. He'd already experienced failure with the discount card email experience. He had someone literally looking over his shoulder and taking notes on his failure. I'd feel kind of stressed out about it too!

Furthermore, he was given a specific task (locating a restaurant) with a completely general-purpose computer interface and absolutely zero help in figuring it out. Certainly this situation does occur in real life, but is it common enough that it should drive the design of user interface?

The mall probably already has a kiosk for those users with a touchscreen UI. It would be silly to expect every user to use nothing but a touchscreen interface. Oh wait a minute...
They're good. I've used them on film sets and with dimmers, and they're way easier to work with than fluorescent lights. Also, you don't have that annoying hum from the ballast all the time. If these new bulbs make the grade for domestic lighting then I'll probably put them all over the house.
Not sure - it may indeed not have been them. But it may have been done for reasons of plausible deniability, or by a different set of people than normally handle DNS stuff, or it was just a canny domain-squatter.

(was also registered with 123-reg, for the record)

Also, it would be The Sun On Sunday, not the Sunday Sun, as that already exists: http://www.sundaysun.co.uk/
Suppose Joe had been cut off from civilization for the last 35 years and the two of you have agreed on a very large fee that he will pay you if you can get him back up to speed on what he'd missed.

Would you treat him the way the OP did?

Would you ever even use the phrase "too difficult" ?
Agreed. I looked around, and there doesn't seem to be any other chat applications with platform functionality. This is a great move.
Donna Wells (Former Mint CMO, current Mindflash CEO) on Software as a Service
A fun Mac indie game for the lunchbreak - Shufflepuck
Google, Microsoft and Apple
That would effectively be like a Facebook Page, wouldn't it? Believe me, you won't enjoy the signal to noise ratio within these "public circles".

I proprosed a different solution to the same problem, as explained here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2738084

Edit: On second read, I think we do share the same concept, just different naming.
Box Scores A Big Enterprise Deal: 18,000 Procter & Gamble Employees Up In Clouds
Count two odd men out.

My ideal social network is a Rolodex on steroids. Just a global, searchable, tagged index that I can pull from for all my apps.
>"Intuitively, this doesn’t make much sense. Most people would say that Google has been more innovative than Microsoft in recent years"

That's not using intuition. That's using an opinion poll and ignores the length of time it takes to apply for and be granted a patent.

When the author goes on to point out that Google has 700 patents and Microsoft has 18,000, this would seem to be circumstantial evidence that Google's innovations are more likely to be based on the work of others than original research - particularly given the interest which companies have to file patents defensively.

This is not to say that Microsoft's claims are valid (regardless of the obvious fact that the past actions of Armonk have no bearing on their validity) or that software patents are a good thing.
Apple’s iAd Is Said to Cut Advertising Prices
Google Maps For Android Now Lets You Download Maps For Offline Viewing
So what does this mean? We just shit can it?

Or it sits on a shelf for a couple years or what? If we want to save money, shouldn't we kill something before we start it?
News Corp. to Shut Down News of the World Amid Phone-Hacking Scandal 
James Murdoch, who also issued a mea culpa, announced Thursday that News Corp. will shut down the 168-year-old paper.
Does anyone else find many of these LED tail light designs too bright? I find myself squinting or outright having to look away from them, particularly when immediately behind the vehicle at an intersection.

I've seen a few designs that do not overwhelm in luminosity, but I find most of them to be an outright hazard by partially blinding those in following vehicles.
All this attention being paid to News International is distracting from the more worrying issues:

- Why the police have utterly failed to investigate this.

- Why the phone companies aren't being hammered for security lapses. Data Protection Act anyone??

- What other papers have done the same. The News of the World is in the same building as The Times, and under the same ownership as The Sun. I don't believe those two papers are clean either.
Don't forget that a lot of the appeal of the FB's events feature is seeing who else is invited, who else is attending, the whole description and possible discussion that can also occur. Sometimes details need to be organised, comments made etc... I think it would also be cool and useful when uploading pictures to be able to tag an event so there is an album which people invited to the event can see and comment.
Can you elaborate on why you think the results will be misleading? Does it have to do with data integrity issues of some sort?
Do I understand correctly that both parties need to have Kik installed on their phones as well?
First, to settle the question about this particular lamp: I found some specs on their website, and they claim a CRI (color rendition index) of 65 for their "neutral" version and 85 for the "warm" version. This is poorer than most modern fluorescents (which people complain about), and the better CRI for the warm version is at the expense of making the light yellow, which many people also don't like. So we're not looking at the at the coming of the savior of efficient light bulbs.

For the question of the law, I agree that the savings in electricity are barely measurable, which is why I think it's theater. The huge growth in residential electricity use has been driven by increase in average home size, and by the explosion in the use of air conditioning. Also, it's not even clear that bulbs like this save energy over their lifetime. Sure, one of these theoretically replaces 20 incandescents and uses less electricity, but an incandescent light bulb is just a tiny tungsten wire + steel leads + glass + aluminium base + a drop of epoxy, all made in one factory with extraordinary efficiency that has been polished through 100 years of manufacturing. This thing has 20 LEDs + mounts + cooling tubes + cooling fins on the outside + "non-toxic" liquid + a bunch of electronics for control and dimming + enclosures and wiring for all of the above, made out of plastic and ceramic and glass. All manufactured in probably 20 factories and transported to be assembled in yet another place. If there is a win here for the environment, it's super-tiny.
If it looks good, $20/bulb is cheap. A dimmable CFL costs about $13 and it makes an irritating noise. Regular CFLs are still around $6-7 and nobody likes the way they look. The electricity saving of LED/CFL isn't as great as over incandescent, so that won't resonate with homeowners straight away, but for businesses it's a no-brainer and that will create enough demand to bring the price down.
You assume they ignored. The mere fact that those high profile Googlers actually create G+ accounts tells me that they are serious about community building this time around. And they actually managed to invite Taylor Swift in.

I'm not saying they're doing an awesome job. But they do care.
Good news, but I don't understand why both? Why don't they choose one (preferably LibreOffice)?
This problem cannot be solved by A*. This is a combinatorial problem which is likely even NP-complete.

Also, we're talking about algorithms executed by humans.
Enterprise Software Sucks but it Doesn’t Have To
Maybe it has something to do with the reporter being from NYC.

[full disclosure: I am from NYC]
Steve Jobs has been trying to popularize the word 'app' for several decades. At the very least since the 1989 launch of NeXTSTEP, an OS that used the word all over. For instance, watch this 1992 demo of NeXTSTEP 3.0: http://hivelogic.com/articles/classic-steve-jobs/

Because of its NeXTSTEP heritage, Mac OS X uses a lot of NeXTSTEP lingo, like 'app', 'dock' and 'plist'.
Now that Facebook has some pressure from Google+, as broken down here http://yodabillclintonwillferrellmarkzuckerbergmichaeljordan...

I feel like Facebook will innovate much faster, and to a better degree. Better for all of us...
A Chinese Farmer And His Idiosyncratic Robot Family
I chose Java for a few reasons:

1) It is very well established and widely distributed.
2) It is old enough to have been battle-hardened, but new enough to contain some useful paradigms/features. It also has support for higher level languages like Clojure and Scala.
3) It is a good balance between performance and ease of use.
4) It has many libraries and resources.
5) While I am urging to give performance some slack, that does not mean to ignore it completely. Because Java is imperative, it gives programmers slightly better control of their algorithms. Most graphics programmers prefer to work low-level, at least in the core of their engine. Python and similar languages are often integrated into script engines, but rarely used for the core of an engine. I am suggesting Java because it allows programmers to work in at least a somewhat low-level style (the byte code is semi-predictable).
6) It is pretty easy to get started and learn (not necessarily easy to master though).

I chose Clojure because it is Java-compatible, but Scala is probably just as good a choice.
Lawn Mower Reviews 2011
Lawn Mower Reviews 2011
Gizzard: Twitter's DB Sharding Library
Google doubling Google+ population
Just get 39 other people to pitch in $1, then violate the terms of the sale and share your purchase with the other 39. Sure, its cheating, but if done as a group, you'll feel ok about it ;).
Why, yes it is. But less important to them than losing the BSkyB merger. Or, it would seem, Rebekah Brooks.

And the paper was largely finished by this point. No advertisers, no readers, an utterly tarnished brand...

But yes, the Beeb has just reported that employees will be placed at other titles within NI. But I would be surprised if they didn't still lose some headcount. After all, most newspapers have been trying to shed employees the last few years. The announcement that they were going to merge some functions between The Sun and the News Of The World was largely motivated by that.
Ah, I knew they offered pay as you go (I tried them out before) but I assumed this was a sort of "dedicated only" server type that required you to pay monthly since I didn't see the hourly rate anywhere, just "$xxx / month".
Don't you think that calling a seven-year-old company with thousands of employees a start-up dilutes the term a little bit?
1) because people tend to like clicking save or pressing ctrl-s.

2) to complement save-as (aka, poor-man's branch)
Our ATMs (Portugal) are very explicit: http://casinoonline.co.pt/images/thumbs/casinomultibanco.gif

The real version is animated (you seen the card entering the slot)
EDIT: Someone made a video... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zzEXfX_Otk
I have noticed over the past few days a lot of drive-by downvoting of anything critical of the Holy Google.
Open Source Ecology - DIY essential machines for sustainable civilization
Yes, you are correct. The 'pipe' needs to be connected at both ends :)
Very cool!

Maybe this is obvious to everyone else but just to confirm with the OP: does the SDK allow me to add chat functionality to my app or is it mainly for content right now?
>It is a very superficial, stereotyped statement (not any worse than those about Aussies, I guess), and people were obviously doing things other than laborers, government workers, and homemakers.

Yes. There were several statements that were plain false, and I picked that one because I had proof-of-falsehood.

>However, the BPO era has added a significant number of jobs of questionable worth and the statement does talk of a real sociological phenomenon.

I think it is entirely possible to write about this phenomenon without having to stretch the truth.

EDIT: I just realized that the article doesn't really say anything about Aussies.
this will surely be their spotify-based app.
Use the mobile site, or the lite.facebook.com site instead.
Refactor My Code - now open sourced
The polagraph draws pictures using a normal pen, some motors and some string.
This is such a cool idea. Make the instant messenger of kik more of a platform and less of an app. I love it.
"If the LED driver handles dimming through PWM, no thanks. The flicker is very noticeable."

The flicker is unnoticeable if the chop rate is a few kilohertz or higher.
"He pointed out Apple’s headquarters, then Hewlett-Packard and a number of other big tech companies, the individual explained. Then he pointed to Facebook and said that it would eventually be bigger than all of the companies he had just mentioned, and that if I joined the company, I could be a part of it all."

This sounds vaguely familiar.

Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; And saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me. -- Matthew 4:8-9

(edit: it's a common theme, one of the oldest is in the Bible, and most are most likely appropriated from there)
Regardless of whether you break the law on a regular basis, having a personal VPS is a very good idea these days.

I still regularly run into problems with websites and applications related to geolocation, blacklisting, or routing, and being able to proxy stuff through my VPS enables me to keep getting things done.

In particular, if you're a Comcast user a VPS is pretty essential since their routing and peering are awful.

Being able to run sensitive traffic through an SSH tunnel when you're on public Wi-fi is also a nice perk.
>Why the police have utterly failed to investigate this

News of the World paid bribes worth £100,000 to up to five Met officers - http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/07/phone-hacking-br...

Scotland Yard took no further action, apparently reflecting the desire of Fedorcio [met police press relations officer], who has had a close working relationship with Brooks, to avoid unnecessary friction with the News of the World. - http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/06/news-of-the-worl...
Balance. In seeking to lift one group you cast aside another hard working group of people. Certainly PrimeSense contributed much, but to discount the hard work of those in MS Research as something less by wrapping them in quotes only serves to despoil your message. You commit that which you wish to redress.

See what Johnny Chung Lee said of his time there for a more balanced look of the records.
The way he floundered looking for somewhere to get started was quite instructive. I've used several programs over the years that would have really benefitted from a UI element that indicated 'click here if you have no idea how this program works', and that took you to useful help.

Not every aspect of a program has to be designed for beginners. But having just one clear item to get people started might be a boon. It doesn't have to assume no knowledge of computers; perhaps just no knowledge of the problem domain or the particular program's workflow.
Every time I see someone cite the Facebook user count, it goes up by 100 million. Why is that?

Edit: <Joke> At this rate, they'll have more users than there are people on Earth by the end of the year.</Joke>
Looks kind of like Hulu.
One anecdote certainly isn't “proof-of-falsehood”, be the veracity of the original statement what it may.
Do Engineers Fear the Known More Than the Unknown?
10 Top Google+ Users Weigh In on the Web’s Newest Social Network
The announcement is here: http://intridea.com/2011/7/7/refactormycode-open-source

[EDIT] And here's the Github repo: https://github.com/intridea/refactormycode
It is designed for content - textual & binary. While I can imagine an ugly fugly way to overload the api and use it for chat functionality within your app, but then it would make for a really bad user experience within your app.

This version of the SDK was designed with the sole intent of content sharing.
Entries on some items seem to explode as well. Keep meaning to load the crash log and send it off, but haven't had time.
You almost defined the P/E - the price earning ratio. Usually, a stock is worth around the order of 10 to 20 times the yearly earnings of the company. If you take all AAPL stocks, their value is around 17 years of earnings. P/E can be higher when investors expect the company to grow in the next years and so soon generate more revenue. An example is Amazon with a stellar P/E of 94. Don't know how long they will sustain that.
Empowering Ticket Buyers with Data: A New Tool from SeatGeek
Should Google do the same thing to Microsoft? Google has shareholders. If they did, I would lose respect for Google that I have already lost for Miscrosoft. Somehow, I don't think Google will, and not just because Windows Mobile is closed source.

I think public opinion/brand reputation is an important thing to consider in these types of situations. For example, this poll shows only 32% of people agree with the strategy:
http://www.wepolls.com/r/584161/Should-Microsoft-continue-to...

I wonder what effect that has on the other 68% next time they have a choice between Microsoft and someone else.
Thanks for that link.

People should know that there's a lot of turmoil in the astrophysics community about JWST. In current plans, JWST overruns have resulted in elimination or long-term postponement of all other NASA astrophysics missions in the next decade. Even non-flight-project research is being cut significantly.
“Download map area” added to Labs in Google Maps for Android
(I'm not the OP) It's just for content right now (content = files, arbitrary text data, images, etc). Once the content is shared, the people can chat about it within Kik of course... but that's not the same as in-app chat.
Not a great analogy. Nothing was taken.

It would be more accurate to say that you left your curtains open, and someone took a picture of the inside of your house through the windows.

Maybe an invasion of privacy, but not theft.
I have a couple of LED bulbs and they are not purple, they are a very "harsh" (I actually prefer it) blueish white much like the neutral white CFL's I have purchased and use.
Is There An iPad HD On The Horizon?
Touring concert lighting designer here (when I'm not coding for money, anyway).

The above is absolutely right; LEDs produce a fairly narrow range of colors. If you look at a spectrograph of an incandescent light bulb (including halogen, which is a bit less yellow), you'll see a fairly flat curve that's a bit higher at the red-yellow (and infrared) end and a bit lower at the blue-violet end. If you look at a spectrograph of an LED, you'll see several narrow spikes. If you illuminate objects with LEDs, you'll find that certain colors appear almost cartoonishly vivid, while others that might look similar under incandescent or sunlight appear very dull.

An increasing number of small-medium concert venues are switching to lighting that's primarily LED-based, which I find very frustrating since there's not much I can do about the problems it creates. If all the LEDs had the same spectrographs, I could probably convince the performers to wear things that look good under LED light. They don't, of course.
notice: everyone is dirty at this game, e.g. google's recent patent application for google doodle "A system provides a periodically changing story line and/or a special event company logo to entice users to access a web page."[1]

[1]http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...
Spotify is for sure being integrated into facebook. Facebook employees have had access for a while.
Its a rumor that has been in the open for a while: http://blogs.forbes.com/parmyolson/2011/05/25/facebook-to-la...
In-text Monetization Innovators Team Up: Skimlinks Acquires Atma Links
I'm saying that if someone volunteers their time to help you, they deserve the same respect that you would give a client. I don't think that's infantilizing anyone.

But you're ignoring the most important part of my post.

If Joe had hired you to do an important job, and you needed the information the OP collected to get that job done, would you have gotten that information the way the OP did?
I would like it if "news" like this had a less biased title (or subtitle in this case.)
I can't agree with you more. I don't understand why people are asking about all kinds of "apps" for tablets. In fact, the best app is really the browser given the screen size of the tablets. (Of course, this still doesn't give you some of the features like background notifications and photo uploading - but I feel these pictures are less important on tablets than on phones.)

What app developers really need to do is to make sure their websites/apps be touch friendly and work well with tablets.
There was earlier some speculation but yesterday it was confirmed by Spotify:
http://www.spotify.com/uk/coming-to-the-us/
Gawker Media in actual journalism shocker: http://gawker.com/5814150/roger-ailes-secret-nixon

edit: the silly headline is sort of thing you see in British tabloids. I suppose it's not funny if you aren't familiar with the NotW.
If you notice flicker, the PWM frequency is too low. I recently built a PWM driver for high power RGB LEDs and there's no flicker, even at very dim brightness. I don't know what's on the market, but probably I should get into it ;)
Impossible! I Could Code That Over A Weekend(tm).
An important point not mentioned in this article is that whilst MS are demanding payment, it is believed that they will lower the payment for producing Windows phones. I would guess this is a huge part of this demanding payment strategy and not just the cash.

Source for pushing Window on phones: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/06/samsung-microsoft-...
This is totally besides the point. He was simply responding to the notion that the ease of the act mitigated the severity.
Indeed, the whole point of these industry deals with each ISP is to circumvent the legal system.

Ungrounded claims of theft and massive losses can't face the light of legal evidence requirements.
Obligatory Post Speculating on Google+
The current implementation will work really well for turn based games.

Currently, it isn't a drop in network layer for synchronous multiplayer or anything, but this is only the first release :)
You could think about it as 'real-time' in the sense that you can see the status of the sharing in 'real-time' - i.e. within Kik I can see if the content has been sent/delivered/read (vs sharing via something like email where it's not clear if it's been looked at). But ya, it's not a real-time unbroken pipe between your app users.
Let's hope this is the beginning of a trend.
In physical 'hacking' if you don't make any effort to secure your valuables, you can't claim they were stolen. I wonder why it is different with virtual valuables?
What about a revamped comment section? I didn't see anything pertaining to comments and those are just as important to the site as the videos are.
This whole particular subthread is about the old MySpace experience vs the current FB experience and why small differences in the experience can yield different outcomes.