skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For text (not for files) you can encrypt on the client side using JS (a fine library: http://crypto.stanford.edu/sjcl/ ) before uploading to the server, this is what I do in https://whisperpassword.com/
I'm more horrified they canceled the James Webb telescope (or are just about to).
Interesting points from Prof. Brian Cox:

* NASA costs less than 0.13% of GDP
and provides 9x return on investment

* The entire Shuttle Program cost approximately
the same as the UK bank bailout

* The Iraq conflict so far has cost significantly
more than a manned mission to Mars

Source:

https://twitter.com/profbriancox/status/88955884390195202

https://twitter.com/profbriancox/status/88956654539902976

https://twitter.com/profbriancox/status/88957802281840640
Can we finally ban techcrunch here?
Usha Enterprises India
Why on earth does any large government on earth not do this?
> With Google creating this much artificial scarcity to bring buzz

Oh dear God do I get sick of hearing complaints about the "illusion of scarcity" every time somebody can't get something obviously in demand.

Do you have any idea how many moving parts there are to something like this?

The only message I get from your post is that you can't separate your opinion from reality (like so many others).
"Quid in nomine? Quod dicitur rosa
Odorem suavitatis, ut non alio nomine.

All you guys are trying to label, taxonimicate the "lay person's" strategy into your hierarchy.

Humans are damn smart, and the cocksure MIT nerd got his ass handed to him.
SwissMiss Pimps Out Hotly Designed Gojee.com
since the advent of fast internet and search engines, only for version numbers
You should check MockupTiger too, it is also using html5 so works only in chrome and firefox. But you can host it on your own domain or use it on desktop.
Yeah, I just want the numbers of "I wanted that phone" or "That phone was cheaper".
They may end up raising more, but from what I hear, they are choosing VCs based on who can secure them top engineering talent for critical positions, not who cuts the biggest check.

That's the lay of the land in Silicon Alley right now. Tech talent is worth its weight in gold.
Using JDK 7's Fork/Join Framework
What does Massive Tactical do? Information on the Internet seems sparse.
It was interesting to read both of you guys. I can see a lot of ego on both sides... But that's a good thing :)

No one is wrong or right. It just depends on what you believe users are doing. One thing is certain: users use "local search" techniques as opposed to "systematic" search. The salesman problem describes this: the algorithm operates using a single current node and moves only to neighbors of that node.

However, depending on the "local search" algorithm used, those may be greedy or not:
- "Hill Climbing" is greedy. The algorithm is affected by local maxima, ridges and plateaux.
- "Simulated annealing" is not greedy. It uses "gradient descent" and does not always pick the "best" neighbors.

I believe the heuristics used by the users:
- are not very precise ("Well, it is better, right?")
- may change over time ("Oh, look at this!")
That's why, I think it is not a "greedy" algorithm with deterministic results, but it is NOT complete anyway (hence, the clear process).

I can't wait for you guys to kick my butt :)
ps: I'm a business major...
Why does motivation matter? Either the company does good (products, environmentally clean, not beating employees too much, etc.) or it doesn't.

Why should you care what's motivating them? And even if you do care, how can you know, other than by observing their actions?
I like Apple, but sometimes, they do really strange things…
That reminds me of one naive I was helping who had serious trouble relating the 2D movements of the mouse to the 2D movements of the on-screen cursor. That relationship seems like it'd be very challenging to explain if someone's not getting it and there's no teacher available.
B2B Online Marketing Needs Consistency
Ways to Get Value From Your In House SEO
MySpace Released Skype-Powered Calls ... In 2007
> This is just a regular product launch.

My point was that Google is putting a lot of effort into competing with Facebook, and that they're willing to use all their other products to succeed with Plus. Think about their bonuses being tied to social, Larry Page as the new CEO, the +1 button in the search results, the renaming of Blogger and Picasa, the redesign of Calender, Gmail etc., the new notification bar accross all Google sites... These aren't just regular product updates, but show how serious Google really is about getting into social, ie keeping facebook at bay.
A "free market" doesn't necessarily lead to a bunch of competitors. Everyone has this picture of a free market with 20 competitors and low prices, but a free market doesn't always work out that way. A couple of years ago we had a bunch of cell phone companies to choose from, but they keep merging because the infrastructure costs kill the small players. A small part of that is regulation, but most of it is just the intrinsic cost of building and maintaining a telecom network.
Aren't some of these things possible with the X-37B?
The Mule lives!

And if you who haven't read Asimov's Foundation series, go now and sin no more.
Am I crazy for thinking that it's inevitable they get sued by the recording industry?
Really cool stuff.

Of course, you need to get the sequence after you've got your amplified DNA. That involves performing electrophoresis or using a more modern DNA sequencer machine.

Questions:

Do people still work with gels and electrophoresis anymore? That seems like a barrier for a DIY shop. Not only does it involve a lot of equipment, but the interpretation of results seems like it would be hard.

Is it possible to send out the amplified DNA and get it sequenced by a service? I know that sequencing costs have gone down drastically with new technology, perhaps the DIYer can benefit from that?
I'd like to see Google implement a similar feature for Google+ by integrating it with Google Music. They could implement it in Hangout somehow.
Truly amazing. It never ceases to amaze me how people in orient Asia are eager to use technology in such an intelligent way. If this system were implemented here in my country (Spain) I'd bet (and I'd win) that the revenue would be insignificant and the vast majority of the ads would've been covered in graffiti in less than 1 month.

Anyway TESCO please pimp my underground!!!!! ;D
I agree, but that doesn't say anything about the perception that the hubbub causes with Joe Public.
There is not much difference between a photo on your screen and a printed photo.
I have seen a 3 year-old failing to grasp how to use the arrow keys to control a character in a game, but swipe to review pictures on an iPhone spontaneously. There is one indirection less, which probably makes all the difference.

(This does not mean that touch interfaces are better, though -- just that they are more intuitive.)
Sorry I meant a breakdown of versions of each browser (IE6,7,8,9) and FF (3,4,5) etc

Thanks
It's not a Pivot when you do something completely new.
Why You Might Want To Consider Java And/Or Clojure For Your Next Project
I also use Omnigraffle, hands down best app for detailed wireframing. Sometimes it can be too much. In those cases I'll just use Mockingbird
What would you have had the tester do differently?

Dismiss the test subject right away since he had never used a computer and found trying to figure tasks out too difficult?
That physical keyboard thing is a huge deal with women with nails (nails don't trigger the iPhone screen).

While iOS catching up on the notification system, you're right about the defaults being somewhat better on some android phones for people (sync/maps especially).

If you don't like apps (sounds like you don't), it's a tossup which phone you'll like better. iOS has a better browser, sync is better on many (but not all) android phones, the lack of a physical keyboard is daunting for many, especially women with nails.

If you just take pictures with the default app, mail, text and use the default maps app, the higher quality camera in many droids can make it a better device for you. It's really only when you get into apps themselves (especially 3rd party apps) does the difference hit you. You and your fiance do not sound like app people.

That said, if you want to make your phones suck less till you get new ones:

Install PhotoSync to copy your pictures over. Don't even need to plug in.

Install navigon to make driving directions better

If you want new notifications now, either install a GM seed (not recommended) or jailbreak (a bit of a pain if you're getting rid of the phone), there are lots of different much better notification schemes on there.
As is usual when performing user testing, the OP rewarded Joe in the end. They taught him how to use email and registered his bakery card. Joe volunteered and could have said enough! at any time.

The ones to blame for Joe's stress and frustration are us software authors. We are already treating our customers that way.
Great app but is there any way to send previously save messages to computer?
Neutering game play is a particularly bad way to punish pirates -- they're likely to tell all their friends that the "game sucks" and leave bad reviews on the web. Bad reviews don't deter the "try before you buy" pirate crowd near as much as they deter legitimate purchasers.
"penetration", as I understand it, merely means the number of people who can access the internet if they so choose. For example, have a phone line through which they have access to dial-up. I don't believe it actually indicates the number of users.
Is this a criticism or just an observation?

Clearly the search engines have all weighed the tradeoffs of appearing too helpful for first-time users and cluttering the screen for regular users.
Possibly not to you. Clearly there is to these people - otherwise this would not have worked.

If nothing else, they can browse a whole wall of them at once, seen at normal size, rather than having to click through lots of tiny pictures.
Titanic sinking + early ham radio lulz led to licensing laws - Internet next?
my three year old figured out how to move around in my Nook by himself. I opened up a 'read-to-me' book and he grabbed the Nook from me and just started swiping. It was pretty neat to see how rapidly he picked up on what to do. He is now a devoted Angry Birds player on it too.
IBM Startup SmartCamp Competitions Capturing
I thought those fundamental differences were the whole point of the article and what makes a community centered around things so useful.

The title isn't misleading to me.
There is a serious lack of empathy on display in this post.

What are you talking about? Everything you know about Joe, you are learning from this post. If the author has no empathy, how come she can describe Joe's emotional state so accurately that it practically moves you to tears?

And I think you need to make allowances for the genre. This essay is a bit impersonal because it's a designer reporting to an audience of designers. The tone is necessarily a bit cold and analytical. I wouldn't assume that the actual interview went down like this, just as doctors don't talk to cancer patients the way they talk to other doctors, engineers don't talk to civilians the way they talk to other engineers, and sausage makers have secret ingredients because... you really don't want to know what they are. Just enjoy the flavor.

As for whether it is cruel to cause someone stress by asking them to use a UX that frustrates them: Well, maybe. But if you have ever shipped a product, you have caused such pain. Not one customer at a time, but wholesale: Dozens, hundreds, thousands or even millions of people have cursed your product. Such is the tragedy of the mass market: You can make the delight scale, but the frustration also scales. The authors of, say, Word didn't want to frustrate anyone to the point of tears, but every day thousands of people are so frustrated, because bugs are inevitable, and because no design can do everything, and because people don't always understand the mismatch between your product and their goals, and because computers are less personal than the least personable of persons.
Agreed. As long as the ability to discover new voices is effectively addressed, the ability to follow someone of interest is pretty valuable. Which seems like where you might be going with http://hackerstream.com? :) Looks nice.
The funny thing is that as an "advanced" user I use the terminal all day long, but we assume the mouse cursor is easier for inexperienced users. But something about that old DOS prompt was not so bad: you just learn the commands, type them, and see the result. In a lot of ways it's a more straight-forward interaction than mousing around.
It's primarily a marketing campaign for their online shop (judging from the video), so yes, probably.
Let's make a new buzzword for that, then, heh.
Ars technica piece cited by OP: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/07/did-the-tita...
Aren't they licensing all that content? I imagine they wouldn't be sued for what they were attempting to do, but for what users are capable of exploiting.
I didn't know what Project Harmony even was and that article doesn't clear it up in the first few paragraphs. For anyone else fuzzy as well, it looks to be "a standardized set of contributor agreements (to the linux kernel)"[1]

[1] http://lwn.net/Articles/450543/
Finally! An American judge with some common sense!

Honestly, though, I think this is a good first step. I enjoy some Apple products, but I'll be more than happy to see them lose this. If they can trademark "app store", then what's next? They trademarks the term "app(s)", as well?
Should Google somehow run background checks on every advertiser to see if they're breaking some US law? (or other countries' laws?) What broken laws should justify removal?

Should this be before or after they allow them to advertise? If before, this would inconvenience the majority of advertisers who are legitimate. If after, should Google investigate every incoming report of illegitimate advertising? Or, how many reports should warrant an investigation by Google?

Regardless, can Google remove these Adword listings without legal issues (i.e. without risking being sued)?

Getting these scammers off the front page of search would be relatively easy - it can be solved algorithmically. They're probably working on it now, with their anti-linkspam initiative.

But I don't see how Google could get them off Adwords without employing hundreds or thousands of people to review advertisers, but this would create more problems of greater magnitude than it would solve.

They could crowdsource it to narrow the (retrospective) review process, but this would create a secondary market of advertising, which I doubt Google wants, nor users would want to deal with.

I can't think of a way for Google to solve this problem without creating larger ones.

It's the responsibility of governments -- not internet advertising platforms -- to police copyright law.
Dear Garry,

I've been clicking on the G+ invite you sent me days ago to no avail.

=T
Storage and LAN bandwidth are ridiculously cheap.

This is true right up until you present a req for more disk drives for one's network attached storage.
Fundamentals of Advanced Mathematics
Blocking has been an issue for the international company I work for.
The company recently switched 4000+ users to Gmail and Google Apps only to find after the facts that nearly 20% of the workforce would have little or no access to most of the Google Apps sites as they are in China (I guess a bit more testing should have been in order...).

I hacked a solution, involving stunnel for encrypted communications, ss5 (a SOCKS5 proxy server), Proxy Auto-Config files (PAC) files and the Web Proxy Auto-Discovery protocol (WPAD)...
An installer is used to easily deploy the whole thing and configure the system.

PAC files are used by the browser to redirect traffic based on URL pattern matching.
Instead of going through the local Internet, requests that match the rules for known bocked sites are diverted to a local stunnel service running on the user's machine (or a local server depending on the configuration).
The encrypted requests are then sent to a server in Hong Kong running the SOCKS5 proxy (we actually now use multiple servers on different HK ISPs and do some load balancing for better results).

From the point of view of the user, the system is transparent: it just works, they have nothing to do once their machine is configured.

I tried many setups, but the various measures used in China to disrupt traffic required the data stream to be encrypted for reliable results.

The only issue we face is due to the really unpredictable quality of the network in China: most ISPs have limited international bandwidth and depending on the ISP, the time of day, etc there can be large variations in quality.

I need to write about this one day...
I think its good for users to associate "App Store" with a generic place to find and download applications on any platform; like the terms "program" and "browser" it helps to have standard ways of communicating basic concepts of computer/device use. Its a benefit to _everyone_ (Apple, Android, Microsoft...) that users can more easily interact with their systems sans training.
Google Invests In Stealth Startup That Aims To ‘Accelerate Science’
That article makes absolutely no sense. It basically says a handful of people messed around on the radio and now a handful of people are messing around on the Internet, so by some extension an unknown piece of legislation not even dreamed up yet is going to be passed to require licenses to use the internet.
Once you add people to circles, there's a bar across the bottom of window offering to explicitly invite those people to Google+.

Click to pop a dialog listing the people as tags or buttons, add more if you like, then invite.

If you leave and come back, the bar isn't there.

This is the same popup shown by the Invite button on your home page when it's there, just a different way of reaching it.
This is awesome. No plug-in? Imagine what could be done with things like Quake Live...
Same team, same investors, same capital.

New code, new idea.

Uber-Pivot?
There's much more info about Snap, Yesod and Happstack (the three competing systems in Haskell-land) on the Haskell Reddit,

* http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/search?q=yesod&sort=top&...

* http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/search?q=snap&restrict_s...

* http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/search?q=happstack&restr...
Gojee.com is poorly tested because it was attempting to animate giant background images which bring an older machine or one without a GPU to a crawl.
30.2% of the world have internet access, so it's fair to assume many have not used a computer and will not know anyone who has when they start, especially in Africa when penetration is only 11.4% (http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm)

The car analogy is poor because you are required by law to take lessons in most (all?) countries. It's quite common for people to struggle to afford driving lessons and it slows down the adoption of cars, are you implying that the same should be true for computers?

The search engine was the default page in the Firefox screenshot so it's safe to assume some will see it.

UI should be constructed for a userbase, however, technically literate, westerners who have spent most of their adult life with easy access to technology, are not the only userbase or even the majority in the world.
It's offering advice for change or improvement - it's criticism. Criticism doesn't have to be negative.
Stack Exchange has worked in a few other areas (math, for instance), but on the whole, I feel like most of the sites are nowhere close to the level of expertise and penetration into the community for a given topic as Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow is one of the best programming Q&A sites; most programmers these days will come across it doing Google searches for questions they have, there are a lot of very knowledgable people there, and so on. I feel like a lot of the Stack Exchanges don't have anything like that level or penetration; they are not well established in their communities, instead they are places for programmers and sysadmins who are familiar with Stack Overflow to talk about topics they are interested in, without actually attracting the expert community that makes some of the sites work so well.

Part of the problem, I think, is that some topics are just much more suited to objective questions and answers than others. In programming, math, system administration, and so on, there are enough objectively right or wrong answers to keep subjective discussion from overwhelming the site. In other topics, what people really want is subjective discussion, polls, and so on, which just don't fit the Stack Exchange model well.

I wouldn't quite say that Stack Exchange has been successful in its expansion. It's had a few successes in other domains, and limited success in a few more, but there are a lot of communities that are really struggling to find their footing.
It seems like scanning the items is a nice feature but not needed, especially if you need to go to one of these scanning stations to order your food. If there isn't a way to order directly from your phone regardless of location there should be. Perhaps a bit more then most online stores providing a more realistic way to purchase your food. When I read the title I interpreted as an online virtual store. A more basic view of the products with a searchable feature should also be an option. When you go shopping you most often buy the same things week in and week out (milk, bread, etc) it would be pretty awesome to set-up a rotating weekly schedule. If entire communities used this the cost of delivery would be offset by the costs of maintaining a physical store.
Not usually. The way that generally works is this:

- You get some competent cells ("competent" means "able to accept external DNA" there are different ways you can make different cells competent)
- You place plasmids (circular DNA strands) containing the trait you're interested in imparting (e.g. glowing) unto the bacteria
- Under favorable conditions the bacteria will take on the genetic information contained in the plasmids

You can order plasmid vectors much like primers, though iirc it's a bit more complicated--may be wrong about that.

Caveat: As Cixelyn mentions there are actually protocols for constructing DNA using PCR and and thus there are also protocols for constructing plasmids using PCR. So yes, you could technically use an OpenPCR machine to construct a plasmid vector which you then introduce to competent cells.
Would a new user know that there is supposed to be a menu? Why would they click the glowing orange box? Why even think it's clickable? Why is it glowing? Is that normal? They'll think: it doesn't seem to be related to what I'm looking for, so I'll keep looking elsewhere.

One thing that I have always noticed to be true (and frustrating) is that new users try to do as little as possible. They try to stay as safe as possible. They want to do one thing, and once they find a solution - any solution - that works, that's what they keep doing. They don't click on strange icons or try new things just because they can. They don't explore because they don't understand, and in my experience they usually think that something will go wrong and they will break the computer if they click somewhere they aren't supposed to. It's hard for us to imagine someone going in with no prior knowledge of how a program is supposed to behave. We have certain minimum expectations, (e.g. there should be a menu bar somewhere in the top left of the screen) and knowledge (you can't do much of anything without clicking the mouse) that they lack that makes what is painfully obvious to us confusing and unintuitive to them.
I wonder if any game companies have secretly released their own pirate version, complete with money making dodgy-ware, to try and get some money back.
EBay to Acquire Zong
Why trends of the past matter