skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have never found a good grocery delivery service that had an interface that didn't make me want to shoot myself.
That's just obfuscating what DRM really is. Sure, it's cool and convenient to use Steam, but it's still DRM. Gold-coated feces, if you'd prefer an analogy. Just for example, you don't actually own the game, and you can't do with it whatever you want.

tl;dr: Convenience is not a justification for restrictions.
There are some touch buttons (not capacitive, just think mobile phone keypads) that are under a plastic film. Those are really easy to clean as well.
How is them targeting advertisements at you in any way evil? First of all, it lets you use Facebook/Google+ FOR FREE. Secondly, well-targeted advertisements are far-and-away better for both consumer and advertiser than blind advertising. Several times on Facebook I've seen an ad that was so perfectly targeted, it meant a new good experience for me, and a conversion for that advertiser.
Apple website hacked
Google's whole business model revolves around selling user data. They don't do it directly, handing over browser histories to the marcom group at Pepsico; they do it indirectly, and in a manner that largely preserves privacy. But that doesn't impact the original commenter's point at all. He's right: at Google, you're the product, not the customer.
"Pure" in this context is basically short for "purely functional." Most functional languages have exceptions -- notably for I/O. Achieving 100% functional behavior is, it turns out, really really hard, and that's what makes Haskell notable.
[ goopl.us ] millions people will cry due to Google
--
--
Agreed. Some of the points were downright incorrect. The "Mobile App" one completely disregards that, while the G+ Android app may be superior, G+ doesn't even have an iPhone app, while Facebook does.
Yes, that's a big one, although I must say I've been pleasantly surprised by the big supermarkets online service here in the UK. The Tesco and Asda websites are not exactly usability masterpieces but they are pretty good.
When the touch screen is used as a replacement for physical buttons - to answer or ignore a call, for example then using the screen is roughly equivalent to having a capacitive button for the same function.
Never met him, but was on the cp list and recognized his name and that he had contributed greatly. I've lost a friend to depression and I have it too; meds can help clamp the extreme lows.
This is pretty cool!
Theres a pretty interesting feature in the pdf standard that few viewers support is embedded animations driven by javascript. As far as I know, only adobe properly supports it, bu there are some nice visualization tools such as pgf/tikz which allow for producing such visuals.

http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/tag/animations/
What would Google gain? More opt-ins. Maybe more people are willing to opt their friends-list into a service called 'Prizes' with no Google branding than Google itself. Or even if not more people, a different set of people, who incrementally add info that would be harder to get otherwise.

The idea this is Slide showing its independence is interesting too, but why no Google/Google+ as even an option?

I think one of the potential problems with Google+ is that it is a "brand extension", too close to the parent brand, which already means something else to people. (To some extent, this was the problem with "Google Video" versus "YouTube", as well.) Maybe Google has empowered Slide to move full-speed ahead on a "Plan B", a network of many social sites unencumbered by Google branding. At the extreme, if all else fails, this could culminate in a new social network service by Google but under a non-Google name.
Joshua,

What's your contact info? I know a good UI guy who just moved to central FL--he might be a good fit for your friend.

Alex
(achompas [at] gmail)
Great explanation, actually. But one question. I thought functional languages were "pure" throughout. I mean, I thought the whole point of a functional language is that there are no side effects and every expression returns some value. How is "pure" distinct from "functional"?

Oh, no no. Pure is not required for functional programming. Functional programming is mostly defined as the ability to pass around functions as 1st class data types. In fact, I noticed on your GitHub you do some Python. Here is functional programming in Python:

# Sum a list in Python using FP
items = [1,2,3,4,5]
function = lambda x, y: x + y
reduce(function, items) # => 15

# The equivalent in haskell:
foldr1 (+) [1,2,3,4,5]

Pure is a stricter form of functional programming, which Haskell enforces.

edit: BTW, Haskell DOES have a steep learning curve, and the inherent recursion breaks my brain. Even simple things like:
`combos = []` `combos = combos + 'foo'`
hurt, because counterintuitively (to me, anyway) this winds up in infinite recursion. I'm very used to OOP so this sort of thing is hard on me. I'm old though.

You're stepping now into the "lazy" aspect of Haskell. You're allowed to have infinite recursion in Haskell because it is only evaluated when needed. I don't really want to get into it here since there are many resources online about it :) But this also isn't inherent to functional programming or pure function programming.
MySpace had nowhere near the audience of Facebook, today. And yes, I mean a product that has nearly 750 million active users.
Just looking at the syntax and thinking about how I would write things in it, this looks strictly inferior to Haml; there's syntax in here that appears to exist solely to shoehorn this into Coffeescript's grammar. What does this do better than Haml to make up for that?
Apple servers hacked by Anonymous
Hover.com: we store & email passwords in plaintext for usability
This has nothing to do with how many public email addresses are exposed and honestly... solving it in this way shows a lack of understanding of the problem. The problem is maintaining effective communication across sectors of your business. A conversation between an external user and your company should be transparent... but not from an email address standpoint. As long as you can log into your CRM software and see the history of my conversation... who cares what email address it came in on.

Having one email address just changes the problem. Now instead of having no context for the conversation you have a jumbled email chain that you're having to centrally monitor, distribute, pass around to other people... if anything it seems vastly inferior than having a new email to billing@company.com causing that customers email history and a notification from being sent to the billing support supervisor.
Perhaps that should read more along the lines of "the most punishing." English isn't trivial.
War is peace, freedom is slavery. I'm really tired of attention-grabbing headlines on blog posts with no content.
If I ever have a company, I will have one email address -

thebuckstopshere@mycompany.com

I will then use a service like Amazon Mechanical Turk like to distribute the emails to proper internal addresses.
I don't need any more filtering or sorting. I think there needs to be more editorial, sort of like Consumers Reports. The biggest problem now is that reviews all cover only a single product. I want to see reviews that cover a product category. Comparison reviews are so much more useful than single item reviews.
Yes, this is very annoying. One reason I pay for Netflix is that I don't like to be gamed by other distribution channels. Netflix should realize that the gaming that this content involves reflects on THEM, even when it is at the rightsholders' initiative/insistance.

Boo.

(I recently watched halfway through something, then got busy for a couple of weeks. I returned to find I could no longer stream the rest.

At a minimum, if there is an expiration date, it should be there prominently on the title's page, so that the viewer is aware of this going in.

Netflix, you need to reconsider who your customers are. If it's big media, just let me know and I'll drop my subscription.
You confuse the medium with the means of distributing said medium. The stream (distribution) is the DRM preventing me from doing what I want with the movie (medium). In other words, the stream itself is the DRM, not the thing that is restricted.
Housing. Period. Craigslist is pretty much the most painful thing to use when looking for an apartment. But they have a lock on the supply side.
spec work is evil. avoid!
iPhones don't have capacitive buttons. They have a touchscreen which while capacitive is much more sensitive, relatively expensive, and backed up with a IR proximity sensor and lots of engineering to make it just work.

They're just not related to this discussion.
Awesome work, Colin. I can think of more than a few uses for a lightweight and secure pipe forwarder. I also enjoyed reading your earlier article about keeping OpenSSL and Apache separate.

I have a question though - in the beginning of your post, you talk about STUD. Did you replace stunnel with STUD, or not just yet? Just wondering how that went.
Thanks. As mentioned, we've got Chrome and Firefox coming out soon. Cheers, Brian.
If his argument had had points, I'd agree. It's just that it wasn't an argument - it was a screed that the parents should have known better and are entirely at fault, and I reject his standing, as he clearly has no idea what he's talking about.
I'm a bit torn on reviews. While I find them useful, I often find myself not much closer to a decision after having read a bunch of reviews. Often, I end up more confused.

Once you've read some reviews, how do you choose one product to buy?
In reality - what we are saying is that structuring data is useful to saying who we are and interacting with the right audiences. It amazes me how unstructured the web continues to be. It's flexible, but is is valuable.

It is a fundamental paradigm shift - saying that the web should be structured around people. I like it. (and working on it ;))
To be fair, nobody will ever raise a normal child who does not lie. It's an adaptive behavior brought about in most children by the age of three, but some studies indicate that it develops earlier in more intelligent children[1].

That's not to say that teaching kids that "lying is bad" isn't a noble goal, but you're going to have a really tough time convincing them when they can clearly see the benefits of it in their daily life (an extra cookie when Mom's out of the room, No detention because the dog ate their homework).

Perhaps a more realistic goal is to channel their learning into teaching the difference between lies.

But I think the whole argument is a bit of a "Red Herring" or is mostly irrelevant. The whole argument reeks of flame-war induced fallacies.

I figure that something happened like the following.

- Google enforces mail policies.
- kid cries.
- parents broken hearted, outraged, determined to share outrage
- article posted, misleading, overly emotional linkbait headline included
- internet response: "who cares, just lie"
- parent, embarrassed, defensive & still outraged, formulates weak knee-jerk rebuttal.
- internet response: "flame on"

The parents are IMO wrong, they may or may not also think they're wrong, but are having trouble publicly backing down from the mostly-stupid position that they took, and continue to argue for the sake of arguing.

Or they actually believe it. Which is a bit stupid, but hey, stupid people exist too. I don't think they're dumb, just caught up in the emotions that stir whenever you witness your own child crying.

[1] http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2008/02/11/why-do-kids...

http://www.srcd.org/journals/cdev/0-0/Talwar.pdf
...so Apple wouldn't need Apple retail stores if only their products were better. Right.

If your product is new to the market, chances are that nobody woke up this morning dying to try it out. It doesn't matter how great or intuitive a product is. You still need someone to sell it. This has been true since Sumerian times.
Twetris: Play Tetris, gain Twitter followers
Why not automate their translation? That's the future of a flat world =)
Brace for a Cybercrime Wave, Report Warns
Just to be clear, when I said "their" I meant Fastmail.fm, not Gmail.
Email spam volumes down almost 90% y-o-y?
Seriously, learn how to punctuate. Ellipsis are not used this way and your placement of them makes no sense whatsoever.
Aren't there lots of good alternatives to Craigslist now?

At least here in the UK, we have the following which are good:

http://nestoria.com

http://rightmove.com

http://findaproperty.com

http://www.globrix.com
It is interesting how twitter has de-emphasized the obvious benefit to people creating custom streams through #tags
Twitter's approach (atleast in the early stages) has been more of Darwinian evolution ("Shit, we have to do something about this or we're screwed") rather than planned evolution :-). It has probably served them well -- the growth they saw in usage meant they could without thinking too much whether something was worth it, evolve to more sophisticated solutions as time went by.
ABC Liquor made my son cry when they denied him the sale of alcohol at the age of 8.

No, seriously, there's an age limit that he agreed to when he signed up.
Home fixtures. Specifically, looking for anything by dimension - I have yet to find any way to find a medicine cabinet for a rough opening of 12.5"x16.5", for instance, or a register of 8"x10" - both actual examples of things I need for my renovation and can't find online or offline (offline because nobody local carries odd dimensions).
I was hoping this was an economics article. It is a politics article on protest organization. Me sad.
A thorough read would mention the semantic difference between them, the granularity of parallelism, some of the intent behind the concurrency/parallelism constructs, implications of performance when trying to do parallelism in Erlang, general parallel execution theory and strategies related to it.
Using MT to sort email sounds like a terrible idea. You don't know what kind of sensitive data users send along with their support e-mails, you don't want to risk one of the mechanical turkers exploiting that.
Who answers their phone in the rain with the face up? Isn't that a little ridiculous? I think every piece of technology has its limitations. I could argue that button phones are loud, and I can't text with them during class or meetings. If you answer your button phone while it's raining, the rain will likely also screw up your button-phone... probably with more permanent damage than touch-screens.

Also, a lot of touch screen phones (iPhone in particular) have been adapted for modern use. With my Klipsch Image S4i headphones (or with the natural iPhone 4 headphones), you can answer/hang up calls using the headphone controls. I've yet to figure out whether I can activate voice control for dialing, but that'd be even better.

When I need to dial on my iPhone in the winter, thin cabretta leather (damascus d302 for example) works wonders, at the same time keeping your hands dexterous and warm. I feel a lot of the problems you're describing are more functions of outdated technology, than poor design in general.
Everything has a beginning.
Imagine you were offered the options of either going to jail or being committed in a mental hospital for the crime of... consuming alcohol (back during the Prohibition).
I'll admit that I'm deeply biased by being a Facebook intern, but why is Data Liberation better than the equivalent feature on Facebook?
This, so much this.

Read your TOS. Read the TOS your children agree to.

Don't whine when it gets enforced, you agreed to it.
FWIW I haven't had a single problem like this since I got a hard case for my phone (HTC Desire HD) with raised edges. Of course this changes the aesthetic quite a bit - a trade I'll make for the protection of the case - and doesn't help if your phone has no proximity sensor, but it is at least a partial solution.
Chris, love that you are keeping up with sharing these numbers with us even as things grow and get more "serious".

Glad to see you have an eBook out and that income, month over month, is up. Best of luck!
Yeah, you've got a pretty good democracy in America. The reason that it seems like it's always "more of the same, no matter who you vote for" is that the government actually has external constraints on what it does. Bush did a lot of the unpopular things that he did because he couldn't find a better way, not because he has a heart of pure evil (hard as that can be to accept). So Obama comes in and starts doing a lot of the same things, and people are surprised.

> You seem to believe that a government is legitimate simply because it is in power.

No, go ahead and overthrow dictatorships, but it you've got a government that you voted for, with a constitution that you approved, kindly follow the law. And elect another government if you want.

> I suppose it's very easy for you to spout your trite little sarcasms from a position of comfort and privilege. Let them eat cake!

You do realize there is no shortage of cake in Greece, let alone a shortage of bread? But, whatever. The oppressed masses shall rise up and throw off the chains of their class enemy, and then retire at 45! Or how about "workers of the world, unite and claim your union patronage appointments!!" Hey, these are catchy. "Burn down a bank, teach a lesson to the capitalist bloodsuckers who financed your house!!"
I dunno if I can agree with the "exact same […] but […] much more fluid/better". I think the motion comics came about because some comic exec though they needed to put their wares on Youtube or something like that, whereas I started with faux-3D/parallax as a neat way to show a lot of information in a limited space. My inspiration is pop-up books, theirs is movies/storyboards.

I don't think you can compare them qualitatively as directly as you've done is what I am saying. Their end product is a movie, mine is a website.
Zappos has free shipping both ways in case you want to return it.
Yes, that's one I've got on my list of specific things. I'm amazed someone like Ikea hasn't done this already.
http://hobolobo.net/what-is-this-thing thinks I'm using Internet Explorer, when in reality I'm using Chrome 14.0.803.0 dev-m.
I think this is a standard feature of most modern touchscreen smartphones and not some "design brilliance" relegated to only Apple devices.

I currently have to carry two phones, one is an Android device and the other is a Windows Phone 7 device, they both implement the proximity sensor and it works the same way as the iphone.

IIRC correctly HTC (back in the days of Windows Mobile 5) already employed this feature in their "slate" phones before the original iPhone was released. They then improved it by adding some rather unique features, like being able to flip the phone over (i.e. laying screen side up on a table) to silence/reject an incoming call.
If you were one of my students, here's how I would advise you:

1. Don't get paralysis.

2. Pick something that gives you good career options. The rest are your hobbies (and it's good to have hobbies).

4. Be cautious taking on any educational debt -- make sure it's worth it.

Your career will take many turns but you want your opening move to be strong.

Frankly, if you can program and enjoy math, your future is bright. When you love your work, you won't need the escapism of substances.
Am I an asshole if my first thought was "that's what you get by putting your data in the cloud" ?
I've never bought clothes online. Free 2-way shipping does sound quite good, but if it means I still have to make a trip to the post office to return something then I feel I may as well go to a clothes shop.
Because we're actually aware of it. I've been using Facebook since 2006, and I've never heard of such a feature on Facebook... and I know all about privacy settings and other features. Does Facebook actually have an export feature?
I think people are overcomplicating the issue, social media simply gives community to people who may have otherwise thought their ideals lacked popular support. This was previously done with outspoken radicals speaking to the masses, but is now accomplished with a general consensus of individuals.

Interestingly, I see the same effects promoting atheism instead of political change here in the west.
In Israel - pretty much everything. All the sites are broken in a lot of browsers, using questionable security practices and most importantly not accepting Paypal (we also have a problem with Paypal double converting NIS->USD->NIS).

There is an opportunity here (R2L E-Commerce system), but I'm too lazy to grab it.
This is a reasonable comment, but you should read spiped before coming to a conclusion; in this one case, we're talking about (for instance) DH code from someone who writes his own blinded modexp. I don't see anything crazy in it.
Show HN: Better domain names shown on HN (Greasemonkey script)
By the time we have native compilation, I hope also our Elisp implementation will be significantly faster than the one in Emacs, so it will really become attractive to people to finish the work that we have done to make the switch there.

For an emacs user, that's pretty exciting.
There's a lot of code in stunnel, but much of it isn't in security-critical code paths. I'm not sure stunnel <-> stud is an apples-apples comparison.
I think the basic issue most people have with Haskell (or rather, with Haskellers) is the fetishization of 100% correctness. For most tasks, it's just not that important, and so the (considerable) extra cognitive load that Haskell imposes is a net negative.

I mean, precise joinery may be superior to hammers and nails when building a house, but it's an expensive proposition, and there are 5 people in the world who can do it properly.

Most of us monkeys, when coding, are aiming to accomplish some task in the notoriously incorrect real world. It is often much better to spend 1/5th the engery get to a 80-90% correct solution very fast, and then patch as necessary, for the very important reason that you don't even know if what you're attempting to do will work. In that mode, like carpenters, sometimes it's helpful to just bang it with a hammer.

If what you do is write compilers, well, OK. The description you're quoting sounds pretty good. But the world doesn't need tons of compiler writers, and those it does need typically have pretty stable specs in front of them, so maybe joinery is the right approach.

I think this guy gets it about right: http://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=440
For most purposes, I find the idea of buttons on a stove inferior to plain old knobs. I can see some merit to the idea of programming an oven to change temperature after a certain amount of time or some such, but a lot of stoves have buttons without any such capabilities.

Most stove buttons I've seen are membrane switches with plastic over them, presenting a smooth, easily cleaned surface. These seem to be the optimal way to put buttons on a stove.
I must be doing something wrong, because I'm getting fairly shitty rendering. I'm on FF5, Ubuntu 10.04. Anyone else have problems viewing their demo paper?

Screenshots: http://imgur.com/a/hESRv
what os are you using? this was a problem for me before i set up hot keys to toggle touchpad on and off.
No, it doesn't. My definition of 'low hanging fruit' means anything that can automated to the point of mass data consumption and processing within the scope of a private corporation's resources.

ROT13 clearly falls within this formula.

AES 256 client side encryption, even in JS, over a 256 bit SSL connection with 32 character base key-phrases, uniquely generated for every message, expanded into the full key and exchanged and stored in a secure fashion separate from the location of the encrypted data itself falls outside of this scope currently.
Abstrations are hard to debug, require a learning curve of 2x the original problem and are rarely complete.

Thank you for that. I've been looking for this concise a statement to make in debates I've had in the past.
That surprises me, considering that Israel is often said to be a thriving startup hub.