skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've gotten into the habit of modifying the CSS of web sites I frequent to improve the readability and usability in general. I do this using a plugin for the web browser. For instance, this is how the HN home page looks like:
http://i.imgur.com/WaTQq.jpg

This is the most perfect design because it's tailored to my needs.

Here's how YouTube looks like:
http://i.imgur.com/eZAsx.jpg

Reddit:
http://i.imgur.com/rnaxb.jpg
oh, totally. Just was having a laugh about it
The text on that site is so damn large it's actually hard to read.
I used to work at a supercomputing center. The building where the machines where housed had offices above it (they were housed in a nuclear research facility, so security was already high) and the building management had to turn the heaters on twice: once to test them and once when we had all the machines down for a while for major across-the-board upgrades.
Great tool !

but something about seeing the original site. I totally agree you're missing something in a RSS reader. But well, when the connection is slow (my residence is in Bolivia ...), what matters most is the content and not the container, right? I'd rather receive the news quickly than waiting the website logo.
Netatalk violating GPL in order to force vendor "donations"
DropBox CDN
Zen Coding – a new way of writing HTML and CSS code
More details here: http://www.netafp.com/open-letter-to-the-netatalk-community-...

With the money quote:

Now in order to stir things up, we’ve released NetAFP Netatalk 2.2.0 to customers only, without pushing to Sourceforge. Sourceforge Netatalk will stay at 2.2-beta4 until we’ve convinced enough OEMs that working with us is in their own interest, until we generate enough revenue to pay our bills.
Car Shipping rates
Interesting you say about high contrast, all the examples are black on white. Do this mean all content related websites should be white backgrounds and black text?
G+me: Chrome extension for managing large Google+ streams
YouSendIt steps on Dropbox's turf with unlimited cloud storage service
I was referring to business method patents, not software patents. Art. 52 paragraph 3 clarifies what's in paragraph 2:

(3) Paragraph 2 shall exclude the patentability of the subject-matter or activities referred to therein only to the extent to which a European patent application or European patent relates to such subject‑matter or activities as such (emphasis added)

This is where I imagine much of the confusion lies. My interpretation combined with a brief search on google seems to indicate that software could make its way into patentable subject matter if it's a subset of a larger system, but not if its the sole "invention" claimed in the patent.

In other words, if you have a hardware device running embedded software, you could patent the device, including in it "programs for computers." Thus, Art 52 doesn't mean that all inventions including computer software are, as a matter of law, not patentable.
Wouldn't be surprised if the Oracle issue is involved: they are after all also not bundling Java (which is required on first boot (rumor?) but by lots of software in any case). I can imagine they don't want to mess with possible lawsuits or licensing fees in the future with the path Oracle is on.
I really hope people don't actually use div#id
In Fireforx: View -> Page Style -> No Style.
Perl 6 Compiler Feature Matrix
I backed up about 5 meters, closed one eye, and squinted the other really hard while focusing on one point.
Given that FireWire gives you direct, unsecured access to memory, the most secure solution would be to fill your FireWire port (as well as any other interface that has direct memory access, such as ExpressCard or Thunderbolt) with glue or otherwise render it unusable.
Old "news" - submitted several time in the past, the most recent being this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2787120

Here are some more submissions and discussions on the topic:

http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=pio...
Ask HN: Are you a part of a small startup in Boston?
Hey guys,

I'm in the process launching a new app for small teams.

The app is meant to create a new level of transparency within task management, identifying and breaking through bottlenecks. While also helping to maintain a manageable workload.

Its meant to replace inter-office emails which might be used for task assignment currently.

I'm located in Boston, and would like to work with any local interested teams - so feel free to email me at the address in my account, or add your name to the list at TaskMark.com and I'll get in touch with you.

I'm really looking for just a few teams who are interested in joining the alpha, providing some awesome feedback, and hopefully using a product which can help them work much much faster.

Thanks
-Elliot
That's why I overclock my desktop and start using Foling@Home in the winter.
With proper precautions, systems can be secured properly and with quite good security. Anytime a computer doesn't have encrypted data it's insecure, assuming an attacked has physical access. Installing a new operating system while keeping old data is cake. If a laptop is stolen or attempted to access data that is encrypted with proper security measures, it's pretty tough to break. Nothing is ever 100% secure but with proper security measures and encryption (either full disk or of sensitive data) it's pretty tough.
Yeah right...
http://boards.4chan.org/b/res/343348504
I can't speak for all government agencies, but in the area of the government that I work, we have created no software patents at all. In fact nearly all the software we create is open source, and we are encouraged to use and contribute to other open source products. It's the very fact that we do not have a profit motive that allows us to do this.
You couldn't disagree with what? The fact that Google couldn't be interested in the app?

It sounds like you're not too enthusiastic about it either ;)
Hi, Andre Behrens, creator of the app.

I would argue it is the web itself that is broken. At the very least, it's an infinite web, and there's room for an awful lot of stuff in there, even the parts you don't like or understand.

The advantage of moving sideways is that that's how every reading experience a user has ever experienced works, outside their computer. More importantly for us, it's how a newspaper works. The fact that this thing works a lot like a newspaper and they love it is something our customers literally won't shut up about.

The simple truth is, the only people I've ever heard complain about the navigation scheme, scrolling, javascript, etc are on Hacker News.

For instance, what you are calling lag is the animation. Most people find computer navigation hostile because things move around and they don't know where they are going.

Animations give their brain time to process that things are changing. Research over the years suggests that most people think animated transitions are faster, even if they are technically slower.

In the case of scrolling, I find scrolling long documents a hostile user interface. It requires a great deal of user interaction and minute control over position. Pagination simply requires "next", "next", "next". I don't think every web site should work this way. But for long form content, it works a treat.

And for the record, I didn't use JS just because I could. I used it because it helped me solve my design goals.
Racing to the Bottom: Exploring the Deepest Point on Earth
I think what we need is a balance.

If everything in your website is in high contrast, big font-size, black & white - it is also a problem.

But I agree the idea behind the "Contrast Rebellion" - the accessibility of web content.
I struggled to comprehend what you are trying to say.

It sounds like you're saying "Make everything a service and that will solve all your problems". But in doing so, you abstract the complexity from the core of the problem, to some other layer. Sort of like SOA, meaning you end up with some orchestration language (BPEL?). You've ended up with a kitchen full of self-replicating spaghetti.
If this is reported correctly, it sounds like passwords are stored in memory for quite a while in their unhashed, clear text form. This is not good for people that depend on FileVault as a way to assume that physical access doesn't necessarily compromise their data.

It's a little hard to believe this as there's really no need to have the password kept in memory; it could be the exploit requires the device to be plugged in while you're typing your password--which is more believable and also less interesting.
I scroll with ease through large wads of text using a simple gesture on the touchpad. I find it much more important that a long piece of text is broken up by scannable subheaders, than that it designed to avoid scrolling.
IT vs. Marketing: Time to Kiss and Make Up
Sozi is a decent alternative http://sozi.baierouge.fr/wiki/doku.php

It can be used as a plugin for Inskscape, and the presentations created with it can be viewed from any modern browser.

Here's a quick tutorial: http://sozi.baierouge.fr/wiki/en:tutorial

And the result presentation from that tutorial:
http://sozi.baierouge.fr/wiki/_media/tutorial-complete.svg
(use space for next 'slide')
"Passware says the security risk is easy to overcome by simply turning off the computer instead of putting it to sleep, and disabling the "Automatic Login" setting. This way, passwords will not be present in memory and cannot be recovered."

Hm, isn't automatic login now disabled by default in the installation process of Lion? The last install I did seemed to have it disabled by default although there was a toggle to switch it on if I so chose.
That's actually not a bad way of thinking about what frameworks are: a structure of places to put things.
On a small tangent, does someone maintain a graveyard of software patents as they become invalidated? Since there are lots of duplicate patents, this might be helpful when people need to defend against patent trolls.
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Wal-Mart Takes on Netflix, Offers Video Streaming - FoxNews.com
Sprouter Shutting Down
This morning I received the following email from support@sprouter.com

Dear Sprouter Community,

We’ll be closing down the main Sprouter website a week from today on August 2nd.

We're devastated to have to shut down the service but unfortunately, due to capital constraints, we've simply run out of options.

We want to thank everyone who has supported us and apologize to our members.

Sprouter has truly been a labor of love and we're heartbroken not to continue on.

We want to wish you all well with your endeavors; we've loved being a part of your journey and we wish you continued success.

Thank you very much for being part of the Sprouter community.

Sarah Prevette
Founder & CEO, Sprouter.com

©2011 Sprouter | Toronto ON M5H1X6
Tips for Easy Unit Testing
pg has said that self-posts have low contrast font to discourage people from using HN as their blog. So, similar reasoning to < 0 posts.

But I also have difficulty finding stories I already read on the front page.
http://news.ycombinator.com/newest

The submissions go there first, and bubble up to HN main page only if they get enough upvotes.

This kind of question is pretty useless as a poll, if pg shows actual statistics I think it would be pretty far off.
Good way to get more comprehensive results, but how would the wexis queries be funded?
tldr: Do not waste your time on this.

-----

Webdesigners: please make sites usable.

The non-javascript fallback display is somewhat broken but at least it works. With javascript enabled the site is stuck on the second slide (Opera 11.50).

And then there is the part where the site says "Content ≠ Illustration". Well, yeah, you first. And by the way, centered text is hard to read. And I can't use my browser's back button nor does the site provide such a function. And dear god, it gets even better on this slide:

Let's put an end to this low-contrast, light gray nonsense and use typography for its purpose:

MAKING TEXT READABLE.

AGREE? LET'S CHANGE THE WORLD TOGETHER!

Never heard about all uppercase text being hard to read?

This might just be an elaborate joke or sarcasm, if so, I do not get it.
Same here. From horrible to fantastic. Really liked it.
Enterprise Software is Dead   Long Live Enterprise Software
For "data" in the above read "many, many stories from a wide range of people, some of whom claim it works."

I recently read someone's report of using polyphasic sleep for multiple years. Don't know where, can't spend the time.

You're saying that no one has ever switched permanently to it. I'm saying people sometimes say they switched back out because of issues other than the sleep.

When I ran on a week of 6x28 hour days I felt better, but I couldn't sustain it because of the constant time shifts relative to "normal" people. When I slept four times a week I got a lot more done, and generally felt better, but in the end I got a job that wouldn't support the timing issues it caused.

I'd just like to know the truth.
Actually, I'd probably threaten to call the cops. Passion or not, 2 am isn't the best time to make unannounced house calls.
Interactive Historical World Atlas since 3000 BC
> What we really need is a crowd-sourcing platform for prior art research

Commercial example:
http://www.articleonepartners.com/ "The World's Largest Patent Research Community"

Though apparently they've filed a patent application for crowdsourced vetting for compensation... http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/11/startup-crow...
That's one of those useless truisms, since preventing casual access to a physical attacker is definitely still important.

Do you really think there are security experts who don't bother with screensaver passwords or whole disk encryption?
Hedge funds.
I think you're still designing for print, not the web.

Your aversion to scrolling seems like a personal preference. Nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't mean everybody feels that way, or should be denied scrolling.

In a distant past, books used to be scrolls, too ;-)
Wherever possible, Apple selects BSD-style over GPL (see e.g. wget vs curl, gcc vs clang)

Worse, MySQL seems to go for a strict interpretation of the GPL (http://www.mysql.com/about/legal/licensing/index.html):

"For OEMs, ISVs, and VARs who distribute MySQL with their products, and do not license and distribute their source code under the GPL, MySQL provides a flexible OEM Commercial License."

Compare that with http://www.postgresql.org/about/licence:

"PostgreSQL is released under the PostgreSQL License, a liberal Open Source license, similar to the BSD or MIT licenses."
Or the waters are literal; and it represents that the Bible was written by a pre-modern people with nothing more than their imagination to guide them. I think Plato would have been embarrassed to be caught anywhere near Genesis.
Thanks for the heads-up. The problem with the Internet is that sometimes you end up reading things by people with inappropriate political positions, and it's not immediately apparent. Hopefully the addition of social networking features to search, etc, will help resolve this problem in future.
I only visit the new page if a) I've already read what piques my interest on the home page or b) nothing piques my interest on the home page.
"add stupid stuff"?

Doing that might make people suspect that the original document is well-written and that the "stupid stuff" was added later.
I think what most people imagine regarding physical access threats is someone booting up a live cd and copying/altering your files, or maybe attaching a hardware keylogger. I think fewer people realize that just by plugging in a firewire device to a running system someone can read and write arbitrary memory values.
"This concept is named 'universal audience' and discussed with great brilliance in a book by Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, called in English The New Rhetoric, which I much recommend."

Thanks for the reference, I'll check this out. There are definitely certain things that are always universally interesting to people, e.g. new ways their children could be in danger. The cool thing about the Internet though is that we can do things like, say, download 1M+ comments tagged 'interesting' on Slashdot and look for patterns that other people have missed.

This is also basically the way I created and validated this framework, e.g. every 'insightful' comment on Slashdot either fit into this framework, or else the framework had to be changed, or else I had to decide it wasn't really insightful. If I ever wanted to turn this into a PhD dissertation or something then I would actually do this transparently at a very large scale, so that people could easily see for themselves that it's actually a very robust and actionable model.
In Opera (depending how you designed yours): Page -> Style -> Accessibility Layout.
Physical memory attacks via Firewire/DMA
If you have the autologin feature enabled, which would you prefer: keep the password in RAM, where most people can't get it, or put it on the hard drive, which is a much easier target?
While it's clear Symbian is going nowhere in the smartphone space (it could have a temporary future in the high-volume dumbphone segment as S40 gets pushed down by better hardware) and that MeeGo took ridiculously long to mature into a non-competitive-but-cute OS, the idea to bet Nokia's future on the unlikely success of Windows Phone 7 is one of the stupidest mistakes I ever saw. The only explanation would be that this was the only way Nokia could raise the money needed to continue operating.

But this whole thing looks suspicious to the point I can risk a couple predictions:

- Microsoft will become immune to lawsuits for violating Nokia patents (either by eventually acquiring whatever will be left a couple years down the road or by licensing them for peanuts as part of a WP7-related deal). This may be particularly relevant with W8's new interface.

- The patents will be sold to a fund that will then use those patents to extort Android phone makers (Apple is probably already immune), creating a pressure for manufacturers to endorse WP7 as a patent-safe alternative

- Elop will retire or be hired by a company where Microsoft holds a stake, either directly or indirectly.
Polyphasic sleep has been discussed extensively here.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=652650

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1464142

To quote Indiana Jones, if you want the truth, go to the Philosophy department. But the evidence indicates the various kinds of polyphasic sleep discussed in those threads is a terrible idea.
There's a second problem that's popping up lately: font-face on the body text.

System fonts have been painstakingly hinted to make them more readable on-screen. Most web-embeddable fonts don't have appropriate hinting or are just plain bad choices for body text. Hoefler & Frere Jones (one of the most respected foundries around) haven't released embeddable fonts because they've been working on it for years.

The result is fuzzy text at small/medium text sizes. It's huge pain to read. It seems some designers forget that good typography is concerned with readability too.
Tales of an East Coast Software Startup
Right. It does make the $6 billion damages claim that much harder to swallow, though.
Their script went wrong towards the end, with the following text on the dark gray background with the fist on it:

"Usability expert Jakob Nielsen has shown many, many times that reading on the computer screen is harder than reading printed material even without making the font illegible. And mobile is worse.

.. and many have written about why gray text is a crime here, here, here and here...

So what we're trying to say is..."

which did rather undermine their point.
Good question. Right now, Westlaw charges something like $100 per search in ALLCASES, which is their database of all federal and state court opinions ever written. Just to retrieve a single document by citation is something like $10.

The general trick is to try to craft a very broad 'initial' search that will encapsulate all of your results; you can create sub-searches within that set of retrieved documents (limited to at most around 3,000) at no additional cost.
Idiots. A strong handling of this would be to collaboratively debunk his arguments. Censorship does not help anyone.
Andre Behrens, creator of the app here.

My inbox has been flooded over the years with effusive messages about how much people like the way this works. The only people I've ever seen complain about usability are on hacker news.

Skimmer makes extensive use of standard javascript, css3, and HTML5 technologies. So I'm not sure what standards I've broken.

I think the meaning of the Gawker debacle might be open to interpretation without further data. For one thing, you should know that users with JS disabled make up a vanishingly small part of nytimes.com's readership.

And since Skimmer has enjoyed a largely enthusiastic response from readers, it stands to reason that most users are just fine with a js-heavy app. Most of our readers, anyway.

That said, if you hate this way of doing things, the entirety of nytimes.com is there for your classic web design enjoyment, and I certainly have no problem with your continuing to use it.

I would say maybe try the app for a while before you decide. Try the different layouts. Use the arrow keys. Try it on an iPad.
B2B SEO vs. B2C SEO
SEO and User Experience Work Together
"In the end, the decision was made to NOT redirect those advanced browsers to the mobile site. You can still go to m.nyt.com if you like, we just wont force you too."

Thank you so much. Seriously. It's extremely rare for it to ever be enjoyable to use a "mobile" site on an iPhone. At least for me.

I feel like sending you a cake.

I wish there were some way to disguise the iPhone as a PC, so that no website automatically redirects me to any mobile version ever.

EDIT: For example, I just got an email saying I've been tagged in a photo on Facebook. So I go to facebook.com on my iPhone, and they've managed to completely break scrolling in their mobile version. I literally cannot scroll down on any page. 100% certain, and 100% aggravating --- and as far as I can tell, no way for me to get to the full site.
Social Signals That Affect Your SEO
How would this be for a policy?

1. Software for a general-purpose digital computer is equivalent to a mathematical algorithm, and therefore not statutory material for a patent.

2. If the all the novelty and non-obviousness in a claim is contained in software, then that claim is not patentable.

3. Software as an element of an otherwise patentable claim does not make the entire claim unpatentable. This is nothing more than the complement of 2. Don't read it in any way inconsistent with 2.

4. Don't read 3 in a way that's inconsistent with 1 and 2. Pay attention to 1, 2 and 3. They are the policy.

Like my policy? I hope so, but they'll never listen to it. If they don't listen to the Supreme Court, they won't listen to anyone. 1 is Benson, 2 is Flook, 3 is Diehr, and 4 is Bilski.
Modern Version Control With Git
No tips there - just an ad for a webinar.
The question really translates to: why companies are not taking risks today? The bigger risks are - the larger would be the profits from exploiting the risks. Creativity and innovation are huge risks but you you need to take them if you want to be successful today. "me too" strategy won't take you far. Apple is the best example for this point. Remember Steve Jobs announcing "year of copycats"?
Assistly now FREE:"Netflix could take a page out of Assistly’s book."-Techcrunch
The world needs to know his arguments in order to repeal or accept them.

He seems to be a nut, but that doesn't mean his ideas are wrong.
Platforms and Networks: Business Model Analysis, Part 5: Virality
Here is a link to the blog post which seems to be down atm.

http://sprouter.com/blog/sprouter-is-shutting-down/