skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not at all hard, it's a philosophical problem. They simply believe their concerns are more important than the users. It's not hard or complicated, they're just philosophicaly fools because they believe what they want matters. It doesn't, and they can't wrap their heads around that. It doesn't at all when customers suffer because all they get depends on customers getting what they need. It's a simple concept that they don't understand because they are deluded into thinking they are worth more, by virtue of their status and positions. A delusion that they spend most of their energy defending. You simply cannot serve two masters, and this is Capitalism at it's finest.
Having parents who own one single hotel is hardly a "vested interest".
Pitches are usually more casual with angels, but other interactions could go either way depending on the person.
According to the host of this very website, when the mainstream media (like, say, USA Today) picks up stories, it's because PR firms hit the media with stories.

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Lucrative lawsuit? Settlement? Besides the obvious terms of use which will exempt Airbnb from liability, why would EJ have said profusely that Airbnb bears no responsibility? How does that help her win a case blaming Airbnb for anything?
WTF? This guy is an idiot.

I make iOS and Android applications for a living.
It is ridiculous to have to create a service to make a few HTTP calls.
For that, Android/Java provides various threading classes so that you can keep multi-threaded code nice and neat.

With iOS, out of the box, you get NSURL and its family.
You have to setup callbacks in your class and you have to keep track of your http calls per class by using things like action=whatever. What a pain.
ASIHTTPRequest makes things much easier.

Ugh, this just makes me mad. Why would people listen to shitty developers?
Why are you spreading this ignorance?

Objective-C is a giant paint, with opaque types.
Having to remember what class you've put into a dict can get messy.

I have to work with both frameworks every day, and Android is the better framework BY FAR.
Sorry, but I think you're making the common mistake of expecting that most people will react to a particular sales tactic the way you would react to that sales tactic. Also, the example shown is absolutely a long form sales letter.

It may be true that people do not read long boring paragraphs, but I'd bet the research to which you're referring is not addressing ad copy. If it is, I'd like to see it. It is in fact well documented that long form sales letter DO convert better than short copy in many situations.

Read here for context of the example used: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2977-behind-the-scenes-highri...
I know usability is hard, but this is just an install. It's not like he's actually up to making a movie, yet.

The user "stories" (are these even stories?) should be:

1 - Bill types "movie maker" or "moviemaker" into a search box (any search box) in the Microsoft website.

2 - A button / link that says "Download Microsoft Movie Maker!" appears on the first page (preferably the first link).

3 - Bill clicks the link.

4 - A dialogue box on Bill's computer say "Do you really want install Microsoft Movie Maker?"

5 - A dialogue box asks "Do you want to make shortcuts on the desktop / start menu?".

6 - A dialogue box asks "Do you want to launch Microsoft Movie Maker now?".

That's 6 steps. People should know what they have to do, if they are getting in the way of those steps.
.-- .... .- - .- -. .. -. - . .-. . ... - .. -. --. ... - --- .-. -.-- .-.-.- .. - .- .-.. ... --- -- .- -.. . -- . - .... .. -. -.- --- ..-. .... --- .-- .... .- -- .-. .- -.. .. --- --- .--. . .-. .- - --- .-. ... .. -. - . .-. .- -.-. - .-.-.- .. -. .-- --- .-. .-.. -.. --- ..-. .-- .- .-. -.-. .-. .- ..-. - .- -... -... .-. . ...- .. .- - .. --- -. ... .- .-. . .- .-.. ... --- -.-. --- -- -- --- -. .-.. -.-- ..- ... . -.. --..-- .-.. .. -.- . .-..-. .. -. -.-. .--. .- - .-..-. .. ..-. .- .--. .-.. .- -.-- . .-. ... . . ... .- -. .. -. -.-. --- -- .. -. --. .--. .- - .-. --- .-.. --- ..-. -- --- -. ... - . .-. ... .- -. -.. -. --- - .. -.-. . ... - .... .- - .... . .. ... - .... . --- -. .-.. -.-- --- -. . .-- .... --- .----. ...- . ... . . -. - .... . -- .-.-.-
Ad hominem. Paul Carr could be the heir to half the hotels in the world, he's still got a point.
At VidCon, YouTube’s evolution becomes clear
Yoda concludes bloated these numbers are.
Can we blame Microsoft for starting the trend of top replying to emails? Since I had to scroll to the bottom of this pdf to read the original message from Bill Gates I'm going to say yes. That is a terrible usability issue I've have to deal with every day for years which I hate. I'd love to go back to the days of plain text and > indented replies.
This mail is from 3 years after Gates stepped down as CEO. I think you are trying to use this to reaffirm your personal beliefs about MSFT, rather than use this form your beliefs about the company. You seem to think that because MSFT made Gates a ton of money, the company should be perfect. The fact that you find it bizarre for a founder to be actively involved in his company's products and working to highlight areas needing improvement is, frankley, bizarre.
A number of techniques help here. These are useful whether or not you're using continuous deployment.

A simple approach is not to delete data, but rather simply set a flag which marks the data as deleted. The application storage layer acts as if this data were deleted. A separate process (changed separately) is responsible for actually purging data which has remained deleted for a certain period of time.

In any case, do you really wish to delete the data? Keep it around -- it might be useful. The only reason to delete data, outside legal concerns, is to control the cost to retain it. Given that you mostly never really want to delete data, you probably want to orient your schema toward hiding it instead. In that case, if you need to roll back application changes, you can do so by backfilling the data to restore it to a visibile status.

Keeping detailed programmatic logs is also helpful for making the backfill easy to execute. For example, in addition to your main textual log file, you keep something like a log consisting of JSON objects, one per line, each which represent the essential details of some application action.
Does the link to scribd not work (such links are inserted in brackets whenever HN detects a story going to a pdf)? It doesn't give you the pdf, so you have to read it in the browser, but it seems perfectly functional otherwise.
Cheap Flights to Amman
To me that's not a question at all. The answer is a ringing: yes, of course. I'm squarely in the 'consciousness is an emergent phenomenon of certain configurations of matter', so to me it is only a question of the technology to create those configurations.

There is matter and only matter. Humans are a configurations of matter and those specific configurations have the property we hold so dear and call 'consciousness'. There is no reason whatsoever to suppose you couldn't synthetically arrive at a configuration of matter that displays the same emergent behavior. This is the basic thesis of the famous book 'Godel, Escher, Bach' by Hofstadter. I am a strange loop. Any similar strange loop will display the same properties.

Any question to this regard probably makes you a closet Cartesian dualist. When you drill down, most people turn out to be that. (Some intermediate philosophical positions are possible, but they are subtle and rarely held consistently by someone that hasn't spent a course studying the matter in detail).

What I'm guessing in my previous post is that it may turn out that you can most easily achieve a configuration that displays consciousness by using biological materials. In that case, any future conscious machine would probably have a core of material similar to our brain. Which more poignantly raises the ethical questions related to creating such machines.

(BTW, note we are conflating 'any consciousness' and 'intelligent consciousness' by focusing on humans)
I don't think you can blame capitalism for this. Apple does this stuff right, and they make money.

[aside: I paid $15 for iMovie 11 the other day, and I think I entered my App store password to confirm purchase, iMovie dropped into my dock, done.]

Continuing, it's more likely that MS execs, managers, just have the wrong incentives. I have never worked at MS, but I'd imagine you get promoted for having people under you, for shipping software, for meeting deadlines. None of these things directly address user experience.

Is there even a high level user experience person at Microsoft, outside of say, XBox, which obviously does have some serious UX work in it?

edit: for q mark.
I actually noticed someones comment turning grey today but I did not know why. I do not think that is in the FAQ.

What does this mean:

"no comment receives downvotes for more than 24 hours."?
jacquesm just said that it wasn't a veiled suggestion at all. He pointed out to her that she was publicly identifying herself already.

Considering that EJ was already in communication with AirBnB customer service and CEO, and has been publicly asking for more attention from AirBnB, she wouldn't be too surprised that another one of the founding leaders would get involved.
If she is lying, AirBnB can sue her for defamation. At the very least, there's some wacky timeline here - she blogs that AirBnB have done nothing, AirBnB respond by offering her something, then tell everyone that "Look, it's not like that, we made an offer to fix up her place". Which is really dodgy.

I suspect that AirBnB are telling themselves "We did no wrong, we didn't trash her appartment, she's a litigious who is dragging our name though the mud". Fair enough. Grow up, you are running a company that is going disrupt the hotel industry - get used to it. Everyone else in hospitality is capable of dealing with ugly situations. Many of them remain good people, despite the ugliness.

I really doubt that AirBnB are a bunch of "nice" people though. Their business is basically illegal in virtually every state. They might be charismatic. They might even have good intentions. But I doubt they are all stereotypical Boy Scouts (as opposed to real Boy Scouts, who are often capable of being very streetsmart, if the situation calls for it).
While I don't think it's relevant to the overall point of Carr's piece, it is still a vested interest. Carr's parents might be very small-time players in the hotel industry, but the hotel industry is a large portion of their livelihood, which is the relevant factor.
Yes, this is the proverbial 'possum under the floor' problem.

No one really has the power to change any of this stuff, without buy-in, and relinquishment of power across a shitload of teams.

Ergo, it can't be done unless BillG or SteveB personally knocks a lot of heads together.
I think it's important to remember that revenue represents how much any capitalist society truly values a contribution, as measured in limited resources we're willing to devote to its success. I think everyone talks a good game about things we wish were important to us yet demonstrably are not, which just encourages people to waste time on projects which will surely fail due to an indifference we feel but can't admit to. Some of HN already views yet more trivial mobile-social-photo-gamification entertainment with distaste, as if we're too good for that work, but I try not to confuse my own disapproval with the stark fact that the crowd does want more of that stuff. I think the real trick is striking a balance between what you want to do and what society wants from you, and believing what we claim to want (but aren't paying for) or what we claim we aren't interested in (yet is somehow in demand) can trick you into a dead end.
"By TechCrunch.com, Published: July 26"
I have Alfred assigned to Option+Space, since I actually use Spotlight for things (though not launching applications).
Please change the title. The article's to do with who is to blame for the East African famine.
They're not mutually exclusive: you want basic correctness/design review of course (my favored approach is now pre-integration code review + authoritative master/master-always-deployable), but a proper feature-flagging system will let you beta or A/B test potentially incorrect (in a code-correctness, performance, or UX sense) changes gradually in the real world. Binary (on/off for everybody) flags are more the exception than the rule.

Server affinity + staged rollouts are another approach, but for long timeframes (e.g. A/B UX tests, feature prototypes) I'd think you'd want to go with flagging anyway from a codebase management point of view.

Some things do take more effort to make dynamically flaggable than it would take cost to delay integration, to be fair. Judgement call.
A perennial classic. While I would say that Windows usability has improved significantly since 2004 (when the mail was written) it's shocking see how the big kanuna's own company became too mired in politics and bureaucracy for even a fire lit directly by Bill under his underling's asses to take 5 years to make a difference.

That's one of the advantages of a distro like Ubuntu: while you may disagree with Shuttleworth's decisions, and while the quality of early releases of supposedly stable software is questionable at best, at least the man can make a decision and see it become reality in 6 months.
Quick advice, that has nothing to do with AirBnB specifically:

> I had the opportunity to hear the founders speak a number of times. They're one of the very few founders that are incredibly genuine about bringing a positive change into the lives of their customers.

Don't judge someone's genuineness by listening to them speak or promoting their testimonials. Watch what they actually do.
Foxconn to employ 1 Million Robots
See point 8 in the article above.

I think Airbnb should be heavily criticized for their inactivity in the Somali crisis.

Also, I think everyone should try and keep things in perspective.
I have a less convoluted way of beating procrastination: just do it!

Because if it's important enough to you you'll make it happen. If you don't, you don't, and perhaps it was not meant to be because there's something you lack. Excuses can be endless and fractal if you dissect them enough. Just make it happen. And once you do, you may find it satisfying enough in comparison that you'll be more likely to take initiative again in the future, creating a virtuous circle. But in short:

Just do it!
No, I totally don't get the Economist. People always tell me to read it. Smart people. Then I read it, and it's like a 9th grader's book report, as you say. It's a hair better than Time magazine or Newsweek.
جريدة الديار اللبنانية - نتنياهو يجبر ثلاث صحافيات على خلع حمالات الصدر
Just because it's in your head, does not mean it's not real!

(I have no idea if CFS is "in your head" or not. But even if it is, it can still be totally real.)
LaunchRock is sort of a victim of its own success. Now that every startup wannabe has a hipster.com like landing page, we're all getting sick of it and looking for something better.
Soft-delete (+ action logs) for data recovery. Also, code review and lots and lots of tests.

For schema changes, there are a bunch of approaches. Just a few:

* Treat (non-purely additive) schema changes as a special case and take extra care deploying them. (This sounds like a cop-out, but it might be the right effort tradeoff for many startups.)

* Write forwards and reverse migrations for each change, and avoid data-losing schema changes.

* Implement all (or all non-purely additive) schema changes by shadowing data operations onto a new version of the schema (asynchronously migrate all previous data onto the new schema in some back-end process.) Write tests to verify the migration/shadowed data is correct. Switch data reads to be on the new schema. Eventually delete the old schema in a subsequent deploy after an appropriate stabilization/verification period.

I find #3 to be the most general, but there's plenty of overhead (computational, storage and man-hour) that may not be appropriate for your case.
3 steps to getting featured on Hacker News
To answer you, yes actually it is. Innocent until proven guilty, and all the language patterns in the world can't change that?
I find that a "100% natural orange" tastes pretty crappy if it sits on a shelf for 2 weeks before I eat it. Plenty of 100% natural stuff tastes bad.

You might further be shocked to learn that all-natural organic farm fresh-squeezed juice might have actually been pressed out of the fruit by a mechanical juicer that ruins the test, and not squeezed out by loving hands.

What's wrong with a product label that calls things what they actually are, instead redefining all nice sounding words to be "stuff that tastes good to praptak"?
Summify
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/summify/id446082229?mt=8&...
You even skipped right over the Amazon affiliate link to the cookbook.
Where is our humanity?
Absolutely. Have you seen some of the "off the cuff" town hall style meetings he's had? The one before the release of OSX was telling, he repeatedly said that if he were making the decisions, he'd do X, but he's not. It was very eye opening that sometimes it isn't all Steve's fault (of course it isn't.)

Likewise, it's amazing to see that it isn't all Bill's fault. Here he is advocating passionately for a huge change in usability and getting nowhere. Lots of these problems still haven't been solved as of Windows XP (Vista/7 have fixed a lot of update quirks by virtue of being a native app.)
You can email me your solution at justin@milo.com and I'll take a look. We just started doing the challenge with that site and there are probably kinks in the grading.
that's what i'm saying, so that's also why the company is responsible, i think
You must be terrified at the presence of numerals and quotation marks in programming languages.

Here's the doc on Collection Literals, BTW.

https://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddv8ts74_4cbnn5mhj

Collection Literals are actually better than string literals, because they only enforce an interface, not an implemenation.
> That's not "talking to reporters."

http://travel.usatoday.com/destinations/dispatches/post/2011...

"Meanwhile, I communicated by email and by phone late Friday with a woman who said she was "EJ," a corporate events planner who later asked me not to be identified by name because of her continuing fears that other suspects may still be at large and because of the online furor surrounding her experience. (She also said she was speaking to the San Francisco Chronicle, and I confirmed portions of her information with the San Francisco police department.)"
Paul Carr fails at being a decent human being.

Three blocks down the street, someone's husband got killed a month ago and the lone mother can't make ends meet with three children to take care of. Someone elderly lost all her children, whom she counted on to take care of her in her old day. Some fourteen year old orphan living on the streets just got raped. They are all hungry and alone.

That's just down the street. In Somalia, children are dying of hunger by the hundreds. In between those fates, there is plenty of suffering that's much, much worse than some incident where someone with plenty of friends, funds, food and a future had a bad experience.

Basically decent human beings put things in perspective and reserve judgment. They try to support EJ by calling upon AirBnB to take certain actions and lament it when that doesn't happen. What they don't do is make this into the worlds current biggest problem and act as if those not taking their proposed actions are minions of Satan himself. Someone disagrees with you on how to handle this case: big deal. If you're so convinced you're right: strike a deal with EJ to fund her trial costs and be repaired after she gets compensated. Put your money where your mouth is and preferably instead of where your mouth is currently. Basically decent human beings don't get their way by shouting the loudest from a high profile website.

The people that trashed that house suck. Michael Arrington and Paul Carr suck for their inflammatory and unconstructive reporting. AirBnB sucks for not handling the situation more gracefully: for God's sake, hire someone specialized in disaster mitigation. There's dozens of people out there that do nothing else but resolve such cases. Throw a cool 150K in and be done with it. Your worst mistake is trying to handle this personally.

But all of this really should not be so important to the vast majority of us that the top stories for the past few days have been about this case. A reasoned analysis of the various ways in which AirBnB could (have) handle(d) this situation and the ethical and business consequences of those ways, that's something that would be interesting. Mud slinging and shouting matches aren't, even if some reasonable arguments are being shouted all ways.
"Here's where you're taking it: she's not the victim, AirBnB is the victim. She's the "extremely difficult customer," or as Robert Scoble put it, "batshit crazy" and a "drama queen." She's not a victim, she's just a bitch. Right. I don't like demonizing victims, but I know in the male-dominated tech world this kind of framing is an easy sell."

This is your problem. You're thinking in terms of "victims" and "villains" when, instead, you should be thinking about the available facts and information.

"There's been conflicting reports about this."

- good news! We've been updated.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2822721

That is the latest report from pg/airbnb.
Foxconn to replace workers with 1 million robots in 3 years
Other reports of this story:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2818847 <- This has all the comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2822935

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2822162

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2823776

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2823808

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2823947

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2823949
Well, it is called The Economist. If you expect to read intelligent analysis of medical conditions, I suggest you look elsewhere. The Economist is good at providing analysis of economical and business matters. I read it for those components and ignore the rest.
> I suspect that AirBnB are telling themselves "We did no wrong, we didn't trash her appartment, she's a litigious who is dragging our name though the mud". Fair enough. Grow up, you are running a company that is going disrupt the hotel industry - get used to it. Everyone else in hospitality is capable of dealing with ugly situations. Many of them remain good people, despite the ugliness.

On the one hand you admit they are disrupting the hotel industry, so they should suck it up and suffer random abuse yet remain good guys and totally affable. (But you wouldn't say the same to the woman).

On the other hand you presume them to be evil and say that their business is "illegal in every state" (which it isn't).

Don't you think that's a mite contradictory?
Come on now.

> products that bring intense pain to it users

I'm a Mac user and I love Office (over OO and iWork).

> as frustrated as anyone else about the problem

It's not "a" problem. It's a large organization with tons of products, and some are more sucky then the rest.

> is completely powerless to stop it

He wasn't the CEO anymore when he wrote this. Also, even if he were the CEO, he can't go in and fix every annoyance himself. He's a leader, he needs people underneath him to do a good job. When they're not, he needs to remind them, that's what this email is.

> is drowning in money coming from his mistakes

If it weren't for Bill Gates, we might not be having this conversation...

> Microsoft has been a slow-motion train wreck for 15 years

Have you looked at Win7? It's pretty good. C# 4.0 is much better than Java. Visual Studio kills anything else on the IDE market. Xbox rocks. A friend just got a Win7 phone, and the UI/UX seems to work very well, better than Android, about as good as iOS.