skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Without a doubt the new site looks way better, Mike Kus does some amazing work. However, in the process I think a lot of things have happened here that probably would lead to more user confusion or drops in conversion than the old design. Design is more than just making it pretty, its also making it usable and making it convert.

A few specific examples...

1. I find the point about contrast in the article to be completely false. There is a more muted palette but I disagree that brown on black is higher contrast than red on white.

2. The mini-circles around the redeem button are just distracting from the primary call to action on that screen, do they do anything? Why would you trade the location name for buttons that don't do anything?

http://o7.no/pwkxA9 [png]

3. The homepage no longer has a single clear call to action ("send a giftrocket"), if you increase the number of possible users paths on a page it will almost always lead to reduced conversion. Your homepage has 19 things I can click on above the fold. (For point of comparison Square and LivingSocial have 5, Groupon has 4). Does anyone give a GiftRocket by clicking on the categories and browsing?
Thanks for your input but that "marketing strategy" lacks a certain amount of clear execution that I'll be needing to rapidly gain solid market share. Why sit around "hoping" for signups when I can guarantee registrations?
The 55 mile range was calculated by Tesla's engineers, not Top Gear's. So, Tesla Motors should be pissed at its own engineers and no one else.
I think it's fair to withhold judgment until we have a better idea of impact on conversion, etc.

1. For us, that's exactly what we wanted. It's Mike Kus' style applied to our product.

2. The mobile app actually looks quite different. If you visit www.giftrocket.com on your phone, it's a functional version of our website. The phone app comparisons were of one specific screen within the redemption flow.
This actually reminded me of Stargate SG-1 - everywhere they went they popped open a chunky Dell machine and started typing.

(It's an interesting thought that it would have cost about $50,000 to get that laptop into space, weight-wise.)
There are 3 ways to use media types in web APIs. http://blog.kevburnsjr.com/domain-specific-media-types-and-r...

0 domain specific media types (application/json)
1 domain specific media type (application/vnd.github+json)
many domain specific media types (application/vnd.github-issue.text+json, ...)

GitHub's v3 API uses the latter.
You can't have functions with the same parameters, but ASP.NET MVC gives you a way around this using attributes. See this SO question. http://goo.gl/wJ4jE

Does that solve what you were talking about?
In the case of the US, you can improve this further:

Find a friend who lives near a Mitsuwa, JAS Mart, or similar Japanese grocery (there are several here in NYC).

Have him buy the candy there in bulk (enough to fill all the US-bound orders anyway), and use the relatively cheap USPS flat-rate shipping to send it to US subscribers.

i.e., avoid buying in Japan (which is more expensive b/c of VAT) and avoid shipping from Japan; the chain groceries have done the hard work for you, so you can reap the benefits.
Cool, but I don't understand $1,300 locks. If somebody can breech a permitter and actually physically get to the door I think maybe you should allocate resources elsewhere.
Good software patent: MP3
i wonder if they gave up on thinkpads when lenovo bought the division, as some US government agencies did.

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/space/space_think...
There seems to be one consistency in all these kinds of stories. The moral, it seems, is: if you want to have security, do not buy what your government does.
Even there it really depends on the kind of game (and target platform). I would say that for a lot of indie games, worrying about low-level programming shouldn't be high on your list. In fact many indie-game developers are exactly the kinds of people who do love to worry about such things, when perhaps their time would be better spent making sure anybody wants to play their game, and/or finding a way to market it--- most indie games don't fail because of bad performance.

An exception might be if the game's core gameplay mechanic is fundamentally based around doing some trick on a console or handheld device that can't be done without careful optimization.
What about requiring interaction from purchaser.

Require a photo of the purchase.

It would add a level of social obligation. You could go further and require a tweet explaining the purchase. You could even add a little homily about good manners and not being greedy to the explanatory text.

I think you are doing a very interesting experiment with new financial entities, and I'm curious to see where this leads.
And Starbucks shuts this down in 5... 4... 3... 2...
Linux has tsocks and proxychains which override the connect() method with a LD_PRELOAD library and force traffic to go through a socks proxy. Easier than iptables since at least proxychains can be installed with apt-get on Ubuntu(don't know about other OSes).
These locks are frequently meant to keep out / track people you already pay to be inside a physical perimeter.
I'm stuck on the randomized rewards right now, looking for enough iron to help my friend finish his ambitious minecart rail system, and simultaneously for 'enough' diamond.
I've created a Haskell implementation of his API: http://rawr.mschade.me/jonathanscard/

The page on Rawr includes a basic usage example as well as links to my implementation on GitHub and Hackage.
I Wish I Had a Portal Gun, the animated rap (via codinghorror))
My opinion is that the current air is great for light weight development and travel, but not so good for heavy development. My use case is probably different then most, as I run 2 linux VMs, 1 win7 VM Xcode, Eclipse IDE, Xcode IDE, Komodo IDE, Adobe CS Suite and compile java, c, c++ in millions of lines of code. I'm currently working on a 17" mbp on 8gb ram and 480GB ssd. I'm usually 12 gb into swap, so I would love 16gb. I heard that the 15" air is in the pipeline, so that might be a good option.
Usability considerations play a large role when designing complex interfaces. Complexity pretty much has to be reduced and errors have to be displayed in a way that makes it possible to actually deal with them, especially in emergencies. Everything just lighting up may be nice for situations when there’s time to investigate but certainly not when time is critical. Yet wrong decisions become more likely when all the facts in all detail are not known so there is also a right balance to strike.

There is an interesting talk which explores UI problems in airplanes (not quite Space Shuttles but also with a lot of buttons and, as far as the UI is concerned, with a lot of similar elements): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlEcCfEakro
A very good response, glad to see it on SO. It's also worth mentioning that decorators can be classes.
Use them to buy your own coffees and whenever you do, add the value of the coffee to the card?
SmcFanControl: Keeping Your Mac Cool!
I'd say that depends on what you mean by "ultimate". The Turing machine is the most fundamental abstraction in CS, sure. But it's not that much of an abstraction of my laptop. My laptop has state, it has instructions, each instruction takes it from one state to another. It doesn't have infinite resources, but for most of my purposes it might as well.

So since my metaphor was obviously unclear, the point I'm getting at is why would I want to be "punching tape" (writing assembly or C instructions) for a "Turing machine" (a physical computer with unlimited resources that executes one — okay, two — instructions at a time) when I could instead tell a robot (a high-level programming language) what I want it to do, and let the robot figure out the individual instructions to make that happen?

And just for future reference, "You know that #{thing I assume you don't know}, right?" is a really douchey way to pretend to try to educate somebody.
This might be true for patents, but don't forget that copyright is (mostly) free. If any band, indie developer, unsuccessful writer and amateur photographer would have to pay such large fees for simply owning their works, what would happen?
I can confirm it was he.net fremont 1. around 2Kw of my servers went down too.

Fremont 1 has been ridiculously unreliable lately; several outages a year; almost as bad as my home power.

Note, for both linode and myself, this is only one data center. I know for me, this is a small fraction of my total servers, and I'm looking at getting out sometime between now and when my contract is up in October.

Can linode let you choose your data center? If you can choose, I would encourage you to leave fremont 1. I know I'm going to start encouraging my own customers to do so.

My understanding is that Fremont 2 is newer and has much more reliable power; It's only a few blocks away, so I'm considering just moving there. My other option is to leave he.net entirely.
Weird how they assume the pilot is left handed...
Yeah, UI/graphics are a big learning curve for DF. It's great for people who were into roguelikes before they found it, but even so. Tile-sets make visualization a lot easier (although if you've gotten into the game without one then they might be unbearable), but they're not perfect. The main problem I have with Stonesense is that, whenever I've tried it, the latest version of DF wasn't supported - as I understand it, the memory offsets change with each version, since all of these tools work by looking at what DF has in memory, so with each new release someone has to go in and figure out the changes.

I remember seeing a 3D visualizer for DF a while back. After a quick trip to the Wiki (an invaluable resource), here it is: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=63484.0
Just to be clear: I'm not criticizing Github for using a custom format. It's obviously the what makes more sense for their business.

But in terms of a REST API, the proper solution would be to use a standard format.
That's the plan. I'll make another post when the site is up and perhaps a few folks won't mind blogging/tweeting to keep future devs/designers from being scammed by this guy.
Ok, but what are you suggesting? An empty network with each user having maybe 5-10 friends within the first 24 hours? Won't last.

Bottom line is this: If "Johnny" can't find something on that cute brunette from Arts 101, We're toast. Get it?

I'm not trying to make full profiles for inactive users. I'm simply searching for a method to allow "Johnny" to find "Katy" within seconds of joining my social network. He clicks "add", she gets an email message. Done.
Out of curiosity, every 15 coffees people buy, does Starbucks send you a coupon for a free drink in the mail?
How do you manage to get an effective 40% tax rate in California? I could see that as a marginal rate on the last few dollars, but you'd have to make in the millions to get there for your overall tax rate.

For example, if you make $100k and take only the standard deduction, you'll pay $19k in federal taxes (19%) and $6k in California taxes (6%), for 25% total. If you include payroll taxes, that's another ~7.5%, so 32.5%. Of course, many people take much larger deductions than the standard deduction, so pay considerably less.
one workaround is to make your decorators require keyword arguments (which often makes good sense from a documentation POV). you can then add a first keyword argument as gatekeeper, with default value None, and check whether it has been defined. if so, the decorator was used incorrectly.

you can see what i mean here - http://code.google.com/p/lepl/source/browse/src/lepl/matcher...

this doesn't fix the problem completely, of course, but it does mean that a user that types @foo instead of @foo() gets a helpful warning explaining exactly what they have done wrong.
I don't agree that ACSOI makes sense. Marketing isn't just the initial customer acquisition cost. It's also a substantial expense that keeps existing customers active, engaged and profitable. If it was just about customer acquisition then we'd never see an ad for Tylonel, Coke or Budweiser.

Fortunately Groupon is issuing a new S-1 tomorrow, so it's likely that those who are looking for more information will get it.
Because he gets a lot of free coffee rebates.
Thanks for the feedback. This isn't the first time we've heard this.
Friendly word of warning to the site owners: whatever you're doing is tripping so many malware alerts in my browser/plug-ins that I couldn't even get as far as reading your article (which is a shame, because it sounded interesting).

FYI, I'm not running anything particularly unusual, and I have never seen that kind of effect on a page before with this browsing set-up. Either (a) you've been "0wn3d" or (b) you really need to tone down the scripting to an acceptable level or (c) you're probably going to put off a significant number of people who might otherwise be interested in your site.
As you can see there are a lot of big screens and very few actual buttons and switches in that photo. It looks like the four keyboards are the bulk of the buttons. I would be curious to know how modal those screens are and how much information they can display at one point in time. It doesn’t look like they can display much and I can’t imagine that it’s fun to go hunting for necessary information in an emergency. Depending on how that works it might be a usability nightmare, one can only hope that Airbus does plenty of UI testing.

(In that context an interesting question is what this interface is optimized for. It may work great on normal flights – that’s nearly all of them, by the way – but break down horribly in emergencies. I guess the UI design rule of designing for the common and not the rare case doesn’t really apply here.)
You won't get any support from Google. (EDIT: Unless your post hits HN and someone from Google happens to read it.)

If you rely on your Google Voice number for business, or even personal use, the solution is to port your number now to a reliable provider that has customer service before issues arise with Google Voice.

The process is relatively straightforward. Some directions can be found here: http://kevinpaffrath.com/2011/06/22/port-number-google-voice...

Google Voice is great for nonessential purposes. If your business depends on it, then you're best served by porting your number and choosing reliability.
I'm in Australia, I just chose armed forces pacific and added a leading 0 to my zip code. A bit dodgy but it worked
Whoa. That's odd. I think it should be illegal for the government to rely / depend on illegal behavior to make money. Otherwise, it seems like a conflict of interest in that there is no incentive to tackle the root cause of crime anymore.
The 4 things you need to prove to become an investable company
AuthorsGoogle: George R.R. Martin
SEEKING FREELANCER (Bay Area San Francisco, California, USA)

Looking for freelancers who are expert in PHP/MySQL AJAX, etc. I need someone to help me enhance and implement ideas on a social networking I am building on.

Must be local to Bay Area San Francisco, no exception. Please email to

rush.tea@gmail.com

Thanks.
I've had people search for my email address on facebook, which I have an account for but really don't use. I've also recently gotten an email indicating someone was looking for my email on Twitter. I considered signing up for it but couldn't get the info I needed to feel comfortable with it so never finished the process, even though I was flattered that this person was interested in following what I am up to. Maybe you could do a notification email like Twitter sends when someone searches and you don't yet have an account but with a better explanation of it all so the invitee feels more motivated/comfortable? IE try Twitter's approach but try to improve on their model.
Why is Android brand better than Android phone
What about soviet pop culture art? magazines? Oddities?Russia seems like such an interesting place, I would reconsider your idea.
I think you might be blindly giving them credit that isn't due. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2857088

tl;dr: the ad won them $400k in a competition, though it was never aired, and the setup existed for only 2 1/2 hours. Despite that:

>The Cannes Lions festival, called the Olympics of advertising, strictly limits submissions to advertisements that have actually been run in the media.

I don't quite think that's respecting their competition.
It only feels wrong because you think of them as decorators without arguments and decorators with arguments: they really are decorators stored in variables and decorators computed by function calls. :)
Not really all that different from an jet airplane cockpit. I'm an aviation enthusiast, btw.
I've been notified for what amounted to two minutes of downtime before (my VPS is in the London data centre). Are you in the Fremont data centre? That is where this outage was.
Do people lose interest in programming as they age
Wrong. There is always a way to do something right. FB added a few thousand Harvard students into one directory. Were they wrong?

I know. I'm asking only because I think I have a better site, a better business model and passion for connecting people. I can do this better.
The fonts on the new version are less readable.
Logo in gold on yellowish/cream background? its the same color category!

Black on weird textured background for the body? do not use textures for background - like - ever - if you're going to write text on it

Then gold text on cream again.

Design legend much?

The rest is ok and there's some actually good tips but what I listed is totally noobish.
The homily sounds like a good idea; that's been shown to actually deter some in the past.

To the other points: how would you go about mandating a photo or any other form of interaction from the purchaser? Jonathan has his card picture posted on the website–Starbucks simply accepts that photo as payment, there's no authorization process in the middle where Jonathan could selectively let some use it while disallowing others.
I've never played Minecraft before, but that video of fire spreading through that Minecraft structure & surrounding trees is frighteningly realistic.

I recently got training in a volunteer neighborhood emergency response organization (CERT, in case you're interested) and they showed a video of how quickly a fire can spread. It's truly frightening.

I found my heart racing when I watched that Minecraft fire just like when I watched a real fire on video.
But then the product he's delivering isn't special, and if he did that I would never subscribe.
I agree with you, except for the dates. It seems to me that worrying about programmer productivity over performance is a phase that we're coming out of. Mobile devices, with less memory and slower CPUs & GPUs than the desktop PCs we're used to are the hardware platform du jour. Also, more people are having to worry about scalability which goes hand in hand with performance: it's not just about smart algorithm choices, kids...
So he makes an excellent point, especially for the long run, but I must admit the tech sector is not currently facing serious job issues. Of course it would probably be more beneficial to the economy and to society to have Google hiring employees instead of buying patents, but that's not going to save Detroit.
To me, programming is a way of bringing your ideas into reality. At first, it is fun to do it all yourself.

After awhile, I've discovered that I have more ideas than I can physically bring into reality myself. Then, the time sunk into programming, although fun, can be the bottleneck. So I understand eventually delegating the programming to others and having more time to directly explore and see my ideas come into life through managing others.

When I was younger I never thought this would be the case.
Ok, so you can "parse" it, which is just a way of saying you can transform a bunch of bytes to a nested structure consisting of a few basic types (dicts, lists, strings, floats, etc). Now what? What can you (or actually your program, not you as a human) do with it without some sort of schema, explicit or implicit?
A large part of our industry is self-taught. You don't need a specific degree to get a good job - or even a degree at all. Some bigger companies are a bit more formal (e.g. Google, Microsoft) and prefer hiring graduates, but even they look at merit before academic background. There are some jobs that benefit from academic experience, e.g. being a quant on Wall Street, but math or physics is a lot more useful for that than CS. If want to work in a field like that (or want to keep your options open) I'd recommend doing the double major or alternatively just major in math, while polishing your CS skills by working on open source software and maybe a few CS courses.

Getting a job out of college or differentiating yourself shouldn't be the prime motivator for this decision (if considered at all). Whichever way you graduate, you will be fine. It isn't like you're trying to decide between majoring in pottery class at a community college and going to med school. Future employers will be a lot more impressed by the depth of your understanding of your field than how many classes you took and the extra curricular activities are even more important (e.g. open source, internships, personal projects).
Actually, you can create a provisioning profile and ask the user to install it.

http://support.apple.com/kb/dl851
http://support.apple.com/kb/dl926
I think it's the combination of creativity and struggle against nature. There have been many games about one or the other but I've never seen one that combined them as Minecraft does. Natural resources fuel your projects and your projects help you control nature. It's a game about the very essence of humanity.
How do you decide between New York and San Francisco as a base for a startup?
Oh, it's simple: I haven't found a single one. Amazon, however, does a much better job with their store. Even Ebay does alright, with seller ratings (no developer ratings in the app store? wtf, just keep scamming!).

That non-letter characters would put things at the beginning of alphabetical lists should have been forseen and accounted for (or ignored) from the very earliest planning stages, the instant they decided to have an alphabetical listing somewhere. That constantly releasing updates would keep them at the top of the "new" list should have been seen the instant they decided to have a "new" list in the first place, and an app's position weighed against the frequency of its release. That borderline-shady developers would continue to produce borderline-shady applications should have been seen the instant they decided to allow a developer / company to submit more than one application, and steps taken to help either Apple or consumers identify potential problems.

Meanwhile, we have this.

They have left gaping holes to exploit the system, and they've existed for three years in the largest app store out there by a massive margin. There's no way to get around that being shameful.