skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Design to me is a mix of art and science. This article is simple math. It's hard to take such a design philosophy seriously without any supporting evidence to explain why the human brain doesn't find some simple concepts intuitive:

- Things are different at the edges
- Objects with text underneath are taller than ones without
- Temporary features (pop ups etc) at the forefront of attention are a different size to things in the background
- Things inside a clear frame might follow different, contrasting proportions to those outside

I'm not a designer but I am a drummer. Rhythm-by-the-numbers is boring. Good rhythm plays around the edges, and within the same beat (say four to the bar) people enjoy different beats laid on top (say, three beats). You can speed up and slow down, emphasise boundaries by adding a little extra time to the last beat of the bar, etc. Is visual design any different? Don't designers use the word "rhythm" precisely because it is a good metaphor?

None of this says Apple that has got it right. But the criticism just doesn't seem to have an aesthetic foundation.
Apple Released iOS 5 beta 6 Firmware For iPhone,iPad & iPod touch[Direct Links]
it's increasingly clear that groupon is essentially a ponzi scheme with some graphic design. can't wait for the post mortem documentary a la "the smartest guys in the room".
Practical tips to eat tasty meals without using salt
Those are probably the worst two countries to choose as an example. Germany and France have a huge influence on the EU.
SimpleBits / Adapted
We're OpenX, located in Pasadena, CA.

We're willing to relocate, and the internship length is flexible. The internships are paid.

We wrote an ad server and have our own ad exchange. We also wrote our own time-series datastore (Erlang and C). Most of our code is Erlang, Java, and C. We're using Cassandra, Riak, CouchDB, Hadoop, and others.

We have datacenters in the US (east/west), EU, and Japan. We handle billions of requests a day, and get a couple hundred milliseconds on each one to determine which ad is the best one to serve. A typical request will hit eight backends in that time period. If that sounds fun, you can reach me at joel at openx . com.
New iPad with retina display coming out early 2012?
I disagree with this approach. Making things so dumbed down only accentuates the depth of the learning curve. By the time I can write code to do something worthwhile, I'll have gray hair. Just show me a python project that can help me play WOW better and show me what to tweak. By the time I get into it, I'll have learned a lot just by reading the comments in the code - and maybe some hyperlinks to web pages that explain what is going on-e.g. pointers, linked lists,etc)
Apple may have altered the Galaxy S picture aswell
Dynamically Generated Forms and HTML5
ReminderMedia in King of Prussia, PA (near Philly) is the publisher of American Lifestyle magazine.

We're looking for a local intern to help us get Puppet up and running this fall. Experience with Linux is really the only pre-requisite. Definitely paid and 16 weeks is our normal internship length but we're flexible.

You can email me directly at jcampbell@remindermedia.com

http://remindermedia.com/careers/internship
I got the opposite idea from that book. I remember it explaining that ants (or perhaps it was something else) would cooperate because often they all had the same DNA, and so were working to propagate the same genes.
It's not totally essential but trips outside the city are 2-3x slower without a car. When you factor in wait times and switching trains/buses, you can spend half the day in transit to do a trip which only takes 40 minutes each way in a car.

Also, many destinations in the surrounding area are suburban or semi-rural. You need the car when you get there, because where you actually want to go is not usually near the transit station.

For example, it was theoretically possible for me to take public transport from SF to TechShop in Menlo Park, but it involved 2 hours of trains and a very limited bus service or 45 minute walk through an industrial park. Or, I could just drive there in 40 minutes.
Sounds like it changed health care for the people living in those two zip codes who don't want to go through the insurance company. Woohoo, but I'm still hosed.
Reading the paper posted at https://www.datenschutzzentrum.de/facebook/facebook-ap-20110... it seems if he finds a judge who understands it he could very well get an injunction prohibiting websites from deploying a working like button to german users. Failure to comply would result in a fine of 50.000€ under current law. Of course it would only be enforceable on websites hosted in germany. I don't agree with his assertion that he can apply the german TMG (TeleMedienGesetz) to Facebook since they have no hosting presence in Europe, as far as I know. And even then there would still be the trouble of enforcing it.

I actually think that would be a good thing, I don't like being tracked through the like button if I forgot to log out.
As the owner of a design firm, and a designer for UI for the past ten years, I think this article misses the point. Grids are a means to an end. That end is functional and visually pleasing usability.

The samples in this article show less functional, less visually pleasing UIs.
Remember "Dabblers and Blowhards"
http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm
'Retweet' and 'woot' make Oxford dictionary debut
And Innovator's Dilemma was written like fifteen years ago. I'm pretty sure anyone at any position of authority understands the concept. That's not what stops large companies from being disruptive. It's fear, bureaucracy, risk aversion, any number of things. But it's not because they've never heard of disruption before.

So, I stand by my point that the value proposition for the sentiment "be disruptive" is equal to that of "just win," namely: zero.
The Best Forms Implementation I've Ever Built
Fog Creek Software, NYC

We're hiring co-ops and interns for Fall 2011 and (soon) for Summer 2012. We love expert coders in all languages (we use lots of C#, python, JS, but we're flexible). Internships are paid and tend to be 10-14 weeks, and include housing among other perks.

Learn more at http://www.fogcreek.com/Jobs/SummerIntern.html (it doesn't mention the fall, but just email us!)
Trolling is not cool, man.
The "gift" is borderline-masochistic obsession coupled with good abstract thinking.
HP has neither balls nor brains
Simple is beautiful
I just wanted to express that simple looking site like this can look beatiful too. There are too many sites in the net with all graphics, widgets and images, but many times all I need to see is just the main content.
That was my point in the first place.
With only a few exceptions, privacy and data protection is handled on the state (or Länder) level in Germany. (One exception to this is the federal government and its data protection.)

He would have to convince his fifteen colleagues to make this a Germany-wide thing. Handling this on the federal level is not even possible in Germany, the federal data protection appointee has nothing to say about such matters.
Future of Python programming language on a Linux platform
All very interesting, but it sounds like one thing this area is missing are the apps and social media links that might help grow the 22% part of their audience into an even larger share. I presume there are folks on here who could help fix that :-)
Why isn't writing software like chess or sport?

The highest ranked player in the world is twenty years old. Any local chess club is full of people who have studied the game for years but failed to break 1400. I've taught people who were just incapable of the most rudimentary strategic thinking and people who just naturally saw things that it took me years to learn.

The evidence is clear that there are people in the world who just can't solve FizzBuzz, many of them people with degrees in CS. Some people just seem unable to grok the basic abstraction of programming. What if that isn't a binary state, but just one extreme of a spectrum?

I can run 10k in 40 minutes any day of the week, but I sprint like an asthmatic Samoan. I just have distance genes, nothing I can do to change it. No amount of training would ever make me a competitive sprinter. I've got too little fast twitch fibre, I'm too short, too lean, my heart and lungs are too small. Is it completely implausible to suggest that there are cognitive equivalents that would pertain to programming?

Why couldn't mental stamina be as genetically ingrained as physical stamina? There are obviously natural geniuses in our field, why not natural dunces?
I remember this happening 5 years ago, but instead of a bunch of salesmen frantically searching for businesses to pitch couponing to, it was mortgage brokers pitching exotic loans to home buyers.

I'll go out on a limb and guess that most of Groupon's sales team consists of ex-mortgage brokers and washed-up real estate agents.
Yes, advice can indeed be "be disruptive", just as good advice includes "do it right" (which far too many don't and know it).

If you're saying that there are people who know they're doing it wrong, but keep doing it wrong anyway, I don't think advising them to "do it right" is going to change anything. Likewise disruption.
Google, please be the webOS white knight
How to Protect Your Eyes When Using a Computer
Respectfully, I don't think you appreciate the scale of huge companies and the requirements for the software and suppliers that help to manage them.

If HP or IBM or SAP or Oracle wanted to do what, say, Dropbox does, they would throw effectively unlimited funding at the problem until it was solved. They might not even bother to market the result publicly, to avoid diluting their brand, but if they chose to do so, then the unfortunate small company concerned would probably be gone in a few months (assuming the large company didn't just litigate it out of existence because it was easier, if you're in a jurisdiction like the US).

Put another way, companies like Dropbox don't do well because they have a magic recipe that the big boys don't, they do well because they've chosen a niche where they're too small for the big boys to care about and where there are plenty of smaller businesses who will value and pay for that kind of offering because they don't have the same kind of resources in-house to do it themselves.

Edit... I should also mention Google, who aren't likely to be competing in the "enterprise" arena any time soon for a very different reason: they aren't set up to support that scale of customer. If you want to sell software to an engineering giant or a global services firm with an employee count in six figures, you don't show up with a few web pages and an e-mail address, you send a CxO or two on a plane to their head office to schmooze them, and then you appoint an SVP whose only role is to lead a large team of sales and support staff dedicated to jumping when that customer says jump.
But your team of laywers could pore over any trove of patents. They don't have to be yours.
The situation is actually quite a bit different from what was presented in the siliconfilter article. I looked into a couple of more established local media outlets and it turns out that this fine does not apply to all of Germany. Mr. Weichert strictly targets sites from Schleswig-Holstein ( Population: 2,8M ). This is the only state where he has 'some' legislative power and it remains to be seen how we would be able to target sites from his specific district. I'm sure you can appreciate the technical difficulty. This is also not a new law but a highly controversial interpretation of existing privacy law. There is a tremendous backlash and open opposition coming from high-ranking German politicians regarding this fine. All in all the whole thing looks more like a PR-stunt, it's highly unlikely that website-owners will ever be fined in the near future for Facebook buttons.
http://dejure.org/gesetze/BDSG/4a.html

http://dejure.org/gesetze/TMG/13.html

http://dejure.org/gesetze/TMG/15.html

Seem to be the most important ones.

Source:
https://www.datenschutzzentrum.de/facebook/facebook-ap-20110...
fwiw: I've found reading biographies of successful (whatever that means to you) people really helpful. I've enjoyed reading more general stuff like 7 habits & millionaire mind and listening to guys like Jim Rohn & Tony Robbins, but have found biographies most helpful in showing me the inevitable highs and lows for many larger than life figures. My point being: to increase your odds of "success", study it in its various forms.
I'm German btw. Don't want anybody to think I learned that gruesome language for the fun of it...
The CERN case.
It's the only state with an agency trying to enforce it right now.

The applicable laws are federal laws.
I wonder if Nokia had approached / will approach HP to acquire WebOS. With Elop @ Nokia's realm, I am skeptical. RIM is too busy building its on OS to be really interested. Amazon, Intel and Samsung seem like very likely candidates to take WebOS off HP's hands.
How to build & launch a successful adult video game interview w/ D-Dub software
The Cube: Data Center Squared
I would be tempted to base the subdivisions on a Fibonacci series:

3, 7, 10, 17, 27, 44, 71, 115.

Note that 4 x 115 = 460.
Given the requirements of the US Patriot act, (cloud providers must turn over customer data to the government without disclosing it to the customer and without the benefit of a warrant), I don't see large corporations moving to public clouds. Private clouds maybe but not public ones.
Thanks, we will open the API. If you share your contact info I'll let you know when it's available.

Snippets will also soon be browsable online (early September) :)
I wrote a little about this:

Another way to respond to this critique: Groupon could have theoretically solved this problem by adopting faster payment plans for merchants. That would make theirs a worse business with lower cash flow, but it would help their PR (and perhaps their valuation). It’s counterintuitive that Groupon could make their business worse but make their valuation better—it depends on whether their share price is, at the margin, determined by the skeptics or the believers.

( http://www.digital-dd.com/hp-immaterial-usability-users/ )
I've noticed a few key factors impacting ability to learn programming:

Hard work. Too many students just won't do the work. They'll show up, go thru the motions, rattle something passable into place, and wonder why they didn't pass (or almost didn't). The work has to go beyond just what is required into self-motivated learning beyond.

Grokking variables. Many don't comprehend the nature of a variable, and thus cannot succeed in using them. They know the right things to say about variables, and may achieve passable results using them, but just don't get the concept.

Task decomposition. Many can't get past "just do it", viewing the term as an end instead of a beginning.

Strict adherence to rules. Whatever the rules of syntax are, that's what you have to work with, and deviation just doesn't work.

Semantics. One must be capable of realizing that certain phrasing influences perception.

Abstraction. Many can't.

Get those down and you'll learn. Miss one or more and it will be very hard.
Somebody else has already went through the same idea and over the course of months thoroughly denounced its viability:

http://calnewport.com/blog/

Being passionate isn't a substitute for mastery, getting burned out by hard work, and general marketability of an idea or product. No matter now passionate you might be about widget-building, your lack of skill and the lack of a market for widgets is the cold hard reality.
I found it more reminiscent of Fight Club. Much of it reminded me of Ed Norton describing his apartment. And I was just waiting for Tyler Durden to come along in the middle of this paragraph:

I check-in to BART on Foursquare, because everyone needs to know that I’m about to take public transportation. Which is kind of like the equivalent to doing something mundane, like taking a sip of a drink and telling everyone about it. Actually? I’ll probably check into somewhere for this reason later. To be fair: I’ve heard if you check into BART 10 times you get the “Trainspotter” badge. I don’t know why this is important to me. But it is. I need that badge.
Thanks for the advice Dave! It's probably a good way to figure out their mentality and driving principals.
Please see http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ieinternals/archive/2011/08/19/under... for a complete discussion of behavior.
When is the last time you rented? My impression is that the rental market is picking up significantly and there are noticeable rent raises even month to month at this point (bubble, anyone?)

Being near BART is going to set you back at least $1700 at the very low end for a studio, $2000 for a 1BR. More for both depending on quality of the place, naturally. You might hack 10% off either of those prices if you pick up a particularly sweet deal.

FWIW, I signed my current place last month, so that's when my knowledge of the current rental market ends. I talked to numerous people including an apartment hunter, all of whom expressed incredulity at how much prices are shifting, even on the order of a couple of months.
What's the advantage of using the asymmetrical one-wing design which undoubtedly makes it harder to control?
Indeed. Pair programming is basically a continuous peer code review. I think you can get most of the benefits of pair programming from code reviews for a fraction of the cost.
This seems like one of those "Oh man, what a crazy country!" stories - and sure, the €50,000 file is pretty nuts - but the more I read about it, the more I think that challenging one company's dominance is potentially a good thing.

If nobody ever speaks up and says "Hey, hang on - how much info are we giving them, really?" it'd be far too easy for companies to take advantage..

Having said that ... this won't stick. By this virtue, sites would have to remove G+ buttons too, and Google Analytics (which profiles 'anonymous' users even more heavily than FB)
Previous intern projects:

http://code.mixpanel.com/2011/05/23/my-first-week-at-mixpane...

http://code.mixpanel.com/2011/08/05/how-and-why-we-switched-...
There is a huge difference between "= means assignment" vs. "= means equality". One is an act of change, the other is observation of factual truth. HS algebra is the latter; using that would have left you very confused ("wait, b=a is false!").
Lockheed Martin is also a non-capitalist enterprise. They are completely funded by the U.S Government, and they have the most ethics violations of any corporation on planet earth. Cluster bombs, green washing, nuclear missles, lobbying violations.
Enterprise software is a hell of a lot more than racks of web servers and managing licenses for Microsoft Office. Any publicly traded company, even one that is not a software company, has tons of business processes that are specific to its way of doing business and its industry. That requires various specialized if not custom software and lots and lots of glue to put it all together. On top of that, businesses want to see into all that activity so all the data from that software needs to be extracted, collected, combined, and reported on properly which requires technical and business expertise specific to that company's business practices and technology choices. The addition of more cloud services increases this burden while decreasing other burdens.

HP makes lots of money through EDS selling consulting services and outsourcing services to do all that stuff. Stuff that is being fed by the move to more and more cloud services whether internal or external.

And when I say enterprise services, I mean software as a service stuff like Salesforce. There are more services that business need than Salesforce such as data warehousing that HP is in a strong position to enter or dominate. That said, even though something like Salesforce is a turn key solution hosted off site, it doesn't mean there isn't an enterprise sales process. A middle manager doesn't buy up 1,000 seats of Salesforce subscriptions at $65 per month without going through the normal enterprise approval process. I've seen it and it can take several months even though your average small business owner can sign up in 10 minutes with a corporate credit card. The real deal involves contract scrutiny and due diligence work. And just because Salesforce is easier, it doesn't mean you don't need a ton of development and integration work to bring it in line with your existing practices and software tools which usually requires outside experts at least for training if not complete outsourcing.
How system update can break love
م Watch Arsenal vs Liverpool 2011/2012
The opinion of the court is very newsworthy, especially if the punish Apple.
Anthem for startups
Thank you! We could definitely use help.
Pair programming is great since it's a mutual monitoring setup to prevent goofing off at work. You are far less inclined to read HN or Twitter if someone is sitting beside you watching. Likewise you are watching your coworker, too.

Think of the 2 to 3 hours real work done days? Now it's straight 8 hours of real work. You come out ahead even with two people at one job.

(just kidding)
Cocoa developer here. What APIs/tools for writing a commercial Windows app?
Hello.

I've been writing Mac OS X desktop applications with Cocoa for quite a while now. I like Objective-C immensely and enjoy developing with Xcode. The best thing about developing for the Mac is that there is a single "official" API and a single set of development tools, which means I don't have to spend time picking a toolset, language and API.

Now I want to jump into Windows development. I was not a big Windows fan back in the XP era, but I like Windows 7. C# and Visual Studio are great. A friend -- also a Mac developer -- and I have an idea for a desktop application both of us sorely need, but we cannot decide what API we should use to write our UI.

There used to be Windows.Forms, but that's deprecated now. I've heard rumors about Microsoft deprecating WPF over Silverlight in Windows 8. Is this true? Doesn't Silverlight just use a subset of WPF?

Windows 8 will also provide a way to write applications using HTML and JS, so there's that.

Now we're thoroughly confused. Deciding between different versions of Windows and Visual Studio was hard enough, but I believe we made the right choices there. This one is a doozy, though. We don't want to spend 6-8 months writing an application just to have Microsoft deprecate the API we use.

I wouldn't even have dreamed of asking this question if our app was just another CRUD app. But UI is a huge part of what we're planning, so we want to make the right choices there.

Help?

EDIT: formatting.

EDIT 2: more formatting.
> What do you mean reset every header? Not set them on the redirect?

When sending a request via XHR you can set request headers. Some are standard headers (Content-Type, Accept, etc...), others are not but widely used (X-Requested-With), and others you can make up on the spot. The web server will get those and can act on that to, for instance, customize what will be returned, or do cache work, or whatever.

If the XHR request returns a redirection, browsers will follow it automatically. That's what XHR does. Now most browsers will also re-use the headers you set (minus those for which it makes no sense maybe, not sure about that one actually but I'd expect things like ETag or Last-Modified could be re-set by the browser or stripped off).

Not Firefox. On the other side of the redirection, your new XHR request will not have any of the headers you set. No standard ones (like Accept) and no custom ones (X-Requested-With). All of those will disappear and Firefox will solely send its default sequence of headers. Which definitely are not the ones you want since you bothered customizing that.

> Is there a bug outstanding for this?

Yep: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=553888

it looks like it might be fixed. In Firefox 7.
That might be the key difference. Analytics profiles "anonymous" users.Facebook knows exactly who you are.