skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You sure are a "Mac power user" who just don't have a clue what the menu bar in OS X is for and for it... Apple is crap and theire products are overpriced and the OS is a piece of crap too because you can't figure how to use it.
Are kidding me? I bet that you only once used Mac OS X in an Apple Store for 1 minute.

I understand that a lot Microsoft people don't like Apple and Mac OS X but to say to be an power user of both systems and only use the terminal in OS X cause it is too complicated is little bit too much of it, isn't it?
I can tell you the exact difference: I used office 2003 for a very long time and since we at work switched to 2007 I can't find anything. Ribbons everywhere but not one Ribbon is self explaining. Not even ONE. Sure you get used to it and after a lot wasted time you know where those things are now BUT getting used to it doesn't speak for a great UI design!

But maybe the complicated stuff fits you better but I doubt such thing!
Ah, I was mostly a "putter in the corner by myself" kind of minecrafter, so I never tried multiplayer. I agree that that is a problem, yikes!
If it works, why do all the online banks use two-factor authentication these days?
Oh wait, there is the solution!

That's used to authenticate the client. SSL's job here is to authenticate the server. So no, that's not a solution.

Besides, it's completely preposterous to claim that HTTPS is useless just because it's not enough for banks. Should each website send an RSA Token to each user?
While I haven't used this UI and I think it's bulky and ugly, there is one important thing to note that I think people miss on first pass.

Typical use based on their research has used the context menu. On Windows that is typically a right click (IIRC). Now Windows 8 has claimed to moving towards more touch capable user interface. I'd imagine anything that is directly touchable with common controls being larger targets is a huge improvement from right-click simulation. These controls, while ugly, I could see as an improvement to usability in those scenarios.

Additionally, I haven't seen any effective file management interfaces for touch devices yet. Most of them shun the filesystem in favor of flattened document collections, so it will be interesting to see how this plays out on upcoming tablet devices. Personally, I was looking forward to stepping away from filesystems and lessening their role in my regular interactions, but time will tell where valuable experiences will be spent, so I'd say we wait and see for this one.
Getting certs from DNSSEC is morally equivalent to getting them from X509 PKIs.

Again: the problem we have is that the UX and policy for HTTPS/TLS is brittle, so that it's hard to recognize and even harder to react to misconfigurations like "we're trusting CAs who are not trustworthy".

Faced with a policy and UX problem, someone needs to explain to me how a reasonable next step is to bake a new PKI into the core of the Internet.

There is a reason the IETF-types are so gung-ho on DNSSEC. But it isn't that they know it's a sound replacement for the CA system. It's that it bothers them that DNS- the- protocol is insecure. And that's fine (I think their solution stands a good chance of making DNS even less secure, but whatever). But they shouldn't get to piggyback on other security issues to achieve their goal.
Civil engineering is very different from UI design.
The Best Product Person of 2011 is....
I wouldn't take YC's decision to heart. They have no crystal ball and cannot know if you will ultimately be successful. You should be willing to persue a good idea regardless of your YC application, which I think is largely a crapshoot anyways.
And

3. Are you the only one?

:)
Do those extra 20 kilobytes really matter though? In the age of gigabyte streaming video, who cares if you redownload facebook's UI a few times a day?
I read the piece and was aware you were receiving inbound interest, but there seemed to be a lot of time invested with the NY VC.

Outside of a few excellent firms (mainly seed), all the bad behavior I've ever heard about from VCs has been from NYC and Boston ("east coast") VCs. This was mainly in the 2001-2005 period, but they were at the forefront of really anti-company terms like huge multiple participating pref, walking out on signed term sheets, etc. (USV and Founder Collective are amazing, even more so because they're starkly in contrast with this).
Cobb, in some writing of his, recommends the textbook Statistics: Learning in the Presence of Variation,

http://www.amazon.com/Statistics-Learning-Presence-Variation...

which I bought just more than three years ago after I read that. The textbook is quite thought-provoking, not just another Tweedledum to the usual Tweedledee of undergraduate statistics textbooks.
Search is part of the answer but it’s not the whole deal. Some users don’t like to search, it would be disastrous to just replace everything with search.

I think that tailor made libraries that leverage metadata are the other part of the answer. All modern music players and photo library apps already do this, they have a tailor made interface specifically for browsing music and photos. It’s not necessary to ever touch a music file or a photo in the file system.

The obvious problem are files you want to use in several applications – e.g. that CSS or JavaScript file you are working on. It wouldn’t make sense to give every app a library, that would only confuse and lead to inconsistencies.

I do think, though, that this is a problem most casual users will never encounter. Just add a document library to Office and most people would be set.
I'm not sure how else they could term it if they want a consistent label for all stages. Colloquially, it would be "they got too big for their britches", but that doesn't come across well in a study.

It would probably be better, though, to have phase-specific terms. It would probably make it easier to identify with each phase.
> The iPad is only popular in rich first world countries.

At very least in Bangkok, which is obviously not belongs to rich first world countries, I can see iPad (and Galaxy Tab) everywhere on a train or even in a not-so-expensive restaurant. My not-so-rich neighbor bought an iPad few weeks ago and ask if I could help him setup Wi-Fi, etc.

Maybe I have an Apple-fan Attraction Field turned on or something, but I've found iPad-availablity around me to be pretty amazing. It's hard to deny that Windows-running PCs are still orders of magnitude more but it's still amazing.
Cool idea, but it looks like the resulting game would be way too easy.
You're not really a power Excel user. :-)

I'm a power Excel user and I can tell you that Excel 2010 is a vast improvement over 2007. 2007 a vast improvement over 2003. There are many things you can do in 2010 that are literally not possible in 2007. 2003 feels like a barebones spreadsheet now.

There are still lots of things missing in Excel, and as a VBA developer I know you can appreciate missing things like the lack of a unified event hierarchy. But its getting noticeably better each release.
On work ethics
Definitely checking this out, something I definitely want to read more into.
"A core feature is something that is required for your service to deliver value. For facebook a core feature is the ability to friend people. An email notification from facebook that someone sent you a message is a nice to have but not a core feature."

Is it a joke?

Without email notifications Facebook would never grow to any meaningful size (if at all).
Fair enough. Usually, when I copy files to USB I have 2 windows open and drag from one to another.

The "send to" email, however: I don't think you can use it with any web-based email, correct? Do people usually have Outlook set up on their machines these days?
We Do Not Need You To Design Anymore
It's a lot easier for a game to let you shoot at where your client-side prediction thinks the guy is supposed to be than to allow players to react to things that happened before their input for a given time tick was processed.

What you're saying is nontrivial and may not even be workable, because it's impossible to really separate "stupid slow player" from "player whose latency is high enough that he can't react".
Between this and the last post about the copy dialogs with their graphs etc., I wonder if they are making a conscious decision to focus the traditional desktop UI more on "power use cases" (not necessarily "power users"). It's telling that the PM prominently talks up Copy as Path and batch file scripting in the video. It makes a certain amount of sense - for casual use there's the relatively minimalist, design-y immersive UI, so the people working on the desktop UI feel free to focus on the remaining use cases and move in the opposite direction.
So, build it. Then make it secure enough that any schmuck won't be able to hack it and serve fake 'trusts'. Then decentralize it so that governments like Iran's can't MITM it. Then solve the problem of having a single organization deploying thousands of fake nodes and poisoning the data.

After you've done that, yes, it'll exist.
Displaying SQL Spatial Data on a Silverlight Map Using OpenAccess ORM
Hey Ryan, sorry for the contentless splash page. We're building up the platform and documentation right now, and as we get closer, the work on that side gets even more intense. We'll put up a video explaining everything later tonight.

In the meantime, we're launching Bushido as a really simple way to launch Open-source rails apps with one click, a unified log-in system, and premium hosting. We do a revenue share with the developers, so all you do is write the app, put up a link that has the url to your rails' app git repo, which branch to deploy from, and any environmental variables you want the app to launch with (so you can customize it at launch time), and then anyone can instantly launch the app. If they end up converting to premium hosting (based on a few factors like number of allowed user signins and apps), we'll split the revenue with you.

The goal is to help developers be more and more independent working on their projects of passion, and to app users way more choice in the apps they can use.

Let me know if you have any more questions, s@gobushido.com!
A lot of people have addressed a mistake in your reasoning (selective bias, only way to do things, etc...). Another point is that context menus aren't touch friendly. The ribbon works surprisingly well for touch.
Show HN: Fast-paced cube action build w/ Three.js
The best summary I have heard of whether or not to apply is:

"If you think you might need YC, you need it. If you think you might not need YC, you need it. If you are ABSOLUTELY SURE you don't need YC, you probably still do, but maybe not."
I came here to say exactly this.

I can take Jason Kincaid's word for it and sign up, or Bushido can actually tell me something, anything, about what it is.

Jason's article does indicate they could be on to something interesting, though.
I'm always happy to use Pay Pal. At checkout I can just sign in to my Pay Pal account, click one or two ok buttons and that's it. No entering of addresses or credit card details, no creating another user account, etc.
How were they able to afford it? Living off the money YC gives you is one thing if you're the proverbial single 20-something, much different if you're married with 4 or 5 (!) kids.
It's also about several features which aren't quite working under Linux. But I'll try that.
Except that those boil down to a couple of basic gestures: tap, pinch, swipe. The hardware buttons are irrelevant in this case. Oh, and swipe to delete? That's in the "manual" that comes with the device. It's smaller than a dollar, for god's sake.
I think it's unlikely that many people will switch from Jammit to Sprockets. At work, we will not switch. Sprockets is built on the assumption that you will be running a JavaScript runtime on your production machines. I'd prefer that we (the rails team) had a solution that didn't make such an assumption. That way the solution could work with or without a JS runtime in production.
From Notch's blog:

A while later, out of the blue, we got contacted by Bethesda’s lawyers. They wanted to know more about the “Scrolls” trademark we were applying for, and claimed it conflicted with their existing trademark “The Elder Scrolls”. [...] We looked things up and realized they didn’t have much of a case, but we still took it seriously. Nothing about Scrolls is meant to in any way derive from or allude to their games. We suggested a compromise where we’d agree to never put any words in front of “Scrolls”, and instead call sequels and other things something along the lines of “Scrolls - The Banana Expansion”. I’m not sure if they ever got back to us with a reply to this.

Today, I got a 15 page letter from some Swedish lawyer firm, saying they demand us to stop using the name Scrolls, that they will sue us (and have already paid the fee to the Swedish court), and that they demand a pile of money up front before the legal process has even started.

Firing up the internet hate machine wasn't the first thing Notch did. He tried to open up a dialogue, before things got to the cease-and-desist stage. It didn't work. Bethesda's lawyers weren't interested in being reasonable.

Maintaining a trademark doesn't require constantly trying to expand it.
I see that argument about the security of Google Docs often and I don't really understand it.

Speaking hypothetically, as an attacker I'd much rather see you keep your sensitive documents on your own computer where you browse flash-enabled web sites, open and edit PDFs, and download email attachments. Trying to get to your Google Docs through a Google Account with 2-step authentication would be much more painful.

That's assuming your enemy is a malicious, non-government actor. If you're hiding your documents from other threats (read: 3-letter agencies), maybe your aversion to Google Docs is more understandable.
Colombiana,online,free
Colombiana,online,free
She Amanda the teacher begins to call the arts of sorcery was very young He began to read a cigarette to his friends and then studied how much advised Witches,
I wouldn't say anything YC provides can't be found elsewhere with some good old fashioned elbow grease and networking. But for a lot of people it will offer a big head start.

EDIT: What's with the downvotes? I thought HN was mostly hivemind-free, but I guess not when it comes to YC?
Thanks for the feedback. We are testing different home page designs that would give prominence to the sign up page.
This attack could of hit people in other countries as well. Small well places malicious BGP updates can reroute traffic into Iran.....
I definitely admire that you and your team are setting a deadline then just jumping in. I can't comment on whether or not this will work for you or not, but I admire the guts it takes to do this. One thing others in your situation need to consider, however, is that if you're brainstorming with your team daily and haven't found an idea that really strikes a cord with all of your, there's no guarantee that you'll know when this will happen after you've all left your jobs. When you no longer have a paycheque, you might feel forced to pick something that doesn't seem like quite the right fit because you have to get something done and start making money to pay the rent. It's imposing somewhat of a deadline on yourselves that you might not have if you all agreed on the idea before you left your jobs.
Mark Little's Blog: Why you need an enterprise platform for a PaaS
they're on the toolbar in Vista and Win 7. In XP they're not on the toolbar but they're on the side bar that is shown by default.

Edit: Vista/7 may not be completely true, but it's certainly that way on my untechnically-minded mother's laptop - probably the result of context (e.g. in a library of pictures) or a setting somewhere.
Hm yeah I recently discovered Xara Xtreme, what seems to be quite similar to Fireworks from my point of view. I once tried Inkscape but it literally grossed me out just like photoshop did. Maybe eventually I'll give it another try.
i think it's kinda the opposite; most founders who want to get rich generate an idea (or create a clone) before committing to their startup full-time. they also most likely fail if that's their sole mission.
Possibly, but the goal looks more to be novelty in a classic environment, like the Super Mario Crossover game.

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/534416
I like the idea, but the levels would have to be entirely redesigned if you wanted to preserve good gameplay. Having a portal gun tacked on to Mario, with no need for it in the game and levels not designed around its use, would just kind of suck.
A good concept, I hope their execution will be excellent and they have some marketing skills, because the latter is what will be hardest in this sector. Everyone can make a single sign-on platform with benefits, but getting those customers - now therein lies the rub.

I hope you guys succeed, because I would love to integrate with such a platform.
I remember when Bushido made the front-page of HN a few months ago (search for details). I was pretty pumped then and am even more so now.

One thing that's been on my mind lately is help desk software. The current leaders are way overpriced IMO ($9 to $49 per month per agent–are you serious?) [1], especially when it's best for everyone at a startup to wear the support hat now and then. Not to mention the fact that some lock in your data.

We once used a home-built ticket system for support (a Rails 2.3.x app that's available at https://github.com/bigfolio/big-help). I'm seriously considering re-writing this app in Rails 3.1 and putting it up on Bushido. The biggest feature request I've seen is the ability to handle incoming emails as tickets, and that's now easy with MailGun or SendGrid.

All that to say I think Bushido could really disrupt some industries (even recent ones) that are over-priced or handcuff customers with arbitrary limits.

---

[1]

http://uservoice.com/plans
http://www.zendesk.com/signup
http://www.assistly.com/pricing
http://www.freshdesk.com/pricing.html
It's only part of it but the primary reason.

The actual removal of abstraction (mouse) have made it much easier to use it. This is why my son at 2 can use the ipad and he can't use the mouse and keyboard for the desktop and laptops.
Having kids just changes the equation a bit, it's not a unpassable roadblock. If you have 1/3rd of a dozen kids, you've probably had a job for a while, credit cards with excessively high limits, etc. It's not impossible to get enough savings to survive for a fixed amount of time, and the credit cards can provide a nice safety net just in case.
Getting Out of Storage Debt
enlightening post and comments to say the least!
d3 2.0.0 Released
Not if the data he's looking for is raw application numbers?
How about training a neural network for each user? You could provide lots of inputs that wouldn't be useful for all users (time of day, pervious likes, week of month, moon cycle, volume on twitter, DJIA movement) but may be very useful for a given user...

So many web apps (due to their nature, I'm sure) are based on a one-size-fits-all approach recommendation engine (i.e. Netflix, Pandora). How about an "everybody is different" approach that takes advantage of cloud processing/storage and scale? Sounds like a fun experiment, at least.
I remember first reading about Bushido at http://swombat.com/2011/4/12/bushido. After reading the blog post, I gave Bushido a spin, and their service really felt like magic. I got to know this team as part of the YC S11 batch, and they're building an awesome company that's giving back to open source. Lots of good things in their future.
That's one possibility, and quite scary because someone with that private key could hijack any SSL connection to any site, not just Google. More likely is that Iran caused DigiNotar to issue them a valid .google.com certificate via social engineering, bribery, or hacking. This is slightly less scary because only .google.com would be affected.

Either way, IMHO DigiNotar's root certificate should be revoked and they should be barred from participating in the CA system ever again. The seriousness of SSL MITM attacks is such that a "one strike and you're out" policy is warranted. With so much commerce running over SSL these days, possession of the private key of a CA's root certificate would allow you to implement plots worthy of a James Bond supervillan.
If you ever have to wipe an SSD the wear-leveling will totally mess with your wipe process. It is always best practice to just do full disk encryption on SSDs, even if you aren't taking it out of the house/office.

Edit: Reference https://www.infosecisland.com/blogview/13722-SSDs-and-the-Im...
Windows 7 SP1 is not exactly svelte - it's around 1GB or so as well.
Just apply, it makes no difference to us whether you've applied before or not.
BitTorrent users don't "act in concert," so judge slashes mass P2P case
Running an additional product, especially one that takes off requires a lot of resources and attention, is very difficult to manage when your primary focus is on a different business. From Justin.tv and their investor's perspective, they are able to maximize the chance of success of Socialcam while likely maintaining an equity stake. Also, the Justin.tv team can focus all of their energy on growing their primary service rather than managing multiple services.

I like the analogy that having a business with multiple very different businesses is like a multi-front war.
This post seems to miss the point - obviously some of the commands that were less-visible or non-existent earlier would not show up on the telemetry data, but can still be important to surface in a redesign of the UI.

The newly-added buttons on the ribbon are there to address the most-requested features (by actual customers) as well as some of the missing features users most-often go to third-party plug-ins for, per the actual blog post from the Windows 8 Engineering Blog.

As for whether the UI is stream-lined or not - while simplification has its place, it is not always a good thing. The OSX Finder is surprisingly devoid of things even basic users can find useful - in many cases it isn't easy to find the appropriate menu option or shortcut to perform these actions - personally I think it goes too far by way of simplification.

It is good to make computers easy-to-understand - but by attempting to remove the learning curve COMPLETELY you can also damage the productivity a computer can provide. The sweetspot, of course, is somewhere in the middle.
Gang of four?
Sam Bradford’s charm brings a young lady to tears
"There's an app for that."
Precisely. Desura and the rest are a bit disappointing. There's a huge opportunity to make something not entirely unlike the Mac App Store, but for PC games. Keep it simple and open, with few rules and reasonably low fees. And no DRM.

As a developer and a player, that's what I want. A package manager with a payment system and a store front, basically. You can add achievements and friend lists and the rest later.
Hey Erik, awesome note! We actually have some crazy-awesome api's for handling incoming emails - each app has a default email address provisioned for it, and an app can add/remove email accounts programmatically. And handling incoming email is done through a very cool hook system we're really excited to share soon.

Each app that's deployed has a bunch of resources automatically provisioned for it, so as a developer, you never have to wonder if something's present - the goal is to make the developer omnipotent, so you can do whatever you're thinking of, without thinking about it too much :)

Feel free to shoot me an email at s@gobushido.com, we'd really love to talk to you about the help-desk app (even we're looking for a good one)!

Edit: Forgot to add: the incoming/outgoing email stuff is powered by Mailgun actually - those guys are so awesome. With the wrapper we add though, and because we're very language-focused right now, we can make the api's a joy to use, beyond what even they're able to do currently.
Thanks! And good luck with the application.