skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>"Clearly, it isn't that hard to get used to using context menus and keyboard shortcuts."

What this may show is that it is mainly experienced users who use Explorer. And based on my personal experience, I believe this to be the case - most people do not know what Explorer is for, let alone how to use it efficiently.

The reason for using the context menu use in my case is that most options are available only from the context menu...e.g. "edit", "extract [from zip] all", etc. and it is only through many years of trial and error that I have developed any efficiency with the context menu - this is because the problem with context menu operations is that they require enough experience to recognize the context and remember what [hidden] commands will be revealed by a right-click.

The advantage of the ribbon is that context menus are made visible when the context is entered, thus allowing less experienced users explore options more easily. Also, the issue with traditional context menus is that they are a mixture of fixed elements [cut, copy, paste, properties] and context specific items [extract all].
The concept of the ribbon - tabs with buttons grouped by function - has a lot of advantages in theory. Obviously you can have bigger buttons which is always a good thing, and you allow each button to have sub-buttons which actually works out really well. I personally think Microsoft is on the right track from a high level perspective.

The problem comes in the implementation. The graphic design is just horrible. Where is the grid? Where is the white space? What the hell is that round button that replaces the file menu? The title bar just looks awful.

If they could clean it up graphically I really think it could be just as nice as anything on Mac OS X. Ask yourself this, if Apple had come out with the buttons on tabs in the exact same groupings but done it in a gorgeous way, who would be complaining about it? We'd all be heralding it.
Do those users use the desktop shell at all though? In my experience with novice users (across platforms: Mac noobs are no better) is that they only know enough to launch apps. They never touch the desktop integration at all.
Don't write your own. That is unless you want to try a new language or simply want the experience. Blogs are a problem that has largely been solved -- at least for your intended purposes (disclaimer for this community!).

WordPress is cheap, easy-to-install and will pretty much have everything you need out-of-the-box. You can then go ahead and add in a theme and plugins if you want.

Focus on creating great content, not reinventing the wheel.
天龙八部sf
The best way to 'fix' Windows Explorer is to focus on improving usability of the OS such that Windows Explorer isn't something average users needs to use. Focusing on improving it is focusing on the wrong problem, IMO.

Having said that, I think the author of the post seems to ignore the fact that Microsoft's research shows that not many use the menu bar currently (because currently, the menu bar is hidden by default). By adding the ribbon, I assume their goal is to improve that statistic, and in turn make it easier for users.
Started getting some corrupted images partway through, at roughly 1:00. Possible meltdown?

http://i.imgur.com/Eme3D.png
http://i.stack.imgur.com/bID6D.png
http://i.stack.imgur.com/ErM6T.png

(confirmed by myself and another user in the http://electronics.stackexchange.com chat room).
I'm looking for some co-founders for the next cycle. Tried my social circles and ran into the competence and drive issue that many of you probably experienced. If you are interested we should definitely talk. Shoot me an email at carden.justin@gmail.com
In order to mitigate attacks like this Firefox users can use:
http://convergence.io/
Fantastic! Startup Genome is gonna help everyone who is into entrepreneurship. Keep up the good work guys.
"...our vision is to create a unifying experience that is a simple and universal sharing platform."

One might say Dropbox has a similar (or the same vision). My question, more directly, is how are you any different than those "direct and indirect" competitors?

I don't feel that your vision is different based on your statement.
5 Project Programs to Use Online
Great work guys! Definitely a really interesting field to continue to dig deep into. Start ups come in all shapes and sizes, but the underlying patterns are extremely interesting and important!
> b) they do not solve a real user problem

I might be part of a minority, but I love websites which let me sign up with OpenID/Twitter/Facebook. No need to fill out the same registration forms over and over again or having to wait endlessly for confirmation emails. Moreover no need to remember which username/password I used for which sites, etc.
One hint I have not seen here: while in input mode use <Cntl>n to auto-complete the word you are typing. This is very good for longer variable names and ensures your name matches what you have typed already.
Hey Max here...one of the authors of the study,

Our study contains startups that are in stages across the board, (Discovery, Validation, Efficiency, Scale).

While many of the YC startups don't reach the Scale stage, and maybe don't scale up their team or or raise too much money, they can still prematurely scale the product by over-engineering the product and not doing enough customer development. There are more nuanced case of premature scaling that are also discussed in the report.
'Move To' and 'Copy To' existed for a long time. I have them on Windows XP. They are not on a toolbar by default, by anyone can add them.

Nobody knows about them for one reason - they are useless.

Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/5e5xN.jpg
Microsoft rolls out open-source Python extension for Visual Studio
Overall like explorer in Windows 7, but its file indexing is very slow. Search takes long time. But third part software like everything[1] does it smoothly. I hope they fix it in Windows 8.

http://www.voidtools.com/
Well, the iOS way would be that documents would end up in a place that is shown when you open a word processor, and that pictures would end up in a place that is shown when you open up an image navigator.
His handling of the Bethesda case is only bad if this really isn't a case of an overly-zealous legal department operating on autopilot. So far, there's no reason to suspect that:

All the information that's public indicates that Bethesda's claims are weak or entirely baseless, and they are not interested in reaching a compromise or really any two-way communication prior to going to court.

Any lawyer that starts a tenuous but high-profile suit without considering the PR aspects is simply crazy, but that seems to be what's happening. Notch has been trying to get someone at Bethesda with a human perspective to intervene, but so far, hasn't been successful.
You seriously think that average users push 'Alt'?
Startup Genome: A web app to test if your startup is scaling prematurely
I'd have thought HP's idea was brilliant had I managed to get in on the deal.

But "we spent 100k on a domain name for a non monetised service which competes with dropbox file hosting on one hand, picasa and imgur on image hosting, letscrate and sendoid on file sharing, and has nothing to match Dropbox on the high end, and is 'just' framing S3 storage" screams "hello? Bueller? What are you doing?"

I can get 25Gb free from Windows Live Skydrive with Microsoft behind it, soon to be 5Gb free from app-integrated iCloud with Apple behind it, 5Gb free from JungleDisk, 2Gb free with industry leading sync from Dropbox, and miscellaneous 10Gb free from 4shared.com, 50Gb free from Adrive.com temporarily, 1Gb from freedrive, 1Gb from flipdrive, 1Gb from fileden, (and stuck in the past there's 20Mb from filegenie).
Four things Google Admitted to the Feds
Reminds me of this video, which I was told was actually created by Microsoft as a self-parody, though I don't have any supporting evidence.

"Microsoft Designs the iPod Package:" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9HfdSp2E2A
I think the ribbon concept is inherently flawed because no human brain can remember such an overwhelming amount of information (what command in which function group in which tab).
Maybe this is an ingenius plan by Microsoft employees to revamp the company from inside out (or outside in?). But seriously, the kool-aid drinking types are probably really flustered by your post, as they think the ginormous waste of screen space is the best thing ever invented. sad
Haha, compared to "F10"? But really, yes, because Alt activates menus in Windows applications. e.g. "Aft-F" for the File menu.
You still haven't answered my question.

I have a set of documents, a subset of which I'd like to copy onto my USB drive. I also have a set of pictures, a subset of which I'd like to copy onto my USB drive. My USB drive already has a set of documents and a set of pictures, and I'd like to get a subset of the documents and a subset of the pictures onto internal storage so that I can plug out my USB drive afterwards and still access them. Can you come up with a way of doing all that that doesn't involve a filesystem or a poor imitation of it?
They're already combining two SAS ports to get 1 GB/s; you can't really do that with SATA, though.

http://www.smartm.com/products/productdetailssd.asp?SMARTPar...

We may also see some migration from SATA to NVM Express.
Nice, but is the templating engine really the bottleneck for your application? And if not, does it really matter that this implementation is 40 times faster?
I started looking for a cofounder about a month ago. I am not sure if I will find one by October 31st but the search is on.

How is this evaluated on the application?

Also, there was a recent clarification by the USCIS that a H1-B visa holder can work for his/her own company.

Is YC cognizant of this and can it help the visa holder jump through any hoops (legal or otherwise) to be a H1-B start-up founder?
As someone who works on large .NET / Java / RoR projects, would I gain anything from switching to vim from say, VS 2010, Eclipse and RubyMine? I'm quite used to relying on visual IDEs, but if vim is supposed to make me incredibly productive then I'd certainly like to explore that option.

Anybody here made the switch and felt it was worth it?
RESTalytics — our Node Knockout entry
I was just thinking this myself. Windows 8 is moving towards a tablet-like structure, they need to go all the way on this and get rid of the filesystem for 90% of users.

Open almost any Windows laptop, and you'll see users who basically think of the hard drive as a file dumping ground. You'll see files stored on the Desktop, or everything just goes into one big directory. How many conversations have you had where you ask "Where did you save the file?" and the reply is "I don't know, just the place that it says when I press save"?

Windows should have had a services infrastructure, where programs explicitly define an export (how to access files the program has generated) and import (which files the program can handle). Users don't really think of files by directory but by type, either Word documents or photos or whatever. The file system should just be a dialog box which is essentially a search. "Show me Word documents I edited in the last 5 days." "Show me all my photos that I took in Hawaii." That's how users think about data.
Seems to be loading in a reasonable amount of time for me.
Yes, here's a place they really could have done something cool with the UI, and spiffed up a be-cobwebbed corner of Explorer.

In XP, there's a folder that you can put folder and program shortcuts in, that will populate the send to menu. In fact, this essentially is my quicklaunch method when using XP. Just put a link to notepad2 in there, and you can view anything in ascii. Rinse and repeat.

It's so useful in fact, that they might have been able to bring it into wider usage, and maintain continuity with older Windows, by adding a context menu such as 'Make me a send to place', which would add a shortcut to the clicked folder or application into the send to menu.

To me on OS X, the Finder sidebar and Dock are the rough equivalent. 90% of my Finder work is selection and dragging to the sidebar, or Dock, the same thing I would use send to on Windows for.
My parents definitely won't.
In other words, you throw all kind of shit at the wall and see what sticks.
I would like to see webOS continue but has any commercial OS, not controlled by a US based company, done well in America?
There is a time in life when you have the mental space and the environment around you where learning anything is relatively free and easy. If you wait until (much) later when you can directly benefit from this knowledge you may not be able to free up the time to acquire it.

Ditto for learning spoken languages, the earlier, the more, the better.
What are bad usage habits?

(since we're on topic: I'm an MS employee. I do not work on Windows Explorer)
Then why are the ipad and iphone taking off? It's really hard to learn to do things on those devices. It's cumbersome to turn off wifi and bluetooth to save battery. The control location makes no sense in the settings menu (to my mind, anyway).

I was a HUGE Apple fan for the early Macs. I totally get what you are saying. But we LOST in the workplace. It was just too slow for the other folks in the office to use (of course, the real death blow was having only a graphics mode to the display so the typing was dreadfully slow-- and the secretaries wouldn't use them- but that's another story).

But I get your point. That's why I phrased my response as I did. I have never done UI/UX testing- maybe the parent has and was sharing his insight.

But if we are all just speculating, I've got to throw out a shout for the other point of view. Yes, too many (how many is too many? I don't know) and it gets to be like using VIM. But two buttons? Seems like it should be ok.
In Sweden for example, you can't release something into the public domain.

There is also another problem, you can't disclaim some warranties for customers. So if you could release the software into the public domain, you could still be held accountable for what the software did after being modified.
This http://kaishinlab.com/2011/05/pitfall-of-customizability/
I don't want to turn this into /r/politics, but look what's happening to Bradley Manning. I'm pretty sure that even if he were to be put to trial in front of a civilian court the call won't be as close as in the case of Socrates, for a lot of different reasons which I'm not going into details now.

Despite being a cause celebre, the fact remains that Manning's alleged actions were, in fact, illegal. Not that jury nullification doesn't happen, but it's actively discouraged.
I agree with a lot of what you said, but point b) of #4 is bogus. Piracy has never Cannibalized games, and never will. It's a farce to think that piracy is a lossy destructive mechanism for the publishers of games.

1) Your average pirate would not have purchased the game they pirated anyways.
2) A lack of good game play centric demo's, shareware versions of games, expensive pricing, and Draconian DRM measures has pushed a lot of people to pirate, just so they can “TEST” the game (primarily on the PC, but to some extent on Consoles as well), before buying it. Nobody wants to spend $60+ on a piece of crap game that is locked to them as soon as they use it, and find out it was crap. Ergo, pirate, test and decide if it's worth the purchase.

Gamers definitely are a lot more willing to spend $.99-$5 for a game to play on their Smartphone or tablet then the $60 as mentioned above for an AAA PC title. (Hence the trend in the article for mobile devices being the favourite of the people surveyed. Notice handheld game devices were lower on the scales....probably because the games are still a lot higher in price.) This is why I feel the indie game space has surged so much in the last couple years, people are tired of paying all that money for games that do not satisfy even with their bigger than movie budgets. But pay a Starbucks coffee to get a game...even if you only play it for a couple days, the reward vs. value is so much higher.

As much as I’d love to have gaming become a purely digital environment as far as distribution, it has a long way to go. Primarily....we need better bandwidth allocation if we are to remove the physical distribution model. My steam account currently has over 280GB of downloadable content in it. As it sits it takes me 4-5 months to download all my steam games while staying within the 60GB/month limit of my ISP. I've stopped buying larger titles on steam and continue to purchase the physical versions so that my family can continue to browse the internet, watch Netflix and stream video via Skype to the grandparents.

O.
OWC = SandForce = OCZ

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4604/the-sandforce-roundup-cor...
You're a programmer, use the terminal.

Also most "normal" users do not have a single __init__.py I like the new Finder but I rarely use it... ack FTW!
Why Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff gave Apple the 'app store' trademark
When my grandfather uses the computer, he reorganizes the desktop, and puts files in folders, and sometimes wants to delete things, yes.

All of those actions require knowing how to [delete], [open folders], [drag and drop].
I'm not saying you don't need a filesystem. There are other ways to interact with data besides a file browser.

On the iPad, I can use the official Photos app (or any of the other photo apps) to get my photos where they need to go, whether that's a phone, computer, website or printer.

I don't read my email by going into the "My Emails" folder on my C:\ drive, I access my email through a UI specifically made for accessing email.

I don't manage individual contact files, I access my contacts through an address book app.

I don't manage individual music files, I use iTunes.

Most operating systems already encourage separating files by type, I'm taking it a step further by suggesting that 90% of users would be better served by many type-specific file browsers than a single general purpose one.
It's always nice when you can shed a bunch of complexity with something simple, because then you can start adding complexity again.
While I also dislike the walled garden approach of the IOS App Store I feel I should point out that it's only a monopoly if you define a monopoly narrowly. E.G it's only a monopoly on the iOS family of devices which is hardly a monopoly on installing apps on mobile devices. It may be a large chunk of the market but there are still competitors with a sizeable chunk themselves.

Walled Garden != Monopoly
Everything You Need to Know About Luminess Air
OK, how do we remove this CA from our computers?
I don't really strive for the absolute reduction to large, basic forms. Without having built my space to control the lighting exactly as I intend, I think that'd be impossible. Mostly I'm just for removing things that aren't being useful to eliminate the costs of having to deal with said things.

However, do not underestimate proper use of color. My bedroom is backed by a Benjamin Moore Jack O' Lantern [1][2] that gives the desired effect (and similar in the bathroom with Shy Cherry). My living area needs something, and I'm considering finding photos (Monaco Grand Prix, Targa Florio) to enlarge and use as panoramic wallpaper.

-----

One thing I have noticed is the opportunity cost of having useless things. Not just the space to store it, but not having the space to store useful things, and the lost opportunities by not having those useful things.

The most common example are having clothes you don't wear. Since they're taking up space in your closet, you end up running out of the clothes you do wear, and not having enough of the preferred styles/articles you like to wear. So by keeping the articles of clothing around, you end up creating this ridiculous artificial problem for yourself which results in more frequent laundry.

I've noticed similar with pots and pans. The 3-quart pot is dirty and I want to make some pasta? I can't with a 2-quart or 1-quart, so I won't be having a shrimp scampi that night. If I simply got rid of the useless pots I almost never use, and bought more of the ones I did, I'd be eating what I want (and probably better overall).

Additionally if the pots are decent looking, and are well organized, it's free decor. I once went to someone's home and their bath towels were in an open reach-in closet, but meticulously folded and stacked. I was impressed, because someone had made some plain, boring, inexpensive bath towels part of their decorum rather effectively.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/yyi62.jpg
[2] http://i.imgur.com/D1DyH.jpg
Show HN: A Site for Understanding Open Source Projects (early prototype)
There's been lots of discussion recently about Open Source projects and their possible lack of documentation.

We have an early prototype - see here for an example for the results of Lucene:

http://www.codemaps.org/s/Lucene

Now, putting content on such a site has challenges, but we are wondering what you think of the output of such a site.

If you use Lucene: Is the site helpful for you? Would you like something else on such a site?

If you use other Open Source projects: Would you like to see something like this for your project?

I hope you like it and find it useful. Really looking forward to hearing how you would want it improved.
I would imagine that Apple's envisions a world of these things being done wirelessly.

What is interesting is that Apple and MS have two totally opposed philosophies in handling the issue of the user not understanding the file system.
Ask HN: How do you keep track of articles to read?
As an avid Hacker News reader I continuously stumble upon fantastic articles that I really want to read, but might not have time for at that very moment.

I'd like to be able to add them to some kind of an online To-Read or To-Do list that I can then access from any computer and perhaps organize based on some kind of subjective priority.

I'd find it very hard to believe if something similar didn't already exist today, so it would be amazing if you guys could share that with the rest of us!

Thanks!
Yes, and preferably on multiple machines/VMs. The JVM and CLR has some interesting ideas, x86-64 is very useful for performance, RISC might open your mind etc, just do it, the cost is not very high for people who already know C or Java or C++ or something among those lines.
Firefox extension to do the trick is linked below: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2938623
9 reasons why my startup idea won’t work
There were multiple companies in my batch (S10) that had applied multiple times. One company had actually applied four or five times, I think.
This doesn't explain the "invert selection" button. I'm pretty sure that one is indefensible.
So does the CPU raise a hardware interrupt when it detects conflicts in the transactional memory? Are there new instructions (or flags) for preparing a L1/L2 cache as TM?

The interrupt can be mapped to an exception to be raised in a language. Clojure and others can integrate with it easily.

Having TM in a single CPU is a good step in the right direction. The holy grail would be having TM with multiple CPU.
Clickable link:

http://www.codemaps.org/s/Lucene
Vintage Terminal Emulator for Mac OSX
This is great news for TV in general. TiVo lost a great opportunity when they failed to let their SDK touch the programming guide or the TV programs. Let's see how Google handles it. If they offer tight integration with video and other important apps (e.g. a Netflix/IMDB/Wikipedia mashup movie browser would be terrific) they can go really far.
It's not really a platform, but I think that's close to what the company formed around the Humble Indie Bundle is doing. I think all of their releases have been DRM free and without any other strings attached, but I actually have no idea what the terms are like for the individual game dev companies. So I think the answer is probably "yes".
For a lot of dynamic languages, at least, the templating engine is a surprisingly large portion of your page load times. I wish I could bring up the breakdown I saw a while back, but it's certainly non-trivial in many cases.