skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apple does studies for these things. They studied multi-button mice and found it slowed people down. The reason is that they clicked on the wrong button some percentage of the time.

What throws people off is, when you make a mistake with a gui, you correct it and forget about it. You don't account for your time because your mind is focused on the task. But and independant observer, who observes you doing the same task in both situations will have a stopwatch and recognize objectively which takes longer.

In some cases-- such as people's preferences for keyboards over mousing-- they perceive that they are faster accomplishing tasks with the keyboard than the mouse. They think this because they press keys faster and the brain accounts for each key press as a bit of an accomplishment... but the stopwatch shows differently.

Its the same thing with the second button mouse.

Trackpads have changed the situation, as a more direct form of control, 2, 3 finger gestures take less cognition. And of course, millions of people prefer 2 button mice, and don't care if they lose a minute or two each day as a result.

So, while there is a reason for the choices Apple makes, those reasons can be less significant over time.

But my point was, there is always a reason, and you shouldn't try to cut new ground unless you understand the reason for the original method.
Researcher on the type of tumor that affected Steve Jobs gives his opinion
Did the release take down linux.org somehow? 509 Bandwidth Limit Exceeded right now
I found this post on hn-daily so I feel I'm a bit late to the party but still this is one of the most profound and interesting things I've read lately regarding technology and had me pondering on hours how this approach can even really benefit my small small company.

Anyway, after reading this I feel really hungry to read more of such posts which tell you what the turning points were of a company and why you should be doing it too or not. Anyone have any links to similar such-must-read posts?
I found the article interesting, specially the the lower half where the strong correlation between the screen size and viewport size is described...
Those numbers being off just by a factor of "only" 10-50X (which I think is reasonable given Compete's record) would make a big difference for a B2B site. Even more important from the perspective of a startup would be the presence of an upward trend - and with Compete, I've seen their estimate for our traffic fall by over 50% in months where we grew by around 40%.

I'm pretty sure for a "decent sample" - at least, accurate enough for the data to be useful for anything - you need to be at least a top 100 site, and even then I've heard stuff from a couple webmasters of those sites that Compete data is off by an order of magnitude or so.
Dennis Ritchie: the giant whose shoulders we stand on
I store all my bookmarks in http://pinboard.in, much better organisation, sorting, faster, cross-os, cross-browser.
Microsoft Inks Another Android Patent Deal, This Time With Quanta
Oh, and in my opinion, if you want to be a successful business person, then don't apply the general YC rules to your business. Those rules are generalizations, and partners often make exceptions. Do what's best for your business, and they will see it too. The best way to think of your app is to think honestly and truthfully about your business. If there was no YC and its set of guidelines, would you have considered tossing this person out? How would you have built your app? Think of YC as a co-founder in your business instead of thinking of them as a college you're applying to. They will be impressed by the same things a potential cofounder might be, every company has its unique set of challenges based on which you will be gauged. I am not related to YC in any way, but cannot imagine them looking for the same six things of everyone that walks in.

My point is, give your own intelligence credit, and YC partners might recognize it. If they don’t now then there is always the next cycle and you can try again.
The Beginning (Google)
My FF, fully updated, works fine. I use Bookmarks extensively. What seems to occasionally crash it are things out of Mozilla's current control: poorly written extensions or Adobe Flash hangs.

Never even heard of needing to vaccuum the sqlite dbs.

FF is a fine browser. So, basically we have one anecdote for and one against, and neither is enough to pass judgement on a full and popular browser like FF.
Dennis Ritchie -gt Steve Jobs
Dennis Ritche > Steve Jobs

I posted a similar post yesterday on news.ycombinator.com, but oddly enough someone deleted my post. I wonder why? What happened to freedom of speech? Is what I said blasphemous to the Apple cult and its followers?

I'm just expressing my opinion on the matter. I feel that there's a bit of an injustice on the matter that Steve Job's death would most likely get more publicity versus Dennis Ritchie, who I think in my humble a opinion, is a more important individual in the realm of computers.
Ghana Gets Aboard Oracle’s Global. Online Learning. And It’s Free
Looking For The Next Steve Jobs
Weirdly, I want a time filter, but to block recent results and promote results older than X years.

I can think of the example, but there was something with few results for (about) 12 years ago (and those were the ones I wanted) but millions for this year. (And I didn't want those.)
Inventor of C and Developer of Unix, Dennis Ritchie Died
i will still take the tactile feedback of real buttons.
Model the human cell? A Cell API
Albanews
Switzerland. 10 trips on scenic trains
Fix for WinRar CRC failed : The Files is Corrupt error
Being "almost ready" means you're not
> Apple studied this on a 512x342 1-bit display, on a machine architecturally incapable of multitasking more than one app at a time. It's just not relevant anymore, sorry.

... how do these technology changes render their results irrelevant? The menu bar problem sits at the point where a user's ability to aim the mouse in physical space on the screen interacts with how the menu is represented in physical space on the screen. I don't see how any of the changes you've listed affect that problem, except for screen resolution, which only seems to make it worse by shrinking the physical size of click targets.
I think right about now would have been a great time for Diaspora to announce their first call for donations. "Hey look, we've got this great product and just need a little time and money to finish it off."
Incredibly smart and complementary founding team. If our enterprise apps used Crashlytics, I'd probably not lose so much productivity over crashes and updates that dont seem to fix anything.
>Assuming Apple maintains its policy of only allowing the Big 3 (Google, Bing, Yahoo) as default search engines in iOS

I know I will probably get downvoted for this, but here you have another glaring example why closed and locked systems are retarded and should be frowned upon by each and every sane man.
Does ubuntu, with 11.10, for any of these models, detect external displays automatically? Is this a feature that is just not in the current ubuntu, or something particular to 10.10 and my Dell?
My guess is that your ruby is loading rubygems on startup. It shouldn't take nearly that long if you don't.

That said, startup times are often not as important as other metrics.
Lord of the Rings Online developers MAY be trying to conceal a security breach
How to restore phone contacts lost after ios5 update
Frontend single-point-of-failure survey by Steve Sounders
notice how many specify "32 bit".

this is a joke for engineering laptops that need more RAM.

I have a T510, which is listed. it definitely doesn't work out of the box, and not all of the hardware (nvidia optimus for example) is fully supported.
What happened to Firefox focusing on Linux responsiveness? They even acknowledged it as an issue and promised to work on it, but I've yet to see that occur at all.
Cmd+Click. You can even do it one handed on a trackpad. BTW that's what I do on PCs too since the third button is so unreliable across both software and hardware.
Ubuntu crashes on my T420 during installation despite T420 is listed there.
> How does that do anything but confirm the GP's point, that it's dumb to place a menu bar potentially thousands of pixels away from the window it applies to?

That menu bar is effectively a billion pixels tall. You can throw the mouse pointer to the top of the screen and only concentrate on accurate horizontal positioning, since the mouse will not leave the top edge.

Putting the menu bar at the top sells out the distance side of the function to dramatically increase the target size.
Most people use Google, or something like Facebook gets autocompleted.
1024x768 is dead.
1366x768 is pretty common actually on lower end laptops.
I was actually going to be an animator before I picked up "Transcending CSS" by Andy Clarke at the uni library.
You're taking the word "pride" and talking about it as if it were a physical thing that really exists.

"Wounded pride" is something that can happen to anyone, regardless of whether they give themselves credit for their achievements. "Wounded pride" really means "wounded self-image" -- everybody has a self-image, regardless of how good or bad it is.
I feel the same pain ... I've switched away from Firefox now and only use it when I'm compatibility testing my applications/sites.
I go to "goodies" and "zero click info sources". I see this line:-

Language SE - quint in quintessential

So I clicky the link, but it appears to have nothing to do with Stack Exchange. Some of the others work - Numote Big Bang Schedule has a nice box at top of the search results.

ALSO: Do you have a printable cheat sheet for all the bang syntax and extras? A4, mono, please!
How to beat the CAP theorem
Fitts' Law is certainly not lost on large displays, set up Expose to use hotcorners and you'll be hitting infinite-width-targets hundreds of times per day.

Same for screen edges: Taskbar buttons or the tabs in Chrome on Windows are awesome, extremely easy to target, because they're on the edge of the screen. (The New Tab Button was recently made Fitts'ier as well: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=48727 )

The issue with the Menu Bar is that it's the wrong thing to be putting on the edge of the screen. The menu items are still extremely easy to hit... it's just that they're no longer useful. No need to have them any more. GUI advances such as the Ribbon or just the concept of removing useless features are leading to apps like Chrome having few menu items at all.

On modern apps the cognitive load of the "which-app-is-in-focus?" is the main problem, which you mentioned. But that's a ding against the usefulness of the menubar, not Fitts' Law in general.
And he would have been if social conservatives hadn't destroyed him.

god damn I fucking hate them.
Find old comment threads on Hacker News?
How do you find the comment thread from an old Hacker News article? Someone sent me an article that I had previously seen on Hacker News several days ago, and I wanted to send them the HN comment thread from that article.
About half a year ago we checked the Chromium project and wrote an article about it - http://www.viva64.com/en/a/0074/ . The PVS-Studio analyzer naturally keeps developing, and in the new Chromium version we have found some errors undetected before. Many errors, of course, refer not to the Chromium project itself but to libraries it employs. But in this article I want to show you how the analyzer's capabilities have improved and not tell you about what we have found in this or that part of Chromium. That's why I will give messages together.
What you gain&#8212;and lose&#8212;by transitioning from MobileMe to iCloud
Don’t Go Pre-Med: My Advice to a Yale Student Worried About Her Future
No it's not "a mile away", it's a few inches away. You're performing thought experiments instead of actually measuring, and that's a no-no. Your intuition is no good. The scientific method is. If you can prove your point that the menu bar is hard to hit because it is as far away as it is tall by a controlled experiment, then by all means, publish your work in peer reviewed journals, because a lot of professional HCI researchers will be astonished, and you will be very famous for proving something so counter-intuitive that breaks Fitts's law and flies in the face of all the other studies that have been done, and the hands-on experience of millions of Mac users.

To test your intuition (by quoting one of Tog's favorite puzzles): Name the five points on the screen that are the easiest to hit with the mouse.
I think it would help if any mouse click outside the arrows would change pages. It would probably also help mobile users.
I dropped FF b/c of the memory leak. As a test, on a spare mac I wrote a script that launched FF and Chrome simultaneously and visited 10 websites I frequent. They both had similar clean profiles. After roughly two days of continuous refresh/load cycles, Chrome's memory was at 148MB, FF was 988MB.
What Happens when Scoble Shares You in a G+ Circle?
You're right - it's extremely difficult, but what I was trying to get at is that it's only the beginning of the complexity.

Landon has done incredible work in this area and we are incredibly grateful he has shared his work with the world - it very much inspired a good chunk of what we do. We have taken things further, though, and updated his techniques to work more robustly with LLVM3 and ARC, added non-fatal exception handling etc. All of this must be done extremely carefully, using async-safe code that is tuned to minimize memory footprint. It's not trivial, but it's worth the effort on our end to deliver the best product we can.

We're huge proponents of PLCR and I wouldn't discourage anyone from using it directly. In fact, we're 100% compatible with it, if you wish to run us and PLCR at the same time, side-by-side. The benefits to using our system, apart from the significant aggregation and analysis we do, is that we actively maintain and update our report collection to support the latest iOS and compiler capabilities, so you don't have to worry about that.

Hope this helps!
Autistics don't adjust their behavior to protect their reputations
I am a bit in the same situation as the author, using Firefox since before it was called Firefox, on all platforms and advocating it very widely.

But, it is hard to go on advocating it. True, they fixed many issues on JS speed and memory with the latest releases (after denying the issues for a loooong time).

However, the slowness of the SQlite backend is quite annoying, as mentioned on the article. The SSL management is beyond ridiculous, especially when the whole model of Certificate Authorities is broken, as the news showed us. The breakage of extensions at each update is abnormal. The Linux integration is abysmal... And yet, at each release, it seems the focuses on UI changes are the more important...

IE9 is now decent, Chrome is really good and Opera too.
All most of my developers friends have moved to Chrome...
How to price developer tools in the app ecosystem
"Second is the environmental and practical advantage. The delivery guy needs to visit one destination, not many. This uses less gas, puts the van on the road for less time and may even reduce shipping costs to you, the customer."

Odds are that the overall carbon footprint goes up because now you have a bunch of people having to drive to the 11-eleven and back, and it likely isn't on the way home.
[I'm not interested in supporting the hybrid industry. I want to support the efficient cars industry. The technology is irrelevant.]
Man Hacking Personal Email Accounts of Celebrities was Arrested
Yammer is Not Just Facebook for Enterprises: A Deep Dive with CEO David Sacks
Amazon's first employee: Shel Kaphan
Try the search box at the bottom of the page.
Cross-browser bookmarks compatibility is the one reason I'm having hard time giving up on Firefox, otherwise, Chrome is certainly faster and better overall. The other issue is that bookmarks are not easily portable on cloud (don't talk to me about delicious or xmarks - I prefer to keep my bookmarks to myself). What if I use Chrome most of the time at home but can't if I'm using library or work computer? There are issues which are still unresolved in the browser world.
DMR : "I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the demigodic party."
This longstanding bug has been found and fixed in the past few weeks. There’s a workaround as well (use the Places Maintenance addon to properly index your Places database).

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=686025
It seems they fast prototyped unity using web.

There are two things that I can't stand about it on a real laptop:

1)When you maximize files folders, and it seems it is default, the desktop icons occlude the links on the file browser, and is SO UGLY.

2)My laptop hangs when I try to restore compiz with --restore. I really miss the 3d cube.

So I'm downloading fedora or anything that makes it usable again.
Germany please!
It's not that much the point here.
Posterous is not the daily-first-class tool for a programmer these days.
It could be Pastebin but I didn't ask myself about it...
I Just took what was opened in front of me and made a commit for dmr
Upscrn, project oriented media hosting site.
We've deployed a new update to Upscrn. This time around we've added integration with Basecamp and new styles. And we are working on new ones that will be included soon (Pivotal Tracker, Lighthouse, Github.
We've also released a new API, and a new Ruby gem for it too.

Check us out at www.upscrn.com
Most people?
The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought progress.

- Charles F. Kettering

http://startupquote.com/post/11400678521
Celebrating Growth To Date & Exciting Announcements Around The Corner
The new rapid release development cycle has bit Mozilla in the rear. For example, FF 7.0.1 on Vista needs to be run as Administrator. I didn't find this out until it just stopped working on my wife's laptop.
At least with Firefox you don't have to deal with things like this: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=41467

When Firefox dropped http:// at least they gave you the ability to turn it back on!
Occupy Your Time Hackathon (In DC, Saturday)
Another tactic is to look at the sources quoted in the article. In the WSJ article yesterday, the primary source was Naval from AngelList -- who has a better view of early stage financing than anyone I can think of.

Unless she distorted or fabricated his quotes, I think there may be something to the story.
The video you linked to is by Quicken Loans, which is in no way affiliated with Intuit.

Quicken Loans was very briefly owned by Intuit (from 99-02), but the only thing they share now is the Quicken trademark.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicken_Loans
And no, I'm not arguing about Unity's invisible menu bar, or whatever it has. I haven't used Unity, and I have no plans on using Unity, because all of the X11 based Unix and Linux desktops have always sucked, and they always will.
I think that in order to understand the nature of "forced" vs "voluntary" in this instance, you may have to consider how the rats normally cover distances. Humans, unlike most mammals, are designed to run for longer periods of time. Sorry if it's already been said.
I see lots of unfair complaining here. I'm still running FF even on machines with 1GB of RAM, and I actually had troubles with memory leaks on Mac, that were mostly related to some extensions.
Ask HN: How may I learn HTML5 canvas in less than 3 days?
Well, I want to learn canvas in a limited period of time.

Any suggestions? Where to start?
You make a great point.

Being selfish for a moment, I also hope that his enthusiasm re-energizes me as well. Thanks for the insight, it is appreciated!
Gabriel is perhaps the most principled, friendly, fast thinking entrepreneur in tech today. Awesome to see this investment and, as a DDG user, excited to see how the team will take it to the next level.
The Mac ‘halo effect’ is real
So now that you've thrown the mouse to that easy to find top of the screen mile high menu bar, and completed your mouse action, don't you now have to find your teeny weeny window over in some far off portion of the screen and move that mouse back into the window you're actually working in?
ARC is Apple's new scheme for memory management (more info here: http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#releasenotes/Objecti...) and there are a bunch of requirements (see "ARC Enforces New Rules") that have to be met for an app to be ARC-compatible. Our SDK also has to follow those rules in order be used painlessly in an ARC-based app.
This is not the government, so freedom of speech is irrelevant. You do not have freedom to say whatever you want here. However, there are a number of reasons why a post like this deserves to be killed, none of which have to do with agreeing or disagreeing with your opinion. In order from least important to most important:

1. The place you're posting is "Ask HN," not "zitstif's personal blog," not Twitter, not any kind of open forum. It's not there for you to clutter up with your every random thought. Quality control is important. There are plenty of places that you can post with less of a focus on filtering.

2. There are a number of threads already discussing Ritchie — almost the entire front page at one point, and one in every three stories right now. You could have commented in any of those. Creating another one with less content is just cluttering things up with fluff. Your comments are not so much more important than anyone else's that they deserve their entries in the thread listing.

3. Steve Jobs and Dennis Ritchie are not in a competition. They're dead. Trying to turn their deaths into one is morbid and frankly awful. Both deaths are a tragedy and a great loss for the world, and it doesn't matter which one you feel is greater.
The Blit: A Multiplexed Graphics Terminal by Rob Pike
The bar is a mile high, but each menu column is still only an inch wide - so distance matters, even if you have mouse acceleration so that a large vertical is painless.
>Utilize your new hire to the max to offload some of your work and give him a trial by fire to catch up

This is an excellent suggestion. Thank you!
I've had a similar experience. I've really come to appreciate Chrome's built in developer tools and have pretty much left Firebug in the dust.
two weeks in a row...
Actually, with pie menus, it's quite easy to hit a target you can't see, because you can "mouse ahead" and be very sure of the direction you're moving, enough that you can reliably select between 8 different directions without looking at the screen. With four items it's almost impossible to make a mistake, unless you're holding the mouse sideways or upside down.
Understanding How Dilution Affects You At A Startup
This is a wonderful move. This would have saved me so much time if it had been around a year or so ago when I was shopping for a new laptop. (I went with the Thinkpad T510, which has worked flawlessly.)
A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Thur., Oct. 13
Details from Air Force on Malware That Infected Drones
> Amazon takes the integrity of these things very seriously [...] if there's one thing they are clean of it's working against their customers.

I'm pretty convinced this is true in general. I just couldn't help wondering if this one case would be a little too tempting for them. But absolutely, it could be completely on the level.
If anything, technological changes have made it easier to hit the target, because mice no longer have physical balls that get jammed with dirt, and they are much more accurate. The kid you're replying to has probably never had to pick the black ring of scum off of the wheel inside a Mac mouse, when it stops responding to movements.
Apple Employee #6: 'I Truly Believe Jack Dorsey Is The Valley’s Next Steve Jobs'
This is just what I was looking for. I was thinking about building an alienware laptop and duel booting to Ubuntu. My big issue was I didn't know where the problems were going to come in. Thanks!
A shame that Sony is not listed.. hopefully this page motivates Sony to certify them :)