skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been a prime user for the past year or so. Seemed a bit indulgent at first, but really love the service. Free 2-day shipping seems un-necessary when you can get super-shipper saving but every time my packages show up in two days, I'm grinning. I still have a Netflix account, but despite my love for Netflix it might only be a matter of time before I switch to Amazon Prime streaming (I don't watch a lot of TV). Now with this? Great deal.
The saddest part of that article were the first 3 comments. Three parent being proud of the "teachable moment" where they taught their 12 year olds to follow the terms of service and not get accounts until turning 13. I'm not a parent, but I think it's more important that kids are taught how to protect their online privacy rather than acting like sheep and letting them loose at an arbitrary age.
I follow Python's example for this.

if (...) {
...
} else if (...) {
...
}

corresponds to

if ... :
...
else if ... :
...

not

if ... :
...

else if ... :
...
There's a difference between "looking like something I'm familiar with" and "working like something I'm familiar with". The problem with bad skeuomorphic design is when it looks familiar but doesn't act like the thing it's mimicking.

A good example of this was brought up by Josh Clark in his talk at Swipe Conference a few months back: the Address Book app on the iPad. The main interface is an open book, but you can't swipe through pages like you're actually reading an address book. In fact, if you swipe in the middle of the right page, you're going to swipe on a contact's field and then a delete button will pop up! Trying to swipe from page to page (like you would if this design mimicked the real object's affordances) could actually be a destructive action.

The design of Classics for iPhone and, later on, iBooks is skeuomorphic and resembles an open book, but you can (mostly) treat the app as if you would a book using similar actions. This is an example of skeuomorphic design that actually works. It looks and works like the real world thing it's emulating.

Bad skeuomorphic design simply looks familiar, but the user experience takes a wrong turn as soon as you start to use it like you would use the real thing. Bad skeuomorphic design can actually deeply harm the user experience because it builds up a false trust with users.

However, using real-world textures, patterns and materials like leather, tartan, glass and aluminum in your app interfaces just to spice it up a bit does not necessarily mean you're designing in a skeuomorphic manner if these items are used purely in an ornamental sense. An app like Find My Friends that looks like a baseball glove obviously isn't made to replicate a baseball glove's functionality, it simply uses some stitched leather textures from the real world. This doesn't mean it's a skeuomorphic interface but it does, in this case, mean it's ugly. The secret is to use realistic patterns and textures sparingly, not drop them from the sky all over the screen.
I don't get anything?
I just realized that such popular memes, contribute in eating away at Internet Explorer's market when they don't work on it. People who for months could not be bothered to even just upgrade to IE7 or 8, are now more than willing to download and install another browser, just to see google "do a barrel roll".
As I've pointed out elsewhere in these comments, XPC isn't required for supporting plugins in a sandboxed application, and it's possible for plugins to exist within a signed and sandboxed app's bundle:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3193354

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3193379

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3193404
Government's Auditing Program For the Cloud Falling Behind Schedule
You need HTML5 browser like Firefox 7.
Receta de pi�a al curry
thanks for mentioning the cache links, I thought they were gone and used the "Cache:URL" query. I don't like the preview pane, never paid any attention to it (actually, I think it's pretty stupid :-)...
Connecting with iTunes is actually no longer required for iOS devices starting with iOS 5.

You can also add PDFs to iBooks on the device without iTunes -- not sure about epub files though.
I love my Kindle and can forgive the response times which I'm sure will improve, but on the other hand I agree with John, the software's low quality. It's nowhere near my iPhone in terms of polish, thought or fairly obvious testing.

For me these things bug me:

The keyboard is missing some obvious keys like comma and apostrophe. You have to go into [Sym] for them but you use them all the time when making notes. They're important keys that have been inexplicably relegated to the extra menu.

There's no first letter capitalization when you start typing a note or start a new sentence. Extremely irritating.

The bookmarking system is confusing, inconsistently named and clumsy.

Some things take a silly long time to figure out, like switching between your present page and the chapter list and back. This is mainly because the menu in a book has silly options in it (Turn Wireless Off is the first option? wtf?).

The arrow rocker doesn't work at all well in landscape mode.

Some things require a full screen refresh while others do not (opening a menu doesn't, closing it does). It's just that little bit jarring.

You can't zoom on pictures enough, very irritating for books which have little maps of battles or such like.

I've had it go titwozz more than once when plugging it into my PC. Is it charging, is it not, screen suddenly resets.

Apple wouldn't have let any of that obvious stuff go out of the door, you notice pretty much all of it within the first few days.
Ravn is still a work in progress, but it is something we’re committed to working on for the years to come

This is the right attitude. You can do one millions little things, but one project must be your life's work. Something you commit to.
Assuming that some hardware is of lesser quality than other hardware, and given the low cost (down to virtually free) of many Android devices, I'd expect more failures per unit.

Of course, it's entirely possible that certain Android devices have lower failure rates than their iPhone and BlackBerry peers. The study doesn't break it down by device.

If you don't want to think about it, then just choose a BlackBerry, with its 6% rate.
Secure Distributed Programming with Object-capabilities in JavaScript [pdf]
I'm a little confused - so in any given month, I can only borrow a single book? Or, is it that for any given book, I can only borrow it once a month?
Here's the video of the talk:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9hHHvhZ_HY
Wireless inadequate for our future of connectivity
There are, for example, comments and string literals, which may be non-english. Also, people use monospaced fonts for all kinds of things aside from programming (for example, my bash spits out errors in cyrillic). And if I pay for a font, I would expect to be able to use it everywhere.
Why not just dump all such laws that restrict freedom of expression and refocus government on what it is designed for: providing infrastructure for the society (building roads, fraud prevention etc.)?
"She said that cleaning crews had orders to remain 20 centimetres (eight inches) away from artworks but it was unclear if the woman had received the directive from the external company that employed her."

Even if she had received such a directive, I think she could be forgiven for mistaking that "tower of wooden slats under which a rubber trough was placed" as art.
You can only borrow a single free book per month. If you want to borrow more you will probably have to pay.
Motivation, Friction & Anxiety: Why startups need to know how they work
I think the inverse might actually be true -- that it's harder to sit in a capsule on Earth for many months compared to a mission to Mars.

In the latter scenario you're a hero on a mission to extend the reach of humanity into space -- in the former you're just some dude in a petri dish.
It's a good illustration of unintended consequences of "safety laws".
Children suffer the most from COPPA.
Yeah, not even the quotes help in some cases, and I expect Google to show me results that contain the exact word I'm searching for, no matter if it thinks I misspelled it (it's like the algorithm says "let me correct that for you, stupid" :-)...
Ten Most Amazing Data Sets In The World
The biggest problem is the use of metaphors that won't make sense in a couple of years. When we don't have printed magazines and newspapers we'll be stuck with the legacy of dated apps and metaphors.

Indulging in objectively bad design in the short term to appease technically inexperienced users isn't a solution, it's putting a band aid on the infected wound of inconsiderate UI designer.

For more on that line, I wrote about it a few days ago http://designedbygold.com/2011/10/the-metaphors-breaking-the...
Yes, the guy did it on construct 2. He is a game designer not a programmer, I'm working with him in the game Cannon Land, that you can see when you enter on www.currantcat.com
Church: A probabilistic Lisp
Unfortunately this doesn't fix the perl tutorial issue (top result is from the early 1990s):

https://www.google.com/search?q=perl+tutorial
Ask HN: Startups - how are you tracking IT assets?
The company I work for is, IT wise, very much like a lot of the startups represented here on HN. We have a ton of remote workers and local workers all armed with MacBook Pros and most utilize client side virtualization. For servers use colo-location with our own hardware and we also utilize AWS and other VPS services.

Right now we are tracking all these assets, leases, warranty contracts, etc using a spreadsheet and it is starting to kill us.

What should a startup use to track all this junk?

thanks
whoosh

He's implying that would be the result of the Apple Kindle.
Sorry for delayed reply and thanks for taking the time to write! I read your BCC blog posts before in the past, it's very cool you take the time to post thanks!
I know a successful startup, they had an office in Republic of Moldova, now all of the devs have moved to US (on H1B) I think this way the firms tried to retain talents.

Another startup also with developers in Republic of Moldova have been bought out by Adobe.

In both cases there was a good dev lead in US and most of the developers in Moldova.
and what about verticals that don't lend themselves to engagement? Insurance is pretty hard to get excited about..
"If you have a middle-class family of 4 and it feels like average is struggling, then that's good: now you know how your voters feel."

Maybe. But I know when I'm struggling, I worry most about where I'm going to get my next dollar. I don't think we want politicians either getting another job on the side to make ends meet or not concentrating on the task at hand because they are struggling to pay the mortgage.

I would also worry that they could easily be bought off (more than they are now).

"Poor people could still run and would in fact get a pay raise, and rich people may not have to make a sacrifice at all (nothing unusual there; rich people have all sorts of other advantages, which is a separate issue)."

I honestly don't want poor people running my city, state, or country. If you can't manage your own life, how could you possibly manage the lives of thousands of other people effectively? You also don't want people running just for the money and it seems like this is exactly what you would be doing. At least when you are wealthy and running for government, it's a pay cut most of the time. They could be making lots of money elsewhere, but they choose to take the responsibility of running a government.
That's pretty funny :-). Well, the Internet is for porn first, code later...
I loved my Kindle(s), but the screens are very fragile. I've already cracked two of them.

If you have a Kindle, you need a case, and should never take it out. iPads seem much more durable (and indeed heavier)
thanks -- corrected.
It seems to talk about watches more.
Big fan of using Central and South American developers. You don't have the time zone issues, their English is usually fantastic, and the cultural differences are minimally (when compared to places such as India). Used them all the time when I had my own firm and didn't have time or resources for in-house development. Also a big fan of the Kiwi's if you have something you can hand off with a fully defined spec.
Rare Steve Jobs Interview
The editors you list all must open a file in response to some user action, right? They don't just automatically know that I want to edit ~/Documents/blah.txt. Ditto for the unarchivers and video players. I'm not certain why the browsers are listed, but they're in the same boat for local files (perhaps opening a file:/// url typed in the address field would be broken, but double clicking a local html file or using their Open… features would still work).

User interaction must happen at some point, otherwise the apps have no clue what files to open.

Xcode (and BBEdit's and TextMate's project features) and Dropbox are interesting cases. Dropbox can presumably ask for permission once for each directory the user wants to sync. It does, after all, already use a NSOpenPanel when the user asks to change the sync location. It remains an open question whether it can permanently persist that user-granted exception indefinitely. [1]

Xcode is special because opening a project will be a user-specific action, but then each referenced file will somehow need to be opened. There is no solution I'm aware of for that use case. If you're a developer in a similar boat, I strongly suggest filing a radar explaining how your app is broken by the lack of such a solution. I bet the BareBones crew is already working their WWDR contacts, making their needs clear...

[1] http://www.cocoabuilder.com/archive/cocoa/308884-sandboxing-...
I was searching if the true? function existed in Scheme yesterday, which ended up very frustratingly:

true? scheme

Redirects to a search for "true scheme".

+true? scheme

Gives exactly the same results, but tells me that the '+' operator has been deprecated and that I should use quotes. Okay.

"true?" scheme

Give the same results, i.e. a search for "true scheme".

+"true?" scheme

Just for good measure, but gives the exact same results too.
Are Bloated Bureaucracies Undermining Higher Education?
Oh wow! I've just looked - and you are correct. This has blown me away. That said, I swear I've read (somewhere) that arts courses are subsidized less. I wonder if that simply means arts courses are substantially cheaper to run?

Thanks for picking that up for me.
why is this news.
Yeah. This is even worse than the Alexa plugin because at least with the Alexa plugin, the pinging might result in all the pages I visit entering the Internet Archive's queue.
Nope. Xcode is special.
A modern browser is required. Firefox 7?
Look, I know I'm supposed to be sympathetic about this, but when you outrightly declare that you want "8.5-9 hours of sleep", yet want to be a millionaire, I doubt your motivations.

9 hours of sleep?

No entrepreneur I know gets even 6 hours! That's the entrepreneur life, that's what they choose. It's like being a doctor!

You are in it just for the money. That motivation won't take you too far.
With all due respect to Hank Williams, the police misbehavior in the Mountain View area does not just affect black people. I'm white and I was stopped, without provocation, in a strip mall in Mountain View on suspicion of being a shoplifter.
Why is everyone on this thread assuming I don't use a VCS? I've "used" pretty much all of them.

Personally, I'm partial to Hg.
Yeah, it's just... stupid. It would've actually been more useful if it was smaller (like Windows 7 taskbar previews), not take a whole third of the page. Thankfully, it's not automatically showing up anymore (at least for me), so it's cool...
Personally I adore OS X design, it's really cool. And besides cool design and usability, OS X has all the power of command line.

Yeah, I'm on OS X, but sometimes I want/need to use a linux distro, like ubuntu or gentoo. Well, I hate that Canonical tries to steel OS X design to their Ubuntu.

So try come out with really cool and different usable design. Don't try to steel existing designs fully, please!
RAVN still seems to have an identity problem. I know it aims to be more than this, but the first thing I thought of when I signed on was, "Ooh, all the Groupon/LivingSocial/Google deals aggregated in a box layout"
Major Music Labels to abandon CD-format
This sounds really interesting. If you do this, can you post your progress and results?
Art.sy Raises a $6 Million Series A To Let Anyone Buy Fine Art
Maybe Siri is the first A.I. to take part in a general strike?
- Signed and sandboxed applications are not prevented from using plugins. No code loading restrictions are placed upon such processes.

Really? That's good news if true. Got a reference for that?

In any case, since loading plugins would be subject to the same restrictions as other file access, the app can't maintain persistently accessible references to the plugin files. The app would have to ask the user to manually pick each plugin using a file dialog, each time the app is run. This kind of "manually-aided binary loading" isn't really a plugin API anymore.

Furthermore, Lion-only apps could employ an XPC based plugin architecture and entirely avoid loading code into their address space.

Please elaborate. I still don't see how XPC can be used to implement a plugin architecture, assuming the Apple documentation is correct in stating that XPC services need to be located inside the main application bundle in order to be loaded.

Re: Thunderbolt -- the problem here is that even if a kernel extension driver is already installed, a sandboxed app can't access it. (The example case in my mind would be my own video capture app: it's got direct support for devices by Blackmagic Design, including their new Thunderbolt-based units. I'm using the vendor's API for this. If I were to sandbox this app, it would have to lose this functionality.)

[Edited this reply to add more details.]
I wouldn't call it an easter egg persay, I just find it funny it actually calculates it
What was the program being used for designing the font?
Yes, they are worse. A lot of times, Bing actually shows something more relevant, so it can't be all the spammers. Maybe it has something to do with the search history Google keeps, because sometimes I get different results if I'm logged out of my Google account...
However, autocomplete will fill out the rest of the query for the user to see, so they should get a fair idea if they are paying attention... which they should be when the contents suddenly spins.
I have and it's a great interview. It's actually got me really excited about what I thought would be a fairly pedestrian OS upgrade.

But I still don't think it goes far enough. I think there are certain conventions that make sense for a handheld device with a touchscreen. What I talk about in the blog post is for desktops, though. I think for ergonomic reasons, a display that's separate from the input device is necessary for 'real work.' From that starting point, there are a lot of wholly digital ideas that can make computing a lot more powerful and productive if we embrace it.
Yep, an occasional HTML5 Easter Egg could nudge people to upgrade. How about a few written in WebGL?
As noted in the comments this is hardly an oversight, the plugin page acknowledges the behavior:

"In addition to the practices described in the Google +1 Button Privacy Policy, by installing this extension, all of the pages and URLs you visit will be sent to Google in order to retrieve +1 information. Examples of this information include whether you’ve previously +1’d the page and how many people have already +1’d the page. Google’s use of this information is described further in the following help center article (http://www.google.com/support/profiles/bin/answer.py?hl=en&#...). "

Tracking HTTPS traffic is really the big deal and it will probably be patched. For the rest, it is just like Google Toolbar, Internet Explorer, Bing Toolbar, etc...

Search engines need desperately this kind of data, it is not surprising that they try sneak "trackers" in any browser/extension, it is just unfortunate that they are not clear about it.
Amazon is letting you borrow books without asking
Renovating Chicago Real Estate
Exactly, we (humans) have loads of experience of people living in self-contained environments for long periods, these kinds of experiments are good for headlines, not for getting to Mars.

Nuclear subs stay down for months at a time, no problem.
They were also experimenting with automatic scrolling in Image Search - that left me dumbfounded when I was trying to click on an image and it was scrolling down instead :-). It seems to be gone now, though...
Always wonder how a new user of hacker news get front page to h'm so easily. Seems to easy to game.
why are we putting what was meant for a statistical/symbolic graphic into sentence form?

Because many people (and other important constituents, like Googlebot) cannot read graphs and so perceive a graph as having zero value but a paragraph telling 1/10th the story of the graph as having positive value.

This is hardly the only "inferior form factor dominates because of ease of consumption" thing out there. For example, rather than look at an unemployment graph or read a paragraph beginning with "Government figures released earlier today say that unemployment is the highest it has been since 2004", most of the world prefers someone whose professional competence is looking pretty to read "Unemployment is up" to them for approximately 4 seconds before cutting to commercial.
Additionally iBooks will even synchronize your bookmarks for sideloaded books between devices (something that Amazon has removed from Kindles).
What Is Advantage Of Article Submission
Effective article submission is about writing quality articles that are useful or interesting to readers, using some on your own website and getting some published on other related websites.
Obituary: Dennis Ritchie and John McCarthy
xenophanes,

I've been thinking about the problem a lot today. I'm pretty sure that my point is basically right, if the model is correct, but my ideas are not clear enough to explain it properly. Model correctness in Bayesian statistics is a complicated problem, and as far as I can tell, it's not a completely solved one. Bayesians usually agree about their calculations, but there's heavy debate about the "philosophy".

In any case, maybe you'll find Eliezer's other post insightful:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/1gc/frequentist_statistics_are_frequ...

I really hope to figure out model correctness, and this optional stopping problem looks a good vector of attack.

Thank you for the discussion, and sorry for leaving you hanging!

Cedric

(if there's any Bayesian out there willing to continue the discussion, my email is in my profile)
the confusing was not the problem I guess, but a laser shooting down 1 million insects per minute vaporizes food for millions of birds, lizards and other insects. Destroying one part of the food network could have destroyed many other parts ..
SEO Experts Academy
I really hope programming languages are one of the ones covered. The number of Ruby articles that are out of date even 1 year old is stunning.
Optimizing Fonts for the Web: Unicode, glyphs, underlines, and strike-through
Amazon's foray into mobile is "just" a natural extension of their retail business. The primary purpose of the Kindle and their variety of mobile apps/services is to get consumers to buy digital goods from Amazon; just as Amazon (the retail) is to get consumers to buy physical goods. The logistics plays a large role in keeping the physical goods flowing; AWS gives them a solid platform to keep the digital goods flowing.