skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For me the only problem with the new Reader is that too much space is wasted on the header thing and controls at the top. Before the redesign my articles would come up to almost the top of the browser window, now the top is uncomfortably low on my screen.

I love everything else from the redesign, it's cleaner and generally takes up less space but the design should be more about the content and less about Reader.
the first link is an awesome read, thanks for sharing!
I was pretty excited about Google moving sharing to Google+ as I like Google+ and I think making it easy to share will be crucial to success.

That being said, I hate the new Google Reader. I used it primarily as sharing tool, and the new sharing makes that more difficult. I think two fixes would make this better:

1) Being able to share easily with different circles. While I might be okay sharing publicly something interesting, there are plenty of less-than-appropriate funny articles that I only want to share with a few friends. This is one of the strengths of Google+, and it'd be great if Reader could take advantage of this.

2) Being able to see shared articles from other people. I understand they want to increase traffic to Google+, but this was always a great feature of Reader. In effect, each friend that used reader became their own feed. It'd be great to still have this feature and even though you're decreasing traffic to plus.google.com, you'd be increasing the overall use of Google+
You don't get sold on knowing on an intellectual level what it is. You get sold on it by using it.
>Unity forced me to start using the keyboard for most things.

That's not a good thing? I haven't used Unity yet, but might try it out just on that comment alone.
Apple to require sandboxing in Mac App Store apps as of March 2012
I think any move towards online resumes is great. It makes no sense that all recuitment is online yet all documents are off-line.

I don't keep a resume anymore, but on occasion someone asks me for one. I normally tell them I don't have one and point to my site, linkedin page, etc.

A couple of times recently I've been told that 'online resumes are not accepted'. Presumably because they can be changed after the fact. Ie - insert fake job, submit resume, remove fake job. Or something.

Of course, I just use the linkedin export to PDF option and send it to the lazy person shakes fist

But you might want to either (a) have a pdf export for people and/or (b) have a 'guarantee locked version' or something so that people know the version they are looking at hasn't changed since they first saw it.

Yes, I know, it's weird to want to refuse updates to a resume, but apparently people want that. It's more about ass-covering by documentation, but I guess that's what many people are about.
It's actually much easier to locate and track large, distant objects than it is to track small, (relatively) close objects. Ever try to track a jet with a pair of binoculars? Not easy.
For those of us who can't do that atm, what does it do?
Better seems very subjective. I spent more time trying to figure out how to read a re.vu candidate's charts and visualizations than quickly digesting useful information about the candidate.

I am a fan of exploring portfolios. I am not a fan of exploring resumes. Especially when I would like to flip through a few hundred quickly.
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24in Monitor. I could see how it might not scale down well, maybe they need to introduce the UI scaling features that Gmail has that might help with a lot of peoples issues. The userscripts I tried basically just removed a lot of margins and padding around content, so maybe those might suit you on a small display?
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> Most people have never heard of Washington University in St. Louis unless you work in Medicine.

Or are old enough to remember the heyday of ftp.wustl.edu. :)
I think there was some confusion. A competing product mentioned in the comments, re.vu, has that option.
Square does not currently require a license, and they have not yet applied for one in California.
I draw the line here too. I accept the control tradeoff on iOS because I view them as appliances, not computers, and there are upsides to the curated experience. But if I can't fully control my primary computing device, I'm out. (I'd be okay with the machine shipping in "grandma mode", so long as there's an official way to disable it completely.)
There is already a contingent of non-power users using Ubuntu. If they alienate those users then who are they really targetting? Shouldn't they worry about user retention in addition to user acquisition?
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I think Moskovitz has another winner on his hands.
That's a fair point, but the product as it stands is very usable for me. Even if they never updated it, I would keep this build as something that is more than adequate for what it does.
> Unity exists because every other Linux GUI has
> fallen victim to this process

That's very debatable. According to me, Gnome 2.3 is by far the best designed UX for a desktop operating system. Like most people, I generalize based on my own limited experience, and I have seen people grow up and learn how to use a computer in Gnome who were disgusted by Windows and OSX user interfaces. Like all animals, humans can be conditioned and there's simply no such thing as "best UX for all".

Lets look at Alt+Tab functionality, which now in Unity (and Gnome3) switches between "apps" instead of windows. The problem with Unity/Gnome3 is that they're doing exactly what Shuttleworth claims to avoid. Quoting Mark:

> we're not that interested in matching functionality
> that was in Win95, especially if we think that
> functionality will get dropped in Windows 8 or 9 or 10.

Unity (and Gnome3) are both busy copying obsolete UI concepts from OSX, which itself is stuck in the 80s. I would say that they'd be better off copying Win95 instead, at least Microsoft recognized (correctly) back then that a concept of an "app" makes no sense on a modern desktop, and windows is what users want to manage, not "apps".

Mr. Shuttleworth admits to be heavily influenced by Android and iOS. That's weird to me, since desktops are ultimately very different beasts. The concept of an "app" came back from the grave only because the 1st generation of mobile devices were very weak, DOS-like if you will, at multi-tasking and IPC. So... Mr. Shuttleworth picked the wrong corpse to invigorate.

In their mindless pursuit of copying everything from OSX they didn't even bother recognizing OSX own bugs like broken virtual desktops. See, Apple themselves failed to copy them properly from Unix UIs (windows from different desktops in OSX are mistakenly combined in the same useless giant Alt+tab list). But the thing about Apple, though, is that they can afford to have an obsolete window management circa 1985 because their windows are shiny and fly around without lag, while Unity just recently learned how to scroll text smoothly.

In the end, Mr. Shuttleworth really shouldn't mention Win95 at all, which now seems to emerge as a clearly superior desktop UX of all 3, nearly 20 years after its introduction.
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What prevents competitors from creating their own app that does this? If this takes off and Square charges X percent, I assume that Competitor Y will develop a similar app and charge X-z percent. I'm having a hard time seeing the barriers to entry for this particular approach.
Just because things are breaking doesn't mean google is moving fast and operating like a startup. Big companies that move slowly can also break things. Case in point: Microsoft.
Not quite. Starbucks uses its own pre-paid system that does use a plastic card, but one without any major network's logo on it. It's just store credit.
Seth Godin warned Google about this 5 years ago...

"But I can give you a warning. This is a key moment of the life cycle of the company. As the stakes keep getting higher and higher and the opportunities keep getting bigger and bigger and the number of smart people keeps increasing, so does the competition, so does the stakes, so does the opportunity to pay a $200 fine. And what I want to do today is really place a steak in the ground about a key conceptual underpinning that I want to sell you on and then try to outline why I think Google has succeeded to date and how repeating that could really help you moving forward.

People care about Google. What happened is you made an audacious promise to people. You changed the way the interacted all day long when they are supposed to be working, all day long when they are surfing, you changed their interaction. And that interaction made them care about your brand. And that means you have a platform to do some spectacular things. But if you blow it just a few times in a row they won't care about your brand any more."

Google Tech Talk: "All Marketers Are Liars" (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6909078385965257294)
I use card case at one of our local coffee shops in SLO. It's pretty slick.
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Is it worth it to buy an iPhone 4S for Siri?
Hi HN,

I've been quite intrigued by Siri. I recall the voice controls of the last iPod shuffle didn't impress anyone so I didn't buy one, but the Siri thing seems like a introduction in the real world of the fictive HAL.

Like everyone I've seen the videos or the funny screenshots but no discussion thread here on HN. Is it that good? Or should I wait for it to be mature and debugged to try it.
I feel like you can only get away with a less than subpar "MVP" if you're:

1)entering new territory and people forgive the mistakes until you fix them.

2) you are a small operation and people will forgive the mistakes until you fix them.

Google is neither. We've come to expect a minimum level of polish from anything released from them.
Extremly low pass
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Not that I'm dismissing this statistic, but android browser is included in the pie chart so I'm guessing mobile safari (i.e. iPhone and iPad) are included in this sample as well.

In my opinion, this is a little misleading. Sure, IE use has decreased overall, but its deterioration is also due to a growing mobile user base. It's worth pointing out that there are likely much disparate data for the matter, a few of which are:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_Web_browsers

http://gs.statcounter.com/

http://www.netmarketshare.com/

With the last one, browsers are broken down by desktop versus mobile/tablet and desktop usage still puts IE at over 50%. I guess it just depends on where one looks for the information.
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These sorts of complaints seem so absurdly dramatic. I don't understand the reasoning behind them. They somehow bring up an eerie image in my head of someone holding their spouse hostage in the basement for lightly mentioning that they wanted to take a photography class. "No, dear, you're not allowed to be anything besides what you were the day I met you. Change is not in the cards for you, unless I make those changes". Creepy.

That overbearing spouse deserves to be left in the dust immediately, and maybe some of these old users do as well. Not that they would be truly left behind, considering the vast landscape of other equally expensive options available requiring just as much effort to install - or MORE, if that's your thing.

We've been talking about bringing Linux to the desktop for more than a decade. And it's not even close. So a company comes along and says: Listenting to you guys isn't working, so we're going to try something else. And now they're somehow considered the antithesis to Linux. What is "Bringing Linux to the masses" supposed to mean? Making all computer users around the world cantakerous curmudgeons who can change every pixel any graphical interface can ever hope to offer? I'm pretty sure I wouldn't like that world. I like Linux geeks, and consider myself one, but I also like all the people in my life who will never even care what Linux is.

And maybe there is a way to the masses via the old ways. I implore you to invest your time and money to find out. I would honestly love to watch that unfold, and I'd probably install that version as well to see if it fits me. In the meantime, I'm going to be happily using Ubuntu everywhere, as I am now - on my 2 year old DIY desktop with 2 giant 27" monitors (worked upon first install, with no proprietary drivers - 3 screens: not so easy), on my television (DIY home theater running xbmc - hdmi audio and video - also worked upon first install - no proprietary), and on my laptop at work (thinkpad, also worked immediately), and of course, on a couple servers at various stages of deploy.

As unpopular as the opinion may be around here, I really enjoy using Unity. It's new and obviously imperfect, but it's one of the better user experiences I've found on Linux. I felt the old gnome 2 desktop was a step back from Windows 7 when I switched my media center to it last year. It looked as though I was installing software from 15 years in the past, trying to fit into a world that had an inch of dust on top of it.

I like the windows-7-like dock bar in Unity. I like that searching for apps via keyboard is king (although the sorting sucks, sorting by usage is essential). Not a huge fan of the omni-preset menu bar, but it's not really THAT big of a deal (admittedly having 2 giant screens makes that possible). I don't give a damn about screensavers, as I haven't used one since flying toasters were the in thing. Truth be told, I spend far too much making things ON Linux to care much about Linux itself. And that's the way it should be. At least that's the only way I can stand to use Linux on every single computer I own.
Completely agreed.

It appears as though nowadays it's almost considered to be shameful if computer don't try to imitate mobile interfaces, even though it feels as if the apex of usability was reached not that long ago with usable and slick Gnome 2 releases.
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Sounds interesting. But also a bit risky compared to a credit card, which to me isn't a hassle to use.

And does it offer reward points?

If not I'll stick with plastic.
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I am guessing he is referring to this: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/8147...
I don't really get it.
Wondering if you can write sprocs that use Lucene in PL/J?
iSSH maps either alt to option or control to option, how do you have it set up to do both?

Prompt lets you use the control key for control, but the alt key is borked on apple's wireless keyboard.

Is there a set up with both these keys working at the same time, preferably on the keys labeled as such?
It seems unfortunate to me that the Canonical designers didn't just start from the very functional, very slick Gnome 2.x releases and improved and polished them while keeping a stable base. Instead there seems to be a need to reinvent a usability paradigm that worked extremely well and gave users a lot of power while keeping a level of simplicity which, while higher than that of mobile interfaces, is in most ways appropiate for desktop interfaces.
Got a question for HN-ers. I would love to be able to use VIM as I would with Eclipse but perhaps maybe I should change my mindset to fit VIM not the other way around.

Here's the thing: I'd like to change my style of work from using Windows/OSX to using VM with Ubuntu server or some Linux without X installed (browser testing is done outside the VM, of course).

Some of the tools/tech I aim to use: PHP, Python(Django), Ruby(Rails), PostgreSQL(MySQL), JS, HTML, CSS, C, and maybe Java (once in a while).

Now, Eclipse has spoiled me a lot (like, really really a lot: 90% of my time is spent using keyboards and 10% on using the mouse. I know a lot of shortcuts to make me very productive navigating a large multi-projects enterprise Java app from XML[Maven,Spring], CSS, JSP, to JavaScript).

I can jump from JSP straight to the Java class if there's a Scriptlet there.

I can jump from Spring XML configuration to the implementation class and all with one key.

I can run JUnit tests easily without using mouse.

Refactor is a breeze.

I can add and dive into 3rd-party library code (let's say spring-core or even hibernate) easily via Maven + pom.xml (m2clipse plugin will download the 3rd-party library source code provided the jar exist in the repository as soon as you try to see the implementation code of 3rd-party library).

Pretty much doing everything almost without having to leave Eclipse.

These days, I want to try the other ecosystems (RoR, Django). How can I recreate such environment and workflow using VIM or Emacs (I don't mind learning other tools such as ctags).

Give me your input HN-ers! :)
Actually, the real question is: what would Apple gain from killing 90% of the app ecosystem?

There are some apps that can't be really sandboxed (Little Snitch, virtualization tools), some apps you can't sell on the AppStore (video/audio/photoshop plugins) and there's even Apple apps that aren't available there yet (Logic, Filemaker, ).

Also, Macs are the only way to write OS X and iOS apps, it would make the barrier to entry way too high for most people, shutting off potential developers. How would you write, say, your Rails backend to your iOS app, on your Mac, if it was locked down?

But yeah, I would jump ship to Linux immediately as well.
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Lots of iOS apps especially free apps have ads. Many are using Google ads network.
Though there have been many disturbing trends in the evolution of the App Store(s), this one is actually quite mild, if not welcome. Honestly, it's always unsettled me a little that any software can just start arbitrarily scribbling bits to the hard drive. (The system folder is protected, but my data isn't.) The concern is only a little about malware, and mostly about buggy code.

All the sandbox requires is that apps only have access to files when the user initiates the action. And unlike most App Store policies, you're also allowed to request specific exceptions as needed by your app, and I'm expecting they'll actually be reasonable about it. [1] This creates more work for developers, but I think overall these changes will help keep users' data safe.

As also mentioned in this thread, these changes have big implications for inter-app communication. But sandboxing doesn't take the capability away; it just requires devs to do more work, again in the name of user security. There will be a big usability hit on apps which don't see regular updates, and apps whose developers neglect to update this aspect of their apps. But the same capabilities will exist, and eventually most apps will catch up to the new norms.

[1] Although if Apple starts making stupid rejections and standing by them, then I take it all back.
I wish there was a standard format for cheatsheets for vim plugins, I have many installed that I'm not using because I keep forgetting them. Ideally I could keep my current cheatsheet on a e-ink screen on the wall by my desk.
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Problem? Perhaps for this fellow and some others. They might might not be aware there are those who don't care for the social side of Google Reader and use it as a place to keep RSS feeds in sync.
/me tries the quicklook -> preview thing

That's kinda cool... never tried that before.

But yeah. Sandboxing does not at all imply not-scriptable. It tends to imply breakage with older systems of scripting, but that's about all, and only until wrappers are made.
The lack of padding is what makes it really bad. Its now entirely too cluttered. I quit using Google Reader, and I'm trying NewsBlur although its far from perfect, its a clear step up.
I think a lot of people are operating under the assumption that Ubuntu is supposed to be for power users. I've used Ubuntu for years, never paid them a dime, don't ever expect to pay them a dime. This makes me suspect that maybe I'm not the person they intend to make money off of.

Far more likely they want to cut in on corporate IT, where saving $50/seat in OS licensing and $100/seat in hardware adds up to real money.
A 30% cut of the remaining 10%.
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Sounds like you should try Linux Mint Debian Edition. I've been using it since I gave up on Ubuntu 11.04
This site is also pretty good and in the same vein http://notalwaysright.com/
I can understand that impulse, but if your goal is to maximize the impact your money has, once you reach the level of a Jobs or a Gates, your name can carry as much weight as your money.

e.g., think of all the time people spend talking about the Gates Foundation and its work. That's important.
Gain? 30% of all application sales, instead of 30% of 10%.

I don't think they'll lock it down to the app store either, but there are plenty of essentially-reasonable reasons why they could/would.
I generally only lurk and don't really comment unless there is something that really annoys me. Not a PR troll, just a Reader user that isn't picking up a pitchfork and joining the angry mobs over something I've wanted changed since G+ was released.

I can see how removing the social features upsets readers, but they mentioned them before they were going to do it and allow you to move your data out if it no longer suits you. To me, using the notes for commenting always felt off, really never felt like a real conversation. I like the ability to share something to my specific circles and then discuss it there, you don't have to only click that little +1 button under the post if you don't want it public.

This seems to be the way that Google works on things. Huge changes, then iterate until it is usable again. They knew they were going to burn users, in this case very loyal users, to make a better product that aligns with their overall goals. I assume they will bring better social integration in the future, though when that will be, who knows.
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Also, it's worth pointing out that whether we "cure aging" is not a boolean proposition. All we can talk about is increasing the average lifespan.

No matter how well you take care of yourself, you're going to be significantly less healthy at age X+20 than at age X if X>25. Curing aging would mean that would no longer be true. There would no doubt be diseases remaining, but your susceptibility to them would be that of a 25 year old regardless of your biological age.
Locking down OSX would be an epic technical and social battle. I can't think of any reason they would go to war with their power users just to do that, especially since they already have a curated platform. They probably just want to give novice users a safe, curated experience by default.
Reminds me of the good old days of

<IMG SRC="Logo-From-Branding-Guidelines-2000x2000.gif" HEIGHT=100 WIDTH=100>

... It is pretty easy to avoid doing this with CSS background images: just use something like:

.banner {
background-image: url(banner-big.jpg);
}

@media screen and (max-width: 999px) {
.banner {
background-image: url(banner-small.jpg);
}
}

... of course, this kind of thing doesn't translate well into a "framework".
If I remember correctly, Google engineers are given the choice of one 30" monitor or a two 24" monitors, which is what the new Google Reader was presumably built on and perhaps optimized for.

However, given the fact that laptops dominate computer sales nowadays, I'm downright amazed they didn't test it further on small screens.
haven't tries this, but would using a promo code work? I think they're valid for use before you make the app public
That must have changed quickly; I swear when I first looked, neither were links. :)