skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you optimize a framework for beginners, you're optimizing for learnability. That's great for the first few days or even weeks of learning. But once you're past that, it's not so great. What you care more about is the usability of the thing once you know it. There are plenty of cases where learnability and usability are in conflict. Letting learnability win is a short-term relief.

If you on the other hand optimize for usability, for making things simple and easy to use for someone who understands the basics, you'll often end up with something that has great learnability as well. Maybe not as much as could be achieved as if that was your only goal, but plenty still.

The other aspect is whether you as a framework designer are designing something for yourself and your peers or if you're trying to dumb things down on behalf of beginners. In other words, designing for what you think beginners might find easy in their learning phase. That's really hard to do. Most technology I've seen designed in such a master/apprentice fashion sucks.

Finally, when you're comparing complexity, it's generally more helpful to look at the complexity involved with completing an entire task. Comparing complexity of "hello world" tells you little about what the complexity is going to be like developing a complete, modern web application from database migrations to XSS/CRSF protection.

That's where learnability and usability are again in conflict. Yes, it's harder to learn a framework that has answers for things like "how do I migrate a database once I have data I care about", or whatever feature you want to focus on, but once you hit that problem, you'll be glad that it's there and find the solution less complex than stringing something together from tons of separate parts yourself.

All that being said, I think Sinatra is wonderful. So what if it's not a fit for building a whole Basecamp or Github? It's great for teaching someone the basics of how HTTP works and it's great for smaller surface apps or for smaller, isolated parts of bigger apps.
I don't know if labeling rapid evolution as "hipster" is quite fair, but the underlying point is true. Have you gone back to a update a Rails project that is 3 years old or more? I have, and it's significantly more hassle in general than going back and updating a PHP project that is 10 years old.

Personally I think this is a small price to pay for a framework that stays up to date and still releases forward-thinking features on a regular basis (Rails modularization in 3.0 and the asset pipeline in 3.1 are amazing features that an emphasis on backwards compatibility could have made more difficult), but let's acknowledge that it is not an unmitigated win in all aspects.
Same here. When writing instructions about how to install the historious bookmarklet, I had to take screenshots of all the browsers, including the iPhone. I don't think of it as a nice touch, it's integral to people's understanding of how to install it.

I haven't had a single request for additional instructions, ever.
I found that really bizarre as well. It's also troubling to me that the sticks don't move in concert. That seems like an excellent mode of communicating what the other pilot is doing.
That's what I'm grappling with right now myself, I've assembled a hefty doc's worth of links to useful resources I've found, and I've got a small library of programming books I've bought lately.

For the holidays, my current plan is to go through a chapter a day of the programming books. Not just read through it, but actually do the example projects, retyping out the code line by line, understanding both the big picture and seeing if there's any gaps in the code that I don't understand. Actually try to experiment afterwards, try to build on top of smaller projects and put them together.
You realize that because OS provides buffering at transport layer, applications do not need to care about frame sizes or any of that stuff. And PHP is even more distanced from the network, because it communicates only locally with your web server, which in turn may (and probably will) do buffering of its own.
Vague Lighttpd error
Lighttpd wont start if I try to start it as root with
server.username = "www-data"
server.groupname = "www-data"
un-commented! Is there a known fix?
It amused me slightly you hadn't "ls"d /etc/motd and discovered the symlink straight away (of course, ls is aliased to ls -la)
Exactly. I fail to see any benefit to removing feedback on how the plane is actually contolled at any given moment.
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On top of that, I actually talk to beginners all the time who are thrilled with the ease of learning Rails. They're building real apps they never thought they could complete on their own.

Naturally, there's some selection bias there (most people who give up are unlikely to write), but that doesn't change the joy for the people who did have a great and easy time.
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There is a funny thing about life and people. They keep changing. Those who are unable to accept the changes and proceed accordingly are left far behind in the league of populace. Same goes with the organizations. If an organization does not comprehend the changes required in its composition from time to time it fails to raise itself above certain mark or maybe even fails to maintain its mark.
From what I read from the preliminary report, it's established that the stall warning sounded. If it had not been audible on the CVR, they would probably have noted it.

One problem was that the stall warning stopped due to high angle of attack even though the plane was stalled, and it started again when the nose was lowered and the AOA was in the "valid" region again. This might have confused the pilots in a situation when they already had inconsistent airspeeds etc. to deal with.
Here is the bug discussing inclusion of update-motd: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/update-motd/+bug/2...
Who cares about Instapaper for Android? ReadItLater is at 10c on the market right now.

Leave short-minded developers to their Objective-C and use apps from developers who care about the platform you chose.
With a price of $0.10, that's about $10k. The pricepoint is about 50x less than Instapaper.
OK. UI is great. But whats the app doing?

Telling you it is your own journal and allowing occasional sharing? So a personal blog that works from your smart phone and thus lets you do stuff that Wordpress won't?

I like it, I must say. But why would users use it? Self gratification? What is their business model? A la four square? Will they eventually have checkins and deals?
I was shocked that new airplanes use joysticks are just simple inputs and don't give (some) feedback on the current state of the current control surfaces or the state of the other joystick.

This seems like a "feature" of analog controls that you'd want to take forward to fly-by-wire systems.
>> FXAA and other similar techniques are only relevant when dealing with deferred rendering only. Detecting edges on the depth buffer may sound as the solution until you realize that two planes at right angles has an edge between that can alias. The change there is in the normal and not the Z.

Why do you say that FXAA is only relevant to deferred rendering?

If you have a deferred rendering setup, you'll have the depth buffer and the normal buffer (a floating point texture with normal vectors) available. These can be used to do edge detection for silhouette edges and non-silhouette sharp edges.

I don't know the details of modern anti aliasing techniques, but I'd guess that you can get the best edge detection using a combination of the color, depth and normal buffer. Whether you want to do this for anti aliasing is a different issue, a simple RGB edge detect may yield better results.

>> Also modern graphics cards do not give programmatic access to the z-buffer as the z-buffer format is often proprietary. Deferred shading based renderers often duplicate the z-value also into a texture.

This doesn't make any sense. The depth buffer may be internally stored in a compressed proprietary format, but it's still available to the programmer as a regular buffer or texture.

You have plenty of ways to access the depth buffer for reading. The depth buffer can be rendered into a texture (either as floating point or regular 24 bit integer), which can be read back in a shader. You can do regular lookups where you get back the depth value or a shadow lookup with percentage closer filtering.

The depth values can also be read back from the buffers (using glReadPixels in OpenGL) to be analyzed on the CPU (not feasible for anything realtime) or saved to disk or whatever.
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Get the x86 emulator installed. It boots in a second and is damn, damn fast. The reason the standard emulator sucks is because its emulating an ARM device - the x86 emulator has no such restraint. Its a HUGE difference in flow.
The degree issue is a bit of a red herring, to be honest: it is not obvious that a particular degree would be either necessary or sufficient for certification (either in general, or the specific case of Malaysia.)

For example, in the UK a three-year accounting degree only shaves ~6 months off the time needed to become professionally qualified, and many accountants studied something else at university anyway.
On Android it is usually even more in-your-face - here's a screenshot from the default setup for HTC Sense: http://smartphoneblogging.com/wp-content/gallery/htcsense/ht... (that's just an example - Samsung, Motorola, Sony, LG are all similar)

Every time you unlock your phone you see the weather.
You have got to be kidding! Man pages are amazing - often you can figure out what is going on or what niche switch you want to use much quicker with a man page than Google.
Yes, but the fact that we can exploit that - and that we use the same physics for read heads as those we use for calculating flight - is pretty impressive, is it not?
I completely disagree. This is the classic Silicon Valley echo-chamber view of Path. Path is not made for the Silicon Valley technorati.

Path is more like iMessage than it is like Facebook or Twitter.

I go for a run. No one knows I'm going for a run. I post to Path. Now if I get mugged, my sister will know where to dispatch the cops to.

I post a photo of a family member. I get a "so-and-so visited my Path" notification. I can then go and chat with them about the photo cause I know that they have seen it.

I go to sleep. My friends check my Path before they SMS me to make sure they don't interrupt my sleep.

The problems it solves for me:

- Did so-and-so see that photo I posted? They can view it on their own time. Once they've seen it I'll have a conversation with them about it.

- I live on my own. My family knows where I am if I accidentally disappear.

- I am asleep. Don't wake me up.
Like you said, I get people to use Sinatra for a while before getting in to Rails. It gets them in to MVC style apps while keeping things simple. Definitely recommend it as a stepping stone to Rails.
Incidentally, I think downloading or saving any kind of file, and then having to "find" it from the entire set of accessible files is one of the worst UI offenses still remaining in modern machines.

I just downloaded/saved something, why do I have to spend time "re-finding it" if I want to access it in another context?
Interesting how this came days after demanding Google (and the others) pre-screen and censor user content. In a country filled with corruption it's very easy to bust businesses on anything.
Not if it is documented to be a symlink and the user should edit motd.tail instead.
What demotivates me the most as a developer
I guess it could be a cheap workaround to always get smooth transitions when changing pilot. Imagine if one pilot holds full left and the other full right and you press a "switch now!"-button. You would need some kind of transition-period of maybe a second to avoid jerk which could be confusing for the pilot to not know when he has full control and when he is in transition.
Something tells me people using Bingo Card Creator aren't the most technical people and these little download screenshots would make much more beneficial there than on the Dropbox page ;)
What about http://rubykoans.com/ for learning Ruby? You'll be following TDD, meaning the code should work if all the tests pass. And you learn incrementally as new test cases pass (or koans, as the case may be). I'll venture to say that once you have a grounding in the fundamentals, it'll be much easier to just read the advanced tutorials and understand it.
That's a temporary promotion.
read some sci-fi: last chapter of flashforward (the book)
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> Existing cars, if driven 20 times as much, would wear out 20 times more quickly

Citation needed. I don't think they would.
1) enable USB debugging on your Android device
2) connect it to your computer with the USB cable
3) deploy your app from Eclipse

Took me one minute and I could test the app instantly on the device.
Ah, yes, I read that too. It was so frustrating that the pilot kept pulling up all the time, it makes no sense. You'd think that at some point he'd stop and reassess, but I guess he was too confused and shocked to do it...
> The voice should demonstrate increased tension and panic as counting down.

This part doesn't sound so useful, in a cockpit with worried pilots.
If the majority of the people in the industry are idiots [...]

The majority of people in the industry aren't idiots.

Imagine if you couldn't advise your friends on how to clean up their registry, or write a script for them because you were practicing computing with out a license! Imagine the silliness of being arrested for showing someone how to use an abacus.

You're just being silly. It is not illegal for me to suggest someone take a pill if they have a headache, offer a friend an anti-histamine, put a plaster on my girl-friend's cut, or clean my nephew's scraped knee with anti-septic. It is also not illegal for me to help prepare someone else's tax return, or the paperwork for small claims court.

What is illegal, is presenting myself as a qualified professional when I am not. That, to me, sounds eminently reasonable.
As any European user of HN knows too well, when you send tiny chunks separated by a few ms a time up to TCP, the majority of the planet will get a jittery half-rendered experience of your home page lasting seconds for a handful of actual kb downloaded.

The better question might be "if you want to turn it off, the question is why", or something.
I will install any Elegant Theme you wish for $ 10
Our world is made of spit and bailer twine. The only difference is the skill at which one uses spit and bailer twine. IIRC LCD panels still have a manufacturing step involving rubbing wool on them, because rubbing wool on an LCD 'makes it work'.

It's only those of us who see spit and bailer twine as all we need that can manage to turn a hacky property of silicon into NAND gates and from NAND gates an iPhone.

If you still doubt it's spit and bailer twine, consider this picture:
http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/talk/transistor.gif

The real professionals are those that can pair their twine with a slick marketing document.
If you can't afford $10 then you hold probably just keep the money, you need it more than they do.
I don't think you need to go from Sinatra to Rails - I actually started with Rails and like dhh said - before I knew it I was building real apps. Rails provided a great framework to get something up and running. It provides MVC and interacts with a database. After familiarising myself with Rails I started using Sinatra (which doesn't offer any MVC or support you get from Rails) and then ultimately started coding just in Ruby. I don't think there's any issue with the learning curve for Rails because it provides the support where you need it. I speak to new developers all the time who use Rails and get it almost instantly - releasing apps a week or two later.
I beg to disagree. Learnability and usability can get along together. Good examples are Jquery and Cakephp. Both have executed this very well from producing well written and well maintained documentation then add a good amount of plugins that is contributed by the community.

For example, in cakephp we have this cook book http://book.cakephp.org which the quality of the content surpasses every cakephp book on amazon.

So, like apps "simple & feature rich" can get along together like "learnability & usability" can get along too. It just needs more work.
This is not only a case of getting comfortable with electronic help. It is also a case of having experience with the extreme conditions in the first place.

I've seen many people who has driven cars, without traction control, for many years and then experience ice for the first time. When the car doesn't move they press the accelerator or turn the steering wheel even more which is the exact opposite of what you should do.
Maybe, but keep in mind that they are in operation on thousands of planes operating night and day, and they very seldom fail. So it's not what you would call a fragile solution. After all, the pitots involved in this flight were already due to be replaced because of icing problems.
Did you, in fact, run into any serious problems with those deletes? (I now have a range of key space that I seem to have "damaged": if I do a LIST with prefix "requests_/" I now deterministically get an InternalError.)

Seriously, though, this new multi-delete is EPIC ;P. I am now deleting objects at an rate of over 4 million per minute! (Although, as these are POSTs, I wonder if these now cost me money; that said, it likely isn't going to much.)

(This is fast enough that I'm now "cleaning house" much more thoroughly than before: going through some of those "database buckets" I have and deleting obsolete indexes.)
His take on android is spread in myriads of little bits in the past posts, like this one http://www.marco.org/2011/11/21/appleinsider-android-paid-ap...

Now, looking for all of this bits is a hassle.
I you are really interested, looking for his podcasts on 5by5 could be a alternative way.
Considering how many incidents there seems to be due to the loss of these airspeed sensors it seems crazy not to have an additional, different method of calculating airspeed.

Is there a reason GPS is not suitable here?
The secret was to do the delete operations in parallel; I've been running anywhere between 64 and 128 LIST->*DELETE processes at any given moment; was often able to sustain 10m DELETE operations per hour. This new feature is still much faster, of course ;P.
Shared acquaintance, no question.
I couldn't actually bring myself to click to page 2.
yeah, I agree with that. Also there's another factor in that stall warnings may have been seen as an ADIRU malfunction rather than an actual stall. In those cases, I suppose pulling back might make some sense if you think you have bad ADIRU input and the plane is in normal law.
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nice article but make it a little more detailed next time ;)
Read closer. Never does he say usability and learnability are opposed, just that there are opposing cases and that he doesn't agree with optimizing for learnability first.
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> It's only those of us who see spit and bailer twine as all we need that can manage to turn a hacky property of silicon into NAND gates and from NAND gates an iPhone.

Are you seriously suggesting that the same train of thought that "rubs wool on LCDs because it 'makes them work'" was responsible for turning silicon into an iPhone?
New version of bloomfilter.rb uses SETBIT/GETBIT: https://github.com/igrigorik/bloomfilter-rb/blob/master/lib/...

The "bit" per key was prior to setbit/getbit functionality. The new implementation is, in fact, very efficient.
Xcode can be expensive, but it comes with a nice, free computer.
http://i.imgur.com/FHz1B.png
Show HN: An immersive 3D interface for Facebook
Do people seriously consider themselves better drivers than the people who actually drive cars for a living?
Is this title chosen to sort out those who comment before reading the article?
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Deliberate selection of inputs would be best. Maybe a switch in the middle that both selects and displays which input is active?
thanks for the advise :)
One question: Why are they not speaking English?

I heard from fatal command mistakes with pilots an Asian country and now everyone has to speak English. Is this again some stupid patriotism thing (i am German, i know the French attitudes), but i seriously thought to prevent command errors everyone has to speak the international aviation language.
I think you'd still do better to have a manual selection of which input is commanding, with an option of having both sticks linked and moving together.
Make disposable web servers for testing
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Bonin would have had to realize that the plane is in alternate mode in the first place in order to react correctly. It probably never crossed his mind since he never trained in it, and conversely if he had trained in it, he may have been more likely to at least check.

But to me the bigger problem seems to be that such an important change in the plane's behaviour could happen without anyone noticing. I'd consider the mode to be something the pilot must be made aware of, not something he has to deduce from the fact that the airspeed isn't available.

Perhaps the mode is shown prominently and the pilots just didn't notice it in their state of panic. Making it more prominent probably leads right into an insane arms race - the stall warning was as prominent as anything can be and still got ignored.

I don't envy the person who has to design a airliner cockpit's user interface and decide which of a hundred potentially vital pieces of information should be displayed how.
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I'm continually surprised by developers throwing out figures like 50% this or that… the (30%) apple app store is a great example.

If you've ever actually RUN anything, you'll know that 30% is pretty much nothing — try retail, or farming.

I think Marco is looking to be proven wrong. He doesn't believe enough in android as a platform — but, what he is offering is the support of his massive audience for someone to have a crack at.