skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
qsb-mac, which I think is now dead, was great because it allowed you to access menu items for any app with minimal fuss.

Quicksilver also has a plugin called 'User interface+' that gives you the same option. Combined with proxies for current application, its a powerful tool.

Great alternatives to cmd+Shift+/ which can be really slow especially on browsers where menu items include history and bookmarks.
so despiteall that, when you are using the prefs screen and turn the input volume theway cown, it should not register any input right? Thenwhy does it? thas not nothing.
It's not Control it's Command.

Command + ?

And I generally always use this to find something buried inside menus. But then usually after that, everything has a shortcut of it's own on OS X.
Actually, it's a satire since it mocks real life. If it mocked an existing creative work, it would be a parody.
;)

https://plus.google.com/u/0/111314089359991626869/posts/HQJx...
This is a great start, but I hope it goes so much further. I always liked the (now defunct) Ubiquity project. Here's the first video they made, it's so ambitious! http://vimeo.com/1561578 You could bring up a browser command-line and start typing the name of a command, say "map" to look something up on Google Maps. As soon as you type 'm' it would give a list of autocomplete options. The internationalized parser had a concept of subjects, verbs, and objects, and could autocomplete or even guess some of them.

But the coolest part was how you could add functionality. The framework let you write new commands that interacted well with the parser and gave hints to the autocomplete, and even custom UI with HTML & JS. And then users could subscribe to your commands. Ubiquity would cache the code and periodically, seamlessly upgrade your browser with new versions of the commands you subscribed to.

I was very sad when they discontinued development, and Unity looks like an excellent place to put these ideas to work again.
what the world needs are more robin hoods. anonymous is a partial example of this, an elite group that fears no organization (big or small) and the means to exact change.

checked out the site, personally i think the money angle defeats the purpose of politics, politicians should be bred to enable positive changes in society based on their core beliefs and principles, dangling a carrot in front of them is not going to foster this behavior, imho.

a better idea would be some site that promotes discussion amongst the people for certain topics and would have some angle to bring politicians into those conversations. that would really help connect the two.
LastCalc: A powerful calculator meets Quora meets Siri
Interesting idea. Are you planning on opening up other zeromq protocols like pub/sub?

The web server could validate the subscription before establishing the connection. That would be a little easier for setting up control over who has access to what resources. I suppose you could do this with REQ/REP but PUB/SUB would simplify the server side implementation.

For my current project I'm using PUSH/PULL with filtering at the server because it was fewer connections to deal with between the web server and zeromq router. PUB/SUB directly between the router and end user client could potentially cut down on bandwidth for a large implementation.
Dark background and light text is much more natural for a screen. Light background and dark text works for paper, but makes no sense on a screen, it's like staring into a lightbulb.
I understand how it could seem that way, but consider the math. If they caused $500M in lost sales, and EVERY illegal download is a lost sale, then with 50M users a day, if everyone was downloading $1 songs, they only had about ten days of piracy. If ever user was pirating one item.

If higher priced materials were pirated, or users pirated more than one item, then we're talking less time. Maybe a week, maybe less, of rampant, constant piracy.

And this site, roughly, was open since when, 2006?
There is good economic literature on how bribery evolves into its more transparent and regulated form, lobbying, as a society develops. There is an equally developed literature on the returns on lobbying. Book-ending all of this is the legitimate claim that no elected official can be expected to understand everything of consequence and so will probably need to be "educated" (the base claim of every lobbyist, whether in good faith or not).

Killing lobbying, sadly, is not an option. It will force the influence vectors under the table and cause all sorts of nastiness. People wanting to influence power isn't bad; it just needs to be effectively channeled.

What is needed is more transparency. Going both ways.

Going up, we need some way for politicians to effectively guage the support or opposition to a proposed piece of legislation. The ad hoc activism model we have going now is Dark Ages crap.

I can see a future where reps and senators pledge to use an online polling platform for bills that voters registered in their district sign up to voice up with, and where not pledging to use such a system will be anathema to one's campaign.

Going down, we need something that makes campaign financing more effective. By more effective I mean that instead of finding out about donation opportunities ad hoc I have a systematic way of ensuring I have considered every candidate and that every candidate has been evaluated on every issue pertinent to me. Not terrifically complicated software.

Second stage of top-to-bottom transparency revolves around informing voters, but I think that is fairly well covered for the amount of influence it has and the number of people who regularly and actively follow elections.
*Point of clarification: I'm not asking why Anon went after them, just how they could be so vulnerable.
It’s Not The End For SOPA, It’s Just The Beginning Of a New Era
"Instead of hunting through drop-down menus to find application commands, Ubuntu’s Head-Up Display lets users type what they want to do into a search box."

Do I detect a touch of Jef Raskin's idea of typeable commands here as well? I'll have to re-vist his The Humane Interface

Bring it on I say
The Chris Dodd petition is signed. Ask Obama to deal with it
>so that they would vote for something.

That is illegal, here's what wikipedia has to say

>Similarly, political donors are legally entitled to support candidates that hold positions with which the donors agree, or which will benefit the donors. Such conduct becomes bribery only when there is an identifiable exchange between the contribution and official acts, previous or subsequent, and the term quid pro quo denotes such an exchange.
It was meant to be a parody.
That is why I was wondering what would have been the signaling channel in this case. Obviously for FBI to put all this effort into it, they'd have to have some payoff (maybe publicity about how well they did the job was the payoff?). So at some point someone had to suggest this course of action and hint on the expected reward.

One way I can think is through Congress. There are revolving doors around many govt regulatory agencies and industries they regulate but I think a revolving door between FBI and Hollywood is a little harder to imagine.

EDIT: Just thought about it. Can someone donate to FBI? I found:

* FBIAA ( http://www.fbiaa.org/donations/ )
* http://www.fbicaindiana.com/donate

Wonder what kind of tricks FBI would do if someone drops $10M in there?
Trying to "equalize" free speech just hands vast swathes of power to the people who get to define "equal". Speech is intrinsically unequal in effectiveness and there's no way to make that go away.
As stated, based on my personal experience tests are a good determinant on who should proceed and who should not. I get to know my students. Even before they take their test I know, for the most part, who are going to do well and who aren't. I know which ones know the material and which ones don't. I can't say, "I feel like you don't know the material and should not take Calc II." This would lead to too many arguments and acrimony.

I can give them a test and when they get an 'F' on it there is no argument. The test is a good measure of who knows the subject and who doesn't. For the most part. It's the most effective tool that I know of.

The absolutely mandatory part is the crux of the issue with regard to face-to-face classes. It forces students to meet at a set time and work on a given topic. In the absence of this forcing mechanism human nature takes over and most students fail miserably at the time management aspect of online classes. This is all anecdotal though. I don't have any research to back this up.
Saint Louis Giving 50k to Startups
The site isn't loading-- does anyone have a mirror?
Nice! Would it be possible to add Ruby as a language example? I could likely figure out more-or-less how the code would appear using one of the other languages with which I am familiar, but it would be quite useful to see the changes to code similar to what I am most often writing.
One quote from the article which I found interesting: “it works so well that the rare occasions when it can’t read my mind are annoying!”

I interpret that as, "While it's great being able to search for commands, it's an absolute pain in the ass to find the command if the search fails."

He mentions being able to look at the list of commands like a "table of contents" for an application, but I really don't see how that is possible considering what he has described.

All I know is that I'm going to be even more lost in GIMP with this update.
> When people heard that Ford was letting people die in its Pinto rather than recall them because it was cheaper, did people stop buying Ford?

Actually, they did.

And, interestingly enough, the Pinto tradeoff decision in question came from a govt decision. Safety costs money. Ford asked the US govt "how much is a life worth" and the relevant design decision used a higher value.

Price matters. Some folks are alive because they traded in an older less safe car for a Pinto. Some of them couldn't have done that if Pintos cost more.
> The article simply says MegaUpload was going to release a new site targeting music distribution.

Not just music distribution, but also movie distribution, if I am reading the article correctly.

Seems like a prime target for RIAA and MPAA, though in my mind, this is just plausible, and not the real deal.
Ask HN: Would it make sense to have a "Wall of Fame" section on HN?
Some links get posted on HN more than once, yet each time they manage to gather enough upvotes to rise to the front page.

The latest example is "A brief, incomplete and mostly wrong history of programming languages," which has been submitted at least three times to HN, on each occasion gathering hundreds of upvotes:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599164

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1327746

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3503896

Would it make sense to add a "Wall of Fame" section on HN to which we can nominate submissions that deserve a special, permanent link somewhere on the site?
> "I like how he thinks that Netflix and Redbox are also ripping him off. "

They don't, actually. They just know that if they play the victim, they can shift the eventual compromise further in their favor than if they took a rational position.

Suppose a given policy discussion is a numeric 1-10 scale, and you and I are at 4 and 7 respectively, compromise (as it is seen by voters who expect compromise to be a mid-way point) is 5 or 6. But if I pretend to stake my position as a 10, compromise is suddenly a 7 -- exactly what I wanted in the first place. So long as no-one (e.g. the press) is calling me out for staking out an absurd position, there's no reason not to run this tactic.
Start-up founders should start as shepherds
In practice it's more like 80 000 SEK per month. I used to live in Sweden and while the exchange rate was 6 crowns to a dollar, the buying power of 10 crowns equaled the buying power of a dollar. Just look at fast food. 5 bucks can get you a decent meal in the US at a fast food joint, about what you could get for 50 crowns on Sweden.

As far as rent goes, it really is much worse in CA. I lived in a studio apartment in Stockholm right by Karlaplan ( very ritzy area ) and paid 10k/month SEK. To get something like that in SF would be much more.
I have already opened up SUB sockets, so that on the JS side can connect as a SUB socket to a PUB - do you mean allowing the JS side to connect as a PUB?

In its current state, people who connect as a SUB socket have the option of passing in a msgfilter in their authentication data, the rationale being that you might only want to authenticate certain users to listen to certain types of messages.
Typical Economist waffle. At least they admit the real problem, the boss says no:

"At base, it is unrealistic to expect many bastions of capitalism to turn their shares over to their workforce"
Congratulations on the new release.

However, if we're talking about Devops for Everyone, I consider myself pratically obligated to tell people about the Salt Stack[1], even though I have no association with the project, just because it is awesome.

It is, IMHO, Remote Execution Done Right. Also, it does not use ssh at all, and I believe it will be able to handle thousands of simultaneous machines in no time. To see what I'm talking about, just take a look at the FLOSS Weekly episode about Salt[2], where the main author himself admits this is his fourth iteration in trying to make a remote execution engine that does not suck.

[1] http://saltstack.org/
[2] http://twit.tv/show/floss-weekly/191
> The plain fact is that if you look at the richest countries in the world, with the best standards of living, they have huge governments that provide their citizens with a host of services without profit, such as healthcare.

Ah, so you're admitting that the US govt provides "free healthcare". (The US is one of the richest countries.)

> It was government, not market forces, that forced companies to stop making kids pajamas out of inflammable material.

Actually, it wasn't. It was publicity. Yes, there's a law now, but the market demand changed first.
Health Care Reform In Indiana
You are absolutely correct. Humans are not rational in this respect. Every overweight person I know wants to lose weight. Well then just exercise and eat better, right? Life is more complicated than that.

The contrived setting of the classroom is much better than an online setting. This may change as technology gets better. Right now, online is not a better format than face-to-face. Online might be the most cost effective format but it isn't the pedagogical optimum.
Our culture looks down upon blue-collar jobs such as plumbers, electricians and other trade-skill type jobs. Yet these jobs are becoming harder and harder to fill and pay is ever increasing. Don't believe me? Hire an independent plumber and/or electrician for a few days worth of work and see how much it cost you.

Unfortunately, there is a stigma with those jobs so people borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars for a college education, then go to work making $15/hour while Joe the Plumber goes to a trade school and earns $60-$75k/year right out of school.
Bullshit. To go legit with currently signed artists they'd have to do deals with the big 4 labels and none of them were likely to license their catalog to mega.

They were much more likely to go the grooveshark route an try to hide behind the DMCA safe harbor provisions.
I also wanted to mention, that on the REQ REP side, in the bridge I actually implement the REQ as an XREQ socket, that way I only need one XREQ socket for all js side REQ sockets. I simply tag the message with the identity of the js REQ socket. I had thought it would be nice originally to create a one to one mapping between javscript side REQ sockets and server side REQ sockets, however creating one zmq socket per js client may present scaling problems, running out of file descriptors, etc..
It seems like a new course of action for MPAA.

1st they failed to push SOPA in USA.

But, they may force Ireland and other smaller countries to pass SOPA like laws.

Then, they can push again in USA claiming that it is good since everyone else is using it.
I have yet to find anything I like about Unity. As many of the other commenters have said, was there any real user testing on PCs the users actually own?
First, I can't down-vote, my account is quite new still and doesn't have the capability (see the green color on my name?). Probably other people disagreeing with you have down-voted you. I happens, you know.

Second, I resort to ad-hominen? Really? Because, besides the "head in the sand" comment, my reply included SIX (count 'em!), numbered, counter arguments. It boggles the mind how one can manage to miss them.

And all those six (count 'em) arguments, in order to reply to your sans-argument ad-hominen that it's all "only in [my] mind. There is no evidence of this outside [my] head".
One year on: The state of Chrome OS
Easily one of the best websites i've ever come across -- been looking for something like this for a while! Would be nice to have html highlighting, but certainly not complaining as is...

Many thx!
I like the idea of an intelligent command line interface. Hopefully it is intuitive enough as well.
> Mint community seems to have some philosophical rejection of it and recommends a reinstall.

I was doing in-place upgrades of Debian in the late 90ies, and they generally went quite smoothly. Not being able to to do that gives me a strong urge to use blunt terms like "horse shit". In-place upgrades are one of the reasons why you have an advanced package management system in the first place, and abandoning that is a huge step backwards. I do, after all, use this stuff on servers too.
I always wished the kind of mouse+command line interface found in AutoCAD existed for more applications. This seems like an nice step in that direction.
To this, this seems like a lot more unix-y way of doing things, and certain for someone like me who prefers to keep their hands on the keyboard, this is top-banana (yes, I know there's ctrl+alt+shift+X to doing something in one app or other, but remembering every combination in every application is a PITA).
If you've used Cloud9IDE's command line, I see this more like that -> you type git, and a popup shows you the completions for git.
There's a lot of haters, but I'm really keen on unity. It's like having gnome-do baked in. Sure, it's not quite polished, but at least it's trying different things than the identikit window managers out there.
How do they get close if they don't try? Perhaps it's just the contrarian in me, but I'm glad to see some movement here. Admittedly, though, it does seem a bit "shoehorned" in, and not terribly discoverable, but I'll withhold judgment until I've tried it. I can't live without something QuickSilver-like at this point, so I should be well within their target audience.
By the way, you can already test it in Ubuntu 12.04: http://www.webupd8.org/2012/01/hud-ubuntus-new-smart-menus-a...
Allowing searching of context menus is a great idea, hopefully this extends to all parts of the UI and will work with Java applications as well (I'm always getting lost in the eclipse settings menus).

Removing context menus altogether though?
Navigating around the application using ALT + <Key> is much quicker than bringing up a search and typing a full word in and then navigating to the second or third option down.

The only other alternative would be to add keyboard shortcuts to absolutely every feature in every application.
I think if you talk to anyone in teaching (except at an elite university or setting) will tell you that students don't do optional. Students do problems because they will get a number for it. They won't do problems (by and large) if there is no grade for it.

Would Stackoverflow.com have the participation it has if it didn't have badges, numbers, and karma? I think your perspective ignores a great deal of research on games and human behavior.
Topgrading: The only way to run a start-up
This sounds a lot like the 'Help' menu in OS X 10.5+, one of the best "details" of Mac OS ever. I apply radial blurs in Photoshop exactly that way. Click 'Help', type "radi", enter.

Also great to find your way around after an upgrade to Xcode 4. I even used it in TextMate until I found out about cmd+ctrl+T. Only Eclipse had (has?) broke it, of course...

It doesn't learn, though.
Same here - Chrome 16.0.912.75 on Windows XP (work machine). I'll let the site owners know.
I agree with you about that writing write-heavy applications in SQL is much more painful than writing read-heavy. I have been hit by various types of deadlocks including the annoying foreign key deadlocks. In PostgreSQL 9.2 they are working on removing false (as in they are not necessary to preserve consistency) foreign key deadlocks so they should be less common if that patch lands.
I've never had an iPhone, so I could be wrong here, but... Isn't an iPhone jailbreak just a hack to let you install arbitrary apps? If I'm right, than your comparison is silly. Cyanogenmod is a complete replacement operating system...
One way to improve the situation is to remove the limit on representatives of 435.

The constitution originally provides for 1 rep for every 30,000 people. If say we go back to that.
While my inner revolutionist is bouncing with excitement. Is there actually any evidence. My worry is that it's all speculation.
Trying it is awesome, but only if it's an extra, not something that's happening in place, of, say, testing their distribution's upgrade process, testing it on disparate hardware, and other tedious things like that that make for a pleasant experience.
Two things:
1. OS X already does this in the 'Search' option of the Help menu.

2. Menus are a useful way to discover the main features of a program. That is, the user can be in 'browsing' mode, not just 'searching' mode.
> the decision about how to behave is made by individual interests and resources, which are much easier to buy or otherwise influence than elected representatives.

You're ignoring the diversity of individual choice plus the information problem.

I've yet to hear of a politican, technocrat, or bureaucrat who can do a better job deciding for me. To be fair, they don't have the information.

Feel free to delegate decisions wrt your resources as you see fit, but leave me out of it.
Agreed, but you need to go a step further; it's the Presidential system that needs to changed.

google "Presidential vs. parliamentarian system" and you'll see what I'm talking about
good point... it also shows how mental exercise helps. Remember the movie, Rise of the Planet of the Apes? It revolved around this topic. although fictitious, the part that proves the chimp's intelligence also came from basic but usefully designed games.
Looking for: Internship, Summer 2012

Keywords: Desingineer, jQuery, PHP, mySQL, HTML5/CSS3, UI & UX Design, Prototyping, Front-End Dev

Name: Patrick Hannigan, 3rd Year Honours Computer Science, University of Waterloo, ON, CAN

Area: Anywhere outside of Waterloo, ON

Portfolio & CV: http://www.patrickhannigan.com

I've been freelancing for 6+ years designing and building website and applications from scratch. I have formal schooling with all kinds of fundamental CS concepts, and first hand experience with UI/UX design, workflows, prototyping, and building finished products. Passion lies with thoughtful product design and shipping products.

Expert with HTML/CSS, intermediate with javascript/jQuery & PHP. Get in touch to see my most recent personal projects - this is what I'm most excited about.

I've done the big company thing... I'd like to get an intern experience with a start-up outside of Waterloo, Ontario.

Contact: contact@patrickhannigan.com
Does this really surprise anyone? Having seen Irish government in action over the years, this is exactly how they like to do things.

That being said, I'm in Sean's constituency and I voted for him, so I'd better call him quick.