skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An interesting thing is that Unity is also trying to be a tablet-friendly interface. Using the keyboard on a tablet is rather cumbersome. HUD looks like a partly desktop-optimized, partly tablet-optimized interface that sits awkwardly in-between.

I'm curious why Canonical thinks it's a good idea to train users to rely on the keyboard to find things. (Ever tried to find a program in Dash?) Despite the rise of the "search" paradigm, keyboard shortcuts, and typing in general, have always been the domain of experienced users and programmers. Ordinary users tend to rely much more on the mouse; they type only when absolutely necessary. In fact, unless the new interface gives them plenty of hints, they'll probably no idea what to type. Wasn't Ubuntu trying to make things easier for ordinary users, even at the expense of power users? Or does the benefit outweigh the potential disadvantages in this case?
Fun with barcodes
New and open science: the end of peer review?
Man we really despise innovation attempts for some reason today on HN. Canonical is trying to push computing into the future and progress user interface by doing really hard stuff. They're sailing uncharted waters and giving us all a lot of good research, and all for free. This is honestly awesome. Not because it's going to be a UI revolution but because we get to see a well funded company, that cares about user rights, genuinely trying to innovate and make our lives better.

Plus the HUD sounds great. Anyone here use Quicksilver or mac spotlight or gnome do? I use them non stop, I can launch/search/command my computer using a simple interface without leaving my keyboard. Now I have this built into each application. And soon developers will start to build applications with this in mind and it'll get even slicker.

Theres no reason to poo on Canonical. They are trying super hard in the face of an ungrateful tech community. It's not about developing the system you personally would enjoy. It's about innovation and the future.

Think different mother fuckers.
You can already print a machine that prints other machines, but you still need a human to make the first one (for now).

http://www.makerbot.com/blog/2010/06/04/a-makerbot-self-repl...
That's great. To be honest I'm guilty of copy/paste Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions myself. :)
Charles Stross' Rule 34 dealt with this concept: fabricators with DRM that only allowed them to print legitimate items, and a thriving black market of hacked fabricators and illegal or unlicensed designs. Good stuff - futurism, but perhaps the not-too-distant future.
Another invention which will alienate even more casual users from GNU/Linux.

Users, even I as a progammer, do not like to have to re-learn and assimilate a new interface-model every few months or years. Ive learned a few times, why cant people stick to what is working already? The menu is super nice, the global menu, not so much but fine thats what some people nice. Now Ill explain to my girlfriend that there is the HUD menu? And after that youll invent something else something new, for what!? All that work and you just have a different kind of menu. Too bad, too bad.

Why not do some real user tests to find out where they are failing right now? Why users dont feel comfortable in Ubuntu? Yes, even those users, like me, and Ive used most distros for a decade. Its just something fishy about both Unity and Gnome2.
Because I believe in the right of a person to be secure in his papers. If you've done something illegal, the government should be able to make its case without needing your computer. If they can't, what you've done is, to me, not illegal. The people that wrote the Constitution seem to agree.
Consumption Makes Us Sad? Science Says We Can Be Happy With Less
> The HUD will be introduced with the next version of Ubuntu, 12.04

> Shuttleworth: "It will be interesting to see how users react to the changes."

Please... this is an LTS release and your users aren't guinea pigs. I would hate to see another potentially promising feature get bad-mouthed all over the place due to premature release. Something like this needs months of usability testing. Couldn't they just wait until 12.10?
Heh as with most announcments where ubuntu makes changes to the UI the tech community is pretty dismissive, I for one love the fact that canonical are pushing forward a linux desktop experience in a way nobobdy else is, I didnt like unity much, but I trust these guys to fix it.

I find well done command interfaces much better than traditional menus for quite a lot of reasons

* they scale better, 10 items is a similiar experience to 100

* they are more discoverable, just start typing a word and go through the list of match (where help can be included)

* they can show information, each command can have a descriptive sentence (and a link to help), icons in a menu sometimes get tiny alt text

* they can adapt to your behaviour, if I use firefox all the time, pressing f in alfred give me firefox
SSE creates a persistent connection. On disconnect, the client will automatically attempt to reconnect.
Zurich (Switzerland) as a startup cluster
You can't say "give the money"

Say "attend his next fundraising"
Megaupload FBI Notice - A Design Critique
Listas de Suscriptores como Nuevos Negocios
Yeah, I just meant I had similar troubles with Unity.
If the strategy you propose becomes more prevalent, law officiers will adapt.

As will the encryption software. Good luck dumping my L1 cache.
Sounds like a smart idea, to me. Since I started using Alfred on my Mac I'm able to control almost everything from the keyword and I'm faster at almost everything.

Being able to guess the user intentions from the context would be a great advantage, but the challenge would be balancing context-dependent commands from the most general ones, in my opinion.
Let's talk about the Boston strangler.

How many women did the Boston strangler actually get? (I'll save you a trip to Wikipedia: 13, over 3 years.) What percentage of "women home alone" is that - even women home alone in the Boston area? Now compare the level of raw paranoia that the strangler generated - surely, paranoia well in excess of any real risk. Perhaps this is a more apt analogy than Valenti realized.

And no one ever seriously promoted a massive reorganization of society, establishment of a surveillance state, or revocation of basic liberties in communication over the matter of the Boston strangler.
How would public financing solve anything? If we gave each candidate a billion dollars it seems like there would still be an incentive to raise even more money from rich corporations.
Privilege Escalation Exploit for Linux
Right. In Gnome 3, you don't even seem to get launchers that you can add where you want. You get some kind of activities thing. I want to press a button and get a new rxvt, not go play activities with the teletubbies.

Xfce looks like it may be an interesting alternative at this point. Gnome "fallback", or "classic" mostly does what I want, but with a name like that, it doesn't sound like something that will get much love/maintenance in the future.
The Disneyfication of Tech
Eventually, it will be interesting to see what functionality people have gotten used to in the current version of Basecamp that doesn't make it over to the next version and how those changes get implemented.

People don't always use tools the way they were intended to be used. Because of that, there are non-obvious features/functionality that may not have even been on the drawing board for the next version. Will 37signals go back and re-implement those subtle pieces or will they put a stake in the ground and say "this is the new way forward".

It could end up becoming an interesting study on how to bridge the gap with two systems when the next version is a complete rewrite.
It's being a little nitpicky. It's not like anyone really cares about the seizure notices and how good they look.
Agreed. As an engineer when a vendor wants me to pick their product over another they try to "sweeten" the deal to make it seem like they're the right choice. It is my ethical duty to refuse the cherry on top and accept what's best for my employer at face value. Why can we not expect those working "for the public" cannot share such practices?
Do they have casual computer users of any other variety?
As an emacs user with experience with a keyboard based 'hud' system, might I recommend an 'apropos' system for discoverability. =)
That earlier discussion is part of what sparked this (craigslist) donation, FWIW. (I work there)
As the US supreme court noted early in its history, the power to tax is the power to destroy. You will surely forgive me if I am a little skeptical of the government having the power to destroy radio, television, and other communications; note that it's actually been done before.
It might seem 'absurd' now, but these things happen:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/j1/stranger_than_history/ and http://lesswrong.com/lw/j4/absurdity_heuristic_absurdity_bia... are 2 excellent reads.

Historically crying out, "That's absurd!" has ruled out actual outcomes. It has done worse than maximum entropy.

So now it might seem prohibitive, but it might be common place before you know it.
Take a look at the mess California is in before you go too far down the referendum-type path. Having a final veto power in the hands of the people may be a really good, final check. Imagine what vetoing SCoTUS decisions could be like.

It would have to be a high percentage (maybe even a true population majority, not just a voter majority). We certainly have the technology to make that happen now.

I'm still not sure we wouldn't wind up with the federal version of California, though.
Thanks for the announcement. I'm actually in Austin so this might be something I'd be interested to visit.
It depends. Attorneys and lawyers can and do take cases representing opposing sides all the time (from one case to the next). It's pretty much a requirement they be able to represent their employer (without personal bias, etc.) It's what allows them to defend indefensible people like, say, murderers --it's not that the lawyer believes in murder, but they are paid by someone to represent the murderer, for example.

So, unless we think they are acting as moles in the DoJ, I don't see much issue with it, unless they have a conflict of interest such as being an investor in the industry or the like.
There is absolutely no information on that page as to what the possible ministerial order contains.
Show HN: local independent band discovery service
http://stagetrip.com/

Born from my frustration at finding good music and shows locally. This isn't a simple mapping aggregator, its (intended to be) a hand-curated local music discovery service.

Right now its really just a shell, as I haven't had a tonne of time to get music into it. The eventual vision is that navigating to a "place" (i.e.: your hometown) on stagetrip you'll be able to find local bands, download some of their music (free), and see when/where they're playing (via songkick api for now).

The other side of the experience is that it (in time) will provide a place for bands to connect with local fans and build traffic to their local shows.

For instance, there's 4 bands in LA:
http://stagetrip.com/places/united-states/california/losangeles
7 in california:
http://stagetrip.com/places/united-states/california
Etc.

Individual song pages include a bunch of stuff:
http://stagetrip.com/song/dont-move_416
http://stagetrip.com/song/faces_645
Obviously the download link, but also voting, location, genre, concerts, etc.

Where available, concert listings show up:
http://stagetrip.com/artist/phantogram
http://stagetrip.com/song/dont-move_416
...as do links to their social networks etc.

You can browse by:
Location: http://stagetrip.com/places
Genre: http://stagetrip.com/genre
Popularity: http://stagetrip.com/charts.php
Artist: http://stagetrip.com/artist

Something tells me that there's already someone doing this out there on a better/larger scale, but if there is, they're still pretty fragmentary.

There's no business model implicitly built into this - its really a "scratching the itch" scenario. Over time, with traffic, I'd like to monetize it with paid promotion by location - i.e.: "Promoted bands in Chicago this Week" sort of thing - a low cost, targeted way of driving traffic to shows.

Thoughts? Comments?
By definition public financing precludes corporate financing.
How would making voting compulsory reduce the need/ability to campaign?
I think you can make an argument both ways. Laptop users typically have their hands over the keyboards, and aren't laptops now the majority of PC sales?
xkcd's take: http://xkcd.com/305/
Color: a color matching game done in d3.js and Raphael
In some ways of looking at it yes. And yet we just had this other thread about how software engineers making $100k are just getting by "ok", not even upper-middle-class...
Egads! This a Tech Crunch article based on a Reddit post based on Google+ post. That Google+ post was also on HN last night so I'll just copy/paste my reply to that.

"This is stupid and wrong. The investigation into MegaUpload took two years. This post wants me to believe the US government convinced the New Zealand government to perform a 70+ person raid in two weeks? The government can't give authorization to someone to tie their shoe in under two weeks!

More importantly, this is an opinion piece with zero facts or evidence posted by a freaking high school student. Why in the hell is this nonsense being posted to HN?"

I know why this garbage is posted to Reddit and Tech Crunch, but HN is better than that.
Supporting your B2B Business – Review of TeamSupport Customer Support Software
I see lobbying reform as just a bandaid to the root of the issue. The root of the issue seems to be that congress just has to many opportunities and decisions to make for the welfare of a giant and growing population. They are open to input from millions of different parties all trying to grab a piece of the taxpayer pie.

I really think the solution needs to be limiting the decisions that congress can make by limiting the amount of funds made available to them. The idea that congress should control all of the tax payer dollars made sense when the only expenses were Infrastructure and Security. But now there are just too many expense possibilities.

I would love to see some "real" action against the way congress is spending our money. What if everyone didn't pay their federal taxes in April? If I a board does a really terrible job at running a company, they usually don't get paid and often lose their jobs. Sure we have elections, but it's very clear that these elections favor the incumbents (ahem, lobbying). What if we really challenged their structure?
I'm pretty excited about how this could make voice recognition a first class citizen on the desktop.

The simple voice tool baked into Windows* is sorta usable, but changing contexts to find things in menus or click buttons is a huge pain. You're constantly reminded that the interface you're using was originally designed for a keyboard and mouse. This has the potential to eliminate a lot of the pain associated with that.

* I don't know if Dragon improves the context-shift situation significantly. The last time I tried it was several years ago.
The best part is you can Command + Shift + ? to open the Help menu (if the keyboard shortcuts haven't been remapped by the app) and start typing. It's how I do a lot of stuff in Photoshop actually.
>Megaupload on the other hand is a company whose sole purpose it to assist pirates. Without piracy there is no reason for the existence of such a service...

While you might be able to make that conclusion about Megaupload (based on some of their internal emails), making that conclusion about file locker services as a whole is complete hogwash. You don't think there's a legitimate reason for a person to be able to upload a large file somewhere for download by someone else? Really?

I can conclude nothing else from your stance but the fact you are either a troll or a paid shill. 5 seconds on google would provide numerous accounts of people who were using Megaupload for distributing their own content who were burned by this crap.
Siri, Meet Your Competition, Evi
That's the motivation and challenge of future education platforms: how can you connect to unknown people in the learning space? It's an important point. Making connections in LinkedIn/Twitter/FB is just one click (and being accepted) but new education platforms can make connections based on learning experiences together (in teams) and challenge top universities networking.

Think about that.
Please provide your reasoning for your assertion in (1). You did not explain why you "need" government of presumably central authority, as opposed to something like an agreed-upon set of protocols operating at a local level.

Please also explain your reasoning for (2). It does not seem immediately obvious that the majority of the public has anything useful to say about policy whatsoever.
How I Decided Which 3D Printer to Buy
This also sounds totally apt. If just a game on one OS platform has orders of magnitudes more downloads that your OS, then your OS is nowhere near as popular as the other OS.

Are people unfamiliar with the notion of subsets?

Two sets doesn't have to contain the same type of items.

If the type of set A is a subset of the type of B, and the number of items on A is bigger, then A is bigger than B for every supertype too.
He did mention the other way as well. I'm not sure if he was only talking about limiting the extent to people in his administration of the whole gov.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/pr...
An ode to running a database on bare metal
Also, I dunno if it helps to say you've just launched yesterday. I rather try to pretend that I'm old and established by putting (C) 2008-2012 or something in the footer.
Is the site serious? If it is then shouldn't it be reported for the conception of a political corruption scheme?
Think of 3D printers as version 0.01 of a Star Trek replicator. It won't be until these "3D printers" use nanotechnology that we can make such complex things in one go.

Right now most of them work with plastic, but it won't be that long until they can use liquid metal, too. They should become a little more useful then.
The only thing I dont like about this is that it appears that you have to type for everything you're looking for.

With the example shown in inkscape - this is good if you dont know where something is -- but anyone who is proficient with a graphic(s) program knows that the more you can do with a left hand keyboard shortcut and a button which reduces the number of times you take your hand off the mouse the better.

What I would far prefer is if the HUD would allow me to assign arbitrary keyboard shortcuts (contextually) in any program.

This way - when Inkscape is active, I can use whatever shortcut I want to assign to "glow" and then that same binding can be set to a different command in a different program, say, GIMP - and I configure it all in one location.

I dont want to type for everything I want to do...
> Obviously, HUD and menus have different functions, and different use.

A hybrid wouldn't be impossible. In the example screenshot, the menu breadcrumb trail is shown. One possible solution would be to show the top level menu items in the HUD when it's first pulled up and allow the user to navigate it via mouse.
Ask HN: Is my service conforming to the Twitter standards?
I know the best place to ask this is twitter itself, but I have already done so: in the forums, by email, by DM. Of course, no response, not even a signup. Here is the detailed question https://dev.twitter.com/discussions/5099

I'm aware that I'm nobody to expect an answer from twitter, especially because they can change their mind at any moment, and if I get a reply "yeah, your service is fine" now, it will be dumb to drop it later.

So, what do you think - it is likely that twitter's new policies are likely to kill my service?
I think it's important to note who the lobbyists are trying to speak for: it's you as a voter. Same with money.

Bottom line: you cannot buy a political office anywhere in America. You still must be voted in. You also cannot directly give money to a politician for their personal benefit; money can only be contributed to their (re-)election campaign. It's valuable because it buys media (that's 60% or more of a campaign cost).

So money, and lobbyists, are just proxies for large blocks of votes.

To fix this problem, you really need voters who stand by their own principles and aren't overly influenced by one-sided media (that's the only reason a politician needs money).

You also need to somehow disconnect the influence of media and advertising from actual voters. Would love to hear ideas on that particular problem.

More realistic changes include those that Lessig proposes: finance campaigns through what is effectively a capped tax credit offered to every taxpayer to allocate among candidates as they see fit, then repeal Citizens United.
3 TechStar insights from a non-NYC startup
This is really getting to the point of ridiculousness (if that's even a word).

Here's the plain fact: if a copyright holder notifies me that their material is being shared on my servers and I do nothing about it, I can get sued by them. If I do this on such a grand scale that there is obviously a blatant amount of copyrighted material and I still do nothing about it, the Feds will probably have to be the ones to shut me down until things get worked out.

This is what Megaupload was doing. This is not a grander problem that will hit Google or Youtube, they tend to remove copyrighted content pretty quickly.

All of this seems very similar to the Gizmondo/Stefan Eriksson deal where things just spiraled out of control into very questionable territory.
Looks to me like we are going full circle back to the command line with this. I mean, what's the difference between this and a command line shell with fuzzy matching?

I like Ubuntu being experimental but right now I'm having pains with Unity on my setup (multiple monitors and apps that don't quite fit with the UI). I'm seriously considering moving to a different distro while they sort the details out .
Yes, sounds like a re-invention of the shell. No problem with that, but it doesn't really sound all that new, imho.

I mash the tab key in bash all the time for completion when looking for a command, perhaps not as advanced as the 'fuzzing', but handy nonetheless.
this technology of 3d printing and self-replication is probably postponed consciously because it means the end of todays economy system. and danger if it goes out of control.
I mean printing guns and stuff like that.