skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm the author of the article, I'm working with Clay at the moment. Thanks for the comment.

It's subtle, but I think that most people outside of companies assume that decisions get made as you're describing above — separate questions of "will this product be successful", and "will we make money out of it". In part, the dilemma is borne out of the fact that for almost every company, those aren't separate questions at all. Think about it; you're the CEO, and someone comes along and says, "let's invest this money in new R&D for a product that may, or may not, work. if, by chance, it does work... it will take out our existing product, and we'll end up making less money on the new product than we do right now on the old one".

very few CEOs will put money down on that. they're using money from their cash cow to do what... to kill it?

the problem is one of perspective.

there's another famous example i love to quote when explaining: blockbuster and netflix. when netflix came along, blockbuster was this huge organization with massive margins and almost 100% name recognition. they looked at netflix, saw a new business emerging with a fraction of the margins that they had... why would they bother wasting their time on doing something like this? they could invest to create a netflix competitor, but if they did, it was going to cost them to do it, it may or may not be successful, and if it WAS successful, it would cannibalize their existing, high-margin business with one that was much less profitable. who would go for that?

the mistake that most companies make is that they assume that they're the only ones that are capable of challenging their existing business with a disruptive entrant. the problem is (and it sounds obvious, but so many successful companies have fallen into this trap): if they don't challenge themselves, then someone else will. from the perspective of blockbuster, with all these profitable stores dotted all around the country, the "DVD by-mail market" was not at all attractive. but to netflix, which was looking at the market from the perspective of "we don't have any business at all, so any business is great", the margins actually looked pretty good. blockbuster thought its choices were "stick with high margin business, or move to low margin business". but really, its choices were "move to low margin business, or go bankrupt".

that's the perspective thing i'm talking about; successful businesses have this tendency to view markets from the vantage point of where they stand right now. what's so noticeable about apple is that they never do that. they start from a fresh sheet of paper — what's best for the customer, not what's best from our bottom line. it's a mighty hard trick to pull off.

hope this helps. thanks to everyone for voting up the article.

cheers

-- james
Cool, yeah I actually tried clicking on one of the screens without realizing it was just an image, would be cool to have a screen where you can start interacting with right away.. good luck with your endeavor
So turn the notifications off. All of the apps on my phone are customisable, all of them have settings which allow me to say "I don't want you to tell me when things happen."
Huh? I am posing a different hypothetical problem to illustrate how covering a steadily increasing percentage of the total length doesn't necessarily imply that the ant ever reaches the end.
Agree with this. The best is to have once-a-week or something moderated Open Forum type post and solicit comment there on all or any given topic. We were living in the world of sanity in the days of editorial page with letters to editor, but blogging brought that model upside down. In the long run and collectively, the comments have not really helped other than where they are specifically appropriate (like link sharing sites like HN/Reddit etc).
It's nice to get some hard numbers around mobile vs. traditional computer usage. I think this says a lot about what people want to use, it's not like these guys don't have a good site to speak of, they've been working on it for years.

As much as I don't like the fact that the open Web is atrophying, I don't think there's any denying that it's the way things are moving right now. It's what consumers are demanding.
The grandparent said "use Google DNS" not "chrome doing its own DNS lookup".

If you use Google's DNS (or anybody's DNS) you are basically telling them which sites your are visiting. If you have a local DNS resolver you will not leak all that information to a single third party.
True but these complaints of crashing seem to be about Xcode 4.2 and below because 4.3 just came out. I haven't even upgraded to it yet.
So, is that something where the "central"/plus server polls the other servers that are running the normal Amon logger/monitor for their info then just displays it in one place?
“Design a two-dimensional cellular automata such that we can create a self-replicating pattern.”

What clients might require cellular automata, and automata such as these?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_30 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automaton tell me they have applications in cryptography and random number generation. Are there any other areas where cellular automata are applied?
The decision about when to be notified or not, and what's important vs. unimportant, should be your decision, not your computer's.

But isn't that the status quo?

I can't think of any piece of software I use that doesn't give me a fairly easy way to temporarily turn off the notifications. I don't want to get notified by Facebook? No problem, I shut it down. Don't want to be interrupted by my telephone? I put it in silent mode. Etc., etc.
http://www.caut.ca/uploads/Backgrounder_UTUWO_Agreements.pdf
Doing the same trick also with Javascript (if you could) could keep the html pretty clean and tidy.

I'm not suggesting you would use the technique to build the main page content. Just the added extras.

Do the link elements add any semantic goodness to the document?

You could also use the web server to transparently add those headers to html output - rather than a scripting language such as php.
New Relic has a series of videos on scaling Rails, several of which are about caching. They're a couple of years old but most of the concepts and method calls are still valid.

http://railslab.newrelic.com/scaling-rails
Easy-to-add instrumentation of Java apps for online monitoring.
That was my first thought. Or people complaining about air travel - "when they are in a chair flying 500 mph 7 miles up!"

I find it hard to get worked up about a program that you are going to use for the next 8 hours taking 30 seconds to start. Though I do get annoyed waiting for STS (SpringSource's Eclipse) to start up.

One thing that would be very helpful for these plugin based program would be for them to be configured with the minimum to start with. It takes forever for Eclipse to start up because it's initializing a dozen plugins/services that I don't care about. And it's not always easy to turn them off.
The world does not work like that; it's not easy to judge other people's actions unless you step into their shoes.

I guess if it took you 45 minutes just to send an email, or 3 days to download Apple's new OS to develop/test on (Mountain Lion - around 4GB), then you wouldn't see the piracy issue (in countries that there are absolutely no alternatives) black and white anymore.
Many people are too young to remember there was a time without free development tools. Where most of them had a cost of several digits.
How Do Startups Hire Well?
I never really thought about it, but I love the fact that Moneyball is exposing people to the power of data and analytics. I've been seeing it all over the place since it was released. Could be an interesting turning point in the industry.
Hiriko - the fold-up electric two-seater set for 2013
Great Resources to Learn HTML, jQuery And Ruby
HTML or Hypertext mark-up language is the main languages used for web pages. It is written in the form of tags enclosed in angle brackets. It is written within the web page content. Mostly these HTML elements are used in pairs but some that are known as empty elements are used unpaired also.
My old SonyEricsson phone behaves like this. After booting it looks like it's ready but as soon as you try to open _any_ menu you get a "loading"-screen which is even more annoying. Booting a bloated windows xp installation is almost the same experience, from desktop first showing to actually usable is twice the time.

I'd rather have a reliable progress bar that says "go make coffee and come back in 5 minutes" instead of being misled to thinking i can use the program in 30 seconds.

But lazy loading for rarely used functions is of course a good solution, as long as you don't use it for everything.
They didn't - last I knew - distribute LAME or other MP3 encoders. I think the patent enforcement situation has changed since that call was originally made, but earlier (late 90's, early 2000's), the patent owners were enforcing patents for encoders but not decoders.
Turning pages in iCal, the hassle of changing groups in Address Book, Exposé being killed where Mission Control adds much more visual clutter (I don't need my wallpaper to shrink or to see other spaces), apps auto-restoring old documents, the 'app opens' animation, the list of recent documents in the Dock icon menu which I don't even want to think about while I'm focusing.

And then some stuff is distracting by being less obvious. For example, when the "default calendar" system in iCal is suddenly more complicated than the system it has replaced. (unless you only have one calendar)

Not all of these personally bother me, but "what in the world" seems a bit harsh when some of them are the most common complaints about Lion.
Working on a project with no set style standard, this article does a good job of voicing my frustrations. When tasked with inventing a new piece of the software, each designer, programmer, and manager tends to disregard all previous design decisions and create their own idea of what the project should look like. It's resulted in a totally inconsistent look, each page only bearing a passing semblance of the one before.

But a living style guide is worth nothing if the team members willfully choose to ignore it and pursue their own style agendas (and they are personal agendas, make no mistake). I've implemented some seriously ugly interfaces in the name of consistency, and the project is better for it.

The biggest hurdle is convincing management that this new flashy module simply does not mesh with the rest of the software. Design wants to impress, management is impressed, off to the nerds to implement it.
Facebook needs to reinvent mobile advertising
I said the discussion, not the post (which in any case did have a political perspective on its second half). mickey7 was replying to jonhohle's post, who was already stating his opinion on politics.
The pocket-sized, wood-fire burning, (eco friendly?) 180 camping stove
Google+ notifications on the search page.
10 Life Lessons from Milton Glaser, the designer of I Love New York logo
Certainly, I would hope it would have been obvious, but we might each have different opinions of obvious!

I find it very hard, without bracket counting, to see exactly what the '+' and '/' bind to. With the more traditional:

(-b + sqrt(bb-4ac)) / (2a)

I find in only a glance I can tell what everything is binding to.
Review my startup: An open, global and social marketplace for courses
http://coursemarket.eu/ Let me know what you think
I think it's nowhere near as bad as the article sounds. The red square from Google+ is small and hidden in the place I usually don't even look, so I find myself not realizing for days that got a notification from Google+. On Facebook, notifications are one of the most useful features of the whole service - they tell me about the more important[1] events that I could otherwise miss (Facebook walls are heavily filtered; otherwise you'd be flooded by updates). And they don't even appear on your e-mail, unless I ask for it (Facebook has now disabled almost all e-mail notifications by default).

So I'm sorry, but I'm not convinced by this article. On the contrary, I find notifications to be one of the best UI solutions out there. They are completely noninvasive[2] and make sure you don't miss anything, so you don't have to constantly check what is going on. It boils down to what alexchamberlain said in the thread - event-based architecture beats polling in almost all cases.

[1] - if we can call anything on Facebook "important". But things like comments to my updates, or activities of my closest friends are things I don't want to miss.

[2] - Twitter, G+ and Facebook notifications are generally numbers on the webpage title / notification bar. They do not play sounds, they do not pop windows up. If one gets distracted by that, I recommend not keeping FB/Twitter/G+ tabs open in the browser during work.
I think the issue here is defaults. When I install Foursquare it started pushing notifications to me every time a contact checked in somewhere- seemingly anywhere within the New York metro area. Absolutely pointless.

But notifications in moderation are fantastic.
I am.. slowly.

I'm speaking to where the assumption that notifications should be on by default is coming from and how selfish it is on the part of the developers.

Anything I love I want it to occupy my true attention. I'm at the point where I wish I could filter only certain email addresses, SMS' and phone calls to ring, and let the rest fall to a central policy...

Do you know of anything that does this? It's on my list of researching as I'm making the switch.
There have been attempts to organize this, including one I know off the top of my head[1].

There are two problems. One is that an orderly transfer of control requires a certain amount of planning and coordination, which are precisely the resources that aren't available when a maintainer has left (or is on the way out). The other is that people tend to become maintainers of other peoples' projects by climbing the open source 'career ladder' from user to minor contributor to major contributor; projects are stable when they have enough contributors that the most-productive non-maintainer can be promoted to maintainer status when the original author leaves.

GitHub helps by making it easy and obvious to fork something and eventually have your repo promoted to be the 'official' one, but as with many problems in open source, finding a particular, specific person who actually does that is the hard part.

[1]http://thechangelog.com/post/1986814704/stillmaintained
A Bayesian Approach To Kalman Filtering
FWIW, I think ruby 1.9 actually has syntax for recursive expressions via callable backreferences, but while I can whip up something that will match balanced parenthesis I am not clear on how it could be used to build a tree-like structure.
"It's a fundamental rule of human computer interaction—the user should be in control of the relationship, not the computer."

Brilliantly put. Summed up a fair bit of my post nicely and more concisely, haha.
This is exactly the reason why many people don't use the GPLv3. If Apple distributed a slightly modified GCC, they would be also given away every patent they have that might be used anywhere in GCC. That is unacceptable, as doing a full search over the whole source code for patent usage isn't reasonable.
I doubt they will, seeing as how they've never blocked this: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gighmmpiobklfepjoc...
Flagging as trolling...and then taking the troll-bait.

All software ships with bugs--including the software this guy will create using XCode. Despite that, this type of drivel is still common among software developers. "One (relatively minor) bug exists that happens to annoy me: that must mean their whole QA process is shit!"

Come off it; this type of rant would be warranted if XCode routinely crashed when you paste a paragraph of text into a label--not because it behaves in a funky way.
One system – more than 100 alternative software implementations
Solving Hexiom really fast with a SAT solver.
Almost invisible. I notice them only when I'm not focused and start looking around for distractions. I'm a bit angry at that, because a notification that you notice several days after the event it refers to is usually worthless.
In that sense, notifications are actually a good deal better than phone calls, which demand immediate attention (or frustrate the caller by making them think "you never pick up the phone!").
Agreed, about the same on my machine. It's kind of expected. On my old machine I would just start Photoshop and go make a cup of tea. Or switch windows and carry on with something else. But I rarely use Photoshop... If you are doing this day in, day out then I think it justifies more RAM and/or an SSD.
AtomizeJS - Distributed Transactional Memory implementation in JavaScript
Scientists report success in first human tests of drug-delivery chip
Design is nice, idea seems cool.
Blender's startup speed astounds me when compared to just about everything else I use. It starts faster than Vim half the time!
I cant wait until someone integrates this with their dating site.

Though for clarity we may need a HAD button as well.
Moreover, I am pretty sure that Apple iProduct prices are carefully crafted to maximize profit. They could be sold with a much lower margin and completely crunch the competition.

So, it seems that at least between profits and market domination, profits come first.
They can't follow the article's suggestion of giving you a mini-game to play during the load screen because that would violate Namco's patent 5,718,632 which covers exactly that:

http://www.google.com/patents/US5718632
That's not actually what's happening. Just a 3rd party dev thing implemented using open graph actions. In face it's not even clear (contrary to what they say on their blog post) that they cleared this with Facebook. See http://facebook.stackoverflow.com/questions/9364501/released...
I ranted about this a few days ago. My favorite idiocy on Windows is their background "optimization" of .Net binaries.

https://blogs.msdn.com/b/davidnotario/archive/2005/04/27/412...

This service appears to perform a large number of I/O requests (probably reading/writing a large number of small files). It will totally consume the disk seek capacity, massively slowing down every other program that is also doing disk I/O (e.g., freezing Firefox awesomebar searches).

The programmers at the linked blog congratulate themselves on how this mayhem lasts only 10 minutes on a typical computer.

Note: I do not have an SSD. :( This and other idiocies will force me to get one next time.
I hate that there's always 'that guy' who thinks he knows how to read legalese better than other layman, so he quickly and assuredly spouts to your audience that you are for sure in deep legal doo-doo; casting doubt into potential users and customers.
New Windows 8 Logo is Latest in Beta Buildup
How does scrollkit compete with code academy? Scrollkit seems to be for building websites, while code academy is for teaching people programming.
> I'm looking at replacing Munin with Amon

Amon Plus can monitor more than one machine.

Also, on the open source thing, it's closer to open-core. The single-server version is open, but, if you want to monitor more than one box, you'll need the Plus version, which, despite being distributed with source, is not, AFAIK, open.
If you are approved, why is there a stackoverflow question asking if this is ok? http://facebook.stackoverflow.com/questions/9364501/released...
This comment - and several others - seem to only be seeing half the picture in this new policy. Yes, it says they won't distribute software the know to infringe.

But the other aspects of the policy set up working practices and operating procedures to minimize visible, organizational knowledge of patents. It seems to me that they're actively trying to avoid knowing about patents so that they don't have to invoke the no-distribute clause and, if they do get sued, can hopefully keep away willful infringement claims. I think that's in general been their goal, but the new policy provides a clear and consistent mechanism for handling the issue.
Adblock has been in the chrome store forever and Adblock blocks google ads across the interweb and not just on gmail.

Do you really think that ad impressions are the driving force behind gmail?
I don't think I've even seen a splash screen since SSDs became affordable in the past 2 years. Also I'm a "give credit where it's due" type of guy and surnames of people that made the great project I'm launching don't bother me.

This whole blog post reminds me of the "first world problems" meme.
Show HN: Dear Instagram, a letter written by my designer friend
I await his next blog post "I got fired for throwing all my toys out the pram" with great anticipation, where he explains how throwing a massive hissy fit and not taking his (some good) points up with the team and management.

I don't agree with this faking rubbish though, if it's not usable then I don't care. There's plenty of bloatware to get rid of in these programs, I doubt the splash screen is the biggest of worries!
The important bit is from the Safari guys:

"We don't currently cache the bytecode (or the native code). It is an option we have considered, however, currently, code generation is a trivial portion of JS execution time (< 2%), so we're not pursuing this at the moment."

Basically, it's not going to be a bigger saver compared to all the other parts of the process (e.g. fetching the file over the network).
To clarify, "lazy" isn't a pejorative in this case. It's just the technical term for deferring work until it needs to be done. "Eager" would be the term for doing everything right away.
Lightsquared hires lawyers to fight FCC
Because after this original comment, I want to make 100% sure. The question is about the button design, not our integration.
> Why do we get such ridiculous statements/ headlines from people that actually run web companies?

Because it is literally the definition of link bait, it's a title people are always going to click on, and so it's a title that has been used often.

If I look to my left in my office, 3m away I see facing me the orange cover of Wired's "The Web is dead." cover, and next to it the 1997 cover of the same magazine that boldy proclaimed "Kiss your browser goodbye" - partly as a reminder not to get carried away with ideas like these, and partly because they make me laugh.
Very informative, in that it answers the question very precisely. It's like the old joke about a helicopter pilot lost in pea soup fog over Seattle, somewhere. A building abruptly looms out of the fog, and the pilot holds up a sign saying "WHERE AM I?" The person at the window scribbles on a piece of paper: "YOU'RE IN SEATTLE". The pilot whips the helicopter around, flies straight to a helipad and lands with 30 seconds of fuel left. The passengers want to know how he did that. "Well, the answer was perfectly correct, but absolutely useless. So, I knew that the building was in Redmond on the Microsoft campus."

Although I liked seeing and knowing what Wordpad means, this is the worst kind of apologetics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apologetics). It's great that Wordpad allows this sort of control. But what the heck? Why does "text" mean three different things? Why does "text" differ from "binary"? That's just confusing.
Photoshop really is not that complex - you could write a photoshop clone that would load in under a second, easily. But it loads all sorts of stuff you do not need up front - many fonts, textures, drivers for scanners, cameras, and so forth. I think the real problem is that Adobe seems to keep patching an already bloated code base - I think if they started fresh they could redesign it more efficiently...just my humble opinion...