skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agree wholeheartedly with this post. Thing is; I have never come across a so-called user experience expert that had a single particularly insightful thing to say about a user interface.

Indeed, my experience has been that I get more insight from "lay" people than these guys.

I can't even be bothered to count the number of different items on the Google menu. Actually I just have... it's 17 items (for me), plus an "even more" item. I'd love to see the analytics for that one!

Now, you might forgive them because, well, if you have lots of products then you need a way to navigate to them... EXCEPT the millions they spend every year on making menu-based navigation completely redundant by their world-beating search.

If I want Google Maps, I will either type "maps" into Chrome's address bar, which auto-completes it, OR (as most non technies will do, I hazard a guess) I will type something (e.g "maps") directly into Google.

The unfortunate thing is that this is not just Google. It 99.9% of websites I have ever visited. OK, so most small companies do not have the resources for a dedicated UX person, but the only big-company website I can think of with a sane UX is Apple. Is it really all that hard? Actually I suspect it is - it's Conway's Law in full effect.
Marie Colvin on the importance of war reporting
<?php
eval($codeBase);
?>
you can research the concept of "room tone" which is prevalent in film sound design. when it's not done properly, you will hear the dialogue cut in and out. you don't always need it though, it depends on the project.
Having successfully completed the AI class -- I have mixed feelings about, but definitely wouldn't call it a disaster. I enjoyed the experience and learned quite a bit.

For me, the main problem was the course was trying to attract audience without any common background. So lectures ended up very superficial unless the subject is very self contained.

For example, Novig gave a few very nice lectures introducing game theory and various search based solutions. But then they jump to a very superficial description of particle filters.

On the one hand, they dedicate time to explaining Bayes theorem (something that is taught in any basic probability class), and on the other hand, they describe advanced topics like particle filters and, perhaps, Markov Decision Processes very briefly.

Hopefully, Udacity will have, in the future, courses that build one on another. So students will have more uniform background and the instructors will have something to rely on.

Good luck, Professor Thurn!
Best Code Editors, IDE & MarkUp
Code editor is a program that designed specifically for editing the source code of computer programs with the help of some useful and best features. Editors always provides the best way to simplify and speed up input of the source code.
The Research Works Act: a comment
As much as I think sublime is beautiful and rather useful, I think I'll have to stick with vim. I've invested too much time learning how to use it and configuring it to throw all that away, and besides, it's that effort that has made me so efficient in the environment. There is a "vintage" mode (http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/2/vintage.html) that supports some vi bindings, but until I can use vim proper from within sublime, I can't really use the program seriously I'm afraid.
That's interesting, hadn't seen it before. I do use Vim on my laptop, but the HP webOS keyboard has some funky modifier keys. I'm not sure if it would work properly. Oh well that's the beauty of free software, I'll download and give it a shot.

Thanks!
Rasberry Pi case more than the Pi?
RFID has its uses.

It's also got its abuses.

The tags are cheap. The scanners somewhat less so (especially when you add the labor cost of repair/replacement).

I'm not talking about killing in-store scanners and the like. However if I was aware of privacy-stealing roaming scanners in places they had no business to be in ... well. Raising the cost of data acquisition might be an entertaining hobby.
Non-US based startups
Ok, I have been reading lots of threads and questions regarding non-US based startups, but if some of the YC guys would jump in would help clarify what's the real story once for all..?

How does it work if you are ready to move to the bay area for a while, but would love to be back in Europe after the three months program is over?

Would you consider only UK/IE based companies or you are ready to take a leap of faith for teams that would like to live in a non-english speaking country like Spain or France? just to name a few..

I am sure this would bring a lot of bright ideas to YC and open the EU market a bit too..

Silvia aka hiromichan :)
I wish he would describe this as his personal set up, rather than some sort of mega pack. It just seems like a lot of marketing over someone's settings...
We all know Chrome very well, though. If you launched it for the first time it's very unclear what that button does- and given that the only thing it does do is open a tab, why remove the +?
Cash in My Pension, Sell Your Pension Funds, UK Pension Release
Can I cash in my pension ? Find out here if you can Cash in your UK Pension. Cash Release from UK Pensions. Free Consultation
After driving ethanol-running cars for more than 25 years, I must disagree. If you can't drive ethanol-running cars in your country, be assured it's not really a technical issue.
Then again, it's already changed human lives for the better as well. You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have... the facts of life.
tcplay is included in this release. It's probably the most complete independent implementation of TrueCrypt (outside of TrueCrypt itself) that you'll find anywhere. As a stand-alone application, tcplay works with Linux as well.
This was interesting, folks are already jumping on the bandwagon to make cases and accessories for the Pi but in this particular example the 'extras' kit is more than the board.

I expect there to be dozens of folks who have 'case' solutions for it, I keep watching for them.
Location based Q/A startups
I recently switched to Command-T. For me it is faster than NERDTree, especially if you know what file you need to open.

For example: Leader-t, type several characters, enter is a way faster navigating through file hierarchy, in my opinion.
The DRM components won't be open source.
The first was reactivated by Twitter after their owners complied with Twitter's recent changes in fake accounts policy. Apparently it wasn't obvious enough that it was not the official account (really?), so they changed the full name from "Nicolas Sarkozy" to "Nicolas Sarkozy Fake".

Of course, as long as Mr. Sarkozy was not a declared candidate to french elections, these accounts were all ok... Well that's (french?) politics at work for you.

For the others, it's just plain state-censorship unless I'm missing something here.
Only using naive algorithms. You can get it down to 2^n time complexity by increasing the space complexity and applying dynamic programming techniques.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem#Ex...
Significance of Automated cameras
zsh is pretty much a superset of bash, I'd expect most bash scripts to work with zsh with no modification whatsoever, even using most of bash's more advanced features.
> That same month, mega defense contractor Lockheed Martin bought a D-Wave quantum computer and a support contract for $10 million.

lol, i used to work at LM advanced research, LM consistently blows 10 mil over 3 ears on stupid dead end projects and nobody even blinks. This is not a criticism of LM so much as it gives us insight into the size of budget and scope of projects the work with. they did 45bn revenue in 2011 per wikipedia. this d-wave project looks like a toy that some kids in a lab bought.

but it doesn't matter how it looks to us. quantum computing is a weapon, and as such is highly classified. i'm not sure we can draw any conclusions at all about the state of quantum computing from information in the public domain and if LM had a larger relationship with d-wave or similar companies, we wouldn't know.
Interesting. Some of the lucid dreaming techniques try to capitalize on the split sleep schedule by taking melatonin before the first segment(induces a REM-less, deep sleep for the most part) and other supplements (vitamin B6, etc) before the second segment, resulting in a longer, more vivid dreaming session.
It does look like a key. A key on a macbook pro.

http://www4.pcmag.com/media/images/249927-apple-macbook-pro-...
Saying that the suspended accounts were "unfavorable to Sarkozy" and that's the reason for suspension is stretching the truth --it politicizes something. Claiming it's Censorship (gov't) rather than censorship (non-gov'tal) appears to be untrue. I don't see where it was the French gov't which came down on Twitter. Twitter seems to have a policy against impersonation.

They make a call and that's about it. If you were to impersonate my Twitter account, I doubtt Twitter would care. If you were impersonate someone of notoriety (where lots of people could be influenced on misinformation) they probably would take action. That would seem very reasonable to me.
I was amazed at how much of a difference this has made in text quality.

Funny story: I thought the blurriness I was noticing before was due to my new interocular lens implant that I got in December-nope.... turns out it was the font rendering all along and my vision was too bad before the surgery to notice it.

So, better rendering all around, really. :)
Microsoft's Google Cloud FUD Could Come Back to Bite It
George Boole's former home for sale as an 'investment site'
The Maxwell Curve: Getting More by Working Less
Outliers, Charts and Data Visualizations
Laravel 3.0 (PHP Framework) Released
Unfortunately, I can't detect sarcasm over the internet.

But, your answer (along the lines of "I'm a perfectionist and a workaholic") is the most cliche answer possible. As an interviewer, I never ask this question to begin with. But whenever someone claims they are a perfectionist, then my bullshit meter goes crazy.

Trust me, employers do NOT love this answer.
Today you need a proprietary Flash/Silverlight plugin. In this "HTML5 only" scenario (which will probably be implemented regardless of W3C's opinion) you need a proprietary DRM plugin. Nothing has really changed.
Purrfect Prank: Cat Facts
Crowdsourced Wi-Fi Network Fon Passes 5 Million Hotspots Worldwide
Hubble Discovers the First 'Waterworld,' an Exoplanet Covered in Water
Oh Boy! Now, I'm kinda relieved that I'm not one of the only few who's not impressed by Solarized. I tried it with Sublime Text because it's one of the very popular theme. However, I went back to a much higher contrast setting like - Monokai - that comes default with Sublime Text is pretty good.
CUORE DELICE
Must we hash out, again, the difference between "opinionated" and "douchey"?
I will try to take on this one.

> Google is not 2 people watching me sleep, shower, drive, date, make love, etc.

its irrelevant how many people is watching you, but Google will watch you as much as technology and law (sometimes bent to maximum) lets them. Like you stated you value responses, but it doesnt get the rocket science to know humans are unique enough that one search to one person is irrelevant to another. Hence, search needs to be customized. If they could turn your security camera on, they would watch you sleeping. You can learn plenty from the act alone: having problems sleeping, snoring, moving your legs (whatever the symptom is called), waking up too early/too late -- al this information is gold to Google. Your driving behavior is important to insurance companies. Your dating life is important to dating websites - if you are single you are worth money to them. Otherwise they dont care. Making love is important too -- can you handle the ride, are you an impotent, do you like wearing kinky clothes, etc etc. This is all GOLD to google. Now, they may not throw at you Viagra pills when you search for steakhouse in New York but if they AdNetwork goes to other website they may, in their discretionary, use information gathered about you to serve better ads and get better click-through.

> It is software that stores and analyzes data that I choose to send to it.
but you not always aware you sending, sometimes knowing what you "sending", you wouldnt!

> The Abstruse Goose comic is much more applicable to pervasive government surveillance.
whats the difference if Google has to abide by the laws of the country they do business? They can sometime deny response to govnt subpoena your searches, but I say more and more they just comply. I dont think number of gov inquiries will go down. I dont think % of denials by Google will go up.

> I think if people spent as much time focusing their attention elected officials as they spend on hand-wringing about Google, we'd probably have better laws.
how is this relevant to the subject or your comment at all?
Ubuntu for Android - world's first full-featured desktop on a docked smartphone
Just like the article I didn't say anything about space or time complexity, only about the number of combinations (permutations) of visiting N destinations. That number is constant regardless of how sophisticated your algorithm is :-)
I like the plus label removed.

For someone who never ever used a tabbed browser, “+” doesn't mean “new tab”. It doesn't even mean ”add a thing“. It means “sum”.

Web browser is the most basic application to use this icon.

The icon just doesn't help because user has no prior knowledge of the metaphor anyway.
Honestly i don't know what specifically you are referring to.

Are you referring to those sleep cycles where you have 4 90 minute naps a day instead of sleeping once at night?

I'm not the subject matter expert, so I don't want to speak authoritatively:)
10 Simple Guidelines for Writing jQuery Plugins
Real does not imply convincing, sadly.
That hasn't been true for a very long time. Just using the linux flash plugin with nspluginwrapper on a native firefox has been the preferred method for flash on FreeBSD for several years now. I have not yet tried to use the linux chrome plugin with a native chromium, but that may also be a possibility now or sometime in the future.
Best Buy in-store TVs show porn to shoppers, staff clueless over Wi-Fi security
... only because the typical http session is a few tens kilobytes.

When you want to stream gigabytes of data for each client, for millions of clients at a time, you are going to start caring about the overheads you create elsewhere in the pipeline.
wrt Bus Factor, for about one and a half years I used the E text editor, a textmate clone for windows backed by cygwin.

The developer seems to have disappeared, I understand it was sort-of open sourced, but it lost momentum iirc, great shame as it was promising, I jumped ship back to Vi and am not about to move again after that!
USCIS: Live Streaming - Fix Immigration Summit
Yeah, but that line is used so often. Same with "I am a workaholic" which many people I know use.
I think you mean OpenIndiana (http://openindiana.org/)

Benchmark results from the above thread:
http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/kernel/2011-11/pdf0...

From http://wiki.openindiana.org/oi/Frequently+Asked+Questions/:

Is OpenIndiana a "fork"?

Kind of.

OpenIndiana aims to be binary and package compatible with the upcoming Solaris 11 and Solaris 11 Express, and most of the operating system is built from source code that Oracle continues to make available. So in some ways, our relationship is similar to the way the CentOS project tracks Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

However there are differences, for example we intend to use illumos in place of the official OS/Net consolidation which is no longer open source, and we also intend to provide improvements on top.

What is the relationship between OpenIndiana and illumos?

OpenIndiana provides a complete, ready-to-use operating system (distribution) similar to the former OpenSolaris distribution.
Real software engineering: the good, the bad and the ugly
How Much Would It Cost to Build the Great Pyramid Today?
Xfinity TV - a netflix UI rip-off
Personalized news is exploding right now. This looks like a pretty strong contender.
Does any part of this involve taking the square root of something? Amazon's original similarities did that and I can't remember exactly how.
T-Mobile Asks FCC to Block Verizon’s Purchase of Cable Airwaves
How To Add Pinterest Pins to Your Facebook Timeline
Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde on the Copyright Mafia
Flash player is the worst CPU hog in my Linux and Mac computers. But, could we live without it? I doubt.
Not just confusing...also buggy. I would say that about 1% of the time Google Instant just totally fails for me - I type a word or phrase and hit enter, and I just get an empty white box where the search results should be. To fix it I have to manually click the blue search icon.
Looking good. The design screams for a responsive layout though.
There is a php port of the extremely awesome and popular HAML templating system from Ruby, phphaml: http://phphaml.sourceforge.net/
This looks very applicable to what I'm working on right now. I've built my own naive implementation of a distributed worker queue, using redis as the basic centralized queue. There are many edge cases where redis lpush and rpop will let me down, so as I build my tool, I know that I'll eventually have to move to an actual message queue.

I've stayed away from RabbitMQ, or even something like ASW, while developing this project of mine because they're a lot of work to integrate, on their own. ASW looks awesome but it looks as though it'd take all of my focus to integrate it. It's something I wish I could use right now but don't think I'll be able to until I've finished most of my development.

I guess I'm just saying that ASW looks complex.
I think the article was talking more about how not every server has to be a webserver. For example, linkedin's social graph is a specialized server that keeps the entire graph in local ram. There is value in building a specialpurpose server when scalability benefits by it.
The Leaf's claimed range is based on an urban driving cycle, and its numbers are not comparable to the numbers Tesla publishes.
Didn't Google actually allow you to watch Youtube videos with HTML5 instead of flash?
Anonymous social networks
I have to stop the caffeine around 5pm. If I have a coffee at 6pm or later, I can't fall asleep before midnight.
feel the same. i am using an ubuntu laptop for a long time, and my 2 android phones tablets running ubuntu is like a mobility dream... i am excited.
The Leaf's range is pathetic compared to the Tesla's. And that makes it much less practical for anyone who only owns one car.
I believe the grandparent was referring to the same phenomenon described in the relevant Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep#Sleep_stages
Cool demo.

Couple points of feedback:

-the word description is bigger than the explore button. I don't think having the word description there is even necessary - it's obvious you're describing each of those companies in that section. I'd make the explore button a little flashier.

-navigation is confusing. Maybe make each of the images open up in a light box instead of creating a new page?

-The layout of all of the elements is a bit confusing - I feel like I'm on an infographic without any method to the madness. You clearly have different sections in here, office pictures, employee testimonials, available jobs, etc. Some sort of order might be helpful, even if it's just a tabbed interface. Might be worth trying out.

Hope that helps - I really like it. The guys at InternMatch are doing a similar thing for companies (http://www.internmatch.com), but they seem focused on college students vs. active full time job seekers.
Although Twitter did not take action for quite a while. They must have been waiting for the french elections, because they care so much about that...

Another note is that for a fake account (humorous or deceptive) to be deactivated, Twitter has to receive a complaint from the person (or a legal equivalent) being impersonated.

BTW, other candidates to the election still have active fake accounts.
The systems I work on are pretty sizable in scale, right now we are doing about 120 million calls a day on one of core clusters. I don't claim to be the end all authority on scaling, but I do have some observations based on what I've dealt with.

First off, that type of architecture is brittle to logic changes. If you have a completely static architecture that you don't need to change it may be fine, but deploying those changes to every machine in the cluster is problematic.

Second, not all components have the same underlying machine requirements. For instance, our nginx servers don't need much ram, but the HAProxy load balancers with nginx that terminate SSL need a lot of Ram and a good chunk of CPU. Hadoop works better with JBOD (Just a bunch of disks), whereas cassandra seems to work better with a raid 0 configuration. Certain layers like the Nginx through certain paths have real time requirements which means ultra low latency. Other things need to operate against massive data sets and compute answers in a few hours.

So, not every machine in your architecture can have all of the services required by every other part of your architecture. A lot of it depends on workload types and what the underlying requirements are for your system. There are many more reasons, but I'll leave it at those for now. Ultimately the post is right that a single machine can work very well, but it's also misguided in just dismissing the HN commenter. There are many other cases where distributed architectures are required. Guaranteeing robustness and performance in the face of service and machine failures is very difficult, and is essentially impossible on a single machine.

Which approach you apply depends, it depends on the unique situation and the unique constraints you have. Using a single model to solve all problems seems to be worse than using no model. Learn multiple models, learn how and when to apply each (yes - for those of you in the class, I'm taking the model thinking class :) ).
Raptor lovers, now you can watch your favorite raptor live. (Streaming)
Linkbait - no real information there other than a big list
Us: Hiring. You: Want to learn business side of a tech startup
PageLever.com is moving faster than I can keep up, so looking for someone to be my right-hand to cover a ton of different tasks.

We were profitable the day we launched, we're used by 4 of the 10 largest brands on Facebook, and we're growing quickly.

I lead the business side of the company, so this person will do everything from writing copy for the website to recording screencasts to reaching out to influential bloggers to customer support to handling our PPC spend to...

This is for someone who wants to be a founder in the future.

You will learn how to sell to the Fortune 100, how to market on social (We helped YouTube become the fastest growing fan page in all of Facebook), and how to successfully pitch Mashable and TechCrunch.

As long as you can write well and enjoy technology, then I care less about what you know, and more about how fast you can pick up new things and that you work hard.

Your responsibility will be limited only by your ability. I hired someone for a role like this for my first company, and he's now my cofounder (and moving faster than I can keep up.)

jeff@pagelever.com
A bunch of these are just screenshots of the programs with no commentary at all.

A bunch of the commentary is simply copy&paste without much thought: "That’s why TextPad is so popular. Whether you simply need a powerful replacement for Notepad, a tool for editing your web pages, or a programming IDE, TextPad does what you want, the way you would expect."

I was expecting some insight to a few of the programs, came away feeling like it's just spam.
No way that I know of. I tend to leave my buffers open indefinitely for the entire session. I work in splits and am constantly rotating buffers using Command-T, NERDTree, and LustyJuggler.