skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You mean like engineering Roundup-resistant crops, inadvertently (but quite effectively) selecting for Roundup-resistant weeds in the process [0]? We're infants with building blocks right now.

[0] http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/03/07/147656157/farmer...
i feel the same way about magazines with their pages, and why are they always square?

seriously though, poo pooing something that gets you a decent look and feel quickly is just being a self important ass. Not every web site has to be an exercise in css masturbation and cross browser dick swinging.

i read this entire article in the voice of the comic book guy from the simpsons.

/written during my lunch hour spent tracking down IE8 bugs.
In case one is unaware, google's translation service is built upon 'high grade' translations - originally from UN translation logs. So, if you actually get a few hundred sites to provide incorrect translations for a specific phrase, you could theoretically game google translate in this manner.
I find this and the parent to be flawed. Door, knobs and so on come in a wide variety of shapes, materials and colors; and so do buttons (open an explorer or finder window - almost every means of interacting with these relies on a button, and they vary widely in appearance.)

The argument this blog post makes isn't that there's a problem with standards, but that a lot of people are using bootstrap without any modification - which is ironic, because modifying bootstrap is vastly easier and safer than creating a new design from scratch.

It takes very little to adjust the colors of the buttons provided by bootstrap, or the links, or add a texture to the background, or change some fonts out (Google webfonts makes this ridiculously easy). When this isn't done, the site leaves no lasting impression unless what it provides is so amazing I can't possibly forget it (this is pretty rare).

For me, power tools would be something that goes at the far functional end of a functional/aesthetic design scale, and even then companies will use widely different colors to separate themselves from their competitors and make them easy to recognize. Perhaps there's something to be learned there.
(Edit: I'm responding to each question in its own paragraph)

What do you mean, 'infinite in dimension'? The universe has only 4 dimensions, 3 spatial, 1 in time.

Your question barely makes sense to me. Why do you need to invoke infinite speeds and times? If 2 particles stay in the same place, and do not interact with each other (gravitationally, electromagnetically, etc) then the distance between those 2 particles would increase over time, due to the expansion of the universe.

Yes, there is an infinite amount of matter in the universe [1]

Maybe. If you pick a random direction and travel really fast for a really long time, the chances of you running into any other matter is extremely remote. [2]

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ewt9y/good_analo...

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
Link for those interested in reading about the runaway AI scenario:

http://facingthesingularity.com/
uh, the risk of human extinction is 100%

the main question is do we have 8 months left or 8 years, 80,000 or 800,000.
Good point. This is where it gets tricky: in large groups with big decisions, people rely almost exclusively on data.

A bad design decision can propagate to an entire organization because there's data to support it.
Living in the Prove It Culture
Stumped by a problem? This technique unsticks you
Yeah, screwing up one thing obviously means that every single other idea they've had is boneheaded.
Catstello - Can't find information that you have read before?
In case you don't get many upvotes or comments, it's probably because many people here on HN have seen this before.

========

The original talk by Robinson is here:

http://www.thersa.org/events/vision/archive/sir-ken-robinson

========

Here are some of the previous submissions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1791749

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1800876

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1802072 <- 2 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1805419 <- 13 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1858254

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1882297

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1886532

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2025766

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2033198

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2214554

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2400496

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2432313

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2527714

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2552518
this is accounted for towards the end of the blog by way of insisting on the importance a real-world use case experiment and determining how people adjust to the configurations over time
Drudge Report Looks Old-School, but Its Ad Targeting Is State-of-the-Art
I think there's a huge opportunity right now as an investor in Silicon Valley to be a pattern contrarian. You'd have the field all to yourself.
PDF.js is a JavaScript project - that's the language we know for sure all our contributors speak :)
Buttons were an inspired UI hack, but now we've got better options
It's worth bringing up The Most Important Video You'll Ever Watch [1], which the lecturer characterizes as humanity's biggest problem is our inability to understand the exponential function. Watch all 8 parts.

I have come to the conclusion that there simply are too many of us. We can probably sustain our current levels for a century, maybe two, but at some point scarce resources (and their subsequent cost) will have a devastating effect.

Basically, we need to correct our population before nature does.

As much as people point to space being our future, I simply (sadly) do not agree. While there might be plentiful resources in the asteroid belt (and on other bodies) nothing compares to how cheaply we can pull things out of the ground here on Earth. Our society is predicated on cheap, plentiful resources such that it can't survive them being several (or even one?) order of magnitude more expensive.

As far as interstellar space goes, even if we solve the reaction mass problem and have perfect (100% efficient) conversion of matter to energy, it will still be prohibitive to go to even the nearest stars.

Perhaps the simplest explanation of the Fermi Paradox is that potential growth for a starfaring civilization is geometric (being a sphere ultimately limited by the speed of light) while growth rates are exponential. And exponential will ultimately "win".

[1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY
CityGrid Advertising API Helps Show You The Money
"How do you guys who have made the jump make the decision to leave a situation like this?"

For me it was easy. It's about the freedom, not the money. I would rather make 60K working for myself than 300K working for someone else.

I hate having to ask someone (like when I was a kid) to have a day off or go on a vacation. When I finally made the switch 3 years ago, my life changed for the better. I love waking up every day and working on my own projects.

If you have a family and no savings, it's a different story.
How Hacker News Changed My Life
Google+ Posts in Timeline View
Securing Your Domain Against Seizure: Where Is Safe to Register a Domain Name?
> However, seeing all websites using the same layout it's pretty boring and dull.

This is a self-correcting problem though. Once there's enough backlash, people will start tweaking things to set things apart. Bootstrap is a good starting point, that's all.
Sorry for not following, can someone give me a quick synopsis of exactly what bootstrap is?
That's the problem of reasoning on timescales of civilizations, yeah? You can't really pay attention to transient effects and still make meaningful policies.

For example, consider how many people died mining coal in the past couple of centuries, or how many natives died when colonizing forces spread them diseases or outright committed genocide.

Sure, it's awful, but would the world really be a better place if America were limited to some traders on the East coast? Or if England had never really gotten the Industrial Revolution thing figured out?

We can't really reason in human terms when talking about the species writ large.
It's an interesting idea. Here are some counterarguments:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/n2/against_discount_rates/
Scale Indefinitely On S3 With These Secrets Of The S3 Masters
"Even with nuclear weapons, if you rewind the tape you notice that it turned out that in order to make a nuclear weapon you had to have these very rare raw materials like highly enriched uranium or plutonium, which are very difficult to get [a]. But suppose it had turned out that there was some technological technique that allowed you to make a nuclear weapon by baking sand in a microwave oven or something like that. If it had turned out that way then where would we be now? Presumably once that discovery had been made civilization would have been doomed."

It works both ways; technology could find simpler ways to build superweapons, but it could also lower the entry barrier to complex, resource-intensive projects. Look at the consequences of even mild singularity predictions for robotics and AI -- things that lower industrial "costs" by orders of magnitude, things like 3D-printers, self-replicating machines, cheap and ubiquitous fab robots. Anyone could build incredibly sophisticated machines in their own homes -- including sports cars, jet engines, and giant TV screens, but equally, compact laser enrichment cascades [b] and nuclear weapons.

Perhaps it's lack of knowledge on my part, but I don't see what will stop atomic bombs from being as common as handguns in 30-100 years. Fissile material is ubiquitous [c]; there's no barrier beyond economics and engineering, of exactly the sort near-term AI could unpredictably disrupt.

[a] (Tangential silliness: terrestrial uranium WAS weapons-grade material a few billion years ago -- U-235 decays with a 0.7 billion year half life, compared to 4.5 billion years for U-238, so in geologic history the fissile fraction used to be extremely high. Another one for the "anthropic principle" bin: earth's intelligence must have evolved now, and not earlier, because if it had it would have trivially nuked itself...)

[b] Check out [NYT][APS] -- it's actually a mainstream position among arms control experts to consider shutting down US research in laser enrichment, to prevent the knowledge from being developed at all. To me this plan sounds about as airtight as have suggested to close the NSA, to keep mathematical secrets like RSA from being discovered.

[c] Here's a blogger who goes hiking and brings back uranium ore by the bucket [Willis], for his own hackery experimenting. Uranium ore occurs everywhere [Cameco]; even common granite is a low-grade ore containing 5-50 ppm (parts per million) U [AZGS]; and research suggests it's even feasible to extract it by bulk from seawater [NBF].

[NYT] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/science/earth/21laser.html...

[APS] http://aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/201007/slakey.cfm

[Willis] http://carlwillis.wordpress.com/2008/02/20/uranium-chemistry...

[Cameco] http://www.cameco.com/uranium_101/uranium_science/uranium/

[AZGS] http://repository.azgs.az.gov/uri_gin/azgs/dlio/414

[NBF] http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/09/uranium-from-seawater-on-la...
On both of my computers, using Chrome 19.0.1061.1 dev on Mac and 17.0.963.66 on Windows, I couldn't get past the "This game should be played in Google Chrome for best performance" warning...
Adam Gopnik on Favourite Essay Collections
Design is very much the culmination of many details and decisions. What is great about bootstrap is all of those decisions are made for you, leaving you to focus on the part you're good at - the app.

A nice palette of widgets and views makes for a consistent and fairly intuitive experience. Nobody argues Mac apps look too much like one another. Folk get angry when they stop looking like Mac apps.

But this is the web, not the Mac. Websites are expected to look different from one another. But when a engineer starts customizing bootstrap so that it "doesn't look bootstrap" I think the end product is often a broken design with awkward colors, margins and compositions.

I think the author of the OP would enjoy a greater set of bootstrap themes, something like bootswatch.com and furthermore it seems like a great opportunity for a company like themeforest.net or someone similar.

Bootstrap is popular not because of visual styling. What sets it apart is incredible documentation and programmer-friendly semantic markup. Regarding bootstrap as a theme is a disservice. Bootstrap is a framework which could use some more high quality visual themes.
+1 for CarsonGross. Bootstrap is a very good thing. AlecPerkins quit your complaining and give us something edifying.
The Print Handbook - The best design reference I have seen in quite some time.
Anons fight panic after Sabu betrayal
Who decided that .com is for everyone? (serious question)
Even better than gitignoring your local_settings -

Save your local settings as settings_local.py.exmp and then

ln -s settings_local.py.exmp settings_local.py

Giving you working local settings, and a versioned copy of them, that is useless unless linked properly.
Tom here from Scirra, where's that warning appearing? In the game or at the top of the page?
I wouldn't compare OS interfaces with websites.
They are totally different things.

An OS UI is mostly buttons and other widgets, window frames, and behavior. The actual applications are very different.

Just to give you an example:

Look Reeder app, Chrome, Things, iPhoto all for OSX.
They are wrapped with the a common UI, but they are much different from each other.

Sure they use lots of the same OS widgets, window frame,etc.. but they have their own design and way behaviors inside.

With frameworks like twitter you can't get that, unless you hack the source. But that defeats the whole point of it in the first place.
Tevatron confirms a 115-135 GeV Higgs
I thought this was widely known but when you hover over translated text, whether this is on the Google Translate page, or at a translated site, you get the option to correct the translated text if you want.

I don't know if this has always been the case, but I'm pretty sure it's been around for a few years.
I think a better usage would be to show two patterns - one of the password being entered and another for the password on file. Salt the passwords obviously before generating a pattern.

The idea is that I have a dozen of passwords, and some I use only when there are stupid password restrictions in place, e.g. "one uppercase letter, one digit, no special symbols". Since these restrictions are not shown on the Login form, it is frequently hard to remember which password I used with this particular site, so having a hint would help a lot.
You would reduce mean distance between all components and, depending on the graph of connections, save a lot on resistance losses.
Any thoughts or ideas would be helpful.
If the rest of the world sees it as such a problem, whey don't they do either a) or b) already? (serious question)
Richard Stallman coming to Singapore
Richard Stallman is coming to Singapore.
Why the iPad 3 Retina display changes everything
I thinks it's more that the downfall of Galaxies was tied to being able to get very cool powers without making much effort, like the new Jedi who killed his character. He encouraged it by feeding a system where players could buy credits with real money instead of 'earning' it in-game.
But you had the gamification stuff in place for everyone right? So there'd be no control group.
I'm wondering what's the need for this when we already have Apache Pig, etc?
They are not. It's not just the colors but the visual style. They are different for all three. Conclusion is > have a top bar .. with distinct visual style.

> If you want to make an application that people use all day, having a unique UI is probably not a win.

Not discussing user interface design, it's about visual style. Button should look like a button, but not so much like other site that user confuses your site with someone else's.

>Consistency itself can be beautiful.

Yes, same with search engines, if you used Google you can use Yahoo. But still their visual design is different in many ways if not search result. You can tell Yahoo from Google but not two Bootstrap sites.

Consistency is good for usability. Again, Button should look like a button, but not so much like other site that user confuses your site with someone else's.
To those wondering how tied to symfony it is, consider this:

It uses the process, console, and autoloader components. That being said, as a user, you need not worry about that. You put the composer.phar somewhere and invoke it.

If that isn't more useable than pyrus, I'd be interested to here what is.
Work aversion disorder
i cant respond to your note directly, but true, a further experiment could be done to analyze how much of an effect the gamification had, but the existence of the effect is clear
> I wouldn't compare OS interfaces with websites. They are totally different things.

Not for long.

> An OS UI is mostly buttons and other widgets, window frames, and behavior. The actual applications are very different.

So is Bootstrap.
Thanks for commenting!
That video is a joke for anyone who has more than a superficial understanding of math. Just because a process has fit an exponential curve does not mean exponential growth is going to continue forever. Past growth patterns are fairly weak evidence of future growth patterns. ("Housing prices always go up!")

That's not to say we shouldn't fear a process that is inherently exponential in nature, like the reproduction of bacteria or a nuclear reaction going supercritical. But if the process only appears from the outside to have been growing exponentially, that's only a weak indicator that it will start behaving in an insane fashion.

In any case, it seems that as nations become more developed people stop having kids:

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/11/fertility-the-big-prob...
The naming convention from SimCity 2000 => SimCity 3000 was not sustainable. The name SimCity 3000 was an over-promise, and should have been simply SimCity 2001. (See my above comment about Maxis almost running out of money trying to deliver on the promise of a version of SimCity 3000 that was 1000 years more advanced than the previous version of SimCity 2000.)
VIsual design: I'd be confused if all apps used same icons. Paramount to using that bootstrap topbar with same visual style.

Note: You could change colors / gradients and some visual design aspects and things would be different.
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Tweeet and save to your hopper
From http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/ : "Simple and flexible HTML, CSS, and Javascript for popular user interface components and interactions."

AKA: Allowing Programmers to take their website designs from nuclear-waste-bad to looks-decent-but-so-much-like-that-other-bootstraped-site-good
I am a UX designer. Bah let's just call me a designer. Included the "Quick Fix" for people who might not have a great design sense.
Whenever I see "user's want standardized UIs" what I hear is "it's easier for me to _program_ standardized UIs". Users want UIs that are in-tune with their goals and mental models and if you deliver that, it won't matter what size and shape your buttons are.

Snapping widgets together like lego bricks and declaring the result to be a "good" interface because it adheres to "standards" is sometimes true, but not nearly as often as you would think, and in my experience leads to interfaces that map closely to the underlying system, but not at all to what the user actually wants to do.

It's good that a non-designer can use bootstrap to create a decent looking site, heaven knows the world is not over-burdened with good-looking websites, but neither we nor the "users" want every web page, or every web app, to look the same.
Bootstrap is great for what the name implies, but when you are delivering the product to the public, it's not good enough.

The perfect example is iOS apps. Can you imagine your designers simply copying and pasting from iOS's default theme? It's very bland, it turns off users before they even use it (which in effect, is bad UX. Bootstrap has both + and -, good UXer will see this and adjust accordingly/depending on the phase of the product). I use this resource for my wireframe/mockups
http://www.teehanlax.com/blog/iphone-gui-psd-v4/
Personally I won't ever use it in a beta product/website as is.

There's nothing wrong with bootstrapping to map out user flow, and give clear indication a button is a button, a list is a list etc. But when it's time to up your game, give access to the public, default bootstrap visual/color needs to go.

Humans judge a book by its cover. If you release your bootstrap website, users will have to work and over come the barrier of your bland looking site and then decide if it's worth it to try your product.

PS: The point about lawyers have crappy websites and yet we still use them is because our expectations changes depending on the organization. Do we expect government websites to be wow and dazzle us? Do we expect a new Apple product's website to use bootstrap? Do we expect a 2 month old startup website to be featured on Behance's frontpage?

And remember who your early adopters are – if it's people that scours HN or see countless bootstrapped sites, what are they going to think when they see your site? Would they be understanding and go 'Oh its okay - they're a startup, I'll give them some leeway when it comes to visual design' or 'Would they go eff this, these guys don't care about design or visuals. I'll come back later'.
You Won't Believe the Scale of This Video Game World
It's a design framework from Twitter for web apps. It has the many different components that you'll probably need (buttons, menus, icons, CSS grid, modals, progress indicators, alerts, etc). Similar to how GUI apps gets all those things "for free".
Nonsense. Game companies cater to those that are the most profitable.

Oh wait.... Nevermind.
Good post by Dave. As others mentioned, I think Bootstrap is very much like the Wordpress for web apps. Just like wordpress has hundreds of templates, hopefully we can get a variety like this for Bootstrap as well. This could be as simple as adding more examples to the official Bootstrap site. Maybe skins?
Another rant about academia and open source
Buying the tech helps them get there faster. Also they don't just buy another product, HipChat has a very fanatical user base. It will likely be easy for Atlassian to get it adopted by the rest of their user base.
Dave makes some good points. But the part that amused me the most is that his site uses a table based layout...he should use bootstrap's row/span system :)
Yup. Singleton superintelligent friendly AI is pretty much our only chance; and we have no idea how to build one.
Door knobs are not visual style. They are user interface. If all logos looked the same, you'll be in utter confusion. That's what visual design is for. Your unique self.
>Unless Apple has somehow reinvented backlight or lithium-ion battery tech, there’s no way the iPad HD will be comparable to the iPad 2 in terms of weight, cost, or longevity.

Huh? How does increasing the resolution of the LCD increase the demands on the backlight?
Neighborhood social platform built by Redditor. 6000+ neighborhoods later...
Another good reason to have /tmp as a tmpfs, I guess.