skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Physical buttons with braille are probably a bit easier for blind users. You could have the elevator read out the label of each button on the screen as it was dragged over, or use voice recognition. However, since a decent number of lifts have braille labels, a blind user would expect to be able to run a hand over the buttons, guess roughly where there button should be, and read the braille label - and once they'd found that button, they could then remember its physical position (two buttons from the left, three from the top) for future use.

Physical buttons also require very little power when not in use, and their cost scales relatively well regardless of number of buttons - whereas a touchscreen panel three or four feet high for a very tall building would be pretty pricey. Touchscreens do have the advantage of no moving parts, so they're waterproof and have no internal wear and tear over time (assuming a sufficiently tough protective screen), but monitor illumination dims then breaks fairly quickly, and any protective plastic/glass shield over the touchscreen could get pretty scratched up.
>The first method provides better protection against talented bullshitters

Assuming that your skill level is above that of a talented bullshitter it shouldn't be that hard to drill deeper in to the previous projects with specifics. You don't necessarily need to even know the field, if you're a competent programmer you should at least get a feeling of how skilled/technical the other person is. And I'm willing to bet that that information will be a lot more reliable than the "what package is Foo in ?".

IMO using the first approach you concede that you aren't skilled enough to meaningfully evaluate the previous work/ skills, which is fine for contracting small work on your home, but you should consider third party evaluation/insurance service for anything big. In a interview scenario using this approach tells me I'm being interviewed by technically illiterate person that can't or won't use someone with more technical ability to do the evaluation, and both can't/won't options tell me that this company probably isn't for me.
I'm assuming that wasn't directed at me-I don't recall having indulged in any-boi-ism of any sort. I also agree with your comment... Being egotistical about something so irrelevant is definitely a bit weird.
Accoridng to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba, Tsar Bomba was over 1400 times as powerful as (Hiroshima+Nagasaki), and that was not even remotely close to killing us of.

Thousands of modern devices would be different in many ways: bombs would likely be more powerful on average than the '45 ones, but they could also be cleaner, and they would likely not be used all in the same place. I would guess the species would survive it, if only because the ones starting it would likely be in a good shelter.
Startup Secret 43: It's not you, it's me
Xilinx's Vertex 7 FPGA uses a stacked design for the interconnects. The FPGA logic is all 28nm, but sitting under it is a completely passive 65nm interconnect layer.

http://www.xilinx.com/products/technology/stacked-silicon-in...
Oh man, this post is so wrong. It's just like saying all people should look exactly the same in order to avoid confusion.

Yes, bootstrap is a good thing. But it should be used only as a base for further improvements.
Just wanted to say that I think your Heatmap.js plugin is awesome and I've used it extensively in a school project last semester.
I have one question about it. Is there a feature to remove some data points, or perhaps keep only some max number of data points in the heatmap so that the older ones are removed as new ones stream in kind of like a queue? Or is the only way to clear points redrawing the heatmap?
I think something like this is important because it allows for seriously real time heatmaps without getting too big and slow.
Anonymous Hackers targets Turkish Prime Ministry Network
Timing doesn't matter to us.

Why is that?

How much does it matter for a large ($0.5-2MM) angel round?
There seems to be trend toward ever increasing absurdity when it comes to interviewing for Software Engineers. In fact some of the recent HN posting about interview techniques are verging on being a parody of the Knights who say Ni from Monty Python and the Holy Grail ("We want you to cut down the largest tree in the forest...with a Herring !!").

As the post says find the Person who is the best fit for your team/company. Everything else can and will be learned on the job if you get the right candidate.
So what? My goal is to create a site that makes money by solving a real problem for customers, not to satisfy some rule 'you have to create a new design thing'. The benefit of a startup is that we can shed the supposed rules of business -- you have to have an office, work from 9 till 5 where clothing, have a logo, have a design, etc, etc.
I Kissed an iPad and I Liked (on release of iPad 1)
Wonder how this changes when you take basement levels, strange starting floors, or different popular floors into account? My current building has three basement floors, which are below the ground floor on the button panel, my Uni building's ground floor was actually floor 2 (it was built on a hill!), and the local shopping center has the bottom floors dedicated to parking, so the usual pattern is reversed: 50% of the traffic goes to the top floor to access the shops.
Github hack: How to protect your Rails apps against a similar hack
Heck, I hang around on HN a lot and still think that the default Bootstrap theme looks great. Sure, a little variety wouldn't hurt and I'd probably change some stuff (like some of the colors) before deploying a real project with it but it looks and works great and it's better than anything I could make as a programmer.
Well its an obvious insight. But the actual increase in time spent on page is what would be interesting.
I believe a haptic tablet experiment is in order...
Key/value is dead. Long live tuples: Pangool for Hadoop
Oh, good. I was intentionally vague there, as I wasn't sure how much was public knowledge.

Yes, basically we bypassed the JP (jump) and RT (return) opcodes, so that the program counter always stepped by one. Externally clock the CPU to move to the next instruction, and keep logging the data lines prior to the OP/LD cuts.
Too be fair, zynga is a parasite on facebooks infrastructure. So while syngas direct development costs are low, the real cost of developing what was required to provide zynga the platform is over a billion. (considering Facebook stated their network inf investment has been 1B)

Also, zynga is an idea thieving bandit of a company - so their costs are also far lower due to their hiring people that can copy as opposed to the thought leaders who would have come up with original content.

But if the only metric you choose to measure them on is revenue to expense, then by that myopic unethical lens - sure they look good.
I'm about to do the same thing. I live in a semi-rural area. It has a pretty large tech presense due to a fairly large R&D naval base, but everybody around here is only interested in government contracting, which I am looking to get out of.

So long as you have all of the skills necessary to make the business work then it shouldn't be a problem. You have the added benefit in that you don't have to split the profits with other founders or investors. You don't have to swing for the fences and can be happy with a single or a double so long as you like the business. And you can always change what you work on without interferring with somebody else's plans.
If I understand correctly, you're talking about confirming whether a password / confirm password box match. The purpose of the three colors is that they are displayed next to the password box every time the user types their password in, providing a visual clue as to whether they've entered their password correctly.
checking out from mercurial and compiling Golang from sources was too much of a barrier to make it my afterdinner play. But now is quite straightfoward to set it up: wget, untar, export $SOMEVAR, compile, run. Nice!

> cd $HOME
> wget http://go.googlecode.com/files/go.weekly.2012-03-04.linux-amd64.tar.gz
> tar -xzf go.weekly.2012-03-04.linux-amd64.tar.gz
> export GOROOT=$HOME/go
> export PATH=$PATH:$GOROOT/bin
> cat > hello.go

package main

import fmt "fmt" // Package implementing formatted I/O.

func main() {
fmt.Printf("Hello, world; or Καλημέρα κόσμε; or こんにちは 世界\n")
}
^D

> go build hello.go
> ./hello

Hello, world; or Καλημέρα κόσμε; or こんにちは 世界
I agree that having bootstrap as a common standard is doing more good than harm. However bootstrap is tied much more to design esthetics than interfaces.

With that being said, website designs have defiantly shown trends over the years (as have operating system "themes"). So I think we'll see something else come along to replace the bootstrap eventually according to the "standards" of the next greatest design phase.

Note Bootstrap does make a solid case for using standard components such as LESS, CSS and jQuery.
Isn't it only one-way solution?
Speculations, see for example:

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2009/how-i-learnt-to-s...

http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/nuclearwar1.html

It may be possible if you ask "given this arsenal, how do I destroy humanity?" but that is not how wars work.
Windows 8 Consumer Preview: Does This Even Make Sense?
This is relevant, but not really sufficient to prevent employers from accessing Facebook accounts. Employers that get "permission" from employees or candidates to access a social media account can (likely successfully?) argue that they are proxy for the account owner.

We've seen something very similar in the discussions around data rights when people die-- family who inherit passwords are unlikely to be sued where there is explicit permission granted-- because they are not "impersonating" anyone.

What could to prevent this is if requests in this manner can be considered coercion or duress-- automatically disqualifying contracts with language requiring disclosure of private passwords, and penalizing parties that try to include similar clauses.

I'd love to cite some cases, but have to run (I do appreciate the legal thoroughness!)
HP LTO-1 A data backup storage option
World is changing very fast and it has became more competitive and instrumented business hub if we compare it few years back. Every business merchant has to be on his toe all the time. This is an age of information, data.
1 pic = 1K words. Hollywood pollutes my personalized Google News
The main magic I do for RISC CPUs is allowing a write callback binding to the registers (overloading operator=) This allows us to handle pipeline invalidation on writes to the PC register, without having to special case the hell out of every single instruction that can modify it.
The term "startup" varies depending on who you are talking to. To most people, "startup" simply means a new business. Around here, it seems to have a specific meanign that I will not atempt to elaborate on because I would only get it wrong.
I really wish that I could share your optimism.

Any claims about our "self-directed evolution" seem to either: define it so loosely as to include purely social conventions or uses of technology (we keep our information in the twitterspheres!, or to assume some magic breakthrough in bioengineering that overnight allows us to start jailbreaking our genome.

The sad, sorry fact of the matter is that in the time it takes to accomplish that, we could blow ourselves up.

Or, we could blow enough of ourselves up to render that future unachievable. The nations that are capable of carrying out this research, and supporting the societies that can support this sort of thing logistically and culturally, are very precarious in their positioning. As a thought exercise, consider how far food on your table had to travel, how many things had to work correctly for that to happen, and how fucked you are if they don't (and how tricky it is to find a replacement, and how many other people would be doing the same).

It would not be unreasonable to believe that a collapse of civilization could set back your scheme several hundred years--for example, consider how difficult it would be to get back to a point where you could use existing machines, much less make new ones. A semiconductor foundry--required for computers, in turn required for any meaningful engineering these days--would be practically unattainable in dire times, even if you find people alive who still knew how to run it!

Or, even more likely, nothing goes wrong, and simple social forces render stagnation even with advanced bioengineering. Read "The Calorie Man" by Paolo Bacigalupi for a recent take on this. There is no reason to expect that we're going to fare any better.

So, no, this isn't an unreasonable pessimism on the rest of our parts.
Are you planning to get funding? I'm concerned that going alone will go against me.
Strong points. But from a usability perspective, Bootstrap would be much more significant if it were opinionated about interactions instead of just gradients, whitespace, and CTA placement.

The examples list of beautiful, usable, and identifiable products and services is long. People learn new patterns quickly - you just have to do a decent job designing the pattern.

Bootstrap's "non-coercive standards" are really just CSS shorthand for an approximation of Apple's successful, so-simple-it-feels-generic, already-easy-to-copy example. Anyone who never invested in a brand or consistent visual language before (and therefore simply wouldn't have a brand or consistent visual language) now just piggybacks Apple's aesthetic. Bootstrap is a small step further on the already well-worth path.
I hope your password is not encoded in the javascript.

And if the script tries it via asynchronous requests every time you type a character until you give the right password, think about the network overhead involved. And if you use this solution, how do you distinguish between a sloppy user (that recognizes (s)he hit a wrong key and immediately corrects it) and a bot trying to guess a password?
I don't think anyone would suggest changing the grid system or standard font sizes as a way to differentiate your bootstrapped site. I wouldn't mess with the scaffolding type stuff unless you really need to create a specific desired effect. Off the top of my head, the quickest ways to make a bstrap site look unique and keep the haters happy would be:

1- Navbar, the dark gray will not fly, tweak the height of it too or remove it all together.

2- Background of your container, give it some life. Here is a good place to start- http://subtlepatterns.com/

3- Special font for your branding/ H tags, boom (http://www.google.com/webfonts)

4- change up the button colors a tad, if only one, the blue one, it seems to be everywhere.

The above items will take you 15-30 min depending on how many combinations you try out & will take you pretty far.
Designing in Data Quality with the User Interface
If you start counting microsecond savings, shouldn't you also account for the fact that people looking for a Lobby button in a real elevator (and not on a website) would actually be looking at the bottom of the panel, because that's where a Lobby button typically is. If the button is not there, then a person will have a WTF moment, followed by a mental stumble, followed by a guess that the Lobby is actually on the 2nd floor, followed by time needing to look the panel over and so on. Even if the button is at the bottom, but of a different shape, size or if it has a LOBBY on it, it's still a hassle, because that's not what's expected of it. If you ever been to Vegas with its humongous "Casino Floor" elevator buttons, you should be able to relate to this with ease.

The whole thing is basically an http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow example. It is silly.
The real problem is what knowledge the question is supposed to test - is it testing whether you know the answer to the question, or is it testing something else altogether?

Put another way, the problem is less the specificity of the questions and more the ease with which you can expect to earn them.

I haven't used Swing/AWT in two years, and I couldn't really tell you what inherits from what. But after a weekend of breaking through the rust, I'd get back into it, so it's of no consequence to any potential employer.

However, some language-specific questions are very telling. For example:

How many arguments does type() take in Python?[1]

If you answer '1' or 'either 1 or 3', that tells me two very different things about you. The latter tells me that you may understand that Python uses prototypical inheritance, rather than 'pure' class inheritance, and it tells me that you may have done a non-trivial amount of Python metaprogramming before. If you understand Python's inheritance structure in this way, you're a much more valuable candidate to some companies than you are for simply knowing syntax errors and interpreter-specific quirks... and the opposite may be true at another company).

(Of course, it's possible that you know that and have simply forgotten, or were confused by the phrasing, etc. - no question is perfect, but after enough of these, you start to piece together a picture of the candidate).

The point is, the former question is something that you can reasonably learn during a training period and which asks little more than face value. As for the latter question - you all know that now, so you can also learn it during a reasonable training period. But actually applying that knowledge (which comes with the followup questions) is something that would require a significant level of familiarity with the subject in question, which is what they are really trying to get at.

[1]This may not be the best wording for the question, since it tips the interviewee off to the trick beforehand, but I can imagine a way to present this question so that it wouldn't.
Why did you decide to go with this instead of a cross platform scripting language like Python, Ruby, or Perl? In both cases you need a custom runtime compiled from C or C++ code.
Air stinks Stop being lazy and work your own native client or just don't do it.

But that's just my opinion.
You have your specialization / generalization axis the wrong way around, I think. Knowing what a for-loop looks like in a C-derived language is correlated with broad experience; once you know it in C, you know it in Java, JavaScript, C++, C#, etc. But someone who knows primarily jQuery / backbone / ember / spine etc. is much more of a specialist, not a generalist. They have deep specific knowledge of a narrow toolset, rather than broad general knowledge of a wide toolset.

That is, knowledge of language over libraries indicates generality (if you know the language and its idioms well, you should pick up most libraries fairly easily); knowledge of libraries over language indicates specialisms, because you end up a little out of your depth when not wading through the library's DSLs.
And some people argue laissez-faire capitalism does not naturally lead to concentration of capital and oligopolies/monopolies. I guess they should play MMOs ;)
Tim Ferriss, on the Joe Rogan podcast [1], predicts a pandemic in the near future (around 28:45). Basically, he knows a guy who runs a biotech company who claims that they, if they wanted to, could engineer a virus within six months that could wipe out humanity.

I wouldn't say that it's the sole threat, however. Yudkowsky seems to take the threat of runaway AI quite seriously. These are crucial times.

[1] http://blog.joerogan.net/archives/3531
It has to be very high, because our uncertainty about the future is absolutely enormous. I'd put the discount rate even higher than the monetary discount rate, which with fairly standard numbers is already effectively 0 in 20 years.
We have the session lengths in terms of time as well -- all the data is on git
>Also, his argument has the same short-coming as the "sacrifice" dilemma: We cannot know for sure that a certain action will have a certain outcome - or that any action taken was actually the cause of the outcome.

I don't see how this is a shortcoming.

If I am leading a company, I cannot know for sure that a certain action will have a certain outcome – or that any action taking will actually be the cause of a given outcome. That's not going to prevent me from doing my best to build a good product and make a profit.

In the same way, the uncertainty inherent in reducing existential risk shouldn't prevent us from doing our best to reduce it.
I love the last paragraph in his post.

"Because it wasn’t the game I loved. That game died in 2005 with the NGE/CU. It died when developers turned their backs on the gamers who had spent the effort and instead listened to the lazy, whining voices who wanted it all given to them."

Sounds a lot like the government of today.
I don't mind writing C++ or python or javascript in mcedit or kate (sorry, I just can't get used to vim nor emacs, I tried).

But Java is special, try to code Java without an IDE. It's possible, but it's PITA. Typing org.something.somethingElse.somethingEvenMoreElse.ClassINeed and looking it up for every class you need will kill you. Even importing org.something * from every library won't help, you still need to know subpackages path to each class, and most libraries have quite huge depth and branching factor :).
Readability, Meet Android
I can't make up my mind about this.
The developer in me loves bootstrap, it doesn't makes me think too much about UI. I can't just worry about coding and functionality.

However, seeing all websites using the same layout it's pretty boring and dull. I think the web is what it is because of it's diversity. I'm a very visual guy, I love te see beautiful well design things and new approaches.

If bootstrap or any other framework is the end of road as far as UI interface, it's pretty sad IMO.
I think your final point is actually exactly what Dave is saying. His point is not that everything should look the same. He's saying that it is helpful for common items, such as menus, to be factored out into reusable bits like Bootstrap so that we aren constantly reinventing the wheel.

Take a look at Mac programs, for example. For the most part, they all have menus, windows, and title bars that look the same. But the important parts of many apps are unique. This makes things easier for both developers and users.

Imagine, as a developer, having to code the entire UI from scratch every time. That's how it used to be. It's not so nice for users when every app looks similar but it subtly different. It means every app has a steeper learning curve.

I think there is room for both uniformity and creativity to co-exist.
Community request for Apache 2.4 in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
...Which is damn awesome!

I remember my dad flipping a commentnmymway years ago after hearing me and my mates talking about our PCs, upgrades, what ifs, etc. Those days: the concept of a terabyte was an expression of absurdity, we'd use the word the way kids on a playground would say they'd one day have a HUNDRED BUCKS!!

He drew a parallel between PCs in the 90s and hot rods in the 50s, saying how everyone who had any depth of knowledge on his block had that knowledge on the field of automotive tuning and spent their off days and wages on their cars.

I see a comparable metaphor at play here and I still do not disagree with it.
interesting stuff cam, didn't think of that use case, but basements are an interesting question. so many possibilities lol
To be honest, I'd prefer Amazon to use Bootstrap with a yellow branded bar at the top, ditto Facebook (with FB blue). Ditto for any flight search website. Anything that's an "application". With blogs however, I don't want to see it resembling the default.
When I saw font awesome, I did not think about how to use it with a bootstrap theme. I saw it as a totally separate entity completely. To be honest Font Awesome was more impressive to me and potentially have much further usage beyond just on bootstrap-themed sites.