skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Obviously "special" keys are expected. CTRL and ESC are used in many operating systems. The point is that an OS shouldn't expect a key specifically for that os. Do we now need an Ubuntu key? Or a CentOS key? Or maybe a more general "Linux key" would be appropriate? No thank you.

I expect Apple to have an Apple key on their keyboard, because their hardware is tied to their OS and you buy into their entire ecosystem when you buy their desktop. But Windows doesn't work that way. Many people use Windows on the same hardware that they use other operating systems. So a Windows key doesn't make sense there.

I suppose it's just a naming issue and most operating systems now recognize the key as a "meta" key, but it would be nice if its name wasn't tied to a particular operating system. And it's especially hard to do that if it has a particular operating system's logo on it.

I guess people became accustomed to this a long time ago and I should just "let it go".
'Honey Stick' Experiment Shows What Happens to Lost Smartphones
8 Qualities of Exceptional NEW Employees
I don’t like .this-is-correct{} because sometimes you have the same variable name in Javascript too, where dashes won’t work.
TED Talk vs. The Spinning Beach Ball of Death
95 introduced the start menu, desktop, and taskbar, and nearly did away with DOS. It was a pretty huge change.
I love the scattered Mac peripherals and the totally flippant attitude. Completely impartial.
Indeed it is as you say. "attr_accessible kerfuffle" was my (apparently, and quite bizarrely, considered inflammatory) shorthand to refer to the whole episode. I'd edit the post to clarify, but it won't let me do that any more
hasn't linux been proclaimed 'ready for the world' every year since 1997?
> To be honest the "edge of screen" interaction paradigm seems pretty straightforward

My Windows desktop is the middle of three computers on my desk using Synergy; at work we use MouseWithoutBorders which doesn't have corner protection. I predict serious frustration in my future.
Use a Water Drop As a Simple iPhone Macro Lens [Photography]
What even worse: there're tons of tutorials on "how to create a shortcut for shutdown on Windows 8 desktop". It shouldn't be like that in the system that tries to be familiar for users of earlier version.
> If you're a consumer, you use the Metro UI. \ If you're a producer, you use the Desktop.

The problem with this is that the "new" desktop is fundamentally different from the old one. It's not as simple as saying "oh, just use the desktop".

> IMO, they are insistent on improving their products.

I wouldn't consider presenting users with a puzzle to be an improvement. I can pick up my iPad and instantly figure it out. I can pick up a MacBook Air with iOS-like features and instantly understand how they work. I was stunned at how much effort was required to learn Windows 8. Absolutely stunned. How exactly is that an improvement?

By the same token, I can pick up a Windows Phone 7 device and instantly understand how to use it - but Windows 8 still somehow turned out to be a confusing mess with a mouse/keyboard. Even on a touchscreen device - it's not completely clear how things work. It was as confusing to use as a Blackberry Playbook.
> For each level of markup nesting, try and indent your CSS to match.

Nope.

> Also write vendor prefixed CSS so that colons all line up

Nope.

> When building a new component write markup before CSS

Yes!

> Instead of building dozens of unique components, try and spot repeated design patterns abstract them; build these skeletons as base ‘objects’ and then peg classes onto these to extend their styling for more unique circumstances.

This is a bone of contention amongst front-end developers. If you're Facebook, and you have a deep and wide site architecture that would otherwise result in masses of duplication, this makes sense (although arguably using CSS preprocessors like LESS or SASS would make even more sense), but these rules do not make sense for small to medium sized sites. If anything, they encourage a thin layer of abstraction on what would otherwise be entirely presentational markup. You were on to something when you said start with your markup: classify your marked up elements by giving them IDs and classes according to what they are and what they do, and then declare rules for how things of that type want to look.

> All components should be left totally free of widths; your components should always remain fluid and their widths should be governed by a grid system.

Nope. Again, grid systems are something that should be used on a case-by-case basis, according to the nature of the site you're building.

> Heavily location-based selectors are bad for a number of reasons.

Nope. What you're arguing against is a rule that has a high degree of specificity. Naturally there is a sane limit to how specific a selector should be (if you want to avoid specificity wars) but `.sidebar h3 span` is not too specific a rule.

> An over-qualified selector is one like div.promo

Alternatively you might call this a self-documenting selector. If you're going to apply a class to multiple types of element and you want them to all inherit the same rules then sure, don't apply an element name too — otherwise you're adding classes which communicate zero information to a developer unfamiliar with the markup structure.

> Do not use IDs in CSS at all.

NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE. Understand specificity rules. Write good selectors. Don't outright ban IDs just because you're not careful enough to write clean CSS.

> As a general rule, all layout and box-model rules can and will work without an IE stylesheet if you refactor and rework your CSS.

Hahahahahahahahahhaa.

I'll echo comments from others here; these are not ‘best-practices’ — they're just a set of arbitrary rules that you might find work for you, but you might find they don't. I'd argue that if you enforce these vigorously, your projects are succeeding in spite of these rules, not because of them.
Ha, amazing someone just learned something :).
I read a lot of font blog posts and find them impressive, yet ultimately unhelpful. They discuss similarities and differences with other fonts in extraordinary detail. They show images of individual glyphs enlarged beyond practicality and pick at the details. They talk about the people who designed the fonts and their reputations. They talk about the companies who funded them and their motivations. They throw about words like "casual", "rigid", "cheerful", "fresh", "clean", and "rhythm".

Has anyone done any A/B testing? How about controlled surveys? I'd like to see actual data collected from normal people who don't know Helvetica by name.
You're not asking non-power users how they feel, are you?

2000 to XP was a big change. So much so that many people reverted to "Classic" mode as soon as they could do so.

XP to Vista wasn't even accepted by most users. I have no idea how many old XP users went to OSX like I did, but I would posit that the number is not zero.

Vista/XP to 7 was also a decent sized change, as I learn anytime I've attempted to verbally explain where a particular setting is and realize that it could be called anything. Unlike Vista, this has nothing to do with the quality of the OS, as Windows 7 is very good. However I can't help thinking that at least some users have gone OSX from this change as well.
Article was updated: "...the NYT has three sources telling them that there are indeed ‘advanced talks’ being held about a potential acquisition of Mashable by CNN, but that a deal could still fall through..."
2 things I would change.

1. There should never be a css reset, normalize is better.

https://github.com/necolas/normalize.css
or with IE6/7 junk removed:
https://github.com/CoryMathews/normalize.css

2. Structure the file in the method mentioned

http://smacss.com/book/categorizing

"So there would be 5 basic areas in your stylesheet.

Base
Layout
Module
State
Theme"
With my diary app Remembary, I occasionally get empty emails submitted from the app's "Support Email" button in the help popover. The "?" button, the "Support Email" button, and the popup email's "Send" button are all in the top right part of the screen, so my best guess is that it's people's children tapping repeatedly in the top right area of the iPad. Good thing I don't have anything particularly destructive up there.

So thinking "what about the children?" is a good idea when doing any kind of app layout. It's good to make sure that repeatedly tapping or clicking on one part of the screen doesn't trigger deletions or other dangerous side effects.

In my case, it's nice to get an email every so often that doesn't have any calls to action in it.
Gowalla finally shuts down after team moves to Facebook
No, it's considered a bad thing that Rails had insecure defaults in a recommended code path used by legions of inexperienced developers. You can still change the setting to the old value if you want to, just like you can explicitly ask for a recursive mutex if you want one. Bonus: Asking for a recursive mutex still isn't a security problem.

And since you want to argue based on SO, I'll just leave you with two bits of data from SO:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/pthreads -- 1,525 questions

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/ruby-on-rails -- 66,675 questions
An hour long video by Douglas Crockford where he explains about the licence somewhere after 40-45 minutes i think. http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Heretical-Open-Source
It was a stupid, misguided effort from the beginning. Due to the way patents work, there is no such thing as a patent-free video library. You can't make one. It's impossible. Any non-trivial program will have some kind of infringement and if someone's trolling for "infringements" then they will find them.

They should've worked instead to get proper buy-in from the various parties supporting the current standards to ensure that another GIF incident doesn't happen.
Diversity Training Doesn't Work - Peter Bregman
‘Ishtar’ Lands on Mars
Oops hit the down-arrow without intending to, my bad, hope someone will fix that.

There is nothing tacked on about a regularizer though, it is very sound even in theory. There are several ways to look at it. One way is to see it as a natural consequence of Bayes law, it is just the log of the prior probability. There are certain things we know or assume about the model even before looking at the data, for example we expect the predictions to have a certain smoothness etc, all this knowledge can incorporated into the prior model, and that is what the regulaizer is. Another way to look at it from stability of the estimates of the parameters. I find the former more convincing.
It's entirely possible to look at a mountain of data and take away incorrect or misleading conclusions from it. The existence of data is not in and of itself a guarantee that the human beings who look at it will interpret it correctly.
I could really resist a Perl version, sorry

https://gist.github.com/2023260
Windows Me was released in 2000, after Windows 98, but I agree with your premise in general.
It looks like there are just some templates for Twitter and Facebook activity right now.

I was expecting something a little more interesting than very rigid templates. A basic and friendly tool really.

That may come in the future. For now it needs some polish.
14-year old Bleichenbacher attack still present in OpenSSL PKCS
XP to Vista wasn't really a major change in terms of user interaction. They added UAC, which might be annoying, but followed existing interaction methods, so it was pretty obvious how to interact with it. Aero prettied up the UI, but the interaction wasn't actually changed by it. Snap added some new interactions, but the old actions were unchanged.

What do you see as the changes that forced the user to "re-learn the OS"?
I actually believe it's primarily a third reason the author didn't mention: (3) not understanding what a "proof" is and what it means to "prove" something. Of course it ties into the 2nd reason in that many people aren't motivated to learn what a proof actually is.

The "impossible to absolutely prove" phrase has a misuse of "prove". A proof is absolute. A proof is either valid or invalid judged solely on whether it follows the rules of the predicate calculus (or the rules of some other proof-framework you're using which is likely using the predicate calculus or an extension behind the scenes anyway). A proof's conclusions are "true" if and only if they are true. ( http://yudkowsky.net/rational/the-simple-truth )

It is true (so far as we know, we might be wrong in the end) that we can't be absolutely certain that something is false, but it's the same case for being absolutely certain that something is true. (Here "absolutely certain" means "no admittance to even the possibility of being incorrect".) This is more generally identified as the problem of induction, but it's more of a law than a problem. One can guess from the name it has to do with inductive arguments that rely on guessing+evidence rather than deductive proofs that rely on accepting premises (which may be true or false) and a proof framework like the predicate calculus.

Edit: Have a Feynman video on UFOs. :) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLaRXYai19A When he says "I can't prove it's impossible", the interpretation you should take is "I can't produce a set of premises we can all agree with that leads to a deductive proof that UFOs are impossible."
The "Post PC" world doesn't remotely mean PCs will disappear.

Agreed. But given what they're doing with their "operating system for the post-PC world", one can't help wondering if that is exactly what Microsoft thinks it means.
Microsoft has been showing off a lot of these lab projects lately. I guess they think it helps with their marketing. The problem is they've not just started working on these types of projects. Their R&D has always been doing stuff like this, but either they never seem to come out in products, or if they do, it happens a decade later. So other than marketing bragging rights, this is all pretty pointless if they don't show up in products at all, or not for a decade.
2 years ago, while working at a SoC vendor, they were explicitely taking into account WebM support for their next generations of chips: not having hardware decoding for a major web codec would be a great failure: with Google + Mozilla + Opera we could see almost 1 billion users affected by this. This is a make or break to have design wins.

A SoC lifecycle can take 5 years to materialize in customer shipping hardware. Yet Mozilla is giving up before collecting the fruit of their previous policy (no system codec).

That's a shame.
I'm a Linux newbie. Or should I say, an Ubuntu newbie. I don't know. I use this system for the same purpose as some people build things with Lego pieces. It's a therapy for me. I like the possibilities that the command line offers. Differently from clicking links (e.g on Windows' Control Panel) you just type what you want. I found it to be a more "precise" way to work. My only complain goes to the file structure and installation process. Whether in Windows you know things will end up in 'Program Files', there's no logic for me where apps are stored in Linux file system. Those three letter acronyms mean nothing to me. They remind me the old days when all data were abbreviated to fit small diskspaces and slow processors. That would be my only complain.
I like Linux/Ubuntu so much that I replaced my mom's Win Vista with it. She uses Gmail, Picasa and Skype, aside from browsing websites. She doesn't know the concept of "file" or "folder". For her, the program talks to the Internet and makes all the magic happen. Maybe there are other people just like my mother out there, either too old or too young, with a different view (thus expectation) of the computer screen. Maybe that's what define the "user" anyway. Using Tron's allegory, maybe we are the tech-minded "programs" looking at users with prejudice and thinking about all the points they are missing by being just "users". And I think Canonical is welcoming these people now, like Apple did a few years back.
:( Sorry, I stopped reading and started doing half way through... so I didn't actually finish the article.
Release android APK files are also signed.
メンズエステアンチエイジング口コミサイト
Microsoft needs to break Windows 8 Metro away from the desktop and make it tablet only, why is this so hard for them to see?
If your interface needs a cheat sheet or tip mechanism or animated assistant to explain to the user how it works, it is a failure.
Gamers outdo computers at matching up DNA sequence alignments
You don't prohibit change. You make affordances. What people are complaining about isn't the new interaction paradigm, it is how hard it is to figure out that paradigm.

The iOS example is valid, but not as valid as you think. You could happily use you iOS device forever without learning that (especially now that Apple put the same functionality in the settings app, probably because it wasn't discoverable). The same is not true in Windows 8.

Given you have to know a gesture just to get logged in, you can't even start using it without knowing the magic incantations.

I think it's great MS is experimenting. They have had he same metaphors since 1995. But you have to be very careful when you change 15 year old metaphors, and I don't think MS has been careful enough. I hope I'm wrong, because that will mean users are getting more savvy, which can only be good for making more interesting apps. But my experience has taught me to never rely on users being more savvy.
Not who you're replying to, but on my list:

CamelCase vs using-dashes is strictly a developer preference. I happen to agree with the author of the doc about using dashes, but I'm not going to call my preference a "best practice". A "best practice" might be more akin to "if you're working on an already in progress project, don't start doing CamelCase if they're using-dashes, or vice-versa", IMO.

Another controversial one is whether or not to have each style on it's own line, or in the same line. The author prefers a new line for each style because it makes for easier diff-ing in version control. The argument could be made, however, that this style introduces too much whitespace and vastly reduces the number of styles you can view at one time, not to mention increasing the linecount of your stylesheet by at least a factor of 3. Neither is, IMO, a "best practice", it's just a developer preference (IME most devs do agree with this doc, however).

There's some other stuff that really just boils down to how the author prefers to read his CSS, and not really about how to structure it in a proven optimal way. I believe it's hard to argue that those are "best practices", something Wikipedia describes as "consistently shown results superior to those achieved with other means". I would like to see the argument that lining up your -webkit prefixed styles achieves this, for example.

Anyway, IMO, a lot of the recommendations in the doc are good advice, just mixed in with some personal preferences. Like the author wrote though, it is his personal best practices, so in that context I suppose these are Best Practices, only the scope is limited to just the author.
I probably would apply to this programme because the founders seem to want to tackle real lasting problems: insurance, loneliness, health care prevention, etc... as opposed to an inbox optimizer. I wish YC had a branch dedicated solely to startups that have truly ambitious goals and want to actually improve the world.
If you're a consumer, you use the Metro UI.
If you're a producer, you use the Desktop.

The line between "consumer" and "producer" is so fuzzy that this doesn't sound feasible to me. [For the record, I haven't used Windows 8 yet.]

Both "types" of users—if we assume for argument's sake that such a distinction can even be made—tend to use a number of apps; each of those individual apps falls somewhere on a continuum of consumption vs. production. And even where each app falls on that continuum for that person may vary throughout the day!

I expect there will continue to be tablets — and they should have tablet UIs — and there will continue to be "desktops" — and they should have desktop UIs. They should be made similar in aspects where it makes sense, kept different in those aspects where it doesn't, and there should definitely be many apps that run on both (with appropriately varying UIs depending on platform) and which constantly sync so that the users' production and consumption can flow between them as desired.

If Microsoft pulls off a single system (even with two modes) that can transition without confusion and frustration between the two and that doesn't heavily compromise either one, then they'll have a very unique offering. But I don't think it's clear that such a goal is even achievable.
How I use VIM for C, C++ and Python coding
Migrating from Microsoft SQL Server to MongoDB - Lessons Learned
Win8 is the result of higher ups at MSFT getting caught in trends instead of being able to tell which strategy works and which doesn't, as they should.

Tablets are a bad business, read tablets not the iPad. The iPad's sales and huge profits are a Black Swan in a lake full of regular White Swan tablets making no money and carving a hole in OEMs quarterly results, so at the end some are actually considering leaving the nascent tablet market. That's because the majority of people still prefers to pay $500 for a very functional and feature-loaded laptop than paying that same amount (or more) for a barely competitive tablet.

That vast majority uses Windows, and now MSFT instead of taking a page from Apple and using WP7 for tablets they are giving the finger to all the Windows users that keep their company going (almost every other division is hemorrhaging money or barely breaking even) by forcing them into the limitations of a tablet UI.
>"Having to abandon all the skills you had in muscle memory for years and lern an entirely new set of clues, moves and small, day-to-day tricks surely wont increase your productivity."

In the short term perhaps.

Over the long term, I have found that switching OS's [or browsers] makes me more productive because I don't continue using all the beginner inefficiencies I was in the habit of using.

An example from switching browsers is learning to use the middle button to open a link in a new tab I picked up when switching to Opera a few years ago rather than using the right click context menu as I had been doing for years.

It took me the better part of a decade to move the task bar from the bottom of the screen to the left side. The value of starting again as "an experienced beginner" should not be dissmissed.
I've worked on a children's app for Android where the client wanted advertisements moved from the main screen (where parents would see it) to the content screen (accidental clicks only from children). That change in design made the client "dead to me" especially when they next wanted me to work on another child app where the business model was:

Fooling children into initiating SMS charges against the phone.
Yes, the same discussion as before leads me to the same question: if this is a world of entertainment embedded devices that support 3rd party apps, why is the term "Post PC"?

Mainframes never achieved the dominance of PC's precisely because they weren't as useful; so it is logical to say that PC's will continue to dominate embedded devices because the iPad isn't as useful.

Embedded devices never even had to compete with PC's on units sold. That didn't make the PC an afterthought then, so what's different now?