skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I do feel bad for users like the one in the video. I feel bad because I know that my father is going to be that person in the video, too. By the time Windows 8 reaches my father's computer, he'll be in his late 50s. He gets around Windows 7 just fine, but he does not stray away from his familiar things. He knows where the browser is and he knows how to tinker around in the control panel to change certain settings. The moment something does not do what he expects, though, he's pretty lost. Especially lost if he can't easily find an explanation as to what's happening, on Google. I have used Windows 8 already, and I can say that if what my father has to use is what I used of it, then he's in for a rough trip. He'll learn it, but sadly it'll take much longer than it will for me, for example.
Could someone perhaps take the relevant suggestions from this HN discussion and modify a fork of the repo?
I would do it myself, but I don't think I am proficient enough at CSS to sift through the comments effectively.
Windows Me was released in 2000, after Windows 98

That's why it's funny.
I agree.

However, it is easier to draw incorrect conclusions from anecdote.
Magic numbers (you have to because CSS doesn't allow you to make variables), specify a height and width in pixels (works well if it doesn't contain text that may be changed and is the only way to do certain things) no index.

I suspect it is because I write HTML5 apps, rather than websites (distinguishing feature: HTML5 apps have no 'you don't have javascript' fallbacks and they can't reasonably have any.).
Designing For Bears.
Are you kidding me? They make it extremely obvious.

Apps with in-app purchases have a giant message on the App Store that, upon clicking, brings you to a list of things the application has for sale.

Not to mention there's a restriction on iOS devices that allow you to turn off in-app purchases all together.

It's like blaming Comcast because your child purchased expensive pay-per-view material when you could have easily blocked the channel.
Why this mobile gaming vet says HTML5 is not the future
> Projects need contributions from everyone of all skills and levels of expertise.

I disagree. I find that politely rejecting or rewriting contributions from people with little experience or clue is a serious time drain for a maintainer (as well as a trial of patience). This goes even for documentation, which, when written by people without a clear view of the software, tends to be confused and misleading.

I try to handle such contributions gracefully anyway, with the idea that some of these people will use the feedback to grow into better programmers, but even that is unlikely to benefit the project -- the time span it takes to go from clueless to good is probably longer than the period in which the person is involved in my project.
> With flash you can read 4KB of data in 100 microseconds or so, if your read is stuck behind an erase you may have wait 10s of milliseconds. That’s a 100x increase in latency variance for that particular variance that used to be very fast.

I had never heard this claimed before -- is this true? Wikipedia says:

"Less expensive SSDs typically have write speeds significantly lower than their read speeds. Higher performing SSDs have similar read and write speeds."

So it sounds like this isn't as much of an issue as the article claims.
sort of relevant: using a water droplet and a paper clip to turn a laser pointer into a microscope and projector:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aK_a-jr-tI
Thanks, I agree. To reiterate something that I think you're saying (correct me if I'm wrong), "An accountant ... in Excel is going to hate a touchscreen. For MS Office to work on a tablet, it'll have to be re-designed from the ground up." Ok then, why would Accounting firms switch to Metro?

With multiple competing options (some in the cloud), surely one of them will cater to the old UI that uses the arrow keys.
> 2000 to XP was a big change. So much so that many people reverted to "Classic" mode as soon as they could do so.

"Classic" mode only changed the way the OS looked. It had nothing to do with the functionality, and certainly didn't change whether the user had to "re-learn" the OS.

> XP to Vista wasn't even accepted by most users.

How did users have to "re-learn", though? Vista was certainly not adopted at the rate that Microsoft had hoped, but whether users accept the product is a different question from whether they have to "re-learn the OS".

> 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.

They did move some settings (can't recall if this was actually Vista or 7). I would hardly say that this required re-learning the OS, though. I will admit that one of the first things I always do is switch the Control Panel to "Large Icons" rather than "Category".

P.S. Disclaimer: MSFT employee
Good point, my mistake :)
Catch all response:

This document is a personal one, and for use at my place of work. I decided to share it in the hope that it might be useful to others but if you disagree with anything please remember; this is a document for me and Sky. You do not have to follow the advice given, nor do I provide any guarantee. — https://github.com/csswizardry/CSS-Guidelines/blob/master/RE...

> Nope.

Fair enough.

> Nope.

Fair enough.

> If you're Facebook, and you have a deep and wide site architecture…

We’re not Facebook, but we are big.

> 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.

Okay, as mentioned this is doc used largely at my place of work where we do use a grid system. For places that don’t use one then this basically means ‘don’t apply dimensions to components; leave structure to parents and wrappers’. Hard coding dimensions on components should be avoided at all costs.

> Nope. What you're arguing against is a rule that has a high degree of specificity.

I’m not. Heavily location selectors hinder flexibility; components should not rely too heavily on where they live, they should be movable as easily as possible. Shorter, less location-dependent selectors aid this.

> Don't outright ban IDs just because you're not careful enough to write clean CSS.

I believe I’ve got my CSS nailed, thanks. IDs will only ever hinder a CSS developer; they offer zero benefit (where CSS is concerned) over a class, thus why would you ever bother using them? If all they can do is harm then just cut them out; even the most careful developers can get tripped up by the overly specific nature of IDs.

> Hahahahahahahahahhaa.

I’ve just finished the rebuild a massive front-end, the project as a whole took over a year. Number of IE stylesheets: 0. It can be done.
To be fair, several of your complaints are really polish. This isn't the RTM by any stretch, and from what I understand, the reason for even having the consumer preview is to get feedback like that. Saying it's doomed because of some of these things isn't really fair.

I'm not sure about the mouse-tablet thing, in general, sure. But the specific way you use the lock screen, for example, is likely to get fixed before they release.

(I've been using the Consumer Preview for about a week on my primary machine and I'm pretty happy with it.)
Human biases
The problem with all this stuff is always the same: it's incredibly, utterly, mind-numbingly boring, which is why even rockstar developers (who are the ones who will get all the credit for the project anyway, and who have the famous sky-high productivity that Spolsky measures in multipliers) can't be bothered to do it.

And I say that after having done some of it here and there.
This is very true and applies in a lot of ways e.g. Building an application to try to take customers away from an incumbent.

I've tried to use Gimp and LibreOffice, but they both are close enough to Photoshop and MS Office that I can't ever learn their "dialects", which are very close to the originals', but not quite. Instead, I constantly feel like I'm fighting them.

When I moved to Pages instead, I was forced to learn a whole new language, and so that's what happens. No remapping, just mapping.
Lessons Worth Sharing: TED Launches Video Series for High School Students
I'd never thought of it that way. However, for me,

input,
select {
background: white;
border: none;
float: left;
font-size: 14px;
margin: 0;
padding: 5px;
width: 400px;
}

Is more readable—each rule and selector on its own line. I am biased as I use Vim and half-page scroll lots, and like an 80-character maximum, though.
I know what it does, and I want to try and use it, but I found it was incomprehensible.
I really like that coffee analogy! I also like the idea that nobody's a loser. And the customer's happier.

I'll go a bit further saying that, while nobody's a loser, I also understand the hippie's cry for a change: Everyone around him is buying espresso machines with pre-formated coffee capsules. The hippie gives away his capsules as whole grains; theoretically, it's the best way of distributing it. However nobody knows what to do with whole grains anymore. People chose the convenience of the capsule, and nobody cares to even try to appreciate this hand-made, fine grained, home grown coffee the Hippie wants to give away for free.
Dashes map more cleanly to existing CSS syntax, eg nth-child, background-color, etc. Much like camelCase looks more like Javascript than my_variable.
That's not really true. At good companies you're still going to need to interview, even with a strong reference.

You may not need to prove yourself technically as much as someone who comes in cold, but you always need to prove that you're a good cultural fit for the team.
Crockford has total license to create any license he wants, of course, but I absolutely hate that license of his, not just because the lawyers are right -- "evil" is not a term substantiated with definition, and all terms in a legal document should be defined and specifc -- but also because insofar as he has expressed opinions about what constitutes evil, I disagree with him.

The YUI documentation, and similar JS documentation from Yahoo!, is chock full of the term "evil" used as if it were an official technical term. At Yahoo!, it probably is. Crockford identifies certain features of JS as "evil" in his book.

This is a generational divide between modern open source and ancient open source. In ancient open source, being judgmental and controlling was socially acceptable; in modern development, if you don't like a feature, you either don't use it, or you create a meta-language which compiles to your target language and excludes the undesired feature.

Leaving the features out of "JavaScript: The Good Parts" was enough - if he'd left it at that, he'd have sent the same message without the weird moral condemnation.

Technically, it's possible that using eval() in the context of any of Crockford's open source code is against the law. Even Richard Stallman has never been that much of a dick.
True, but I didn't feel like writing \propto
Actually, touch-and-hold-to-move/delete apps is one of the few interactions that iOS specifically pops up a message to let you know about the first time it becomes available to you (after initial setup). It's an interaction that works well once you know it but isn't easily discoverable, so while a popup message explaining it is undesirable, it's probably a good/needed thing to have. But obviously those kinds of interactions must be kept to an absolute minimum - you don't get very many opportunities at all to go outside of the user's workflow and teach them something without becoming extremely annoying... most learning needs to be through intuition/discovery.

Anyway, to a large extent I agree with you - change is often OK and users, while complaining, will pick up on it.
Performance, yes, that is probably the biggest issue you are going to have with HTML5 in my experience.

I'm doing nothing more than pushing a set of tiles around a canvas element, and there are irregular hiccups where the animation loop (a simple setInterval callback) stops for a frame before starting back up again.

Granted, the stuff I'm doing is pretty simplistic, and I haven't tried to optimize for performance yet (or code around the stutters), but it's not an encouraging place to start from as a hobby game developer, let alone someone trying to make a living from it.
Rejecting code and docs is a fine strategy for the short term. In the long term, people and enthusiasm are the scarce resources. Taking the time to cultivate them as members of the community pays off down the road.

I don't agree with your assumption that "the time span it takes to go from clueless to good is probably longer than the period in which the person is involved in [the] project." If I can spend some time shepherding the new person, who is probably more naive than unqualified, it will pay off in spades later.
Fantastic app, does a fantastic job of recognizing my palm - unfortunately, it seems to also really like my face. After the tenth or so time that it had paused my music without me raising a hand, I realized that every time I turn my right cheek to the camera, Flutter pauses my music. Which is a little troublesome :)
The change in taskbar buttons was absolutely massive. Never make the mistake of confusing your ability to learn interfaces with what the general consumer knows. The general consumer doesn't find computers intuitive -- full stop. Everything they know is learned; everything.
Absolutely not. There are many ways for a founder to get rich. Liquidity is just one of them. A pretty standard way is for the company to start issuing dividends. The founder is presumably a major shareholder, and so if a big dividend is issued, they'll get a big chunk of that.

Obviously if you've raised VC, then that won't work - though angels will probably be more understanding. So, the conclusion is, liquidity events are only necessary if you've raised VC money. So don't raise VC money if you don't have to.
Just some off the top of my head, from my own experiences when I was still naive and ignorant (and I still am), and from observing others.

4) You can also be removed from your role a lot faster and be forced down if the team (or worse, the investors) feel you're not ready and they feel the company requires adult management. For some people, it's true. But in some cases, you can get really buried because of petty issues, or in worst-scenario cases, forced out and left hanging to dry. You may come out of the experience having learned a lot, but you may also come out of the experience very bitter. See recently submitted article about Khalid Shaikh, regarding YouSendIt, Noah Glass of Twitter, Eduardo Saverin of Facebook, etc. Yeah, all of these guys probably made big mistakes and probably didn't deserve to be one of the senior guys. But the point is that they also didn't get a lot of help to develop themselves, whereas at a big company, the structure is in place to help develop people who need it (not always, but more often than in startups where everyone has to pull their own weight or die). Another recent alleged example is Naveen Selvadurai of Foursquare, though that guy has done a good job of taking the high road if it's true: http://www.businessinsider.com/naveen-selvadurai-tried-to-fi...

5) The level of transparency and all the good stuff that comes with it is all dependent on the level of integrity of the startup's leadership. There are lots of stories of founders who lie, mislead, and misuse the startup's money.

6) You can help shape environments, but it is also a natural psychological event that your environment shapes you. If your founders are domineering, arrogant, and generally assholes, it will be hard for you to influence the company, especially since most of the early hires will either be similar or easily cowed into groupthink. If you're not up to the task of standing up, you either become one of the cowed sheeple or get pushed out. It's sad if an startup's (or any organization's) culture is like high school, but it can happen.

7) I'd say it really depends on the leadership's philosophies. If it's a business type who's like "I'm the CEO, this is my leadership group, and you guys are just code monkeys", I'm betting you probably won't see this kind of culture where everyone can be involved in the hiring across the entire organization.

8) Already addressed somewhere in these comments.

9) Politics can exist in smaller companies too. And when the group is as small and tight-knit as startups are supposed to be, if the politics exist due to poor leadership and poor culture, it will be an even more painful experience than in a big company. After all, in startups, you can often spend all your time with the team when it's crunch time. In big companies, more often than not, you have the option to go home and leave work at work. It can become a lot more personal in a startup if the culture is bad.
>consensus-best-CSS-practices standard out there

No no no no. Best practices becomes an excuse for developers to switch of their minds and not think. In all cases there are exceptions to the best practices but people always forget that.

The reason there are differences between what people prefer is that they work on different problems. That is a good thing and should be encouraged, not squashed.
RMS uses a laptop with a Chinese CPU right?
That one really bewildered me too. Suddenly there's no motive for having a unique element on a page, and styling it's children accordingly? Nonsense.
On Being a Startup at Launch conference
(1) Murder.

(2) It's likely that many crimes are caused by the black market for drugs; the black market for drugs can be suppressed by legalizing them. It's also likely that many crimes are caused by drugs; these crimes can't be suppressed by legalizing, and in fact may be exacerbated by them. Drug dependency is devastating to economic well-being and to family systems and both those failures also give rise to criminality.

I'm pro-legalization, and if you read his blog Devin seems to be too, but if legalizing is a pipe-dream solution to the "incarceration problem", then pointing wildly to it during discussions of the incarceration problem does everyone a disservice.
Making OSX awesome, my software setup.
I don't think companies like Google deserve to be called startups anymore. Apple too. There are examples out there. We hear the occasional horror stories about these companies, but in general, we hear a lot more about how happy and inspired people are to work there.
"It seems obvious to me that the iPad (and iPhone) are for casual use or travel. It may be productive to review sales figures, or tweak the wording in the presentation, while on the plane. Anything more requires a keyboard in my opinion."

You can easily pair a wireless keyboard to an iPad. This is how I got my parents to replace their computer with an iPad, and further lower my family tech support costs.
A plea to parents purchasing iPad Apps for children:

Stop buying apps that do stuff like this.

If you see that an app has a $99 in-app berry purchase, don't download or buy it.

If you see that an app encourages children to poke and sling animals and destroy things, don't buy it.

Do a small bit of research to see if the app was designed with your child's age in mind. Buy apps from trusted sources like http://tocaboca.com/ , http://piikeastreet.com (disclosure:that's me), http://www.duckduckmoosedesign.com/ , etc.

If you buy more of the good stuff, there will be more good stuff to buy!
5 Critical Trends For The Data Professional of the Future
No, the Moon Did Not Sink the Titanic
As someone working in the government, I can tell you why: files too big to email. There's an inane number of security rules regarding when and by what means you can move files around internal networks. Using Megaupload probably wasn't kosher, but strangely it didn't bring down the I.T. security police.
My non-technical mom has been using 10.04 (Lucid) since 2010, I really thought it could have been The One Linux to Rule Them All because it did/does everything right. I even use it at work. (I use Gentoo at home. (Where I sometimes do work.)) I recommend Xfce4 to anyone who can't get Gnome 2, since it's Good Enough. I really think that moving away from Gnome 2 was a huge step backwards and I don't think it's recoverable until a new Gnome 2ish UI is built on top of Wayland.

Desktops shouldn't have an App structure, they should have a Windows (or tabs if you prefer, the task bar is just the tab dock) structure. Microsoft realized this way back in the 90s, which makes Windows 8 OS even more amusing. It all feels like just a bunch of circle-jerk after noticing the iPhone was praised by the commoners for its UI.
Oh man I should hand this article to anyone who wonders how I scraped through school with a lit degree and somehow became a software engineer.

My pinboard solution is intentionally low-tech. A yellow pad of note paper I can take with me anywhere. First page is the things I want to accomPlish for the week. Following pages are things I learn or want to add to the list. On Friday I make a new to do page, consolidating and removing previous pages.

I keep the pad on my desk in front of me. I can look at without opening my computer or phone. This usually preempts frivolity.
In ancient open source, being judgmental and controlling was socially acceptable;

This in the middle of a rant that is highly judgmental :-P

The simple fact is, in “modern" software development, you are free to route around Mr. Crockford’s license if you so desire. Being a “dick” and being ”controlling” would be to do something like patent his thingummy and prevent anyone else from using it or their own implementation of the same functionality.

If you’re free to write your own thingummy, he is not controlling or judging you, he is controlling and judging himself by deliberately choosing a smaller audience/market for his work, much as the hippie in my story has deliberately chosen to make less money by not selling to the big chain.

Don’t take it so personally!
Funny that you posted this today: I just wrote a blog post titled "Entry Level Start-Up Job or Entry level Big Company Job + Side Project."

http://dalethoughts.com/2012/03/entry-level-start-up-job-or-...

The combination of working at a big company while having a side project may outweigh the benefits of working at a start-up (at an entry-level gig).

At the entry level, the pay-cut you're taking by working at a start-up can be significant on a personal level. For someone who recently graduated college choosing between a 40k gig at a big company and a 35k gig at a start-up, that 5k will be much more significant than an engineer taking a pay cut from 85k - 65k.
Yes, my fingers don't always type what I expect...
As I mention below, this tweak shows up even in models that go well out of their way to avoid independence assumptions. I didn't watch the video, so I'm not sure what Norvig mentions, but I don't think citing independence violations makes the fudge factor vanish.
I would keep an Instaprint box in my house.
Watch a nanoscale race car get 3D printed with a laser
Vim - Navigating files in vertical splits
Infrastructure as a Platform at bitly
Using your definitions, we are just in the computer age, and have been for 70 years (maybe there was the vacuum tube age and the transistor age). That is an engineering definition and doesn't apply.

These padigm shifts aren't about what is inside the device. They are about how the devices are used and how that usage impacts people and society.

The glaring, obvious sign that the world is changing is a grocery store checkout line. Five years ago, a couple people in the store might be looking at BlackBerries. Now, everybody and their kids have a device, and often, those devices are talking to each other, via wifi, 3G or Bluetooth.

That is the people impact in the Post PC world. And that impact will be as large as the impact PCs had on the world (IMO). I just hope it's a positive impact.