skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"But git is great on the usability front - if you have understood to responsibly wield its great power."

What that sentence actually means is that the usability sucks and that if you spend enough time reading man pages you might actually get the software to do what you wanted it to do. Which in short means the usability sucks, if you want to say the usability was sacrificed in order to provide great power then say so, UNIX being powerful does not improve it's usability.

Personally, I don't think either UNIX or GIT made the trade off between usability and power, usability was simply ignored.

"Dumbing things down for everyone to cater to a lower common denominator is one of the worst things you can do to software in general." Actually it's one of the best things to do in software, you'll want to look at companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft who all dumb things down so that the average person can do things like 'find what they're looking for' with out having to understand the math behind PageRank. Imagine the UI for aircraft was so horrible that to get from NY to LA you needed an aerospace degree.

PS. Mac has all the power of UNIX but with out a retarded interface meaning no tradeoff was actually necessary.
Thanks. We truly believe our startup would be successful, because we're right there dealing with the problems and lacking areas within the industry every day.

I guess, we're most worried with accurately and simply conveying how our startup would solve these problems to non-industry personnel.
You can open up another instance of Excel by going to Start > Run (or the Windows 7 equivalent) > "excel" and then opening up your document. Then you'll have two instances of Excel open each with their own window.
I'm one of those crypto-noobs. I'm getting better and studying, and obviously hanging out on Stack Exchange.

I didn't make it a tribal conflict. If anything, the article did... I was summarizing. I must have missed the part where scrypt was mentioned here, but I have seen it called out on SE.
I have an LG Optimus, and the touch response is horrid. The phone works well in other areas, but UI responsiveness and text input accuracy aren't among them.
Right, they can buyback, but no matter how far they go in that direction they won't end up as a private company.

The shares they purchase don't transfer the ownership they imbue to the board of the company -- they are either retired, held as treasury stock or given to other shareholders. The majority shareholders remain majority shareholders of a smaller amount of stock.

To think of it in a very simplified way, if the company bought back all the shares except 10 from some staunch holdout, that guy would own 100% of the shares of Apple, (and each share would have a stratospheric price).

For the board/management to take control of Apple from the shareholders (which is what people mean when they talk about going private, really), they have to personally acquire more shares.

They obviously can't do this with the company's money, because shares bought with that transfer to the company and either dissolve or are transferred. They have to use outside finance to do it.

This is what I mean about you can't buy the company from the shareholders with their own money.

(They could in the simplified world use the money to buy back the stock and grant it all to board members, but in this world there is a tonne of legislation preventing this, and if they did it to take control out of the hands of shareholders they'd be open to action.)
I'm not sure if you are being snarky or missing forrests for trees (or the other way around). It's probably a complicated multi-variable situation. If I buy a polished turd for 70% again as much as a regular turd, I stil have a turd, albeit a lovingly polished one. The one widely applicable truism is not cancelled out by another: "a fool and his money are soon parted".

Another way of looking: those places all got exactly what they paid for: someone good at manipulating a given set of rules and following strategies to the T, and who brings a fancy name to the table. Too bad they didn't also focus on the "changes behavior when the rules and the strategy don't make sense" too.
Yeah, but we don't say that we are in the 'post pen-and-paper era'...

... because pens and paper are still around, and still useful for lots of things, even though some of the things they were used for in the past are now done on the computer.

Just like PCs are still around, and still useful for lots of things, even though some of the things they were used for in the past are now done on a tablet.
The MPAA is apparenly the plaintiff here, I'd expect it's okay for them to be biased! Google isn't immediately part of the case and is butting in on the assumption that they're helping out the court, not to make the whole case for either side.
I'm curious to ask what you use instead...
I always run "git remote update" rather than "git pull". That fetches any updates from all remotes, without any changes to the working tree. It's great if the first thing you want to know is, "are there any new updates?"

If the answer is no, that's that.

If the answer is yes, you can immediately follow up with something like "git rebase origin master". Or not. Separate decision.

So, git's push/pull metaphor never felt like a great fit to me, since it lacks this level of control.
> the only time I've ever seen her use the computer was for word processing and creating presentations. "Office" kind of stuff.

i.e. for work. Laptops/PCs are for working, tablets are for playing -> little more than expensive toys, in the same way your TV was. Are tablets replacing TVs? Absofuckinglutely. Are tablets replacing work laptops? Not a chance.
Upcoming changes in Google’s HTTP Referrer
Might want to add a mobile specific stylesheet.. But otherwise looks awesome
I usually agree with most everything Jeff writes, but I'm highly skeptical that what pushed the "post-PC" era over the top was better display support.

I've seen the screens, they look nice and crisp and clear and...I kind of don't care. Oh, the views on it are great, but it offers me nothing new.

Quite frankly, as product releases go, I question whether Steve would have let this out the door. It's a nice product, but insanely great? In comparison to prior developments, I don't think it meets that bar.
OLED micro-display with 2687 PPI (dpi)
What's funny is that, in context, that isn't a joke. IE really will be an important check on the ability of an open source project to abuse its power.

...what an odd world we live in.
Happy FastMail user here, too.

I like their file storage, too. I host my website there for now.
I think in the cases cited in the OP, investing in more employees is probably strongly correlated with knowing how to deploy additional employees at high ROI.

A smartly run business is probably better equipped to get incremental revenue out of more people/investment.
Also on the same Wikipedia page:

> At present, the cost of returning asteroidal materials to Earth far outweighs their market value
In the past, I always had a Power Mac / Mac Pro. It was a needed item for some of the stuff I would do. In the last couple of years, I have switched to a 17" Macbook Pro. I expect in a couple of years, I will be down to a MacBook Air with a nice external monitor at home. The form factor of my needs is getting smaller.

My Dad is now retired. He was a big PC guy and had various PC portables not a few of which were tablet convertibles. Today, he has an iPad and doesn't use anything else. He can e-mail, look at pictures, browse the web, and keep track of his bank accounts. It also makes for some decent entertainment for his grandson (my nephew).

We both started at much different places, but the Post-PC era has arrived for him, and I am one of those people who needs the trucks just as some still need bigger iron.
He facebooks his twitter buddies.
I think it depends on what you define as "Post PC" , whether we really talking about "post wintel" or "post keyboard and mouse".

I think the precision and speed advantage you get from a proper keyboard and mouse setup vs a touchscreen, especially when you consider how cheap both of these items are will mean that they are around for some time even if it as an optional add-on rather than a core part of the whole interface.

I see the "post pc" as more of a rethink of the PC minus the general historical baggage that various versions of Windows etc have carried with them for last 20 or so years.

What I think people are really clambering for is a better user experience from their software.

Let's take the filesystem as an example.

Years ago it made sense to have an OS with the concept of files and folders being exposed to the user.

Why? Because you needed to be able to group your stuff together, either things for a particular project or because they were of a particular file format (word documents , spreadsheets etc).

You would also have "drive letters" which told you whether it was on the "C drive" (inside the computer) or the "A drive" (portable). This is no longer important since we can trivially sync most things to the internet regardless of where the bits are physically stored. In fact Unix doesn't even have the concept of drive letters at all.

File formats can now easily be replaced by Mime types and meta info since fast SSDs and indexes can be used to search either the device itself or cloud storage very quickly. This means it is easy to have an app that loads and immediately provides a list of all the documents which it can work with.

The only requirement that is left is the "grouping", folders are pretty bad for this because you can only group in one dimension. A better system might be some form of "tagging" for example tagging as "work" or "my project" etc.

By removing the filesystem from the user's consciousness you have already massively improved usability and I think this is probably the biggest thing that has made the iPad so easy to use because it essentially turns the install process for an application into a 1 stage thing. Combine this with having updates automatically install silently in the background and an application ecosystem built around the idea of the internet and web as a first class citizen in the OS rather than an extension of it and you have a very seamless experience.

The physical "input into the device" landscape though I see as something blown open and I really don't think there needs to be one dominant paradigm here.
Stanford partners with Coursera to offer more online courses
I believe that the intentions of the subject and photographer matter. I do not believe that the intent of any distributor matters. A photograph is a moment of time set in stone, and cannot be changed by appendices.
h.264 is already ubiquitous and has been for at least a few years.

The MPEG-LA previously stated that they will not charge royalties at least through 2015 and relatively recently extended that right indefinitely[1]. Obviously we don't know their real intentions, but they have not given me any reason to distrust them so I take them at their word for now.

[1] http://www.engadget.com/2010/08/26/mpeg-la-makes-h-264-video...
This is true, but I wouldn't bat an eye at the phrase "post-mainframe era," though of course there are still plenty of mainframes doing useful work.
Minor quibble, but Chrome makes it pretty easy to change your default search engine to anything you want, including non-Google search engines. It's not that you need to use a keyword to search a non-Google search engine, it's that you need to use a keyword to search a non-default search engine. :)
A smartphone with 854x480 resolution on a 3.7" display also has 264 PPI

(Motorola Droid, Defy, etc.)

Might be related. It's "just" the same kind of matrix scaled to a three times larger display.
You're missing the point. You are on Hacker News, you will probably care about such things. My mom doesn't care if you can't filter and sort on multiple columns. She cares if the thing is easy to use and portable, which the iPad wins hands down over a PC.
Instead of Sales Calls, Make Service Calls
Yesterday we had a love fest over Elon Musk, but I for one always thought James Cameron's sidetrack into deep sea exploration to be really, really awesome.

We know more about the moon than our own deep seas. Chilling in a Martian greenhouse is cool but meeting the Bloop is cooler.
Whoops, I will stand corrected.

Casting my eye over the recommendations in the pages I linked - yes some of it seems to be a little behind the times (for instance, adaptive hashing isn't mentioned once in terms of securing passwords), but none of it seems outright terrible.

Is this something that the crypto community/experts can come together and improve the same way as the vuln/exploit security community have made OWASP what it is?

Or is the real truth that executing proper crypto techniques are simply to difficult to boil down into a pile of cheatsheets?
Visual programming has been around since the 70s and has never really taken off because it requires lots of screen real estate. The conciseness and semantic density of text will never be beaten.

You don't discuss philosophy with flowcharts; why should you code that way?
Wow, that's radically different. I didn't realize how much less dominant IE was in Europe - or how marginalized Opera was in the US.
Whippersnappers.
Writing Augmented Reality Applications using JSARToolKit
I'm the author of the 'Why I don't want to use Go' post you're talking about.

I think you definitely should learn Go! I spent a few days using it when it first came out, and there are a lot of neat ideas that are worth learning about. I just can't think of a problem that would make me want to use it in production.

FWIW, the HN title was (incorrectly) 'Why I don't want to Learn Go'. I used that title for an unpublished first draft, but s/learn/use/ before making it public. Posterous seems to still be using the old (unpublished) title as the URL (http://arantaday.com/why-i-dont-want-to-learn-go), which is probably where the submitter got the wrong idea from.
I think you're missing the point. The post-PC era means that only tech savvy people need/will use PCs, not that PCs will disappear completely. What I'm really waiting for is for some company to realize this and make a device that caters exclusively to developers.
Guise Bule here !

Am just about to begin an IAmA on reddit if you fancy joining me there : http://bit.ly/redditor

Or follow my updates on twitter about this :

https://twitter.com/#!/Guise_Bule

OR go read my blog post : http://bit.ly/MicroFap
GoGrid Tries to Charge Cutomer $84.36 for One Hour Cloud Instance
F# 3.0 - Information Rich Programming (video)
If it is open source why would google and apple have a huge advantage?

Surely anybody else could even fork webkit if they so desired.

Having one pile of C++ to browse beats having multiple piles of C++ all with their own bugs an eccentricities.
Why on earth are people still allowing their referers to be sent to third party websites?

It should be the first thing you disable.

If a site insists on referers use an automatic spoofing plugin like RefControl.
Rack Middleware for SEO, fun and profit
I just tried with the taskbar on the bottom, and I could not drag the mouse cursor below the top edge of the taskbar.
I'd be interested to see how (if at all) these optimisations in file size impact the battery life and performance. Alpha blending isn't free (though neither is overdraw), and using more CPU than 'disk' could use more power.

Though the differences could be lost in the noise.

Has anyone done these sorts of trials?
Let's not go overboard - both Mac and iOS have Updates and Settings and service packs, it's just that these are simpler to use than on Windows.

Also the first call I got from my Mum after buying her an iPad 2 was to ask how to increase the size of the Notes font (turns out it couldn't be done).
Oh, I know what it is - I've tried it and found it horrible.

I meant, what is it supposed to be? Is it supposed to taste like something?
Ask HN: Anybody reading the Startup Owner's Manual by Steve Blank?
I pre-ordered the book from B&N and still waiting to recieve. I am just curious to know from people who are reading or already read it about the quality of the contents and meat of the book.
Think about what's needed to bring your product to market. Does your team adequately cover the bases? If you have to hire to fill the gaps, can you find and manage competent people without excessive hand-holding?

Teams come in all shapes and sizes, what's important is that they have a reasonably viable shot of doing what they propose to do.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I'm pretty positive as long as Firefox is free to users Mozilla won't have to pay for the H.264 license. So in that sense, it _is_ free...
You can do that right now on Android.
> Things like this remind me of "serious inquiries only" on craiglist which I find insulting and I'm sure that turns off inquires that could result in sales.

Just this past week I had my first experience trying to sell something on craigslist -- and I think the reason people put "serious inquiries only" in their ads there (craigslist) is because the VAST majority of responses you get are email address harvesters... Of course, the "serious inquiries only" blurb won't help with that but I'm sure that's the reason for it...
Why Top Talent Leaves
Yes, but you can't mass produce it with that - this seems to be a breakthrough.
> I wouldn't be so smug

The problem with HN is this. The sport of 1-uping each other to prove something. It's not a matter of being smug, at least not from my perspective. My point is - you either are against group/mob/religion thinking or you're not. If you're for these types of groups be prepared to see your theory through past warm, fuzzy feelings for us westerners. If that wasn't clear, my apologies. But I'm not bowing out because the politically correct view makes me more popular. The politically correct view should be against tolerance of violence through not-so-obvious roots. Instead, we have those who are dancing around the subject rather than addressing it directly.

Isn't it funny that when you come up with a counter argument against violence you end up back at my original point about religion being a force of violence?
Scientists develop tools to make more complex biological machines from yeast
Ads in mobile apps aren't just annoying -- they're risky, too
In the mid 90s this also happened: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUs7iG1mNjI.

We've come a long way since then and still have a ways to go before the dumb terminal model comes back... but I think it will happen. I think the problem for that model has been that the only people who have found a use for the power of a full size computer on a mobile device have been gamers, but I think this is probably because developers have never had the ability to build applications that use more than the mobile device's native hardware. OnLive needs to make a development platform on their service.
This is also a perfect misquote. Read Mitchell's post http://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/03/18/video-user-experie...
Patent encumbered video isn't free.

I understand your sentiment but I've been using H.264 in Chrome and Safari (pretty much every browser, if I include video wrapped in a Flash Player) without paying a dime. From a practical perspective, to most users H.264 usage is free.
It's funny to think of how standardized keyboards are within the US today, and yet it wasn't so long ago that you couldn't even count on the arrow keys being in the same place (or in fact, being there at all - which is why you have hjkl on Vim to this day.

On the other hand, the computers at Bell Labs had an arrow key, which is why R (which is based on S) uses '<-' for assignment, as the two-character combination was enabled for compatibility reasons.

And on a related note, I can't imagine how people use Vim without rebinding ESC to Caps_Lock. Given that ESC used to be where TAB currently is (and the latter is too useful to be removed), I don't really see a point in keeping the obsolescent Caps_Lock, especially when it's so irritating to keep moving the hand to the furthest corner of the keyboard.
They'll probably charge for h.265. This is why at least I want WebM to remain as an alternative and continue to be supported by browsers. It would at least keep MPEG-LA from ever charging for their codecs.
Holy @#$@, people. Did I wake up in a naïveté vortex?

No, C doesn't define sizeof(int). It is implementation defined. But you don't change it once you implement it in a given development environment... not if you want people to create and maintain production code with your tools. You don't speculate that one day you might want to change sizeof(int). It's just not something you do if you want to be taken seriously.

Is anyone in this thread over the age of 16?
0.48" × 0.38" (1.21cm × 0.97cm) = 2687 PPI, 0.0095mm dot pitch

Makes you wonder what we'll have in a few years, if they can eventually make that 20 times the size.

Keep in mind any smartphone with 3.7" display and 854x480 resolution is already the same PPI as the ipad3
More dancing around the subject. As I said before, you're for large groups of people thinking together without critical thinking...or you're not. It's that simple. If you're for it, check the "socially acceptable" bullshit at the door and be prepared to see your argument through.

I agree that atheism has become somewhat of a religion, which is also a very bad thing. No disagreement there.
Well , we have vastly increasing screen resolutions as demonstrated by the new iPad not to mention easy zooming etc.

I'm not necessarily suggesting that you entire program will be converted to a diagram overnight but it might be an interesting way to declare general structure.
I agree the quote from Steve Jobs was impressive, but it also fits the well known quote that goes "the best way to predict the future, is to invent it"
Warm cuddly gasoline.

You know I thought most people know that gasoline burns and that they have to be really fucking careful with the stuff.

Same thing they also already know about electricity.

So, I am not sure that you could stop the electric car industry by worrying people that the energy store could kill them, as everybody who has been on the roads long enough has seen burned out cars from pile-ups at some point.
Executives see worsening work-life imbalance
Thanks for the link. From that post:

For the past few years we have focused our codec efforts on the latter part of this sentence. We’ve declined to adopt a technology that improves user experience in the hopes this will bring greater user sovereignty.

I'm glad to see that Mitchell Baker recognizes that Mozilla's stance towards video codecs goes against user experience.
Please, please, please be careful with continuous scrolling! Off-topic---but the blog article prompted me to check out bindle.me itself. I was pretty curious about all that content in the footer, but every time I got to the bottom, there was another pageful!
This may not fail the metaphor test. Take a real folder in your hands and try to stuff in it a drawer which is too small. Your corner tab will stay in the corner while the rest gets "smushed".

If anything, this makes it a bit more intuitive for the user as it avoids the confusion of losing controls because of an errant mouse drag.
I'm not sure if you're trying to prove me wrong or back me up here. You're saying a bunch of people acting as a single group of dumb terminals of a single ideology is a bad thing? I agree. And I agree that there are other forms of religion and that when a bunch of people react irrationally it is usually in a mob setting. Not sure how this is in support of religion, so I appreciate the sentiment!