skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That would force me to spend time to manually drag everything into folders with the same cataloguing problem you face in every other domain after which I would not really be able to locate anything else.

True, the fact that I have this many apps is a professional deformation, but still the app life cycle from installing/updating, to managing/organizing, to finding and launching one is severely broken from its mental model on.
You're right, most browsers recommend using URLs < 2048 characters (particularly a problem for IE), so it is a problem for larger playlists. That's due to the way I'm choosing to iterate on the application. I wanted to get the site off the ground and enable URL sharing without getting bogged down in DB design. I consider that part outside the MVP. Thanks for checking out the app!
`We need to be cognizant of how much of the pre-internet world is now completely obsolete and unrecognizable to any one under 20`
Sorry, I had resized the instance. It should be good now
Plain text link (more readable IMO): https://raw.github.com/kriskowal/q/master/design/README.js
How is that so? A pretty standard part of usability testing is say heuristic evaluation. You pick the heuristics applicable to the target audience - engineers, like be accessible through CLI. No response means the app executed without problems, man doc etc and test. Usability != pretty interface.

In fact, sometimes you might not want a beautiful interface, because you want people to get the job done. I think the issue with the original article is that it paints broad suggestions so it is easy for me, you and everyone to argue their point.
I've never received an offer to work as a software engineer other than by going through the whole interview process. My impression was that the vast majority of other people who became software engineers at the companies I applied to had done the same.

I'll take your bet, if you are still inclined to give away money.
"Self-driving cars are about to be legalized in California. That same technology will enable the robot revolution. "; To deliver pizza do we really need safe driving cars or flying motorbikes?
A simple solution would be to exchange employer-provided benefits for government-provided benefits :-/
Free software has been spectacularly successful at building significant parts of our current computing infrastructure: kernels, compilers, web servers, languages and so on. Many of the products that the author would consider as having good usability are a thin layer built on top of millions of man-hours of open source stuff. So maybe free software is not that good at generating interfaces for the masses. So what? Many of the solutions that the author points out translate into boring work. Why would we expect people to do boring work for free? How could that model ever be sustainable?
More eyes on HN = more chance for quick up-votes = greater likelihood of hitting front page.

Part of the reason I set up http://hn4d.com was to get a sense of how much activity was going on at a given time. Can't say I have done any sort of rigorous testing though.

Link title and content also matter - as well as a link's relationship to other posts that have captured the hn community's attention..
Hipster Branding
The Other Side Of The Story: WhosHere vs. Who’s Near Me Live
Yeah, "usability expert" is not a pretty job title. I guess it means the person focuses on usability testing and is an expert in the user's domain.
Software that discards applicants based on simple keyword mismatch doesn't "raise the bar."
Automatic Adsense A/B Testing + Optimization
Last time this was posted <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1777665>, Eliezer linked to a related article worth reading as well: Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/
Stephen King and eBooks
Many of these are very usable for their target audience:

Vim: adds such user-friendly features as syntax highlighting and WIMP while keeping an interface (vi) that is already well known to it's users, thus preventing them from having to learn a new set of commands from scratch

Emacs: Clearly the most programmable text-editor currently used. The ease of usability for extending it is the reason it is adopted.

mutt: synthesized interface from several already existing mail clients, most notably pine and elm

Apache: If you consider the user to be web developers, it (NCSA HTTPd which is what Apache grew out of) introduced CGI, which was a huge usability step for making dynamic web-pages.

Linux: Not sure. It's essentially a clone of SVR4; probably just the fact that among it's always had the best driver-support on commodity hardware is the win here.

Postfix: It's more usable than sendmail; not really a glowing review though.

X: Yeah, I can't think of a single good thing to say about X. I've heard that Motif was the "killer app" for it that kept it around, but I wasn't there so not sure.
Egyptian Court Sentences Mubarak to Life in Prison
No, the post just has to assume the AVERAGE hand size. Including smaller height people (e.g asians), and women's hands.

You really think Apple should make a larger display because an insignificant minority has larger hands?
'Hack The Real World And Share The Results'
For anyone thinking they can improve open source software's usability, donate your time here: http://openusability.org/.

Mind you the project's goal is to make OSS usable by 'common computer users'.
Haha something tells me other countries which have very negative attitudes to drink driving are not the type of places that you go around bribing police :-)

And I'm not sure what you are suggesting with the comment about getting a beating from cops, and it being much worse for foreigners? Are you defending the US as a tourist destination or attacking it? :-)
The other s
The other side of the story: http://m.techcrunch.com/2012/06/02/the-other-side-of-the-sto...
If I understand right: You argue that no war is worth high collateral damage, even if involved democracies (more or less) follow the laws of war?

How about if a junta relies on that a democracy don't want to pay those prices and creates a situation where blood will flow if they don't get their will?

Arguably, both Japan 1945 and Saddam Hussein are cases of that.

Do you REALLY want dictators to rely on using their own people's suffering to get out of e.g. sanctions or surrender? I doubt it...

Sorry for coming in late. I bother writing these answers because I used to have similar opinions as you before my hair started to fall out. You are a standin for a young berntb, I guess.
- Amazon's cut - prize fulfillment costs

At smaller scales, there can be a huge difference between sticker price and what you actually have to work with:

http://kotaku.com/5902280/what-the-hell-these-game-developer...
Valgrind has almost single handedly rescued C from the ashheap of history.
Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism
Off topic: can you edit the title to "Things the TSA doesn't want you to see"? This is the preferred format for titles beginning with a number: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
According to what I've read, in GHC there are only four STG registers that are mapped to fixed registers in the x86 backend (and only one of them can contain a value). All roots are guaranteed to be either in this STG register or in the STG stack, which is kept separate from the C stack and is tagged with pointer/nonpointer info. This is certainly an option, but it seems suboptimal to me; we want LLVM to have the freedom to assign registers as it likes.
But it wouldn't weed out the people who can do well on tests but can't apply their skills to real problems. Part of the interview process is getting a better look at the person behind the resume, and mailing in test scores defeats that.

Also, all the SAT does is see how well you can take a 4-hour test.
Sorry Karunamon, you are wrong - you are special (or at least lucky).

I concur with the original post that Facebook sets and unsets options, or in my case ignores them as it sees fit. In one example, I have a friend who no matter how many times I 'unsubscribed from her game feeds', or blocked her game apps, still appeared in my news feed. I had to unfriend her to stop the spam appearing.
As a guy who's worked in several startups i'd have to say that yes, I think they do need guys like you but there is a catch. I've worked with lots of developers from tons of different backgrounds on three continents, but the one thing they all had in common was experience. Do you have experience in other disciplines? I don't mean do you know C++ but can you program your own AI for a Game Engine? Have you already done this? Can you apply your machine learning knowledge on an Open Source Web Analytics tool? Your definately backend (as am I) so I'd say just program something, open source it, and let that be your gateway in. Just as a curiousity what's your Doctoral work on?
A pretty worthless article which makes a lot of false assumptions about the nature of free software.
I admit I had not read the actual bug report before I commented, but I just did and it reads:

>Impacted code directly passes request params to the `where` method of an ActiveRecord class like this:
Post.where(:id => params[:id]).all
>An attacker can make a request that causes `params[:id]` to return a specially crafted hash that will cause the WHERE clause of the SQL statement to query an arbitrary table with some value.

For me that is a classic SQL injection attack that can be avoided 100% of the time if you use bind variables for all user input into an SQL query.

Rails doesn't use bind variables - it uses something that looks similar, but it is actually rails code that escapes and concatenates the user input into the query string before executing it. This bug was in that escaping code. However, if Rails correctly bound the inputs to all queries (which is pretty easy to do) then this escaping code could be removed totally and this problem would never have appeared.
Mutual Assessment in the Social Programmer Ecosystem
How would that affect flagging?
Yes, there is other work on this problem. My google-fu is strong.

http://archive.org/details/minimumareacircu00agga
"We show that the smallest k-gon circumscribing a convex n-gon can be computed in O(n^2 log n log k) time"
This is elaborate enough... the paper isn't written in anything like pseudocode.

I'm presuming that that's not the result referred to below though (it's different authors, but this was the same year as the paper above):
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0734189X859...
"A recent paper by Dori and Ben-Bassat presented an algorithm for finding a minimal area k-gon circumscribing a given convex n-gon, where k < n. An infinite class of polygons for which their algorithm fails to find the minimal area circumscribing k-gon is presented."

http://www.springerlink.com/content/11373157378222m3/
"Given any plane strictly convex region K and any positive integer n >= 3, there exists an inscribed 2n-gon Q_2n and a circumscribed n-gon P_n such that Area(P_n)/Area(Q_2n) <= secant(pi/n)."
(ie this is how much you expand the area when you halve the number of edges)

If nothing else, knowing that the words "minimum circumscribing polygons" is the right thing to google for is useful (not just minimum-area - I presume minimum-perimiter solutions are useful to you too)
Show HN: Save notes + bookmarks while browsing
Not need profilers? I haven't run into a C (or any other language) programmer so skilled that he's even usually correct at finding the bottleneck without a profiler.

Programmers who don't use profilers write slow programs (even though they spend many hours "optimizing" them).
Some people are also really good at essays. It's also like talking to a wall, and it would filter out many effective immigrant workers.
> PS. Have you ever asked the people you have interviewed what they think about the process?

Specifically asked? I've received lots of feedback from people who made it through the process. They've added to my bag of interview techniques here and there. In general, they appreciated a hiring manager who spent a lot of time and effort fielding good people. Those kinds of comments tend to be a bit self-selecting, though.

I've had a couple of candidates who didn't make it get frustrated with the process. One in particular lost his cool just trying to pseudocode a routine to determine prime factors of the input or something like that. If you lose your composure doing something like that, I don't want you in the trenches with me late at night when we have a demo to show to customers the next day and something isn't working.

When people have asked me for feedback on why they weren't made an offer, I've always tried to be as candid as possible; especially when it seemed that they were sincerely trying to improve. Screw HR and their obsessive need to CYA.
I built a dashboard (very pretty if i do say so myself!) using the ITRS Geneos product. Management love it. The operations guys, not so much. Why?

We have plenty of tasks we could constructively spend our time on rather watschen der blinkenlichten.

If no one's going to watch your dashboard, why build it? If occasional glances at a dashboard is your monitoring strategy, why monitor at all?

Our monitoring system has to not only interrupt and alert us, it also has to be capable of some interventions on our behalf occasionally.
Why three prongs?
I've got a demo video and more info here http://duhcam.hello10.com/
I had to email a friend the other day and let him know that Match.com ads were being displayed with his "endorsement" as a user.
Exactly.

Maybe the CEO got a not so gentle nudge from the investors to hurry up and hire somebody and you were the one they were interviewing next. Stuff like that happens a lot. The process is more about outside factors than the actual interviewing process itself.
Dont submit when any big company product is going to be launched or any Big event is going to occur like IPO etc
I dont like to submit on holidays & weekend.
i was looking for a good book to bring me up-to-date on recent changes to c and the best suggestion i received was to get the latest edition of harbison and steel's book (which includes c99).

i don't know if you know the book - an older copy is on my desk and it use it regularly when working in c - but it's part introduction and part informed guide to the libraries. it's not a "friendly" book (it's not for "dummies"), but it's well written and surprisingly compact for all it contains (at least, the copy i have is; i am waiting for delivery of the latest version).
Valve hired their first wave of Linux developers, hiring more
github.com. This should be your number one resource. Clone a Repo, read its source, break it, understand it, rebuild it, extend it, and then you know how it works. just type in RESTful in the search box i'd be willing to bet 100 bucks theres already a JS repo...
Agreed on all points, and just to emphasise: my primary experience of this is in person in the US in a variety of cities with groups in their 20s / 30s. In my experience this just doesn't happen in Ireland anymore and it would be very surprising to see this sort of behavior show up in a movie / tv here except in the context of highlighting the 'wrongness' of the action.
Thiel is misinterpreting the increase in lifespan data. It's a famous dataset, but it's intepreted in terms of decreasing infant mortality -- not an increase in the average upper limits. Over the last couple hundred years, the average western lifespan if you've made it to age 40 has increased by about ten years. However, infant and childhood mortality (and death due to childbirth in someone's twenties) have gone through the floor, leading to the graph Thiel is using here.

The ~6 years of lifespan gained at age 65 since the 60s largely has to do with basic geriatric care (60 years ago, a fall leading to a broken hip would kill you at age 70) rather than true "life extension". Also, many therapies for things like cancer at that age can keep you alive, but quality of life is another thing entirely; and then it still kills you.
The static analyser, friendlier error messages and the plugin architecture that allows it to integrate easily in IDEs.

The re-factoring support and modules extensions are also a welcome additions.
How Serial Innovators Find The Best Problems To Solve
I don't really buy it. I think practice with tackling bigger and bigger problems teaches you more about the need for the specific kinds of abstractions that are most useful for SE. When you get to problems that are too big to fit entirely in your head, you start realizing the absolute necessity for hiding implementation details, and when you work over time with other people using your code, the similar necessity for limiting the flexibility and expansion points in the libraries you write - i.e. not making things too abstract, in many cases.

So much of abstraction in SE is about chunk size - what's comfortable to fit in your head when thinking at any particular level - and minimizing surface area between modules, where enough experience with a wide selection of APIs to develop good taste is important.

Whereas I see a lot of mathematics as being about eliminating redundancy, seeing connections between things and reducing them to their most orthogonal and best factored form, with the minimal number of concepts; but with not a whole lot of concern for complexity specifically. The same approach applied to SE can be useful, but mostly only in central libraries that have the widest variety of uses. I'm thinking of collections in particular; there, you want a wide selection of querying and transformation primitives to make arbitrary data manipulation problems easier to express. But most libraries and APIs don't benefit from that kind of factoring; they are best approached from a UI perspective, looking at use cases and building in affordances that make all the common cases trivial, while making the edge cases possible. This makes them lop-sided and redundant, and probably would offend someone with a heavy mathematical orientation.

tl/dr: mathematical thinking is roughly the right kind of thinking, but practice of reading and writing code teaches thinking that's a better fit.
Facebook is not a community, it's a medium of communication. A sixth of all humanity is not a very useful group for social purposes.

Calling it a community with warrens doesn't seem like a useful description, to me.
FYI, we run an app that used to use Highcharts too, but we discovered flot and never looked back: http://code.google.com/p/flot/ Wanted to share in case that's useful to you, too! (In particular, it will come in handy if you ever need to develop a web app for commercial purposes, as Highcharts has a tricky licensing scheme for web apps.)
> ... Skilled C programmers ...

Sadly you don't find many of them in the enterprise world, specially when dealing with off-shoring companies. :(

> ... Given the intense competition in software, there must be solid reasons C remains the foundation of computing.

Because it is dumb to code everything new, just because another language is cooler, nicer, safer, etc. So existing software keeps being coded in C.

Even if I expressed my opinion the way I did, I will surely pick C if it makes sense for the project at hand.
Interesting theory. What do you think of the following test? Someone starts a new online "meeting-place" (yeah, I know, it takes a lot of work for a new one to get traction) and take pains to ensure that all the moderators are Perceptives. Make it an explicit norm of the meeting-place to avoid judgemental comments. Then wait to see whether this new meeting-place degrades less quickly than average.

I tend to think that most people can learn not to express judgements if they want to become accepted by the others at the meeting-place (and that it is possible to exclude those who will not learn).
Most of them had to go through the same thing to be hired.
Isn't Facebook more of a paradoxical phenomenon? You go to Facebook to use Facebook to communicate with people on Facebook. My point being that it's both a community and a medium of communication at the same time?
Working with ModalPopupExtender in ASP.NET and Ajax - Lesson 09
It's much simpler than that. Free software is usually created to be used by the creator, so there is no incentive to make it intelligible to others. The author is correct about incentives but the best incentive is payment for the software. At that point it's no longer free.
Groupon is the poster child for everything that's wrong with the silicon valley startup model.

Founders creating stupid companies with marginally useful products and the VCs pumping millions into them in hopes of a quick profit.
AppleTV is a middle of the row product in the set-top space in terms of software. Perhaps they have been holding back and now have something revolutionary. Who knows.

It would take a blow-me-away type of product for them to truly crack open this industry. In away where they could force the hand of cable companies like they did with AT&T. So it's going to be interesting to see what this hype is all about.
Odd, but effective, Windows Fix
Cool Idea. I was really looking for something similar. Adding some notes with bookmark is much needed. No need to open lot of similar bookmarks while looking for something. Good job Guys.
I called it at least a year ago: TC is the TMZ of internet gossip.
مشاهدة مباراة الاردن والعراق بث مباشر تصفيات كاس العالم 2014
This isnt as much about the misuse of the term design as you make it seem. The author is right that free software is generally not as well designed as its non-free counterparts. Most of the time bad design manifests itself as too much complexity, strangely organized settings menus, way too many settings to begin with. You seem to have this "screw the average user" mentality which I'm guessing comes from the fact that average folks don't tend to use free software (mostly referring to Linux the OS and Linux software but it does apply to other platforms some of the time too).

If you're making software for the power user set then the status quo is probably just fine but if the free/open source community really is committed to winning the hearts and minds of users of the standard platforms (Windows and Mac obviously) and really do want to get a bigger piece of the market share pie then developers will have to dumb things down a bit and simplify.

The attitude you seem to have towards users, calling them dumb people and meat stacks, is exactly the thing keeping those dumb meat stacks from using free software. Programmers also seem to hold a sort of bigot attitude toward designers which your comment also exemplifies. Functionality, elegance, resuability, and everything you mentioned are great and necessary but there's no reason it can't be prettied up a bit and simplified.

The bottom line is that if you're developing software for people just like you then you can ignore the dumb meat stacks and the pesky designers and still be successful but don't ever expect average users to educate themselves in order to use your software. They don't care about the limitations of technology and how everything works together nor do they care to learn. They just want to press button X and have action Y happen with the least possible friction in between. If button X doesn't get action Y to occur as fast or easily as they want then they're uninstalling your app. That is, unless uninstalling involves more than a click or two otherwise it'll just collect dust and consume disk space. Until you design and develop with dumb meat stacks in mind only programmers and power users will use your software.

Now im not saying this will be easy nor am I saying free software developer have to start doing this. After all, they work for free I'm their spare time and create amazing amazing products and alternatives to non-free software. What I am saying though is that this is the reality of dealing with users. It's not ideal and they certainly act like an entitled lot but it won't change especially now with the proliferation of prettified and dumbed down apps everywhere you turn.
Daft Punk gets the New Orleans treatment