skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Really

The problem in free software is that 1) engineers don't have the needed mindset 2) resources are limited, of course 3) the developer usually does whatever is in his mind

Gnome is "usability" gone wild. Remove the steering wheel and pedals from the car so to make it "simpler". Good luck driving it anywhere

(Really, from my experience with Fedora 16, out of the box experience at first it's bad, then it gets worse when you see all the little details gone wrong)

And to help matters, they think PulseAudio is a good idea. PA is a broken answer in need of a response, really. And it definitely affects user experience.
ShowHN: Facebook iOS SDK remix - rewritten now easy to use
> 2. Force opt-out over opt-in notions of content distribution.

> Engineers dislike advertising because we know details of how our privacy is being violated. We don't have the bliss of ignorance.

Nailed it.
I also think it really depends on how you are taught or where you start...

I started programming in C/C++ (my first book, I'll admit at age 9 was a C++ for Dummies book, it came with a compiler :P).

I have learned and use a lot of higher level languages, but I still think about data structures, I still think about what the best way would be for handling the data most efficiently, mainly because I don't want to rely on the language doing the right thing.

I've seen Java programmers though that then start programming in C++ or even C and never pick up the art of thinking about their data structures. I work with one co-worker now that went through the extreme trouble of implementing Java like enum's which have caused all kinds of "warts" and all kinds of issues because they are not enums and they aren't "real" classes.

Watching Java developers turn C++/C developers is really interesting, they bring all kinds of "bad" practices back with them and the code is worse off because of it!
Pyacoo.js: Python and other cool stuff too JavaScript library
"We are in the era of mobile platforms"
Cool idea - would be nice to be able to look for a specific item vs. rankings.
I can't believe the level of dishonesty here. The point is obvious: NONE of the acts cited by the WP article were acts of violence.

Did you miss out on Sesame Street? "One of these things are not like the other..."

No I'm not trolling. I am expected to be treated like a troll by the herd here however.
Thanks for contact
I was a big fan of EmEditor on Windows - started up instantly and had great features like native CSV support and vertical highlighting.

I currently use TextMate out of habit, but I'm really not fond of the performance. Find in Files locks up the entire editor, and occasionally the same thing happens after committing to SVN. I've been flipping between SublimeText2 and Vico. I'd probably use Vico fulltime if it had a way to toggle between vim-mode and "always insert" mode, since I'm still a little rough when it comes to vim.
You should not be worried about this: even with valgrind a few bugs will take days of debugging to get fixed...
"We already have good reasons to be concerned that a high-cost biological attack could be launched out of someone's literal garage, and it is not an irrational fear."

It's easy for people to just pick up a knife at a restaurant and stab someone too. People don't spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about this though because it just doesn't happen that often.
Nice. Implementing the same problem in Clojure has been on my todo list. Now I've seen yours though so I guess I'll have to think up another problem :)
I think you have almost already solved it [1]. You may think of having a pin tag with a small cross (while the mouse hovers). If you see, people clicking the crosses often it's a good feedback that the tag may be wrong. It can help you correct these tags if not appropriate.

In addition, you should also think about adding tags for CAM RIP, BR RIP, DVD RIP etc. Movie torrent downloaders do care about such information.

Disclaimer - I am a UI/UX autodidact.

[1] http://movies.io/m/4o
Stuxnet was very clearly sabotage. I can't believe the herd here. Downvote away.
they could be genuinely trying to help you by telling you what worked for them

Sure, that's often the case. And then there's ridiculous arrogance like "All your accomplishments are pointless without your child next to you", from a recent parenting thread. (And that's a case where "trying" it to see if it works would be an exceptionally bad idea).
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Agree on the difficulty, but Im not seeing any gaps in my data outside of what I have purposely filtered out. I have it based on pulling my stream, assuming I am the one who is logged in.

I will be sure to constantly compare and contrast the actual FB stream against the Blockify.me stream. The main frustration I am having is that the Graph API response time is twice as long as the REST api, that is now deprecated. We are looking into what calls can be batched and where we can use caching to speed up the app.

I do appreciate your sharing your experience so that I can learn from it.
The Launch of Scholrly: new search engine seeks to change how you find research
Learning Curve of Angel Investing
As a developer, I'll outline why I rationally have great contempt for advertising.

Television, print and radio advertisements have irrevocably caused me to gag at most advertisements. I can see right though the lies and half-truths that marketers spin to fool people into buying their mediocre products. Take any McDonald's ad campaign over the past few years. Note that (at least in Canada) that no overweight person is ever featured. Somehow, perfectly healthy people are devouring Big Macs and we're expected to believe it.

Advertisements now often rely heavily on sexual overtones. Web advertisements are quite guilty as well. As an adult male with a functioning brain, I find ads that rely on sexuality disgusting. I wasn't compelled to purchase alcohol before the commercial came on, and now I'm thoroughly repulsed. Decrement another point of respect for marketers.

I'm also disturbed by ad companies tracking me whenever possible. I read a forum thread on a public computer which described a custom suit company. For the next week, I was inundated with ads for that company on the same computer. I do not seek "personalization" as I never intentionally click on ads. If I want something, I'll go out and look for it. On my own computer, I block as many ad servers as I can through my hosts file.

Yes, the world really does revolve around money. However, advertising is not the sole plausible revenue model for a web site. Wikipedia is a fine example of a web site that doesn't need third-party advertising to exist. I have a tremendous amount of respect for the Wikimedia Foundation because it's funded so openly. GitHub seems to be chugging along without bombarding its users with advertisements because it has a premium content model.

As was mentioned earlier, "engineers" are smart enough to see through advertising. Disillusionment of web sites like Facebook and Google Analytics is more than enough to propagate disgust for advertising.
The fact that the data types are directly linked to HTML generated types is a rather strange decision, since it makes using the schema in other contexts more difficult. Why not use the more generic, built-in JSON types, and consider adding an extra property to forcibly convert enum to one of a drop-down SELECT list or a RADIO list, with an auto-detect feature otherwise?

What of other layout features?

One problem with complex HTML UI generation is that often you need something customized, and abstraction layers can take more time than they're worth to get it done.
It was a good read, but it might as well have been titled: Why Afghanistan has poor Democracy uptake, and how to improve that.

Basically, the author says, "update" the process that's responsible for the open-source world, into a more methodological corporate environment.

He doesn't realize it's a completly different world. In which the mentioned "fixes" are contradictory to it's sprit.

Developers want to spend 100% of their time just hacking away. They are not going to transform that into a 10% dev time and 90% "sit there doing UI and feedback studies, and nurture-the-community time".
I like this approach - it doesn't break the existing experience of free upgrades.

While I can understand where the GP's idea of paid upgrades is coming from, the not-infrequent occurrence of apps going from Paid-->Free + IAP is often enough that I can see paid upgrades being yet another way App Store users get taken advantage of.
Asserts are for enforcing invariants in the code. If you replace an assert with a conditional that allows the execution to continue, you are concealing the problem and making it that much harder to track.

Practically speaking, your function should not be failing because your other code passed it invalid parameters. That's a bug in the former. That's why parameter validity should be asserted.
BackboneConf Slides Available
As a programmer/contractor for DHS, I'd love to hear what you all think would be a useful set of APIs for DHS to make public. It's all fine and dandy to say 'oh yeah we have an API' but it needs to be something useful. So what would you want to see? Financial/Budget type data? Performance metrics across the different Components within the Department? What?
We've gotten some great pre-launch feedback from academics and librarians, but I'd love to hear HN's take.
I think you are right. Microsoft seem to occupy the land of the damned if you do and damned if you don't. If this was apple, I get the feeling that people would be gushing all over it.
The proposition "software X has comparatively bad usability" is expensive to provide additional evidence for. The existing evidence includes the typical experience of people new to FOSS using things like Emacs, VIM, Gnome or GIMP, a difficult-to-explain preference for proprietary software among professionals in various fields and among typical consumers, each person's individual experience, various critical analyses of free software by usability experts studying the problem, and sundry other evidence. If this isn't enough to convince you that free software broadly has comparatively poor usability, the odds of discovering additional evidence that would convince you is probably too slim to be worth the effort. But it's a premise many of us accept. For those among us who do, blog posts like this provide some insight.
For me personally the biggest problem with free software (I mean linux here) is that there is not consistency. You can't design a program UI and expect it to fit in different desktop environments etc... there are no proper design guidelines imo.
And that's* why cleaner APIs like this are awesome: I didn't knew half the available capabilities of Google Maps API until gmaps.js was published.
Software Raises Bar for Hiring
Follow up, I just saw the cookie disclaimer the other day and I'm in the uk
I work as an engineer for an advertising company (criteo) and call me naive but I believe we do none of these. I still understand the stereotyped view of advertising companies that we all hate.

Also, Google is (mostly) an advertising company.
You can. This item, for example:

http://hnrankings.info/4058277/
Any app developer with that mentality probably is not going to make an iPhone app worth using in the first place
Not to be pedantic, but the Thinkpad T61 is a Core 2 Duo machine that came out in 2007, not 1998.
I'm hoping that with the coming of IPv6 many of these issues are going to go away. At that point Cloudflare could give every customer their own /128 that is static across the world (they route their /64 or /48 however they please using anycast) and forward traffic as they have always done with caching.

Then it becomes trivial to block a single IP, since it is assigned to a single customer you won't have any collateral damage!
Hey Prawn,

You are making some very good points, sounds like you are particularly familiar with the issues at hand. RE the operahouse stuff - the student that did that were going for a 'ken done' look - very scribbly:) I'd say the pen performance when dealing with small detail is very decent - not Wacom Pro decent but not far off. Might org a video to show the performance. By the way we're drawing up a list of internal testers, can I interest you in trying out Collusion and telling us what you think?

Cheers,

Rob CEO - Collusion
In addition to K&R I always recommend "C Interfaces and Implementations: Techniques for Creating Reusable Software" to anyone who is picking up a long-term hobby or career in C.

Someone on this forum recommended it to me. It's been invaluable assisting me in refactoring major portions of a legacy code base. In a way, it's helped me bring the DRY principle to our C application. I write in C every single day though and it may not be applicable for a hobbyist/generalist.
"It seemed to Leon that the problems faced by immortal quadrillionaires in vats wouldn't be that different from those facing mere mortals."

See: http://craphound.com/walh/Cory_Doctorow_-_With_a_Little_Help...
erm, that might be because your still looking at the current video. New video to be uploaded in the morning, have a look then:)
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I think this is more about changing the mindset of the typical workers at the federal agencies (hundreds of thousands of whom are not doing IT related tasks as their primary function). Those of us who work for these agencies as programmers & IT people have a big job to do.

Only recently have the govies started thinking about how their data can be useful to the general public. In the past everything had been stovepiped and guarded with peoples' live(lihood)s. Hopefully this makes them think about data integrity throughout the life of that data.

Think about how data used to be provided to the public before. A bunch of government folks had to collect data and make sense of it themselves and put it together in a report destined for congress. It's waaaaay different to just provide that raw data to the public. Rather, I think what we'll see is more sanitized data sets, after they've been internally analyzed and vetted (probably multiple times). Not exactly transparent.

But I hope one day, after many iterations of API building, we'll get to a point where the data truly is transparent.
The gmap3 and also the one on google code(forget name) seem to have a larger API, for example I really like the "DirectionsRenderer",I don't see anything like that gmaps.js.
Didn't know about Stamen maps either, thanks for sharing
You sound like a Zionist shill.
While I respect the work done by the Mapstraction guys, I found that to get several non-trivial things working, I had to dig into the proprietary parts of the individual underlying framework - which defeats the purpose of using Mapstraction in the first place.

I had to rewrite large portions of the map interface code when I switched from Google to Open Street Map.

That said, the project is still young and maybe once I get some time, I should really contribute code to it to get those bits I needed working.
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I recently was reading was looking for an API that had address and directions support and found these two, http://gmap3.net/ and http://code.google.com/p/jquery-ui-map/. Any plans to add that to gmaps.js?
Interestingly, his older and popular (and I felt much better written) article on free software usability ( http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2008/08/01/free-software-usability ) seems to redirect to this one.
I certainly would not, as you would be more restricted in your freedom to communicate and opening yourself up to more possibilities of legal troubles down the road.

They would love it if you signed, but I can't see any benefit in it for you.
>Over the past few years, usability of free software has improved slightly.

Slightly? It has improved by leaps and bounds. I just switched from Mac OS X to using Ubuntu almost exclusively, and aside from a few bumps here and there, I have been very happy with it. That's a plunge I wouldn't have even considered three years ago.
Mars One plans to establish the first human settlement on Mars by April 2023
The crosses are a nice idea, although we'll be hard at work at improving our algorithm first (one guy in the team is fulltime on that) and see how it goes.

We'll try to get as much as we can right by default until we ask for help from users :)
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This will eventually be perceived as holding [Game of Thrones] hostage until there is enough money in their Kickstarter account.
The most interesting part to me is that somebody managed to get phone support for GMail.
I haven't actually tried it yet. Thanks to your words of encouragement maybe I will this weekend.
I dislike advertising itself as much as the next engineer. I won't even attempt to defend that position with logic, it's a visceral preference.

But I especially wouldn't want to work for advertisers. It seems natural that such companies would be structured to have engineering work for sales and marketing, with management acting as a funnel rather than an umbrella.
Well at least the plastic deadzones in the oceans will be easier for find with the ones they missed.
Bit.ly Redesign Upsets Users: What's Wrong With It?
> Brian is a douche [...] But the fucking fact of the matter is that he is right.

Speaking personally, I'd be reluctant to have a business relationship with either party in this dispute.
Sorry for the rant but posts like this piss me right off.

Usability seems to mean low entry barrier and pretty looking these days rather than functionally elegant, normalised and reusable. Usability now means giving dumb people pretty looking things and not bothering to write a manual or relying on their understanding of the domain or having any compromises between the machine and the meat sack using it.

Also stop blogging and fix it if it's a problem - that's the joy of open source. If they don't want the 'fix', then its not a fix for the supposed problem or the problem didn't exist to start with.
My kids use Ubuntu, OS X, iOS, Android, and at school they even have Windows. They are as indifferent to the OS as we are to the vagaries of navigating various websites. They use Spotify and Chrome and play their Humble Bundle games. They are 7 and 10 and totally grok accessing an NFS filesystem over wireless and understand that if they can't access their music, it's probably because the wi-fi isn't connected.

One thing this does point out, though it might be a bit antithetical to many OSS devs, are there any open source usage stats packages that developers can build into their systems? Like Chrome uses?
prepared statements often eliminate this vector ... the thing is, mysql2 the most popular db access gem for rails does not even implement prepared statements, and AR does not have a mechanism to send these to a db.

In an ideal world the app passes the db gem 'select * from posts where Id = ?', [1] and then the gem takes care of preparing and executing. In all the real world web apps I have seen the number of "distinct" SQL statements they need to run are quite low (in the 100s) so preparing is a no brainer.

I do not see this at all as a Ruby problem it has nothing to do with dynamic typing, I see it as a problem approach to db access. I believe Sequel (another less popular db gem for Ruby) is not even theoretically prone to these kind of issues.
Willy, I've tried e-mailing you through your about.me site, but it seems to get stuck on "Sending..." (and showing the spinner).

The message I sent was:

"I'd be very interested in any data you might have of this type (to overlay on a 3D model of Earth I'm building for a flight tracking project).

What data do you have?"

If you could respond via the address in my profile I'd be most grateful!
Here (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=1000-genome) is a recent article in Scientific American regarding sequencing a genome for <= $1000. It's pretty cool how it works. Most current genome sequencers tell bases apart by different wavelengths of light, but this one takes a completely different approach and measures pH changes.
Ask HN: What is the best introductory bioinformatics book for a data mining researcher, so that he can understand the practical biotech applications of data mining algorithms he already know?
Modern advertising is a parasite on people's evolved cooperation mechanisms. We naturally feel moved to do what those around us are doing, and advertising preys on that instinct by providing it false social cues to encourage behavior that is profitable for the advertiser.
Tl;dw: Stop mocking, start testing
Open Source Web Conferencing
Hmm all that gallium, arsenic, toxic plastic and other joys rotting in a river. Fun eh?

This is what happens when designers get hold of science...
They don't hate advertising tech, they hate spending time on something as useless as advertising.

An engineer wants to build something useful, and advertising is not useful. I mean really, who cares if 1% of a particular demographic switches from Tide to Wisk? Do you really want to put your talents to use in that way?
Exactly. Facebook's model depends on being opaque about what is going on behind the scenes with user's data.

Most people, when asked outright, will tell you they don't want every, single little thing they post shared to the world, searchable and existing in perpetuity. Just like they'll tell you they don't want to see ads. However, when you try to explain "privacy settings" it's often not understood (my mom), or not worth the effort. It's opt-in vs. opt-out; if Facebook were opt-in, it would have created precisely zero billionaires.
But posts like this are armchair quarterbacking everybody else's lives. If the guy phrased these purely as personal lessons and talked some about how he learned them, he would be much less grating.

What really kills me is his bio. "Hi, I’m Julien Smith.I help people lead more productive, awesome lives— one day at a time. This is my blog. If you like it, please subscribe below."

For me that might as well read: "Hi! I'm an overconfident asshole who gets off on telling people I've never met how they should be awesome exactly like me. And I get paid for it! Please let me manipulate you into buying my stuff."
Creator here, I would love to hear any feedback you all have.

I also have around 3 months worth of historical data if anyone is interested or has a cool idea.
Here's what one looks like, for the curious:

Mobile: http://i.imgur.com/kQlmh.png

Desktop: http://i.imgur.com/ZiOqX.png

This appeared in my news feed last night, and is still there now. It moves like a normal item (i.e., its not 'sitckied' to the top or anything like that).

On mobile its pretty jarring. Bigger than any other posts.
And one can only imagine that this kind of strategy will become increasingly common, resulting is a bizarre cat and mouse game with users, as facebook gets more and more desperate to hold on to its "value", what ever that actually is.
When I was last in the US (in 99) I was told I was brave for walking to the mall. It was only a few miles, for some reason this concept of walking was somewhat weird to the locals. To be fair, I was in Jacksonville NC, but I found it odd that they found it odd.
I'd like to see software engineers who are part of the hiring process in their company apply for their own position anonymously. Go through the whole enchilada: the phone interview, the code tests, the puzzles, the questions regarding optimization and performance, etc. Let's see if they can pass all the hurdles.

I have $100 here that says most won't (if any).

*
If we can't hire people due to a broken system, how do we expect to succeed?
Differentiation is apparent by scrolling down our product page: decently designed and manufactured hardware (unlike iPen) real time cloud collaboration, ocr as you write (mentioned in the video), handling of media, deep field.... hope this helps
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