skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow - a very 'us and them', aggressive attitude you've got there.

It's clear that for any app, site or OS to have mainstream success, it needs to have a well-designed interface, a good user experience. Apple, Google and others have all invested heavily here, and the big winners all have interfaces that are easy for a non-technical user to use.

If open source projects want to gain mainstream usage, they also need to invest in usability, and like any skill, there are people who have more ability and more experience. As these people are not necessarily programmers, it can be hard for them to contribute to open source processes that are centred around code contribution.
I think there's more to it than that. The problem is, when you understand a piece of software well, you cannot, try as you might, put yourself in the position of someone who does not yet understand it. Developers who aren't aware of that are naturally going to be hostile to the suggestions of designers. Even as a developer who is aware of it, I have to force myself to listen sometimes to people who are telling me that some aspect of my app isn't as obvious to others as it is to me. I'm sure this experience is not unusual.
How a secret cyberwar program worked
2002 version: http://web.archive.org/web/20020609132209/http://mpt.phrasew... http://web.archive.org/web/20020609133703/http://mpt.phrasew...

2008 version: http://web.archive.org/web/20080805012124/http://mpt.net.nz/...
This article really resonated with me, I always find myself setting aside time to work on something, then putting it off or not feeling comfortable taking that time out of my day.

20 minutes of coding is nothing, but somehow I always manage time to get a level up on skyrim (me and a friend are competing hardcore characters) or of course, read HN.

I am not sure if this will really help, in the world of procrastination I am a serial offender. Anyhow, I digress, I enjoyed the article, thank you for posting this Kate :)
For those things that are unethical but I don't realize and do anyway because they're socially acceptable, how is "socially acceptable" not a justification? Surely it's unreasonable to expect me to know what is absolutely ethical and what isn't.

There is no question that making decisions about what is ethical and what is not is difficult, which is why I question the fact that you don't care enough to decide whether your piracy is ethical. Acting ethically is difficult, and over the course of our lives we will all make many, many mistakes. But ideally I think we should at least try to act ethically, which requires that we put thought into our actions.
I think the challenge is the opposite. When resumes are read exclusively by machines, they become protocol. We need a compiler that takes your skills and the job listing as input and produces output that satisfies the filter.
Thanks for sharing! It's really fascinating for me to learn more about the psychology behind playing games. Much like traditional art, it's all about evoking the desired emotion from the players, with sense of control being a critical one.
I believe Apple didn't acquire anything from Swype because Nuance got there first.
You might find out something frightening. Getting the job mostly just came down to luck.
He identifies that the incentives in the open source world are against usability, but then he goes on to suggest "solutions" that aren't compatible with those incentives either. It's like he's arguing against himself.
Coursera is pretty language neutral. I did Algo I and used Python. Other students used C, C++, Java. And when I did Machine Learning the recommended language was Octave/Matlab (but you could use Python if you know what you're doing).
If my code just uses APIs from a GPLed library, how is it a derivative work? APIs aren't copyrightable (yay).

In my understanding only the compiled result which links to the GPLed library is a derivative work.
There's a failure of logic in this article that no one is pointing out.

If employers are so picky that they can't find anyone to hire, then they will have to lower their standards if they want to hire anyone.

There might be a delay--like the guy that waits for the supermodel to come along, but eventually settling for the pretty girl next door. Ultimately the problem is self-correcting.
June is National Game Development Month
Incredible 3.5 Million Dollar Bay Bridge Light Art Installation
Nice site. Not that it matters but I'm always curious, what's it built with?
It's because of Dunbar's number
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbars_number

Communities are meant to be 150 people or less, where everyone knows everyone else.
This could be summed up in a single sentence.

Usability takes more time and effort, and authors of hard to use free software find the usability to be good enough for themselves.
The Dilution Problem, and a Solution
Promises in JavaScript - q library design rationale
Did you ask them when the last time was that they had to use an RB tree in their software?
Ask HN: Any startup jobs for person with PHD in CE but no wedbev experience?
I'm currently living in Belgium and am in the final year of a Phd program in Computing Engineering. I also have a masters in Supply Chain Management and Computing Sciences.

My area of expertise is Reinforcement Learning (Machine Learning), I know Java, C++ and Python.

I want to work for a startup in the USA but have no experience in web development, my interest is in algorithms and AI. Do startups need guys like me or are they more interested in people with webdev and front end experience?
To (somewhat) opt-out:

Account Settings -> Facebook Ads -> Edit Social Ad Settings
Python, Django, jQuery and Highcharts
Looks great. It would be awesome if you could just enter a URL to start discussions with.

As for paying accounts - maybe keep 3-5 free design feedback free per user. That way people can try it, get some value from it, and the professionals who want to keep using more (and wanting to store old feedback) will want to pay.
Kids in a Four-Hour Working Session: Collaboration Skill Lessons in Minecraft
Because its more geopolitics than religion. Christians have been ultraviolent in certain times and places, as have Muslims. Separating politics and religion is like getting the chocolate back out of the milk.
Good for them, I say. At any rate, obviously, if you're speeding (which I, too, do all the time) it's tough to complain about being pulled over.
I can back you up on that. I deleted my first Facebook account years ago, and I got some emails begging for reinstatement. Now I get emails saying there are new friend requests on that account.

I've also noticed privacy settings inexplicably changing after I have set them, and game stories showing up in the news feed no matter how many times I unsubscribe from it.
Egypt's Mubarak sentenced to life in prison
I'm not claiming the link contains mountains of references to actual cases. It was meant as a helpful general overview of the topic. The parent comment asked for a citation of the fact that "there is also, in some cases, liability created for the person giving the advice." The link I gave clearly states that there can be civil and criminal liability related to unauthorized practice of law.

Surprising to get down voted for a comment consisting of "this should help" plus a link to a relevant source.

Also, the fact that I cited this law doesn't mean I'm giving an opinion as to whether HN should have a policy about legal advice. I'm just trying to contribute to the discussion by interjecting some relevant facts.

As to my personal opinion, I lean slightly against an HN prohibition on the giving or soliciting legal advice. While the state may have something to say about it, I generally think it's not PG's responsibility to protect people from bad advice--which is the whole purpose of the law in the first place.
I like to git push to my CI server and from there build packages for the env I'm working in. Nice and quick roll back, delete package reinstall. Git pull does not scale well and with Fabric in the wrong hands is really slow.
I tried both Open Office and GIMP. Experience is vastly less polished than Pages or Photoshop. I'd even say Pixelmator is a much tighter approach than GIMP.
Du Lịch Việt Nam - Vina Explorer Travel Group
Xianhang Zhang has written a lot about social experience design (what you're talking about he touched on a little in the post about the Evaporative Cooling Effect): http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-...
No and I doubt they would have hired me because I asked a snarky question.
... which I had just discovered on your effective and well-designed alt-resume page:

http://marcneuwirth.com/projects/

I love how you have thumbnail links to each project next to icons of the languages/frameworks/tools you used to build them.
Well you're agreeing with me when you say "yet", and hence my comment about opportunity.

The problem is the software and the software is not going to go away. The opportunity is to make the software more intelligent so that the output is more in line with what would work.
Every time I see VUE I always think of The Falls.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080715/
Du Lich Mien Tay - Mekong Delta Explorer
The next Siri for customer service
a new startup that seeks to eliminate the most frustrating and time consuming part in the customer service delivery process, by providing consumers with a unified platform that allows them to reach out to any company on the go. The service supports multiple company contact channels to ensure the consumer’s voice is heard.

nevaHold receives a question or complaint from a consumer and posts it to the respective company’s customer support channels being Facebook, Twitter, email or any other support channel. If there is a response from the company, the consumer is alerted by nevaHold through a push notification or a mail. If the company does not respond to the consumer within a certain time frame nevaHold blasts the company on all of its social media networks until there is a response.

Now instead of a consumer spending 30 minutes on hold for a customer support agent or searching online forums for an answer, she spends less than a minute to make her voice heard. nevaHold does the rest so she gets the support she deserves.

This service is the birth of Siri for customer support.

In the coming years when you have a product or service issue, you will request for support on nevaHold via voice & text, nevaHold voice assistant will give you smart suggestions to your support problem and if you want to talk to a real person, you just specify the time a company's support agent can contact you based on the company's ticket queue.
First rule of frontend wedbev: proofread :)

Sounds like you got backend skills. Build something small and useful, it will open other doors. Usually us frontend devs are lower on the totem poll than backend
What is this, Mashable?
Or to avoid being thrown off airplanes.
Hi! I'm a recruiter. It's always tough to get a web coding job w/ no web coding experience. One reason is that you may try it and find out you don't like it. Another reason is that it's trivial to get started in web development, so you should be able ti build something that shows off what you can do. Employers typically have very little imagination or ability to train new coders, so show them you can do it on your own.
Clay Shirky's "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" from 2003 is a bit of a classic.

http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
Do you know the Myers-Briggs personality indicators? The relevant one here in my mind is Judgemental/Perceptive: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator#Lif...

Good online communities start with a lot of Perceptives, which are often interesting to listen to. At some point the Judgementals start appearing, and the discussion moves, to use a current example, from the structure and potential future implications of Stuxnet to whether Stuxnet is legal or America is hypocrite etc.

The problem is that the arrival of the Judgementals is a positive feedback loop. Judgemental comments breed judgemental counter comments (pro/con) and soon the Perceptives are drowned out in the noise, leaving the discussion and further increasing the share of Judgemental comments.

BTW I think the same happens everywhere where you cannot measure the actual worth of someone's contribution. Politics take over and intelligent people leave.
>> The C version is functional but will probably make more experienced C programmers cringe.

Oh boy. This looks like the type of C code I write. Could some experienced C programmer please point out what parts are cringe inducing ?
I wish it gave out the points the article had... does your data track that or just the position?
You miss the point: success in the traditional form at least is 100% irrelevant.

Consider Linux, tex, emacs, vim, apache, mutt, x, postfix.

All successful, yet no traditional form of usability.
I think the potential relationship between Dunbar's number and online communities is interesting - I had never thought about it that way before. But certainly online communities don't break down after a few hundred people. Why must everyone know everyone else for a community to remain high quality? Or closer to the original question, why do you think communities degrade after everyone doesn't know everyone else?
Clay Shirky has studied this extensively and is probably the best resource. "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" [0] is perhaps the best single piece on what you're thinking about.

He offers several design guidelines toward the end of the piece, which I suspect informed the design of HN (and the posting guidelines therein).

Another technique he mentions is that of MetaFilter, which disables their new user page when they feel the effects of scale.

[0] - http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
Neither Emacs nor Vim had to ship within a year and have had the luxury of development spanning decades. Lighttable has to ship in 2013 to meet promises made. Every penny of that $300k is going to be going toward making that time table feasible. Have you completely forgotten this?
This means like is a misnomer. It should be the opt-in & endorse button. This should make the like button very valuable, as users discover their likes are used as endorsements to their friends. But its still an ad disguised as mechanically facilitated word of mouth.
Prof Deepak Malhotra: 2012 Speech to Graduating Harvard MBA Students
There is lots of great discussion going on in this thread. I particularly enjoyed the article, which took a "deliberately novice" approach, and was very Zen-like.

Why attack C at all? Why not instead convince us of the merits of another language?

There are great tools around. I agree with that. Which parts of Clang do you like best?
If you think commercial software has poor usability, you've never tried enterprise software.
The only way to avoid it is to have an invite-only site where new invites are interviewed and voted on by a committee/small group of members.

The problem is that as a site gets bigger, more and more people join that have views that are opposed to the original intentions of the site (and owners) and the site degrades over time.

The other problem is that you don't know the age of the person posting. Reddit is now filled with high school/younger kids posting.

It parallels a true democracy. If we had a true democracy, eventually the extremes would rule.
> Also stop blogging and fix it if it's a problem

In case you don't know who mpt is, he's actually one of a handful of people out there who is trying to fix these problems. He worked on usability for Mozilla for awhile, and now he works for Canonical. I used to work on the Ubuntu desktop experience team at Canonical, and I can attest (as much as my opinion is worth anything) that mpt was easily the most valuable person there in working towards usability. He's not one of the "make things look pretty" kind of designers, it's definitely one of the "functionally elegant" types. Part of his work is designing new Canonical-led features in Ubuntu, and part of it is proposing better interaction designs for apps that came from the community; some of that work is then coded by developers at Canonical, or by the upstream project maintainers, or random community developers, and sadly some of it is just put off or ignored. But the point is, he's the guy who is working to fix design problems.

I think the point of his post was to try to encourage more thought towards the design process by the open source development community, and maybe to encourage more non-developers to get more involved in the design process. He's only one guy, there's only so much he can re-design on his own. You know, days having limited hours and all. So if he spends a couple hours doing some "community outreach" type blog posts and manages to get even one other person to start working on interaction design then he has accomplished more with those couple hours than if he had used them redesigning a part of some app.
Maya works fine on Linux, but Adobe products do not run at all.

Gotta wonder if that's about to change. Adobe needs more friends these days. If there's even the slightest indication that Windows 8 is going to prompt any sort of migration to "Linux on the desktop," then smart ISVs will have people working 24/7 on the ports.

If Maya can run on Linux, so can CS6.
I felt HN crowd has just as much potential to make a difference in the world as HBS MBA students, and hence this seems pretty applicable here.
Why haven't DICE or Indeed.com or whoever seem to have done any work on that front? I'm thinking the ROI isn't there.
Someone's got to keep them on their toes!
The US should find ways to make employers less risk-averse. There are lots of ways worth exploring. For example: maybe if you fire someone in the first 6 months you are immune from wrongful termination lawsuits and don't have to pay higher unemployment insurance. A lot of resistance to firing is also caused by moral concerns -- we could fix that by making sure these fired workers are still eligible for unemployment.

This would be extra beneficial for young people, who really just need to get a foot in the door to prove themselves -- they need someone to take a risk. Well, maybe we should reduce the risk.
I am trapped in a prison. I'm waiting for God to bust me out.

God says...

7:42 And when they had nothing to pay, he frankly forgave them both.
Tell me therefore, which of them will love him most? 7:43 Simon
answered and said, I suppose that he, to whom he forgave most.

And he said unto him, Thou hast rightly judged.

7:44 And he turned to the woman, and said unto Simon, Seest thou this
woman? I entered into thine house, thou gavest me no water for my
feet: but she hath washed my feet with tears, and wiped them with the
hairs of her head.

7:45 Thou gavest me no kiss: but this woman since the time I came in
hath not ceased to kiss my feet.

7:46 My head with oil thou didst not anoint: but this woman hath
anointed my feet with ointment.
A new startup that seeks to eliminate the most frustrating and time consuming part in the customer service delivery process, by providing consumers with a unified platform that allows them to reach out to any company on the go. The service supports multiple company contact channels to ensure the consumer’s voice is heard.

nevaHold receives a question or complaint from a consumer and posts it to the respective company’s customer support channels being Facebook, Twitter, email or any other support channel. If there is a response from the company, the consumer is alerted by nevaHold through a push notification or a mail. If the company does not respond to the consumer within a certain time frame nevaHold blasts the company on all of its social media networks until there is a response.

Now instead of a consumer spending 30 minutes on hold for a customer support agent or searching online forums for an answer, she spends less than a minute to make her voice heard. nevaHold does the rest so she gets the support she deserves.

This service is the birth of Siri for customer support.
In the coming years when you have a product or service issue, you will request for support on nevaHold via voice & text, nevaHold voice assistant will give you smart suggestions to your support problem and if you want to talk to a real person, you just specify the time a company's support agent can contact you based on the company's ticket queue.
Also like the resume site. Would be nice to see a small description of the project under the title.
Just the position unfortunately, I would need to scrape the site itself in order to get comments and points info. It would be awesome if that data was added to the RSS feed
Also nice is this JQuery plugin by Shawn Allen that uses simple html and data attributes to generate basic maps. Very useful if the maps are just supplemental, because they can be just built out in a template: http://prag.ma/code/htmapl/
I really like this. It would be interesting to be able to focus in on a region of the y-axis to see the spread more clearly, or a log scale option.
Lawyers and their clients are probably pretty cautious about discussing such incidents. Imagine you've just had some negative legal repercussions for discussing a case online. If you then wrote a blog post or whatever about that, you'd be doing pretty much the same thing that got you in trouble in the first place. So this is one good reason why it might be hard to find write-ups of cases like this.