skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They are indeed easier to use, but more difficult to learn. Tiling window managers are like giving someone a control system with no labels on the buttons. Users need to consult a manual to know what they're doing - which isn't something people generally like doing.

You don't need a manual to figure out how to use a touchscreen or whatnot though, which is generally why they're preferred by the masses, despite being inferior.

The same thing applies to emacs and vim too - they're capable of mostly everything IDEs do and much more, but it's non-obvious how to do things without taking the time to learn, read, search - something that people are less likely to do with age - but kids don't have a problem learning.

There's other issues like consistency too. With stacking based UIs you have some consistency built in, but you don't necessarily have it with the tiling window manager and minimal UI applications - take for example the difference in keybindings between xmonad and emacs. Another problem is that some apps can "hijack" your WM keybindings.

You can fix those issues by modifying the configs, but that's an even further level of learning that most people have no chance of ever doing.
Soccer: 4x4 Soccer - Free Online Games
> For an understanding of how limited international data links were as recently as the early 1990s, one of the key public data links between the US and Europe at the time was a 9660 baud link according to a dated, but fascinating, compendium of networking at the time

I, for one, would be fascinated to see this.
Well, it is newsworthy at least.

Sure, being upset/getting angry just because of a little bit of Twitter downtime is stupid, but that doesn't take away from the fact that one of the biggest and most important discussion and communication channels the web has is completely down.
I suspect that corporate executives would also be a lot more cautious if the failure of their businesses directly lead to death. It's a worthwhile perspective to consider, but bee-haviour is definitely not close to a solution for humanity's problems.
The best part is their status site is powered by tumbler even though they acquired posterous.
Twitter is a protocol masquerading as an app.
I went through this same though process - and then came to HN to refresh the page to see if an article went up about it.
The article (and the rest of the author's writings on the topic) contains a lot of evidence that his children are delighted with what they're doing. They're happily choosing to spend hours of time tinkering with this stuff, both with dad and on their own.

And it's not surprising at all. You're not thinking like a small child. Children focus intently on things that would bore adults to tears all the time. They have so little context that almost anything can be deeply interesting to them.

Now that I have a one-year-old, we spent a lot of time admiring the workings of garbage trucks, examining grass, etc. I can easily see his curiosity evolving over the next couple years to the point where he could amuse himself for hours with a command line and a speech synthesizer.

And he likes the iPad too. This isn't an either-or proposition.
WooThemes Announces Subscriptions For WooCommerce
Of course ICANN is wrong. There just in it for the money. Their TLD-creation is like a money press, why stop?
Except that Craiglist doesn't "simply work" for a large part of the population out there. The process of getting a photo from the average person's camera to Craiglist may seem trivial to us techies but it's a huge barrier for a lot of people. In fact, I would argue that Craiglist is missing out on a huge market because they haven't taken the simple step of coming out with a basic iphone app that makes the process of posting easier. Until they do, there is market opportunity here.
Not really a secret[1]:

Peter Thiel: Do Y-Combinator companies follow a power law distribution?

Paul Graham: Yes. They’re very power law

[1] http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/21869934240/peter-thiels...
I made my big leaps and bounds reading when around 5 I was given a chance to work with DOS and win 3.1. I can say I would be a different person today if that computer never got dropped off from a family friend.

At 6 I was running through the registry messing up everything I can. (I once made the desktop completely iconless, didn't make for happy parents.)

Now I've got a 4.5 year old daughter, she uses an android tablet pretty consistently and I'm glad she's shown interest, I think I'll be getting a box setup for her soon now that she's showing a bit more interest.
Android app: NFC credit card data theft now in the cards
The license has changed, read http://blog.opalang.org/2012/05/opa-license-change-not-just-...

The source code is released on github with a delay of several days.
They just updated:

http://status.twitter.com/
Free it now!
That's fair. In retrospect I wish I had written my comment in more of the form: "If X, then Y", instead of presuming X. If the essay is fictionalized and she didn't actually move to a new city to avoid social interaction, or find herself totally consumed for weeks by one mean comment, then surely none of what I am saying applies.

Re: "this is not normal," if I sound like I'm claiming some kind of authority, it is only the authority of personal experience. I could have written those passages that I quoted, and not too long ago either. Those were my "normal." Once I experienced what it was like to feel secure and free of those unmanageable emotional responses, I found it incredibly liberating.

The strong belief I took from this experience is: no one should have to live that way. No one should have to structure their life around avoiding things that they emotionally can't handle. I can't say with certainty that this is her situation, but I know it was mine.
Linus did lose some credibility in my eyes. Not that one needs to conduct themselves like a suit at all times, but his behaviour seemed counter-productive at best.
Why do some AJAX responses include a first statement of "while(1);"
> Kids aren't learning abstract fundamentals at that age though. They are mimicking stuff.

I have to respectfully disagree with you on this point. A member of my extended family does extensive work with deaf young children (aged six months to six years). Her job is to accelerate their spoken-language development, which has been delayed by virtue of being deaf. She repeatedly makes the point to me that the difference between children with delayed language (e.g. most of those she works with) and a "normal" child is that those with delayed language tend to not understand (or use) abstractions in their speech. They treat each word as if it has a single application or use. Once they understand that each word actually can have multiple applications, their ability to learn new words grows exponentially. Until that point, they are simply mimicking.

That sounds like an abstract fundamental to me, though I am perhaps mistaken. (This is also subject to a counter-argument about the nature/nurture aspect of language, e.g. do we have an inborn understanding of language.)

Also, on a more personal note: by the time I was five, I was experimenting with electrical circuits. A few 1.5V flashlight bulbs, a pair of switches, a few D-cell batteries, and some wire went a long way. I taught myself that you couldn't put lightbulbs after each other and have them light up to the same brightness (e.g. series resistance), but that you could connect them in parallel without any of those effects (these were short-term, so I didn't notice the extra power draw). Likewise for switches -- if they were in parallel, then breaking one was enough to break the entire circuit. Those are brand-new, abstract concepts that I was, as you say, internalizing in an intellectual sense.

And no, I wouldn't have called my IQ particularly high at the time, and I still would not.
thanks for the update! :-)
I strongly disagree. Presentations are often almost an hour long and may contain over 100 slides + images. That format does not translate particularly well to a blog post.

Did you look at the link I posted? It's a far more enjoyable, engrossing, and informative format than the equivalent multi-post blog series.
I don't disagree, it is currently a seller's market in most places if you are skilled.
How can you be sure? Your link only have a few select critics, whose opinion are 99% useless. I wanna know what real users think. My own personal anecdote asking a few people about it is closer to unicorn puke than acclamation. But I don't like anecdotes. Are there are quantitative study with a large sample of users' opinions about how Metro looks? I'd be very interested in one.

There have been many reports here and there about how people like metro. But without such study, anyone saying it looks "good" or "bad" are just worthless anecdotes. Of course it's subjective, what really matters is what the majority of the target audience thinks.
Regardless of who the author is, the post is made on a Cato website (and Cato is founded by Koch), with their branding on all sides. It's a little disingenous to suggest that this piece was posted without approval.
Sorry, I don't. Just an opinionated, french father-in-law steeped in french history and colonialism.

One of the things I quickly learned after leaving the US is that American historical events are viewed very differently in different sides of the world. Maybe some of the french HNers can give the french perspective.

My understanding is just the interpretation of US history books and one grumpy, old frenchman.
Agreed. It is one thing to falsify customer reviews, for example, but something completely different to have several aliases to promote an active community. The information and links that were posted obviously provided value to readers. Who posted it is not quite as important. The same thing with Kevin Rose saying that digg was a friends site. People are naturally guarded against being sold to - even if the said item acutally does provide true value. People just want to decide on their own without the sales pressure.
How Much Sugar Is in That?
My mother-in-law's visiting over that time, so no-go for me. But it looks like a great opportunity. Definitely beats driving!
The Perfect Technocracy: Facebook's Attempt to Create Good Government
Thanks. pretty good.
I don't believe it is newsworthy. In fact, it's sad that it is being written about because it shows the utter shallowness of what passes for 'Silicon Valley News' at the moment. And it's sad to see this as a 'top story' on Hacker News taking up space.
I'm the author that discovered this bug - and went way out of my way to tell the Internet Explorer team about it. I uncovered the error while working on a client's SharePoint site and figuring out why a certain page always caused their computer to freeze up.

The most amazing part of this exercise has been analyzing the traffic trends. This page gets a crazy amount of traffic in Japan and China - I still can't figure out why.

It has also been a remarkable insight into the dysfunction that is Microsoft; I'll hear from some random Microsoft employee twice a year who became aware of the site and wants to fix it, after pointing to the closed "not a bug" thread on MSDN they all vanish (apparently keenly aware of how atrocious the IE team reacts to external interest/support.)
The even better part is that Tumblr is often down itself, which means that status.twitter probably has more downtime than www.twitter
So, first they ditch their native syntax for a more JavaScript-approach, now the native backend is being replaced by node and mongo? With all these fundamental changes, is this the right time for a 1.0 release?
Always fun when you're developing against an API, and then have to perform a frantic investigation to work out if your latest code change broke everything... or it's just the API endpoint itself.
It's not down in when tried with an anon proxy service:

https://proxify.eu
Conversely, this has always been my complaint against the general hoopla and bandwagonning around Twitter -- they didn't do anything technically innovative. When they first started generating buzz, I instantly thought, "Oh, did they create a new messaging protocol that is universally accessible, redundant and easy to use? That's killer!" But, that was not the case.

Yes, they had a good idea and executed very well, but as I see it, Twitter is nothing more than your run-of-the-mill 4chan board. I still don't understand the draw, but then again, there's a lot of facets of modern society that I simply have no explanation for (reality tv?!?) and have been better off not worrying about it further.
Ford Schools Apple With Clever Phone Login App…Wait, What?
Agree with maxko. Basically he outlines the 3 major benefits of joining an accelerator program. He then questions whether many of the accelerators can deliver all or any of those 3 stated benefits with a relatively depressing outcome.
> The larger the institution, the less accountable every individual within that institution tends to act.

I'm reading Liars and Outliers, by Bruce Schneier, and this is one of the big points he makes in his discussion of how trust and security balance to allow society to function.

There is a huge difference between personal morality and organizational morality, for instance. Even if every person working for Citigroup had been basically moral (in the sense that they wouldn't have committed fraud alone) this still could have happened, and probably would have.

The argument that gets repeated ad nauseum, that things like this are the fault of "a few bad apples", is just plain false. The bad apples certainly exist (especially given that our society and economy reward anti-social behaviors), but the incentive structure is the real problem. It's systemic, there's no getting around that fact.
Will You Fight for the Open Cloud?
If they decide not to hide it, some interesting news is on its way ;)
You are correct:

The Long-Term Labor Market Consequences of Graduating
from College in a Bad Economy

http://mba.yale.edu/faculty/pdf/kahn_longtermlabor.pdf
I think this is another good example of how we as an industry are still unable to adequately assess risk properly.

I'm fairly certain that the higher-ups in Twitter weren't told "We have pretty good failover protection, but there is a small risk of catastrophic failure where everything will go completely down." Whoever was in charge of disaster recovery obviously didn't really understand the risk.

Just like the recent outages of Heroku and EC2, and just like the financial crisis of 2008 which was laughably called a "16-sigma event", it seems pretty clear that the actual assessment of risk is pretty poor. The way that Heroku failed, where invalid data in a stream caused failure, and the way that EC2 failed, where a single misconfigured device caused widespread failure, just shows that the entire area of risk management is still in its infancy. My employer went down globally for an entire day because of an electrical grid problem, and the diesel generators didn't failover properly, because of a misconfiguration.

You would think after decades that there would be a better analysis and higher-quality "best practices", but it still appears to be rather immature at this stage. Is this because the assessment of risk at a company is left to people that don't understand risk, and that there is an opportunity for "consultants" who understand this, kind of like security consultants?
di" is one of my favorite commands. Delete everything inside the quotes not including the quotes.

You usually want to replace what's inside the quotes, so hence use ci"

cit is pretty nice for replacing a tag's inner html. And of course this works with parentheses - ci( - and brackets - ci[ - and curly braces and single quotes and angle brackets.. I love vim :)
Show HN: My 10yo's First Text Adventure
Sorry guys. I added twitter to my phone yesterday and tweeted twice. I didn't think it would break anything.
I can't be the only one that saw this, and immediately thought "Wrap this in some browser detection code, and display it in a tiny iframe if you're using an inferior browser..."

No? Anyone? Guess I'm wearing a black hat today.
Good point about the difference in timing! Who knows what info Microsoft has that we don't; but for brand-trust reasons, it seems important to update at least the Lumias to WP8, if at all technically possible.
If a large manufacturer had a fire in their facility, it would certainly be industry news. This seems like a similar situation.
I had this problem years ago against the Twitter API. It took a shot of rum and a cigarette before I figured it out. And I'm not a smoker.
http://www.klonix.org/jun2012/twitter-20120621-125438.jpg
ditto.

I wrote my first love letter at age 5 and my mother delivered it to the girl's family, who took it and read it to her, because the poor child was only 5 years old and couldn't read herself. LOL!
People like to chat with other people: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cb_simulator
https://plus.google.com/s/%23TwitterDown
How to Activate 'Do Not Track' in Your Browsers
My original thought when hearing about the prospect of new gTLDs was that a central body would look to claim a descriptive term such as 'blog' and make it available to anyone who wanted to host a blog under set criteria, and provided that centralised body committed to providing access to anyone under reasonable terms. This would act as a guarantee of origin of the site and would be helpful to consumers.

I don't therefore see an issue with the registration of new descriptive gTLDs but only if access is provided in line with the above. The issue with Amazon/Google's land grab is that we cannot guarantee the basis on which access will be made available which could in turn lead to segregation, particularly if google were to control a gTLD and also provide greater prominence to it in search results.

At the present moment in time, it is the lack of certainty in the process which is troubling. Of course, if I read ICANN's handbook more fully things might become much clearer.
I would give vim a miss - particularly if they'll be hacking xmonad.hs in the near future - emacs has much better Haskell support (I believe). The same is true for dozens of functional languages. I can't be doing with the confusion of multiple editors, so emacs wins for me purely based on the languages it supports.

I wish I became familiar with emacs a lot earlier. It took me ages to transition from using IDEs because of the steep learning curve.

Oh, and I wish I grew up with a Dvorak keyboard. I was forced to learn it after getting RSI about 8 years ago - but I'm better for it now.
Indeed. I was about to go contribute, but then I saw that it's a total concession in principle. I don't want haggling over how much when a robber robs me at gunpoint, I want the robber to be stopped. I don't want a concession to the principle that robbing is legitimate.
99,9% of people doesn't care at all about how technically innovative something is, they only care about how useful it is. And Twitter is incredibly useful.
What Happens When We Turn the World's Most Famous Robot Test on Ourselves?
I'm curious why you wouldn't feel flattered that your creation was noticed and worth copying? I would.

Do you believe ideas can be owned?
Meet SwiftKey 3
I'm a guy who fits your description of judging themselves too harshly and downplaying their skills and readiness. I have a tough time telling when other people are doing this, even though I do it myself.

Do you have any advice for telling when someone is doing this?

I ask because I can't blindly apply it to women any more than men, because I've seen so many women be over-confident in their skills, too.
Mom did spelling and grammar, dad (me) did the adventure engine and helped with coding (via sublime text snippets).

It's his story, puzzles, and he did the vast majority of the coding.
Great work. Do you have any plans on releasing this as a nicely packaged ebook? I'd probably pay for that instead of having to individually instapaper each page.
There are several apps like this, EggDrop being one of them, but Yardsale seems to have the edge in UI at least..
It has 56 tweets now...perhaps the outage is somewhat intermittent?
Put your extensions on a diet with event pages
This is more like a large manufacturer having a power outage. A fire would destroy machinery or stock. Nothing's getting lost here, something's just unavailable.
There's a thick line of acceptable to unacceptable and developers know when they are stepping over it or not.

IMO, Angry Birds is fine. Different device, game play taken to the next level, different theme. While I have never played 'Crush the Castle', I imagine the boulders the trebucet threw had different results.

As for unacceptable, how about NimbleBit's Tiny Tower vs. Zynga's Dream Heights? Dream Heights isn't in the spirit of the first game, it's the same game with 'better' (I actually prefer Tiny Tower's pixel art) graphics, almost screen for screen[1].

[1]] http://www.slidetoplay.com/story/zynga-releases-tiny-tower-c...
This is what unit testing is for
We're talking about a five-year-old here. I think it's absurd to think that any of us know what a mainstream productivity OS is going to look like by the time it affects his "job prospects".

At that age, what matters isn't any of the material learned. It's the attitudes and self-conceptions that matter. If a five-year-old learns that he likes telling computers what to do and that he can get steadily better at it by exploring, that's a huge win for his future.
Every train around here has seat back fold down tables.
I did this for a while, highly recommended.
https://mobile.twitter.com/ is working just fine.
That's what I was thinking as well. I really don't enter insert mode using i very often at all. Fun project, but I don't think it would actually be productive to use.
Nexus One came with Android 2.1. It got Android 2.2 and Android 2.3 - 2 pretty major versions of Android.

The Lumia 900 came with WP 7.5. And now it's not getting WP8, just some features from it. How is that the same?
Sounds like you just invented a new product: XIsDown.com, where not only do you get notified that X is down, you get to whine about it with other people.
Those are pretty good and thanks for sharing. personally, I find podcasts hard to manage and they just are not the format I enjoy. I tried. Do you have and blog suggestions along those lines?
This really needs a way to let you at least look at the app and the items for sale without requiring a Facebook login. I declined. :-)
Where's the RSS feed? I don't know you well enough to give you my email, but I'd put you in my feed reader and enjoy articles as they come out.
The key with finding a role model that inspires you is often times finding someone you can relate to. I don't think its an exaggeration that in the STEM fields, its much easier to find examples of male role models than female ones. Which is fine seeing as there are a lot more males in the fields. But I don't think its an issue highlighting some women, so young females have someone to look up to when they run into gender issues in their own careers.

As a woman in high school and college in the stem fields (computer science, physics and biochem), while I can't point to any example of explicit sexism I faced, there was definitely this feeling of a "boy's club" at times, and at least personally, there was times I felt excluded and looked down upon by some individuals within the field. And even from individuals outside the field there was times that I got this feeling that people thought it was "weird" that I liked this stuff. Don't get me wrong, I loved it wholeheartedly, never once did I consider switching to something more "feminine". That doesn't mean that it didn't get me down at times. I had the benefit of having some strong female professors, who definitely inspired me.