skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>But if they say, "The date display on the Calendar icon should match the current date on the phone", that's "slavishly copying".

I don't think that's the case, if it's just showing the date on the icon.

On the other hand, if the instruction is to "Show the date display on the Calendar icon exactly like Apple's icon," that's a different story.
There are lots of benign substances that cause issues to people that have malfunctions: allergies and gluten intolerance are two simple examples.
Exactly. ZFS was deliberately released with a license designed to keep it out of the kernel. It's unavailable to the Linux community, so people use what they have and work on replacements. The controversy isn't technical, it's legal. And it's not resolvable by feature lists and fanboi flaming.

ZFS is great, I'm sure. But btrfs is great too and rapidly improving. I don't think the Linux world has much to worry about.
Increase Internet Speed Up to 20 Percent
Risk and reward. No bank is going to loan a company at this stage money and there's no guarantee the investors who are providing this money will get any return at all and there is no collateral, so the founders should pay more for the money.
do you honestly think people view cellphone number ownership as a sign of trustworthiness? cellphones are cheap.
Learn how to be a n00b
I would imagine the commenter was referring to the works of Rand. Google for some of his corporate brands and look at all the black. Try the Next logo for example.
I've used PUR water filters for years. The filters don't indicate when they need to be changed, so I change them when they start filtering water slowly. In the past, when I lived in Los Angeles and Portland, filters would start filtering water slowly after a few months of use.

Now I live near Madison, Wisconsin, and I realized recently that my current filter has been in use for more than a year and it filters water just as quickly as the day I started using it. I contacted PUR to see if there might be something wrong with my dispenser, but the rep suggested that my city's water must be very clean.

So I learned that some cities have water that is much cleaner than others.
A few paragraphs into the pull request and I just knew the HN comments would be full of energy-sucking Debbie Downers fazed and miffed by the word "yo", using the word "brogrammer" in their epithets, and saying things like "just present the facts" in a comment that not only creates zero value but squanders it from the pool.

In a bout of absolute irony-blindness, these Value Vacuums are far more insufferable than the very material they declared "distracting".
It looks like Google is turning its search engine into a global Spotlight, blurring the distinction between a personal computer and the internet. Or rather, making the concept of a personal computer irrelevant, which I think is a stated goal of theirs.
Like i_s said, we're only worried about getting data out, not writing data to.

Craigslist and Twitter both have read and write monopolies of in the two sided market of classified ads and interpersonal 140-character messages, respectively.

We're not trying to do anything to displace them from their write monopoly. We're coming up with a technological solution that will hopefully be like taking a cat out of a bag. Once you take it out, hopefully you can't put the cat back in.

However, with enough self-interested nodes forming a swarm to extract and share the data, essentially creating a publicly accessible ToS free copy of the data, you have basically broken the read monopoly those and other web properties have.

From there, it's much easier for many agents to form a federated network of writes to compete with the read monopoly.
I guess I feel that space is so huge and has so much stuff in it that any progress in exploring it brings us closer to post-scarcity, whether it's humans or robots or both. Humans on Mars will always be able to respond to things much faster than humans on Earth monitoring robots on Mars, for one.
I actually like being auto-logged into YouTube.
One thing to note is that our funding velocity is not linear, it has been picking up speed. If we can keep the momentum going and spread the word, we are confident that we will hit our goal.

Regarding ads being not too annoying, people are backing app.net because of the larger goal: creating a service where the user is the customer rather than the product. This allows app.net to focus all of its resources on pleasing the user, and ensures app.net will not try to shut down 3rd party developers who are competing for advertising dollars.

To this end, app.net does not need to become twitter-like scale to create a sustainable business.
> They make several claims.

But notably not that one. And their claims specifically contradict yours.

> It's also a claim I've made based on personal experience with both "mineral salt crystals" (alum - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alum) and regular deodorant, and knowing the ingredients in both and how those ingredients affect bacteria.

You can make whatever claims you want. That doesn't make them valid. Lots of people have "personal experiences" with homeopathic medicine and are convinced of its efficacy. That doesn't mean they're correct.

I also question how much you actually know about how the ingredients in various deodorants affect bacteria.

> One killed off all odor causing bacteria after a few weeks (I no longer have to use it, maybe once a week).

No, it didn't. Are you really under the belief that those "odor causing bacteria" existed only on your armpits? That they don't exist on the skin around your armpits, or you know, all over your body? That they couldn't and wouldn't simply spread back to your armpits if you managed to kill them off there?

I also hate to break the news to you, but there's a pretty good chance that you're smelly and just don't know it, because over the course of "a few weeks", you trained yourself not to notice it.

> No, they just don't put the same amount of alum in their products to make it effective.

Many of them don't use alum at all, because other ingredients are known to work better, especially for people who also want antiperspirant effects.

> Their game is to mask the odor

Masking the odor would mean covering up. Alum, aluminium chlorohydrate, and aluminum zirconium tetrachlorohydrex gly don't have any significant smell of their own. Indeed, you can buy unscented deodorants from the major manufacturers, and they are exactly as effective as the scented ones.
I really hoped that this was going to be a joke about how, if you use black, Apple will sue you for patent infringement...
This is just a version one. They're going to do all the numeric stuff too.
He does not only tell you to reduce the contrast, which with a good enough screen can be arbitrarily high, he also advices you to increase the saturation. And pure black can not have saturation.
People are upset because they wanted to be part of the elite club that maybe possibly would have had their DNT header honored, but now that it's likely that a huge percentage of other people on the web will have the header enabled, suddenly the header will be useless for sure.

If this header would have only been useful if it was only enabled by a small set of people, then it has always been stupid, and is in no way Microsoft's fault. Imagine a perfect world where everyone using IE organically decided to poke around in their browser settings, find, understand, and enable DNT. Are the trackers now somehow less justified when they ignore it in this perfect world? No, the motivator is the same — they want to track as many people as possible and "disabled by default" is just a thin excuse. People that are defending the idea of trackers ignoring DNT because of IE are engaging in some weird kind of corporatism.
Most risky loans require collateral and have legal stipulations that have pretty onerous consequences if the money isn't repaid, so there is a lot risk of default in typical loans and in that case, the bank gets something, which is thought to be of higher value than the monetary outlay.
I've always preferred light on dark.

Bottom line: You can't please everyone.
I agree.

And we've seen time and time again, that just as everyone else "catches-up" to an Apple device, Apple go and release the next one that jumps them ahead again, because they have that 1-2 year head start.

Yeah, I know it has not always been the case, but I think it's pretty safe to say it was the case with the iPod for it's entire life, and it does happen with the iPhone/iPad/MBA/MBPr
Vacant houses in Tucson don't help people get jobs in Silicon Valley
My first thought as well. But there is an argument to be made that the screen is a different world, and the black of the screen looks as unnatural as pure black in the real world. I think this would apply less to a phone or something with a short view time, as adjusting to the new color palette would take us some amount of time.
In case you're curious, the text you are reading now is #000.

Which is not to say that #222 wouldn't be easier on the eyes.
Scoopinion Tracks What You Read, Not What You Click
I won't say it'll fail only because he's so persistent in gaining mind share. Sooner or later, someone will "acquire" this project.
God help you if you attempt to defend the use of anything except statically typed languages on proggit.
Depends on what you mean by "pull this off." The alpha itself is pretty beefy for the alpha's I've seen. The API isn't stable but it's certainly nothing to sniff at and the web GUI is more realized in a few weeks than twitter was in a few months (learning from others mistakes makes this easier, of course).

Dalton's pretty clear said he's "not trying to kill twitter" see, http://www.quora.com/Twitter-1/Will-app-net-kill-Twitter/ans...
Hm? That tweet says that #000 looks better. Edit: OK I totally missed the first smaller tweet at the top. Banner blindness I guess.
its funny how most people here dont know anything about design .. i totally agree never use black .
Never use black because it's too strong to always be used? If you want something strong, use black. If you don't, don't. That's about it.
Crowds for a Cause: we're giving away a month of free work.
You make a very good point. I had to do a trade study of different microprocessors (for embedded software) when I worked at a more engineering-focused organization, because one of our requirements was that a certain algorithm had to complete in under 30 seconds (or something like that---I don't remember the exact time requirement). One of the things we had to do was try to quantify how fast the algorithm would run on each processor, which as you mentioned was nearly impossible.

We ended up looking up the MIPS [1] and FLOPS [2] for each processor, whether it supported SIMD instructions, and how many pieces of data its SIMD instructions could process in a single instruction. Some processors didn't support floating point math, so we had to estimate how fast it could be emulated with integer registers. Then we had to have some formula to estimate the run time based on this data and the nature of the algorithm (what percentage of the code uses floating point vs integer instructions, what percentage can take advantage of SIMD, etc).

The problem with this is that even the published performance data, such as MIPS, aren't a measure of a single attribute that we can apply in any meaningful way. For example, MIPS is affected by clock speed, which instructions are executed (some may execute in a single cycle, others take several cycles), branch prediction, and cache coherency. How do you quantify stalled instructions? The final execution time is a result of an interplay between the hardware's characteristics and the algorithm's characteristics (as compiled by a certain compiler) over time.

Perhaps a more appropriate approach for software engineering would be statistics. Given normal distributions for MIPS, missed branch predictions, etc, similar characteristics of an algorithm, and perhaps the language and compiler used, then maybe we can give a confidence interval for an algorithm's run-time.

But like you said, in many cases it's probably easier (and cheaper) to just build the algorithm and then measure it.

[1] Millions of (integer) instructions per second.

[2] Floating point operations per second.

[3] Single instruction multiple data.

[4] Not to down-play the difficulty of that task. I'm sure it's very complicated as well.
I guess - people have been seeing my previous search queries via chrome for years now. Isn't this what incognito windows are for?
It doesn't look like it shows the actual content of e-mails unless you search for something like "confirmation gmail". "confirmation" just gets you the "Messages from..." box which you have to click to open.
Also stop using grey http://stopusinggrey.com/ add just a bit of colors to you designs.
How to use a waterfall chart to interpret web performance data
Internet Tax Would Cost Average Shopper $167 A Year
Most paper isn't #fff, and most black inks don't appear as #000. Also, I think that tactic opens the debate to aspects of technology, manufacturing, and cost analysis.

I agree that painting isn't the most optimal tool for pushing this point, but I don't think the print argument is a whole lot better when comparing to css styling technique.
Right - And as a potential customer, I now think: "Oh, square has Starbucks' processing, they probably won't go out of business under me, so I can have one less worry".
Interesting! I'm also a woman, so there's some social pressure to shave.
I do that all the time too. I don't want to have to act like a mini-search engine myself and ask "Now where did I see that?" I just want to find the info easily and quickly.

It's important to emphasize that this is a field trial that people can request to join. We're going to keep the trial relatively small (~1 million people) so that we can collect feedback to make sure that the product is really helpful and that it doesn't surprise people.

I've already seen the product become much more useful just from internal feedback, so I'm looking forward to what the field trial participants have to say.
Well the thing with printing is that the K part of CMYK is actually not the darkest black, yet it's 100% K that's used to print a book.

Fully saturated rich black (100% C+M+Y+K) is usually a little too jarring against a bright stock — take a look at most high quality books and notice that the stock is off-white and the ink isn't nearly as rich as #000 black on screen.

I think the original point as a lot of merit. Staying even just a little bit further from #000 or even pure grays (try #335, etc) can give more even tones and keep contrast high while reducing fatigue.

You're right about comparing art to print though — different goals, even though the conclusion is valid.
Peter-State Detector
Self-diagnosis: are you one of the victims of the Peter Principle?
That's right. The matches from Gmail are collapsed unless you specifically indicate intent with search keywords like "gmail" or "email."
I could be pedantic and link to a few tweets, but I think a quick search.twitter.com would yield you a few answers.
We can't even put a self-sufficient colony of people in Antarctica, where we don't have to worry about the lack of atmosphere or radiation shielding.
The Limits of Density
thanks for the attribution!
It looks fine to me. What's wrong with it?
I never let people use my cookies. I always start an anonymous window to let people use my browser (especially since most of the time, they'll want to check their email and go to gmail...).
I think it doesn't have to just be a Twitter rival. Twitter is heading into the mainstream direction. Focusing on news, celebrities, etc. A voice will develop if this does go to plan and Twitter could be Reddit while App.net could be Hacker News.
There were certainly people calling app.net and our API spec vaporware on HN and other places.

The purpose of this post is to showcase the alpha-version of our web service and API to users and developers and to encourage them to check it out. We hope that our work so far will speak for itself and get people excited about join.app.net.
Your observation is interesting! Do you have any insight into why that is?
Not quite true. Black holes for instance. Also, there's some carbon nanotube pigments used to absorb like 99.9999% of light that lands on it. It still looks pure black even when using a powerful flash to take a photo of it. These pigments were developed by NASA for use in telescopes where even a little bit of light can ruin the image.
Google gets most of its revenue, by a long shot, from its free users.
Recurring rationale I've noticed in this conversation:

If nobody harshly slams this, they might think they're good designers.

The designers are so arrogant, thinking they could redesign such an important website.

Harsh feedback makes you better.

--

First, I have never encountered anyone important (to me) who cared what HN thought, or even rethought their opinions after reading HN slam something. I've only heard people talking about HN as a source of news, not as a relevant gauge of anything, and certainly not to reconsider if one is right or wrong.

Frankly, nobody ever should pause and reconsider what they are doing because of HN's sentiment; at this point it's still better than some random forum, you get a lot of useful links and facts, but the critiques are totally worthless. People rarely try to be helpful here, it's just a positive feedback loop of nerds trying to show that they have more refined taste, more nuanced discernment, or a bigger mouth than the nerd before him.
OK, no argument there. The headline could be softened (Never use black in web layouts) as logos/branding are different from UI/UX design.
Out of curiosity: are there any objects that are "pure black"? (i.e. 100% absorption of the entire visible spectrum of light)

My naive guess is that the only way to have pure "black" is an absence of light (ex: deep caves, deep sea, etc)
API Access , 400 daily active users and its gonna be a funtastic service for eejits* who like machine learning, personalization etc.

* Me.
It's awkward, but it sounds like some borderline-illiterate high school students I used to know.
I think they copied the W from the label on the can of cashews I am currently munching.
He was, "low risk" but the police carried AR-15s and handguns, brought along with 2 helicopter units and apparently copyright infringement sniffing dogs. What a gross waste of police, as well as taxpayer money.
I disagree. It's not about the ads directly really. It's about the fact that the ads will dictate the fate of the service. To survive, the service has to go where the customers (which are not the users, but the companies buying ad space) wants it to be. Just look at Twitter: in order to monetize, they will eventually block third party apps from using the service, which is bad for the users, because Twitter's own apps can't compete with many top third party apps.

Looking at the users that are currently using the alpha version you can see that these are mostly tech people - developers, designers, bloggers, artists etc - who are enjoying even the current state, which just has a few hundred users. We don't really mind if the service doesn't scale as Twitter does, that might actually be a good thing. And there are services that proof that paid accounts are a valid and successful way to monetize: look at pinboard.in, for example.
> Exactly. ZFS was deliberately released with a license designed to keep it out of the kernel.

Right, it's a big conspiracy.
For even more readable text, white on black. Semantically, you want to focus on the content and make the user ignore the background. But if the background (i.e. white) is visually louder (sorry for the poor wording) than the text (blackness / nothingness), it's a bad reading experience.
> You'll find those productive robots in every modern factory in the world, building everything from cars to candy more efficiently than humans.

Doing one pre-programmed thing, and they they can't automatically adjust the feed rate as the drill bit wears down, or pick up the bit they drop when their suction pump jams, or change their own electrodes when their spot weld quality drops.

Automated factories take vast human effort to set up and are extraordinarily sensitive (i.e. prone to breaking) to unexpected inputs or deviations in operating environments.

This is not a good line of reasoning when arguing for their suitability for exploring an unknown planet, though I appreciate you might just be specifically addressing your parent's point.
I don't think my friends would have a problem giving me a truthful answer if I said, "hey, I'm doing an experiment this week; I need you to tell me if I smell or not".
App.net Alpha Review
> how ADD can be caused

I'm sorry, but there is no definitive cause to ADD at this point.

Secondly, medication has been proven over and over again as the single most effective method to mitigating the symptoms. Medication plus behavior modification is the most effective treatment.

There is no cure for ADD so they have to treat the symptoms (bandaids).

> We know things like MSG and artificial red food dies cause ADD in a large percentage of the population

We only "know" it in the way that we "know" vaccines cause autism.
No, most people I know would give an honest answer, since they'd be the ones to suffer from it and it's easily fixable (as opposed to being fat).
Like Apple did, now also Samsung uses child labor
> non-design

So you disable even browser defaults and this is superior?
Unless, you know, you want to make images or video pop out with great contrast.
shpoonj your account has been hellbanned as of 11 days ago here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4305877
Let's take one statement from your root post-

But compared to the iPhone, it's far less intuitive, it's build quality is crap, and I can't make it though a day on a charge

Ignoring hilariously subjective statements on intuitive interfaces or build quality (that fuzzy measure that has nothing to do with actual suitability to task or hardiness, but instead ends up being a reflection of what people have been told build quality is. If you make a hammer out of glass, is that superb built quality?), I'll focus on something more empirical -- battery life. I happen to have a GS III, and coincidentally I forgot to plug it in last night (it isn't the first time I've done this). I am currently on hour 29 off the charger, with medium to heavy use, with the battery at 33%. So what now? Do we wage a battle of anecdotes? Should we? Is that a productive use of HN?

The single objective measure you referred to is battery life, to which professionals have actual repeatable, regimented tests. You don't. Your statement on it is irrelevant.
Probably would look less pixely...
One thing to think about is that many users have auto-dimming screens, which means that your dark-grey color will appear black anyway. What tends to happen with these low contrast, analogous color schemes is that they result in a mid-gray soup of colors. I tend to use higher contrast on the web than in print. Itten's seven color contrasts is a great way to learn how to create contrasted color schemes that still survive dimmed screens, even without using the light/dark contrast.
Exactly this. People that really care about optimizations aren't going to install the default Debian install anyways. They'd do a net install and build from there to get max performance for their old computers.

And I love that about Linux. I absolutely love how minimal you can get it (CrunchBang for me is the right mix). But it's time to focus on user experience if we ever want Linux adoption to spread. And that means we have to stop optimizing for computers that came out 10 years ago.
Back when I used to do some print design, we always used 95% K max. Anything else came out funny on the stock we were using.
I like Unity, it is fairly keyboard friendly.

But really, I just don't want changes on the desktop at all. I live in Emacs, the rest should just work.