skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
yes, pubsub is an old pattern.

what HFT experience do you have that makes you think of those systems as toys?

a webpage that responds to requests in 10 milliseconds is fast. a trading engine that responds to requests in 10 milliseconds is a joke.
IIRC both Erlang and ROC were inspired by telco reliability culture.
Me too, but let me add that I think it is also worth considering that they may not be there to search. For that reason it feels a bit weird to make www.wikipedia.org a crappy version of www.google.com...
English speaking people, presumably.
Craigslist’s Challenger Could Be an App, or Several
They seem to be very effective and successful, until you see their incapability of grasping their advised Wiki logo's and Wordpress logos similarity. That's where they just fail.
Nice addition. Question for the community, what are the thoughts on this approach of iframing the full content (ie filepicker.io's complete app) inside a lightbox vs fully built in JS?

I have a project that I'm about to venture in which will need a similar setup and curious on thoughts.
I think it already delights users. Wikipedia is so absolutely content and hyperlink driven that it hardly needs much else. It's immense popularity and ubiquity is proof of that. I draw my delight not from some invasive graphics and UI work, but from the fact that when I want to read about Pyramids, I click a link on Google to Pyramids (or on the Wikipedia front page) and ALL I SEE IS PYRAMIDS. No other UI, no other stuff to interfere with what I'm trying to do. And from there, I click hyperlinks and quickly jump from Pyramids to Ancient Engineering to Trigonometry to the various mathematicians who have improved on the work the Egyptians did.

The delight is in the speed at which I can quickly explore and consume human knowledge. Nothing I've seen in terms of graphical suggestions would improve that - only distract or prevent my friends in other countries from being able to use it properly.

To me, Wikipedia is embodiment of "less is more", which supposedly all of these hotshot designers are supposed to subscribe to, but apparently mistranslate it to "a metric butt-load of negative space".
> A better one is to understand how a car is built before you drive it.

Yep, I agree. That is a better analogy. If you know how to build a car, you will be an expert at building cars, not driving them. I mean, how many of the better racing drivers are builders themselves?

If you always have to think about the how, the expression and the art suffers. Always. Human brain does not think in abstract logic, no matter how much you convince yourselves otherwise(may be except for some). It is always better at thinking intuitively.

Now, if you disagree, I would encourage you to keep posting. I like to discuss this. Not just to challenge you, but would like to know about the mistakes in my thinking.
I mean its easy to make a nice interface for people who just browse and such. But it becomes a problem when people go: "Oh so does it have Word and all my other office products?"

Open office and etc are all pretty poor replacements.
Batik Sarimbit C29
I don't buy it. In that scenario, how does anybody learn to drive in the first place? Someone who hasn't spent years of their life driving manually won't have developed the skills to intervene properly in an emergency. At best, driving would, become a specialty career/hobby, like piloting aircraft.

By the time all personal transportation is automatic, it won't just be the status quo with "robot chauffeurs". The whole transportation ecosystem will have to change substantially. Self-driving cars are just a first step to get people used to (or even enamored with) the idea of automatic transportation on a large scale.
The biggest problem I have with this sort of thing -- actually probably the whole field(s) of UI/UX design -- is that there is no actual prototype but it seems like they are implying that the programmers didn't include any of those features because they didn't think of them, and that now the real work for the 'redesign' has been done. As if the hard part was making a bunch of pictures.

So this whole thing really irritates me.

Having said that, I think that modernizing Wikipedia or MediaWiki is a an interesting idea (although probably not a priority), and this is actually a decent starting point for discussing how many of the new (mainly, but not entirely, stylistic) UI/UX trends (principles in a few cases I guess) could be applied.

I mean obviously their nav takes up more space than necessary and we don't need Wikipedia's logo to look just like WordPress's, but the minimalism, alternate typography of some sort, monochrome icon widgets, etc. are apparently now required in order to qualify as contemporary design. And the connection clouds and highlighter quote idea is cool. And it probably wouldn't hurt to remove one or two of the buttons on the editor or move them to an advanced section, or spend an hour or two making the editor looking more contemporary.

In case anyone actually reads this, I have a question. Is the thing where buttons and controls are monochrome icons (and usually with no 3d appearance), is that going to stay? I mean, is there a reason you can't have multiple colors in icons now? Also it seems a lot of times you don't get labels on buttons anymore (I know, tooltips). How much of this stuff is likely to stick for the next 5, 10 years, or is it just a short term fad? I mean I coded a UI recently for a component platform thing I am building (actual functional software platform, not pictures) and it had multicolor traditional icons on normal 3d buttons with labels. This UX guy saw that and said I was 'completely out of touch'. So I took the labels, 3d and colors off the buttons.
> ...and decided to eliminate, ahem, everything except... …the letter W, which is/could be the most famous W in the whole web.

Wikipedia is available in 275 languages, and the current logo at least acknowledges that there are other writing systems and that this is not just an English encyclopaedia.

Changing it for a W is a complete disregard of the significance of Wikipedia as a multilingual reference work.
A (folding) bicycle can solve a lot of those problems.
Go, is to my mind, the most exciting new programming language by far. I am looking forward to seeing how it progresses in the next few months.

Now if only they had called it GoLang....
The critique was written by a competitor. Isn't the motive obvious?
Wordpress isn't very well-known by the general public. I mean hell, it's not even in the same ballpark compared to Wikipedia.
It's only n-factor if you have n orthogonal keys. Typically "something you know", "something you have", and "something you are". In the same sense that two passwords isn't "2-factor", I wouldn't say that a finger print + DNA sample is "2-factor". The problem with "something you are" as a third factor is that it typically requires you to have some hardware to get that information, in which case it's just 2-factor again. And if we get the technology to read out brain dumps, knowing a password is just a part of something you are and we're back to 1-factor... Which suggests it's not the number of factors that are important, but the total number of bits of information involved and how hard it is for theoretical attackers to gather all those bits. Is your scheme torture-proof? I doubt anyone would prefer torture over handing over their phone+password to their gmail account. But most attackers aren't going to come torture you. A phone or a yubikey or what have you is immune to OS keyloggers which defeat passwords of any complexity, that alone makes them useful against a big class of attackers. What class of attackers does e.g. a thumbprint further defeat? It sounds like it's more useful as a reset verification than anything else--you can forget your password and lose your phone but you don't lose your thumb--usually. (We can also get the 'mark of the beast' and have chips implanted in our hands.)
What is the thing you can build with Riak Enterprise that you don't think you can build with just-plain-Riak?
Why are they leaving so much in their accounts? Amazon is not a bank, and as such they're probably not subject to the same regulations. We've already seen this issue with people leaving too much money in winnings in online poker accounts, or PayPal accounts.
Guilty as charged. Sometimes it's hard, you really think it's a good idea but if it's a side project not generating any revenue then, as much as you'd like to follow the users' sugestions, you just don't have time to (or any other reason).
If you can change the email or password by phone, then nothing is solved. Adding the credit card was, as I understand, simply because amazon required a credit card number on the account (possibly last four digits).
I don't think thats the kind of deletion vs inclusion he was referring to, though you are 100% correct. I think what he meant was there should be a setting you can choose to view a minimalist version of the site.
To be honest, I was shocked at the prices when compiling the initial list.

I think it can partly be attributed to the higher-end software dev/design teams being first to the punch with Retina, and partly because most of these apps are productivity / media apps. Aperture, Coda, etc. are definitely worth the price of admission – they're fantastic software.
Well if you have an app or website that enables photosharing, you'd want to capture content from offsite and deliver it into your gallery.

Importing stuff from the big sites--Flickr, et al is great, but say someone has everything sitting on their personal webpage or scattered on site around the internet?

Instead of making them save, then re-upload a bookmarklet is great.
I'm glad Wikipedia is nothing remotely like that.
For comparison, a great deal of us in the US, if not most of us, were taught this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cursive.svg

And I hear this is fast on its way out, with cursive English script simply dying, with no replacement.
Natural computation:A Philosophy
Interesting case here for carjackers. You're Google car probably won't floor it in the middle of the night through a red light when an armed gang approaches your car. Then again I guess that's what "manual" is for.
Oh dear...

New! is a fairly... new.. advertising agency from my country, Lithuania. They are trying to become better known, so this is without a doubt a targeted publicity stunt ("Look how well it worked for Dustin Curtis to redesign American Airlines! I guess we can do something similar!")

And as that, it's pretty bad. Not only did they showed poor design (in a sense of "how it works") skills, but also left a bad impression as a studio.
I see some Wikipedia people commenting, so I'll mention I MUCH prefer the existing Wikipedia over this design. It's simple and it loads quickly.

I find this design gaudy and the gradient bars reminds me of mid-2000s ASP.net design style, which I have a particular adversion to.

Just because a design has been around awhile doesn't mean it requires an overhaul.
right, that's why i left HFT.

i was just trying (inarticulately) to make the argument that even if the "only" cost of HFT is the massive amount of talent going into that field, it's still a huge cost.
:) Even if it were securely hashed, giving out the first 2 letters reduces the range of guesswork substantially, especially when combined with wordlists. Also, the service-guys have to see my password, after all, they are immediately able to tell me whether I "guessed" the right password.

I don't believe there is any hashing going on, after all, the bank in question is ANZ, they don't even use TANs for online-banking.
Box Sync - Finally Ready For Primetime
You sure? I suspect for most people, they don't use enough features of Word for LibreOffice Writer to feel much different.
Isn't this scenario why Gmail's 2-factor authorization gives you a set of one-time passwords?
It's part of the Redditization. Please try to keep up.
New is New's idea is just to trash the well-recognisable wikipedia W, and replace it with a new one, with no good reason.

And trash the icons for the various Wikimedia projects.
Nice observation. I buy it, but question how often authors have that specific intent in mind vs. unaffiliated submitters and voters creating the narratives with what they can find. Who knows? There's a chance Madonna^WMarco himself might not be targeting the HN masses with his latest post.

Regardless, it's finally dawning on me that the never-ending stream of Apple punditry is a fucking bore, including the "high quality" sources in the echo-chamber such as DF and 5by5.
WAN replication and their apparently awesome support are the differentiating factors I usually hear about.
I disagree - their target audience is developers, not "normal people". Because bootstrap's default styles have been beaten to death by startup-in-a-weekend type apps, I subconsciously don't trust their service because it seems like it might not be here in a month or two.
Why the Swiss? They speak French, Italian and German.
Clever is the enemy of simple.
Flat. More space. Focused on typography. Typography.

I think designers are moving further away from form follows function.
I've been waiting for an account for a couple months with you guys now... how long until you start taking more people?
Thank you. That was helpful feedback. We are all medical professionals so we are interested in outside viewpoints since our outlook may be narrowed by our thought that we have experience in the field. We will definitely look into these ideas!
Actually, there was a big kerfuffle on Thingiverse when someone published, as proof of concept, a design for a plastic rifle magazine: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:11636
Facebook VP Of Engineering On Moving From Coding To Management
Yes, the key to grokking Erlang is understanding that all of the good design decisions come from reliability, not concurrency. Concurrency is to serve reliability, not the other way around.
One of my favorite articles I always share when someone does an unsolicited redesign without putting the requisite analysis into it:

http://www.ryanholiday.net/this-is-what-real-analysis-looks-...
> PS: 4chan has also invented a clever sorting algorithm

Isn't this just relying on the scheduler which is probably a minheap?
You mean wikipedia?

I mean, wP?
Indeed, I can't say I recall its appearance at all.
AngelList is an international (if US focused) platform for startups to connect with accredited investors.

Seedrs is a UK platform for startups to crowdfund equity investment from non-accredited investors.

Kickstarter is a US platform for individuals or companies to crowdfund patronage donations.
Hah, I agree, but when did "cloud" become synonymous with "outsourced services"? That's kind of an abuse of the term :-)
Tried it, and there's apparently more to it than that. When I change the resolution that "Device" disappears from the Hardware submenu. Other changes to the plist, (e.g. the name of the device) leave it working.
what does that even mean go away
Microsoft's Massive Metro Mistake
"We hope you will find it interesting."

Why the guillotine on these guys? I think they contributed something meaningful to the discussion. You don't have to like it to be respectful.
If there are people making money off those HFT trades, then somebody else is losing money. It's a persistent tax on the entire market. Just because it's in the background where you can't see it doesn't mean it isn't affecting you.
Agghhh, it's like they're making it web-3.0-y with all the giant logos/buttons and a massive toolbar. I already hate sites enough that cram a whole load of fat things above the actual content. Especially sharing buttons. I KNOW HOW TO COPY A URL DAMMIT!
Hey, perhaps I'm missing something, but could you add a button to show the styles on an element, somehow? Thanks!
I don't think they're proposing changes to Mediawiki, they're proposing changes to the look of Wikipedia. While they may be synonomous, one is the software, one is the organization that uses the software.

Wikipedia could change the template for their version of the site, without affecting MW at all.
Introducing the New Windows Photo Gallery and Movie Maker
This is a smart idea by these folks, it's generating buzz for their firm and likely helped them improve their branding chops as they thought through this.

I found the way they presented it deferential and respectful enough, why trash their effort? Of course these fantasy redesigns are naive and mostly impractical, but there may also be some decent/helpful ideas being suggested. Do you think Wikipedia is worse off for all of us discussing how it might be improved?

I like unsolicited redesigns so long as the people behind them aren't snide or arrogant in the way they present them (I can see why the NY Times redesign irked people).
A great observation is that having access to the content provided by Wikipedia is a delight in and of itself. That's a fantastic starting point for investigating, then, how you can enhance that experience with great design.

These guys did that with this brief. It's not the right answer, but it does raise some interesting questions. How do you design a more delightful Wikipedia without damaging the content? Because surely you agree that certain elements of Wikipedia - like editing pages, for instance - could use a good bit of delight here and there.
Carjacking a car loaded with recording equipment that probably phones home with GPS and other environmental data probably isn't the best idea.
DEAR READERS THANK YOU
I put 40k on my first car and hit stuff enough to warrant replacing something - often just a fender etc - at least 5 times. Only one fender bender when I rear ended someone at ~15 mph talking on my phone like an asshole.

I know I'm a worse driver than most. But I also wouldn't say that my similarly young friends average anywhere close to 1 such error per 250k miles. Definitely closer 25k.
How's the air up there on your high horse?
It's very Ayn Randish, Atlas Shrugged stuff but some days I can't help but feel this way.
Paul Graham's most inspiring quotes
I do already see some general design improvement on this page compared to some of the earlier ones, good work on that! As for obvious Bootstrapness, I think if you wanted to do something quick & minor with a big impact you could just change that default navbar background.
From mod to game: How DayZ will evolve as a standalone release
But does it matter what language is more popular? That is not what Wikipedia is about, really
At issue here is that many of the things they choose to pour their delighting syrup over are fundamental to the way the project is managed. We probably don't need to litigate whether MediaWiki's UX could be improved; it can. "How?" is the operative question; one clear answer is probably "Not this way."
However, even if one could produce such an organism with diybio technology, not killing oneself in the process would still be non-trivial.
Turboname finds the name of your next project
I'd happily pay $1000 a year for a car that doesn't drive itself.
Ask HN: Want to improve the startup weekend manager open source project?
You may know startup weekend and the way each event handle idea selection, team selection, etc.
As an organizer of the past startup weekend in my city I build a simple yet handy application that helps guys on a startup weekend to vote for ideas, promote it on social networks and share team information. Also as the content stays on the site it acts as a repository of past events and let you search for past ideas, teams and interesting people to know. It could be a great place for networking with startup weekend participants all over the world.

swmanager (the app) was build in 2 tiers python/tastypie api and a backbone.js responsive client for mobile and web browsers.

I just want to check if there is anyone interested on help us improve this open source project.

The github repo is: https://github.com/rutanmedellin/swmanager

Feel free to fork, comment or whatever guys, tnx!
Is it a good idea for a design shop to propose features that would beg huge numbers of otherwise passive consumers of the encyclopedia to register accounts? Because you'd have to do that, to get highlighting and bookmarking.
"loving LOLcats or rickrolling as outputs is like loving a tasty hamburger; visiting 4chan is like visiting the meat factory. At some point, it’d probably help to visit the meat factory, but that might make you go vegetarian."

-- Danah Boyd (retelling her friend's saying)

http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/06/12/for-the...
Ask HN: Do I really need a nontechnical person?
I and my friend got an idea that can be very valuable if implemented nicely. I am the technical person and he is a business person.

Since I already had something to work when we thought about this project, I said to my friend that he should have matured details as I was finishing my task and getting my hands dirty with the required technologies.

Pretty long time has passed and although I am fully ready now to develop, he didn't do his homework and the model isn't even ready.

In short, if he doesn't help me for the business model, where else can he help me? I think, no where! Is it better to leave him and continue myself?
The point is network effects and total wealth. Imagine we could import every programmer in the world and put them all in Silicon valley. Hard to imagine that being a bad position for the US.

A good analogy would be the financial systems of London and New York. Just because all the financial people congregate there doesn't mean they are taking jobs from the local talent.
Wow, I had no idea that Wikia ran on MediaWiki. I have usually avoided wikia wikis because they always seemed harder to use than Wikipedia. Now that I look closer, I can see the similarities.

What is the Wikia fractal?
I think the basic principle of visual simplicity is going to stick around. I do think there's some faddish elements to the adoption though. I like dropping 3d. Embracing the two dimensional property of the screen seems well founded. I doubt the monochrome is permanent: we can simply convey more information with color. I'm conflicted on the lack of labels. They are undoubtedly useful, but do visually clutter the screen. To speculate I suspect that if eye tracking come into wide usage tooltip like extra contextual information on the focus of attention could take over almost completely.
It's not as if many webpages couldn't be made to respond to faster.

Not to brag, but I've built trading engines in the past year that can process 20 years worth of data in less than a ms.

Now I'm a founder at your usually derrided photos-sharing start up. Sure we could make most requests come out of the server in less than 2ms, but what of it? It's still going to take the user upwards of 1.5 seconds to load all of the content, and at least 100ms spent on the wire. Working at a consumer level startup, there's no point in optimizing the server yet when network costs are so high, and there's no point in improving the network when there's no ROI in it.

----

Answering to his question:
> what HFT experience do you have that makes you think of those systems as toys?

I'd imagine that massive distributed systems are more complex to think through that HFT systems because the later are more monolithic due to speed constraints.
Stuck in the Tech Startup Culture
We are being promised a self-driving car. Either it drives itself, or it doesn't. If it doesn't, it's not what it claims. And if it does, what are the driving aids for?! That's like wearing a hat indoors.
Really? I use a custom search engine in my browsers so I can search directly from the address bar since I know I want Wikipedia results and don't want to sift through other junk.
Carsharing systems are already dealing with these problems successfully.
The Best Recruiters – followup to The Recruiter Honeypot
Yay, we (Pattern Insight) finally made it to Techcrunch.... not that we tried too hard. Our focus was primarily on getting and keeping our customers happy.
Google Fiber/TV Now Available in K.C. Free packages also available without tv