skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Question for other designers:

Do you feel that while UX is at one end of the spectrum, visual designers at the other - UI Designers sit squarely in between them?

I ask cause I love visual design, making elements pleasant to look at, enticing user to push buttons or guide their eye to areas I want them to look at. But I also spend huge amounts of time time thinking about user flows, scenarios and tasks, how one page flows to another, how it all connects and constantly going around asking/testing with people if the flow is confusing or interfaces aren't clear on what they should do.

I guess UI Designers are half UX and half Visual?
An interesting approach might have been adwords for apps.

Apple came out with "get users comfortable paying for apps & take a 30% cut" model which suits them as a company. But, realistically a lot of apps don't make their money from directly selling the app.

A lot of apps might be willing to bid against each other for users. I'm not sure how big a market this is but it could be substantial.
Thanks! I wish I could add it to the AppStore but unfortunately I can't sandbox it, so it would never get accepted.

One nice thing about Mountain Lion (not sure if it's true for Lion) is that if you quit an app it's usually kept running anyway, so when you reopen it it should start quickly.
I've always wanted to write a Ruby app launcher, like QuickSilver but the language the end user uses is Ruby. So you could define sets of apps like web_dev = [:macvim, :chrome, :iterm], and then web_dev.launch to launch them.

This app tackles that aspect of my launcher, and makes me wonder if my launcher idea is even necessary. Maybe this app is enough. I'm looking forward to it maturing some more (based on other comments)
FTA: We subconsciously respond to treatment - even a sham one - because it comes with assurances that it will weaken the infection, allowing our immune response to succeed rapidly without straining the body's resources.

I wonder if there isn't an alternative explanation, that the placebo effect may be an elaboration of the human social instinct. Consider how a control patient in a drug trial must feel when they are not given any treatment. Perhaps receiving the pill is an act of symbolic inclusion in the tribe that cues the immune system that the individual has a better outlook because they will be cared for by others.
Also, "right before I leave the house". GPS has no idea if I am going to work until after I left.
No.

My point is that the issue is that in many cases individuals don't understand the nature of the relationship that they're entering in to and therefore are restricted in their ability to make a good decision on their own behalf.

Contrast this with what you're saying which is that they don't understand and therefore are making a mistake in choosing Goole or Amazon.

With respect you don't know me and you have no idea what is ideal for me. You don't know my wife or what's ideal for her. You don't know my dad and what's ideal for him. It would be very, very odd if the same of many diverse and well made products was right for all of us.

Being an end in itself isn't better, it's just simpler to understand.
I ordered the Kindle Fire HD 32gig yesterday. I am considering cancelling it due to the ads for one major reason, battery life, and other reasons.

I don't want anything displayed when I lock it. I want it off. I also don't want anything displayed when I turn it on, I want instant access to my stuff.

I'm not a fan of Apple products, but I know the iPad is good for $600 (32gig version), so I feel like the price differential is somewhat reduced by ads, and I'm still taking on the risk of ending up with something like the original fire. ($240 difference)

I wish Amazon had shown a price to remove the ads along with the release and also showed an exact demo of how they work.

When they said customers are buying the best tablet, they really aren't if it has ads. Rather I am buying a lower end, ad supported tablet. From a marketing perspective, they signal low quality, rather than high quality to the customer.
All the companies you are mentioning are very hard to get into for an average guy without connections. Also, it is university and your network that matters, not your place in class.
I don't know if you've ever heard about the way central banks work, but it's pretty complicated too.

There's a difference between using the currency in transactions - which is potentially simple for both dollars and bitcoins - and managing the behind the scenes of the money supply and control mechanisms. Few people need to be central bankers, and few people need to be bitcoin miners, so I don't feel it's that big a deal.
Agile development articles mega-list
All too often, UI people end up being marginalized because management doesn't support them. Unless you just want "a new coat of paint" a good UX design will require some hard changes and product realignments. If the CEO is not interested in taking part in that conversation then you'll never be able to build a good product.
Methinks you need to refine your definition of 'explain'.
The first CSS font on the web
Looks like fun, and I'll have a play in a while.

A couple of things from the top of my head; Alfred integration would be cool, currently I keep nothing in my dock (other than finder and trash) and launch everything via Alfred, being able to launch a group by name in Alfred might be cool.

On switching groups, when it's choosing what to close, does it only close app's that are explicitly listed in other groups? How does it cope with tray apps like dropbox?
When I (infrequently) fire up Steam/games I tend to manually kill off a few of the background servicey apps like dropbox I'd otherwise leave running all day.
Amazon’s Silk Browser tracks users' visited URLs
Managing Per-Project Interpreters and the PATH
Experience :)
I suppose it can be definite as "someone who does what is asked for with nice(maybe not spectacular but at least nice) results, whether it's his main field or not, as long as it's related to it."
Perhaps a clarification from anyone downvoting you as far as why you are being downvoted which I assume is because of this statement "quality go down because YC requires applicants to join HN"?

Or is it "now you have thousands of applicants who would have never joined if YC didn't required it." (sic)

For clarification, per PG:

"The first thing I notice when I look at an application is the username it was submitted under. If it's one I recognize for making thoughtful comments on Hacker News, I give the application extra attention."

http://ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html

So I can fully understand that while joining HN is not a dejure requirement to getting accepted to YC it certainly seems like a defacto requirement based on the above statement.
It has never worked for me. I ended up creating a not-motivated-to-do list.
Also one thing that always gave me pause about Haskell was the record system, and the inability to have fields with the same name in the same module (especially when the fields are generated from a database). Has there been any progress on that front?

There have been a zillion proposals, but as far as I know, not much actual consensus or implementation work.

Anecdotally, I've never run into a situation where this was anything more than a minor annoyance. I don't doubt that it can be a problem under the right set of circumstances, but I think the issue gets more attention than its magnitude truly merits. People theorize a lot about the difficulties it can hypothetically cause, but in practice, it seldom actually manifests itself.
I spent nearly an entire summer doing this, back after I graduated from High School in 2003. If you just follow the manual and enter the commands blindly, you can do it a lot faster. Instead, I took the time to look up each package I was installing, figure out what it did, why I was installing it, and so forth. Chipped away at it a few hours a week, then went through the process of install X windows, _which was the worst experience of my life_.
I actually think it's disingenuous that they don't upfront that they're affiliated with the Obama campaign. There is a small bit of text, but it's intentionally hard to read and placed below the fold.

I'm pretty confident that if you use the site and enter your email address, you're going on their mailing list.
Leveraging the 'watering hole' technique to penetrate into one network in order to gain entry into another more compelling system (the actual target), is clever but nothing new. The recon work represented by Semantec's technical report, however, is fascinating to me. It's a great summary of the attacker's methods; reusing code, quality of code used, and statements (albeit brief) about comparing the techniques used in what would normally seem as unrelated attacks.

I also found it no surprise that 0days in this case were routinely wrapped in shockwave to deliver payloads for guaranteed execution.

AV companies may be snake oil salesmen, but i hope they at least fund research like this a bit more aggressively.
There is some redundancy between vectors and lists, admittedly.

However, edn is not without legacy. Part of that legacy is Lisp and s-expressions, and deserves some respect and accommodation. If that means readers map the [] and () to the same code path, well, that's not much work. Writers can always write only [] if they prefer.

Having the distinction has proven tremendously useful to Clojure, and might to other applications as well. In particular, consider DSLs written in edn, which, like Clojure, might need to distinguish calls or grouping from list/vector data. For all the bitching that goes on about parens, few people would want to work in a language without them :)
Who Will Win the Fast Growing Online-to-Offline Sector?
I just made it up, but I guess it would be a designer that can do the whole song and dance. In the article he specifically mentioned that UX and Visual Design is not the same thing; fair enough but startups want to do more with less...

Again, I'm no expert and I'm just a technical nerd who "doesn't get" designers. Probably should keep my mouth shut, in retrospect ;)
I think you misunderstand how the app works. It closes all apps except those that you have defined in the app group.
So you are part of the problem - repetitive content - that you seek to eliminate? The suggestion you made was also made over 1600 days ago. The problem you claim is new was happening before you joined!

Maybe the hints and tips for new users could repeat every couple of months?

Sorry for grumpiness if this post sounds grumpy.
For whatever reason I can't CMD-Click an article without being taken straight to it. I normally like to open a load of links in the background then read them one by one.
It's more like, "What are the prime factors of the numeric representation of your name", and then the sweet is awarded to the store of the person with that name. It doesn't buy you anything if you relay someone else's answer.
Fwiw, I believe the best estimator has been improved on since HyperLogLog, with a more recent result that is provably optimal (and slightly faster asymptotically, dropping the loglog factor), which perhaps more importantly can also process streamed data online: http://people.seas.harvard.edu/~minilek/papers/f0.pdf
The main way I'd improve HN is more aggressive moderation of stories -- there are just many which often lead to bad comment threads. Either bounce them off the site entirely, or lock/hide/prevent comments on those stories (like on some job posts).

Right now, the first page of stories are all "good", but often there are 50%+ bad ones.

The other thing would be some way to coalesce multiple stories on the same topic into a single entry -- when Steve Jobs dies, it's nice to have a front page post, but no real need to have 30 of them.
Shit Apple Fanatics Say, Part 1
I'm well aware of the central banks and their complexities, but bitcoin just adds a layer on top of that - ultimately bitcoin needs to be converted back to traditional currency in order to be useful for the masses. You haven't really escaped the central bank ... you've just added your own layer of complexity on top of that pre-existing and never-going-anywhere system.
A Dual-SIM Samsung Galaxy Note II spotted in China?
I'm not seeing this as a subsidy issue. Some of the quotes in the article sounded like PR from cable or some other companies.

The biggest thing from a cost POV is the access to city building and utility pole rights of way. In most places, utility poles are owned by a combination telephone, power and cable utilities (or third parties), and these parties make it very difficult to run "last mile" cable by refusing lease space to third parties, or making it extremely expensive to do so. Many municipal broadband initiatives have died as a result of this.

So Kansas City allowed Google to use it's rights of way, buildings, or leased pole space to run cabling. And it allowed a few employees to use excess city office space, and provide some marketing support.

Big whoop. Kansas City made some modest concessions available to make a important service available to its citizens.

The usual subsidy story is different. My city, like many others, indirectly subsidizes the cable company by giving them a monopoly on wired television service. In exchange for a goofy public access cable studio in our high school and free cable internet for a few public organizations, all ratepayers get to pay more money for lousy service.
550 days. :)
10.7.4, MacBook Pro, 2.2 Intel Core i7

Sep 7 10:29:14 wwd2-robert Foreman[3030]: 15.000000Sep 7 10:29:20 wwd2-robert Foreman[3030]: Exception detected while handling key input.
Sep 7 10:29:20 wwd2-robert Foreman[3030]: -[__NSCFDictionary setObject:forKey:]: mutating method sent to immutable object
Sep 7 10:29:20 wwd2-robert Foreman[3030]: (
0 CoreFoundation 0x00007fff8dd9df56 __exceptionPreprocess + 198
1 libobjc.A.dylib 0x00007fff94046d5e objc_exception_throw + 43
2 CoreFoundation 0x00007fff8dd9dd8a +[NSException raise:format:arguments:] + 106
3 CoreFoundation 0x00007fff8dd9dd14 +[NSException raise:format:] + 116
4 CoreFoundation 0x00007fff8dd5abd0 -[__NSCFDictionary setObject:forKey:] + 96
5 Foreman 0x0000000100002bf2 -[AppGroupController saveName] + 103
6 Foreman 0x0000000100002c5f -[AppGroupController control:textShouldEndEditing:] + 17
7 AppKit 0x00007fff8e83d5ff -[NSTextField textShouldEndEditing:] + 236
8 AppKit 0x00007fff8e89f0ca -[NSTextView(NSSharing) resignFirstResponder] + 426
9 AppKit 0x00007fff8e38a429 -[NSWindow makeFirstResponder:] + 429
10 Foreman 0x0000000100002cb2 -[AppGroupController control:textView:doCommandBySelector:] + 76
11 AppKit 0x00007fff8e83c7ac -[NSTextField textView:doCommandBySelector:] + 105
12 AppKit 0x00007fff8e86db48 -[NSTextView doCommandBySelector:] + 160
13 AppKit 0x00007fff8e6c6c93 -[NSKeyBindingManager(NSKeyBindingManager_MultiClients) interpretEventAsCommand:forClient:] + 1799
14 AppKit 0x00007fff8ea1b6ca -[NSTextInputContext handleEvent:] + 747
15 AppKit 0x00007fff8e8e5298 -[NSView interpretKeyEvents:] + 248 16 AppKit 0x00007fff8e85dec5 -[NSTextView keyDown:] + 691
17 AppKit 0x00007fff8e33b7ac -[NSWindow sendEvent:] + 7430
18 AppKit 0x00007fff8e2d4a55 -[NSApplication sendEvent:] + 5593
19 AppKit 0x00007fff8e26b0c6 -[NSApplication run] + 555
20 AppKit 0x00007fff8e4e7244 NSApplicationMain + 867
21 Foreman 0x0000000100000fe0 start + 52
)

The syslog also contains a list of all the apps that are running and the list of apps to close, the apps to close include things I didn't add to Foreman and other things like /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Library/LoginItems/backgroundinstruments.app which I'm not even running. When it catches an exception it seems to shutdown everything in the "to close" list.
Really interesting. As someone who's done some consulting in e-commerce I've always dreamt of an open source engine based on MongoDB.

Magento and Prestashop are perfect examples of "relational databases gone wrong"... 2,000 tables? Right!
Well, C is never inadequate. Quite a few languages have their interpreters/jit-compilers written in C. C is portable. C will continue to be a major language and will not become some obscure legacy language. You can tell I am a fan boy, but I am a fan boy for a reason. That said, you do not seem to like C, and further you already have the program written. I think you would pitch this as your "pseudo-code" and show it to your customer. Let him or her know that you will be rewriting it and that this could take some time. If your customer is willing to wait, you now have two programs that you can benchmark to compare speed. You can compare development times in a real way, etc... quite an interesting little project once the "project" is finished.
The people they want to hire are fine with walking away from insulting tactics like lowering the bid. Plus there would be serious reputational damage.
I think you have just spawned a recursive argument, which
Segmentation fault
Stik.com’s Dirty Business Practices
A quick story (a personal blog post) about Stik.com and some unethical practices I observed.
Actually it depends on how you use GPSs. Its certainly possible to write a mapping/GPS app for a smart phone that is competitive with the more advanced features of handheld or dashmount GPSs, but I simply haven't seen one yet. None of the features I need are big ones, but rather a bunch features that add up to a much better user experience for a GPS geek. A couple of those hard to find features are: multi point routing (or some way to allow me to tell the GPS the route instead of the other way around), ability to build routes on PC/Mac and upload to the GPS, off-road routing, track to route conversion, etc..
I have a DX and frankly, I think it's a pleasure to read and use. I would like to see a DX2 come out sometime!
It's like a teacher telling a class "Pick a number between 1 and 1000". If they pick the same number as the teacher, they win. If more than one picks the winning number, the first person to get it to the teacher wins.

There's no "many sums to calculate" contributing towards a result. It's more a lottery - did my one calculation produce the right number.
You're right, I missed that it CLOSES apps, not hides. And it closes things very aggressively, including system apps.

Definitely not the app for me.
Nope, all REST calls now require authentication: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1/overview#Authentication... (and search is now formally part of the REST API as of v1.1)
Well, goodbye twitter widgets on lots of websites, I guess. (deviantART does a JSONP widget on user pages, lots of wordpress plugins do it, etc...)
I could tell you were being tongue-in-cheek so it didn't put me off. The Steve Jobs part actually got a chuckle out of me.
There has to be some element of truth in this. If I look at a post about javascript closures, and am as mind-blown as I was 5 years ago, I have failed as a programmer (or vim, or erlang, or whatever...).

I can't suggest that we try upping the "super deep"/"good intro or midlevel" stuff ratio, since there are always new people floating around who need to see this content to learn about it. And there are still plenty of good deep articles that float through here.

I work in a college department, I watch grad students come in each year, and the best graduate and move on. I have come to realize that it is just a necessary function of community to have to go through the "boring" set of discussions to get the new folks up to speed. These are more or less always the same. Its after the intro stuff that new and interesting things are taught, and the perception of the pace slows down. New stuff has been happening at the same rate forever, its just that "new to me" stuff has started to approach the "actually new" stuff rate. This can lead to quality seeming to go down.
It will close any open app not listed in the app group that you just clicked on. So, for example, if I don't have Excel in any of my app groups and I click on an app group that has Emacs and Terminal, then Excel will be closed.

It only closes apps that appear in the dock. It won't close dropbox or alfred or any background processes.

edit: And I also want Alfred integration :) I was thinking it could create .foreman files which you could then open with Alfred. Foreman would then handle it the way it handles clicking on an app group now.
I don't know where you live but where I do, driving is the main mode of transportation and especially the only one where directions matter.
The 2 Biggest Mistakes I Made When Learning to Code
Curiosity sets personal speed record, begins flexing its robot arm
IPhone is bigger than all of Microsoft
I think dragging from the dock always just removes the apps from the dock. At least that's the default behavior, and I have not found a way around it.
They're all set to target _blank...could that be affecting your CMD-clicking?
Be afraid. Very afraid. Project managers can often appear like roadblocks to innovative solutions. In fact, I've lost arguments even when the benefits for a particular technical solution are obvious and accepted. But maintenance is a big factor for those people. Not meeting a requirement is bad for your future prospects. Deceiving others is potentially disastrous for you current ones.

What would be said if a future requirement, unknown to you, were for an ARM chipped portable controller for said instrumentation, as a student project.

Bad move.
Think early TechCrunch. No tech stories, only direct links to products and services are allowed.

http://pivoted.co/
It's not posts about Apple per se. Apple makes fantastic stuff. It was the out of control community fawning and over reactionary responses to the slightest critical comment that was the problem.

A year ago even commenting that anything was wrong with any Apple product was met with derison, scorn and a flock of downvotes.

For whatever reason, the tone here has changed tremendously for the better so that this community can actually have serious, educational and productive discussions, and even present respectful competing opinions here. It was frustrating, but frankly it was boring as hell also.

I really think the turning point was the moment that pg turned off the points.
This looks pretty interesting, although I'd strongly prefer a self-hostable system to SaaS (at least as an option).
Obstinate people like myself who find pulling out their credit card for unnecessary crap annoying.
The Year of the Game
"HN rockstars would receive hundreds of upvotes for the most minor of comments"

It would be interesting to test the same thesis that I have which indicates there is a halo effect on anyone considered a rockstar which allows them to get more upvotes than they would w/o the rockstar status.

This is of course the way life operates. The only question is to what extent it happens. People tend to pay more attention to someone who has the trappings of success and/or has had their ticket punched.

My guess is that a long thoughtful comment by a new user or non rock star would gain almost the same upvotes as the same long thoughtful comment by a HN rockstar.

However a short comment, I'm fairly certain, (and once again this would have to be tested) would generate more upvotes from the rockstar then it would by a new user or non-rockstar. The gap would be much wider.
All this will lead to is gaming the system by trying to post material which will gain karma, i.e. currying the favor of the majority, vs posting things that are legit interesting. It will bury gems and minority opinion.
Facebook already has you..
It just seems kind of irrelevant to say that they are "required to honor" anything, given that they are entirely free to decide not to hire someone they bid on, and that someone is entirely free to not accept any offer they make.
I don't live in a big city and my main mode of transportation is driving and especially the one where directions matter. Walking around inside the mall/plaza or my university campus don't require me to look up directions. It has been handy a few times when I visited cities but those add up to at max a week in a year. So yeah, it is pretty useless for me and thank goodness something like Waze exists on iPhone.