skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's a case of optimization. You can either build a handles-all-situations MS-Office, or you can optimize for an 80/20. When your feature set grows out of the 80/20 you run into issues.

For me, a perfect example is locking/unlocking the pivot on the iPhone by double-clicking the home button, sliding the bottom bar rightwards, clicking an icon with a turny-lock on it. That's total madness, but I understand how it got there. When I finally discovered that I mailed all my iPhone-owning friends, none who knew the trick.

Similarly, killing apps that remain in memory. Double-click home, hold down one of the icons until all the in-memory apps show a (-), then delete each of them. Granny will never get that. I'd personally like a settings page that just lets me set a default on/off for in-memory for each app so I don't have to keep cleaning up apps that want to use GPS and memory.

So, rather than having 10 buttons on your iPhone you now have one button and have to use morse-code to tell the thing what you want. Rather than an ugly screen menu, you have to use Google to figure out how to take a screenshot or un-lock the swivel.

When all you have is a home-button, everything looks like a nail. Or something.

I've made similar optimizations/(later possible "mistakes") myself. I tend to put a lot of effort into few features to do exactly what's required, but that always has to be balanced with possible future feature expectations. It's possible to paint myself into a corner with that, so I often think "is this app meant to be 'tight' like an Apple app, or should I optimize for extensibility?"
If they don't personally know the answer, the partners have a broad network of education insiders and experts to tap from, both on the educator and investor side. IK12 has funded companies in the e-learning space, browse through the companies page: http://www.imaginek12.com/companies.html

(I'm the co-founder at LearnSprout, IK12 W12)
All the social buttons and 3rd party crap on that website crashed Safari on my iPhone. Lord what I would pay to have Adblock and noscript on my iPhone.
Interesting thought. Never thought about it this way (and working in an environment, where it might fit).

Not trying to defend the practice of ads like they are today, but thinking twice brings one thought to my head:

Why recreate the style of an old medium in a new one. When the printing press was developed - for the first decades books just looked like before. looked like they were handwritten by scribes. Gradually books evolved into something more of their own.

So why build digital copies of magazine-layout? I really do not have a better solution - I am merely asking the question, that keeps bugging me all the time, when I think about the evolution of the web.
Absolutely. Apple always has, and always will cater to extremely simplistic use cases. Apple products are a lot like a conspicuously clean room - dont look around too much and you'll be fine, but the second you open that bulging cupboard, all the shit piled in there comes crashing down on you.

I still think that Mac OS (not necessarily iOS) is much much more reliable and has a better UI than Windows, but this brings to light an important point. Apple's software tends to have a lot of nasty little edge cases that you run into (and not as a power user either). Its also unfair to marginalize the view point as a minority (for example, until recently, you couldn't even properly set up google calendar to work with multiple calendars on iOS. the issue about a 19 GB other is definitely not an uncommon occurrence either). Further, its not functionality being sacrificed for aesthetics. It's aesthetics being prioritized over functionality consistently leading to bugs which we have to put up with for years.
As a big user of PDF.js, I have to say it's great for basic PDF documents. However, complex vectors don't render nicely with this
b) No data loss is acceptable. Any data loss is simply "product doesn't work".

So Windows XP never worked for me because of all the blue screens of death where I lost data from time to time?

Consumer grade technology can and does lose data, too bad! but its the reality we have to live with for now until better hardware/software floods the consumer market that handles the data loss problem at an enterprise level.

In this day and age, if you lose data because you didn't take the necessary backup precautions, I don't see that as being Microsoft or Apple's fault, it's your fault!
Case in point: my last purchase of Apple hardware was a Mac Mini in December 2010. Nice installation, I like Time Machine. Max OS X Server is obviously a broken product, but there is a BSD-like OS underneath so no problem.

Two weeks later internet connection dies. After spending huge amounts of time investigating all kinds of things that seem that they might be relevant, I use the Time Machine "revert OS to a previous state" option and it works again. I spend more time on support forums, &c, and find out more about how to diagnose problems with the wireless, in case it happens again, which it does, 2 weeks later. With this new-found knowledge, I figure out that the firewall is blocking DHCP lease renewal, a problem easily fixed with an ipfw command. Every two weeks since then, 30 or so times, I guess, the same thing happens, and I have to fix this. I have stopped trying to understand why my installation of OSX seems to think it should periodically block DHCP lease renewal.

It's my impression that, based on my experience trying to find help, that the Mac OS user world is different to that for Linux or Windows in that the people who get known as Mac OS experts generally don't have much in the way of detailed knowledge of what the OS does at initialise (despite Singh's out-of-date documentation of that in Max OSX Internals), how to query device state, &c, but instead have cookery book knowledge of things like tricks you can do with the defaults command.

And this seems to be the way that Apple likes it. They make a polished product that you are not meant to mess with in ways they did not anticipate, with the OS exposing a limited API.
I won't say that any of these are particularly discoverable, but there are a couple solutions to the contact search issue - one is to tap the stausbar, which scrolls directly to the top of the list, and the other is to use the letter-index on the side, as the entire region is a high-speed thumbscroller (tap anywhere, fling to top).

The internationalization button certainly does suck when and only when keyboards you do not want to use are activated, however. :P
Maybe they are but they can't get the distribution to hardware or ecosystem to develop apps for it. Most PCs are sold with the OS pre-installed. As for mobile... there is still hopes for plenty of competition. Jolla Mobile being one of the future hopes created out of the remnants of the Nokia Meego team.
Every time you plug your iThing to your Mac/Windows it backs it up. And as of iOS 5 you don't even have to plug it in. They only have to be on the same network and the device automatically backs it up daily.

Oh, and if you feel nervous, you can right click on the iThing in iTunes and select backup to manually backup again.
Padrino is pretty good, but really, the docs are lacking in my opinion. For someone new to coding ruby on the web, getting a good grounding with Rails and then using Padrino is, in my opinion, a better idea.
Still, somehow keychain would have to know the passwords, and presumably they would have to be encrypted with the login password of the current user. So it would still be possible for the current user to extract their own passwords. I don't think it is possible to hide passwords on the client side.
b is even worse, because it might be i had that data and it was important to me.
I remember a time when template engines ran on the server and sent finished HTML pages to the clients. What happened to that and why have we adopted methods such as this? Is this to balance load away from the server?
Medium-priced islets were no great investment after all
Robocopter arrives
Switching to a new aspect ratio and new dock connector surely does break some eggs.
Agreed. That sort of setup does suck. But then again that sort of team isn't really doing Scrum (they're certainly ignoring the way the roles should work, and they're certainly not using the sprint retrospective to improve).

This isn't Agile sucking, or Scrum sucking. This is folks not doing Scrum sucking.

The issues that caused the OP to move from Scrum to a Lean approach - I can go with most of those (indeed they match my observations of some other transitions)... but the delivery one doesn't ring true in my experience. I've seen a bunch of Scrum teams with a laser like focus on delivery.
Advertisers have a financial incentive to track you as much as possible and are constantly engineering their trackers to do it even better. Users are on the side of a losing team if they don't stand up. I read 3 sentences one was "They can't track you in different tabs" baloney.
The iPhone 5 is hardly a great leap forward
Overnight working makes a comeback at Western carmakers
Do you have sky? Sky know more about your TV viewing habits than you think. And they have the technology to sell that information. Why do you think they've been pushing new Sky+ boxes at everyone. This isn't conspiracy, I've have a Sky representative tell me this.
The real-world analogues of the devices he's interacting with do just work with minimal thinking, and this is what the letter index mimics. In an indexed book, you find the letter and quickly flip open the book to the proper page. In an indexed scrolling list, you touch it and scroll directly to that letter (or magnifying glass). I really don't intend to 'blame the user,' but I'd respect the 'user' at least a little bit more if the user would explore the software. The options are very clearly laid out, in the user's language (especially wherein a user can use said language to write such an in-depth rant!), and they are discoverable with even the most casual searching.

Touching the screen isn't going to get your fingers sawed off or anything. It's there to be touched, and destructive actions are insulated from touch. A little exploration goes more than a long way.
1) From a technical perspective, this is damn cool - exceedingly well done. Color me very impressed.

2) I hope I never actually see anyone using this on a website, attempting to make things "easier." Between Scribd and Slideshare, and Adobe trying to force its hideous crash-prone plugins into my browser, there are already enough people making a mess out of what is one of the more well-thought-out aspects of OS X. Give me a link to a PDF, which Preview.app handles in wonderful fashion any day.

3) It would make a sweet browser plugin on browser-in-a-box platforms and other platforms that don't have a nice native implementation (which upon further reading seems to be the goal).
XSS injections on these are gonna be fun..
To paraphrase Winston Churchill, Apple's products are the hardest to use, except for all the other product out there...
Much as I love Valve, Steams usability is pretty poor. I wouldn't trust them to make good OS X replacement any time soon.
Guy activated kanji in preferences, but doesn't like it. I don't know who else should be blamed! The iPhone comes with only your local keyboard layouts.

Do you expect apple to display a pop up every time you change the language saying "did you know you can disable unwanted keyboard layouts?"
But free.
Meet instacompo.se before everyone
JAL gives investors coupons for cheap flights if they don’t dump their shares
Much of this is dopey nonsense but he's correctly describing a few Real Problems.

-- iOS devices blowing their asset layout and 'Othering' out is a Real Problem that used to happen far too often. The only fix beyond a backup+restore is to remove and re-add photos and music. If that doesn't work? Time to restore up to 60GB over USB2! Whee. Good luck explaining this to mom.

-- The built in Mac applications and frameworks are frightfully poor - it's unacceptable from a company that prides itself on quality. SyncServices is still a flaming travesty, Mail.app spontaneously corrupts messages and passwords, Spotlight can die in twenty different ways, iCal is a UI disaster, Address Book has completely broken sync options... the list goes on and on and on. Of all of these, I think Mail is the absolute worst. Three total rewrites and it's still neurotic on a good day.

-- iPhoto is goddamn slow. No matter what, no matter where, no matter when.

iOS is an order of magnitude more usable for two orders of magnitude more people with an order of magnitude fewer issues and two orders of magnitude fewer things to go wrong that makes an order of magnitude more money for them. So I think that's where he Lion's share (haha) of Apple's QA is spent. Sadly, I fear OS X will never receive that same level of care.
I'm sorry - I could have been clearer. The point I was trying to make was that the process of reading to determine whether it is a heavy weight process is not an onerous one.
A lot of people did consider Windows 9x unusable because of problems with stability and reliability. XP Mostly fixed those problems, though it did get off to a bit of a rough start.
How did LinkedIn pick dust.js as its client-side templating solution?
I stand corrected. Though I am curious, it is replacing standard PC or is it the BB market that is getting eaten up?
Apple's iPhone: The untold story
I'd guess 'both', but I don't know for a fact.
Nice try, but too little to late.

On the topic of overexposure: Let us not burn our film.

It is time to move on.
"Isn't the purpose is that there isn't anything to get?"

I know what you're trying to say, but you're entering a very dangerous area here. There is no useful system, anywhere, that doesn't require some amount of understanding. Even intuition doesn't come out of nowhere. Our intuition is only based on what we've learned so far. That is why we click on things that look like buttons and that is why, when facing a steak, we intuitively "know" it's edible. In both cases the outcome may not be as expected, but that's a different story.

My point is, that a system which requires no prior knowledge whatsoever and no understanding is essentially useless, because it literally couldn't do anything, for it would just be a void. I'm getting philosophical here, I know. Even the simplest of systems require a user to grok its basics to become useful.
Guide on How to Free Rip DVD to HTC EVO 4G
This is the best guide on how to free rip DVD to EVO (4G), and the tool you need is a free DVD to HTC EVO 4G ripper, a freeware to realize playing DVD videos on HTC smartphone EVO 4G, etc.
Last one was rather interesting. Recommended for anyone in Japan at the moment.

Can't remember any names though; hopefully everyone else will be in the same boat!
Know the difference between data-informed versus data-driven
theory: your outer tracks are filled with data which is older and that you presumably read less
Goldman Sachs Scales Back Junior-Analyst Program; No Contracts for College Hires
There have been backlashes in the past against authors who block content to Adblock users.
This is increasingly my bar for participating in crowdsourced or user generated content based startups. How much is my investment of time and energy going to be squandered when they don't make it; how likely are they to make it.

I'm still pissed off at all the DailyBooth pictures just stuck in limbo because the management team lost interest post acqui-hire and haven't done anything to help folks get their data - valuable pictures capturing moments in time in some cases - back from the zombie company.
I'll risk a downvote for a non-constructive comment now, but I have to say this.

"switched to [..] Windows and everything pretty much just works". That sentence pretty much just beat OSX with its own slogan!
Sorry but what does OSX have to do with your iPod not playing MP3s ?

And I don't really understand why you think your anecdote is relevant considering you switched 3 years ago to Windows Vista. Which lets be honest was universally recognised as not being Window's finest release.
Spongebob Nike Dunks Women
> If advertisers had though[t] a little more long term

Quite. It is ironic that the author is appealing to users to think a little more long term and tolerate all these cynical, short-termist ads to support his preferred revenue stream.
I regularly write in three different languages and use emoji. The internationalization button is a godsend.
First-ever color movie found at Britain’s National Media Museum in Bradford
The One Little Secret That Made Hilton Hotels A Smashing Success
Looking forward to this one. Roti is a really nice venue with some great food and craft beer available. See you all there!
We've moved the entire MVC + routing frameworks all into the client in one go. Now it seems we're experimenting with which bits of work can still be delegated to the server. Pretty interesting times really, it all still feels very experimental.

As someone just learning Backbone.js this stuff fascinates me :)
It's a slippery slope and an arms race that doesn't end well for the advertiser. By using AdBlock, the user has expressed a definite preference not to see adverts. If you manage to get your advert past that, what have you gained? You've associated your content with scummy practices and given a member of the public a negative impression of whatever it is you're advertising.

Of course, it's possible that you just don't care, but fundamentally what you're proposing is a technical solution to a human problem, and we all know how well they end up working.
1) Yes to balance the load and to save bandwidth (if you have the same engine on front and back end you can make that decision late in the process or change your mind and move stuff between the front and back end depending on how the performance comes out)

2) These days more work just happens on the front end. With some web apps the back end is a pure data store and all the GUI is rendered on the front end. Doing a round trip for each front-end change would make the UI to unresponsive to be useful.
I shouldn't have used the words data loss.

Of course it isn't, but he should have backups of his iPhone.
So do you really think that Mac Mail, Calendar and Adress Book are good tools for poeple who have a lot of mails, appointments and contacts?

I'm not so much complaining about Apple's software as I am quietly accepting of the fact that Apple makes pretty consumer gadgets not tools for professionals.

Actually, I think it's a good thing that Apple's software is unsuitable for intensive use. It leaves space for actual software developers (us) to provide that.
This is an amusing digression but it doesn't change the point. At any other company the size of Microsoft the cost of installing a high-end Windows OS or a server runs into the many thousands of dollars and would normally be a very convoluted process to install. Within MS it takes all of a matter of seconds, everyone there is protected from one of the biggest pain points of using MS software, which I think is a pretty significant problem.
CRM. It's a problem
I have no idea why people don't do this so much any more. JS templating is crazy. Everyone knows JS DOM manipulation is slow on most current and all legacy browsers. Whereas string manipulation on the server is stupidly easy and fast.
State of Data #116
Firefox already bundles the pdf.js reader. See https://bugzil.la/714712.
Roberts Space Industries
It is a music composition application.It takes your singing and makes a beautiful music for it automatically!
JITs don't have so much time to optimize, as static compilers do. Therefore, they can't do e.g. whole program analysis, or expensive cache related optimizations. Despite 15 years of effort of speeding up JVM, it is still slower in general than optimized C. Not by much (usually good Java code runs within a 2x slower margin), but still - it can't beat static compilers.
ChromeOS is one very conspicuous example. Android is also beginning to make inroads in hybrid computing use cases. Both of those are Linux kernels, though.

The more conclusive answer, though, is that writing OSes is hard. Just look at Linux - driver issues due to lack of hardware manufacturer support is practically expected. Any startup has to deal with a tremendous barrier to entry in hardware compatibility that neither Microsoft (for whose operating system practically all non-Mac hardware is made) or Apple (who actually produces the hardware that their software runs on), and experience makes it pretty clear that they aren't likely to get it right for a very long time.

Windows got the vast majority of its "buggy and crashy" reputation from crappy third-party device drivers, because as it turns out, doing compatibility for however many millions of hardware profiles is Really Freaking Hard. Apple sidestepped that issue by not even trying (ever try to build a Hackintosh?) and just limiting their target profiles to a known set, much like the console manufacturers. Anyone that wanted to challenge them would either need to be in the hardware business, or develop relationships with hardware vendors that would get them preferential treatment that Linux developers haven't been able to get for decades, and that's not going to happen without a truly obscene amount of capital.
The danger is when you become obsessed by your tools.

For example, obsessing over the use of a semi-colon to signify the end of a statement in your language syntax.
Absolutely right. Have you read "The Innovator's Dilemma"? If not, I recommend ordering a copy from Amazon. Incredible book.
I have this error with Firefox 9.0.1:

currentPage is undefined http://mozilla.github.com/pdf.js/web/viewer.js Line 285
It's common sense once someone explains it to you, but when you're learning about all of this new client-side tech you tend not to worry about speed until later, and then it's useful to see posts like these telling you what you can do.

I guess this is why frameworks like Rails compile your assets for you - it's a "silly not to do it" task, but not everyone knows about it.
For the ones that are gushing money? "Think Dominant"

Well, that goes fairly well with their 1984 commercial I suppose.
Here's to making CRM sexy!
> with the OS exposing a limited API.

Can you be more specific ?

OSX's problem for me is that it exposes too many APIs (FS/BSD/Carbon/Cocoa) which can overlap in odd scenarios e.g. accessing the AddressBook.
I always felt that function hoisting is harming code readability. I prefer reading the code from top to bottom, I don't want to stuble upon functions that were not declared before.

If I recall correctly the main reason why this feature is not supported by CoffeeScript is because of some awkward IE bug though.
A publisher has, as I see it, three choices if they want to make money off adverts.

1. They can ignore AdBlock, and spend money dealing with the support problems that the broken site causes.

2. They can block AdBlock users, and spend money dealing with the PR backlash.

3. They can take AdBlock into account designing the site, and spend money on a graceful enhancement JS system.

Option 3 is close to what Reddit do, and I think they've got the best approach: spot when people aren't using AdBlock, and thank them for it.

AdBlock, NoScript and Ghostery exist. People will use them, and you cannot stop them. This is just the cost of doing business.
Like Vista, it is designed around things Microsoft needs it to do, not what the user needs it to do.
Really, if you wanna complain about something that's in Rails and not in Django properly, talk about database migrations.
Well, as someone who has seemingly missed the client-side MVC revolution, I still use server-side templating. And it's great, especially over slow conections. And it degrades gracefully when JS support is unavailable.