skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey all. I'm the curator (punch me in the feelings for saying that) of Skeu.it.

Thanks for the support!

I'm enjoying the debate here and won't get too much into it. For those arguing what is and isn't skeuomorphism, you're missing the point of the showcase.

Skeu.it, as specified on the masthead, celebrates arbitrary and gratuitous user interface decisions. Specifically, this means the misappropriation of visual artifacts designed for evoking familiarity in both form and function.

So yes, in my joyfully entitled opinion, using a big piece of frosted glass, with paper hanging from a rope, with magic buttons that somehow exist on lined paper, is a foolish design choice. Really, I wouldn't even call it a design choice, I'd say it's more just a collection of photoshop tutorials masquerading as an interface. Unnecessary skeu is the 2012+ version of the House Industries' "Crackhouse" typeface (http://www.houseind.com/fonts/crackhouse) appearing on every website and flyer 10 years ago. It's a classic, recognizable typeface...but stare at that for a moment, think back to how it didn't really make sense to announce free puppies or a car wash in deconstructed type, and let the understanding wash over you. Mmm, delicious understanding.

I have no hate towards skeu ("skeuomorphism must die" is silly) at all. In fact, I defend it:

http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-advantages-of-skeuomorphic... (from last year, a bit outdated)

Thanks again, and please send any good candidates my way (@303, @skeuit) for skeu.it!

Edit: Proper capitalization, the official end of my majuscular laziness.
"Brogrammers" more likely.
In other news, IP addresses are still working. ;)

So what can we conclude from this incident?

GoDaddy's registrar service
GoDaddy's authoritative DNS service
GoDaddy's hosting service
GoDaddy SSL certificates
etc.

They are all different services. When you link them all together and give GoDaddy control over your entire setup, if there's a problem with any one service, you can't recover as easily as if they were each handled independently. meme: "Do one thing well."

"All-in-one" solutions, though they might provide convenience, might come at a cost in terms of disaster recovery. meme: SPOF

I wonder if this thinking might also apply to software: using a single, large "all-in-one" program versus using lots of smaller, independent (and replaceable) programs.
Small is not beautiful: Small firms are less wonderful than you think
I don't care about fashion one way or another. I understand that it is a kind of art that is not supposed to be appreciated in the sense of "real people actually will wear this specific outfit". A lot of it looks completely ridiculous, but I understand that there is artistic merit (which I have no grounding to appreciate, or any real interest in) to it outside of what it looks like if you imagine someone on the street wearing it.

Which is why it seems to me like "that looks silly" isn't a valid thing to say at a fashion show in the first place.
A Pong Traffic Light In Germany.
Thanks for your comments; brings other useful aspects of application to light.
> but if you want the next Facebook, you're not going to get it by investing in, say, Codecademy, which, as laudable as its goals are, only appeals to newbie coders, who are a tiny slice of the population

Well you would just never know. Computer science and software engineering could become part of the basic school curriculum in the next few years. In the news you see that "the 14 year old boy developed an X for the iPhone and is now a millionaire". Enough of these stories could prompt the education system to deem coding as a basic skill like math, english and science. Code academy could end up being the platform that schools use to teach it.

But i guess the chances are slim because as it stands now the population is small though the possibility is there.
nobody needs a devil's advocate, it is a cheap way of making an argument for the sake of making an argument.

leather does not add distinctiveness to your app, it creates an association between your app and leather that now shares a bond with the 100s of other apps that use leather. the only apps i can think of that have used leather to such an abstract, memorable extreme are paypal (blue leather wtf?) and find my friends, the classic.

mental models have nothing to do with this, unless the average user has a previous experience that associates your product/service/offering with leather. even cowboy boots, even some sort of evocative mood, whatever, that's fine, but if you are using leather because you think you're making it distinct, there are far too many others doing the same.
> Please don't imply that I don't know the way the US system of government is set up and why it was designed that way. I know this subject better than most.

Yes, and on top of that, you really understand contemporary computer security issues. You've certainly proven that.

>> Yes, however the topic is not your personal preferences, but which choice has the greatest risk.

> But it is a question of my personal preference.

If it was simply a question of personal preference, you wouldn't have asked for the advice of others in a public forum.

You can't have it both ways -- you've posted in a public forum, asking for someone to explain why address changes are difficult. I explained it. Now you're insisting you're an expert, don't need anyone's advice, and in any case, it's all a matter of personal preference.

Knock yourself out. But I suspect long-term, your war against reality isn't going to go very well.
Wait, proposing a hypothetical that maybe the FBI got UDIDs by an accidental capture of Instapaper's server is libelous, but insinuating that The Verge is a shill for OEMs isn't?
4cast.me Lets You View Your Local Time and Weather Beautifully
It only started to "seem" that way in 2008 or so when Google--
a large corporation that wants to monopolize a segment of the market-
started a propaganda campaign against Apple to try and
rationalize ripping off the iPhone with android.

This is incorrect. There have been written concerns about software patents being monopolies at least since the year 1990 (http://deoxy.org/swpc.htm), not to mention the Free Software movement spreading the word against patents a lot earlier than 2008, the first Pirate Party was founded in 2006, and I bet I could dig a lot more examples of "prior art".

There is a whole lot more than Google versus Apple in the software patents story, please read some more about it.
What is wrong? Mainly the fact that those have nothing to do with skeuomorphism, it is only pointless bloat. Those designs have nothing to do with real world metaphors, they just shout "I can use cool textures too!"

And it is not new; the first weave of this epidemy stroked Windows somewhere around Win98 when average developers, inspired by a few actual skeumorphic designs, have learned how to use non-rectangular visibility regions and all this crappy ~1MB shareware become ~10MB (because of textures) crappier (because author had spent most time on "design") shareware that was antiskeuomorphic because it looked/behaved neither "real" nor like a Windows application.
Both Luna and then Aero were nice enough to make people appreciate consistency and refocus on function, while the madness moved to iStuff (ok, Android too, but thank heavens considerably less).
This ^. Your reply is way more succinct than mine - thanks.
> why do your tests need to go over HTTP at all?

Just off the top of my head, how would you check file_get_contents which can take a url as a parameter?

You can't just throw http://www.google.com/ in there. You might be compiling on a machine that's not on the net, firewalled, etc.

It becomes useful for functionality that normally relies on an external http server to work.

The OP also mentions several more scenarios where it is useful and even necessary.
The Verge's "integrity" has now been questioned by both Marco and Gruber[0], both of whom appeared On The Verge[1,2]. In both cases, they demonstrated a veneer of level-headedness for the sake of their own "integrity", but it was obvious from the subtext what their real feelings on the matters discussed were.

I wouldn't take either of their opinions seriously. The Verge is the best tech website out there period, and there's no reason to believe that its journalists are biased. They are doing some amazing reporting and really trying to revolutionize online journalism.

And fuck Instapaper - Marco was such a douchebag about Android support. Use Pocket[3], they have beautiful apps for all platforms and don't inject their personal opinions and biases into their software. You can export your articles from Instapaper and import them into Pocket, so there's no excuse for not switching.

0: http://joshuatopolsky.com/post/31285353423/integrity-and-bul...

1: http://www.theverge.com/2011/12/12/2630911/on-the-verge-epis...

2: http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/21/3033481/on-the-verge-episo...

3: http://getpocket.com/
Well, if you think of it a 'chainsaw' is a tool to 'segment logs' (the wooden ones) so the name kind of translates.

Now, no idea where "Moustache" came from.
In just skimming through comments, it's interesting to note how many people already keep this habit, myself included - my spark file can be found in the back cover of my notebooks... Keepin' it analog.
Something Marco did himself, even calling that app "a likely culprit" - which is pretty strong wording.
RSS in JSON, for real?
For example, what is so bad about this?
http://skeu.it/image/24908403424

Because it reproduces a hypothetical real-world object, that not only doesn't make any sense (what is a sheet of paper hanging from a glass panel anyway?), but doesn't add any meaning to what this interface is supposed to do?

You can use skeumorphism where it makes sense. The problem is that login form has no analog in real-life, so in this one designer just went crazy for the sake of it.

EDIT: Yay, let's downvote.
Palo Alto Networks reports first earnings since IPO, revenue exceeds consensus
I know someone who failed, closed the startup and joined another company if that answers your questions.

Probably wrong on this, but I've not seen any tech startup execute well (at scale) in gyms. Except maybe booking services or basic trackers.
Spoken like someone who has never been slut-shamed.

Classic ad hominem.

People don't actually get maimed because they stupidly walked into a minefield.

The operative term here is 'hypothetical analogy'. By insisting on the accuracy of the morbidity statistics of real-world minefields you're intentionally confusing the point and trying to derail the discussion.
I wonder if all those beige PC clone makers did licence anything from anyone design wise. In other words, what if Apple design is to become the ned beige PC style? Cheap PC keyboards all look the same, and nobody complains. Same for screens, etc.
What makes Apple design so distinctive is partly because it's neat, and partly because they're the sole computer makers to use it.
Steve has a fantastic hour long talk given at the Computer History Museum and shown on youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
I'm based outside the U.S
Unless you're writing code, in which case you'd need a laptop too?
Actually, I would expect the latter to be easier.

Teaching someone who is bad at coding means fixing 2-5 years of mistakes. Teaching someone who is poor at communication means fixing 20+ years of mistakes.

Plus, it's easier to convey coding mistakes than social mistakes since it's more difficult to communicate the large amounts of unwritten social rules.
I am a huge fan of XAMPP/LAMP for exactly this reason!
Well, obviously there are tons of apps that have diluted leather's distinctiveness (and leather is but one example), but the argument for a garish, non-functional skin is still as I outlined above.

Also, I didn't mean to imply that leather in itself teaches you how an app works. However, once you've used an app with a distinct skin, the next time you launch that app the skin, as a sort of visual touchstone, will help you remember how you used it in the past, etc.
and some people like they way it looks

The bar that I use for complaining about something is if I like the way it looks.
"The HP machine doesn't just share a few design features with the iMac, it's lifted the design wholesale."

Careful! According to most people in this conversation, that crosses the line into "fanboi" territory. (Yes, with an "i". That's how insufferable this can all get.)
Thanks for replying. Sent you an email! The book looks really good!
Thanks for the Picplum (https://www.picplum.com) shout-out guys. We had specific requirements around custom UI for using Filepicker. We worked with their team to get it built and integrated in less than a week. Love the support!
You don't have some things cached that should be obvious to cache, like the HTML for the most popular repos. Loading the commit messages from JSON for a page that's being accessed tens of thousands of time a day is less than ideal.

It isn't just github, it seems like a lot of web apps don't use the lessons learned for web sites.
"You know what's broken? Things being broken."
(1) What motivated the start of such behavior for others?

I was letting things slip and forgetting things I needed to remember; so it was more of a "hey, I need to be more organized" kind of thing, but it also came with the benefit of capturing EVERYTHING.

(2) How do you react to your idea log with respect to balancing focus between current projects / work, and speculative projects?

It's sad but true, you can do anything, but not everything. Most of what I capture are todos, maybe the occasional project or "big idea", but two things have forced me to realize I can't do everything. First, I was forgetting things again, because I'd capture them and never see them again (reviewing wouldn't help; there are simply too many to review them all). Second, to fix the first, I added a default deadline of "today" to my capture template. Then once I started going down my todo list, I would reschedule, only to come across some things again and reschedule again. After a while, I finally started forcing myself to either cancel or indefinitely defer things. I have a core set of "must dos", habits, chores and such, plus short term goals, but haven't quite gotten to the long term planning stage yet. For now, it's all logged, version controlled and archived in git, so I never truly "lose" anything, I just give up on doing everything and prioritize.

(3) How do others account for visuals such as sketches or interface ideas which are often easier to create with analog tools?

I'm mostly an auditory/textual person (code monkey by day), so I don't miss that too much. You could do ASCII art, I suppose (http://emacs-fu.blogspot.com/2009/01/drawing-pictures.html ;) Although, I would like to have some nice charts (or at least cumulative stats) for a bigger picture; this is actually yet another project idea of mine, which is very feasible with org-mode: http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/intro.html
> moral responsibility is commutative

That's nonsense. A baby doesn't know right from wrong, but parents are obliged to care for it. Just because a bear doesn't have responsibility doesn't mean we can shoot it wily-nily, there has to be some justification such as in the example you mention. And commutativity is a property of operations, you probably meant that moral responsibility is a symmetric relation.
I think she was looking for the extra attention, but accidentally overstepped that threshold, and is now neck-deep in shit.

She's not coming out of this with a net gain.
Yes, and that's why service companies look for employees who respect deadlines and product companies look for coders who get-sh*t-done.
Imgur is beyond simple. http://imgur.com/

Drag and drop or control + V is all you need
> Rodrigo is an MIT graduate who writes compilers in his spare time. He is a core contributor to Haskell and wrote a few very well known Python packages. He can generally write very solid code that's readable and handles edge cases beautifully. However, he takes days to answer emails, he rarely picks up his phone, he doesn't seem to have much of an understanding of the importance of deadlines, he does things his own way, and you can't get a clear thought out of him without rambling incoherence surrounding it.

If you take 20 programming novices, maybe one will be as good as Rodrigo at coding after 5 years of intensive practice.
> "Outdated technology" is a hard thing to say.

On the contrary, it's very easy to say, and sometimes even to identify.

> Focus on energy/mass ratio. That is the main constraint.

If that were the only issue (and you're not saying this), we would drive cars with little nuclear reactors in them. Reactors like the one powering Curiosity on Mars right now, but a little bigger. That would give "hot rod" a whole new meaning.

> Petrol is not "outdated" on that metric.

True. It is in every other way. I agree that electric cars have an uphill struggle against the petroleum economy, and it will be a while before electrics offer the performance we're accustomed to from gas-powered cars -- assuming that ever happens.
I wonder if the screen is fast enough. I would love to work on an actual non-glowing screen.
I'm not saying the GPLv2 withholds distribution rights; rather, it grants them conditionally, and if you can grant them conditionally you can withhold them.
They protect Search technologies using Trade Secrets not Patents.

There is an actual patent on PageRank: http://www.google.com/patents/US6285999 in case that statement is implying there isn't.
But wouldn't it be awesome if one showed up and made an insightful contribution to the conversation?

If I were a woman who had lost a limb in combat and had had a higher than average number of boyfriends, I think I would probably feel quite insulted that people were assuming I was unable to reason logically about the OP's premise.
I see the current skeuomorphism trend, in a way, as cargo-culting. People saw some questionable, but not entirely dreadful uses of it (basically Apple's effort) and thought, "yeah that looks good! I'm going to give my app an awesome real life texture!"

Take the denim weather app design for example.

To what extent does a denim effect, that one would associate primarily with jeans, have anything to do with the weather? Did the designer think to question that, or was it just a case of mind-bogglingly detailed texture being the in thing?

I mean, if you can't come up with a reason for that particular choice of visual metaphor other than "it looks good", then was it really the right choice?

On a side note, I dislike the usage of this in native app design. You'd get those ridiculous apps in Windows XP with bonkers custom UIs, including Safari and Quicktime, for that matter. Now apps in OSX are skinned in odd ways (in Address Book's case, detrimentally so) and Windows 8 appears to be aiming for a consistent look and feel.
Ask HN: To build a 'very snappy' Rails App - JS MVC or WebSockets?
After seeing this post -http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4499845 - by cheshirecat, it dawned on me that I can build a relatively snappy Rails app with WebSockets.

I have been wanting to learn a client-side MVC framework (leaning towards Ember.js), but now that I have seen this I am wondering if I am better off just using a WebSockets Ruby gem.

I know this might not be the 'typical' HN question...but if I ask this question on any of the forums for the client-side MVCs, I am likely to get a skewed response (obviously).

I asked on Stack Overflow - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12359978/to-build-a-very-snappy-rails-app-js-mvc-or-websockets - but because this is more of a 'discussion/debatable' question, the mods thought it wasn't a good fit.

So I am hoping that some HNers that have experience with this stuff can shed some light on which might be a better approach for me....along with the pros & cons for each.

Thanks.
I agree with this. I like knowing exactly what all the pieces of my stack are, and how they mesh together.

If someone is churning out websites right and left I could see this being a more interesting tool, as it seems to be more powerful that any "boilerplate generation" scripts I would write myself.

The pain point of managing dependencies is indeed non-trivial in my experience, so I will keep an open mind for tools that look to solve this.

Random stream-of-consciousness idea: I create a new directory, and in it a text file containing the following on separate lines: "jQuery html5boilerplate AngularJS". I then run a build command to pull all these resources together in a sane way. This would allow me the fine-grained control I prefer, help ease the tedium of fetching dependencies, and obviate the need for a stream of "yes/no" questions at the terminal. This functionality may exist already, and it seems like it could be built by leveraging the logic being Yeoman, but with a different "UI".

Food for thought!
I don't buy the landmine analogy because she didn't "walk into" this situation by happenstance.

Imagine a woman (or a man) who is sexually assaulted after deliberately entering a prison reserved for violent sex offenders and intentionally provoking the inmates. The offenders have committed a reprehensible crime. Still, the victim is responsible for taking on an obvious risk.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grizzly_Man

I have sympathy for the Grizzly Man but more for the average bear attack victim.
Another major example is being able to identify which problems matter to the company. Rodrigo works on whatever his manager tells him to do and executes splendidly, while Gabriella identifies the big problems that most people don't even realize can be solved with code and fixes them. In this case, Gabriella can easily be massively more valuable. I've mentioned on HN before that I used these same problem-identifying skills, combined with very crappy, amateurish coding, to save a former employer $2MM in under a year. And I've continued to do this-e.g., by writing SQL Stored Procedures to solve problems that many people in a company run into, which has been a tremendous help for my career.

That's not to say communication skills aren't important, but identifying the projects/problems relevant to the business at large are even more so.
This has been a known vulnerability for dns, as they are susceptible to DOS. We use network solutions for DNS but they can be taken down in a similar manner as GoDaddy.

BTW one of the servers we needed to access did not resolve, but I was able to connect via IP instead of DNS. Host file baby!
I love how people throw around the term "Citizens United" and forget that without Michael Moore, there would be no "Citizens United".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._Federal_Elec...

Reverse that SC decision, you harm speech like Michael Moore's.

To your other point, there would be no corporate sponsors if we didn't concentrate the government's power in Washington by forgetting we can solve local problems using local government, and if Washington actually let businesses compete fairly and not creating artificial barriers to entry, such as license fees, over-burdensome regulation, frivolous patents and high taxes.

The problem isn't just corporations, which BTW, except for monopolies, are a net benefit to society (otherwise they just disappear). The problem is that we vote for corrupt politicians who corrupt our laws and interfere with the market killing off bad corporations.

James Madison said "If men were angels, no government would be necessary." The corollary is that government is not comprised of angels, therefore we can't expect it to be necessarily better than corporations.
Mayor Booker Wants To Hack Government, Make It Performance-Based
My first thought was the same - if it performs like the "page flip" on the Kindle, I'd jump off a high building within minutes. But I've no idea if most of that delay is down to the screen or some combination of processing power and/or conserving power.