skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, your amazing feat of engineering phone, with a color retina display, audio-video capabillity, 700.000 apps, gyroscope, HD cameras, etc has some extra stuff taking 3GB drive space (of the 16GB device).

Your amazing, multi million lines of code Windows desktop, the work of some 1000 people or more, has a problem with indexing.

The protocol and apps that connect you via email to everyone you want, free, globally and instantly, sometimes loses a mail. Or the UI is slow to load your new messages.

A program with which you can do on your laptop what it took huge teams, million dollars of equipment, and professional expertise to do (FCP), has a crashing bug in some particular action.

The program that lets you talk to everybody on the planet, instantly, with video, and paying nothing, has a badly designed UI.

etc...

Yes, I can see how "everything is broken".

Because, when we didn't have any of these, when 30 years before you had a rotating dial to dial numbers on your phone that only called landlines and cost mega bucks to call internationally, when you had MS-DOS as the most prevalent desktop OS, when 20MB was a huge disk in a desktop system, and before something like video chat was only possible
in huge organizations with special software, everything was perfect...

Wanting to improve things? Fine.

Not understanding the complexity and magnitude of the technical achievements you use everyday? Bad.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4460398
Beautiful. Trying this starting today!

Easing into it, though, just removing the clock on my laptop... still have flights to catch etc.
Since this is HN, what do you think about the business impact of it?

I know "make something small but better" is a nice motto, but will it work for Apple, Microsoft? Heck, even for a proven startup's product, is it a good long term strategy, or a long term gamble?

There aren't much examples of 37Signal's model of "don't implement features but keep polishing" approach.
I rarely see those used except when you look at codegolf contests. There you can find all of those variables put to good and creative use :)
At my last^2 job we had an IRC bot with an HTTP interface. Someone made a url-forwarding-service link that would, when clicked, post itself to the channel. Hours of fun with that one.
Someone give this whale a Babelfish!
This is the point where you demonstrate with evidence that a lack of recognition of IP would cause such problems, right?

As someone who gets paid for developing software that can be freely shared, I'm particularly interested.
They made DB2 in the early 80's. DB2 has always seemed like the quiet giant in the database world. They even have a free Express edition [1], but I never hear anyone talking about it.

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/db2/express/download.htm...
So you 'only' applied 2D interpolation, if I slightly understand what motionflow is, and it restored so much information ? I thought it was a 3D aware superresolution algorithm like I've seen used for space probes.
Apple uses a bog standard <video>-tag with a h.264 encoded video as its source. Every browser that can play that video (Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari) will be able to play that video. If your browser can’t (Firefox), then it won’t be able to play that video and Apple is so nice and offers a sensible fallback.

QuickTime is never required.
I remember reading somewhere once that warm drinks are more easily absorbed by the body than cold drinks. Maybe it's something to do with that?
I completely relate to that feeling. This has led me to use less of everything over time. One day I realized this, that I was in fact applying the KISS principle to my life. Fewer apps + fewer features + fewer gadgets = fewer bugs irritating my day-to-day life.

Examples:

My desktop environment on my laptop is Linux with, 99% of the time, just a bunch of xterms and a browser (without extensions... they tend to crash browsers).

I installed exactly 4 Android apps on my phone (after flashing it to cyanogenmod to get rid of the bloatware): gmaps, youtube, barecode scanner app, some app to write notes on the home screen (NotesWidget). Everything else sucks and is a waste of my time. But even the dead-simple NotesWidget app author managed to mess it up with enough bugs that I am considering writing my own(!) I have tried at least a dozen other notes-taking application and am not satisfied with any of them.

I don't maintain a music library. Sync'ing music across multiple PCs, phones, other devices, etc, suck. Personal libraries "in the cloud" don't work because I am not always online. I just listen to satellite radio in my car.

I own no TV, no game console, no tablet.

And yet, I am a tech enthusiast. I accept a little "complexity" where it makes me happy: I program GPUs/FPGAs, I have a home theater set-up at home, I maintain my own website/blog on colocated servers, etc.
Thanks, you can unsubscribe from some emails there, but the linkedin update and a bunch of other email communications are not covered.

I've solved the problem by marking it as spam.
Well, that's the balance between features, bugs, and cost.

If consumer software companies were working more like, say, people working on Curiosity (Mars' robot) or aircraft navigation software, you could have a phone that does much less but without bugs.

The reason why it is this way is because people usually prefer to cope with minor bugs that giving up on features. Plus, when you buy a product, you usually know the list of features but not the list of potential bugs.

So you can make a company that sells phones with 0 bugs, with a 2004 set of features. Or an OS that focuses purely on providing a bug-free experience, but 5 years late.

Not sure all that would sell well.
I think it's powered by http://slug.in/ which was a recent djangodash project.
I think Quattro was the #2 (behind Lotus) for a while - ahead of Excel. Borland just seemed to have an uncanny talent for running products into the ground.
The quality range between 0 and 1 is because it's a percentage.

Think of an image, the HTTP request being for an image. The client can say (in an Accept header), "Give me a lossless .tiff if you have it, but if you don't then I'd like an image in .jpg format that is 80% quality. If you can't do that then I'd prefer a .gif that is equivalent to 50% quality. If you've failed on that... well, screw it, I'll take ASCII art, it's better than nothing.".

The quality represents a loss in quality of the supplied resource, and a preference list of the order of acceptable types (in the case of an Accept header) for each step down in quality.

It's a bit of an abuse to read quality as "order by" and to treat the percent quality as "range 0-1000".

I think that example is actually given in the specs, but I'm fairly sure audio was the resource type used.
Reading his laundry-list of paper cuts, it looks like many of them (around 50%?) relate to one particular issue: synchronisation. It keeps coming up, time and again, from his email woes (seriously, folks, didn't we solve this one back in 1980?) through to the borked address books, contact lists, and photo streams.

Sync software usually takes a conservative approach to deleting or merging records, and leaves duplicates lying around rather than risking deletion of vital user data. This is a good thing. What's bad is that the tools for housekeeping -- merging and deleting duplicates -- are generally rubbish. (I have the same problem with my phone's address book: masses of duplicates due to sync processes that conserve stuff. And trying to get rid of them using the tools provided turns out to be a tedious pain in the neck, requiring multiple mouse-clicks or focus changes per record.)

Further down the list we get into identity management issues. Nobody seems to have a really good handle on how we manage identity across multiple machines, much less how we manage esoteric stuff like family relations for delegating access to photos or music purchases or whatever.
The real world problem that time tries to solve is synchronization of events. By having a standard method of measuring time, we make it easier to interact with other people and society. While I think it's a great idea to not be a slave to the clock, it really doesn't help you when you miss a train because you misread the sun.
>Every computer environment is layer upon layer of kludges. There is shit all the way down.

You missed the AMAZING INGENUITY and BRILLIANCE that is also all the way down.
I did this years ago. Works wonders. Watches are for suckers.
This links into his 'follow the money' theory. If people were doing this, you find out who is earning money from doing the abuse, and you jail them. Same with those who are funding it.

People who download music for free on pirating sites aren't supporting the music industry. So I don't see how people who simply receive the data (or even send it free) are supporting it.

Flooding the 'market' with free information saturates it to the point where people would not want to pay money for it. Or if they did, the amount they'd want to pay would be so low that it would decrease incentive for people to offend for purely monetary reasons.

People who would offend for non-monetary reasons would do so anyway, and legalizing the material would aid in tracking down the distribution network to patient 0.
So, your amazing feat of engineering car, with automatic transmission, ABS, a GPS, incredible fuel efficiency etc. stops in the middle of the highway sometimes.

Your incredible display, which somehow manages to use liquid crystals to display beautiful 1080 HD video develops a jitter and bright line down the middle after a month.

The machine gun which lets you launch tiny projectiles at speeds high enough to kill a person sometimes fires rounds without you pulling the trigger and causes a casualty.

...

Yes, the technology is incredibly complex and represents a huge transformation in the way we do
things, but a customer doesn't and shouldn't need to understand that, and certainly shouldn't be offered the complexity as an excuse for it not working correctly. Given the fact that most (all?) of the products mentioned in the post have some kind of price associated to using them, its not unreasonable to expect they work correctly.

This is not to say that the people who made the tech are at fault per se, just that the customer is not at fault either for complaining when things dont work.
I completely agree. I'm sick of feature bloat, especially when it's taking away from perfecting stuff that's useful but not 100% there. Not every application needs to solve every problem - but it would be really nice if they did actually solve one, rather than prod at a dozen. I'm sure it's part of the reason we get attached to early-stage startups so often: they're hyper focused on scratching their own itch and haven't yet been massively distracted by all of those nuisances that come with growth (like needing to make money)

Having said that, I'll point out that Sparrow (like every other non-webmail client I've used) seems to fall over when dealing with massive volumes of email. I'll get into the office with 500 new emails, skim and archive 490 of them over five or ten minutes or so, and then a few minutes later half of them will just show back up. Overall still a very solid product, so I too was disappointed to see it eaten up and killed off by Google.
Louis Vuitton Wallets Sale - Louis Vuitton Online
I thought it was supposed to be Apple ?
I foresee a world where everyone speaks English, but with a regional accent.
Highly unlikely that a real video format would take more bandwidth if encoded properly. Video engineers have thought of this problem.

H.264 would emit "skip" macroblocks for everything except the area that was changing (probably near the cursor). The repetition of "skip" would be easily compressed.
Another mystery appears. I wonder what happened in 1993-1994 to get his migration path off by 90 degrees.

http://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/viewImage.do?id=10079&aid=47...
One thing you could do is quote the day when you are going to finish it. Overall you are going to be faster not being a slave to short timescales, getting into a zone and getting a lot more done.
If you write your shell scripts in Ruby they do come in handy. I certainly wouldn't use them outside of that context.
>This is one of the things that really upsets me. I hate how nothing ever works.

And somehow you left a comment, using an OS and a browser, on a international network, that put it up so everybody in the world can read it, and I read it in a totally different country.

All totally unimaginable for the common folk just 20 years ago.

And all that with huge color flat monitors, optical mice, mp3s playing in the background, wireless networking, and tons of other stuff going on at the same time. Heck, you might just left the comment from your mobile phone, or I might just read it in mine.

How's that for "nothing ever working"?
Testing Android apps or websites? Here's a useful MindMap / checklist
Why are front end developers so high in demand at startups when it's easier?
Are project managers becoming an extinct species for agile projects?
>"having naked sexually posed images of oneself available online is not especially helpful to the individual and may lead to negative attention, bullying, abuse and such. Making such actions illegal is saying that they are outside of the behaviour expected as morally normative."

So, behaving in an abnormal fashion that others label immoral... resulting in people targeting that person with abusive bullying...

Would this also reply to things like coming out of the closet as a homosexual, being a vegetarian, a pacifist, a male cheerleader, etc?

After all, we can't have children being bullied for being different, so we should criminalize it, or barring that, criminalize expressing that difference.
Mach-O, the executable format used by Darwin (and hence Mac OS X) also has that feature, where it is called "two-level namespaces".
"A vanishing middle class." This is becoming too true. Especially with the middle class receiving the least amount of help. The poor get free boosts, the rich get breaks. The middle class work horse gets beat the hardest.

"Liberal arts? Out of luck."

STEM is the driving futurue for our country. There should be more incentives for students who pursue STEM related degrees to attract the new next generation. There hasn't been enough of a push with this in our education system. Instead we are still allowing students choose what they please without any real world knowledge that their degree path makes a huge impact on their job outcome. I think we do a poor job on that.
You've totally missed the point of his post. You're talking about Scott Hanselman here, he does understand all that.
If you're asking a friend for a last minute favour I think it's only good manners to at least bother to phone them about it. I also find the notion of tracking who'd done favours for whom rather awkward.

A favour is a personal request from a friend, I can't see this is an area that needs to be made more efficient...
We've already received 2.5% of our funding target with nearly 3 months left https://seedrs.com/startups/hey-jimmy
I'm on Firefox nightly, look OK on my side.
I did not spam. You didn't read the text at all, did you?
the last two sentences of that story made me want to strangle the author. :|
This is such a beautiful concept - in this over-scheduled world we're not giving ourselves as much space to foster creativity and reflect.
Yes probably I am gonna set up a proxy to make http 301 or javascript redirection, an ugly hack but HN deserves.
PlainTasks - opinionated todo-list plugin for Sublime Text 2
Just look at how it's used. It's not the same. sh imports shell commands as functions. envoy allows you to run shell commands very easily, like perl's ``.
You've fallen into the trap of reading about something that is written by someone who has no real boss and thinking that you could apply it to yourself.

Living 'without time' is a great idea and is ideal for how we, as humans, have developed. Unfortunately, in the real world, the rest of us need to use time to make sure we do things on other peoples schedules. Whether it be the boss, the airline, the doctor, the kid's school or whatever, we need to make sure we're aligned.

You will only be able to really do this if none of those things apply to you and you can spend your days doing whatever you want.
Run Java Console Application in the Cloud
>Yes, the technology is incredibly complex and represents a huge transformation in the way we do things, but a customer doesn't and shouldn't need to understand that, and certainly shouldn't be offered the complexity as an excuse for it not working correctly.

In some ideal world, where you can have things with MILLIONS of moving parts and TRILLIONS of states, designed by mere mortals and still have them be faultless, yes.

In the real world, the customer will have to settle for things not being 100% perfect.

He can now do things unheard of even in science fiction 20-30 years ago, and takes for granted things only appearing like 6 years ago (e.g YouTube).

>Given the fact that most (all?) of the products mentioned in the post have some kind of price associated to using them, its not unreasonable to expect they work correctly.

I think that, yes, it is unreasonable. That you pay for something doesn't mean anything related to it's error margin. You cannot demand the impossible just because you paid for something. It's like saying: "hey, I paid for this car, why does it is disfigured when it crashes and can kill me?".

Consumer products (non digital) break all the time. You can even pay top dollar and yet have crap food served to you. And all those are far less complex than software.
I don't think MS needs to lower the price that much for businesses, given that a full licence of Office probably costs about that. Checks website, oh it's $499 for 1 user, 2PCs (obviously bulk discounts will be massive, but still).
Currently, the owner name is shown as some one from Amsterdam.
http://who.is/domain_archive-com/subtlepatterns.com/
Probably due to missing data points. It may seem that the line is straight but it's possible the whale traveled circular.
"Dropped my watch right into the garbage."

I washed mine by accident, left it in my trouser pocket. Been using the phone since.

"I learned how to read the sun"

My granddad did that, and the stars when visible. Maritime upbringing.

As a teacher, I need to be in the right room at the right time and it is my responsibility to manage the lesson so it finishes on time. There are other ways of organising education of course...

http://www.steinerwaldorf.org.uk/upperschool.html

...but I don't think society at large is ready for those yet.
The Only Thing Killing Your Corporate Culture Is Your Corporate Culture
Collection of all the tools on single page for website analysis, No need to go anywhere else.
For those of you who don't know what a Bloom Filter is or the concept isn't quite clear, you should check out this site: http://www.jasondavies.com/bloomfilter/

He has a nice interactive demo with an explanation on how it works.
On Amazon now, I have learnt not to buy a Kindle book that doesn't also come on paper, because that is the quality filter, than the author managed to get a publishing deal. I don't think that signal will be around for much longer. It's the same thing as Gibson says, a thing had to have a certain momentum behind it to make it into the outside world, that is missing now.
Why do you try to fill people with a false sense of security Akemi? How do we know obscenity charges are rare? Why should we think it would only apply to 'hardcore' porn?

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/12/why-defend-freedom-of-...

Perhaps you'd have people believe that Christopher Handley's circumstances are rare, but perhaps they're but a minority of what we manage to see publicized for what it is.

Obscenity laws are seriously problem, a cudgel that can be wielded ruthlessly, and people cow in fear to it as Handley did. It must be confronted.
It's fascinating! Though it's interesting to debate if we should apply humanly qualities such as loneliness to whales (or even other creatures). Does this whale really feel lonely (like we do)? Or is it just doing what its genetic program tells it to do? I don't recall where exactly I read, but I had read that the contribution of language is significant as far as human consciousness and feelings are concerned. It mentioned that animals have signals as a form of communication (show a ball, and dog would come over) but humans have signs. The whole conscious world is composed of signs for us and that is what makes us unique. It had further mentioned that even in aboriginal people who don't know much about modern cosmology, they still have a theory of some sort to signify the origin of world. Animals simply lack that kind of framework and therefore behave according to their genetic program or trainings.

Yes, the field was called semiotics and I recall reading about how a wandering bee doesn't give a damn to humans dancing and celebrating nearby.
It's a shame webkit never implemented the Animated PNG extensions and that no browser supports MNG:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNG
http://caniuse.com/apng

This would probably some of what people want here.
An iPod Nano watch, without the iPod nano
Other mysterious sounds: http://weburbanist.com/2010/06/07/signal-or-noise-8-mysterio...
I did (and still use) alarms on my iPhone to remind me before events that I absolutely cannot miss. I agree with your point but I think you can find a balance between not missing the train and having a clock chained to your ankle.
It was a similar story with Word Perfect, their failure to move to a GUI basically handed MS Word market dominance. Their belated port of the DOS UI was very awkward at first, and the move to 32-bit in 95 was the final straw.
Very much like-minded, here.

> Sync'ing music across multiple PCs, phones, other devices, etc, suck.

Was thinking the same but I had to do it, because I need a back-up and I need my music at work too. The only sane way: have proper files half-manually arranged in directories synced with a real solid linux tool (unison). Same for pictures.

What I want to emphasize here is that the current trend against files is a disturbing regression, and can only end in a complete mess or loss of the things you own. I have kids pic in my folders, and I owe to my kid to still have them in 20 years, if nothing else.

This discussion reminds me of something weird that occured to me when I was following lifehacker: it had so many advices and nice tricks and apps you should install to your system, and at the same time was very voical against the bloat and the clutter.
It was ratings agencies that declared them AAA, not banks.

You skipped over one of the important questions - who was lied to, and about what?

As for the "closed source" nature of CDOs, it's irrelevant. I've read a few CDO prospectuses. They all are pretty clear about the fact that the purchaser is taking out a long position on housing. If you lost money on securitized debt, it's because the instruments behaved exactly as they were supposed to: housing goes up and you win, housing goes down and you lose.

CDOs are also explicitly not closed source - the purchaser gets a detailed listing of every single item it's value is derived from and the exact set of rules that will be applied to determine who gets a payout.
You can make a similar list for Latin though; the Romance languages are (by definition) descended from it; that's Spanish, French, Italian and Portugese, and English and German are heavily influenced by it. That's a significant majority of the score of the top ten languages from the article, so you can argue that by their standards Latin is more significant, even though it's no longer really a living language in its own right.