skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Comparing social media gurus to doctors or surgeons is a bit of a stretch.

People ask you for free advice because they don't understand the value of "social media advice"... most likely because that value is highly subjective and 9 times out of 10 given by some self-proclaimed expert who doesn't have a clue what they are talking about.

However, asking a doctor for advice about a sickness - you can expect a much less subjective answer, from a certified professional (around which there are official regulatory bodies etc). It's easy to understand the value in that and therefore much less likely that the layperson would expect that kind of advice for free.
Oh, no. My refusal to put an exclamation mark inside a word is entirely deliberate.
Gee, I wonder why he didn't mention the maps? Apple's devices are still more compelling for me personally, but less so than they used to me. Hopefully Google builds and maintains its own iOS maps application.
Log in to the Humble Bundle site and you can download new versions.

I mostly just grab the Steam keys so I don't have to worry about keeping up with new versions.
Did you really expect anything different from a non-paid PR rep of Apple?
I think the notion that poor product design can evolve from abuse of data is an interesting discussion, but unfortunately a) it probably isn't poor product design (what function would you put in the areas of the screen most likely to suffer a misclick?) and b) not at all likely due to optimizing click-throughs. Ironically, the misclick problem is a well known issue in online advertising, and the best way to mitigate it is to use the data to dampen the noise.

There are obviously a number of ad revenue driven pressures on Yahoo Mail's design. The display advertising market is very different from the search engine market. It is only tangentially about the clicks. The biggest pressures are:

"Premium Locations": these aren't necessarily the places that get high click throughs, but rather the locations which are prominently displayed and noticed by the users, which causes them to stand out in a world awash in banner ads. This competes with good UI design, which wants to put important functions in these exact same locations.

"CPM": just getting way higher impression counts. This translates to filling the screen with as many ads as possible, stealing screen real estate and really disrupting eye flow.

"CPA": Lots of ad networks/DSP's try to arbitrage between CPM and CPA. Misclicks don't generally help much with that beyond hindering optimization efforts to use clicks as signals. Mostly what this does to design is encourage "rest points" in applications where users are likely to actually take the time to go all the way through to a conversion (think of it like TV commercial breaks in sports).

"Uniques/F-Cap": You want to raise the bar on the minimum # of impressions seen by every visitor, because those early impressions are far more likely to be people who haven't seen the ad before. Advertisers pay a lot more (10x more is not unheard of) for that. So, there is pressure to spam the visitor with as many impressions as possible before they are likely to leave (which makes it hard to serve ads in a way that is proportional to the value the user derives from the experience).

"View based conversion": The underbelly of the adverting network. In theory this is a good thing. In practice, it creates an incentive to shove ad locations in to the page that the visitor never even notices (ironically the opposite of the problem the article contends).

Some people have apparently gotten the impression I was questioning your credentials, your intelligence, or somehow attacking you personally. At least in terms of intent it couldn't be farther from the truth! While I think your naïveté about online advertising undermines your article, all it might imply about you personally is your curiosity about online advertising is low as compared to other pursuits. If anything, I'd say that is a compliment. If I conveyed or you perceived anything other than that, I certainly apologize.
Strong_parameters integrated into Rails (RIP attr_accessible)
That would be great as if there was no one servicing your area you could potentially sign up as a 'poster' allowing more remote areas to be connected if someone was available.
Linking with SCMs is also a must-have, IMO. "Import existing data from XYZ" would also lower the bar for adoption.
It was more of a "slides, with a whole lot of words coming out of his mouth, the mouth of one of the world's foremost experts on the subject matter" sort of talk. I got the sense that it was practical to proceed to the next level, which is all he was asking of Google.

I also got the impression that he was in his own world. That tends to be how geniuses talk. There was no introduction, no covering of the basics, no time to settle in. It was like jumping into the ocean of his mind, and you either sank or swam with his thoughts.

He was 78, and possibly already sick with cancer at that time, yet he came off as a young visionary with unwavering optimism. That, combined with his accomplishments, made him amazing, and one of my heroes.
I'm not sure that's necessarily true. On the web, it's often the less savvy users that convert best in response to advertising. For example, a lot of money is made online selling payday loans, ringtone-related subscription-billing junk, and 'magic' tooth-whitening and weight-loss formulas. Ignorant, poor people are often the most easily monetized, and I'm guessing they're often the least likely to value their time enough to pay $15 to avoid ads.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but I don't think it's as straightforward as you indicated.
Good spot. Now folk like to claim that the bigger screen on the iPhone is better than the even bigger screen on non-iPhones. It's absurd.
I come from a data understanding background, and the cool
thing I liked about this article was the following statement:
"...experiences like this are great reminders that data only
takes us so far, and creativity and clear thinking are
always required to find the best solutions..."

I think in principle the statement was a good one, but unfortunately the case study doesn't fit it. The location of the ad isn't influenced by optimizing click through rates, as she presumed. It also, isn't really bad design, because there isn't a much more harmless thing to do with a misclick than to show an ad. Most importantly though: the way to mitigate the damage from misclicks actually is to use the data.
I was thinking on phone processing of speech, not sure how much difference it would make. The point of that list isn't that those things don't exist, but they are areas where Apple could push hardware, operating system and web services in order to do something innovative in mobile computing.
i think his summary is spot on. Daring Fireball has always been a terrible blog to read.

The iphone 5 is a fine phone IMO, even thus they failed to advertise it as such, use a crappy new connector and "forgot" about NFC.

The screen looks good, the CPU looks excellent, its finally lighter, it also finally has LTE, and the rest, well, is mostly on par with rest anyways.
Amen bro :)

I like to think of Apple and Google as different "eigenvectors" for building a big, profitable company. Apple represents one extreme -- closed, premium, vertically integrated, resulting in highest profits but lower marketshare. Google is almost the opposite -- open, ad-supported, trying to get its search box and ads onto everything, resulting in highest market share but lower profits.

Being able to pick pieces from each approach for your own company is the real lesson here.

And for me, personally, I could get excited working at either Apple or Google -- just like it's interesting to play chess on either the white or black side. My goal is to understand the game!
Felix Salmon is an a-hole and a moron. First of all, if you're going to title the missive "...of the day" there should be more than one example per quarter and such example should actually be vapor. Beyond that, Salmon gets almost everything wrong about small teams building products and Kickstarter in general. Small teams can have huge advantages over big companies specifically because they don't need to build hug quantities fo product. And Kickstarter has a fairly well-known reputation for products from manufacturers who don't have all the answers before they are asking for money.
> And personally, I think that iOS 6 is a disappointment and no one wants to admit it. The hardware is eclipsing the software.

The actual explanation is that the iOS6 beta was made available in June, people have been talking about it for 3 months. It's old news (and felt enormously boring during the keynote as we'd already seen pretty much everything they demoed aside from — I believe — panorama). The hardware, on the other hand, is new.
Thanks! The hidden nav is certainly a risk. The bumps on the bottom of the bar try to suggest it, but are very subtle. A major overhaul like this would involve some marketing efforts, and/or a NUX tutorial upon first launch. They'd lose that chunk of existing users who hate change, no matter what progress is made. I can picture the streams of tweet rage already...

Recommendations on clearer nav icons? Always seeking constructive feedback from people wiser than I.
> for those times that you have a great adult math or science joke you have to tell, we've rolled out the ability for you to create 18+ hangouts.

> for those "other" adult conversations that DO violate our terms of use, please continue to report them and send evidence when you can. it helps identify and remove the jerks from our system.

This must win the price for the most hypocritical thing I've ever read in a, albeit semi official, product announcement.
Why not kickbug!
Patent trolls aren't the problem. The problem is that it's a profitable business model to have an idea, patent it, and then sit on it waiting for somebody to accidentally recreate it.

The reason this is a profitable business model is because too many obvious patents are granted. If granted patents were truly non-obvious, the likelihood of accidental infringement should be exceedingly low.

Patent trolls are merely a symptom of this issue. Hurting trolls does little to attack the wider problem.
Possibly because it's quite possible to have a successful exit or profitable business with only a Series A (Google did it...), but hard to reach that milestone on seed/angel funding alone, unless you're bootstrapping entirely in which case you don't care about funding.

The reason follow-on rounds get harder is because there are exponentially fewer markets where it's rational for investors to put money in at that valuation. If you take a $5M Series A that values the company at $20M or so, then a $50M acquisition is still a win for everyone. If you take a $50M Series B that values the company at $300M, you better be a billion-dollar business. If you take an $800M Series F, either you're the next Google or a bunch of investors are about to lose their shirts.

The Series A crunch gets publicity because it means that a bunch of founders are presumably either going to fail or will get talent-acquired for not-quite-FU-money. The Series B crunch just means that a lot of companies are getting acquired for FU money for the founders and a down payment on a house for the employees.
Ask HN: Self-employed - How do you keep a normal schedule?
Like I said in the title, I've recently left my full-time "regular corporate" job to go at it on my own as an iPhone developer, doing contract-work for small firms. Does the HN community have any advice for staying focused and keeping good work habits. Specific advice on not getting distracted (by HN, for example!) or how to manage your sleep schedule would also be appreciated.
I'm sorry to hear about what happened to you, but I'm glad you are making progress in getting over it. Based on your dosage, I do not think you have a lot to worry about, just don't become dependent on it. Here is a pubmed study regarding higher frequency than you report (although I do not know your dose)

"MATERIALS AND METHOD:

We prospectively studied, as part of the NeXT (Netherlands XTC toxicity) study, sustained effects of a low dose of ecstasy on brain function in 25 subjects before and after their first episode of ecstasy use (mean 2.0 +/- 1.4 ecstasy pills, on average 11.1 +/- 12.9 weeks since last ecstasy use), compared to 24 persistent ecstasy-naive controls, also measured twice and matched with the novice users on age, gender, IQ, and cannabis use. Cognitive brain function was measured in the domains of working memory, selective attention, and associative memory using fMRI.

RESULTS:
No significant effects were found of a low dose of ecstasy on working memory, selective attention, or associative memory neither at the behavioral level nor at the neurophysiological level.

CONCLUSIONS:
This study yielded no firm evidence for sustained effects of a low dose of ecstasy on human cognitive brain function. The present findings are relevant for the development of prevention and harm reduction strategies. Furthermore, the study is relevant to the discussion concerning potential therapeutic use of ecstasy.
"

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17476480
i'd note that most heavy duty military equipment, including rifle bodies and several other parts are generally made of quality polycarbonate nowadays, because its lighter and arguably stronger than various metals (it's as rigid but not as brittle, and does not rust in any way)
Let this be a lesson: How not to handle a conference
10 Java Generics Interview Questions for practice
CloudFlare is much more than a CDN.
Apple doesn't allow anything other than their provided Webkit rendering engine for interpreting websites, in extension to not allowing any third party interpreters in general. They do now allow others to repackage Webkit into their browser apps, which Google has done with Chrome - albeit like with Win8@ARM they can't do JIT then. So it's not all that different actually, the outcome for the user is about the same.
Its enough to supply everyone in the world (all 7bn) with six Raspberry Pi computers (at US$35 a piece).
> Bullshit- they played schedule chicken and got caught. It'll happen again.

Yeah. And it's not just software either, the Osprey had very similar issues with its planning and handling.
Technology vs. Utility
Liked bashmarks? Try SwiftCommandLine. Easy nav, edit, open files by reference
First: it may not be quite so apparent from the screen shot, but the ad is framed to make it distinct form the rest of the app. Going further might well do more harm than good, as it could disrupt sight lines and make the UI garish regardless of ad content. The ad itself also draws distinction with the surrounding widgets by employing a different font, a different icon style, a different background, and a different icon size.

As the article describes, people aren't misclicking because they've looked closely at the ad and mistaken it for an application function. Misclicks are predominantly people who really aren't sure what they are clicking on, don't know they are clicking, and/or didn't intend to click at all.

Either way, in practice Yahoo's optimization efforts if anything create incentive to minimize misclicks, not the other way around.
I wasn't able to figure out how to post a comment/reply on Blogger, sorry.

Thanks for pointing me to your article from the HN flame war about MongoDB. If only there were more useful articles like this and less flaming.

You wrote "...in MySQL, the application is king and the db a humble servant." That is exactly my experience, and it leads not only to terrible databases but to piles of awful code written around terrible databases. In 1974 Kernighan and Plauger wrote "Choose a data representation that makes your program simple" (Elements of Programming Style). Other esteemed programmers have said the same thing. A well-designed and normalized database schema with validations and access rules implemented in the database will reduce the amount of application code needed.

I've written about keeping data management code in the database where it belongs (http://typicalprogrammer.com/?p=101), but you make a much clearer argument with real examples. A few years ago the Ruby on Rails people championed the idea of "application databases" and writing HTTP+XML APIs, which probably seemed like a great idea given that few, if any, Rails applications ever had databases that other applications needed to access. Now the NoSQL folks have taken this even further, eliminating structure from the data and all ACID compliance, separating the data from integrity enforcement, all in the name of scalability problems their app might have if they get as big as Google.

I am stuck with MySQL most of the time because I work with broken web applications, and so far all but a couple have used MySQL. As a long-time Oracle and SQL Server programmer I almost cry trying to figure out some of the MySQL databases I come actoss. I am working on one now that uses GUUIDs as primary keys in every table, generated in PHP code, for reasons I can only attribute to ignorance.
Introducing- eBay Feed
Great reporting from Ms. Violet Blue. Have seen her grow from starting an interesting sex education blog with classy radio podcasts to reporting now on quality and integrity of open web properties. Kudos on that!

Unfortunately paid PR (or corruption in top media properties), both in institutions of profit and non-profit, is a problem since time-immemorial. Containing corruption is one of the hardest problem to solve, and could become one of the main reasons to push people into believing machines more than people next-door.

Hope Wikimedia corrects this soon.

[Edited for spellings]
That's lazy reasoning.

I know lots of people that have >$500 dollar phones, who refuse to spend any money on apps. They only install free apps - it doesn't matter if a one buck app will save them time or money, they want free apps and only free apps.
Just for quick and dirty calculations, not betting the farm on it. Thanks for the cautionary message though.
This is from the MusOpen guy. I'd like to better understand what they are aiming to do: bug/ticketing systems grow over time. Any new bug tracker will be simple. Starting from scratch is always simpler.
Are we defined by the information in our brain or the matter composing it?
2 posts that discuss this issue. what do you think?
It's not getting paid twice. The reason there's no option for "free with ads" is because ads have diminishing returns. Each extra ad you show makes customers less likely to buy a given product. Advertisers won't pay as much if they're part of a giant block of ads.

For the company to get the same amount of money, the trade-off curve looks something like this:

Pay $x, see 0 ads.

Pay $0.75x, see 1 ad.

Pay $0.5x, see 4 ads.

Pay $0.25x, see 20 ads.

Pay $0, see 50 ads.

Some customers prefer to pay with their eyes instead of their wallets. You don't like to do that. I don't like to do that. But it's fine that companies give us the choice.

Also, you pay for broadcast TV?
I would say the relatively low level of discourse around Gruber's reviews are a reaction to his writing. The guy makes a career out of opinionated, mostly unsubstantiated one liners. Of course people are raring to give him a taste of his own medicine.
Can somebody verify if you can just go there, even though you're not linked to MIT in any way?!
Make sure you want to do the work.
While I agree that being a data scientist increases the odds one might know a thing or two about online advertising, it's far from a strong indicator, so I'm not sure what your basis for suggesting a "non-trivial chance".

Ms. Mason has confirmed her lack of domain expertise, so I guess that settles it.

In the process of attempting to highlight an important lesson about applying data analysis, she has highlighted another important and related lesson: regardless of the level of one's data analysis expertise, without domain expertise to contextualize the data, it is terribly difficult to do any kind of useful analysis.
I think it is important to do it in the right mindset and with the right intentions. Most people associate MDMA with partying, and while that may be one use, I don't think it is necessarily the best. I don't even understand how people go party on mushrooms. I think the best is to be somewhere safe and quiet, outdoors hopefully on a sunny day with someone you trust or by yourself and just to sit and think and write if you can.

It is a matter of looking at these substances as entheogens (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entheogens) and not a party tools and considering yourself a Psychonaut (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychonaut) and not a party animal.
>I know that Apple isn't popular around these parts

Except that we know from surveys that most HN readers use Apple computers, phones, and tablets. And yet, even here, you can't appreciate feats of design, engineering, and usability without s vocal minority getting amusingly angry.
> I think that the very idea behind IP laws in the first place was to protect effort

No, this is know as a "sweat of the brow" interpretation and has been rejected by the US Supreme Court. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow

Just because something takes effort does not mean it should be protected. Just because a person could make more money by having exclusivity does not mean that thing should be protected.

I haven't thought about the issue of magic tricks enough to know what I think about it, but I definitely resist the notion that something should be protected simply because it took work to create. That way leads to a society where everything is pay-per-view. For example, just because I scan an old book doesn't mean I should own a copyright on the scan.
If you're not familiar with the concept at all, "The Lean Startup" isn't bad. Otherwise, it's fairly fluffy in terms of content, and you'd be better off with something like:

Nail Then Scale It: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0055D7O1U/?tag=dedasys-20

I've heard good things about this too: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006UKFFE0/?tag=dedasys-20 - if anyone wants to comment on how it compares to "Nail It".

I've also got Steve Blank's book, but haven't read much of it yet. I'm signed up for the course though, and agree that he seems like a good speaker, although I haven't had much time for it yet.
Rumours have it Apple made it's own chip.
But that's beside the point. I really really don't understand this "no innovation, blah" attitude. I think people parroting it have the least chance to innovate at anything, they are condemned to mindlessly repeat the same stuff over and over again, and that staff is not true most of the time.

Ant btw, Gruber does criticise Apple sometimes. Those who read what he writes know that.
Speaking about our own projects.

Because Mono is not a solution when you need high scalable servers running in commercial UNIXes, z/OS and similar systems? These type of solutions always get to use C++ or Java in our projects.

My current project is actually done in C#, but it is a 100% Microsoft stack.
Eh, I can afford the no-ad premium. But I prefer the ad one, as sometimes they are interesting, and they are always more interesting than the wretched Amazon screensaver pics.

Also, the ads are not on the media itself, nor do they interrupt it. They are not intrusive, and do not bother me.
I love the back button. After losing my uninsured galaxy note I'm stuck with iOS for a bit. I literally hate the way that I can click a link in an email then have a mammoth task to get back to the email app, then the correct account, then the correct email, then the correct part of the email to find the next link I've been sent so I can start this dance again.

Roll on the launch of the note 2, back to a phone and OS that allows me to accurately place the cursor when I'm editting text!
Yes, this is the truth.