skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agreed with your first post. I am also holding out for the thought that there are exceptions. Interestingly, this comment stood out to me: "That is mostly because eBay is a generally badly designed site. They have one of the most averse-to-change user bases on top of it, so bad decisions stick for a longtime." But they have a huge userbase. Transactions are happening. This is where my confusion kicks in... People claim a site has bad design, but a ton of users actively use the service. I would venture to guess that a large percentage of those users are not tech-savvy.

So what is the measure by which we are able to claim that some site's design is "bad"? I provide the counter: large, active userbase and a lot of money moving through ebay. Perhaps not enough money goes there? Do we think someone could create a competitor to ebay with a "better" site design and steal ebay's crowd? What role does site design actually play here?
Well... It's embarrassing.

Unfortunately, Brazilian law attributes a higher value on someone's public image than it does on free speech. Hate speech is similarly suppressed and slander lawsuits are routinely used to silence criticism. If you blog about the bad service you got at some restaurant, you risk being sued. Not that long ago offenses against someone's honor have been used as mitigating factors in murders.

The bright side is that, if the lawsuit is considered without merit, the other part will have to cover at least part of your legal bills.
> What is the point that you are trying to prove?

I was arguing against the following statement: "But it's an exaggeration [...] to say that the enterprises that develop new drugs for prescribed medical treatment are corrupt in general beyond what Goldacre claims with specific evidence."

Or, more generally, reminding people why it is that our infrastructure is falling apart and why the federal government is at risk of collapse in the next few years, which are both in large part due to the massive amounts of fraud in the medical system. At least a third of all medical spending is waste and fraud, and that's not even counting the damages from all the needless harm it inflicts on people. Even just fixing some of the low-hanging fruit would leave us with enough money to provide healthcare to all Americans, as well as build an entire nationwide highspeed rail network every single year.

> Your evidence seems to be that they do not talk about all of the corruption and problems that you would like them to talk about.

It's mostly the intellectual dishonesty in virtually every single post that bothers me. The entire point of the blog is to 'prove' that alternative medicine is inferior to mainstream medicine because it isn't supported by science. They do this by looking at all the ways alternative medicine isn't supported by science, while completely sweeping under the rug all of the ways that mainstream medicine isn't supported by science. My concern isn't that the authors aren't mentioning specific issues, but rather that they're going out of their way to mislead their readers about the issues and the state of medicine more generally.

> That's an 18 year old source, talking about life expectancy, which is a trailing indicator.

It's the most recent data available. The fact that a lot of the data about the medical system is 20+ years old is in fact one of the biggest problems.

Also, I'm not in any way dismissing the contributions of modern medicine. As you say, modern medicine has contributed an enormous amount to society. Which makes it all the more unfortunate that many of its most vocal supporters wildly exaggerate its benefits and stick their heads in the sand when confronted with its problems. Making an intellectually honest argument in favor of modern medicine has to be one of the easiest tasks in the world, so the fact that so many of its supporters can't even do this doesn't say much for the quality of their ideas.

> Trying to prove that modern medicine has a net negative value because of a few issues of systemic corruption is not the way to do it.

I'm not trying to prove that it has net negative value. However, it's definitely not just a 'few' issues with systemic corruption.
I tried signing in with Google. Why do you need so much biographical information? Never mind, I won't use this.
> Brazil is a joke.

And so is every country, because ignorant judges are everywhere.
I think you are confusing together a few different things. A sanity check that is always on is not an assertion (at least by the usual sense of the word). Nobody is against sanity checks, just like nobody is against motherhood and apple pie. What I disagree with is the idea that sanity checks should be turned off in production, which is the core idea behind assertions.

It seems like your experiences confirm my own. People toy with the idea of turning off sanity checks in production, but eventually reality sets in and they realize that this is a bad idea. Then they keep calling the sanity checks "assertions," because nobody wants to submit a search-and-replace patch for a big code base, and a few die-hards still cling to the dream of running without error checking.

This leads to a lot of confusion whenever I talk about assertions (oh, assertions? You mean those things that are always on?) And so the cycle continues.
Ugh, not NURBS again, they are so much harder to control for high-detail surfaces you see for modern organics, and provide little to no advantages to hard and most environmental surfaces.

Leave NURBS to vehicle and product CAD, where it's actually very useful
I should also point out that I only know what the "big red button" does because I use GMail.

If I was seeing GMail for the first time in a completely foreign language: I wouldn't associate "red" with Compose/New Message.

Colors carry significant cultural baggage.

Here in the U.S, for e.g: I associate Red with `danger`, `anger`, and perhaps `stop` or `caution.` [0]

At first glance, a red button (relying solely on skeuomorphic distinction, and not the text) is something I _definitely_ don't want to click. I would assume it would delete my selected mail, or perhaps mark it as spam.

At least with text you don't have that cultural baggage. You have the baggage of the language, e.g: you definitely have the steeper learning curve of learning the UI's language.

Though I'd rather it be grammatically ambiguous, as opposed to being visually ambiguous. For instance: if MS used slang or abbreviations in their Metro applications, it may throw off non-native speakers.

---

While I agree with GP that MS could benefit from using a bit more distinction. I'd still steer away from using colors and gradients and such (rather: such distinctions wouldn't be my first choice).
Cultural differences aside, you have to consider biological differences, such as color-blindness.

You can add visual distinction without necessarily resorting to skeuomorphism. For example: add some vertical lines, mess with font-weighting (which MS seems to use heavily), etc.

[0]: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/colours...
what's wrong with OpenID again?
How long did this take to create? It looks damn cool
I agree. Visual design is like fashion and flatter is now "in". There are pros (cleaner, less distracting chrome) and cons (where is the button).
Seems pretty silly to claim it's "obvious" as this guy does repeatedly. I'm not sure you can claim that the move from being able to upgrade and service computers to not being able to is a move toward being an iOS device. Seems more likely that Apple just makes those sacrifices because they're required to make thin and light products, and at today's speeds few people need to upgrade things anymore. (Not that it wouldn't be _nice_ to be able to upgrade things, but we've seemingly moved to a time when a lot of people don't mind the lack of this as a feature)
Billions of Windows Users Affects with Java Vulnerability
I can write you code that will pass all static analysis tests with full code coverage and complete dependency injection that still makes you taste your lunch in the back of your throat. I think any good programmer could.

> forgetting that the reviewer just skimmed it over to get it out of their queue.

There's a difference between cargo cult code reviews and an actual, formal code review.
Ditto. Going to jail and/or getting fined for calling someone a name...seriously?
Well, Google asked the NSA to help them with security. So if Google can't secure their mail, then we are all hooped anyway.
I can assure you whatever position you were interviewing for 3 years ago, it wasn't for this. That was most likely for the previous reskin they did a few years ago.

The frontend / backend was completely rewritten over the course of this year, throwing out most of everything from the old site.
If you've ever seen very young puppies playing, you know that it's not as cute as it sounds. There's yelping and pain, and often even blood as the puppies bite one another mercilessly. But as the days and weeks pass, that stops; by being bitten, the puppies learn that biting hurts. It takes a little while, and is perhaps not the most pleasant of methods, but it's what their minds can process.

Some people are the same way. It's a cruel thing to force a bully (or its net-cousin, the troll) to look in the mirror and see what they've really done; what they really are. It messes with a person's head in a way that those who haven't experienced it cannot understand. But many of them legitimately NEED that kind of cruelty; it's the language they speak, the stimulus they know how to sense.

It's still cruel, mind you; it shouldn't be shied away from, but it shouldn't be glorified or looked forward to either. Sometimes it's not even possible, especially in the age of the Internet. But when it can be done, I'd call it preferable to bringing in the authorities. It's less wasteful, on account of not throwing up lifelong obstacles for the troll to overcome, and when properly applied it hurts worse than the law would allow our authorities to inflict anyway. Justice and vengeance, all wrapped up in a nice, neat package.
This is sort of a non sequitur, but the bootstrap UI makes this feel oddly like app.net.
Brazil is one of the top countries when it comes to takedowns. This one might have slipped I guess.

http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/government...
Citing Payscale? That's somewhere between desperate and useless.
In my short 5 year career as a software developer, my absolute lowest point was working with Blackberry creating applications.

This was around July 2010-ish.

The development environment: Sucked. Eclipse with some rubbish plugins that didn't work all the time.

Each change in the UI, I had to compile, publish to my BB device (which took about 20 minutes each time) and see how it ran there because the simulator was nowhere near to the actual representation on the phone.

Using Java to make BB apps wasn't so bad, I mean, I was only used to C# at that point, and the transition wasn't that painful. It was the god damn awful developer tools.

I wouldn't go back to making Blackberry apps ever again; I value my happiness much more these days and I can afford to pick and choose my jobs.

I wonder if they have made things easier this iteration. It's been 2 years since I've seen things in the ecosystem after all.

My absolute favorite platform to make Mobile apps is Windows Phone 7 (I hear 8 is pretty much the same). You just can match the developer tools for it. It's so simple.
idealism is a wonderful thing but really it would just get more people on mac or windows
I mean, as a good point, ray tracing still isn't fast enough for the vast majority of pre-computed rendering for motion pictures. See PRMan and the majority of other modern renderers that all use still use the REYES algorithm. Sure, a unbiased renderer is great when you just need a single still without a huge amount of tweaking, but when you need motion ray tracing -everything- will remain impractically slow for a very long time.
They're only oddities to well-off straight white able-bodied males with no perspective. These "oddities" exist for good practical reasons and the government is there for all people not just the nerd faction who decide they only want the government functions that benefit them personally.
>Another example of the web causing a problem for current law.

More like law causing problems for the web.
Neither. It's just that different things needs different design approaches. An online store has nothing in common with a presentation site. Just like a real store needs shelves, an online store needs to group the information somehow. Sidebars aren't the only way to group information. I bet Apple will redesign its online store in the near future.
I think expecting end-users to know or care about the implementation detail of a memory-mapped file is even sillier than all the other silly expectations floating around this thread.
So people that work together but live a couple neighborhoods apart will just drive separately? Wow, it sounds like nobody has seen this poster:

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3615/3399729832_330d4a5bed_z.j...
I definitely find that my focus is greater prior to eating. In fact, on days when I'm coding, I usually end up skipping lunch because, though I'm hungry, my brain is much more engaged in the process at hand.

Here's an idea: write a simple script to record key strokes during the time that you're coding; monitor your calorie intake; graph that shit. Science!
We used to joke that if you were in the Tevatron (Fermi lab) parking lot you were a co-author!
Very cool idea - starting a conversation on an image.

The issues I see:

1) The image(s) are easily obscured by comments.

2) Alerts, alerts everywhere.

I could see this having a very broad appeal to any type of community that uses images. Making an image and submitting it to reddit may be a great way to get traction (the image would be the marketting, the conversation would be extra).

I liked being able to comment anonymously and was disappointed when I couldn't continue to do so on the creepy house pic - I could see this really taking off.

Good Luck!
Extremely relevant - http://analytics.blogspot.com/2012/09/mobile-friendly-sites-...
Mobile-friendly sites turn visitors into customers
I want this in the browser. Throw away the DOM, and let's just have canvas and JS. Skip loading any HTML or CSS. It would be great.
You vastly underestimate the value of predictability in billing to a business's "Chief Fretting Officer".

If you asked companies if they'd rather pay a random amount between 100$ and 500$, or always pay 500$, 9 out of 10 would opt for the latter. And if you don't understand why, then you've never spent any amount of time pondering a business's cash flow.
Great constructive feedback. This gives me something to work with. Thanks!
How do you find your passion?
Evil Alternate Screen
if there actually is dust and blowing actually takes it out of the cartridge then it works. the article was saying most of the time it wasnt dusty so there was no point to blow on it but we all still do it, hell i've done it on CD's, flash drives, power connections, pretty much everything electronic if a quick unplug replug didnt work i have tried blowing in it and eventually it works though blowing doesnt help it makes me feel like im doing something to help it work.
Whether you price by usage or have tiers, always do value pricing, not cost-plus pricing.
Note that a tree farm is not (usually) a forest. A tree farm is usually just trees, all the same type and age, in a relatively uniform grid, with minimal other flora or fauna. A forest is a complex ecosystem that happens to have trees as its largest component.
I'm confused as to why I would need to register at all? A public facing demo would be really nice, even if it limited the features so you could still charge for the full product.
As far as I know, Feedburner is still delivering blog emails to the subscribers. But alternative options are always good.
Also, just a few comments:

By clicking on a comment, it will hide all of the other comments. Furthermore, in the tag options you can edit which tags that you would be able to see.
That's exactly what code reviews are used for at our company. You learn things you wouldn't have learned otherwise and a stylistic consensus grows bottom up as people discuss the whys of their personal style.

Occasionally bugs are caught. We also timebox reviews to 30 minutes and they are asynchronous (review the last week's commits on github).
If you asked them that way they'd opt for the former. However, most pricing structures don't provide such a clear-cut range; the edges feel quite fuzzy, and that uncertainty does indeed drive customers towards predictable-but-higher pricing.
Links have more subtle affordances that make them stand out from web text and few people have a problem navigating that.

Microsoft's problem isn't inherent in having a 'flat' design. It arises because of their alternately uniform (outlook), and seemingly arbitrary (metro desktop), color, contrast, layout and font-weight choices.

They could conceivably shift to a design-language where those attributes could be used to hint at interactivity at least as well as a big shiny buttons.
Sure, it's awfully simplifies everything, but at a huge cost.

> lighting, reflections, diffraction, motion blur

Just about every one of those becomes easy, but incurs a huge performance penalty.

Also, thinking about it, I'm not sure that motion blur actually becomes significantly easier.

Lighting isn't a huge win, direct lighting is improved slightly, but GI is still impractically slow.

Reflection and diffraction are a pretty good win, but are also things that are solvable with a "ray-trace sometimes" approach, which is a much more likely solution for the near to mid-term.

And generally speaking visibility is done with some sort of ray checking anyways, sure it simplifies things that now we don't have two different solutions, but the complexity is a huge optimization.

So sure, it'd simplify things a ton, but I don't imagine it to be the primary rendering technology in real-time game for a long time.
My above statement is actually aligned with your sentiment. I think people use data analysis to help predict future events like how many customers you'll have or how much an expense will be.

I figured, since Keen is in the business of helping people with those predictions it would be a really awesome application of their own API. Customers could see their usage as part of the visualizing product and it would help them predict their bill.
You are reasonably certain now, based on what information? This really is a funny case study on how rumors develop on the internet...
Deconstructing the new MySpace design
It seems like they listened to you:

"Indeed, An Almost Entirely Bootstrapped Job Search Giant, Gets A Monster Exit"
Yeah, loads of teams I know need Group Therapy.

:-)

More and more I realise that great software comes out of teams that work well together, talk about the code daily and most importantly want each other to succeed.

Code reviews might be a way to encourage that. But there is an honesty needed. Its often called a "collegiate" atmosphere - usually its based on the idea that everyone around the table has earned the right to be there, they all know and respect that, and importantly no-one can simply fire them or ban them arbitrarily - then you start to see honesty in code and discussions
Maybe Schmidt has more information than you? Just saying...
Maybe you should make constructive comments instead of making assumptions about what people learn or don't (or what they know or don't, or what has worked for them or hasn't).

There are some really disrespectful people in this community.
I ask my bosses what my passion should be every morning like a good american.

Just kidding I develop apps on the side so I can pretend like I'm doing something interesting with my life.
I love old Avalon Hill games. One of my dormant projects is working on a networked Russian Campaign so that I can play against my dad.
> But unfortunately they seemed to spit in the face of DBAs and Ops people a long time ago by proclaiming them to be unnecessary and archaic.

>>WTF ? I have never heard 10gen say anything remotely like this.

From the "Ease of use" section of their Philosophy page http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Philosophy,

This means that MongoDB works right out of the box, and you can dive right into developing your application, instead of spending a lot of time fine-tuning obscure database configurations.

There goes the indirect jab to the RDBMS DBAs wasting their time.
Google, now sponsored by the NFL
An idea would be to integrate this with a DVCS system like Github och Bitbucket. Jetstrap could do commit/push at a frequent interval, thus allowing you to revert your changes. Good job.
"focus on... not being found to be wrong"

Why is that?

Is there really even a "right" or wrong" in this process? Isn't it more of a matter of being able to support your choice of design trade-offs with cogent arguments? And being able to persuade others?

There is no doubt some amount of "Why" questions that a developer can ignore. The ones that come from people who have not done their homework and thus have failed to locate the (obvious) answers. But any developer who thinks he can ignore each and every "Why" question, even if he's highly competent, is not someone I would trust with really important stuff. Is it that he is afraid of being "wrong"? That he does not have a good argument to make? Is he hesistant to say, "Honestly, I don't know. That is just the solution I chose." I don't see anything "wrong" with that. No single developer is going to be able to think of everything, of every possible solution or scenario. I thought that is an important reason behind something like code review.
Surfing.

Ever since I picked it up when I moved to Hawaii it superceded all of my other hobbies. The payoff for improvement is so great, and even if you don't have a great session, you're out in the ocean.
Definitely. Around my old neighborhood, Game Genie was a highly prized accessory if only for that reason. Cheating was all well and good, but having your Nintendo actually work? That was the real advantage!
I think code reviews are fine as long as people are learning and building rapport with each other. When either of those are missing the reviews can be a waste of time and even detrimental to working relationships.

YMMV to say the least. You can find yourself working with the friendliest person who teaches you something useful every time you look over code. Or you can end up working with someone who's emotional maturity level can only go up to put it nicely. Combine the latter case with someone who isn't quite old enough to "know what they know and know what they don't know" and you have a recipe for disaster.
Yahoo Names Ken Goldman as Chief Financial Officer
Pivoting a City: Can Startups Help More Than Themselves?
I noticed the "Try Jetstrap free today!" then I saw you mention "Our first thought was $10/mo for 100 screens"[1] which I think is not only underpriced but the wrong pricing structure.

You should implement something like this:

- User signs up - gets 5 - 10 FREE Screens.

- Once they've used up their FREE screens take them to a page to purchase more screens.

- When they have 1-2 FREE Screens remaining you should have a popup which says they've nearly used their free screens up and to buy more (with one option offering to go to payment page & the other leting the user continue what they were doing).

- On the page where the users can purchase more screens, I wouldn't bother with a monthly subscription plan because that's not what your target audience is interested in.

I'd offer the following options:

100 Screens - $39 ($0.39/Screen)

250 Screens - $95 ($0.38/Screen)

500 Screens - $180 ($0.36/Screen)

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4572125
OK, it just seemed to me that the stated goal of Mongo-like servers was to take some of our accepted notions of the "working set as it relates to database software" and put them up for fresh discussion.