skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In reference to OP, it's a matter of thoughtfulness. A Facebook birthday notification happens whether you're thinking of a person or not. At least, if you put it on your calendar, you had to sacrifice some time and energy.

Not to say that you're less thoughtful for using Facebook reminders; it just seems to promote shallow interactions at times.
While these sins are good things to be thinking about when building a site lists like this can be dangerous if they cause people to make a fundamental error; assuming you know what "most users" or the "average user" know or want without actually doing some basic usability/UX testing.

One of the most important things to consider when thinking about usability/UX is that if you built it then you're not a good authority on what it's like to use it.
It is ... slightly creepy, depending on whether they remember that they didn't give you that information.

But more to the point, is it worth scraping fb on the off chance that their email is part of the public profile? I would think most of your target audience would have better privacy settings.
Unless you're getting sued or threatened with jail time, it's not disruption.
I tried using oh-my-zsh, but all of a sudden bringing up a new terminal (on OS X) went from taking ~1 second to ~5 seconds. Totally killed my interest in zsh.

I'm sure there's a way to make it all work nicely, but bash has been doing just fine for me, I don't feel the need to figure out an entirely new configuration system for a tool that ultimately has little new utility in my workflow.
This gives me hope that my patent for "Going to the Bathroom" is going to be approved!
Facebook's $4.5 billion secret weapon
How DayZ got to 1m in five months, and what's next for standalone
The Founder’s Dilemma
Tax alchemy: tech's avoidance
Thanks for the offer and I'll take you up on it. I'll shoot you an email when I get home.
I live in the Bay Area and my town isn't even named on Apple Maps. The streets are there, but they show it with the wrong name. I could understand if this was an obscure little English hamlet in the wilds of Norfolk, but this is the San Francisco Bay Area.
Why would he never be dumb enough to do this? It seems that he does not see it as a moral decision, and I'm guessing he's betting that windows 8 adoption will never be that large.
Can Gaming Help Kids Learn?
In the article, OP explains that they (there should be a gender neutral singular pronoun in english) are in middle of analyzing data from a certain income group who are used to getting around the web, who handle both desktops and phones. It's in the first or second paragraph!
Digging deeper into Apple’s maps problem
it's creepy. if you didn't have a form-fill inviting people to give you their first names, you missed the opportunity to address your followers by name. lesson learned for consideration next time.

you should also be thoughtful about how much email you send to someone, if you didn't put that form alongside a fairly explicit opt-in. If the form said, "notify me when you launch," that's not the same as "please feel free to market to me indefinitely."

When we recently launched, I had a similar list, to which I sent 1 (one) email only, and in that email stated that it would be the only email they received from me without further opt-in. We got multiple appreciative comments in response.
> after we saw the article on Techdirt

It's unfortunate that Google is still relying on the press/blogs as a means of elevating customer support tickets.

I know this stuff isn't easy, but I really hope some serious effort is going on to make Google better at customer support. It's a major blind spot. Automation is great, but it will never account for every possible scenario.
Google's 'beta' is equivalent to spiderman's broadway 'previews'. When they open to the public, start amassing huge amounts of user data, using the public for R&D, call it what you want, the public is paying.
Nohomophobes
I would take the PC on general principle. I can vouch the L4D games on PC are fantastic, especially when playing with some friends.
No, it is not. It is not the same to prevent you from accessing your information (however high-value or critical it might be) than having the very same information being actively used against you in unforeseeable ways.

Besides, this statement runs against the core principles of Risk Management, which recognizes the need to prioritize the use of scarce resources to protect the most salient risk according to a utility function that combines but the likeliness and the adverse consequences of each potential incident.
Patrick McKenzie launches lifecycle email training course
I think that "in-person usability testing" refers to the process of actually watching a user use a product. I agree with you that these aren't general truths, but I don't see where the author said that; the author said that these are "general findings". Also, they are general findings for a specific target market: "lower-income users who access the Internet at least once a day on a desktop at home or work, or on their phones". My guess is that anyone who visits Hacker News does not fall in that target market.
This is an interesting approach for a beginner, but eventually one must commit in order to have subconcious command of the syntax. It could be argued that multilingual children have greater command over the essence of language.
I want to sire your love-child.
Upon re-examination, all the claims for this patent were cancelled (see the last page.)
Why Is Part of Facebook Broken?
http://www.webgl.com has a decent collection of demos (full disclosure: self plug)
I'm thiiiiiis close to going back to rc, because when there's any kind of load on my system it can take multiple seconds for a new xterm to open with bash. rc starts in no time, and I already use it when I have to write a quick one-off script.
When people say Maps is a "huge step backwards", are they actually using the product? I mostly use my phone for driving directions, and the addition of turn-by-turn navigation has been a huge step forward. Maybe I'm the one iPhone user in the world who thinks Maps is awesome, but that seems unlikely. It seems more likely that this is just another case of the "vocal minority" being amplified by uncritical journalists. Remember what happened when Facebook first released the News Feed? :-)
just stick an exec zsh at the end of your bashrc, wrapper in an if statement if it's not available on all machines on your environment.

do people have the same attitude to screen/tmux or vim/emacs (vs nano)?
In one online game I played, people accused me of cheating/using a bot [I never did]. The problem was that they actually were cheating and could see through walls and/or used an aimbot to improve their accuracy, but my reaction time was faster than theirs and I would get a headshot off before they could kill me. Of course, it didn't help that I used a shotgun which was ridiculously overpowered in the game.
In addition to things that were said, I found some good work on Elance.com, and small projects then evolved to things that kept me busy full-time.

For me it was a bit intimidating to begin with since I had to compete against developers whose bids were a fraction of the price I quoted. However, I soon found out that there are still people out there who value quality and are willing to pay more for it, so the "secret" is to make sure you put a quality bid. What worked for me was:

1. Make sure that your offer refers to the project description. Even highlight issues you find. There are lots of people out there who don't read the details and so people offering work appreciate it when someone actually read and thought about their project.

2. Describe how the project relates to an experience you have. Show a couple of examples work you have done with similar nature.

3. Include a sample of your work. In a couple of projects I was told that I was the only person who did that. I won both contracts although I had the most expensive bid.

4. Be responsive if the customer is asking questions before they make the decisions. Despite not winning all those projects where I had contact with the customer, it gave me an insight to their thought process, and even when I didn't win, it was useful to know I was a runner-up (and where possible, why I didn't win the contract).

5. Don't under-price yourself. There are probably cheaper developers than you, but are they as experienced as you are?

6. Don't over-price yourself. There are some naive customers who estimate a work to be more expensive than you think it should be (yes, really). It's tempting to be greedy and up your price, but I found out that being fair led to long-term relationships and to people who kept me so busy I didn't have to look for new clients for a while.

Hope this helps.

Edit: formatting.
The judging system did not pass the Turing test...
Apple is using AutoNavi (not TomTom) for its map data in China (which Google is using as well). Here's a blog post from someone who lives in China describing why he likes iOS 6 maps more than Google Maps.

http://anthonydrendel.com/blog/2012/9/24/ios-maps-and-china....
Udacity's CS101 Class Has Enrolled over 200,000 Students
Hi mingpan, sorry about that. It looks as though a HN moderator changed the headline before I had a chance. Hopefully it's less ambiguous now!
It's a good idea to play with. I've been using Streak, which merges CRM with gmail inbox. Google's own task integration (as with Apple's, Yahoo, et al) have been poor.

But I agree with previous commenters that a speculative mobile app is unsuitable for kickstarter. I wouldn't be surprised if the new rules issued to prevent speculative hardware projects were eventually expanded to include things like mobile apps, but in any case it's a marketplace -- others with the capability to fund are free to disagree, and if enough do it will get funded. What's to complain about?
Ask HN: Good books on the history of computer science?
I like computer science, but I would like to know more about it's history. Any good book recommendations? Maybe a good book on the overview and then some good ones on specific aspects (business, technical, biographies, etc.)
Works perfectly with Nightly (2012-09-28) on Windows 7.
Why no fullscreen support for Firefox? It support fullscreen api (http://caniuse.com/#feat=fullscreen) and as far as i can see it's just as stable as chrome.
Want to Run Code on the ISS? There’s a Competition For That
Questions To Ponder: Services World And Integrated Stacks
Reminds me of a super simple game I wrote a few years ago to try out processing.js - http://nickcammarata.com/processing/
I independently wrote pretty much the same post.

http://www.apreche.net/dont-change-the-computer-change-yours...
STEVE JOBS WOULD NOT HAVE ALLOWED THIS!
"No longer must developers and entrepreneurs have a deep understanding of telecommunications systems to build applications that leverage voice and SMS."

Kinda makes this sound like you've never heard of Twilio. And given that a lot of your audience has heard of them, it makes you look a little naive.

I think a better way to put it (paraphrasing) would be to say TelAPI is the best way to build applications that use voice and SMS. Go on the attack and demonstrate why you're better. Show that implementation with the competition requires more code or certain functionality just isn't possible.
Why would a company want all its employees to have to buy their outlook calendar-based time logger doohickey? They just distribute it on new hires' computers and be done with it. And that's not even getting into the ones that actually have proprietary data/trade secrets. Forcing all windows 8 programs to go through a Microsoft-curated app store is just not going to happen unless it's for some very limited "starter edition".
This article was written to express findings of one study ("two days running usability tests") with specific products ("websites that sell financial products like life cover, funeral policies, and annuities") for a specific target market ("lower-income users who access the Internet at least once a day on a desktop at home or work, or on their phones").

Take the information with a grain of salt. It's a positive thing to think about how a user outside of the early adopter cohort will use a product. Maybe not right at first, but at least later on when your company outgrows (hopefully) its first users.
Pandoc is a compiler from N input grammars to M output grammars. Compilers are easy to write in typed, functional languages because they have algebraic data types and pattern matching.
You are right, but what I tell my programmers: if you want high performant SQL-query you can make 2 things:
1. Think carefully about data and write generic SQL without any DBMS specifics
2. Try to optimize everything with your DBMS specifics

The latter - almost never works. Be it Oracle, MSSQL, DB2 or PostgreSQL.

And even when it works - it's unacceptable.

We had a query in Oracle that executed several hours. Our Oracle DBA found a way to tweak Oracle that shrinked it to 30 minutes. It was interesting, but impossible to use in practice - we could not guarantee that other queries will go fine with this server settings. (Our DBA was the first who was against using in production)
I woke up early and then proceed to kill 30 minutes on this instead of getting to work on time :-/
Instagram Use Is Exploding
Stealth is bullshit.
Why Reddit is banning links from Reason.com
Feds snoop on social-networks without warrants, ACLU says laws don't protect you
Because forcing all their customers to move to one of their competitors would be a fantastic business decision?
Show HN: Milled - Aggregates emailed offers to unclutter your inbox
Why is there a $0.05/call charge to set the caller ID? This feature is already available on Tropo at no cost.
And what even smaller percentage of people go through the trouble of reporting an error event if they do see the curl? It feels weird to pay for a service, and then have to actively work to make it better.. (by paying, I mean buying an ios device..).

Then I understand the release and iterate strategy, and I'm sure it applies in many situations. But when you are Apple and have painfully built a reputation of releasing only great products, you may want to think more than twice before crippling your star product, even if it's just a little.
Hackers by Steven Levy, if you haven't read that yet
Developers: Up with iOS, down with HTML5
And just entering the address/location queries (whether they succeed or not, and whether the user's own satisfaction is implicit or explicit) gives Apple bulk who-queries-what-from-where data that can be manually reviewed or automated-tested in followup processes.

For example, they know how dense their geo-data is; where does the volume of queries most exceed the existing density of data? Which queries actually result in someone following instructions to their terminus, and then not requerying again for a while?

Also: while Apple doesn't have a toolbar reporting every query and click into Google Maps -- as with the Google-Bing search results dustup of February 2011 -- they could be using their own automated process to trickle queries into Google Maps APIs and highlight major discrepancies with their own answers, for engineer/data-entry attention.
It's possible in the way that it's "possible" to compete with local ISPs - all you have to do is lay your own 50000 miles of cable! Well, Google, as a huge megacorp, actually has the resources to do this, but it hardly fosters a free and competitive environment.

Just because a company with a market cap in the hundreds of billions can do it doesn't mean it meets an average person's definition of "doable".
Pro-tip: turn flying things into a murmuration :-)
Good question, I've wondered this myself.

I'm not in this domain, but they do have the location of millions of phones as they move around during the time the Maps app is open. This could solve problems like adjustment of roadway locations, finding one-way streets, identifying highly-used locations. If people take a different route than the one recommended, this is also a clue.

The location information would also provide a focus-of-attention mechanism (concentrate manual effort along oft-driven routes).

I'm not familiar enough with their privacy rules to understand what portion of this data was already available to Apple versus stuff that is only available on the server side.
Fire a few bullets, hold right or left arrow, never die. Left it on while I went to class for an hour just to test. Still alive.
Masterpiece: Starflight for PC
Another comment has already mentioned Taskforce; Mail Pilot (http://www.mailpilot.co/), which was another Kickstarter project, also does something similar.

I really want something that does this, but as a native desktop app and a mobile app, and syncs to a web app so I can access it from elsewhere. And a pony.
Always know your audience. Hacker News readers are not most users and you won't always be designing for them. You wouldn't believe what hangs up most users unless you saw it yourself. This is true for the web as well as all devices. Forgo testing with real users and prepare for a high bounce rate.
I'm not clear what the problem is. Do you have a study that shows that, for example, 12 years of training over 4 years of training produces a significant result in mortality rate?

Reducing barriers while still producing similar or good-enough output is the nature of all industries.

To take the doctor example, say you have the following available to you (price for a single visit):

$0 - Google
$50 - Cheap Walk-In Clinic
$250 - Regular Doctor Checkup/Visit
$1000 - Semi-good specialist
$9000 - Specialist

Which would you go to for a headache? Ear infection? Dull pain in an arm/shoulder for a long length of time? Strange heart symptoms? Tumor?

To go back to programming, take the same list

$0 - CMS/Drupal/Wordpress/Bighost
$1000 - Outsourced
$9000 - Local Consultant

Which would you use for a personal blog? Friend's bar website? Restaurant chain?
Go by Example: Timers and Tickers
awesome! i am friends with Nate, their Miami based guy. Looking forward to seeing how other people integrate their API to their apps.
Apple Maps' Six Most Epic Fails
I suggested acquisitions and investment in outside companies that are on track to create a $100 million product within six months but are maybe undervalued by the market. They need to look for situations where there aren't six layers of management to soak up all the rewards.

I've never heard of a company dumping millions of dollars on random developers and I don't think that's possible. They may dump millions of dollars on a VP, but by the time it "trickles down" through all the layers to the team it comes out as "you're lucky to have a job." So in almost all instances it's telling people to kill themselves to launch a $100 million dollar product in six months just so they can keep their jobs (with free food of course). Those people are going to take option 2, quit and go somewhere else, and the product will never launch.
"Release early, release often" is good advice, and in that sense there's nothing wrong with using customers as "beta testers". No matter how good your QA department is, there're always unanticipated issues when you release at massive scale and push something to dozens of millions of users.

But you don't just rip out something millions of people depend upon for a function as critical as safe navigation in unfamiliar areas and replace it with something that has constant, pervasive issues performing its basic operations. A custom Maps application and dataset is a good business move, but you have to make sure it's at least a minimum viable product before you do the kind of rollout that Apple has done.

When Google replaces Gmail with the shinier "Googmail" and 25%+ of mail to the new service comes back undeliverable, and there's no reasonable method to revert to plain old Gmail, you'll have a comparable quagmire. The fact is that while Apple's Maps may occasionally work sort of well, the failure rates are unacceptably high; too high for anyone to trust the program any more.

It will take years to undo the damage from this, and I fully expect a good portion of people to swap iPhone for Android as a result.
I'm happy to answer questions, as usual, though I'd prefer to talk about this as a business rather than this as a product, because I'm not totally comfortable with selling on HN.
Auto Accident Application
You don't understand Jobs - this solution would have been a cluster and really hamstrung the new iOS maps app. Apple is not afraid to release a new version that is a downgrade - check out iMovie '08 or even FCP X.

Your suggestion sounds more like a solution that Google or Microsoft would do - they don't care so much about creating UI confusion for the customer as much as giving them choice (simpler move, as that abrogates the vendor having to make the call).
http://www.shirleyreade.com/images/ArtGallery/Children/TheTi...
Ideas for reviving America’s entrepreneurial spirit
Back in the nineties, people actually added "not that there's anything wrong with it" when they announced not to be gay.
Zero mention of mass transit directions.
Lots of people agree that SC2's editor was good enough to do a lot of neat things. Someone made a 3rd person, mmo/arena type game. There was some issues with the fact that sc2 netcode is no good for mmo/shooters, but I think the true killer was the fact that it was impossible to get your map to become popular if you weren't already popular. The popular maps stayed popular because they were always on the front page.

This is completely different from wc3's system where whatever games were hosted by people showed up, so you would have to wait to find a game you wanted, but it also provided new maps much more exposure.
It seems like in Europe and especially UK, it's truly bad. In the SF Bay Area, it's reasonably functional for me, but there are enough mistakes (from my own usage, not looking for problems) that I don't fully trust it.

And that's the problem - if I don't fully trust it, it loses a lot of its utility. I downloaded the Bing app as a backup. I still like the new UI and the turn-by-turn.
Thanks. I love the new maps too. The step by step audio cues and especially visuals are delightful and feels right.

The only missing use case for me is street view. I've used it extensively in the past to look at houses when I was home shopping.
It's been a few years since I've taken a look at Flash; some of the other comments lead me to suspect some of the things I say here will be out of date.

I've always stayed away from Flash because you had to shell out a gazillion dollars for the developer tools. I stumbled on the open-source toolchain a few years ago, but I wasn't able to figure it out. All the tutorials I could find were written for the official toolchain, and the docs for the open-source toolchain assumed good knowledge of the official one. swfmill...flasm...mtasc...so confusing!

Adobe's recent noises of abandoning Flash Player for Linux hasn't helped my perception of them, either. I develop on Linux if I can. Having to test Flash in Windows -- and not being able to target Linux -- would be a pain.

So as far as I'm concerned, Flash is a dying legacy platform; HTML 5 and Coffeescript are the future.
The New MySpace Is Going After Twitter Not Facebook
The truth about WP7 v. Win8
"Escalator" became commonplace after Otis started using it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalator#Loss_of_trademark_rig...
Great comment, appreciate the feedback. We'll keep that in mind and perhaps tweak that statement a bit.

We do acknowledge Twilio and respect what they've done so far. Though, we're confident TelAPI's increased set of features are well-suited to satisfy the needs of developers building systems with highly custom telephony requirements. Twilio's solved 80% of the problem. We're out there to solve the remaining 20%.
The Rage For MOOCs
Operation Unlike Is A Go: Page Fan Counts Are Dropping Because ...
UCL does something similar. C is the first half of the first term, Haskell is the second half.