skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mobile devices are fantastically horrible objects, and you have to blame the deliberately hobbled, crippled nature of touch screens for many, many things that suck when (trying) to use one.

My fat fingers are too stupid to learn how to type on soft keyboards, and that's the end of it. Even when turning on pointer position feedback that shows the path and position of the cursor, to reveal what the interface THINKS I'm trying to do, it's usually a little off because my fingers are soft fleshy blobs. Soft keyboards are one of the more reasonable examples of touch screen software, and there are many varieties, and they get a lot of truly professional attention. Seriously, try using an ordinary desktop keyboard with a water balloon. It yields poor results.

Touch screen experiences suck. Add to the fact that many devices include resolution independent interfaces, and there becomes this hellish mix of software controlled guess work that stands as an insurmountable obstacle between me and the delivery of actual professional work, beyond typing an e-mail. They will never yield the pixel perfect pointing precision of a mouse.

Touchscreens are prompting the destruction and reinvention of lots of things that work fine with any Keyboard/Video/Mouse interface, are twisted into horrid mutant abominations that make me want to commit suicide on touch devices. Everyone is bending over backwards to coddle and baby people who own these status symbols du jour.

That being said, there needs to be a line drawn on re-designs of perfectly useful software, in the name of the holy tablet/smartphone/touchscreen complex.

Case in point: Bookmarks & RSS

In Firefox, this is one of the key features that has me hooked for life (while it remains in place). In every mobile device I have ever seen, RSS is an abomination, and I refuse to embrace it. Internet Explorer is too awful in general, so don't even bring it up (I won't get into why Chrome is also a non-starter, but I'll just mention that in-browser authentication is point-blank wrong, and I don't like signing into my browser). But it's perfect in Firefox, and they shouldn't touch it. If RSS ever disappeared from Firefox, I would simply never look at another feed again. I would not use a stand-alone RSS program to consume and digest RSS feeds.

RSS is a key component of bookmarability in Firefox, and it ain't broke. Not on desktops and laptops. I hope these kinds of details aren't lost in the rush to compete with amateur crapware that we find on mobile devices.
So did anyone ask these same questions to businesses that hire CS grads? How about business that hire programmers/non-CS grads? Would be useful to see the flip side.
Then so called "JsonP" is definitely infringing...
Reminds me of this quote from Steve:

"Jobs tells the VP that if the garbage in his office is not being emptied regularly for some reason, he would ask the janitor what the problem is. The janitor could reasonably respond by saying, "Well, the lock on the door was changed, and I couldn't get a key."

It's an irritation for Jobs, but it's an understandable excuse for why the janitor couldn't do his job. As a janitor, he's allowed to have excuses.

"When you're the janitor, reasons matter," Jobs tells newly minted VPs, according to Lashinsky.

"Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering," says Jobs, adding, that Rubicon is "crossed when you become a VP."

http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-on-the-difference-...
I prefer Dallas (Colo4, specifically). They've been incredible. Only one significant outage in 7 years. They're nearly half way between coasts too, so they're a great latency compromise if you're stuck with a single DC.
This is a new phase of the tablet wars. During phase 1, an iPad was not only more polished (both hardware and software) but also much cheaper than the competition. In 2009, no other tablet maker could match iPad on cost for equivalent specs because Apple had completely optimized the supply chain. Non-iPads mostly sucked!

Fast forward 3years, tablets are no longer a novelty and users have figured out that the product is more function based rather than status driven - unlike Phones where brand plays a part in the purchase esp because majority of the usage happens in front of other people.

One sign of this change in consumer behavior was signaled by the launch of iPad 4 within 6months of the iPad 3. Felt like Apple saw a glitch in the matrix and had to make sudden changes. Q3 earnings confirmed that iPad sales were down.

What now? Well, the door is wide open. People will pick based on personal preferences as there is no clear "objective best": iPads, Kindles and Nexuses are all interchangeable.
StackExchange is down
aweber.com currently owns the IM world. I have some experience with them and with mailchimp. This is like somewhere in between, aweber is more spammy prone while mailchimp won't allow you to auto-respond unless you buy a subscription.

Baisically, there isn't a reliable freemium service with an autoresponder. It also strucks me as "hassle free" light service i would use for medium to small size projects. Will use it soon
I love this mainly for the crafting of the query. It would probably be worth extracting that piece out into a separate application of its own, so other Admin models are able to build out filtering in a similar manner.
I think as a startup, you have to say screw prior patents. Focus on your product. Build build build and when you've made it, fight back.
Upcoming eBook about bootstrapping by Garrett Dimon (sifterapp.com)
That is you, but others convert
AWS doesn't have a presence in Texas.
The man's got taste.

That was true of Jobs as well... but holy crap, have you seen his yacht?

Unfortunately, good aesthetic judgement in one area doesn't always carry over into other areas, even those that seem closely related. Human-machine interfaces have a functional aspect that can't be handled by dashing off yet another homage to Dieter Rams. Ive hasn't yet shown competence in this aspect of design.
AWS Storage Gateway - GA and Support for New Gateway-Cached Volumes
The other teachers on his team? Its not like that was a rampant problem when we were groing up....
I could definitely include this as an option
Am I the only one that read this as a parody of Google's management? Only the last paragraph particularly autonomous vehicle part felt like a genuine argument (even that I didn't agree with).
PDFs render pretty well on the Nexus 7 with Adobe's reader app. I'd guess better since there is more resolution?
No official source. Just conversations with friends who work for various agencies when they abruptly switched despite professing their undying love for their iPhones.
A comment empty of content...
In a world of apps, who gives a rat's ass about whether turn by turn directions are built-in (pretending Apple incorporated them into the OS rather than just branding an app developed in house)?

What matters is the quality of the directions, not that they are marketed with a lower case "i".
>If copying is wrong

That's never been the philosophical basis of copyright. Copyright is a limited, artificial monopoly designed to encourage creation. It's not that copying is "bad", it's that limiting copying for a short time might encourage people to create new works.

A paper that argues that the economically ideal copyright length is 14 years (which is exactly what the original term of copyright was in the US): http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/07/research-optima...

Thomas Jefferson articulates this reasoning, talking about patents:

>If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. -- http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12....
I am also asked to defend my habit again and again. And so I have long struggled and meditated on this problem. What I ultimately decided is that a repository of bookmarks or open tabs, or of any kind of knowledge, is useless as a static collection and quickly degenerates into a backlog never to be accessed again. I abandoned my humongous Delicious account and have since been developing a little something that offers a different take on the subject. I have been saving dumps of my open tabs' urls into files for years now, to preserve my sanity, knowing I would one day get around to the right solution to my own ailment.

My take on the problem is action-oriented browsing. I think that anything you clip or save or note down must have an intended action, now or in the future. Maybe you are saving a bookmark because you want to refer to it when you tackle some personal project you want to do someday/maybe. It must then be triggered by that project when you finally get to it. If you never get to it, the bookmark will die with the project, which is just as well.

Most bookmarks will never be accessed again, but you don't know which ones yet. It's the long tail principle. We don't have time to do everything we want, but in the spirit of GTD, ideally we'd like to map out all that we could want to do, so we can always (say, weekly) review our priorities and be ready to pivot into new directions if situations, or our minds, change.

Even if you are only saving a cute picture of a cat, it is still actionable. Why are you saving it? That's the key question. It may be because you want to show it to some people, so it should be triggered in your next interaction with each of those people, and then you're done with that bookmark and you can let go of it.

Articles that you want to read or reread should by triggered by a reading list, or by study plans for particular subjects, or even by a blog post you want to write on the ideas you read on several of these articles.

It's all about what should trigger that bookmark to come into your attention again. You shouldn't need to remember to check it back on your own, or you may well never do.
I couldn't find a Privacy Policy or ToS anywhere...this is really interesting to me, but if I'm going to let you track everything my users do on my site, I'm going to need to know that you're not going to sell their emails, sell that data...
> Create a backup of your bookmarks using the import and backup button on the Library window on each machine

I've tried this. The tags are not in the JSON dumps. The Mozilla people apparently believe that backing up your bookmarks means to back up everything except the tags.

A corollary: The only way to actually back up your bookmarks is to back up the places.sqlite file. Nothing else contains all the relevant data.
I got some good review comments on my Finderous mobile app. Now I am pivoting it to make open/closed location based groups. Similar to meetup but a lot more casual.
Mini-tablet replaced the kindle for me. I never had the paper book and e-ink reading requirements that many have. e-ink is just too slow for me.
New American Fiction: Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
Cisco wifi phones support logging in as different users.
Totally agree, it is crazy useful! Also agree it would be nice if it could be based off of something besides User (Django's ContentType framework might be the right bet there).
Quora Top Writers 2012
Cost for high resolution streaming, at $10485/PB: $ 251658.24
Cost for low resolution streaming, at $10485/PB: $ 22963.81

The numbers look much better in right-aligned fixed width, don't they?
If the influence of the vesting schedule helps delay his (presumed) move to a competitor, I'd say it benefits shareholders plenty.
This is the first novel I've read that mentions Hacker News by name. It was a bit like a Microserfs (Douglas Copeland) for a new generation, with a little William Gibson vibe. A light, fun read. The Economist review will go into more details. I think it would appeal to many HN readers.
The comment is non-offensive and draws an analogy between two organizations which used propaganda effectively. Comparing Mr. Gruber's writings to those of fellow travelers is a legitimate comment on the possibility of editorial bias in the original article. I

It is useful because it places the article within a larger historical context. It extends the content, and on HN, that is appropriate.
Luckily, they didn't immediately pull all competing apps out of the store when they released this, as they have done in other cases.

Podcasts.app is crap, but there are Instacast and Downcast (I alternate between those) and probably other good choices that cost less than a half gallon of gas.
> ...ensuring that there is some limit on the scope of Wikipedia. It is this latter one that is the key facet.

Right... but in a world where I can store the entirety of Wikipedia on my mobile phone, you have to trabsitively ask why there is a need a "limit on the scope of Wikipedia". I see no a priori reason why Wikipedia needs or even should tolerate such limits, so one must examine te arguments used to defend that policy.

So far, the only reasonable arguments I have heard (as in, discounting technology problems that never existed: you can easily scale Wikipedia to have a bunch of mostly-ignored articles) come down to "verifiability" through the argument path I elaborated (and which britta seeded), and that is precisely the path used by people defending "deletionism" on behalf of Wikipedia editors.
Oops. My heart just missed a beat that we forgot to add this for launch! We're not going to do any bad stuff, we're not going to sell the data nor emails, there is nothing weird going on here, we want to be as useful and valuable for businesses as Olark is. We're a Y Combinator company, and are thusly obsessed about doing the right thing and delivering an awesome product and support.

I'll get a Privacy Policy online asap.
> Had Martin Luther King, Jr been 'anonymous' and preached with a V mask...

... he would not have been assassinated at age 39 by someone who didn't like him speaking truth to power.
Absolutely agreed. I didn't realize how easily someone could be confused by this until I noticed that my dad had the Firefox DMG file on his desktop as the primary way of getting to it.

Every time he launched Firefox he would mount the DMG and launch it from there, rather than from his Applications folder.
I agree with you, for me I found his background very impressive event without the Harvard stuff, it shows he is dedicated, not afraid to take risks, and move where his carrer taken him

I mean, good for him, I'm not surprise he was taken in
Yes. We think those should be configurable through userfox rather than your code, but we're going to offer both solutions shortly.
"This site is currently in read-only mode; we’ll return with full functionality soon."
I didn't read anything on the site that said they wanted to specifically talk about CS degrees.
Just a white screen for me too. When I hover over I see the tweet text, but the images never load on the screen. Chrome 22.0.1229.94. Cool idea though!
It'll do nothing. I personally wrap the userfox snippet on userfox.com (uh) with a check to see if the user is logged in, but yours will work.
"We Work on What We Think Is Cool"
I think Spaced Repetition is precisely a tool, in the context of languages, for the words you don't get enough or constant enough contact through reading, writing, listening and speaking. For words that you do, you don't really need it since you'll memorize it from actual use/need.
I'd like to see Intents or Contracts or something so that apps can reasonably an reliably communicate. The walled gardens that iOS has is fairly obnoxious.

I have both an iPhone and Nexus 7, and I keep forgetting on N7 that sharing to Evernote doesn't require laborious app switching and cut and pasting. It's a very real, important piece of the puzzle that Apple hasn't even bothered trying to attempt.
We have SQL Server 2008 boxes with 128GB+ of ram; we're able to run all of our production databases right out of memory. This would be cost-prohibitive in a virtualize environment such as AWS, Linode, etc.
Is ARM still lower power when dialed up to perform?

I think there are some interesting possibilities, especially with the bursty nature of web traffic but there is also still a noticeable performance gap between ARM and x86.
That's WHY you patent things. In this case, you could consider this trade standard, and thus not valid.
We wrote a solid application, made a silly video, and got into YC (hack-free?)
>or utterly lunatic theories on experts

I've read (and enjoyed) all of Gladwell's books. Outliers' theme revolved around the idea that in order to be good at anything you need to practice. It popularized the "10,000 hours" principle. I'm not sure how that qualifies as "lunatic".

This is pop-media, not academic research; it's a good "jumping off" point. God forbid someone tries to be entertaining with their non-fiction. But, last time I checked Gladwell had 3 titles on the NY Times best sellers list, so he probably doesn't care what any of us think.
The United States of Entrepreneurs - America still leads the world
Thank you, but sadly I am currently not setup to pretty much use email at all. ;P I thereby have enjoyed being able to have a long conversation on HN (which I do use quite often), but totally understand it must be infuriating for others. :(

Regardless, thank you very very much for taking the time to respond to my comments and to take them seriously enough to read in the first place.

(As opposed to another in-depth response, I thereby have simply clarified my previous argument regarding notability-from-verifiability in the other thread, butcher wise left all of the other points alone: maybe some day we can continue the conversation, possibly via email. ;P)
well done, man, well done. It warms my heart to see people who understood what computers are for.
> Polling is another form of standardized testing (unless you propose asking different questions of each participant).

No, it's not. Polling is an analysis of a large population through sampling. Standardized testing, in the context we're talking about, is an evaluation of performance based on the performance of a different group.

> It seems you don't object to standardized testing at all, but merely to the goals of the current school system

Here's the funny part. The goals are expressed through the school system. The kind of reform I'd like to see (read: infeasible in the short-term, at least) involve societal upheaval. I can talk about it, as long as you recognize that I've been working for the past few months on trying to figure out a good way of capturing my thoughts and have yet to succeed to my satisfaction.

I can't speak for wpietri, but my opposition to standardized testing is multifarious. For instance, I've experienced its detrimental effects on education firsthand. (In high school, there were a number of interesting topics that we had no time to cover because it was more important to teach to the test. My desire for education reform was born right there.) For the same reason, I dislike grading and GPAs and such. I don't consider this opposition very important, though, because I think we're teaching the wrong things to begin with.

> conveying knowledge/skills

The decision of which pieces of knowledge and which skills to focus on is a political decision and a form of indoctrination. Otherwise, you're not actually conveying anything so much as facilitating the ability to discover/develop knowledge/skills.
Supreme Court seeks a way around “perpetual copyright” on foreign goods
Are American universities really that expensive?
FOR all its current economic woes, America remains a beacon of entrepreneurialism. Between 1996 and 2004 it created an average of 550,000 small businesses every month. Many of those small businesses rapidly grow big.
The world's largest company, Wal-Mart, was founded in 1962 and did not go public until a decade later; multi-million dollar companies such as Google and Facebook barely existed a decade ago.
Brooklyn Fire Dispatch Live Scanner Audio Feed
I am proud to be one of them.
Patent ALL "using a multi-user OS on X device" ideas!
This article is entire speculation (Hint: it's gaseous).

It could be patents, but it doesn't prove that it is by any measure.

I would like to see multiple users on phones, because I would love to put my phone in guest mode whenever someone wants to borrow it, or whenever the lockscreen is unlocked without a pin.

If it really IS about patents it sounds like a great case to demonstrate the silliness of patents.

Smartphones ARE computers, they have computers within them, they run computer operating systems, ...

Computers have had multiple logins for decades.
Tablets are allowed to have multiple logins.

Why on earth should multiple logins on smartphones be considered patentable?
I don't see what OOP has to do with Computer Science. Isn't that Software Engineering?
We've already seen lots of small changes to take advantage of the extra screen height. Virtually all the iOS built-in apps and many third-party apps have made tweaks. Not just stretching the size of the main area in which you view data or other stuff, but actual interface changes as well.
It's not absolute, but relative. E.g. I'd learn some interesting things studying either databases, or rocketry, but I'm pretty damn sure I'd be more interested in rocketry.
"At a glance can the average user tell the difference between iOS 2 or 3 and 6?"

(A) Probably can't tell because iOS 6 is on all the phones, zing!

(B) If he's trying to cut and paste he can tell. iOS 2 won't let him do it, iOS 3+ will force him to copy the entire body text randomly, iOS 5+ will randomly offer a handful of options that generally do not include the one the user is looking for.

(C) Ok, so it's visually stagnant. I guess I'll agree here. Turns out, there's usually less to disagreements than first glance might indicate.

"any fundamental work on improving the user interaction and look & feel of the thing in 5 years."

There are certainly new gestures and there's voice. There's new functionality in the buttons and from the lock screen. I would not say this is totally accurate.

"I find it unbelievable that there's nothing that could be done better and that iOS was launched with perfect interaction design, fully formed from the heads of the designers, or perfect visual design, reverently propagated to the modern day and on into the future."

I don't see anyone claiming it's perfect but there's a good argument to be made that Good Enough + Consistent > Better. Which is to say that Apple users, who do get updated to the latest patch, might be jarred if Apple constantly yanked the UI here and there for the sake of slight benefits or "keeping the look fresh".
Keep your cell phone alive during the storm
Pretty good advice that you prob already know
Can you post the original link to the Show HN post?
Ask HN: examples of successfully hacked (non-computer) system to your advantage
I've been thinking about this PG question for a long time and can't come up with a good answer. all of my "hacks" revolves around business/computers.