skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A stable API always benefit the user because it makes possible more (and better) applications.

Saying "ranting and foaming of mouth" kills the conversation and I believe is one of Gnome problems for some time now (_aka_ If you're not with us, you're a hater).

Conversation is part of the open source community.
> Despite all the ranting and foaming of mouth

There seem to be plenty of links to discussions in the bug tracker to support this article.

E.g., the attitude of the dev in response to reasonable argument from his users in https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=485846 is pretty much "I'm not changing it, just because". That would make me rant and foam at the mouth because a reasoned approach patently failed in this case.
> imitate OS X as much as possible

Apple could imitate a fair bit too. For instance, I'd like the OS X 10.6 Finder to be as useable as the Nautilus file manager that shipped with Ubuntu's Gnome 2 in 2010.
This is actually a real shame, for me the http://news.ycombinator.com website loads really slow, as in, a page load every 30 seconds, but I never had a single issue with the http://hackerne.ws domain.

With this update, Hacker News is now basically unusable for me and I may have to consider finding a new, similar site.

(This is no threat, just an honest account.)
The problem is that there are few "ordinary users" currently using Gnome and as the technical users leave Gnome because it's not as useful to them anymore, they're losing their main source of advertising and endorsement.

OS X is a pretty good example of how an operating system can be simple enough for regular users to use but still have advanced options that power users and technical users require. I understand why they're attempting to copy it, but I don't think they're going about it in the right way.
Its not so black and white, a pop up is way more annoying that some text at the end of the article. And what is more relevant, the user just have to stop reading and just close the page, two actions that the user was going to eventually do even if there was no ad; but pop-Ups and video ads make the user lose resources (time) and it requires a special action to be cancelled (look up for the little ex in the corner and click it). Also because is text and not and imagen it does not significantly distract the user from reading the article. Also the fact that is highly relevant (consulting for companies/startups and a scrip to improve HN reading) makes it more acceptable.

In this order of ideas related shameless plugs are better than most other forms of advertising.
Yes sorry that was an over-simplification due to ignorance - Ruby 1.9.3 and Python are both compiled to bytecode now, but still tend not to do as well in speed comparisons to the Java VM (which perhaps has just had more effort on optimisation). So in that sense it is like Java, but slower - for most people that really doesn't matter, but for twitter with this level of traffic, it probably would. You can of course run Ruby on the JVM now too, but I think that came too late for twitter.

What I found interesting from another twitter blog post linked from the article was that they are actually running on a modified version of Ruby 1.8.7 REE, not Ruby 1.9.x as you might expect, so that must really skew their comparisons![1] Anyway, there are a lot of variables in a huge system like twitter, so boiling it down to just a problem with Ruby performance seems pretty simplistic (as you'd expect from the register), and I seriously doubt they could have avoided this kind of rewrite and refactor of their entire stack in any language when hitting this sort of scale. To me it doesn't say much at all about Ruby as a language or whether it is suitable for websites.

[1] http://engineering.twitter.com/2011/03/building-faster-ruby-...
Elon Musk says Tesla Model S variants coming next year
This does not share an interpretation with the "empty madness" retort - they may as well be talking about totally different posts.

Doshi writes "the takeaway for me is: find the best possible things you deeply depend on in life." Clearly, mapgrep instead read the post as a celebration of materialism. The meanness of the language may have been unjustifiable, but the point made was not irrelevant. There is an argument around how we prioritise people versus things, and some will fall so far on the people side that a preoccupation with things seems almost offensive. pg asserting that the popularity of the post was "the decline of HN embodied" seemed to me equally wrong. I (a lowly newcomer) thoroughly enjoy a top-voted post that strongly contrasts the submission, especially when the pair serve to draw attention to a dichotomy.

Edit: On reflection, the most interesting thing about the two texts might be that they actually seem to share a frustration with materialism. Where the author of the vitriolic response wants the notion of design quality entirely out of the equation, dcurtis liberates himself by settling it one object at a time. I see examples of both in my own life: choosing the watch or the sneakers and buying them over and over, so that I never again need to think seriously and qualitatively about watches or sneakers. And, in moments of design obsession, waking as if from a trance thinking "When was the last time I called my mum?"
Art.sy, a collection of the world's greatest art
Sick Ads... Make You Wanna Puke
Yes, you could use an HMAC for this, however you need to keep the private key, well... private, which in practice is not easy. If the server is compromised, an attacker could steal the secret key and use it to generate signed cookies for any user. This method is also subject to reply attacks for the duration of the token's validity, though that is less relevant with SSL.

Whereas if only token hashes are stored in the database, then the entire database could be stolen and nobody can use it to generate valid cookies.

EDIT: Also, if an account goes rogue you have no way to invalidate its cookies, so you'll have to do a lookup for each request to see if the account is blocked.
Very interesting. It's a shame that it has such a sexist background..
Clear for Mac
If you would be amenable to it being realtime and not play-by-mail, I could send you a tweet with the source and demo (which will be running a live version and won't be closed (assuming I don't become homeless and run out of money for hosting any time soon =) )) link for you to take a look at?
It seems like this author misses the point too. At first it seems like he was trying to reshape the original posts' message into a sort of 'live the best way possible' message, but instead he turns his focus back onto material goods.

"This isn’t materialism, it’s a deep consideration for the non-materialistic things that depend on the material. A lamp for reading or helping. A flatware set for eating. A backpack for hiking. A towel for traveling. These are all intellectual and spiritual pursuits that are also important."

Eating is not about flatware, neither is hiking about backpacks, nor traveling about towels. Obsessing over the best backpack takes away time you could be spending actually hiking.
How small is the market and how much work it will take to make a web/mobile app for it? I think if done properly it can get some paying customers. Even if it doesn't become a big startup, it has the possibility of becoming a good source of passive income.

How about reimplementing the core logic in python and exposing it as library/API so that all kinds of web/mobile/plugin front ends can be built on top of it?
I am always baffled by this "best==most expensive, therefore by looking for the best you have to be a spoiled rich person" mindset.

Some of the best tools I've owned cost less than the average tools you can find at Walmart.

And if I may expend the discussion to softwares (which are also tools to me), some of the best software tools I love are free -- vim for eg.
New Facebook Login Page Analysis
The placement of the menu was very conventional and I didn't think it could be a problem, but, now that you made me think about it, I'll consider this.

On the other hand, I don't think that the "binary crap" can be so much more distracting than any other picture I could put there. And I happen to like it :)
I actually have the entire thing rewritten as a C library that I have been licensing commercially to companies for years. That part's easy. The hard part (for me at least) is building the web site, billing etc.
"OSRC staff primarily worked to develop the Linux support for AMD's server processor"

It's almost like they want to fail. Do they expect their hardware to run Windows Server or something? Thankfully, the linux developers they're letting go won't have trouble finding jobs.

AMD stocks are unsurprisingly going down (as they have been doing for a while now). See https://www.google.ca/finance?q=NYSE:AMD
There is plenty of merit using a language you enjoy.

A certain language might be twice as fast to get work done in, but you can be 10 times as fast if you are enjoying yourself and motivated.

I just wouldn't kid yourself that scaling is the reason for the choice. Just enjoying it is plenty of reason.
From dustin's article:

"Reasonable people would probably not spend the time to read a book about the history of flatware, buy twenty sets, and test the feeling of each metal utensil against their teeth. That sounds completely insane. But who cares about reasonable people?"

Out of curiositiy: how much money 20 sets of designer flaware cost? Because if it is something around the price I suspect, then dustin's original article is very close to saying: 'I am rich, and you should be too'. You know where I live ... I've just sold some of the used clothes of my 1 year old child to a middle-class woman... Even buying designer stuff is about money, not to mention buying 20 sets just to try out...

Fortunatelly there are obscure hobbies for unreasonable people which do not take money. (Like learning set theory just for the fun (or insight) of it.)

tl;dr: dustin's original article is a triviality:

1. if you have enough money
2. you have enough time
3. your obsession is buying very well designed things

then go for it.

But it is a triviality that most people lack (1.) even if they do not lack (2.) and (3.) (And because of lacking (1.) many people lack (2.) and maybe even partially (3.) (having bigger problems, they do not think about these things that much))
Linux Mint with Cinnamon seems to be a pretty popular choice nowadays.
Sidebar renders poorly on my nexus 7.

http://www.imgur.com/1z5Vv.png

The math was quite interesting though.
hn algoritm...
Seeking founder apprentice (Thailand/Bali)
and you can use Play from clojure too, if you think you are pragmatic enough...
I disagree. There is a good reason to want 'the best' within limits (cost, availability etc.). For example, hiking with low quality shoes that give you blisters decreases your enjoyment of hiking. Hiking with shoes that fit perfectly and give comfort makes hiking much more enjoyable.
Who's Dustin? Link anyone?
Well, back 10 years ago when Gentoo worked like Ubuntu does now except it was n^2 slower and came with 3 difficulty modes for installation, e16 was the bee's knees window manager. You could edit your own GUI menus by configuring a text file! everything was infinitely customizable. EVERYTHING. not to mention having transparent eterms with really cool backgrounds. In this context, e17 was the shang-ri-la of desktop environments and also perpetual vaporware. I looked forward to e17 for years but they never seemed to make progress. Just a screenshot here and there, tantalizing us. then Compiz came out and I forgot about it completely. The allure has to do with the fact that it had great potential and it was being made by uncompromising perfectionists. Like the novel that the fans were begging to be released but the Author refused because it wasn't quite perfect yet. Well now, after so many years, the progenitor is ready to reveal the creation. I am ready to see the vision.
Still hacking away on http://www.thetaboard.com on nights and weekends. Getting a good flow of signups. Trying to decide whether to charge for it (and if so, how to market it) or possibly just leaving it free (it isn't costing much to run).

As always would love to have some feedback.
Fixed positioning + allowing zoom is not a good idea.
You need a backpack to hike. You could hike without one but that would involve carrying everything in your hands. Backpacks are the evolution of ergonomic design to make carrying items on long journeys comfortable.

You need a towel if you travel. You could drip dry after each shower or decide not to at all but that introduces another set of hygenic and time-wasting problems.

You need utensils to eat. You could use your hands, again not paying attention to hygiene, or you could be civilized and use a knife and fork.

Researching and buying the best ensures you should only buy once. It's appreciating that someone, or group of people, have spent months, even years paying attention to every detail in designing something that serves an important purpose.
Your email is not displayed in your profile. You have to put it into the description field if you want it to show up.
May be you need a partner who is experienced and fluent in building modern web interfaces.
Unfortunately it seems recovery of AMD now depends on very smart people that are not there anymore

Looks like they gave up after settling with Intel (and some years of bad management)

To be fair Intel also abandoned their idiotic race for MHz which fixed things for them.

Maybe their investment in ARM servers may be a light at the end of the tunnel.

Every computer at a store today is fast enough for 99% of people.
The problem for most mere mortals with the HMAC scheme is that there is a very real possibility of the server being compromised and the secret key being stolen. In this case an adversary could generate valid cookies for any user. However, with the magic number scheme as long as only the hash of the random number is stored (we should add a per-user salt too) then the entire session database could be compromised, but an attacker cannot do anything with it.

Also, though less of an issue with SSL, the HMAC approach is subject to replay attacks while expire_at < now.

EDIT: The HMAC approach also lacks any method to invalidate cookies manually, or automatically e.g. when the user changes their password. This means a compromised account is open to attack until expire_at < now, and there's nothing you can do about it other than blocking the account for that duration, which now means that each request needs to do a database lookup to see if the account is blocked. You could generate a per-user secret key, but now you have a database lookup again, so you might as well use the magic number scheme.
> People in their 20s (just), 30s, 40s know about the Apple 'cool' factor but on a recent trip to SE Asia I would guess 60% or more of the teens were using non-iPhones.

I can't speak for the rest of Asia, but judging by my extended family, the Apple craze in mainland China is still pretty ferocious. A combination of the materialistic culture and view of Apple as a luxury brand often leads to situations like [1] and [2] popping up in the news.

Of course, each country is different. Was it Indonesia where Blackberry had a 90% market share among the youth?

[1] http://www.chinasmack.com/2012/stories/chinese-freshman-girl...
[2] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2126172/Chinese-boy-...

> Finally if the iPad mini is "good enough" for most people then it will cannabalise the full iPad sales.

This was the same argument against the iPod mini. As Apple has stated before, they'd much rather cannibalize their own products than have a competitor do it.
Great great job! I love the demo and love the clean interface compared with Trello. I think eventually you'll reach a point where you need to decide if this is still a side project or there's some potential there. Leaving it free for now is perfectly fine but eventually as more and more people use it, it might cost you a whole lot more (in which case, it might be a good thing). Good luck!
The Unwiki: Github Pages + Jekyll Bootstrap + Markdown
Making something people want - the GoCardless story
I have a terrible memory, and want to remember more about the little things that happen in my life, and remember the facts I come across that I find interesting. Spaced Repetition Learning is a proven tool for improving memory, but still isn't available in a well designed simple app. (I've tried them all!). I am busy building this app as a side project. I was excited when http://memstash.co/ launched but it doesn’t use spaced repetition, the key aspect of improving memory. There are so many fascinating things around me, and with this app I will remember everything I want to.
Jam With Chrome
Wow. I really didn't expect a page like that to come from Facebook.

I mean their iPhone apps have been pretty polished design wise and I would have expected the same attention to detail from their login page. You can almost see the logic progression of A-B tests:

Shift this 1px higher = 1.0001x more logins.
What is your marketing methodology? Do you have any blog post that tells story of thetaboard : idea - to - inception - to - first few users ?
Qt Creator 2.6.0 released
I also believe that limiting customization is important. Any Firefox dev can tell how terribly hard it is to improve Firefox without breaking addons.
GNOME does not have the man power of Mozilla, let alone Apple. They want to create great things by implementing them one at a time. that's the open-source way, and most free softwares are built like that.
I feel the comparison with Apple is somewhat unfair, because GNOME does not have enough developers to release a complete product at every release (or should they just work in the dark and not release anything for the next 2 years?). Ubuntu is in a similar same situation, and they do improve over time.
So they do it one thing at a time and try to involve as much the community as they can.
If I had to direct such a project with the resources they have, I don't know that I would have made better choices.
Also, my feeling about the GNOME UX, is that decisions come from UX people, and that it is the very reason it enrages us developers: we have different ways to approach interacting with a computer, we are very picky about workflows, and we tend to reject innovation if it makes us change our habits.
And that's where I agree with you about leaving their current audience frustrated: GNOME wants to reach out to "normal users", but its user base is mostly hackers. It is hard to innovate in the UX space when your users have their workflows and interaction patterns burnt into their brains and fingers.
I believe that someone who never touched a computer before would much prefer the GNOME UX over a more traditional desktop environments.
> as the technical users leave Gnome because it's not as useful to them anymore

[citation needed]

I'm fairly technical and I'm not leaving Gnome. There was a time I spent hours downloading themes, sometimes building my own from them, so that I'd have the "perfect" desktop, but not anymore. The most time I lost in the last 6 months was tweaking my init.el file so my Emacs would start with everything I need to work comfortably. I also built a console font so my terminals and text editors would mitigate my 3278 nostalgia (https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font).

A theme is just a theme. We don't have to fight much over it.

API breakage, OTOH, is a problem. Anyone who develops for Gnome should have a continuous testing install somewhere running tests against the latest master branch to prevent nasty surprises down the road. Also, people who develop apps and feel Gnome is going in the wrong direction should get involved in Gnome development. App (and theme) developers are the users of Gnome's APIs much like I am a Firefox user. If it "feels wrong", I'll get in touch with the developers and try to help fixing it. Ranting is not going to help.
I'm not sure what the point of this question is? Usually, if HNers have a project that they want to show to the world, they submit it as "Show HN"... But seeing as you're here for almost two years, I guess you already know that.
My problem with this is this: "I tell myself that everything has to be done by 5pm"

Thing is, i cant tell myself anything if its simply not true. I cant force myself to get everything done by 5pm because i simply dont have to, i can do it later and i know it even if that means stress and doing it in the last hours.
Interesting that engineers spend an inordinate amount of time researching the best hardware and software, yet can't understand someone who extends that search into the material world. A search for perfection is admirable in my opinion.
Well, apparently, this imitation strategy seems to be a massive fail. At least if we take user satisfaction as the primary metric.
My lost iPhone
If someone wants to license my polymail library for this purpose I would be happy to do that.
Lagom - Better than Best
If Google wanted them enough they could still purchase after the additional VC. They'd just need to pay more.
I'll throw out another factor:

When Rails was introduced, there were no other substantive Ruby web frameworks - Ruby itself was relatively obscure compared to every other web-capable tech. As such, it (Rails) had no competition in the framework space. PHP, Java, Python and other languages all had competing web frameworks to choose from.
I learned to code for exactly the same reason, i even started an uplink style computer hacking game while learning. Unfortunately it got a bit too popular for my skills and i had to shut it down because i didnt know enough at the time to squash the bugs and make it properly playable. One of my biggest mistakes was shutting it down. One day ive said ill start it up again now that i know my shit.
Nothing mind blowing.

GameBalls.info
Keeps track of viewer counts of video game streams.

ExtempEngine (.com)
A mobile and chrome news database app for a very specific niche - high school extemporaneous speech students
He recommended a wallet on twitter another day https://twitter.com/dcurtis/statuses/228993399028609024
Here's the link to Dustin's previous article and a link to a discussion which took HN ablaze. - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4755470
My two side projects:

http://www.sizeall.com site for comparing things by real size on screen

http://www.newswebreader.com web Usenet client (three pane, like Thunderbird)
This is exactly why I moved to Linux Mint (Mate or Cinammon, your choice) on my desktop and crunchbang linux (with openbox) on a relatively low-powered laptop (even though Linux Mint would run fine on it -- I like a little diversity).
Sunflowers Seen Flying Through Empty Desert. Why?
Mobile apps and number of concurrent connections
A brief discussion about limiting or not limiting the number of concurrent connections in a iOS app.
Currently working on a little app that sends email reminders for movies you want to see in theaters. It happens far too often that I see a trailer somewhere, think "woah I want to see that movie" then just forget about it, only to remember when it's no longer playing in local theaters.

Just finishing up the frontend, should be able to release this soon... if I find a good name, at least. Current working title is Filmnudger which I think is pretty damn bad, haha!
I write the odd blog post but have not done any focused marketing. I've gotten a few write ups here and there that provide a trickle of traffic that converts into signups pretty well.

My goal with ThetaBoard is to keep it very simple and flexible. I think I've achieved that (which is good) but it makes marketing more difficult--it's hard to market "unspecific". And having Trello as a free 800lb gorilla doesn't help.

I have a full time job so it's not a huge priority for me right now--I'm just focused on building out new features people request (that make sense). It's growing on its own at a pace that keeps me interested.