skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> No, it's not. On the contrary, it's not only relevant, it's the central issue.

Ok, I'm sorry, I presented my point of view and shouldn't have expected others to think the same.

As for me, I'm not exactly touched by visuals. My ideal UI and UX is CLI and this has not changed for over twenty years now. Anything more than this is an annoyance for me and I would probably consider much of really good designs as ugly overkill. Probably, because I have no way to say which design is good and which is not, I lack the skill to care.

However, I'm a programmer. I'm easily excited by what someone coded, especially if this something reaches the limits of technology. I am a kind of guy that's going to be amazed with a simple, bug ridden, slow and visually ugly proof-of-concept, just because it's cleverly coded.

I didn't had the time to read through the source yet. I don't know if it's enough to make me smile. Maybe it's not, maybe it is. And that's the point: I'm a programmer. Not a business person. I don't care about a product. I don't care about UX. I'm in love with code, and that's why I still work as a programmer, am not burnt out and not going to go into management.

If Bret was product-centric he'd use Flash to do this. It would be faster, both in development and execution times. It would be cross-platform, at least as much as Flash itself is. It would be prettier and much more usable. It would take fraction of work that went into coding this in JavaScript.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding him, but the fact that he did this in JavaScript suggests, for me, that he didn't treat it as a "product", that needs to be "shipped". I think he took a journey into unknown, beyond the limits of current JavaScript technology, and documented this journey in the form of code. That's why I'm going to read his notes, his code, and learn from him. Because I'm a programmer, because what I care about is code.

You are entitled to be primarily concerned with how usable the site is. When I said that you're missing the point, I thought that maybe - maybe - Bret didn't even think about usability of this particular site, maybe he wanted to show programmers that coding something like this is possible. Maybe I'm wrong, this is pure speculation - Bret himself should say what he intended.
Why is ITU Governance of the Internet a Bad Idea?
I would argue the exact contrary. China tried and failed to control their internet. The famous virtual wall of china is very easily surmounted.

The metric isn't about who is more or less likely to try to isolate the country from the internet but rather how hard is it to actually accomplish such a feat?
How are India, Estonia and Latvia on the same rung as highly suppression-ist China?

This is clearly facetious.
the author missed the paradigm shifting ...

He still thing that shadows and transparency are what make an UI usable ... huh.

There is a lot more affordance in modern UI like Metro than in old school static "3D" UI with reliefs and shadows like we all know in Windows, Mac or Linux ...

When you hover something which is interactive, it tells you that it can interact, how, and what for. This is affordance. While shadows are just ... nothing.
I haven't used Metro, so I'll wait to judge how usable it is, but I love the fact that they've gone their own way, and not created an iOS/Android lookalike. The blog post feels too negative, and gives the impression that it's written by an older man that dislikes breaking with the norm - though his points are probably valid.
What on earth does it have to do with the topic?
The only aspect of W.I.M.P. that exists in iOS is I: icons.
Funny, because Windows Phone 7 had very static tile sizes (there was one double-width one), wheras 8 allows a large variety of sizes.

They do still fit a consistent grid, though- they're all half or double size another. Android widgets, by comparison, can often be very weird dimensions, and have very different designs that look ugly when combined.
Playing with Go: Embarrassingly Parallel Scripts
A list of changes since Go 1
Greenland is .gl, Denmark is .dk. On the internet they are different. :)
I noticed that screen sensitivity in N4 is much lower than S3. This is quite irritating.
I don't understand why Ballmer isn't in the list of Microsoft's major shareholders: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/mh?s=MSFT+Major+Holders
Questions to Ask Potential Cofounders: The Master List
What are the topics you and your cofounder should cover before you take the leap? Here is the complete and Master list.
It repeats the same motivational messages, maybe it would be better if it just ran out...
The crock is extremely poor experiment design. Automatic F in an experimental psych class, or the stat classes I've taken, or quant chem analysis class, or I'd assume pretty much any hard science. So some random and completely uncontrolled combination of viewing violence, artificial light, novelty response to something new (assuming the game was new to them...), adrenaline (duh), finger/hand exercise, skin exposure to plastic, last but by no means least magic video game cooties has an effect on sleep.

There's a subtle difference between anecdote, data, and information... Due to poor experimental design, this is an semi-interesting anecdote, nothing more. Which is too bad.

Edited note: Its the timing thats bad. Doing a huge wide ranging experiment is perfectly valid iff you've already got tons of verified data and info of ALL the constituent parts and can subtract that statistical noise from the huge # of variables experiment. Its like giving higgs boson search raw data to Newton as a first experiment rather than starting with an apple off a tree. For example, medical sample of adrenaline level at bed time fed into formula to subtract out effect of excitation. Then medical experiment using scrambled video signal so the same melatonin effect based on raw light level and average color/brightness can be subtracted out of the sleep data. After subtracting out about 10 correction factors they might have real data, or even info, instead of anecdote.
Very much this, hyperlinks are visually distinct elements in pure HTML and get color and style change (underline) to indicate the link. One of my biggest pet peeves are sites that alter link style in CSS so that it loses those kinds of visual clues and makes it harder to know what can or cannot be clicked.
If you play around on *nix machines you'll want to know perl, at least how to read it and find translations for the things you can't read. You'll find it all over the place . . .
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/lisp.jpg
I almost skipped because I figured it would be another introductory article to how to use bash and coreutils, but this was actually very good.
According to my wife (PhD), impostor syndrome is a huge issue for new woman scholars - especially those in traditionally male-dominated fields. I think part of it is the lack of female role models in those fields. When all of your committee, and all of the scholars you reference, are male, I think you get an implicit signal that you shouldn't be where you are - despite having successfully completed your doctorate.
IPhone To Computer Transfert, transférez vos données iPhone sur votre PC
I just went back to XP from Seven last month in my home computer (4GB Ram). I'm with you.

- Things I got back with XP:

Sound 3D acceleration in video games.

I can force v-sync in my AMD video card.

The keyboard multimedia keys work again.

Great performance for more software.

- Things I had to add to make XP usable:

Launchy

RocketDock

Some tool to make the Win+left and Win-right keys work like Win7.

- Things I miss:

The launch lists.

The percentage completion indicator in the taskbar.

I still have a Win7 machine with 8GB Ram at work, so I can compare both every day. My next machine will be Win7 too. But with much beefier hardware, to make it worth it.
Consistency is not just to avoid confusion and make things easier. Inconsistency is a direct source for irritation and annoyance. Its very easy to see if you give a computer worker a different keyboard setup (that is, other than qwerty or even just a slightly modified version). It drives people nut!
Nah, just need more messages.
Because it is an extreme case: small population, almost no diversity, and on an isolated island. There aren't many internet connections to Greenland and there isn't much demand for different ISPs either. So cutting a cable or an ISP off of the Internet cuts off the whole country (it's an autonomous country).

So, a mad despot or a sloppy construction worker could cut Greenland off of the internet.

Another interesting case mentioned in the Article is The Netherlands: a small country, a small population, but a enormous amount of ISPs and connections to other countries. Good luck cutting that off as a whole, you mad despot!
I get frustrated when things move from text to icons. E.g. gmail (at least on android). Studies have shown that text buttons like "mark as spam" are more usable; I wish google would listen.
Very nice. Bookmarked! (I don't have many bookmarks, so this is a prestigious position in my browser.)
Why did The Daily fail? I'm putting it down to it having no unique character and thus suffering a blandness of writing. That, combined with terrible UX.
Is it just me or is the font size on that blog really, really small?
Why I’m a programmer
How a C++ compiler implements exception handling
And menus. And windows, if you consider the fullscreen to be a window. And pointer if you consider icon highlighting to be the affordant equivalent to pointer.
All I'm saying is that it isn't an indictment on the ship's entire existence, and that it served a noble purpose when it wasn't being used in those operations. Don't be petulant.
there is an awesome TED talk by Amy Cuddy that touches on this subject (in addition to how to combat it) http://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_shapes...
You can provide labels with action bar action items inline instead of just relying on a long press to get a popup hint by using android:showAsAction="ifRoom|withText" on any menu item in the menu XML. You can also do this programmatically.

The big downside to this is that one phone devices you basically will only be able to show 1 action item with an overflow menu since you'll run out of space with just the first action item. The best work around is to make actions very obvious based on the icon used for the action item. You could also consider moving non-obvious UI behaviors into the main content of the page where there is more room for labeling.
Some more context:
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/media-lab/mobile-media/19...

The Daily's publisher claims to have had 100,000 paying subscribers (not clear if these are the 99-cent/week ones or the $40/yr)...assuming 100K of the latter, that's $4M in annual revenue.

Past reports said that the startup costs were $30 million and that annual costs were projected to be $26M (Murdoch claimed that operating costs would be "less than half a million dollars a week")

http://www.businessinsider.com/murdoch-the-daily-will-cost-5...

I'm not glad it failed (for the sake of people who had jobs), but I'm glad it didn't become the flagship of future media efforts...which it seemed it might be because News Corp could afford to operate it at a loss for years. Besides the whole iPad-only thing, it was obvious that it was way too hard to maintain, with each page/feature seeming like a bespoke-app built from scratch...never to be seen again after the day was over. That's no feasible model for any content-provider.

Best of luck to the staffers who worked there, they did pick up some pretty good talent. But talent alone won't bring enough subscribers (the NYT also announced buyouts today)

* Here's an example of the bespoke-kind of features that the Daily tried to do...don't know if they actually tried this out, but the costs to produce this on even a weekly basis would be non-trivial:

http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/media-lab/mobile-media/11...

> “People familiar with the Daily tell me plans for future editions of the app include a gee-whiz feature that will allow correspondents to offer readers a 360-degree view of whatever they’re talking about.”
I agree. I played around with the Surface RT for over 30 mins at a Microsoft store with the intention of buying it for my parents for Christmas, and I walked away because even I couldn't effectively figure out what the "rules" were for interacting with Metro. I'm sure if I gave it more time, I could, but there is no way my parents, who still use XP, would be able to figure it out.

I wasn't sure what I needed to do to get to the "Desktop" mode where it looked like Windows 7, or how to flip back and forth, and which things I could swipe, etc. I felt like it was a big mess because a lot of the UI features that we've come to expect were not there. In contrast, the iPhone and subsequently the iPad were intuitive right off the bat.

To be fair, I'm seeing a lot of this terrible UI experience in other things as well. For example, on Chrome when you are reading a PDF, if you want to save it or zoom, it's not obvious how to do it. You need to miraculously hover over the bottom right corner and then the buttons show themselves, but there are no visual cues indicating that that's what you're supposed to do. It's fancy, but terrible UI.

The same thing occurs on Facebook, where people are just expected to know where to hover in order to show functionality. I don't know where this trend came from, but it's terrible, and I think this article is showing an extension of how we are moving away from all the visual cues and things we've learned about UX in the past 30 years. Sure, it's different but it doesn't mean it's better, especially when it forced people to hunt, peck, and guess for functionality, something that UX is supposed to get rid of.
Portuguese here.

I had a quick look at the link you provided, it has to do with the amount of national communication providers really route the traffic across borders.

Since most of the traffic goes over Portugal Telecom, switching them off, would already cut most of the traffic I imagine. Specially because they also own most of the internal cabling, even when the service is offered by other companies.
You know, you could have just floated them...

And if that sounds crazy, my last implementation of the GoL was built for micro-optimization... my field space was a 1D array that held both the current generation and the swap space for the next generation. So I could see things being made slightly more simple by having the draw space semantically match the logic.
Iran Suspends Computer Programmer's Death Sentence
If you feel like a fraud doing a start up, imagine how it feels making flash games for a living
This December, I will be speaking to some students that want to pursue a career in tech.

How I have catered to this feeling is this: I told the organizer I would not speak about being a success since I am not yet successful. So I will be speaking about what I know, which is about bringing products to life.

Even then, I still do not feel so comfortable doing it.
Here's a couple to give an idea of where I'm going. The main thing I would add to the OP's list are books on the squishier topics of emotional intelligence and working as a team.

A book on communicating designs (this helped me a ton even though I only use it where necessary which isn't too often)
http://www.amazon.com/Applying-UML-Patterns-Introduction-Obj...

Also this was transformative for how I approach leadership:
http://sivers.org/ff

Also the Lean Start Up was big in spite of the hype just for articulating how thinking strategically about what you're building and for who can lead you to success.

Hopefully that paints a picture of how I think this list could be better balanced.
Part of the reason might be Apple's Newsstand. "For a lot of people Newsstand is a place where apps go to be forgotten." http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/06/25/flipboard-nyt
> the new WDDM driver model prevents a large class of crashes caused by faulty graphics drivers

True. However, the current AMD driver offers something similar for WinXP. It has prevented one restart already.

And my other computer with 7 just froze because of a problem with the video card, so Win7 WDDM driver model is not fail-proof.
That makes sense... the context definitely helps.

I love how laws remind me of some of the really bad code I've written in the past, with all sorts of broken patches trying to fix it, even though I know I just have to throw it out and start again...
Married for 30 years. 3 brothers, 2 sisters, 13 nieces and nephews. Still haven't resorted to asking people what they want. What's the point? They can get that for themselves.
Oops, there were 19 slots last time, so we invited 17/19 as many this time.
I personally like the lead paint correlation more, because it appeals to me to think that the only reason things were so bad for so long was because everyone was brain-damaged.
Install Launchy.

Problem solved.
Looking at the link http://www.riagenic.com/archives/487 it shows they contrasted Metro with gaudy and awful chrome. I think it is a bit of a straw man in this case. Metro just took a idea and implemented the extreme of it. And extremes don't always work well there needs to be some compromise. This doesn't have to be all 0 or all 1 (all gaudy horrible chrome or completely flat polygons filled with color).

"authentically digital" -- I am all for it except that most people already have some baggage or notions of how interfaces work (both in real world and digital). It also happens that those in digital world mimic those in the real world (buttons have shadows for ex) or some conventions have stuck that have been randomly chosen initially (links are underlined).

Now maybe it is a noble goal to re-educate the user and I can see that. I remember hating Ubuntu's Unity. Now I like. It has re-educated me. But I also happened to like other aspects of Ubuntu and didn't want to switch to an alternative that why I stuck with it. But it seems a lot of people did and a lot of people will also do that to Windows.
I'm very well aware of the term and would consider myself a metrosexual in some ways. It was just a play on words.
> "don't use perl, it promotes brain rot"

> and no, i wont revisit my thinking.

"I don't think this is the tool for the job, THEREFORE IT ROTS YOUR BRAIN! If you try to talk to me about that, I will chant, "I'M NOT LISTENING" over and over with my hands on my ears."

Really?
According to the Belize authorities he's not a suspect
Congrats!

Are you guys using Django? I met some of your team at the Pycon India.
News Corp. Shutters The Daily iPad App
I agree, but I also think it's a tricky subject. Doing things for the sole purpose of increasing your karma would probably be considered a negative behavior. On the other hand the community gives karma to reward behavior it approves of (and vice versa), so it isn't right to completely ignore it either.
Skyscraper just closed our $500k seed and we're hiring both dev & design
(disclaimer: I'm a co-founder.)

Skyscraper just closed a $500k seed and we're on the hunt for full-time dev and design. We're a 3-person dev team at the moment, 5 people total. We've got roles to fill at all aspects of the stack, especially back-end architecture and advanced client-side javascript. There's a number of big nasty problems we're looking for the right people to come help us solve.

https://www.skyscrpr.com/team

or shoot me an email at
jacob+hn@skyscraper.io

Jacob
Pass the CA Bar Exam in 100 Hours
http://www.cliki.net/Cells

haskell is south park, lisp is the simpsons.
The hyperlink has dealt a mortal wound to the newspaper industry, and social media will end up dealing the coup de grace. Old media would love to still have the ability to consolidate news into a nice pre-packaged product that they can sell, but the web has destroyed the ability for that to happen. Why have a Daily app when you can have Twitter or even RSS deliver the news? It's hard to pay for something that is just lying around everywhere.
This line of argument always jumps right from rods and cones to perceived affordances without ever making the case that there's a significant gain to perceived affordances from mocked up depth. If this is so uncontroversially true, surely someone has done a study you can link.
But why are the titles different sizes? There may be no reason beyond aesthetics, but that's his point: differing sizes often conveys information, and even if it does not, it takes effort on our part to realize that size differences does not imply functionality difference.

And if I did see a double-door immediately next to a normal sized door, I would wonder why that was set up like that. Is one the emergency exit? Is one the freight-entrance?
Go Language ~ Good To Begin Links Part#1
Congratulations. Definitely my first choice for building telephony.
Yes we do. It was good meeting you at Pycon.
Up for unix and "EDA is the lingua franca of data science". What you can do and discard on the unix CLI takes many times longer on certain GUI based OSes.
not as ridiculous as this. https://gist.github.com/969788
Search Engine Optimization is Just One Piece of the Marketing Puzzle
Left wondering why VLC relicensed some code to LGPL
Microfluidic Panels: Beyond the Touch Screen
Thank you. This has become my one and only default homepage that I open up starting each day.
3 Onsite SEO Tips for the Internal Pages of Your Website
Heh -- the parent was referring to Richard Kimble, protagonist of "The Fugitive" (I'll wait while you Google it), not Kim Dotcom. While there are some commonalities, R. Kimble was an upstanding medical doctor who, I'm pretty sure, never rapped ...
Also agreed. Enjoy getting these as one of the first emails in the morning. They are always well written, informative, and fun.
"The problem isn't that people don't care"

I think you are overly optimistic here. Let's put it this way: if people were told that they had to report one crime committed by their neighbors in order to watch the superbowl, what do you think would happen?

"They would care if they knew the realities of how their communications are stored, processed, and exposed to their governments"

I have a lot of friends who know this, some of whom know it in more depth than many HN readers. Guess what? They all stopped bothering to maintain a PGP key. They all carry cell phones, and they do not even take the time to try to disable location services. They are all users of at least one of (Facebook Twitter Google+ GMail LinkedIn). If the people who know these things do not care, what make you think that people do not know these things would care if they became knowledgeable?
You got a new web UI. I still find there are lots to improve

Are you using bootstrap?
In Unity:

1. Open your program of choice.
2. Right-click on the Unity's icon.
3. Check "Keep in Launcher"

Enjoy!
Why drink water that may have micro-organisms in it when you can drink water which you know has micro-organisms in it?
I'm behind jgrahamc at #29 but my results would be similar. One extra driver, though, was getting on http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders was a goal a few years ago. I specifically spent more time on the site and began to submit stuff. Nothing low quality or spammy but just 'putting the time in.'

Now /leaders isn't highlighted anymore, I spend less time contributing and more time lurking. This is neither good nor bad as I am statistically insignificant in the great tide of stuff on here. But we're all motivated in different ways in different contexts and I've learned over the years a main motivator for me is credit/recognition/"glory" (and not the points per se). Now I know that's a 'quirk' of mine, I take advantage of it as a way of getting my work done and stopping procrastination, rather than trying to do well on HN or wherever ;-) Except for this comment, surely..