skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
100% agree. Outlook doesn't support responsive CSS... but doesn't it support conditional comments? I think Zurb might be missing an opportunity here.
I stated it in another comment, but the mobile-first strategy is more about user interaction design than implementation technology choices.

I tend to agree, but for this discussion I'm trying to restrict my use of the term to the distinction in the original articles, which as I read them is very much about the technology platform choice rather than matters of presentation or user experience. (Perhaps I've misunderstood the author's intent and that is why I so strongly disagreed with the argument from the earlier blog post.)

If you start a new startup today and you have resources to design a single user experience, it's a choice of designing for mobile/tablets or for laptops. Responsive design is not a solution here, as you have to think full user flows.

With due respect, I don't accept your premise. We're doing it right now, with a web app that uses similar tricks to responsive design to present things differently on different devices. With the obvious exception of collecting payments, where a native mobile app probably has at least one major option that a web app doesn't, we aim for a very similar user flow regardless of the device used to access our service.

This particular app is more about consumption than interaction, so of course we're not representative of the entire field and YMMV. However, I'd say the main thing that lets us present a user experience that is similar across devices is just keeping the whole model very simple and designing the interactions/controls carefully so they are viable on both large and small screens. We do occasionally adapt a certain part of the UI to present things in a more natural way depending on the device, but we don't find this is a problem very often in practice. We've been considering various more interactive/social features, and I would agree that these require more adaptation to suit different devices, but even so, I don't see us building two fundamentally different user interfaces any time soon. Until evidence shows me otherwise, if your user flows are simple and your underlying data/presentation models are good, I don't see why a single user experience with localised enhancements/adaptations can't serve many kinds of device well.
> By that metric, the market picks the highest quality of winner pretty much by definition.

I dunno, Windows and Internet Explorer has been the "winner" for the past few decades ;-) By the metric you mention ("of most utility to the largest number of people."), yes, they are "high quality". By many other metrics, they are not the highest quality products.

Jokes aside, I absolutely want the market involved as well. I think the market is fairly efficient, but it has it's downsides (e.g., the great patent wars - I'd hardly call that market efficiency).

I don't think the government has all the answers - but I don't think the market does either.
> Grammar is always the toughest.

I think this depends somewhat on the language. For some, grammar is the first major bottleneck to get to a usable beginner level, but for others, it's pronunciation. For example, Danish grammar is relatively simple (which is one reason Google Translate is very good translating it), but it's quite difficult for non-native speakers to pronounce it intelligibly. I've also heard second-hand that pronunciation is a bigger problem than grammar for beginning Mandarin Chinese speakers.
It's funny because the cards documentation is still using Instagram as example. :)
Like that, but something that actually grows over time.
The global megatrend is still the developing world developing. There are so many people who don't have clean water, don't get good food, don't have electricity or automobiles so that things can "get better" for the median person on Earth for a long time.

If we apply human ingenuity to it, it's challenging but believable to can support this in terms of food and energy for the next 50 years at least, and beyond that time frame it's likely that the world population stabilizes.

You might find many signs of decline such as the crude humor on TV sitcoms, the disappearance of defined benefit pensions, or Facebook and Zynga as "tittytainment" for the masses. You could say we'll never have another Einstein or Feynman, that we'll never have a satisfying paradigm for deterministic chaos with more than three degrees of freedom, etc. You might also point out very real problems we'll face dealing with global warming, terrorism, cybercrime, unemployment.

However there are so many exciting things I see going on today. The space program is more exciting today than it was in the 1960s. When I go to the west coast I see cool new restaurants that start in Hollywood, set up another location in L.A., then San Diego and the next thing you know it's a national chain with 50 locations. I think of all the cool little handmade things you can buy on Etsy.

I think there's still going to be a rapprochement between the FIRE (Financial, Insurance and Real Estate) industry and the real of the economy, but I think lots of people are doing big and little things that make life better and more interesting.
Did you read the article? All WMs will need to be rewritten, and must do compositing.
MySQL founders launch MariaDB Foundation at Oracle
You mean the Windows 2008 R2 server that I have at home? Or the Ubuntu server that I have at home? Can't be the DG/UX server, that's sitting in the garage awaiting the metal scrappers.
There was a competitive communications infrastructure before the USG decided to nationalize it all and AT&T managed to lobby themselves into a weird government-mandated monopoly position. If AT&T had not been granted a monopoly competitive pressure would have forced something like NANPA to be developed and we probably would have ended up with LNP a bit faster.

On the other hand AT&T’s monopoly provided funding to Bell Labs which had more to do with our modern world than DARPA.

The Internet as we know it today couldn’t exist until the government in the form of the NSF and their government & research only rules were bypassed by commercial interests.
Keep walkways clear of ice and snow to prevent falls
Your math is off by an order of magnitude, but 50k a month is still amazing.
Chaos theory: what happens when Amazon buys you random stuff?
Tesla wasn't picked over another company, they were the only company trying this.

The DOE gives all kinds of grants and loans to innovative energy companies because it's seen as a national security issue.
Instagram to remain independent of Facebook for a long time
A future where storage and processing costs nothing
For those curious about eBay financing, check out the book "eBoys: The First Inside Account of Venture Capitalists at Work" http://www.amazon.com/eBoys-Inside-Account-Venture-Capitalis... (the book is 10 years old, likely to be available at your local library).

It was definitely not a slam-dunk idea, and even Benchmark partners felt uneasy about financing an online classifieds site that would be easy to replicate and invite large players to compete in case there was a valid market (Yahoo! indeed made a move at eBay with Yahoo! Actions priced at $0 listing fees, since Yahoo! had other sources of revenue).

While Meg Whitman was being recruited for the CEO role, she browsed the dinky classifieds site and was not super-impressed - Benchmark guys basically bought her and her family air+hotel to at least sell her on California prospects, if not eBay's future.
It somehow feels as if for some folks like the author, bringing down Microsoft is more of a priority than adding to user freedom via Linux or BSD or whatever.

See Ubuntu Bug #1 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1 - Microsoft has a majority market share

So if you believe the graph that someone else posted today, Microsoft has already lost and that means Ubuntu/Linux has won... or something.

http://www.businessinsider.com/mary-meeker-2012-internet-tre...

From the article:

>Every purchase of a Windows license is an attack on Linux. Linux has not won, and Microsoft is as dangerous as ever

What if people buy an iPad instead of a Windows PC? Is that an "attack" on Linux? How about total lack of developer freedom in iOS or even charging for in app purchases or banning linking to a website for buying things?

Or even if the user buys a Mac instead, do you think Apple would be better at enhancing user freedom that MS was? How about the Apple tax on all hardware that you need to buy to get Mac compatibility if it gets a monopoly?
Governments have been involved in 'public works' for at least the last 10,000 years. Without it you end up with a weaker society with a weaker military which is then easy pray to invaders.

It may have started out as roads, bridges, defensive structures, and irrigation systems. But the CDC is well within that domain.
You make an excellent point, because I don't trust those Win8 numbers at all.
I'm not surprised to hear that the percentage of external activity is going up. Do you have a good handle on what the average ratio is nowadays?
This article and the comments here on HN seem to miss the entire point of mobile first (although the comments on the article itself are spot on): mobile first does not mean you're actually intending to build for mobile at all.

It means funnel everything your site is trying to accomplish down to how you'd design for small viewports so that the focus is on the most important navigable aspects of your site or service. In knowing where exactly you're trying to send your audience, there are less questions about the hierarchy of elements and calls-to-actions on the rest of your designs.
Could be just regular users as well. Anyone who has enough karma can "flag" a post, and a few flags will typically knock something off the front page (unless it has a ton of upvotes counteracting that).
As a 21 year old, I wanted to take offense to the Steve Jobs comment because he was a real jerk and the innovation came from the Woz's and not the Jobs, but given my limited interactions with others in my age group, the vast majority of them are pants on head dumb enough to have a shrine to honor turtlenecks.
Congrats to Bradford! Prismatic really is great. Definitely one of the few sites I use several times a day.
Sinatra doesn't like £ signs
Ann Arbor Startup MyFab5 Aims to Disrupt Yelp
I think this comment by Brandon Burns made on Fred's blog puts things in their proper context.

I feel like a point is still being missed: mobile is a channel, not a product strategy.

Instagram worked mobile first because you use it to take pictures, which you do on your phone. You also use your phone to order a taxi, and to connect with friends when out — Uber and Foursquare.

Google still has more activity on the desktop than mobile; why? Because people don't like executing intensive searches on a small screen. Viral content driven platforms do better on desktop; why? People look at and share content mostly while goofing off at work, on the computer on their desk.

Your product defines how you execute it, not the channel.

Chase user behavior, not press headlines that say "X sector is growing!"

Think like an experience designer, not like a VC.
Rather than setting git's pager to less with options, just export the "LESS" environment variable with options you want less to use everywhere.
I used to work for a startup that used acmecorp.com in all their demos and all over the documentation. It turned out the company behind the domain name didn't really appreciate getting dozens upon dozens of "confirm your registration" emails... but they did say we weren't the only offenders.
AnimateText.js - Text animation jQuery plugin
Read the FAQ: http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Read the guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Hang around for a while and read the comments and see what the style is here.
Is that really an issue with Microsoft/UEFI/secure boot, or is the problem that OEMs aren't building firmware that does what you want?
I think real innovation is most likely to come from China. For example, they plan to build a 220 story tall sky scraper in 90 days: (http://gizmodo.com/5962070/china-will-build-the-tallest-buil...). They've also been building a massive high speed rail network over vast distances throughout China.

I think with these feats they want to establish themselves as a super power that can take on the U.S, as well as to improve their infrastructure. I think it's a good thing, as peaceful competition between nations has always lead to benefits for the world in general.
Those are for America. But global trends emphatically(?) disagree with you: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/03/business/global/03iht-srta...
Ecofont, Will this save the planet?
Regulations that are good for workers are important as far as I'm concerned too. And do play a factor in purchase decisions. Basically everyone is worker and consumer, so strengthening consumer and worker rights is good as far as I'm concerned.
On field testing
Another smartphone instant messenger released: Hike
Google funded Drones to Track Rhino Poachers
BetterCheckbox.js
Twitter may be reaping here, but I don't think there's a question that Instagram is choosing the Flickr route here. Flickr is actually a negative-click for me, knowing that they are going to frame-break my RSS reader (Netvibes), or cause a 5min browser load on my old-ass phone. Twitter may deserve this in the way that we all know, but Instagram is worse. That they have FB to backstop them is their saving throw.
Thanks Toby, hopefully we'll get good enough at hiring to take advantage of the cash and make those several times a day a lot more enjoyable! :)
Raspberry Pi: One of the Top Linux Innovations of 2012
Although the market is substantially smaller, this would be really cool to mash-up with Twilio to create Interactive Voice Response menus (Press 1 to get your account balance, Press 2 to speak to a representative, etc).

You could also allow users to select Text-to-speech or integrate eLance or http://www.voices.com/ and sell human voice-overs.
http://www.feedbackarmy.com

One of the suggested questions you could ask (when I last looked) was "What does this site do?" The examples page gives you a pretty good idea of how it works.
Poll: How much pay cut would you take to work from your choice of location?
Being developers, there is strong argument that working from your choice of location/home etc. gives us a lot of room to build stuff better. If given a choice considering all else being equal, how much Pay cut would you take to be able to work from location of your choice which includes home etc.
1-10%
10-24%
25-50%
Greater than 50%
No. Pay cut is not worth for me to work from anywhere.
Heh, I think its funny that your "Examples" in the "Get Started" page have rounded corners in the thumbnail preview :)

You guys forgot the "edit" in copy -> paste -> edit
Dan Gilbert, Self-Made Billionaire, Leader Of The Detroit Renaissance
What happens when someone nearby using your Karma buys more data and the you pack up and leave?
Y2K38 - The Unix Millennium Bug
Awesome, very useful product, definitely one of the most relevant news aggregation services currently. The recent web redesign also enhanced desktop use as well. Congratulations team!
1) I wouldn't say community agreed so much as set by PG. But yes, it's a requirement.

2) They exercise their own judgement. The capability becomes available once you pass a deliberately non-public karma threshold that I honestly couldn't remember if I wanted to.

3) There are. I don't believe their identities are public.

4) No. At least not in general. Sharing non-interesting posts is viewed negatively.

5) For anything that exists on its own page or is longer than a paragraph or two, definitely link. I guess you can make a case for inline quoting when you just want a very short excerpt that can only be found on a long webpage.
Ask HN: What did you do when your startup failed?
Is the text of Assange's "Cypherpunks" one big code?
Rescuing exceptions without notifications or: How to fail without knowing
As a user of all three (FB, Twitter and IG), I'd actually wager in the opposite direction...
I'm the post author and would be happy to answer any questions and discuss academia CS and startups.
Trackstar - Convert your revision notes into audio.
Hey, I'm 18 and a student. I realised I learn well via audio so I built this web app. I used Rails. Please give me some feedback. Thanks

www.trackstar.co
(1) Varnish exists, so we can actually run it and analyze its performance. There's no need for "this can't work because X" arguments because we know whether it can work or not.

The author claims Varnish works with huge mappings too. In another article: "For example, Varnish does not ignore the fact that memory is virtual; it actively exploits it. A 300-GB backing store, memory mapped on a machine with no more than 16 GB of RAM, is quite typical."

(2) Varnish doesn't ignore the fact disk is slower than RAM. Its data structures are built to minimize page faults, and thus seeks, for this reason. See also: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1814327

The virtual memory abstraction leaks, just like every other abstraction. That doesn't make it worthless.

(3) Files aren't append-only: you can reuse space for a different purpose when you don't need it for its original purpose anymore. How do you think databases work? Or filesystems?

(4) The author's not talking about using disk-backed memory for your general purpose heap. He's talking about using the virtual memory system to access a giant cache on disk.

So is the author wrong about everything? Varnish seems to work, so if he's wrong he's getting away with it.
> are preparing them well for a future career in academia, if they so choose

Assuming that option remains. In other disciplines, from what I read, it is fast disappearing for the majority of... "qualified" candidates.

As the quality of the product (i.e. potential employee and what they have to offer) declines, I speculate so will academic opportunities. There's a lag while the decline in value reveals itself, but eventually the world catches up with the new state of things.
"Every purchase of a Windows license is an attack on Linux. Linux has not won, and Microsoft is as dangerous as ever."

This just seems silly. How is this an "attack", does the Linux foundation somehow lose funding proportional to the number of Windows licenses sold?
Cancer Therapy Lessons from the 2012 US Presidential Elections
"Zip code not in supported region" is not a consumer friendly error message.
Amen brother.

This is essentially what it all comes back to right? The thing which drives me insane is so many presidents and administrations have been unable to grasp this. I still think back to Jimmy Carter's speech in 1978 warning about the need for affordable, sustainable energy.

What have we done in the past 30+ years to address this imminent crossroads? Next to nothing.
Great news! I've been using the Prismatic app daily since it came out. It perfectly fits the job of "what's going on". I tend to skim on the iPhone and save good articles to read later (or with Pocket, another favorite).

The tech is really interesting too. High Scalability had a post this summer on how it all works:
http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/7/30/prismatic-architec...
Your argument is flawed and this can be demonstrated with countless examples. For example, it is difficult to have social order when your elderly and your poor are dying on the streets. This is why we have welfare and social security.
How The Government Can Still Get Your Digital Data without a Warrant
Building a Real-time SMS Voting App with Node.js, Socket.io and Highcharts
Unix System Programming in OCaml eBook
>The biggest flaw in Secure Boot is the spec requires a single Platform Key. You can add more keys, but they must be signed by the Platform Key

I think this that is just wrong, can someone please verify? I thought the user could add their own master keys to boot their own OSes apart from being able to disable secure boot as mandated by Microsoft for Windows certification (as much as it can force OEMs without the anti-trust rulings stopping it from mandating requirements to OEMs).

There is so much FUD and misinformation spread by folks who you would think be otherwise smart and knowledgeable that it's hard to find to what to believe and what not to.
Apple, Please Redesign the iTunes Redesign
Atlassian Challenges GitHub to a Fork Fight
Yahoo ordered to pay $2.7 billion in bizarre Mexico lawsuit
This was my very favorite talk from the Lean Startup conference. I hope they put up the video as well, which was excellent.
A Crash Course in Solid Web-based API Design Tutorials
No matter what language you choose you should have a systematic approach to logging exceptions. Unless there is some specific action you want to take with an exception, you should let it be thrown to the outermost level possible and have it be caught there.
Ask HN: Are parent companies looked down upon by investors?
Companies like Atlassian do a great job of building a brand around their many products, but would investors rather invest in specific products like HipChat and bitbucket separately or the parent company as a whole?

I suppose it's possible to incorporate each of your products separately and give the parent company the shares rather than the founders (who own the parent company) but is this overly complicated?
Jason is the man and we'll be prodding him into doing more posts and starting to open source a bunch of our clojure stack.
So when you see numbers you agree with, it's fine. But when you see numbers you don't agree with, you don't trust them? OK.
Former Microsoft Manager To Launch 'Premium Marijuana' Business
Congratulations! The site is great. I use it every day. A few things I'd love to see:

1. API - I'd love to integrate with you guys.

2. Daily e-mail - As much as I like to use the site sometimes I just want to have stories pushed to me too.

3. I would like to have a bar at the top of the list of stories that shows what I have "saved for later". I usually save stories when I don't have time to read them but I always forget to go back and read them because it's not in front of my face.

Keep up the great work!
Regarding your point 2, the min. Karma threshold is 500 to be able to downvote.
Oh look, a G+ clone...

MS is so inept at anything "social", it's sad they even keep trying (but I guess if you have enough monkeys banging away on a keyboard long enough, they'll eventually pound out the next FB "killer").

The Messenger+Live (aka. "Messenger social" from the site itself) is a comedy of errors -- has anyone signed into that recently? It's XP meets Vista meets Win8, but mostly just the annoying parts of each. And their "social forums"[1] are the worst forums that I've ever had the privilege of ignoring.

1. http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/
Note that funding for such things used to come from individuals who could easily buy shares.

Univac for instance, started in just this way, selling shares for a few dollars apiece.

In these times, however, lawyers and government have strangled such bootstrap methods.

Whether Tesla is a success or not, that the govt was needed indicates a failure in some other part of the system.
I consider our now constant and affordable access to enormous amounts of information (fast and mobile internet) as a massive innovation. It's built on top of lots of other incremental innovations and inventions, but that doesn't lessen it's impact on our fundamental behaviour.

It all boils down to your classification between invention, innovation, and improvement. According to my own subjective classification, there's been a lot of innovation since the 70s. More than I can keep up with anyways.

I think AR is going to be pretty significant too, and a huge enabler of new tech as it matures.

This is just the way to sell a book these days though right? Make extreme claims you don't actually agree with in order to stir up interest.