skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
U.S. election, iPhone 5, Kardashian top Yahoo 2012 searches
If I'm not mistaken I've read Gruber complain about Apple's products with bad UI/UX before. I'm not sure Apple doing this would change the outcome of the analysis. I also didn't read the article and hear "bad UI === Microsoft".
rs and lam look interesting. Are these commands really only available on BSD (i.e. 'proper' Unix derivatives)? Hoping for Linux compilable code.
Why is this a "fiction" and why do you need banks? Why do you dismiss Bitcoin? Please explain.
There are no non-interactive tiles in Windows 8 or Windows Phone.
I drifted over to HN from reddit (and pre-meltdown digg before that). While I had previously considered reddit comments to be 'higher brow' than those at digg, I have found the gap to HN to be substantially wider. Not so much in terms of grammar nazism and semantic pedantry, but more so tone, content and comment structure.

Glib and offhand attempts at humour are not much appreciated here, even though they might contain some wit, which reddit would gobble up.

The HN audience seems to upvote comments that are analytical, insightful and informative. This takes some adjustment for reddit heroes who can reap great karma with a well-placed meme.
Designing the first 3D-printed house - it's made from by nylon.
Tiles are different sizes depending on their intended use. App tiles on Win8 are active - i.e. the app can render new information to them. A newsreader app can tell you most recent headlines at a glance (without having to launch the app), your email app can tell you number of unread messages, weather can display current conditions without forcing you to launch.

Larger tiles are used by apps that need to convey more information - your email app that just shows an unread count probably doesn't need more than the standard 1x1 tile, your newsreader might want a 2x1 to have room for headlines.

I'm not a huge fan of Metro, though I have been actively devving for Win8 for a few weeks. I don't think this is really a problem - all of this stuff is pretty obvious to users.
You might want to relax. I mean, these MOOC courses only became ubiquitous this year. Give at least 5-10 years to see what the effects will be.
A Stalker's Guide to Guest Posting
I just replied to this on Ask Ubuntu (including screenshots). You can reduce the padding a bit with a .gtkrc file and/or custom GTK themes. This and some font-tweaking on the same file should be good enough.
That's not it at all. "Basic human rights and the principles of the Enlightenment" have no position in American law while The Constitution is the foundation of all American law and of the actions of American law enforcement people.
Yes, Go does make writing stuff like that nice, but I think the actual code given is pretty heavyweight. This does the same thing:

package main

import (
"fmt"
"net"
"io/ioutil"
"strings"
)

func main() {
file_in, _ := ioutil.ReadFile("domains.txt")
domain_list := string(file_in)

done := make(chan bool)
count := 0

for _, domain := range strings.Split(strings.TrimSpace(domain_list), "\n") {
go func(d string) {
ipAddresses, _ := net.LookupIP(d)

ip := ""
if len(ipAddresses) > 0 {
ip = ipAddresses[0].String()
}

fmt.Println("Mapping: ", d, "->", ip)
done <- true
}(domain)

count++
}

for i := 0; i < count; i++ {
<- done
}
}
I think your blog post is a great piece on why to stay focused but there was really nothing to back your arguments other than staying focused. To that end, it would apply to any blog site, don't waste your time reading blogs when you should be working on your startup. It inherently has nothing to do with TechCrunch
I felt the same during my Masters. I was gulping down papers and books on stuff very new to me and churning out papers at a crazy rate. I was overwhelmed.

When every paper came back with very high grades I actually questioned one of my professors about those grades. I literally said "I feel like I'm faking that I actually know what I'm talking about". She was amused.

Looking back at it: I was working an awful lot, loved the subject, and have a way with words (at least in my native Spanish). So the output was good, what else would I expect?
Apple - Think Twice
Agreed, Naner raises a very good point. Just uploading it on GitHub won’t help much. However wouldn't I be right in thinking that it would be easier to get press, adoption and attention to something that is open source?

Maybe my question instead should be something like: Given relative small resources, is it easier to succeed as a startup if your product is open sourced?

For business strategy so are we leaning towards the usual rout of releasing the software as open source, to encourage a more rapid adoption, while the company sells ongoing support contracts, custom integration, services and consultancy.
>some elected politicians equate legal tax minimisation with avoidance.

Isn't that exactly what the term means?

>This from a group who were discovered to be minimising illegally expenses

Some MPs illegally claimed higher expenses than they incurred. Generally they resigned as soon as this became public. I'm not saying there's no corruption, but UK politicians are held to higher standards than practically anywhere (in no small part by the strong, activist judiciary and a strong, diverse press).

>The rationalisation seems to be that because local firms, unless using what would now be seen as avoidance, cannot avoid profits and so corporation tax, then everyone else should jolly well pay it too.

How about "companies making profits in the UK should pay taxes on those profits in the UK"? Seems sensible to me.

>It's odd. These rules were set by the very people complaining about them.

a) Who better to look for weaknesses and improvements?
b) A lot of the complaint boils down to: these companies filed fraudulent accounts.
At the turn of the 20th century, this optimism was widespread: science and industrialization would, according to popular thought, bring about a golden age where disease, famine, and war would all be forgotten. Some people, like H. G. Wells, had different ideas; rather than bringing about an age of peace, new technology would be used as a tool of war. H. G. Wells thought that radioactivity (which was cutting edge at the time) would be used to make bombs so powerful that whole cities could be destroyed and that airplanes would be key to military tactics (he was a bit off the mark on some things: he thought submarines would not work, that airplanes would not be invented until the 1950s, and that nuclear bombs would explode continuously for an entire day -- nobody said he had a crystal ball).

Robots distributing social power? I think it will be the exact opposite. Robots will be used to maintain social power, to prevent people from every gaining it. Your robot will be like an iPhone: you will be locked out of the software, forbidden to make modifications, forbidden to hack. Your robot will produce only as much as you need to survive; you will not receive enough to gain any more power than you already had. Your robot will also spy on you, so that if you start organizing a group of people to rebel against those with power, you will be thwarted by some means (perhaps your food will be drugged to reduce your cognitive abilities, or maybe for simplicity you will just stop receiving food). The people with power will never have to worry about being unseated, because they will have total control over the means of production. The only threat to the powerful at the point will be their own incompetence; only when they are not able to make the right decisions about managing society will society have a chance to rebel.

Here is a microcosm of what a world where robots run everything would be like:

http://www.wired.com/cars/coolwheels/news/2006/08/71554
The author doesn't get it. A lot of the way users know what to click is based on consistency. If it's a tile on the start screen you can click it. Want to print? It's always in the same place? Want to share? Same place. Want to close an app? Always the same way? Want to see more options for an app? The same way.

Now within the app one could argue there is a stronger need for affordances, but even there I've yet to encounter a single problem in my use of several Win8 apps.

I find the Win8 interface a lot more intuitive than the OSX interface. But I'm sure others would find the opposite. I suspect a lot depends on your starting point and your predisposition. My four year son figured out most of the Win8 interface in about 5 minutes (literally... at the MS store he was flying through the UI much better than I'd ever seen him with Win7 and a mouse).
I am Android user and I've been criticizing Apple's UIs before.

Personally I find the direction of Android Jelly Bean towards a flatter look to be annoying. It makes sense sometimes, but I surely hope it doesn't go overboard, like Metro does.
Our ancestors did not own smartphones, so the broad evolution argument is kind of garbage. User interfaces need to be researched before we can make conclusions on skeuomorphism vs "pure digital".

Furthermore, the author talks about affordances and how Metro has none. This is false. Anything that can be touched on the screen reacts to your touch. For example, if you're scrolling down the main menu and your finger happens to press down on a tile, the tile will be "pushed inwards" at the point of contact (even if you haven't released your finger). It's very subtle, but it definitely lets your subconscious know that in the future, if you would want to press that thing, you can. Now it's not an immediate affordance like a door knob, but a touch screen in itself is an affordance for touching, and once you touch then the other affordances reveal themselves.
I've actually written small projects in all of them. The one that excited me the most was Ruby (and outside of scripting, golang). Ruby seems clean and small, which I like. But I also question the long term prospects of various languages. There seems to have been an explosion of languages in the last few years and I wonder how many will survive long term. Then I'm possibly just spoiled by C and C++, which just seem to maintain a (relatively) mainstream status.
wow! awesome way to explore github.
Banned From Making Money, These YouTubers Share Their Stories
Life: Thinking a Community College to Uni route would be an easy transfer (I had the grades and extracurriculars to get into any Uni I wanted, but had no $$$ at the time), having a daughter at 18 with a (w)itch, this list is growing as I type so I'll stop now ;)

Programming: Taking a job at a company where the Web department is in the Marketing Department,and only our 2-man IT department has access to writing anything more then HTML/CSS. Politics.
Unborn twins caught on video MRI for the first time (fighting)
His reasoning is basically "don't read TC because in the times I did read them, I focused too much on them and not my own endeavors...something that's completely MY fault."
The same India that has been charging people with crimes for voicing criticism of politicians on the internet?
"I feel that the complete lack of distinction between clickable/tappable tiles and non-interactive ones is a very real problem"

Really? Where is this problem? I know the tiles on my phone can all be tapped, without any exception (WP7).
Nothing is going to happen with digital security rights so long as the NSA wants to be able to store everything indefinitely and we have a Congress that can't even agree on more critical issues like the budget.

It wont be an issue unless people make it, and for most people security isn't even a consideration.
One other issue that I've noticed after looking at the leader board

http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

here on Hacker News from time to time is that pg's last major change in the site code (to make comment karma scores invisible to persons other than the person posting the comment) really seems to have made a positive difference in the site. That change was quite controversial when it was made.

Site founder pg began the experiment by opening a thread, "Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696

After looking at the discussion there, he announced an experiment

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2434333

601 days ago of not publicly showing comment karma scores, but rather just letting each user see her or his own comment karma scores when logged in. That change was protested in several LONG threads in the first few months after the change, but what I noticed is that I started seeing the comments of the users from whom I learned the most, the most often, more consistently sorting to the top of threads, and on the leader board I noticed that the AVERAGE comment scores (still disclosed there) of the 100 highest-karma users began better matching who was making substantive, helpful comments as contrasted with who was making comments that were, in pg's words, "a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted."

A reality check on what kind of comments get upvoted is to look from time to time at the bestcomments list,

http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments

which is still not exactly really a "best of" list of HN comments, but which has converged to better quality since that software change. The user jgrahamc appears to have seen his average comment karma score rise under the new software settings, deservedly so. Other users whose comments are especially thoughtful, whose user profile pages I visit to look up their most recent comments, also appear to have gained in average karma over the last year and a half that that software change has been in effect.
Good luck. You will need it :)
To be a contrarian I'll say that jgc's blog is representative of the "new journalism" that puts pageviews uber alles. In particular, I think jgc is more interested in exploting the hacker news community for traffic than in good writing.

It's true that jgc writes a lot, but I'd say his average article is pretty average. His best articles are great, but it seems somehow he manages to score a run for a blog post that's really worth a ball or a single. It's hard not to believe that a voting ring is involved somehow.
Thing is, good news isn't just "lying around everywhere". It takes a lot of work to make it. I will openly admit to bias because I work for a newspaper, but I dread the day when the only news outlets we have left are opinionated, biased blogs. No-one in the field actually gathering news, just an endless stream of people interpreting events they haven't witnessed in countries they've never been to.
On my iPad, my 2-year old is able to unlock the screen, go to Home in case any app is active and then open his favorite 2 apps (a simple game for toddlers and a painting app).

That's not saying much though, he just did what all kids do ... tried things out and quickly memorized what worked and it was easy and fun for him to do so because of the touch-screen. He also taught me some shortcuts I had no idea were available, like how to do multitasking by switching between active apps or how to split the on-screen keyword into 2 smaller pieces :-)

In general, kids can learn by trial and error quite efficiently, sometimes in a matter of minutes or seconds and shouldn't be used as a benchmark for how intuitive an interface is, because all that really says about an interface is that it can be learned by trial and error by kinds. Regular WIMP interfaces are indeed not intuitive for kids because the interface is often exposed through hierarchical menus that can't be explored by children who can't read.
Woah - I didn't even know a leaderboard existed!
Congrats guys! Seems like a cool platform.

Question: I noticed the press release on MarketWire is nicely packed with keyword-rich links (clever SEO work!). Does this get distribution on sites beyond MarketWire, and if so, do the links remain? Just curious how effective this sort of strategy is for link-building :)
This is still true for community colleges and state schools. The problem is that a degree from one of those schools doesn't mean as much as a degree from a good school, (or really, from what I've seen, much at all,) precisely because it's something most people can get.

Good state schools are still pretty valuable degrees, I think, but the problem is that the tuition isn't low anymore that those places. Community colleges are still affordable, but not so much the "flagship" state schools. In the '60s you could go to UCLA or Berkeley for basically nothing, but nowadays it's getting up towards $10k/yr. Same with places like UT-Austin or UW-Seattle.
Tumblr hacked?
Top searches for 2012: #2 iphone 5 (yahoo.com)
Hits close to home. I do a lot of data conversion, arrangement and manipulation on the CLI.
When some coworker inherits any of those tasks and I explain how to do it, the answer tends to be "Aaaaallright, I'll use Excel".
Submitting random articles from favorite sites (TechCrunch, Ars Technica, TorrentFreak, etc.) as soon as they're published (i.e. before anyone else), would probably get you a few thousand Karma points in a month or two.

From my point of view however, getting good points on a comment is a lot more satisfying and worthwhile than your general Karma count (once you're over the various thresholds).
There's a library for that pattern:
http://golang.org/pkg/sync/#WaitGroup

Instead of counting and using a done channel,

import "sync"
...
var wg sync.WaitGroup
for ... {
wg.Add(1)
go dowork()
}
wg.Wait()
Startup playbook: reverse-engineering Clay Christens’s market disruptions
A Step Toward Creating a Bio-Robot Hybrid
Yea, I kind of agree with some of this. My coworkers are big fans of Perl Critic because it enforces a standard (and I assume one that promotes cleaner Perl). But it often seem to me that the popularity for Critic is somewhat of a language failing.

I guess the argument could be main that it allows you to write hacky little scripts which could can then apply Critic too and slowly refactor into large projects. I'm not entirely sure I buy it.
I zoomed. I think your criticism is valid.
Clickable: http://www.doitbefore.com

I don't do Facebook logins on 3rd party sites, but the landing page looks nice.
People tend to infer two-way bargains that have some degree of fairness; they are upset when those expectations are violated.

The general bargain is "You provide some services, I agree to let you see the data that I put in and either show me some advertising or charge me a small fee." This holds true for Facebook, Google, Apple... The problem is that many people assume that their data will be kept reasonably (not perfectly) private. Advertisers get to specify the attributes of people who will see their ads (age, large geographical area, expressed interests) and not, say, phone number, name, birthday and address.

But that bargain has not actually been struck.

And if you do read the pages and pages of legalese, and manage to comprehend it all, it can still all be changed out from under you.

People who realize this generally aren't happy about it.
No, it shouldn't. Not in every case. If you're building a company site and care about every customer, then yes, make everything compatibile back to IE6. Your aim is to earn money via web, which is only a tool for that; not to make progress happen. But even then you might want to enable some more advanced features for people with better browsers.

On the other hand, when you're building a personal site you can do whatever you want, especially if you want to make a statement, and especially if you are specialized in information and interaction design. You push the status quo and lead by example.

The web is not a static organism. It needs to evolve, it needs to be pushed to it's limits and beyond. If you don't want to innovate (in this particular area), than by all means stay with least common denominator. But don't stop those who want.
There is a "rs" package in Debian so it must be available on most Linux distributions. Otherwise it should be quite straightforward to port the code since it doesn't do anything complicated.
Go is great for stuff like this, especially when part of an actual system.

That said, if this was just an adhoc job (to figure out which domains point to a specific IP address) you can just use "xargs -P" or GNU parallel and it becomes a pretty basic shell script, along the lines of: cat domains.txt | xargs -P 1000 -n 1 host
Google afraid of Facebook
Amazon afraid of Flipkart (in India)

Starbucks:: No idea (?)
This is great feedback. I would add:

- Load your ToS and Contact pages in new windows. I didn't notice that they had appeared in the gift list zone - this definitely doesn't feel the right place to put them.

- I would consider exposing the list ID as part of the URL so that users can copy and paste them around in chat windows / email / twitter, in case they don't want to use your sharing services.

- I would second the idea of a blog as a way of promoting interesting and/or useful gift ideas.
> I wish my city Melbourne was more like that

In contrast to SF, Melbourne is way more interesting in terms of great small bars and restaurants to find. I tell people that Melbourne is one of my favourite cities in the world to eat for the variety and authenticity.
Congrats on launching this :)

I would suggest putting the title you have for this Show HN post on the landing page right at the top, since it's hard to know what exactly it is that I'm putting my github username in for.

As for the graph, it's awesome and fun to play with! I found the "close" button on selecting people a bit small to click.
Most of the time this is true, but I've certainly had comments like this one[1] where I thought maybe deserved some upvotes, but an order of magnitude more than what I would consider other good comments. And sometimes I post what I think is a wonderfully insightful post about how simplified memory access methods are the most important part of RISC nowadays and nobody upvotes it.

[1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4789008
It's all about getting rid of the noise.

Because there's nothing worse than seeing 7,000 comments on a Reddit article and 99.7% of them being complete garbage. That's discouraging to a community. Why even bother posting when someone's lame joke is 347 votes ahead of yours. So I'm a complete asshole on HN. When I see jokes or one liners I downvote away. I feel guilty and sympathize for the poster but... I like the noise free environment too much. So I wipe away the tears and downvote away.
I think the argument might be that it's easy (easier than many languages) to slip into writing bad Perl, which promotes brain rot, it also sounds like it's a discussion he's had many times before... and perhaps isn't too interested in having again.
Idea premiums and a funny cartoon
Pretty cool.

Could be improved with a fading background and keeping the bottom links in the same place when progressing. :)
Extending Markdown/MarkdownSharp for jsFiddle embedding
Because it's better than bash and it's almost certainly already on you system. Even if that system happens to be your office's Centos 3.5 server.
"make piece with someone"
Congratulations Venky & team.
Mayd enan adik bdough
These are called style guidelines and iOS has them too [1]. If you don't adhere to some of them, you won't even get your app in the App Store. So you need to design your app in an "iOS" way, just like here Windows Phone devs should design in a Windows Phone way.

http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/userex...
A Simple Tour of the Ruby MRI Source Code with Pat Shaughnessy
Another amusing facet of this is that the chairman of the Public Accounts Comittee, Margaret Hodge, is a large shareholder in Stemcor, the Steel Trading company set up by her father and currently run by her brother.

Stemcor paid £163k of tax on £2.1bl of revenue in 2011 [1]

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/businesslatestnews/966839...
Trying to figure out if there is significance in the door sizes is not a conscious thing - and it is important to do this sort of thing in the background, unless you want to be to be the one who trips the fire alarm.