skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Rest assured, they have a business model in place : Selection Bias, as evidenced by the rise of FoxNews, MSNBC & Glenn Beck's the blaze. With facts & news now getting commoditized, "opinion" & "Analysis" are proving to be lucrative cash cows. pay me X $ & I'll package & interpret the news for you in a digestible way that aligns with your values, biases & preconceptions.
It looks and works nothing like the sucky Music app on iOS. I wish that app would work that way!
But that then creates an expectation that "anything in a square box can be clicked on" which is going to make life difficult if you want to design an app but now you can't use square boxes for pure information display.
Glad you think so. Watch out for more awesome stuff coming really soon.
Jacob Nielsen details many of the usability issues of Metro design, see Flat Style Reduces Discoverability in http://www.useit.com/alertbox/windows-8.html .

At the highest level, Metro design feels like a case of design overgeneralization. It tries at once to apply the same look & feel principles in Touch, Desktop, and Web context.

Jack of Many Trades, Master of None.
The section on "Personal Priorities and Risks" is very important. Deciding when to go full time and how much each cofounder is willing to put on the line is something everyone needs to think about going into a partnership.
>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.

Wow. Wait until you see your first revolving door.
Show HN: A Distributed PaaS with Instant Scaling
A couple comments have suggested this is Imposter Syndrome and it might be a little of that, but additionally it's the opposite. Imposter Syndrome is about feeling like your successes are not your own. This article is about not feeling like your successes are significant enough. Imposter syndrome is about your successes being bigger than you are worthy of accepting responsibility for. This article is about your responsibilities being bigger than you're experienced for.

That understood, I think a lot of this problem stems from our fascination with survivor bias -- only those companies that have big successes. We think big successful exits are where we should concentrate our learning and if we aren't one of those big exits then the experience we have isn't significant enough to help others.

It's like the Don't read TechCrunch article also on the front page right now. Those blogs and even here, we spend a lot of time talking about the exceptional startups. Those with exits (Zynga, GroupOn, Instagram) or those scrappy little dogs fighting the man (AirBnB, Uber), or fighting the 600 LB gorilla (DDG) -- you know, the ones PG would consider "trying to be successful."

The reality is, the vast majority of startups out there are building businesses slowly. They've been at it for 5 or 10 years already and you've never heard of them. Some of those will be acquired or get investment next year and you'll think they are overnight successes. All those thousands, maybe tens of thousands of startups who have made it 5 years are already successes. They are run by individuals who have escaped the machine, the rat race, the enslavement to the corporatocracy! YEAH!

I say that's a success. I say that takes risk. I say that takes understanding the world and what it values and being able to add enough value to support at least yourself, maybe your family, and even some other families.

Every entrepreneur I know with success talks about how they did it all themselves in the beginning. Don't hire until you can't do it all yourself anymore. Wake up, work, go to sleep. Not these tiny population of stories where you get 10 million dollars and then hire someone to do tiny little things that don't really need to be done anyway. I can't imagine paying someone full time to manage a Twitter stream but there are entire companies built around enabling entire teams to work together on a twitter stream! Wow.

That kind of stuff seems like a big waste of time and money to a lot of "real" entrepreneurs. A lot of "real" entrepreneurs don't even know what Twitter is. Or even use the web at all. We could all stand to learn a thing or two from them and none of that knowledge is at TechCrunch. We could also stand to share a lot of the knowledge we have gained never having achieved the success we are constantly reminded the startup world appreciates even though our successes are amazingly awesome when compared to those outside the startup world.
Is he trolling us? I can't tell. It's such a ridiculous scenario/question that I just find myself unable to take it seriously. On one hand, I want to help - to answer with good info - but on the other hand I don't want to waste my time with a joke of a question. I'm choosing to believe that he's trolling.
By making the software open source you can sneak into enterprises under the management radar. You can make friends among ordinary developers in the enterprise. They can recommend your additional plug-ins, services or whatever you are selling to the management. However, at that point you'll need strong sales department to make the sale actually happen.

So, the two options are not alternatives, rather they complement each other. You'll need sales staff in any case. Making the product open source can help the sales staff to sell related products.

Whether it's worth it is up to your consideration.
I wish Apple was the one that came up with Metro and not Microsoft. If it did, then many tech pundits with high readership like Gruber, Siegler et. al. would be posting endless analysis of how Apple shook up the UI paradigm to make a great new UI instead of going with the same old icons, toolbars and docks and how everyone else is copying them with sparse UI. That would've led tech minded folks to give Metro more credit than all this upvoted noise with link bait headlines on the tech blogs with flimsy analysis of only about how it sucks and nothing about the good parts like "content over chrome" or "authentically digital". I think Metro is in some ways becoming victim of tech partisanship, you can absolutely love your iPad, have an Android tablet with ICS(I do), but still recognize some good UI work being done by Microsoft.

Edit: Something like the following post would've definitely made the HN front page if it was iMetro or even if it was Google that did it with Android. http://www.riagenic.com/archives/487
Redhat has been selling service contracts to support their free software for more than 10 years.
How to extend the web
Yes, but it costs me nothing to go to foxnews.com or dailykos. I think something like the Daily would appeal to someone like my father who still places a lot of value in spending $80/month watching news and "analysis", but I think it will be hard for the industry to find a larger audience as time goes by.
"If I need to ask a lawyer just to find out whether I can use some code... I won't ask the lawyer, I just won't use the code."

Well said. I think the license is a good "spirit of the agreement" breakdown but it falls flat when it comes to expressly defining what is/isn't, must/mustn't, etc.
Whats interesting about this is that SV Angel invested. Ron Conway has a very close relationship with Twilio and The TwilioFund is "powered by 500Startups and SVAngel".
BitSquid Foundation Library - C++ memory management and collections
No, RDP is not dataflow. The "Lisp has already done that" response got tired decades ago, and it usually isn't true.
Cloud Storage: A Vital Part Of Any Business Continuity Plan : The WebPal Blog
I am a little dissapointed you are catching some flak. It is your life, do what you think is right.

Kudos to you for your decision. A book was written about marriage, long term monogamy, and (at least for me) showed that maybe sex shouldn't be this huge deal we currently make it out to be. It's called Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha.
what they need to be looking at are underwater cable landings [1] and not "greater than 40 ISPs".

http://www.cablemap.info/
Pretty good read as always, Sal!
This goes for any creative profession where you often work solo or within an echo chamber.

For me it's basically "Keep your ego in check. If you can't do that, learn to listen instead of defending"
Mikogo for use in the Software Industry
Hi,

I'm contacting you from Mikogo, which offers a screen sharing product that I believe your readers would be interested in as engaged users in the software industry. Mikogo allows you to share your screen in real-time with up to 25 users, offering a good solution for online collaboration with participants. It is used by more than one million people in over 180 countries around the world, and is compatible with Windows/Mac/Linux/iOS/Android.

Does this sound like something you'd be interested in covering? Have a look and let me know what you think, a free-download for non-commercial use is available at http://www.mikogo.com.

Thanks!
Goose down jacket women
maybe another factor to consider (and don't take this as a critique) might be your user name. I doubt few people actually confuse you with pg. nonetheless I believe it's a name that sticks out given the prominence of the name graham on this board - and as a result your user name might be easier to remember.
Wikipedia quotes the dictionary incorrectly. It refers to a heterosexual man, yes, but the "-sexual" postfix comes from homosexual. It's meant as a put down to straight guys acting gay.
APA to drop “Asperger’s syndrome” from its diagnostic manual
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.

Because more people or larger objects use the double door. In both cases, it has nothing to do with you as user using the door, so you're wasting brain cycles thinking about it. It's a door. Walk through it.

it takes effort on our part to realize that size differences does not imply functionality difference.

No it doesn't. Size may imply significance difference (which is the "why" you're looking for) but I can't think of many cases where it implies functionality difference. A double door serves the same purpose as a single one.
After reading this article I realized that I have the Impostor/fraud syndrome. My co founder on the other hand doesn't suffer from it and attend events, tech meetups and is often invited to speak about startup experience and stuff. I feel very uncomfortable giving advice as our startup is not successful yet.
I don't know how Metro looks lately, but when I tested a WinMo 7, the interface gave no clues of what elements are clickable and what elements aren't. So I ended up clicking like an idiot on images and on text, which sometimes triggered a click and sometimes it didn't, depending on how static or not the element was.

You can see this mistake in some Android/iOS apps that come with their own custom designs. For instance Twitter on iOS is friendly and all, but after expanding a tweet, to view the full profile of that user, you have to click on that profile's image, while the profile's name is NOT clickable. I always make the effort of going through "what the hell do I click on? every single time I want to view a profile.

So if this still happens in Metro, with the UI giving no visual clues as to what elements can be touched/clicked or not, then your argument is not really valid, being a poor rationalization. In the real world things that can be acted upon either provide audio, visual or tactile clues (or all of them at once).

Also, I agree that the design in Android Jelly Bean tends towards the same kind of flat look. It looks indeed nicer, but it's not as radical. In general, buttons are still buttons, with the exception of things that are designed to be clicked as an after-thought (e.g. the clock widget's primary function is showing the clock, but it opens the dialog for setting an alarm if you touch it, but that's not the only way of setting an alarm, being just a convenient shortcut). There are some annoyances too, like the phone pad for dialing numbers, which just shows some white numbers on a dark background, something that's annoying me greatly.
That doesn't really work, because you have to be able to hit them all simultaneously, and in fact, you can't. The theorem says that for any given epsilon you can choose enough to ensure that you are within epsilon everywhere except in a very small section of the real line, and you can make the parts where it's not within epsilon very small.

The problem with your comment is that yes, for any given point you can get as close as you like, but the hard part is getting close nearly everywhere all at once. More, you then have to show that there's some sort of convergence, and that where you are close now is a superset of where you are close when you demand to be closer.

It's not straight forward.
How r u diferent from other API platform?
Who does Facebook think your best friends are? (weekend project)
The Daily (iPad Magazine) shuts down
Whenever I see patio11 posting on any submission he is always the top rated comment, often when his comment (nice though it is) is fairly offtopic.
Free And Open? World Governments Discuss The Internet In Secret
would you consider making an rss feed or would that defeat the purpose?
9-year-old 'pirate' case settled for 300 euros
I agree that it's a tradeoff.

Though one thing that differentiates them is that the systems we learnt about titles and dates being typically interactable had mouse pointers. I can't quite express why, but it feels less annoying to mouse over something and discover it's interactable (via a change in the mouse cursor) than to stab at text on the screen.

I guess one is a more passive "will this do something if I interact with it" while the other is a more proactive "I'll try to interact with this and see if it works". One results in a yes or no answer, while the other results in a failed action, which seems more frustrating to me.

That all just goes to show that, as you said, it's more complex than simply missing affordances = unusable UI.
How do the courses on Coursera work? Can a person do a course merely by watching the videos after it closes?

Is it possible to review old courses and take them at my own pace, or are they completely gone once they are done?
I think the argument is that if you're making a profit off a country's citizens, you should also be paying taxes to that country's government, otherwise there'll be a large net flux of money out of that country (e.g. with Amazon, Starbucks in the UK).

Let me put it another way, you say that:

>beyond that, I am not benefiting from any government services in the EU.

but you are benefiting from the government. Without a stable and moderately successful government, your customers wouldn't be in a position to be able to pay for your services. And that's exactly why most of your customers could, conceivably, come from the EU, but are unlikely to come from a developing country.

I'm not saying I agree with this; I don't know enough about how this sort of taxation affects the system as a whole, but I believe that's the logic.
Civilian drones exist.

How difficult would it be to reprogram military drones? At some level they're just processors and motors -- do the processors have debugging interfaces (serial or USB) available? If not, the mainboard with processor could be removed and replaced by something like a few Arduinos or TI Launchpads.

It shouldn't be too difficult to make and program a large quantity of boards to be hot-swapped with their current electronics. Then it's just a matter of playing "air battle bots" and damaging their drones, then taking apart damaged drones to make new drones.
Show HN: Using D3.js to visually explore your GitHub connections
We got inspired by the work Mike Bostock has been doing with D3 and wanted to experiment with how we could extend the library in more of an application interface setting than just charting, so we built Nodal: http://nodal.me

The project is built on Python/Flask/Heroku. Read more about the experiment here: http://mattstockton.com/2012/11/30/navigating-your-network-graph-with-nodal/
Ask HN: Review my Startup
Hello guys. A friend and I built a small web app last week and we would love to get some feedback. Are we providing enough value for the users? Is there enough information on the homepage for people to sign up with Facebook? Here's the page, thank you for your feedback!
www.doitbefore.com

Regards from Germany,
Jan
It's about being technically feasible, not about having the political will. New Zealand is on there for example, I believe it has a single pipe therefore easily cut, but it would be highly surprising to see it happen by government cause (more likely an undersea accident). I thought Australia would be the same but I guess it has a lot more infrastructure going across the pacific and also north.
I think it's fine to hijack the default scrollbars so long as all you change is their appearance. If you can't do it without changing the way scrolling via the wheel feels in any way, you need to trash it and use the default scroll bars.
We were not accepted after the YC interview. Here are our thoughts.
It was 2002 when the last competent UI engineer left Microsoft, none of this is a surprise.
Getting into the video game industry was the big mistake in the first place.
My personal fav: http://minimotivation.com/
Tech Accelerator for Public Media
I've been curious (I don't advocate trying this) as to how possible it would be to create an account for the explicit purpose of farming karma (for the minimum amount of effort) and what strategy would be best to achieve this.
35 Open Source Apps For Mac Users
This is brilliant. The irony is subtle but it's completely brilliant. "Do more by reading quotes which might encourage you to do more instead of actually doing more."
I feel that the complete lack of distinction between clickable/tappable tiles and non-interactive ones is a very real problem, and not unlike the sort of thing that pundits have skewered Apple for in the past (the overly-ornate skeuomorphic-esque visual designs of Calendar / Contacts / Game Center, for example).

That being said, I think there's definitely some truth there for a lot of the other Metro hatred. More and more modern iOS apps have a flat UI style that isn't unlike Metro, but you don't see people giving them shit for it.
Yup: Value Added Tax regulations on food. Is a scone a cake or a biscuit? The most recent was the government deciding that warm take away food would attract VAT. Cold food is zero rated except for cakes that are 'luxury' items. That lead to the infamous 'pasty tax', serious debate as to what temperature could be described as 'warm' and a hasty climb down.

There is however a strong feeling that certain Large Internet Related Companies ought really to pay some tax on their UK operations.
It depends. Some courses are operating on a schedule and once they're closed you can't access the materials. Other courses operate on a schedule but have elected to keep their materials open.
Resig wrote about micro templating in 2008, and his code is much more terse plus it'd be trivial to add interpolation for {{ }}.

Source: http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-micro-templating/

(Tip: read through all the comments)
Agreed. 95% of the stories on TC are about fundraising.
I was thinking the same thing. Its not like iOS or Android handle these things any better. I think this is further proof that usability is something of a snake-oil field past a certain point and that all interfaces are learned.

Now everyone is an expert on UI/UX and the overly-reaching and never quite defined "design." Oh well, whatever sells ad impressions I guess.

Heck, at least Metro doesn't fall for the sin of nostalgia based skeuomorphism and other overdone cliches. Not sure how the market will respond to it, but its a decent attempt from Microsoft.
Maybe, however in these times of austerity there's also nothing like a large corporate playing smart to irritate the natives (speaking as a UK income and corporate tax payer).

I would love to see the impact the UK boycott of Starbuck has had on their bottom line. Sure, not everyone cares but clearly enough people have forgone their red cups over the past few weeks for Seattle to take notice based on todays headlines.
I'm pretty sure I get cells; instead of a debate can you post a tldr of what rdp is?

edit: andrewcooke posted a very good link
Really helpful to have this concise document...what a great list of things to consider about a partnership. So many of these are easily overlooked.
Couldn't disagree more. We know that things are clickable when they are verbs or icons that are well-established synonyms for verbs. Gradient isn't a substitute for being explicit.
The HN title is incorrect; instantmotivation.com is a squatter. It should be instamotivation.com
My personal experience with AdWords is that it's worthless to try to figure out whether an ad is good/bad until you dial in your keywords first. People post on here all the time about their ads and their CTR but it's meaningless without a discussion/understanding of the keyword(s) that triggered the ads.

As such, it leads me to question your keyword selection. You need to know "What were the keywords that actually triggered my ad?" This is possibly VERY different from the keywords you entered (particularly if you are using broad match). My guess is you're wildly off the mark in terms of your keyword selection/filter. Adwords expands broad match keywords to the point of unprofitability IME. You have to find out what people are actually searching for that trigger your ad and "trim the fat" by modifying your keywords so that you don't pay for unrelated things.

For example, let's say you have "print shop" as a broad match keyword. That is so general that Google is going to auto-expand your keywords to synonyms and "things that Google thinks are like print, shop, and print shops". So if you used that as a broad match keyword, you might be surprised to find that your ads were served for the following keyword searches:

* Shopping for printer

* printer repair shop

* what store can I print my paper

etc, etc, etc - if your ad was triggered for any of these keywords, you can see why you'd get a 0.00% CTR over 30,000 impressions for all of those. Those sort of results would take a good ad and make it look like a crappy ad. Let's now add in this keyword that triggered your results:

* print shop

You look at the metrics and find that your ad has a 5.00% CTR over 10,000 impressions. But when you combine the results, your aggregate CTR would be a miserable 1.75%. Thus you'd be making decisions ("Scrap that ad, make a new one") based off of misinterpreting the data.

I'd suggest you review the actual keywords that are triggering your ads and look into more refinement on the keywords. Once you have the keywords dialed in, you can better work on the ads.
Slightly OT:
"The Rods... so sensitive that they can be triggered by single photon"

This sort of thing is why I love HN. Irrespective of the topic, there is always some little gem I find somewhere. I was very sceptical of this claim, so I looked it up. Turns out it is possible:

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Quantum/see_a_photon.h...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10800676

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1281447/?page=1
'Girls' using cell phones will be fined rules an Indian village
Anonymous, Or Not?
Yes, but again: they aren't stating that it's some property exclusive to videogames that affect sleep but something about playing videogames (including all side effects) can have an affect on the quality of sleep.
We got inspired by the work Mike Bostock has been doing with D3, but we wanted to extend it to more of an application interface setting than just charting. It's built on Python/Flask/Heroku.

You can fork the project on GitHub here: https://github.com/MattStockton/nodal

Or read more about it here: http://mattstockton.com/2012/11/30/navigating-your-network-g...
They had them play games right before bed. How is this different from reading right before bed? That's what often messes up my sleep. And I am in my 30s and know I shouldn't read in bed, even though I love to.
Congressman asks Twitter to ban Hamas