skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a designer and I don't really understand this article. Should design be bad so we can judge the crap from the good?

It assumes that glossy buttons will keep people in a piece of software that's awful or hard to use. As kirillzubovsky said below, it will entice but not keep you in forever. People will simply move on.

I look to Dribbble for inspiration and I'm continuously learning and trying to improve by looking at the best work on the site.

The thing is someone who is great at visual design also has a great awareness of UX, they just don't define themselves in the same way UX'ers do. The guys and gals designing this stuff are interface designers, they don't just put things in places without thought. So you got stung but a app that looked beautiful in the screenshots, did you read the description and reviews?

What this article doesn't do is list some examples of products with amazing designs but poor user experience.

I think it's easier to find a poorly designed site with bad ux then it is to find a amazing one.

Right now it's a great time to be a designer - interface design is finally becoming important and is seen as a key differentiator. More time, effort and money is spend on UI/UX and this benefits everyone.

Do you know what the real frightening thing is? That so many designers are improving so quickly. Before Dribbble it wasn't really that easy to find them but now talented people so easily accessible. Want someone who's great at shopping cart design? Type in the search term, click on profile, click on the 'hire me' button.

Keeping up is the scary part
It seems like it would be really run the try to repo this with robots.
Controversial views are a necessary but not sufficient condition for visionary status.
I agree on the first three points. I disagree on the fourth.

The fourth point is, ironically, most true for those who manage to become highly sought-after professionals. You have to be very well-paid and sought-after these days to achieve financial independence from any one employer, allowing you to take full responsibility for yourself. At the other end, you either get basic needs supplied via the wage paid by your employer, who is on some level morally responsible because they basically own you, or your employer fails to provide for you and you become dependent on family or the state.

The broad swathe of people who will forever remain proletarians, poor or well-off, rely on someone else to supply them/us the means to their/our basic needs.

And, in fact, the financially independent (including the rich) aren't really any better. They depend on the entire market economy that has evolved to enable them to trade one highly specialized form of labor or property for otherwise-valueless tokens which they can then trade for all their basic needs and more.

Real material independence from other people - for an individual, family, village, or nation - is possible, but its desirability is very questionable. A tiny homestead, a small farming village, or a large nation-state like America or China can afford to say, "We want to achieve complete economic self-sufficiency without depending on trade with the outside world." Most units of existence in between those will start having to make trade-offs in the standard of living and level of technological sophistication they can afford if they don't admit they need the help of others to live well.
Impress.js presentation tool
I wonder what the uncomfortable truths that everyone is ignoring are in today's programming world?
Came here to say this. Internally-geared rear hubs are great for certain mountain bikes, where derailleurs just won't work because there is too much mud. But for everyone else, a well-adjusted derailleur system will be fine. (Yes, you have to pedal forward to change gears. If you're stopped at a light, press the front brake and move the pedals forward. Or remember to downshift as you're braking.)

I've thrown a chain twice in recent memory: once when I was climbing on a chain where I disregarded the rule against breaking the chain without replacing the pin with a master pin (that you break off after driving in), and once when I was trying a new kind of lube on the chain (that worked more like glue than lube). A well-maintained derailleur system is very light and very efficient, and with a bit of practice, easy to use.
The Flickr API is a national treasure
Nike Launches A Tech Accelerator
Peekaboo: Another look at MNIST
We had the opposite experience here in the UK. That is, Spotify has been here years but Rdio only launched recently. I tried Rdio for a few days of the trial period and hated it (too visually noisy, too much emphasis on social, poor/shallow selection of music available). So I could sincerely write the opposite of this post but I won't because it's too subjective.
A tale of two object models: Ruby and Javascript
You get it. That's exactly the point.

Go ahead and make a new API, no problem, but don't break the apps we built over the last N years while Flickr was hibernating.
Access to older stories? Past page 3 the url params usually expire before I can get to p4. It sucks trying to find something from a bit ago.
Who said anything about threatening!

What an incredible windfall to have your API declared a historic landmark. What kind of marketing opportunity would that present. Please. Even a marketing idiot could figure that one out. :-)
I'd like to know why the author thinks that programming is one of the most difficult branches of mathematics, because I disagree.

Is it because they didn't have relatively easy-to-use languages such as Python back then?
the telltale signal wasn’t spikes or irregularities, but the opposite. ... Their heart rate was too normal; it didn’t change throughout the day as much as it should. That observation strikes me as revolutionary.

It was revolutionary... like 30 years ago when people first noticed that decreased heart rate variability is a marker for bad events, obviously without "a machine learning system that can sift through gigabytes of data".

Not that I disagree with the rest of the article, but the anecdotal example is poor, and it just wouldn't be Hacker News if somebody didn't pedantically point that out.

Also, FWIW, in the field of predicting bad things in premature babies based on patterns in heart beats, these guys are a bit ahead of IBM, having recently completed a multicenter randomized controlled trial: http://www.heroscore.com/
The article clearly laments the fact that you can't use design anymore as a quick quality shortcut, and that's the point I attacked.

Your point seems to be:

"The problem is that the focus on design means that developers spend too much effort on design and not enough on quality. We build tools to make design easier rather than making quality easier for developers..."

To that I would say, design is one aspect of quality, and spending effort on it is spending effort on quality. What would it mean to make quality easier for developers, beyond making better tools for design, development, testing, market validation, support, and so forth? All of these tools exist and new tools are consistently released.

In fact, I think the surge in attention to design can largely be seen as a 'catching up effect'. For many years, all the other kids in the party got a lot of attention, now design is getting attention as well, but I'm not at all sure it's getting disproportionate attention.

Finally, new shortcuts for assessing quality always exist, and they're almost by definition at the cutting edge of their field. Maybe that's not 'pretty looks' anymore, and that's ok. Other areas of rare craftsmanship are still alive and kicking - communication quality is a good example. Lousy copy on pretty pixels abound.
As an audiophile and someone who has a very diverse music collection; both service aren't even close to worth it. Combined they can't even cover half my music library.
Here's a blog post that explains...

http://threads2.scripting.com/2012/december/aNationalTreasur...

Dave
Best thing for most lithium batteries is to be kept cool and neither fully charged or discharged. Many phones already try to keep the battery at about 90% or so for this reason, it might be nice if this was configurable on this laptop.

Keeping a laptop on and plugged in all the time, especially if it runs hot, is probably the fastest way to decrease its capacity beyond extremely aggressive charge/discharge cycles (normal use is probably better since the average state of charge is then lower). I've completely killed a battery in a few months when I made a habit of leaving my laptop on my bed turned on during most of the day, Now I either remove the battery or keep the laptop in sleep when it's not being used if it's being kept plugged in for extended periods.
The battle is not the war. You can be entrenched because you started 20+ years ago when nothing better was available and haven't improved since, but when new competition springs up to replace your anachronistic dung, you've got a whole new fight for the future on your hands.
Pong Reborn: Rebuilding the original arcade version of Atari's Pong
The only difference indicated between the two is that rdio has soul? Poor article, no evidence to support your opinion at all.
Have a look at the availability of songs after release date compared to itunes? Spotify wins in this case.
My experience is to the contrary: the people who've had to use it at work (as opposed to voluntarily for their own projects) are the ones who despise it most. It looks pretty neat at first, after all. It's only when you've dug deeply into it - and have experience in other languages to compare it to - that you genuinely start to loathe it.
Oh and spotify is cheaper....
27 places to get a free science education
Good roundup of free courses
No, it's because a larger amount of programming was more complicated back then. Resources were significantly more constrained, and converting database result sets to pretty HTML layouts wasn't part of the field yet.
Give back power to “Colorimètre / DigitalColor Meter” in MacOS Lion
By default, the color picker of MacOS X Lion doesn’t display the hexadecimale’s values. Why?
That just sounds wrong somehow. Money is social. It's what you use with people you don't know, or people you want to bleed.
Reddit (r/gaming) thread by the creator: http://reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/14wr0a/to_build_a_video_...
>Think if someone where to say "There are too many beautiful women in this world, we can't accurately judge their personalities"

I don't think that's the right analogy. It's more like saying "there are too many women who spend too much effort on makeup and plastic surgery and not enough effort cultivating their personalities." The problem is not that too much pretty is bad, the problem is that there is a trade off between pretty and other valuable things, and it's bad if pretty is the only thing that matters.
The easiest way to update it is to replace those with the closest current equivalents.

Fortran = C, Basic = PHP, Cobol = Java, PL/I = Perl, and there is nothing on the landscape that is really equivalent to APL.

So let me say more about APL.

APL basically started as math notation turned into a programming language. In order to type it you needed a special keyboard for all of the extra symbols you needed. It evolved into an incredibly compact and versatile language, with a well-deserved reputation for being hard to read. In fact the classic challenge among APL programmers is that one would write a program in a single line, and the other would try to figure out what it did!

The Wikipedia article on the language is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language). They offer the following example of an implementation of Conway's game of life in APL:

life←{↑1 ⍵∨.∧3 4=+/,¯1 0 1∘.⊖¯1 0 1∘.⌽⊂⍵}

Update: Apparently one or more of my comparisons are offending people. If you'd respond indicating which comparison offends you, I'll explain why I made the comparison.
No, stuff that falls inside the black hole stacks up around the event horizon, which really grinds stuff up to the planck scale and transforms it to maximum entropy hawking radiation.

falling into it, it has enough degrees of freedom to put you into any kind of virtual reality, so you might experience falling into a singularity or somehow travelling into an "asymptotically flat spacetime" but I'm certain that the classical picture of a black hole is completely wrong.
Anyone whose thinking is wishful can safely be disregarded, of course.

But this utopian resurrection and transcendance story is just one version of the singularity. There are many people who think AI is not physically impossible, nanotech is not physically impossible, and so recursively self-improving AI with strong abilities to act in the physical world is a possibility. Many of those people think that is a very dangerous possibility.

You can agree or disagree with the detailed arguments, but you cannot accuse these people of allowing wishful thinking to cloud their judgements.

I like MacLeod as a writer, but that slogan is damaging because many people hear it, laugh, and stop thinking.
Comparison to space travel is silly. I'm your age, and I remember clearly what happened. Don't you? We kids were so excited about getting closer and closer to a man walking on the moon. The closer we got, the more exciting. Finally, we watched it happen. Woohoo! We did it! And then we all lost interest. It was done. It wasn't entertaining anymore and it wasn't worth any money to anybody, so we got on with our real lives and did things that WERE fun and profitable.

It was a government program built for reasons other than economic, so it didn't grow organically as an economic system serving and adapting to the needs of customers. When the non-economic reason went away, the growth rate dropped to near zero.

Compare that to information technology. Is that one centralized federal program divorced from economic reality? No, it's growing organically, serving countless different markets demanding countless things. Machines can do more every year, and the more they can do, the more diverse the demands for them to do more, and the more people there are who are willing to pay, the more people who are working on better IT technologies, the more investment, and so on.

Will there be a singularity? No, we're not all converging on a point in technology or time. We already have domains where machines are orders of magnitude better than people and those that are the reverse, and the machines are sliding past us gradually. There isn't one "general intelligence" model, either. People do some cognitive activities so poorly that it wouldn't be considered intelligent at all if we didn't use ourselves as the benchmark for general intelligence. We'll find ways to improve machines in specific domains and find other ways to generalize their intelligence across various categories of domains, one step at a time without ever crossing any visible "general intelligence" threshold.

The process has been underway for a long time. We'll eventually reproduce whatever Nature has done, and much that it hasn't, if we don't kill ourselves first.

How soon? How soon what? A gradual change is already underway and will just continue. Maybe at some point augmented humans will notice that they can't think of any specific thing an unaugmented human can do better than a pure machine, but others will debate it and the augmented people and machines will keep improving until they all think it was sometime in the past.

Okay, how soon will it be possible to upload my mind to a long-lived substrate so that I won't disappear like an unsaved term paper when the power goes off? Probably not long after my power goes off....
Point taken. As an explanation for the Fermi Paradox, however, that isn't so useful. :)
Moore's law is not decelerating - transistor density is doubling on schedule, with process shrinks happening like clockwork. Smartphone performance has actually been doubling yearly - better than Moore's Law.

If there are fewer transistors, it's because we haven't worked out how to use them effectively; or they aren't demanded by customers. If not in demand, other ways of improving performance won't be in demand.

It's this pattern of improvements overshooting demand that Clayton Christensen wrote about.
Full disclosure: I work for Rhapsody.

If you are in US, UK or Germany, please try Rhapsody/Napster as well. There's a free 14 day trial anyone can sign up. iOS app and Android app recently got big updates and the apps look really polished and snappy.
Yes it's dangerous to draw from examples that we don't understand the workings of. But all the evidence seems to indicate that brains and DNA don't pay much attention to parsimony or micro-optimization. Or high-level architecture. Or modularity. Nature just does what works.
That's not the 1st rule of jokes! The 1st rule of jokes is that there are no rules. The 2nd rule of jokes is that everyone finds different things funny. The 3rd rule is to break all the rules.

Repurposing the stilted propaganda of long-ago times, or of clumsy tyrants, for subtly absurdist/ironic humor value, does not in any way lessen the original horrors. It celebrates the distance we've achieved, while also offering a teaching moment by contrast/reference.

See also: "we will bury you", "let a thousand flowers bloom", "we had to destroy the village in order to save it", "i have in my hands a list of hundreds of known Communists", "the war to end all wars", "the mother of all battles", "this blogger has been harmonized", etc.
So how Microsoft defines minimal specs for manufactures to follow if they want to use Windows Phone? Valve would simply provide the OS in your example right?
If you are Dijkstra, with a zest that becomes its own attraction. He did a great deal of important work, but seems too often to be remembered for stinging epigrams.
That's not income tax. That's income tax added to payroll taxes added to capital gains taxes added to dividend taxes.

If you're making enough money from dividends and capital gains that you have to pay taxes on them, great! Pay your fucking taxes and don't complain, because most of us don't have investments at all outside our retirement accounts. Ha, that's if we're even fortunate enough to have proper retirement accounts!

And payroll taxes are more or less flat, or even regressive, yeah.

I say all this as someone who already looked at his paychecks once and found that after all the income and payroll taxes came out I was only getting 2/3 my nominal salary in take-home pay. You know what that taught me? Negotiate for net salaries.

You know what it didn't teach me? To complain about how a fortunate person like me has to pay into society to get the public sector out of debt and enable it to afford to help society again.
>design is one aspect of quality, and spending effort on it is spending effort on quality.

I don't mean to say that making something beautiful is not worth doing, but rather that other things are important too.

>What would it mean to make quality easier for developers, beyond making better tools for design, development, testing, market validation, support, and so forth? All of these tools exist and new tools are consistently released.

That's pretty much what I mean. And sure, they exist, but it's a trade off. If we spend more effort on improving UX tools, we spend less time improving other tools, because there are finite resources. The key is to find the right balance, and the argument can be made that the pendulum is now swinging too far toward superficial design considerations as a result of that being (over-)used by users in choosing between products. But certainly reasonable people can disagree.
Yes, but my point is essentially that talking about profits in a post singularity world is probably as sensible as talking about Mao as CEO of China. After the singularity we will likely have a different socio-economic system and profits will probably be something like a noble rank is today.
The comparisons you've made are flippant ones without much serious weight to them. I didn't downvote you, but, for example, COBOL bears no resemblance to Java beyond "it's used for business applications." Unlike COBOL, Java has a thriving non-business ecosystem and is a suitable tool for a lot of varied tasks. And, perhaps more importantly, it is regarded as such--the opinions held of COBOL at the time do not look remotely similar to the opinions about Java today.

I can't speak to PL/I : Perl so I won't try, but FORTRAN : C is likewise unfair. BASIC : PHP is closer, but still denies the credit (yes, there's some) that the PHP language, core library, and community deserve.

(EDIT: I will totally agree with you that APL is cool, though. ;-) )
The Open Group's DCOM implementation wasn't open source. Also, MSRPC/DCOM is just an RPC layer, the real value/lock-in was in the protocols built on top of them, such as Active Directory.

dcerpc.org has a maintained version of the OSF DCE RPC runtime (this bounced around from the FreeDCE project, to PADL, then Novell, Likewise and now Apple).
Is there some uncomfortable truth about PHP that's not being shouted from the rooftops in every thread about PHP? If so, what is it?
I don't really understand what you're going on about. The parent was discussing about how most people in college are either living off loans or their family but when they graduate they have to get a job because no one else is paying the rent. I don't know, it's pretty simple, right?

You're talking about some kind of "workers of the world unite" type stuff, which is not where the parent had any intention of going.
You took the wrong lesson from the Chinese Room. behavioral equivalence is enough, and the Chinese Room shows that behavioral equivalence isn't possible to achieve through hypothetical trivial implementations like "a room full of books with all the Chinese-English translations"
Landmark personal and societal rights to social structures and databases is interesting psychotechnologically, in our real world where data rights, personal rights and property rights are so important.
There are people who are fantastically talented at organization and software development who are mediocre at design. This article is written by a guy who somehow can't see past the lipstick on the pig.
> We build tools to make design easier rather than making quality easier for developers, result in a market full of worse software that only appears better on first impression.

This is especially noticeable when you distinguish visual design from functional design. Developers seem to be focusing increasingly on the former at the expense of the latter, and it's giving us a lot of software that looks wonderful as a static image, but is really frustrating to use and nearly impossible to customize.
> It's true that the EU case forced Microsoft to release certain documentation. I doubt they'd have done it without that.

I was peripherally involved in that (my employer was part of the lawsuit) and Microsoft releasing the specs for RDP. It was somewhat encumbered which would have been hugely problematic for free software projects, but not for commercial entities (who I worked for).

I'd reverse engineered RDP, but that is way more time consuming than starting with specs. That work was put into escrow along with my papers, hexdump printouts with marker highlighting and scribbles etc.

Only one engineer was given access to the RDP spec which was kept in his locked office. Even the component including RDP was built by him in his office on computers in his office which were not networked.

I don't know if what we did was because our lawyer was too paranoid, or not paranoid enough!
Samsung already has a cortex a15 chip. If this takes a year it will be woefully out of date using an a9.
Dogs can function quite well in their natural environment (in close proximity to humans); white Bengal tigers will die very, very quickly in the wild. The mutation is non-adaptive.
Rebuilding Pong from scratch with circuits