skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe a balanced combination of the two design philosophies can exist together where skeuomorphism is only used for actionable elements such as buttons etc. but not other elements.

It sort of reminds me of old pixelated video games where sprites stood out from the background making it almost instantly clear which elements could be interacted with.
Facebook Said To Have Sexting App In The Works
So that's why I didn't get anything done today. My project management tool is not for doers!

All kidding aside, it looks pretty and well designed, but I don't see any value in yet another project management tool.
Google’s Gmail Outage Is a Sign of Things to Come
Why We Need to Protect Some APIs as National Landmarks (e.g.,Flickr)
There are a lot of successful people under 30. Especially when you include things like Writer, Actor, Athletes, and people who have taken seed funding, but are not yet profitable.

What I thought was interesting was how much overlap there was with the category's. (Art & Style, Education, Energy, Finance, Food & Wine, Games & Apps, Hollywood, Law & Policy, Marketing & Advertising, Media, Music, Science & Healthcare, Social Entrepreneurs, Sports, Tech) It was like they created did some research for interesting people and then created new category's after the fact. But, that may also relate to who was willing to be on there list.
You can't take any kind of reliable conclusion about general behavior from this event, there are tons of variables that may be biasing it.
So you thought the same thing :)
his 1st point was not about commenting what code does but why it is done the way it is. I don't see how you can extract all the required information (including web links or rational) explain the rational behind a implementation into a function name.

// unroll loop for 50% speed increase. Optimal offset 4
// 3: 25%
// 4: 50%
// 5: 40%
for(i=0;i<x;i+=4) {
...
}

How could you extract that into a function name?

2 is definitely more an opinion, but I use XML comments on every function, object, parameter, return value with a quick summery because it integrates into my IDE and is used to generate API and library documentation that is invaluable to developers who don't necessary have the code, only the documentation.
New YouTube Capture Lets Your Record and Post Videos Instantly
Gangnam Style hit 1 BILLION views but the world is still here
Ugh, I feel bad for the guy. His entire life will probably be tainted by this. Any future employer, friend, lover can and will find out about it through a simple Google search. He's probably the worst of after this incident; his brother a mass murder, his mother shot dead, him being tainted for the rest of his life...
VLC for Windows 8 Metro still needs $22,000 on KickStarter, donate now
Why does that change the article? He still likes guns!
I have been using this for several days and have received quite a few useful reviews. The main thing that bothers me is the emphasis on a single screenshot. I always open each site into a new window to test the responsive design and browse the site a bit.
>I'm thinking about creating localized versions of the site with a way to choose the preferred review language. Does it sound like a good idea?

Indeed, sounds good, it could debunk my wrong-target-group defence ;) Maybe enough to just give users the option to choose the languages they want to review in and submitters the (advanced?) option to ask for users who speak one of the languages existing in the system.

>About the link... What browser do you use?

Chrome 23.0.1271.64 under Ubuntu 12.04.

Will be interesting for me how you design the vote-system and how good it works, as the current situation is "one review for a review" adding votes to that could be kind of tricky.
Be Passionate Like a Kid
I'm 15 and I read Forbes occasionally, some articles about startups are interesting.
YouTube Capture app one-ups Apple’s video sharing options
This type of thing is precisely why, after seeing what happened to Richard Jewell after the '96 Olympics bombing, when a tragedy like this happens, I try to stay clear of anything that mentions the killer's name/motivations/etc for a couple days until there is a clearer picture.
how long did you wait for that to happen.. :o
Instead of focusing on the mass shootings, focus instead on the thousands of children killed by guns in between the mass killings.

I don't think that you will find that this number is a statistical fluctuation.
Sounds like sleep paralysis.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis

Interesting how your brain seemed to reason it.
"We were very surprised to see Gmail announce last week that they'll soon end support for Exchange ActiveSync (EAS), unless of course you're willing to pay Google for your email" sounds better than "Google stopped paying MS royalties for using the ActiveSync protocol for their free accounts, and we can't be bothered to support other open standards out there for contacts and calendar sync".
Samsung Galaxy S3 (I9300) one click ROOT with ExynosAbuse Android APK
Is this really surprising though? You don't have a typical relationship with Google like you do with Apple. Their main profit center is advertising revenue so their interests aren't exactly aligned with a customer trying to purchase a smartphone or a Gmail user trying to get support for the service. I remember signing up for AdSense and I would get tons of emails from Google about calling to speak with a rep to setup an ad campaign, and it seems perfectly rational that that is where their support would be.

I buy an iPhone instead of an Android device because I don't want to be the product or an ancillary thought in Google's strategic objective of ensuring their services aren't locked out of other platforms. From Apple I get their focus as a customer and as result the user experience (both pre-sale and post-sale) has to be excellent, because that is their entire business.
On getting featured by Apple and the long road getting there
Do you think there's a way to strike a better balance?

I wouldn't want it to turn into usability testing because it would sort of defeat the purpose (i.e. quick reviews, get first impressions, improve, repeat).
A simple blog engine made in Node.js
"In the end, social media got to the answer of who Ryan Lanza is much more quickly than a dozen local reporters would have done. But social media also creates a world in which we are watching the investigation — and reporting — unfold in real time."

A local reporter, in this case the usage seems pejorative, might have wanted until they were certain before printing the name and therefore might not have needed a retraction. I would have respected them more if they just said that news moves fast and they make their money from ads so being the first mover improves their bottom line.
I'm going to avoid commenting on this essay beyond saying Paul, thank you very much for sharing it. I've been circling the drain for the last few weeks due to relentless problems in my personal life, and you've reminded me that there is something worth living for inside all of us.

Your essay was precisely what I needed. Though I don't know you, this piece has changed my life in a way that you'll probably never know, and I owe you a lot. I'm sure it's the same for many others. Thank you for sharing, and thank you for ignoring the haters who are bringing noise to you on the discussion of God.
It's always touching to see these people who have no problem at all with consumption during the whole year suddenly shed a tear around Christmas time to denounce the materialism of our lives. And to remind everyone how the world was such a better place when we had nothing at all to share and buy. They should go for a trip to North Korea and enjoy a "non-materialist" Christmas there, with just bananas as the little extra they can permit themselves to have on special occasions. That must be pure bliss! That does not explain why people are so eager to leave these countries whenever they can. (and of course there is a connection between authoritarian regimes and consumption. Isnt that obvious for everyone yet?)
Omniscience and omnipotence (generally ascribed to God by mainstream Christianity) give concepts like "fair" the equivalent of a divide by zero. Ditto eternity. I love seeing serious discussion of the ideas, right up to but never at or past the point where the reasoning supposedly justifies doing actual harm to the participants (willing or not) - and, no, "saving their souls" is never a counterbalancing good.
W3C buttons down HTML 5, opens up HTML 5.1
>From my brother, I received a personal understanding of death, and a constant reminder to live my life as though it may end at any moment.

I'm not sure how to really ask this, but what does it mean to live your life as though it may end at any moment?

For example, does that literally mean to pursue today as if you could really be gone tomorrow? And if so, how?

Does it mean that if you really want to go sky diving you should do it soon (i.e. now)? If you've been thinking about moving to another place for a while, but just keep putting it off for semi-trivial reasons, should you just go and see what happens?

I've heard people say that they live each day as if it could be their last, but I'm not sure what that means, practically speaking.

There have been several things that I wish I'd done, looking back, but I didn't mostly out of fear.

The idea of living each day as if it could be your last has always intrigued me.
Lost page write due to incompetence error  SanDisk
Then what the bleeding hell am I?

English/Hebrew/Scala/C/Python/Object Pascal/Haskell
Without comments how do you produce documentation for your code?

I put XML comments on every function, object, property etc giving them at the very least a short summary. These are then compiled into documentation xml that integrates with the IDE providing pop-up documentation for objects and functions without needing to see the source code. This xml is then compiled into actual html documentation is also used for APIs and libraries that other developers use without any access to the code.

Maybe documentation falls outside of the purview of source code comments... but i don't think so and i find it really handy to have the source code self documented with comments keeping docs and code in the same place.
You couldn't pry the PaperWhite out my dead hands, I love it so much (as their 3 month wait-list also attests). If it took them some iterations to get there, it should be worth the wait.
Thanks! It would make it easier if it was an 'n for 1' system but would it would make it more like the various post 10 reviews for 1 review web designer forums.
Wow, I actually took part in this study, and it's on the first page of HN?
> We have a problem with rushing to judgment.

... says a guy who, in the wake of a tragedy, rushes to say that we need more gun control.
This doesn't address the practical real-world problem...

Most developers are under at least moderate pressure to deliver and usually their priority is this...

1) Make thing appear to work

2) Make thing actually work

3) Clean up code to pass a code review or not be yelled at by a coworker

4) Comment where things are necessary

In many cases we barely get past step 1 and a half and usually its not even our fault - the business case has been mostly satisfied and according to the mucky mucks its best to move onto the next feature. Yes most of us dream of places where we can craft our code to oblivion but its probably not the average reality unfortunately.

I think its great when somebody takes the time to comment - commenting is not fun and has very little upfront reward but can be a lifesaver when traversing complex logic. If you have the ability to leave a profuse amount of comments I can hide them when I dont need them and use them when I have no idea whats going on - comment as much as you like.
Mod_pagespeed as a Proxy for your Phone
Your approach to this comes across as the equivalent of lamenting the state of 'kids these days' because 'back in the day,' if you did something wrong the priest would 'beat some sense into you.'

Some people find the idea of engineering and/or mathematics intimidating. If approached in the right way, it will 'click' for them, or at the very least their fears can be assuaged (allowing them to pursue higher learning). I take two issues with your posts here:

1) From your posts here, your approach sounds like you want to 'beat some engineering fundamentals into them.' You say that you've mentored others, so I can't believe that this is actually your approach, but your posts come across this way. This may be at lease some of the reason that people are reacting the way they are to you.

2) You seem to be lamenting the fact that some people will work on these kits, and never go further with the 'higher learning' aspect. This is to be expected. There will never be a way to convert 100% of those curious into the One True Path of Engineering Enlightenment(tm). At the very least, the people that only dabble will get past the idea that all of this 'technology stuff' is some sort of voodoo magic that the majority of the population seems to believe.
The better solution would be to teach people how to use the parts

If your attitude is that you know best what other people should do, you won't get very far. They don't want to plow through a book, they want to build something that does something. Who are you to tell them that they can't?

You say that getting them interested with a kit is useless because they will bail as soon as they hit some math. Well, they're certainly no worse off than if they hadn't built the kit, which is the alternative.
So, you're not a fan of Seattle, Portland, NYC, or moving outside the U.S., then?
Minimalism and skeumorphism are not mutually exclusive.

Skeumorphisms are adopted on UIs, a priori, to give hints about the function and ease the interaction with new users. It's a metaphor to reuse prior knowledge of how things work in the real world.

What Apple did with the calendar app is not skeumorphism: it's just kitsch. While the app looks like a calendar, it doesn't work like a calendar (you don't flip between months, for example), so it completely misses the point.

On the other hand, you could design a calendar that works like the real thing, using minimal lines and flat colors, and you could argue that it's minimalist and skeumoprhic (because it still carries assumptions about another object, the paper calendar, even thought flipping pages is not a metaphor of digital media).

BTW, the definition of skeumorphism in the Wikipedia article is too narrow, and at some points downright wrong.
With any luck the numerous libel/slander lawsuits will be enough to get him the help he is going to need to deal with this clusterfuck.
I'm still not sure where the arson/gun violence comparison is viable. Steps have been taken to try and curtail deaths caused by fire (deliberate or otherwise) which have clearly succeeded.

Are they foolproof? Not at all. But aside from more inspections to prevent code violations, what additional steps are there? Preventing doors from being locked? Providing better battering devices for police? Banning fire?

The way I see it, the pro-gun lobby and enthusiasts have so successfully barred the door to future attempts at legislation that most consider it a topic un-worthy of discussion.

And, again, I say all of this not even really believing that more gun legislation is the answer. These are the better options:

- Better, easier to access healthcare (including mental health resources -- this is something that most western countries should improve)

- Close the income discrepancy between the wealthy and poor which will open up advancement opportunities for lower income families and individuals

- Decriminalize certain drugs, or at least possession

- De-emphasize incarceration over re-habilitation in the prison system (for profit prisons? Jesus...)

Address the perceived necessity for weapons rather than the weapons themselves.
There isn't any good evidence either way. It's too hard to control the variables. It's possible that banning guns increased homicides from guns and other means. It's possible that it prevented homicides from guns and other means. There is really no way to tell from the evidence. But it is certainly not clear that it helps.
The difference between Backbone and Angular is that AngularJS is more like Rails whereas Backbone would be more like Sinatra. What it means is , for complicated apps , you'll have to do complex stuffs anyway , so 'complicated' features are better built in the framework itself.

Unless you use a plugin , you'll have hard time updating your views automatically in Backbone if your model has nested objects. And your models cannot be arrays. In AngularJS it doesnt matter.
Mod_spdy
Not to mention code is imperfect. My main platform is Obj-C/iOS and there are numerous API bugs, workarounds, and bits of ugliness involved when integrating with third-party APIs and libraries. These definitely involve comments because they are incantations that have a reason for existing, where the reason is entirely non-obvious on examination.

God help the guy who rips out a seemingly innocuous line of code only to subtly break things underneath. Even a simple:

// Hack around time parsing bug in iOS3+, see [StackOverflow thread]

saves hours of lost productivity.

We can get rid of comments the moment we invent a perfectly expressive language, where every single line of code in your entire stack is under your control and everything works exactly as advertised out of the box.

Until then, I'll keep commenting where I need to, and never when I don't.
I agree with this article, except increasingly I have been writing tests that do not completely avoid the full database connection. Wherever possible, it is avoided by writing smaller methods that take parameters and can be tested independently of where the data does or doesn't live...but this won't completely work. I know it's not the purest way, but running against a test copy of the schema provides a couple benefits:

The actual behavior of the app is tested. For example, some web frameworks will have different behavior when you compare the behavior of their Model validation classes with and without foreign key constraints at the schema level. Not running this level of integration means that you're not really understanding how the app behaves, and mis-documenting its behavior with your tests.

Another issue I have encountered is ensuring the proper load order of fixture data. In CakePHP for example, I haven't been able to manage this adequately. Cake uses a test database for unit tests, and for a lot of inter-related tables with foreign keys, you can trigger DB errors before your tests even run if the constraints fail.

Finally, running this type of test suite on dev/stage/prod can be a quick way to verify that the full stack is behaving as expected. You can read any configs specified in the codebase and rely solely on committed, versioned code.

Perhaps this is just a result of using the wrong tools, and other languages/frameworks seem to have this down a bit better. Rails and rspec have worked a bit better for me.

In any case, each project I work on has a front-end test suite that logs in, scrapes all known pages, and tests those results. These are using the DB also and from the app's point of view, the incoming requests mimic that of a real user.
Once is probably enough to stop a good chunk of spam and general thoughtless comments, with how powerful first impressions are and all. (@dhh: does it work?)
From my perspective God does love that axe wielding rapist as much as Mother Theresea. You can love someone while still being disappointed or even while punishing them. That's my perspective at least, although I don't even presume to begin to understand the complexity of God's love.
I played around with backbone.js for a couple of days and gave up. The documentation is there but it doesn't help someone who knows 0% about the concept.

Then I tried Knockout.js - It has a very nice quickstart. http://learn.knockoutjs.com/ - after a few days playing around with it, I started on my project.

Good resources:
Knockout.js Documentation
http://www.knockmeout.net/
Stackoverflow
If you're doing something you really love, money is just a side effect.
RE: Facebook Groups

I've never understood the psychological reasons behind pointless social commentary during moments of tragedy such as this.

My social media streams were full of blather: "I feel bad for the parents and kids", "I hate school shooters", "I hate kid killers!!...ad nauseum. No kidding! There is a support group for people like you, it's called Everybody.

Why comment at all? Is it some coping mechanism? Do they feel as if they will be judged because they didn't publicly admonish the shooter?
If you were born in a first world country, then yes, your parents were rich. We are the global 1%.

Your income distribution analysis is flawed in a few ways though. You can't have negative height or negative intelligence, but you can have negative income. Likewise, there is an upper bound on human traits, but no functional upper bound on income. Moreover, money grows logarithmically but human traits inherit very slowly.

Anyway, that's not the point. You sound unhappy. You should fix that. Start by realizing that money won't fix it.
Hacker News is not about religion. It shouldn't be.

Sometimes the occasional jab at fundies is overlooked, sometimes the occasional mention of solace in a higher power is tolerated; but the nature of Paul's characterization was beyond the cultural norms of this board.

The strength and appropriateness of someone's statement in areas that are beyond his or her's direct involvement in a particular project or field should come directly from the innate strength of the arguments themselves and from the innate appropriateness of the arguments themselves.

Paul is a great man. He's directly impacted my everyday work flow and many of my ideas - but the closeness of this community is damaged by divisive and potentially offensive claims. If anything he should be setting the standard for what is expected here; and I say this with full knowledge of of how many of his potentially offensive arguments rang truth to my ears.

If someone is in pain and they wish to talk to someone close to them, even with potentially offensive ideas, that is one thing. Writing something on the internet and submitting it to an online forum, however, is an implicit acceptance of the review of others at that board.

I truly believe he is well meaning, civil, caring, etc. But this place will devolve quickly when the subject matter becomes highly subjective and divisive.
How  to Push Your Company Past the Startup Phase
I'll assume you're either not commenting on the article, or you're unfamiliar with Monbiot.
Yeah, I'm glad we all have higher standards these days, even though it makes it harder for me as a non-designer.

These days when I see something like Pinboard's front page it's kind of a shock. I couldn't possibly bring myself to pay for something so ugly.
Project for Awesome 2012
Eh, if they launched today they could at least slap Bootstrap on top of it to clean it up a bit. :)
How is this different from codemirror? Codemirror's preview utility easily handles this (and much more versatile in other ways):

http://codemirror.net/
http://codemirror.net/demo/preview.html
Does raising the tax burden slightly on a particular bracket affect the presence of loopholes like this?
I agree, performance optimisations like this definitely require significant documentation.

However, for what most of us do, these optimisations should be rare. More emphasis should be placed on code maintainability than performance of individual components in most situations. Hardware is cheap, developer time is expensive.
Mark Penn, Microsoft’s New Strategist, Hopes to Boost Bing
Some people feel an emotional identification with those at the centre of the event, and wish to communicate that with their social group so that they and their friends can support each other.

I don't do it either, but I don't particularly judge people who do. Everyone is different.