skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The last several years have been about the disruptive transformation of hardware devices that have changed the way people consume information and go about their daily lives. This is all about to change. Why? Because in the next decade these technologies, operating systems and hardware devices that are currently being built by the aforementioned brands, will be so similar to each other, the consumer will care less about the actual design of the hardware or its brand. People will just demand a pane of glass, more or less. Glass will just be glass. The ‘wow factor’ will wear off after awhile.

Having developed quite a few apps and websites I find myself agreeing with this thesis - the web will win in the end, not because of any inherent technical advantage (in some ways it's behind mobile apps in terms of performance, look and feel etc), but because the open web has so many advantages for developers and users that in the end it will overcome its disadvantages, and it is of course improving all the time as browsers improve, so the performance gap is narrowing constantly. At some point the performance won't matter, and the advantages of the open web will come to the fore.

The contrast between deploying a few fixes a day to a website, and churning out new app versions only to have them rejected by someone at Apple, often for inscrutable and unjustified reasons, then waiting days or weeks for approval, could not be more marked.

And as a user, the advantages of the open web (i.e. not walled gardens like Facebook) will I think have an irresistible pull - advantages like linkable, shareable content, content on any device even unforeseen ones, not having to rebuy apps but just subscribing once and using anywhere. The fact that web dev imposes so many limitations is actually a strength, as it means it can be deployed almost anywhere, and give at least some value to users for decades and over any new devices which come out, as opposed to the binaries being created for current mobile platforms, which in a decade will be forgotten.

I almost wish Apple had stuck with their first solution of asking developers to use a webkit API on iOS. It would be fascinating to know just exactly how surprised Apple were by the reaction to their suggestion that app developers develop using webkit, and whether they always planned to have a native SDK. At first it certainly seemed like a rushed decision and something they had to scramble to keep up with, and if they'd stuck to HTML it would be interesting to see how the landscape would differ now - perhaps we'd have interoperable apps between mobile devices, rather than the silos we have at present.
Linus Torvalds on Pixel - "I suspect I'll make this my primary laptop."
Q&A with Google Now’s creator
>Government contracting databases didn’t even have "an information management system that keeps track of everything built,"

This brings record-keeping to a new low.
wow, I gotta try this!
PyPy: Py3k status update #10
If MS raises its prices, it will weaken their market position - that's the punishment for their malbehavior.
How Saudi Prince Alwaleed manipulated his way up the Forbes Rich List
If as a developer one doesn't have much of an eye for design, Bootstrap is still a good way to begin, as opposed to nothing at all.

That's not to say devs should just use Bootstrap and be done with it, but it's a decent start; I'd rather have someone clueless about design using Bootstrap than styling forms on his own.
I think you are correct. Let me add two points: 1) Even though presenting constructive criticism may be uncomfortable for both parties, getting "blindsided" by the boss can really wreck a working relationship. 2) The reception one receives depends upon the prior relationship - a good one raises the probability of getting a "listening ear."
Well, I guess it's also possible to promote that to a more user friendly setting.
After 3 minutes I had to close it. Maybe if I wasn't aware that this is synthetic I would benefit from it.
OT: Damn that's a nice blog UI.
> Designing [...] is a set of rules, just like programming

I could agree with that, but I found design extremely unpleasant. For instance: it's almost impossible to vertically center a <div> inside its parent <div> in CSS without some obscure magical CSS-guru hacks which usually include creating wrapper <div>s. Why should I change my markup to adapt to browser's representation? Why can't I just v-align: center it?

Are those rules? Sure. But extremely frustrating rules... and that's only the technical part of design!

Don't get me wrong, designing is an awesome tool for your belt, but I found it extremely frustrating. Maybe I'm the one to blame for it?
Some LED "bulbs" are effectively florescent too, they just use LEDs to excite the florescent material.
Great mix-tape
HTML5 in general degrades fairly well, with the exception of with browsers which simply don't support CSS at all (e.g. IE5 and below).

You're right to say that older browsers would ignore the unknown attribute, the problem is that having links broken might degrade that site to a point where it isn't usable.
> they did on iOS (for a while).

No. Apple never had a super-majority (or even a majority) of the smartphone marketshare, let alone in the EU where Symbian and BB historically held strong marketshares during iOS's tenure.

iOS's best has been 30~40% in some european country (not even EU-wide). Although it does capture the vast majority of profits, but that's not really relevant to antitrust-type cases.

I believe Samsung currently has a bigger share of the EU market than iOS. There never was a case of monopolistic abuse from apple in the EU, because they never came close to a monopoly.
JavaScript URI functions – unit tests
I love Google and adore Disqus!
Well, at least the monad abuse uses a real monad, but why not just use lens (http://lens.github.com/)?
For now, it´s "just" browser applications.
Yes it works at night in our apt at least. I'll put up some obnoxious affiliate links as soon as I found the product.
finally registered after years of lurking purely to upvote you for this
Is the socat required in the Fabric bits at the end?
Coding is creative also, if you don't know program design, your code will look like (and behave like) crap.

But like coding, UX design is only learned with lots of practice, you have to specialize somewhere. Even designers specialize between visual, motion, and interaction.

(And lots of fun if your specialty is programming language design).
> Apple products are omnipresent in the Simpsons nowadays. Whenever there is a tablet, it is an iPad. It makes me quite uneasy.

Guess what the Simpsons creators use.

The only time it would be used specifically because it's an Apple would be if Lisa is using or wanting or buying it. That's because Lisa is supposed to come across (now) as the stereotypical Apple user.
Well said, thanks for your comment. The webkit API approach could have been pretty interesting indeed. What'll even be more interesting IMO is Apple's next move in this game of chess. Not sure if Timmy has the chops to pull this one off.
It's a blogging site that is in beta. Writers are invite-only. I see some parallels to Svbtle.
No,it's not. "Outside" could mean an equally small space,just outside of building. Sure,it's better,but it's no where near the real "free range" where chickens are just free to go wherever they like. It's more about space that they get rather than whatever they are outside or not.
It's only a small percentage of the taxes that Microsoft has dodged, er, "structured away". Microsoft can pay the fine using their cash that's stranded overseas without having to repatriate it back to the US and pay taxes on it.
yes...thank you air force!
The money paid to the European Court goes back into the EU budget.
Unpaid fines continue to grow. Eventually it would perfectly within reason to seize (take) Microsoft's copyright on windows making piracy perfectly legal.
Nice method.

The trick with children that age is to take what they do know, in this case counting blocks in a square, and take it just one step further.

My wife used to teach kindergarten. The first grade teacher came up to her at the start of her second year and asked her how the class knew how to multiply. My wife, who is NOT a math person by any means, realized that multiplying is just the natural progression from "skip counting", which is a skill in every kindergarten standard.
Partly perception - chickens are taller than cats and with wings spread out they can look quite large.

Partly aggression - chickens are/can be nasty and will attack other animals with sharp beaks. Combine this with the fact that they're flock animals, one cat isn't going up against multiple flying, aggressive, pointy ended foes.
Which charity offers a donate button that I can easily integrate into my app?
I've developed an open-source Android app for local and cloud file encryption (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=csh.cryptonite). I've been asked many times to integrate a donate button into this app to support further development. There are various reasons why I don't want to do this (most of them selfish paradoxically) and would rather prefer to integrate a button to donate to a charity instead. That's why I'm looking for a secular charity that offers a simple way to integrate a donation button into my Android app. The donation amount that comes from app users should be trackable, and I'd also like to thank donators if they're OK with it. My preferred charity is Plan International (http://plan-international.org) but unfortunately they haven't replied to my inquiries. Any other suggestions?
Okay, thanks for the reply
Show HN: Free in-app feedback & chat with your mobile app users
When Apple have a monopoly, they will be part of these rules as well. As soon as you enters monopoly status in the EU, there is certain rules and regulations that you need to comply with.
What does this mean for ChromeOS or Firefox OS? I'm seriously curious how the legal system considers them in light of this and why MS hasn't mentioned them (to my knowledge) in their defence.
No matter how awful iPhoto is, it's still better than almost anything you can find on Linux. I know because that was one of my biggest gripes while I was using Ubuntu up to about 5 months ago.

And it's not about how Macs just work, it's that you have apps for almost anything that actually work.
Yes, that is how most news & information is - and has been - traditionally subsidized for centuries.

It doesn't help that supply has far exceeded demand, but there is still a convertible value to content.
that is upto the court to deicde, tomp got a point that since companies cannot be jailed, they should be fined a percentage of their revenue!
Yeah, it had the political motivation to uphold the European laws regarding abuses of a monopoly. Evil ...
There was an interesting article in the NY Times recently about the meaning of comfort and specifically compared the difference between cold overhead lighting in Japan and warm side lighting in Norway.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/magazine/what-does-it-mean...
WebStorm 6 released
Why don't they start fining car manufacturers for not providing customers with a choice of seats made by other manufactures? Antitrust law in the EU is a load of bs, coming from someone who uninstalls IE first thing after installing Windows.
SLAP
I seriously doubt MS will commit seppuku over a fine. Which is really what scoffing at this would get them.

More than likely, they'll roll out changes to their browser preferences now (that they've been caught red-handed) and maybe include a "browser bundle" that has Firefox, Chrome and IE in newer versions and recommend OEMs deploy the same. Naturally it may still default to IE if the user clicks "next". That way, they can maybe negotiate down the overall sum of the fine saying "hey, sorry we're late, but look! We're doing the changes."
>committing the crime

If a someone in a corporation is actually committing a crime , then, yes they can go to jail.

If they have committed some kind of civil offense or if it's a criminal offense with no jail term attached then they don't go to jail. There's nothing special about corporations that prevent the people in charge from serving jail time.
Neither ChromeOS nor FirefoxOS have a majority market share in the OS market that they use to push competitors out of the browser space. No problems for them.
Lose Thos actually was renamed Sparrow OS
http://www.sparrowos.com/
Why would every occurence of the string "fl" be in a different font?
That's indeed my thought, why only Microsoft? Apple should also give that choice to their OSX users.
This fine is plain stupid. Why EU doesn't fine Google for the same thing on Android. Android is in a monopoly position in EU and I do not saw any broswer choice screen when I first start my Android phone.
And lowers the amount member states have to pay (it does not increase the budget)
Asking someone in advance whether they would pay for a hypothetical solution is a very erratic method to evaluate an idea.
In one word... Trust.
Simple - they do not have de facto market dominance

When they do and take actions that are detrimental to the proper functioning of a free market they will get fined as well

Microsoft is not evil, not by any normal definition of the word, but they are using power to keep power. That's normal, and that's why anti-trust laws are draconian - something is needed to equalise the odds
This may be true, but we don't need to outspend the rest of the world on defense in "peace" time. I'd also argue that we're very good at building insanely difficult to use systems. Perhaps if getting users up to speed with weapon systems were a design priority this wouldn't be true. After all, everywhere else but the military tech gets more powerful and simpler to use.
You "uninstall IE" eh?
>Head to an American supermarket on the other hand and eggs are always held in refrigerated units, like milk and cheese and other dairy products.

This applies to Sweden as well. Every supermarket I know of sells the eggs refrigerated (by the dairy products).
I just switched to Terminal from iTerm2.
Or more related, why can Microsoft bundle Paint and Outlook without providing alternate graphic programs and mail clients?
Microsoft will probably counter-fine by raising its prices by 1€ in EU. Europe will happily pay for it.
"When the intern tells me that “the tests are for those who can not program”

I wish I could do that to the guy with "10 years exp in C and C#" who told me the same.
This designer-implementor conflict I think is the biggest hurdle with being both the designer and developer.

If you're thinking about the implementation too much while designing then it can compromise the design because you can tend to subconsciously shy away from things that may instinctively 'feel' hard.

So for me this is where the biggest strength of a separate designer can be if they're just focusing on making the design truthful to itself which in turn can challenge the programmer to push that bit more.
> I'd be very surprised if the majority of C software is either

Or java. Or C++.
Serving time for a purely corporate offence is very very rare. Health and safety negligence is most common, but even the horse war scandal in Europe (where unfit horses were sold as beef and then into ready meals) it's unlikely and people there committed fraud as part of course of business
We also learned it in, I think, 4th grade or perhaps 5th. This was in the US. And yes, I've also forgotten it. I don't think I ever used the method outside of that lesson.
Show HN: QR Codify, The Most Useful Snippet I've Ever Written
Yes, coding is also creative. If you want to write some sexy code you'll have to some designing. But program design is more like planning.
To write nice code you need some sort of planning before firing up the text editor.
In UX design you need to have "an eye" for that sort of stuff.

At least that's how I see it.
It never was a silver bullet to begin with. There is no way that unit testing could cover every ground. Granted, for what its worth, it is something that is reasonably cheap that you could run over and over again cheaply. Functional testing can cover most of the cases, but its more costly, requiring a full system setup, takes longer time to run and more expensive to write.

Manual testing seems straightforward, but its not repeatable, hence more expensive, since it requires warm bodies to run it every single time.

Given the effectiveness and the cost of each approach, it makes more sense to have different coverage for different test. For something that is more expensive, you would choose to create and run it for the most important part of the system. For something that is dirt cheap, well, why not just run it everywhere?

Consider regression test. It covers every part of the system. But its not possible to run it every single time a developer change something. The cost is too prohibitive to run it at every changes, even with automation, much less using the manual approach. What about unit test? Dirt cheap. You can run it every 15 minutes or so if you are inclined and it would still be okay.

I would say that it is wrong to start a software development exercise and just religiously say we have use TDD. The right question to ask, is what is your of degree quality and what is the cost that you are willing to pay.

For some people, hey, lets just hire rock star developers for everything, but some projects cannot afford that. And if can only afford a team that barely knows what unit testing is, there is not much point of training everyone for a short project (say, 3 months with 1 month warranty).

And yeah, there is limited benefit with unit testing (as is with everything), but still I don't think its fair to throw the baby into the bathwater too soon either. Do what make sense and do what works.
I have a presentation that goes along with a talk I give to developers on understanding some simple techniques that they can use to contribute to design: http://www.slideshare.net/appsfire/anatomy-of-a-button-13406...
Android's 61% market share in Europe is hardly a monopoly:

http://www.nasdaq.com/article/apple-raises-market-share-to-5...
I think the EU should stop collecting taxes and get American tech giants to fund the public service with spurious fines.
Some do, some don't. The two smaller stores I normally shop at don't, the huge supermarket a bit down the road does.
I totally agree with the post, linking is somewhat broken. In our application (https://codeable.io), we have a table with tasks, where each row links to the single view for the task. Inner wrapping each <td> didn't really "feel" right, so I just went with javascript approach, having data-link attribute on each table row, then redirecting the user on click.

I know you might ask what about graceful degradation?, but the truth is our app relies heavily on javascript (websockets) to work, as 90% of modern apps/sites do, so we decided to ignore it. We don't like that, but something's got to give.
They already have been doing that for a long time. They are in compliance now.
The app I want
No so clean to me, without an 'alt'-attribute..
No politically motivated as in a small European browser maker that't always had the smallest market share on Windows decided to make a complaint over something completely ridiculous i.e. MS bundling a browser with the OS
First Intel-built FPGA
"You don't have to be a freaking Picasso to suggest color change"

Too bad they didn't chose a single color to use on their website: http://123ship.it/
The browser choice option was merely one agreed solution to the problem that as owner of the ecosystem (windows) MA was not letting any other browsers in.

The highly competitive marketplace for mobile devices gives you as a consumer a wide variety of choices of operating system, and each operating system (apart iOS) is adjusted by the operator to best fit their idea of market

You can choose devices, you can choose different versions and setups of android. There is a competive market

The fact that its not free as in speech is not the problem (it should be but)
why do you do this ? Windows is my desktop enviroment where i run my tools, but all my webdev lives on virtual machines that run Ubuntu. So much easier.. even on OSX i do it this way, and it works beautifully and my desktop OS doesnt matter at all.
If you want to actually solve your practical problem, I suspect a proposal to change CSS would have more chance of being accepted than one to change the A tag.
Bakthat: Python backup framework and command line tool
You're misunderstanding. The problem is that Microsoft is using its OS monopoly to try and create another one. These special anticompetetive triggers only come into effect when the company has a monopoly.

To be more clear, there is noting illegal about HAVING a monopoly. It's what you do WITH a monopoly that matters. If you don't have a monopoly, you're much less restricted with what you can do.

To correct you analogy, it would be if one car company manufactured 90% of the cars and decided to sell the cars with its own tire brand.
Practically speaking? Because no EU company that sells a paint program or email program has filed a complaint. This action was started by an Opera complaint to the EU -- not because the EU was looking around for things it didn't like.
When I'm designing I consciously ignore any sense of "this is difficult/impossible to implement" and when I'm working with a designer I tell them to ignore development constraints in the design process. Once we have a fina design and it is impossible, sure you can reevaluate, but don't let that influence the initial designs IMO.
>but because a tiny minority of the otherwise hugely
>welcoming community set themselves up as some sort of
>entitled priesthood and actively discourage 'idiot users'
>from getting involved.

I've spoken to many people over the years and looked at why they use Windows rather than Linux. The reasons, in order from most common are:

1. Lack of the applications they need; nearly always Outlook and Excel

2. Familiarity with Windows that they feel they've invested a lot of time in

3. Simply didn't realise there even was an alternative

Out of all the people I've talked to, there have been a grand total of ZERO that have ever given "Had a bad experience with a member of the Linux community" as a reason. None. Ever.

So, I'm more than a little dubious about your claim that this is in fact the main reason. Got any figures to back up that little theory of yours?
Which is still an issue for a lot of people who depend on them.
In many cases, it's much easier to prove that a corporation did something illegal than it is to research who exactly in the corporation was responsible (except for the CEO, of course, but to hold the CEO criminally liable for everything a company does would be too open to abuses).
Oh. You're probably right. I have to test this!

Hm, eggs here in Sweden are generally washed, but not refrigerated, so it's neither like the situation in the UK nor the US. Interesting.
"Important" is a relative matter of course, and surely light bulbs were not as ubiquitous in 19th century as they were later, but e.g. London had 2.5 million light bulbs at the end of 19th century. That is not insignificant.
Your link was borked. Try this..

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4RoeipegxkWQXlTd1pJOTVFWk0/...
An Elite State of Mind
Then why stop at browsers?

Why not do the same thing with AV, audio players, text editors, file browsers, CD/DVD burners, etc... ?
Listen, 50 percent or 100 percent of revenues - that easily leaves you with a bankrupt company. That's not in the interest of consumers.

Microsoft was fined around 1 percent of their global sales for a violation of the terms of a kind of a settlement in an old competition case (antitrust case). Microsoft already knew that if they violated the terms they would be fined up to 10 percent of their global revenues: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-09-1941_en.htm?local...

Microsoft mostly complied with the terms of the settlement, but not entirely as the OP describes. In that light the 1 percent fine is probably not way off.