skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Awesome UX. I believe this implementation is called a v-buffer, though I can't find any references right now but I am fairly certain I read about it a decade back.

Apple used this technique for their menus early on while Microsoft took the alternate route of using a delay which was quite annoying. A lot of power users removed the delay via registry settings and it was surprising why Microsoft didn't adopt the v-buffer--might be patents related?

The problem with the delay is not only the delay itself but for wider menus the delay needs to be even longer. Then to account for novice users, you add in a little bit extra just for good measure.

One way to mitigate long delays is to make the parent menu taller so the user has a bigger margin of error while they move the mouse horizontally to the right.

However before hi-res displays became common, vertical real estate was far more limited. On the earlier windows machines where you often ended up having two columns of menus, this was even more annoying because trying to get to the second column of menus required moving your mouse right, through the first-column's submenus. In later version of Windows, Microsoft did away with two column menus and introduced a single column with scroll up/down to solve this issue,but introduced further delay when trying to get to menu items below the visible screen.

(edited for grammer)
Why Google Thinks Two Music Subscription Services Are Better Than None
GroupTalent's Payment Vendor Selection Process
This ID is pretty much the only thing employers get to ID the workers, and thus track the quality of their work. (Which is particularly important on Turk, as anonymity seems to encourage fraud.) Everything else is push: web service calls to contact a worker, or comment on an assignment. That stuff is all intermediated by turk, meaning it’s all anonymized fairly effectively - and quite constrained as to content and format.

These days Turk goes so far as to handle your 1099s for you - so you don’t know the names of even the workers that have done more than $600 worth of work for you…

Of course most employers in it for the long haul build up reputation databases built on these ids, and many encourage their workers to fill out profiles, direct on the employers website, allowing for more direct contact, and less constrained messaging.

Which is why this is a big deal for the employers: names, pictures, locations, and review helpfulness, can all be shoved into the reputation algorithm or used by survey companies for demographics. So it will be harvested.

And that makes turk a lot less anonymous. Which seems like a breech of trust to the workers, because although they aren’t guaranteed anonymity in the TOS, that has been the bargain so far.
Four hours of commuting a day just to do something that could have been done on Skype, WebEx, or Google Hangouts always raises my morale...

Then don't live two hours a way from work.
Who killed the Duke of Densmore?
She's doing this to get away from "me-first" culture, which is common to all dying firms, and to get people toward a "goal-first" outlook instead.

The problem with this attempt is that it's one rule trying to stand in for many. The first thing you have to do is make sure that no one is rewarded unjustly, and that no achievement goes unrewarded. The next thing is to get rid of the free riders, hangers-on, bad management, sociopaths and other office blight.

The final step, and she'll hate this, is some kind of ownership. Employees are people who do what you tell them to do. Part owners look for something they can do to contribute to collective wealth through the future of the company.

Sounds Communist? Not to my ears, and I'm pretty far from ever supporting dead ideologies. It's just common sense. People need to feel like they're part of a team, and that's how we signal that in our society, through ownership.
Use pastebot from tapbots (authors of tweetbot) for this sort of thing personally. http://tapbots.com/software/pastebot/
A primary (if often unstated) function of corporations is to diffuse individual responsibility and accountability.

Decisions -- where they are rational -- become a cost/benefit analysis. If you really want to deter the behavior, the costs have to outweigh the benefits. (Perhaps significantly enough to outweigh various arguments about what the true costs and benefits might be.)

And... this still says nothing about the damage that may have been caused to victims, and compensation for same. (For example, take someone's health away in certain fashions, and no amount of money can replace it.)
Exploring Java8 Lambdas. Part 1
Best Buy is not "no longer permitting employees to work remotely" -- it now has to be discussed with your manager [0].

[0]: http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/05/technology/best-buy-work-fro...
i completely agree with that. that is what i am intending to convey.

the point of others and the author is that pattern recognition doesn't explain the mind because it doesn't account for memory. my point is that the term recognition obviously implies a mechanism for memory.
This looks very much like the capital one mobile app...
The words in the license don't matter, everyone had the right to transfer their software from one computer to another the whole time.

See: http://cr.yp.to/softwarelaw.html
I think perfect and mediocre are both enemies of good.

"It complies with the spec... ship it."
awesome stuff!!
Chrome on iOS uses the Safari back-end. Only the GUI is different. Apple will not let you install a completely new browser on iOS.
Facebook Adds SPDY Support
Wow what a suck up article to Yahoo :

"Parking lots and entire floors of cubicles were nearly empty because some employees were working as little as possible and leaving early."

That's certainly not what I heard from how it worked at yahoo, I guess all those managers just don't care if the devs do not delivers there weekly items.

Not to say that Yahoo structure is not fucked up and that this step was not necessary, but the reasoning given in this article is weak
Damn..
I think I'll send myself a DMCA notice, post it on HN and get lots of traffic and noise around my brand
How sad is it that the first thing I thought was, "I wonder if they're going to sue him."
Indeed - I always have at least one Linux VM running on my Windows Workstation. I found, that when I really want the nice posix tool chain, that was a more satisfactory approach than futzing with cygwin all the time. Perhaps that should be my long term windows solution - thanks.
If the right side box is very short, this algorithm gets a bit fussy. Not a problem for Amazon since their right side box is fixed height, but often a problem for menus where there is only one item in the sub-menu (usually because the sub-menu is programatically filled in.) You have to thread the needle moving your pointer to the right, because if you leave the line, it collapses the selection and selects the next item.

Even OS X has this issue, so if someone gets a good solution, they can beat Apple at their own game.
The Golden Rules of Code Documentation
I keep hens, and usually can't tell the difference in flavor between store-bought and home-produced. Occasionally the store-bought ones have a stronger sulphur odor, but even that is rare. Others claim they can tell the difference. YMMV
SparkFun employee here. Not trying to push products too hard, but if you've already got an FTDI board or cable, you can pick up a Pro Mini for just ten bucks now. That's double the $5 the article claims, but the pro mini comes with power and status LEDs, an on-board voltage regulator and reset button. I use them in most all of my projects because they're so easy to work with, which is far from the case when using an atmega on a breadboard. Plus they're breadboard friendly :)

http://sfe.io/11113
from the actual paper (linked at the bottom of the coffitivity post):

"A total of 188 ideas were generated, for an average of 4.48 (SD = 2.09) ideas per person. The noise level did not affect the number of solutions generated"

"ideas generated by participants in the moderate- (vs. low-) noise condition were rated as more original (M = 3.87 vs. 3.66; F(1, 40) = 4.76, p < .05)."

Ratings were on a 7-point scale (1 = not at all, 7 = very much)... so ... a difference in originality of (3.87-3.66)/7 = 3% (i.e. not actually particularly significant (in the usual use of the word) even though the 3% difference was statistically reliable)

"... a significant effect of noise on this appropriateness index, such that ideas generated by respondents in the moderate-noise (vs. low-noise) condition were rated as more appropriate (M = 4.48 vs. 4.20; F(1, 40) = 5.34, p < .05)."

again, (4.48-4.20)/7 = 4% difference... not exactly impressive, although apparently it was statistically reliable

It always pains me to see scientific research reported in the media in such a way as to inflate the significance of the work ("significance" used here in the layperson sense of the word, not the statistical sense of the word).

PS the statistical significance was only reported as "p < .05", which means there is a 1 in 20 chance of getting a difference that large or larger due to random sampling alone (i.e. in the absence of an actual effect).

This XKCD cartoon is worth a look: http://www.xkcd.com/882/
Google Plus Local, Google Pages Places Update March 2013
Thanks, sage advice to be sure.
Yahoo has some 14,500 employees. There were 200 employees targeted by the widely reported action.

Was innovation and collaboration really suppressed because 1.3% of the employees worked at home?

This all sounds rather ridiculous.
Additional to the notes of others, LayerVault have a HackerNews clone of their own called "Designer News".

http://news.layervault.com/
Are they supposed to be anonymous, or were people just assuming that?

Edit: The closest thing I found was that you can't create tasks that involve "collecting personal identifiable information". I would think that is aimed more at preventing tasks that are essentially selling your info for the price.
It strikes me as a way to reduce headcount without announcing layoffs.

It's shitty if you were one of the telecommuters; and while I am loathe to side with a crappy doublespeak management move… Yahoo! does need a shake up. That's Mayer's whole deal, right?
The anchor text and surrounding paragraph of the link is also important for SEO-value, so I'm afraid that would not work. I think the idea of a shiv is a neat one, but unfortunately not very practical at the moment.
I used to do freelance work in a big open office setup with a lot of different companies all owned by the same big holding company. Once or twice a week one of the partners of the parent company would come in with a box of brownies or some such thing. The startup kids who hadn't paid themselves in months would all stand around eating the treat, saying "god, this is the best place to work."
awesome idea... Totally worth trying this app out.
The 37 Signals blog posts on here every week all like this one make me not want to work there.
https://code.google.com/p/sharex/ makes those types of gifs very easy on windows. It can also do a load of other cool stuff.
E.U. Fines Microsoft $732 Million Over Browser Choice
Well, I don't think most people know that this tech exists, so in part the purpose of these articles is to inform them. I think the fear is that this thing can sweep an area at a couple thousand feet and indiscriminately collect information. The FBI uses equivalent devices so that they don't have to go through the formality of acquiring a court order or asking the telco, with this they can do the same thing and cover a huge space in a short amount of time. Like other drone tech this takes something many of us used to consider an acceptable security/privacy tradeoff because it was limited by manpower/range, and greatly reduces those limitations.
I've told the story to my students many times (probably mangling some minor details over the years, but getting the point across).

AFAIK (correct me if wrong)...

- The code was re-used from the Ariane 4, which was designed for launch only in the northern hemisphere. The Ariane 5 was launched from south of the equator, hence the importance of unsigned vs signed.

- A run-time warning was generated. Problem was where to put the warning, which wasn't specified, and which thru dangling pointer overwrote current position/velocity data. Watchdog code noticed the now-impossible trajectory, decided the system was very very confused, and initiated self-destruct for (relative) safety.
I used to work at a company where there was a flexible work-at-home policy. It was great, except for this one guy named Smith (name changed to protect the lazy sumbitch). He would frequently email the team about how he wasn't feeling well, or how he wanted to concentrate on something important he was working on, or how he woke up so late that the commute wasn't worth it so he'd work at home.

That was fine and all, but then he would send emails about how he wasn't feeling well and was going stay at home, then show up for the after-hours company parties. He once sent an all-company email to invite others to watch videos with him in one of the meeting rooms during a Wednesday afternoon. I responded "Wednesday afternoon? I think I'll be at my day job then." To which he replied "By Wednesday afternoon, I meant after 6pm. Technically, that is afternoon."

My manager tallied up the days that he did this, and I forget the exact number, but they added up to more than 50 work days in 10 months. The policy wasn't specific about how many days you could work from home, so he was allowed to do this. Worse, others started to follow his example.

And yet, he was getting his work done on those days off, so no one fired him. But, his behavior annoyed everyone s.t. we called working at home "Smithing". I still showed up at work and put in my best, but it certainly was demoralizing to have to work with such douchebaggery.
For a long time comments in code were considered as a code smell by myself. I only did comment my code if I had to say something about the "why" aspect of it. A few months ago I changed that and now I am back to commenting more than before and not only the why but also the how - of course not always but if there is a complex piece of code I will comment it. I do this even though I am using a language which produces very readable source code. Here is the why:

We are humans and we do communicate with our own language. Our brain is not made to read code. We are not a compiler who thinks in EBNF. Commenting the how is appropriate in many cases especially if you are not working alone but in a team. (1)

I really enjoy comments of people who are smarter than myself. Those comments (especially) helped me a lot to improve my own skills, to understand their code better and my feeling is that those essential comments make our code better - not worse.

(1) "we/our" = the people working in our startup
I concur.

There are n-ways to join in a conversation, but the more direct experience you have, the better you will be able to field certain types of discussion. So, experts and expert debaters will dive right in and attack the topic head-on. More timid souls will wait in the wings and hope that someone will say something that they can directly respond to with confidence.

Sometimes you have to be slightly shameless if you want to join in a conversation. Stating an opinion (soap-boxing) does feel a bit like cheating the system. But I would argue its slightly better than standing on the sideline.
What did you do before your learned TDD? Did you write automated tests? To what degree?
In 1962 there wasn't exactly enough computational power anywhere to do a reasonable simulation of a flight.
Do you have any reason to think that Smith would have been less of a jerk if he had to come in to the office every day?
I took away the exact opposite - this is yet another example of not needing to know the right math. In the end, he can study up a bit and/or seek out a friend who does know, but be got the hack done without it.

This is how it works with my wife and I sometimes. I write a lot of code, and she either fixes or writes or advises me on the bit I need to work much better.

I admit we can't run the world or write good code without math, but some of us have strengths in other areas.

tl;dr my matrix algebra is fuzzy too.
Creatrice
What is wrong with my brain I don't even know
Why Coders should be nice Wizards
The 11-Year Quest to Create Disappearing Colored Bubbles
Moore's Law, not mobility, is killing the PC
I rather enjoyed your longer comment upstream.
The designmodo logo is quite debian-esque. Maybe too close to debian's i'd think.

EDIT: https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/7d9027189b18855f5f2ddeb7d...
Here's what I think is being missed in this discussion:

Product != Software

People buy software because they desire some intended outcome. For instance, I recently switched to Xero because emailing spreadsheets of categorizations back and forth to my accountant is messy and frustrating. And I might buy a book on bookkeeping because I suck at it. Or a course on cashflow because I never learned how to properly budget.

I think if you were to ask me, Patrick, Amy, Nathan, etc... if we see a huge difference between, say, a SaaS product we run and a workshop we teach, we wouldn't. The goal's the same: make someone better off than they were before.

It's really frustrating, but understandable on HN, to see people downplay products that aren't software. When writing Planscope, my goal was to help increase project transparency between consultants and their clients. After talking with many customres, I realized a large number of them needed help on something much more foundational to their business: how to price. So I built another product that helped people with that.

(Also, I honestly don't think that posting some — hopefully helpful — content on what I learned in trying to sell a book is going to result in "Double UR Freelancing Ratez" coming out and crushing my sales anytime soon.)
On one hand, this strikes me as an example of, "Something must be done, this is Something, therefore this must be done."

On the other hand, if you assume that Yahoo was doomed, then everybody was going to get screwed. If Meyer can save the company while only screwing e.g. half the workforce, that's a substantial improvement, even if not all of the changes necessarily help.
Good question. Maybe that's why nobody pushed him to come in.
From the linked James Gleick article:

"the programmers had decided that this particular velocity figure would never be large enough to cause trouble. After all, it never had been before. Unluckily, Ariane 5 was a faster rocket than Ariane 4. One extra absurdity: the calculation containing the bug, which shut down the guidance system, which confused the on-board computer, which forced the rocket off course, actually served no purpose once the rocket was in the air. Its only function was to align the system before launch. So it should have been turned off. But engineers chose long ago, in an earlier version of the Ariane, to leave this function running for the first 40 seconds of flight -- a "special feature" meant to make it easy to restart the system in the event of a brief hold in the countdown."
There are no small amount of times when you'd want to wrap a block with links, including headers, summaries, and composites.

It's actually unfortunate that in so many cases where people wrap blocks with anchors, they go for the inner-wrap method which has a major downside in that the inner anchor does not span the entire block by default. That means that there are a lot of, say, logos that have padding you can't click on (contrast with the horrible ads that have clickable whitespace).
The Mars Climate Orbiter mixed up feet with meters. Seems it calculated how far off the surface it was during landing, and when it decided it was at 0 units above the surface the retro-rockets were shut off as intended. Except that it was, in fact, still a few miles up. Code re-use struck again.
> IE 9/10 are actually pretty decent. They don't have a lot of the not-quite-standards-yet bells and whistles Webkit's rapidly iterating on

IE9 is missing a lot of neat stuff which others have had for quite some time (limited CORS or D&D, no text-shadow, offline apps, transitions, placeholders, gradients, animations, xhr2, classlist, History API, typed arrays, async scripts, strict mode, webworkers, file & filereader API, 3D transforms, websockets, flexbox, requestAnimationFrame, datalist, page visibility, forms 2, ...)

IE10 is significantly better, but still behind (mostly due to no webgl and fullscreen)
Neither Putty, nor Secure CRT - both of which I have used extensively (I even purchased Secure CRT for personal use on my windows system) are as polished as to Terminal.App on OS X. It's not like Terminal.App is 10x better than SecureCRT (It isn't) - and I love the fact that I can get Putty up and running on every windows system I touch in < 30 seconds - but if you spend as much time in the console as I do, even a 10-15% improvement is enough to chose a different platform for the terminal app alone, and I would suggest, after having used all three of these tools, for a minimum of 1000 hours each (approx. 1000+ hours on Putty, 2000+ hours for SecureCRT, 4000+ hours on Terminal.app) - that the OS X Terminal.app gives me that 10% improvement.

I don't know if I should be embarrassed to admit that the Terminal application is the single most important driver as to which operating system I use, but I guess it's okay as long as I realize it's not everyone's.
This reaction is a bit visceral, and unnecessarily so. The "cult" and "dogma" accusations sound fairly outlandish, to be honest.

Part of the reason experienced devs push back against TDD has to do with patterns and habits. It's safe to say that TDD feels awkward to anyone with other established work patterns.

TDD is of course simply a methodology. It works well for some teams, and perhaps not for others. What it does do is impose a culture of testing and rigorousness, which is rarely a negative.

Sure, you can decouple testing from TDD, but IME teams that apply TDD have more extensive coverage than those who don't. Causation correlation caveats apply.

I personally dislike TDD because it disrupts the thought pattern I have become accustomed to using when developing software. I consider myself relatively junior, so I can only imagine how much of a workflow departure it must be for more senior engineers. However, just because it doesn't work optimally for me (or, optimally at first) doesn't invalidate the approach nor make anyone who uses it some brainwashed cult member.
There is a good article examining the various possible causes of the Ariane-5 disaster by Bashar Nuseibeh: "Ariane-5: Who-Dunnit?". See PDF here: http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/seoc/2007_2008/reso...
Not really but the experience is similar.
With regard to Dalke's complaints, I participated in that thread a bit; but others were doing a better job than I so I walked away. In short, Dalke's complaints were the complaints of someone who had little or no experience with TDD; and so weren't really significant complaints. Profit's paper complained more about the experimental procedure of Phil Hack's paper in support of TDD, than about TDD itself.

The reference to a "silver bullet" is a straw man. TDD is not a silver bullet. TDD doesn't keep you from screwing up. TDD will not guarantee success. But adopting and following the discipline of TDD can be remarkably beneficial, and shift the odds more towards success.
If clicking a comment just opens a small textbox beneath the comment then it's not a big deal if they miss. But I can definitely see having different pages loaded being a problem.

But ultimately, it should not be a limitation of the technology that determines what is an isn't usable. That's a job for UX designer, and they should have every freedom with the technology to create their designs.