skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've had the opposite experience. I don't use it myself (I even opted to buy a new laptop with XP over Vista) but I'm responsible for looking after a Vista laptop where I work and I have no end of problems. Networking issues, compatibility with Outlook 2003 issues (every now and again it just stops working, has to be rebooted to be able to send/receive mail again), it's incredibly slow even though the laptop is new (decent spec).

Based on that I wouldn't take the plunge to use it as a primary OS (even as a Windows user generally.)
Almost making a joke is worse than just making the joke.
That's exactly the type of thoughts we're looking for. I forgot to mention that the screenshots were not the actual screenshots we'll use. They are there for the general feel of the "mockup".
BlueChild: End to End development of a Perl Catalyst Website
I don't have any answers but I hope the Windows 7 team do.

As with you my main gripe is with dialogs that steal focus - especially ones that popup while you're typing, and only show for a split second because the focus is defaulted to a button and as you press the space bar you unwittingly 'OK' the dialog box!

I'm interested to see how Windows 7 works.
you should make Add timmy@timmyontime.com, Add timmyontime
and Add timmyontime@hotmail.com these into links (well i know u can make the one for AIM into a link)

and this is a reason to use the app, not a feature: 98% instant messaging VS 2% web
Type what you are doing instead of clicking in a cumbersome interface.
As a corollary, when everything seems old hat to you, you've truly become old.

True wisdom maybe maintaining your curiosity and an open mind so you can branch out at any age but knowing when to "split into new branches" and when to "[merge] into a previous experience". Given how abstract that sentence is, this is clearly an art.
Sony could sell a ton of video editing software as a download. Maybe this is why they walled it off.
Good point. Seems obvious in hindsight although the article also presents another theory: "the monotony of the events of old age compared with the vividness and novelty of the experiences of youth must also be considered."
Yes, at 35, this is how it seems to me, too.
The Value of a Warning (with roles/traits)
What the article argues is sometimes true, but sometimes it happens that a community dies because of insane moderators, as the above commenter observes.

It happened on the MaxPC forums a few years ago, where I and a few other long-time posters were banned for reasons that were trivial, because one of the mods -- a very hotheaded and patriotic Canadian -- was threatened by the respect others accorded us.

BoingBoing is doing the same thing, from what I can tell, with its idiotic disemvowelling.
Everything you always wanted to know about employment
"Time is what a clock measures."
-Einstein
In fact, you're commenting of the old site. To comment on the new one : http://img18.imageshack.us/img18/2460/ss5u.png . We could make the "add timmy" clickable but it doesn't work well on every computer (in fact, on my own computer).
I would love to hear from the hardware guys why SPARC ISA is such a bad idea.
Try to amazon this book named Made To Stick. The whole book is about how to make a message go viral.
The way to do it around here is to deadpan it, and see how many delayed guffaws you get.
Am I the only one who sees the irony in the Digg bait title for an article about Digg bait articles? Or, is it intentionally ironic? I must be getting old, I can't tell anymore.
JPerl - Perl on the JVM
Healthy women don't want to be anywhere around those sorts of men

Will have sex with them gladly, though, and tell the nice guy the kid's his.
Startuptools
Windows 7 Starter Edition - can only run 3 apps at a time
With all due respect: developers are not designers, and visa versa. Puts on M$ Monkey Suit, "Delegate, delegate, delegate!" I know you're not a big company, but that doesn't matter — if you're developing a consumer-facing web application, you need to be thinking about UX/UI, branding, etc. The bar is raised, web-app market is ultra-competitive, consumers will ditch a bad looking site.

In my humblest opinion, your current website is better structured and more professional looking than ss5u.png, but that's not to say it can't be improved. I too am not a fan of the color scheme (brown, orange, etc.) but from a design standpoint, it's feels like a complete thought while ss5u.png looks and feels like an unfinished wireframe (as a customer, I'd wonder if your product is unfinished too). However, there are elements from ss5u.png that I think you can merge, like the call-to-action button for one, the lighter color scheme, etc.

I think people mistakenly believe a designer's job is easy, and quite frankly it's not... it's torture. Reading your blog post, I was happy to see you came to the same conclusion. :) People see a clean and simple design and say, "that's easy, I can do that!" but fail to realize the amount of work and iterations that it took to get to that point. Visual harmony requires balance, and there's a reason why few companies can reproduce Apple's simplistic product design. It's NOT easy.

Designers live in a perpetual cycle of NEVER being satisfied because we tend to be obsessive-compulsive. I'm glad you got to experience this, but now I think you should put down the mouse, get back to hacking, and let a professional handle the job. :)
Good point, but you're still not 100% right because FBI for example requires its agents to have a pretty good vision (http://www.fbijobs.gov/1113.asp#2).
> BoingBoing is doing the same thing, from what I can tell, with its idiotic disemvowelling.

Apparently I didn't do a good enough job obscuring the identity of the group blog and moderator I was referencing... ;-)
No, you have it completely backwards. That was the problem with their old UI's. They were built by developers for developers with minimal thought towards everyday users. This was the first major shift away from that and it seems to have worked. It took into account how people used Office and is the result of countless focus groups and studies. As I said earlier, it takes a while to grok it, but once you do, there really is no going back.

My wife is an excellent example of a non-tech user. I surreptitiously installed Office 2007 on her computer when I upgraded her HD and reinstalled Windows. She hated it at first because it was different than what she was used to (Office XP). She hates change as most people do. But as she used it, she got used to the new UI and now has said she loves it and wishes more of her programs worked that way.

I hate to sound like a Microsoft homer, but seriously, the ribbon UI is one of the more innovative and fresh ideas to come out of Redmond lately.
A bit offtopic maybe, but there's a nice short story from Stephen King about this time perception phenomena.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Pretty_Pony
Plus, the number of milestones and changes that occur when you are younger are much greater then when you are older, and those changes are more novel. You have your first word, your first step, your first day of school, the first time you learn to ride a bike, the whole puberty thing. There is a huge number of changes occurring that you have never experienced before.
Plus you have the anticipation of all that is to come, and when you are focused wanting something to be here, it feels like it takes much longer to arrive.

As an adult, I often have days when I become so involved in what I am doing that I lose track of time, poof all of a sudden the day is over. The only time I can remember that happening when I was younger was when I was either reading or playing video games.
There are people who are gateways for particular sites. This is both good and bad. Perhaps a gateway user's should get special skeptical handling in the code, but some gateway users bring good content.
McDonalds: From YouTube Video to PR Crisis in less than 5 days...
The article linked is from the authors of Made to Stick. They have an updated edition out. I'm guessing it won't have a section on Dominos Pizza or Susan Boyle though.
VMware unveils its cloud OS
The issue with Wall Street overcompensation has more to do with what has happened to nearly every other profession in the past 3 decades: utter fucking meltdown. Academia: the job market for PhDs is so terrible as to constitute a glaring and likely mortal embarrassment to the profession. Law: big-firm ("biglaw") attorneys now face a single-digit percent chance of making partnership, but are still expected to work hours that would be reasonable only if eventual partnership were guaranteed. Medicine: doctors' standards of living are being continually eroded by the scumbag bureaucrats who staff the health insurance companies. Manufacturing: in the Midwest, the recession began in 1980 and hasn't stopped yet. Infrastructure: falling apart due to low investment. At the same time, housing costs, medical bills, and tuitions have skyrocketed while commodities like food and gas have been more expensive. Enough numerical gymnastics are employed to make inflation appear low (and, thus, real GDP growth seem high) but if the numbers were accurately reflected, inflation would be closer to 5-7% and real GDP growth would be flat or slightly negative; the entire 2000s decade would appear to be a recession, which is what it has been for most Americans. What changed in 2008, for most Americans, is that the rich fell down too, and quite visibly; thus, people became less embarrassed to talk about it. It's no longer an admission of personal failure to talk about how bad things are.

The result is an economy that shows a lack of pluralism: finance dominates, all other professions suffer. Most Americans don't understand the complexities of the situation and liken Wall Street to a cancer responsible for the atrophy of the real economy.

I don't want to see finance get destroyed, but a return to a pluralistic economy where people assume roles appropriate to their abilities and behaviors. The perverse irony here is that capital markets are supposed to efficiently allocate resources, yet the era of the market-state has utterly misallocated the nation's talent, strangling academia while directing a disproportionate share of talented people to finance, one of the industries in which they're least useful.
Nice writeup. Should have mentioned hbase as well.
NSA wiretap leak against aMember of Congress
We've got a million dollars and we want to buy your micro ISV
Is Java as we know it doomed?
Ask HN: What would you want to see in a new programming language?
Wait, so it would be unethical for a human to bring a Neanderthal child to term, but if we cram it into a monkey, suddenly it's hunky dorey?
"In 2006, a study of nearly 3,000 nurses with breast cancer found that women without close friends were four times as likely to die from the disease as women with 10 or more friends."

You could always argue that there was a common cause to both the lack of friends and the lack of survival. Perhaps you'd call it a 'life force' until you worked out the details. Perhaps there is a gene that manifests as both solitude seeking and reduced survival options.

Whatever the case I think a lot of people would prefer articles like this to at least mention that there are other possibilities rather than spending time on fluffy and frankly uninteresting anecdotes.
Oracle stares into Sun for storage future. Just what is Oracle's business now?
Sorry if I ranted but I went on for "over 6 sentences" because I am sensitive to this cliche of investors/speculators as nonproductive blood suckers. It was one of the images that was used in a certain historical catastrophe where I live (Germany). It's also a very popular image today, risking throwing the baby (capitalism) out with the bathwater (corruption, greed, ...).

Regarding 2, I also like the quote. But the article misquotes it by leaving out the crucial part: independent valuation, based on economic fundamentals. I think you overestimate people's "implicit judgement". Many if not most people buy because the price recently went up, and vice versa, without reference to fundamentals or doing their homework. Leaving out the valuation part makes it read as if Klarman was simply inverting the trend-followers. But not so, the point was doing independent research and acting only when price deviates sufficiently far from one's own judgment.
A designer job is infinitely hard to do and I learnt it from our various tries to get something good looking. Maybe I have a dream of being a good designer and that's why I can't delegate it ;)

On your side, what do you do to have a good design?
You must mean headsethotties.com
Hey, metajokes ought to have all the same rights as jokes, even if they were born of a chimp!
Someone at Adobe has a sense of humour
SEO Traffic Spider | Ways To Build Your Backlinks | Successful Methods To Build Backlinks
The purpose of having backlinks as an element of page rank algorithm is that people will want to link to pages that have quality content. The more the number of backlinks a site has, the better it is.
They should fear Anatel. The US Navy has no authority here.
Online Marketing Lessons From the Obama Campaign's Technology Guru
I've always thought it to be the exact opposite. Experience for a child is intermingled because children can often only perceive one plot-line. I remember that, when I was 5, I would watch reruns of various TV shows and think that prior episodes had been taken apart and combined. In fact, they hadn't been, but in my mind the 2 or 3 plots in each episode were stored as separate entities.

When you're older, you're more able to process concurrency and your sense of self is more compartmentalized. You have a work-line consisting of your career and job life, a family-line, a vacation-line that emerges when one travels and is otherwise ignored, and probably several friends-lines (college friends, work friends, friends of the families) corresponding to various distinct social groups. Each plot-line is allocated only a fraction of the time given to the single plot-line a young child has, and thus each progresses much slower per year.

For a child, a year is an eternity. For an adult, it can be very short, because many plot-lines advance very little in this time. If you have a vacation spot you visit every year, every time you go you are bringing up year-old memories that seem as if they occurred yesterday, so time seems to be going extremely fast.
WSJ.com editor on when to charge for content
That isn't really a "privacy" concern.

The block is most likely based on the referer header. Probably if you redirect from some other domain it will work.
What copyright holders don't get about consumers and BitTorrent
How ironic, I've lived a long time in Germany. Didn't expect a pure pro-market comment to come from there, which doesn't mean that there is anything wrong with a pro-market view (just to clarify). The historical context is interesting; in other countries speculators are pursued often with more vigor.

Even more ironic, that after the downer the Chicago school of thought (Economics) received in 2008, the President's economic and intellectual team is, well, from Chicago.
So Oracle owns VirtualBox?
Palmone Treo 700wx Verizon CDMA AT Cellhut.com
Palmone Treo 700wx is the novel with newest publication of the business by such valuable skin texture and good-looking gaze. The chief skin texture of the handset is Processor. Intel XScale™ 312MHz, 128MB, 60MB nonvolatile reminiscence accessible toward customer, and 1.3 megapixels by 2x digital zoom and videotape detain carry, habitual beam steadiness to incarcerate your images.
I think democracy is a means to preserve good government/stability. A means to guarantee sanity.

With a perfectly functioning authoritarian government there's always the danger of it going to hell. A good king replaced by bad king, or what ever. With no checks and balances there's no guarantee things won't go crazy.

And obviously authoritarian governments are almost never good, because they are by definition not accountable.

But a functioning democracy, which functioning institutions and laws above individuals, that's a difficult system to achieve. In a very troubled part of the world, democracy is not something that just naturally wins over armed strong men.
Believe if I say the Brazilians who are doing this are not "impoverished". They just found a freebie and many of them don't even know they shouldn't do it.

As for the military implications, I don't know why the hell those birds were not DoS'ed before. If a couple clever civilians figured that out, I can't believe no bad guy ever tried that.

How effective a DoS on those satellites would be on denying US-Navy fleetwide communications?

Actually, I assume badguys are already using those satellites for short bursts of encrypted data that looks an awful lot like navy traffic sent via very narrow beams the satellite (and ground people) have no hope of finding where it came from.

Perhaps, instead of cracking down, the Navy should call the NSA and listen more carefully to what is being transmitted.
Every designer has his own process: some prefer to sketch first, some use photoshop as their sketch tool. When people watch me use Photoshop, it's very much akin to hacking because I've got all the keyboard shortcuts memorized like the back of my hand. That being said, I tend to start with PS because I'm faster and it's more eco friendly.

If you really want to be a designer, then you need to teach yourself the basics. Photoshop suffers from being too accessible, so a lot of amateurs tend to ignore the basic universal rules of design. For starters, learn the basics of grid design, information architecture, and typography. There are a lot of great books on Amazon, but you should be able to get a strong grasp of the basics just by googling:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/03/26/grid-based-design...

http://vandelaydesign.com/blog/design/resources-grid-based-d...

Here's another link that went around Twitter, a lot of simple things (but not obvious to a developer) I think you can apply to ss5u.png such as proper white space / padding, etc..

http://wefunction.com/2009/04/quality-within-web-design/

Like all crafts, you can't expect to be a design god overnight... it takes practice, studying other's work, reading, etc. I think it's admirable that you are learning to design, and if you really love it — keep doing it!!! But from a professional standpoint and as a business owner, don't practice on your company until you're absolutely confident you're up to snuff. If you were B2B product, I think design can be a much lower priority to an extent.
On bad reviews and customers and Ego
These images are not extraordinary, and it certainly is NOT "digital Escher". There are thousands of good artists, including the guy who does the perspective chalk drawings on sidewalks. What makes this informative or insightful, and not merely trivially amusing?

And that mattress should be floating in the water, not daintily sitting above it as if surface tension was keeping it up.
Obviously, we'd have to consult an Unfrozen Caveman Constitutional Lawyer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfrozen_Caveman_Lawyer
America's Newest Profession
How to Fix the Uncommunicative Table
Great news! What an inspiration.
Back when I first started programming, a peer highly recommended to me to take a martial art. It didn't matter which one - the only requirement was that it had to require discipline and focus.
Training in a martial art is a wonderful way to induce "flow" - get distracted during a sparring session, and the consequences can "hurt" a bit more than just time wasted.
Cheaper virtualization becoming a reality
> this led to the United States strongly favoring universal education.

I'm all in favor of folks getting as much education as they want.

I question, though, whether the current system of universal education is really doing all that much educating, or whether it's mostly a jobs program for unionized teachers.
> Is there another accepted way of delivering notifications that I'm not thinking of?

Yes. Designing your software so that it minimizes the need for such notifications. E.g. Dropbox has not once shown me a popup yet it does some very critical file sync operations. Every other app I used before Dropbox kept annoying me with "do you REALLY want to sync this file even though the source is older?" Dropbox silently and smartly handles this (by keeping both copies of the file and naming them accordingly).
Why is this voted down? The link is a bunch of pretty pictures. Tutorials would have made it useful and informative.
I really don't what is wrong with a Digg bait title. Every writer should know that a good title is a good style of writing an article, right? Correct me if I am wrong since my writing really sucks.
The Times Reports Quarterly Loss of $74 Million
I really made an effort to get used to UAC. The concept is good, but in the end I just got so sick of the pointless pop-up dialogs that I had to turn it off. None of my Windows installations has had a malware infection anyway going back to 1994, so I don't think UAC was doing much for me.
The answer to this question depends on how you define OOP and FP. I think the answer is "sort of".

The problem with OOP is that it encourages the proliferation of mutable state. If each object has mutable state, then a large object-oriented program has distributed mutable state, potentially in hundreds of different silos. Problems like concurrency become impossible to reason about.

FP encourages the careful sequestration of mutable state. It's false to say that FP outlaws it entirely, since it's hard to do anything useful without side effects. However, functional style limits and sequesters mutable state to such a degree that it's usually easy to reason about what side effects are happening.
Arizona surges ahead with new $1B solar plant
It's also worth noting that you're not wasting your time.

When a designer and developer are working TOGETHER (ie: they understand each other), it's clockwork. You're learning how he thinks, and it will only make you both a better developer and product manager.
Being a relatively new community, Stack Overflow has been wrestling with these issues for some time. Most recently, Michael Pryor [1] posted a topic [2] questioning the need for closing questions, which, ironically, has been closed 7 times [3], and generated a lengthy (but otherwise well-mannered) discussion with some people on both sides of the isle and many others in between, culminating in a blog post [4] about what constitutes an acceptable question.

Historically, my position has been similar to the unofficial policy here at Hacker News, in that topics/questions should be allowed if they interest/concern hackers/programmers, even though they may not specifically be about hacking/programming. However, recently I've come to see that, if left unchecked, generic discussion questions will overrun Stack Overflow simply because they appeal to the greatest common denominator of the audience, and therefore garner the most attention.

The closing system on Stack Overflow works quite well as that limited check. By providing guidelines for acceptable questions and a mechanism for closing those that aren't, Stack Overflow provides the means to keep it's garden (to borrow a metaphor from the article). However, by having the community, as opposed to appointed moderators, keep the garden, it means that fun, insightful, or otherwise constructive yet off-topic questions can remain in a limited capacity, so long as those that want to keep them outnumber those that want to remove them.

1: Cofounder of Fog Creek. Partner of Joel Spolsky, cofounder of Stack Overflow.

2: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/756650/why-do-people-clos...

3: On Stack Overflow, users with a certain reputation score can vote to close a question. A question is closed when it reaches 5 close votes. The one exception is that starred moderators can immediately close or open a question. Once closed, the same mechanism is used to open a question back up.

4: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/04/the-stack-overflow-que...
conflicker?