skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would say that non-flat design isn't for "aiming the eyes" - drop shadows, bevels, and gradients help things to stand out and communicate affordance in a way that's immediately compatible with the human visual cortex. Flat design is a constrained form - it's like saying you'll paint a painting with only two colours, or write a song with only two notes.

Keep in mind that your visual cortex responds more to difference in colours and spatial frequencies more so than it does to flat expanses of colour. Things like drop shadows and borders add much-needed high-frequency acutance [1] at the edges of shapes, which helps with object recognition.

You see this all the time in the real world - take a look at the logo on these cans [2] and note the white border surrounded by the black border. Going from the base colour like this, all the way to white and then back to black effectively saturates the spatial frequencies at the edge of the shape and forces it to stand out from the background - I'm holding one of these cans in my hand right now and boy oh boy does that logo ever pop.

You see the similar techniques around all the time - look at the text labels on Google Maps, or the black borders around video subtitles. Similarly, see the gradient and drop shadows on the icons on an iPhone home screen - those are there to make them visually recognisable as objects, as opposed to rounded rectangles.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acutance

[2] http://i.imgur.com/WWRDsiE.jpg

Edit: further demonstrations of your visual cortex responding to differentials:

TEMPORAL: http://imgur.com/iqMFv5z.gif

If you stare at the center cross long enough, your retina fatigues and the pink dots start to disappear. Likewise, the rotating absence of a dot is replaced by green.

SPATIAL: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/HermannGr...

The sharp spatial frequencies (unlike anything you would find in nature), aligned at right angles to one another interfere with one another so strongly that you start to see dots at the grid intersections (some may find this stronger than others, I sometimes get this effect from the Windows 8 homescreen, for chrissakes).
> ...because they think he gave secret information to a nonprofit.

That it is a non-profit is hardly meaningful. It's still a competitor, a competitor that seeks surplus revenues. It doesn't make the lawsuit any more or less valid.

> What more do I need to know?

How about the facts of the case rather than the surface-level circumstances? That's probably a start. I'm not saying Opera is in the right for this, but I think it's a bit premature to start casting heroes and villains in this particular narrative.
>Not really.

Mind explaining a bit more? If I buy a Samsung Galaxy S4 and the lock screen wouldn't let me in because of a bug in Android, Samsung is still responsible.

>Vendor lock in still applies.

Again, how exactly would that be, if I am say using Ubuntu and Mysql+PHP on a Azure?
To the last point:
Mozilla not being involved directly in public is not surprising (unless you hold Mozilla to a higher standard, which some folks do).

It's pretty typical that what happens is the corporation gives some initial advice, and tries to find you good counsel.
They basically have to get out, because the corporate employment lawyer does not work for the employee, and there is usually a clear conflict of interest between representing both employee and corporation interests at the same time.

Since Mozilla was not sued here, Mozilla may pay for his defense (depending on factors), but direct intervention usually does not happen.

The rest goes to your "public opinion" element.
Mozilla may publicly support him, of course, but in most cases, associating yourself with a lawsuit is often lose lose, even in cases where it appears to be defending a good guy (Imagine if today they support him, and tomorrow it turns out he was lying).

They may just be hoping their name doesn't get dragged through the mud here. I haven't seen any public release from Opera accusing Mozilla of bad behavior, but if Mozilla comes out and says something very supportive, Opera may just do that. My guess is staying out of it publicly seems the best way to accomplish that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casper_(cat) Heres a similar ca story thats not anecdotal.

I'm not at all surprised by the story growing up with working dogs on a rural farm. Dogs would constantly surprise you with the understanding of the world around them, often better than people you would work along side. One dog we had knew the locations of buildings by name, and you could tell it the speed to get there and wait for you (I think via the urgency in your voice). You could say "met at the house" and it would turn and head straight back to home, or "go to the kennels", it'd shoot off and wait for there etc.. (Collies BTW, various other breeds we had struggled with simple things like avoiding running head first into barns if you called their name out loud while they ran LOL).

Whats more fascinating to me is this Boing Boing piece on baboons raising pet dogs http://boingboing.net/2013/04/26/baboons-raise-pet-dogs.html
I can't speak for Australia, but I know that both are true for US pose markets. Power is a big part of what's sold, but there are many other markets too. Black start services, generation capacity, and frequency regulation, just to name a few.

Part of the key to serving electrical demand is having a balanced mix of generation to serve your load. Some units are better running flat out, some are better for brief periods at peak demand, and some are good at quickly taking up the slack if another unit fails. Different power markets exist within the same geographical footprint to ensure that all these types of needs (and more) are met. (24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and into the foreseeable future.)
What do you mean a primary concept?
That's just it. It does keep the history accurate, if you're literally just trying to grab updates from upstream. Unless you're actually working on, or merging, a separate branch then normally rebase is what you want.
Of course, that's absolutely correct. But that's the minority use case, at least in my experience. Git's default is set up that way because of how the Linux kernel maintainers work, which isn't how most organizations who use git work.

Even though git is distributed, most orgs have a central repo that they use as the source of truth. When contributors pull from this central repo, IMO they should be rebasing, not merging. When the maintainer pulls from other people, yes, he should of course be merging.

The merge commit that a contributor implicitly creates when they resync with upstream (without rebasing) is ugly and confusing. It provides no useful information and only serves to clutter the project's history, not make it clearer.
Let me know if you'd like TokBox at your next hackathon.
song at tokbox

http://tokbox.com
To me, it seems that question is answered pretty clearly in the "What" on their homepage:

A 3-month hands-on accelerator designed to help entrepreneurs from around the globe build healthy businesses.

(with "build healthy businesses" in bold)
Do you lift?
I'm entirely unfamiliar with the usage displayed by examples 7 onward. In fact they seem to have lost something essential in the meaning of slash, since they seem to be introducing mere afterthoughts instead of actual alternatives for the preceding. Fascinating.
Opera is definitely "evil" these days.
Don't be a shithead. Good advice to remember at any time. Smart people often mistake showing their smarts with being a shithead. The very smartest ones grow out of it.
> The simplest justification there is: they think they're right. Is it so hard to conceive?

Actually, yes. Even if morally, then certainly not pragmatically.

> And until this thing goes to court, everybody should abstain from passing judgment on either party.

That doesn't make sense. Most suits settle out of court, after all. Should we wait to pass judgment every time a patent troll carpet bombs small businesses?
> Interaction without doing the wireframing.

I think many are quite surprised about what professional IxDs do, design isn't all about pretty visuals. Wire frames, story boards, specifications...

> The thing is, as a creative individual, I don't pigeonhole myself as a "developer" or a "designer."

There is a lot of diversity in design, so pigeonholing isn't quite useful. Many people specialize vertically (development and design within a narrower product space). But I also don't think being a generalist is a good answer, as the practice/experience element is important and so shouldn't be diluted too much.
I'd also recommend this course. I didn't take it too seriously, but I did learn a few things from it and it was worth the amount of effort I put into it. For sure.
Try keeping up with the latest tools in design. Its not like designers don't have a technical component also (e.g. Illustrator for visual work).
Most sites these days are inoperable without JS.
Siri was an empty vessel into which we poured our hopes and dreams for more personable computing. Too bad it turned out to be a flaky frontend for Wolfram Alpha.
You are not doing them any favors, first by not disclosing your employment at Google and second by what you said.

If I were Larry Page or Ballmer or...I'd force every employee to declare "Disclosure: I work for [Company,] but the opinions are mine"
Well, I think "passion" or something in that direction makes a big difference.

I can tell that programming is my forte because when the going gets tough, sometimes solving a problem but most often when debugging, I have the drive as the first commentator put it to slog through it.

And while I'm pretty good at system building and administration, when there's a messy bug to be found because something's not working there are few things I'd rather less do, solving it draws on my willpower in a way that's just not even comparable in programming. Even the hardest, takes weeks to find disjoint in time wild pointer bugs (well, weeks back in the days where I had to get my company to procure debugging hardware because the 808x family didn't have it built in).
You think of young people as a fresher version of ourselves. Young
people don't know anything.
-- Don Draper
I wish on ios I could pick a theme and stay with it. I dislike how every page is white and every other black with no rhyme or reason. At night the white screens are especially blinding even at lowest brightness. Sometimes negative works, but not when screens are half-white, half-black as is the trend lately.

Sigh... I miss the days of Windows 95? when I chose a theme and all apps had to follow it.
Game Dev Tycoon developers give pirates a taste of their own medicine
At the Prototype reactor site I qualified on there was a pretty impressive tale of a student who managed to try to bring a turbogenerator onto the electrical distribution system approximately 180 degrees out-of-phase.

The resultant current surge generated enough force and torque to physically lift the turbogenerator off of the deck before the breaker tripped. The amazing thing is that somehow the steam piping didn't rupture in the process.

Next year the aptly-named "sync check" modification was installed to prevent shutting the circuit breaker unless the two buses had approximately equal phase.
typo in the redacted version.
slightly off topic, but there are a number of people who'd be inclined to say that very few observations, if any at all, are objective.
> Alternative social networks such as Instagram, the photo sharing site that won 30m users in 18 months before Facebook acquired the business a year ago, have seen surges in popularity with younger age groups.

I don't think losing users to Instagram in particular should bother Facebook, since they bought it a year ago.
Tight-Knit Javascript Animations: Exploring the GreenSock Animation Platform
The best way I know to "check" radiometric ages is to date a rock using more than one isotopic system (e.g. K-Ar and U-Pb) and compare the ages that you get. If you get the same age from isotope systems with different decay rates and systematics, that is strong evidence that your technique is working.

People have done this many times, and most of the error comes from different levels of uncertainty in the decay constants from one system to another. Many of the decay constants have not been updated for decades (e.g. Steiger and Jager 1977) and are suspected to be a few percent off, but the people who are qualified to make such measurements (physicists + chemists) aren't the people who want to use them in applications (geochronologists and geochemists). So the incentives aren't aligned and I doubt anyone will ever fix them.

Note: Was a geology/geophysics PhD student until recently.
That written offer must accompany the physical product. Google did not do this as far as I know. I mean, if we are going to be technical about this, the GPL states that even if you distribute the code via a "network server", you still must provide, accompanying the physical product, a "written offer" (it's the same clause) to give the user said code via that path.

Really, all doe88's point was is that when Google sold this thing, they were already on the hook for this: he didn't even mention the "Internet" (your technicality), he just said "release", and providing a written offer in the box would have satisfied that. I don't even think doe88 was aggravated at Google: he seemed to just be pointing out that this isn't really news.
Command shell, GUI, it's all software. If you have an x86 machine without an operating system on it, is it a computer?

Is an iOS device not a computer because it doesn't have a CLI?

What about a hypothetical computer that uses your brain as input - would that have a CLI? CLI/GUI/etc is irrelevant to the definition of computer.

Unless you're just being a pedantic troll, in which case kudos :)
One of the most important parts about an undergraduate degree is that it's a foundation for knowledge, not narrowly focused on one particular topic. That's why gen-eds exist.

Anyway, had I received this question on a test, I would have started with a discussion of the command line and how powerful it is (i.e. the "ugly") and compare/contrast it with UIs (i.e. the "beautiful"; start with Win 95 and continue on to Win 7/8, Mac OSX, etc).

I'd throw in references to Spolsky's famous adage about "all abstractions are leaky" - i.e. you could discuss how UIs are beautiful, yet the command line (ugly) is where the power exists. There's at least 2-3 pages of content in that alone.

I'd end with how UIs brought the power of computing to the common man - learning to use the command line is difficult (esp for the elderly, the young, the mentally-challenged), but pasting a UI on top allows even the most computer-illiterate to work. Add in some discussion on the desktop metaphor and you're done.
IllumiRoom
Why is this suddenly sliding off the front page?
Sad how even after a rumor has been denied and discredited it's still repeated ad nauseam in linkbaited titled "articles".

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/04/29/socialbakers-denies...
Permanent magnet excitation is a possible way to generate the required field flux for a generator, but it's not a reliable way.

If the permanent magnetic field isn't strong enough you can't even generate enough voltage to power-up the excitation circuit at all, and that's the circuit which would feed the current back in.

So whether this is feasible or not depends on the generator design.
It's interesting that you consider YouTube a positive example. During their flat transition they seem to have thrown out many features that I consider important for the platform. As an example, I lately can't figure out anymore how to jump from a video to 'more from this user'. They splat their semi useful recommendation everywhere instead.
C#, .Net ASP, Visual Studio, and Azure are all very good development products. I know, because I tried them myself. Or ask the Stack Overflow guys. It's called thinking for yourself. As for your appeal to the recieved wisdom that everything MS does must suck because Graham said so, let me point out that their monopoly gives them very little advantage when it comes to catering to developers. No one has to use their servers, languages, DBs, etc. So they have to do a good job.
SST is not designed for orbital flights, nor will it used for that, so I don't know how it's that relevant to talk about how much close it is to orbital speeds.
What are you looking for? Pretty much anywhere between the presidio neighborhood in sf all the way down the peninsula to say Cupertino/Sunnyvale will be good, depending on what you want.

BART stops running about 12:30 AM and caltrain stops around 9, so unless you plan to work normal hours, plan on needing a car or a bike to get to and from the office. Commuting in a car is not fun, because traffic can be pretty bad.
Open Source vs Open Standards are two very different positions
Tokbox has the coolest swag. Save me one of those glowing bracelets Song ;) Yuri
>Gallup question wording: “Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to ten at the top. Suppose we say that the top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you, and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time, assuming that the higher the step the better you feel about your life, and the lower the step the worse you feel about it? Which step comes closest to the way you feel?”

This doesn't seem to me like a good measure of well-being, but rather a measure of how well people can tell what their income is relative to their peers.

If I see much richer people than myself all the time I'll assume I'm halfway down the ladder. That doesn't mean I'm actually unhappy, just that when I look around, I think I could probably be happier.
OK. I think Jeff narrowly misses an opportunity here to kick off some badly needed navel gazing in the software development community -- some perspective that would really help the people that are unsure about their future in software development.

Let's say there are roughly two classes of software development: there's development for development's sake, and there's programming to get things done.

The first class is where software libraries are written and big applications and architectures are developed. It's the one that really requires passion and big heaping piles of experience, so that you can judge the right way to solve particular problems (and anticipate other problems). This class lives in abstraction. If someone has never written a single line of code before college, I wouldn't encourage them to shoot for this class.

The second class is this huge under-served market that the leaders of the software development community seem to rarely acknowledge. I'm sometimes not even sure they know it exists. It's the market where programming is merely a skill that someone brings to their job. It's the market where retail stores could have managers that can cobble together a script to help them iron out scheduling conflicts; where experimental scientists and engineers collect data and then write single-purpose applications to do useful stuff with the data; where even office receptionists can tweak a spreadsheet here and there to make some aspect of the job a little easier.

People that have some primary skill set and have programming as a skill are really valuable in almost any environment.

I've had a lot of different jobs, from government to really big corporations to really tiny mom-and-pops and just about everything in-between. Every single place I've worked could have benefited from someone there with a little bit of free time and some programming expertise.

If you get part way through a computer science major and decide you don't enjoy it, that's totally OK. Go and find the thing that you really do love, and go do that thing, and bring your programming education with you. You don't have to be a good programmer there, you just have to be able to understand another industry well enough to see where it can benefit from having a few things automated here and there.
I'm in a similar boat. I have a few things like that where I think the best thing for it would be to get it where to the point where a bunch of people would fork it and make their own cool things.

I don't want to be in business, I want to make cool stuff.
As mentioned, i've disclosed my affiliation numerous times in these types of discussions, and it's certainly not hidden anywhere. I'm not writing public blog posts or articles, so i feel no urge to start and end every hacker news comment with "I work for Google". In fact, when I did, i'll point out someone said it wasn't relevant!

As for the rest, honestly, that just tells me I wouldn't want to work for you.
If you don't believe your employees can have a reasonable discussion about the actual requirements vs perceived requirements of an open source license, that would be a sucky workplace, and it would make you a less desirable employer

The same is true if you can't have a discussion about random esoteric areas of licensing without making assumptions about the views of an employer.

If you want to know what Google's views are, i'm happy to tell you, otherwise, the world would generally be a better place if people would stop having to add disclaimers all over the place when having normal discussions (As a random aside, if you ever have the occasion to join a mailing list that has lawyers from multiple companies, about 95% of the text is disclaimers)
I disagree. At a competition like PennApps or Disrupt, your odds of winning anything are really small. Most people I know know this, and just go to have a good time.
I also had this job. I remember a professor calling me up to inquire as to how to pirate Microsoft Word, as he didn't want it to come out of his department's budget. (I believe it was a $20 charge or something.)

I referred him to my manager.
I've had that too, but when it eventually comes back (~10 seconds) I get about 100 repetitions of the last key I pressed. Mid-2009 MacBook pro.
Unfortunately its hard to get anything approved in this slow-moving world.

Internet has evolved to such a point where we should throw out the old plumbing we built it all on, and make what has proven to be the common use cases. "place food subway" and "person mary jones text" seem like more logical ways to map the human brain onto the internet hive mind. the internet should have a built-in drop down menu search for all the things you might select from any type of data categorized as humans would
Noted for post-apocalypse.
If you're going to rebase every pull, you may as well just use SVN.
Using Coroutines In Protocol Simulations
You are thinking of GPLv3, not GPLv2, when you speak of the network server distribution. :)
http://mulan.sourceforge.net/
> it would probably be kind of cool to get money to help ladies achieve orgasms

Yeah, that's not what most male prostitutes do. Can you think of any other demographics that might demand male sexual services?
Thanks!

Strange -- the storm is both larger and smaller than I would have expected.
It would be more interesting if someone wrote something like this for standard jQuery-compatible syntax. jQuery code in, compiled selectors out. And it's just standard javascript, so no learning curve to learn or anything.
That looks nice; in particular `hg fold` solves the "messy local, clean remote" problem nicely.
Wil Wheaton - Why it's awesome to be a nerd
I don't have Firefox on this computer, so I can't check on that, but you're definitely wrong about Chrome. If you click Edit blocking options and uncheck a tracker, it unblocks it globally.

I wasn't sure of this last night when I wrote the comment, but I just tried it out with Google Analytics (since it's pretty ubiquitous), and it wasn't only unblocked on that domain.
I feel like this is a more sufficient explanation than the one provided by the author. The front-end people at wikipedia probably remember the hoops they jumped through to work within IE5's quirks, and developed best practices that still happen to work out in that context.