skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with you that the title of the post is a clinging to the trend and keywords of the day, but the message is (dare I say?) a proper one. Design is not (just) trendy fashion ornamentation. At its root, it should be about clear communication. I think the OP, while relating this message to "flat design", is correct in his description of approaching design from the content outwards and only adding embellishments to the content-being-designed as needed to further enhance the clarity of understanding that content.

What I took away from this was that one should be careful with the visual elements one adds, and stop to think about how those additions are helping the primary goal of communicating ideas (this may take the form of reading words, feeling excited about a product, awareness of a brand, or usability of a UI).

I like his example of the screenshots framed by Apple devices (as I've seen on so many websites). Is the goal to communicate that you make Apple devices or that you make content that could work on that type of device? In this case I think (e.g., if this was for a business portfolio showing screenshots of software UIs to potential clients) the goal is more about showcasing the work not the devices; and the more minimalist "flat design" for those device frames would seem more appropriate in communicating the simple idea that "our stuff works on mobile devices".

I think many designers need to keep the OP's points in mind and consider, step by step, why what they're adding to the content in the form of design elements is helping rather than distracting. Do you really need a drop shadow on that image? Does it help make the content's point clearer to make your button look like it's made out of leather? Is that script font you chose for your headings making it easier to read what you're saying? I think these are the sorts of questions the OP wants designers to consider, and I think his points are good to keep in mind.
Have you discussed your reservations with cperciva (the guy behind Tarsnap)? I'm sure he'd be happy to address them if you just ask.
Agreed. Even if only one of you wants to stay at home for some period, your household income is now halved, with an extra mouth to feed.
Does anyone know if this degree will count as masters in front of USA immigration department? The only reason I see for getting the masters degree is getting into the EB2 bracket for green card.
"world libertarianism" isn't 60s sci-fi?
Should int be an abstract class?

Actually, in my recent C I've taken to wrapping most ints in one-member structs, so the compiler will catch it when I pass a foo id where I meant to pass a quantity...
The Art of Finding Anyone’s Email Addresses
Haven't thought of that tbh. I only have a single reservation that I mentioned in my above post. Not to put any words in his mouth, but I'm not sure there can be a solution to it given his current architecture of the system. It is inherently a multi-tenant SaaS backup service...
Syntactic Ngrams over Time
Fuck censorship. Depictions of violence are not violence.

Movies, porn, video games. Do they encourage shooting people in the head? Not in real life.
New Computer Attacks Traced to Iran, Officials Say
Not to mention the fact that most people in China don't have Internet access of any kind.
"Second, there's no "line-break", much less it is "his". Get a larger monitor/device or enlarge the browser window. If you're seeing one, it's a hyphenation added by the slideshow service's CSS for widths under some size. Definitely not there for everybody, and definitely not "his"."

Nice try. How much wider than 2560px would you suggest my browser window be?

And the service, such as it is, allows you to insert line breaks into text.
Risk Management for Developers
Developer of Apple-banned Endgame: Syria takes on the Drug War in NarcoGuerra
You have to realize that European college education is heavily subsidized for their citizens. If a student from a developing country comes to Europe to study, they'll have to pay the full prize, which often comes down to €10,000+/year.
Mail: How Do I Switch To A Career In Software?
US tech, labor spar on immigration as Bill Gates, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg
Writing language-agnostic code is an incredible dangerous idea, since, of course, it is completely impossible. What does "->" mean in Ruby?
The article picks a curious line to end on:

"You know you have free will, but don’t feel like you need it."

Which is odd, considering that the protagonist of the tale has done nothing but make choices throughout the whole story.
>Whilst I broadly agree with the thrust of the article I do wince when I see statements like "once-in-a-century genius." applied to Steve Jobs.

Well, in business issues he IS a "once-in-a-century-genius".

He bootstrapped 4 companies. Apple (which he built from nothing), NeXT (which he build for a pittance and sold for 400 million), Pixar, and Apple v2 (which he built up from near bankruptcy to total dominance).

Even just taking a company from near bankruptcy to the highest ever profits and cash held in the history of enterprise in a decade, would be enough. But he also changed (and owned) 3-4 market segments (mp3 player, music downloads, app stores and tablets. And having the profit of all other top 5 PC makers combined for it's computer lineup I'd count as "owning" that market too.

>I also cringe when I see "You are not Steve Jobs" etc. indeed I'm not nor would I want to be

Noticed how the statement was not targeted at you, but to people who DO believe they are like Steve Jobs and that mimic him?

For that crowd, the reminder "you are not Steve Jobs" is totally appropriate.

>It fascinates me how we continue to set the bar of leadership based on a man who judged by his actions was a borderline sociopath, I guess success by whatever measure truly does forgive all sins.

And it fascinates me how you don't see that leadership is all about success.

Would you have a cuddly, lovable by all, Army General in World War II that lost the war, or a cursing, bad-tempered sonofabitch that won it?

Plus, what other "sins"? Shouting at some engineers? Closing favorable deals? Insisting he gets components in time? Losing his temper at meetings? Yes, because not 100% of us do the same things and worse at times...

It's not like he had employees beheaded, tortured children in his basement or paid prostitutes to piss on him or something. He yelled at some people, fired others. IMHO, the worst thing he did was taking advantage of Woz. And that was like 35 years ago.

(I also find the BI article you linked to extremely grasping at straws. He once left the hotel he had booked a room in because he didn't like the room"? Sure, borderline psychopath behavior. And for a while he didn't want to acknowledge his daughter and pay child support, but he later made up. Yeah, that's Jeffrey Dahmer material...).
Read books. There is plenty of sci-fi that deals with exploring the intersection of computers and consciousness. Authors like Neal Stephenson, Charles Stross, and Vernor Vinge are well known in this area.

A great novel that came out recently about transhumanism is Nexus: transhumanism: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0857662937/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...
I'd love to see Accelerando the movie.
The author doesn't mention a lot of journalists will be replaced by robots too. He thinks the Internet was a great tidal wave for the profession... Just wait for the next auto summarization breakthroughs.
The Seasteading institute / Bioshock are quite recent alternative communities. 1960s libertarians were just anti-Stalinist.

The borg are definitely interesting, but they're portrayed as some machine like force. I mean why can't the crew of the Enterprise communicate with telepathic brain chips? Better way to transfer information.
You're right. I checked out his homepage and it seemed like the opposite of what he was saying in his post (irony). But I think he made some good points nonetheless. Not necessarily that "flat design" is good design, but that Design's goal should be to enhance the communication of the content and not distract from it.
Microsoft's Internal Attack Video Against Google Chrome Is 'Leaked'
Beautifully put. I too, see the ideological cost of patronizing Apple's closed system.

But there is another fee levied when the most popular set of devices in our country allows unlimited snooping of the people's data.
Europeans don't have to worry that much about prestige, since in most (Western) EU countries, the quality of education is mandated and upheld by the Department of Education.
The string is a stark data structure and everywhere it is passed there is much duplication of process. It is a perfect vehicle for hiding information. -- Allen J. Perlis
Yes, so Jobs only had "two-in-a-century". Or "twenty-in-a-century".

That's kind of a pedantic distinction, isn't it?
Key to Success, How to Profit: M, GNW, CLWR and GLW
Kiiy, The Robotic Friend, Brain & Body Engineering
So, actually I let acabal hoist himself by his own petard a bit. Dictatorship is the wrong choice of words for what I think he's describing and serves to obfuscate the manner in which decisions are actually made in creative projects.

There are a lot of places where having a centralized ultimate authority is very very very important, but in which individual autonomy is still preserved and let flourish. Newspapers are a good example. There's an editor who's in charge and they're in charge of the tone, direction and disposition of the sorts of things the paper is going to cover. They may even write for their own paper, but the sum of the paper is always going to be more than just what they've directly put in.

Nevertheless, it's really important that the editor sets priorities for the newsroom, and manages what everyone is aiming at.

Are there bad newspaper editors? Hell yes. Are there strategies to circumvent bad editors? Yes again. Is it sometimes easier just to find another job than deal with an editors bullshit? Yep again http://theadvocate.com/home/5922742-125/pulitzer-winners-lea...

Where software tends to differ from things like a newspaper hierarchy (or something like the police department from the Wire), is that it is okay to have discussions of efficacy and criticize a project's leadership (which tends to happen ALL THE FREAKING TIME).

And this is where it's relevant to discuss the way that designers prioritize and deflect criticism of their priorities (as i mentioned in reply to acabal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5767301 ).

Successful designers try to figure out what their usebase actually needs and in an priority order that makes sense to deliver them in. People complained bitterly that the iPhone didn't even have copy & paste which is a feature that didn't show up until iOS3. Didn't seem to hurt the iPhone's sales, though.

In that vein, i'm still entirely unsure as to whether Gnome is doing the wrong thing (particularly because i haven't seen anyone actually articulate what's wrong w/ Gnome3 in a meaningful way, and i have no idea who Gnome3's current actual userbase is, and who their intended userbase is).

What's the alternative? Well, there's a couple. Someone should articulate a reasonable case to the Gnome guys as to why their vision is wrong. If that doesn't work, fork the project and let the userbase decide on where the project should go.

If you decide you don't like centralized authority in creative endeavors, i guess you can try to invent some new method of project direction (or heck borrow Debian's i guess), but all of these endeavors have their tradeoffs. Debian moves slow, community forking is divisive, and trying to articulate why you are right and the Gnome guys are wrong is potentially futile.

-------------------------------------------------

I guess the tl;dr is this. Design and (organizational) politics are interlinked, but they're not the same thing. You can be good at design and bad at politics. You can be good at politics and bad at design. In the Gnome debate, it is unclear to me which side is good at either of these qualities.
CDs are polycarbonate and are sold for $20 for a spindle of 100. At a pretty good profit. "Bullet proof plastic" is just marketing buzzwords.

FWIIW, polycarbonate has to be quite thick to stop a bullet and is generally used in conjunction with glass. Looking at the chart[1], it is clear it will only stop relatively lower energy handgun bullets, not high power rifle bullets. For that, it requires a glass + plastic laminate.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletproof_glass
Yes, I've read all of those and I even posted about Nexus on my twitter https://twitter.com/gulakovuniverse/status/32785180278142566...

That's what I was referring to by more modern scifi ideas. Why aren't they included in the storylines of older yet more mainstream stories like Star Trek / Futurama / etc
Yeah, I'm not a fan of the slide-deck medium. Why couldn't this be a simple blog post page that I could scroll through quickly and easily if I wanted to refer to it? Slides are for secondary collateral in presentations, not communicating large chunks of text on the web.
"words always win"

Add seven to three then multiply the whole thing by twelve.

(7 + 3) * 12
Permalink Developing The Ruby PHP Node.js Cloud
مشاهدة مباراة بايرن ميونخ وبروسيا دورتموند
In my country it's 0 cost for the student.
Apparently the average cost the government pays per year per student is around ~3000 USD. Medical students cost our government ~7000 USD per year.

And as far as I know, professors are still very well paid, so I still fail to see why would the education in the US cost so much money.
Interesting. Tarsnap and rsync.net seem to alternate coverage on HN, and for the longest time I kept forgetting they were different, even though I had vague sense of confusion.

This one is Colin Percival's project.
Are you sure that not having a profile won't make you an NPC?
Game designer designs a game for 2,000 years from now, hides it in desert
Seconded. For example Stanisław Lems The Futurological Congress was written in 1970s and is quite refreshing read.
The post is mostly an opinion. And where it tries to bring analysis, it fails.

According to the author, gnome3 and unity are flawed. Well, many people like unity now. It's not that different from the other operating systems. And sure, there'll be people who won't like it too.

But if these are examples of design dictators screwing up things, what about the interfaces that existed before unity? They had a ton of issues too. And while I may not have had issues with them, unity is certainly easier for the non-technical crowd. And the rest of us know how it needs to be tweaked to our liking.

Nothing's wrong really.
Google Now's "Topics" Page Returns, Shows You How Much Google Knows About You
i guess they don't care about anything else as long as they can do their job
Sync is not backup. For backups you also need the ability to look back at the previous versions of your files. For example in your sync solution if a file gets corrupted, all copies of the file will also have the corrupted bytes sync'd. With a backup solution you'll be able to rollback to a previous non corrupted version.
What do you mean by unlimited access? Sure, there is only a limited amount of university places, but it does not matter what is your social situation or how much money you currently have - you can study law or medicine just the same as a rich guy, as long as you have good grades that allow you to get into the university in the first place. But if you did study hard and got good grades, any degree you could choose is 100% free.
Thread: Mathew taught me something
>Nice try. How much wider than 2560px would you suggest my browser window be?

Then get a browser that works, and do not assume that any artifact you see on your screen was put there by the original author.

>And the service, such as it is, allows you to insert line breaks into text.

Something which is beside the point. He did not insert any -- which you claimed he did. And it's not even there for us in other systems/browsers, period.
I'm sorry -- while content in this slide deck is mostly correct, the title and conclusion are all wrong.

What the content is describing is good design, particularly:

- The more variations in embellishment contrast you employ, the weaker the content becomes and more complex the document becomes.

- Embellishing content... to enhance context, to enhance contrast, to enhance clarity

However, the criticisms of "flat design" generally run along the lines of not providing enough affordance (is that a label or a button?) and not providing enough contrast/clarity (making all the elements on the page look the same, leading to confusion and lack of hierarchy, instead of sufficiently differentiating them through the use of color, depth, shadows, etc.).

The author then says that "visual interest" is an appropriate thing, but then says to use flat iPhone/iPad outlines, instead of photorealistic ones. Well, generally the photorealistic outline is going to look nicer, as long as your page isn't already too busy. It's a poorly chosen example.

The author is trying to define away "flat design" as "good design", but that simply isn't the case. Flat design is a very specific design trend that is not the same as good design -- it can be used well, or used badly. Good design is good design period, and flat design can sometimes be very bad design.
I would love to have something like the Backblaze client but working with Tarsnap as a backend: you install it and you forget about it. The sensible default configuration is good enough for average joe but you can tweak it if you want.
Truly paranoids are/will/should use Bitcoin or Litecoin. I don't get why pricing is USD$ only, it just seems that cryptocurrencies are perfect for this kind of service.
Following typical layout rules, there's a much easier way to get this conjunction without indents:

if(foo == bar

&& baz == qux

&& ! frob

&& whatever()

&& something) {
New Gmail Ads?
I think before we define a _new_ email standard, that there should be an email standard in the first place. So many clients treat email differently:

* quote levels increasing or not

* how to format the date of the previous message

* whether or not you attach the original files when replying

* how to format the headers signatures of the emails

* where attachments are, i.e. inline or as an extra

* read receipts

on and on.
It bears pointing out that the vast majority of changes to government have, historically, been brought about by violence. Only a vanishingly small minority of them have been effected through nonviolent political action.

(Once a society has achieved democracy, the equation may be different (and closer to what you are saying). However, only a small minority of human societies have achieved democracy.)

TL;DR: fuck it, print weapons
I would have trusted that more if the tarsnap client had source code available.
This is a dream come true. Where do I sign up?
+1.

I always hate it when I enter a party and the violent cacophony of five or even ten simultaneous conversations hits me at once. And even when I find a group of people I can stand, there's this awful noise all around. It would be pretty awesome if glass could not only find the people for me, but also actively filter everybody else, so I can talk in relative quiet.
Prediksi Skor Bayern Munchen vs Dortmund 26 Mei 2013
Prediksi Skor Bayern Munchen vs Dortmund 26 Mei 2013. Prediksi Bayern Munchen vs Dortmund. Prediksi Pertandingan Bayern Munchen vs Dortmund.
> Your correction amounts to saying "the problem is not crime, it's criminals" -- it's obvious and it's already conveyed in the original phrasing.

No, that is distinctly not what I am saying. My assertion is that centralized authority is important, and perhaps even necessary in creative endeavors.

Furthermore complaints about "bad" designers tend to actually amount to "i disagree with your design vision/priorities/choices, therefore you are bad". But disagreeing with someone's design choices does not mean that they are being a bad project leader.

Edit: having read over my original post, it's a bit muddled so i can see where you're coming from. If you read some of the other sibling posts, you'll get a clearer sense of what i mean.
d) all of the above?
This. (Except for the virtual worlds stuff.)

If what they're selling is online videos and someone to check your homework, $3,300/yr sounds kind of expensive.
The last line is the most important: if there is a backdoor (that is the Lawful Interception interface) there is no guarantee that it won't be used by unauthorized third parties.

Anyone could have predicted that something like the Google hack was going to happen. I also seem to remember that there was a similar incident involving the cellphone network in Greece.
5 Things I Learned Spending A Summer With A Billionaire Business Mogul
When someone controls (and/or biases) the information feed you base your decisions upon, your will is no longer completely free.

We used to call it news media ;-)
Well,

Storage:	300 picodollars / byte-month
($0.30 / GB-month)
Bandwidth:	300 picodollars / byte
($0.30 / GB)

right on the home page.
The first quote doesn't appear in the article Berman links to. And I can't find a reference to $6,600 anywhere else except in that non-existent quote.

Am I missing something? Did Berman pull that number out of thin air? Where did he get it?

---

Edit- Here [http://www.omscs.gatech.edu/faq/] they write:

"We’re not yet ready to announce a specific program cost, but the plan is to offer the Georgia Tech OMS CS for a total cost of under $7,000—a fraction of the cost of Georgia Tech’s on-campus program and even less than that of comparable private universities."

That FAQ has a lot more meat than the LinkedIn article...
> There's no difference at all but for any even mildly ambitious undergrad in a STEM field, physically attending a research university is an opportunity to get involved, however peripherally, in such research.

This is precisely the point. Our undergraduates go mostly up to Med School, and having a reaearch paper published is almost a requirement to get into any decent medical program.

Also, in an online course the interaction between is of a wholly different kind that a traditional brick-and mortar university. The social network that you build while at uni is part of why you go there in the first place.
I think you're too smart for your own good. All of this research sounds great, but the best solution is usually the simplest.

What you choose to focus on will make or break your business. The banking industry is a tough one to break into, so it's an uphill battle to begin with. What you think is a "natural" next step, is the furthest thing from it.

The fact that you are conducting research through a cousin's husband is a red flag. You need personal knowledge of the industry. You need to be balls deep in the banking industry before you try to cater to their needs.

Sell something you have an interest in and your enthusiasm will shine through, thus increasing your odds of success.
My (Terminal at that institution) masters was paid for completely, as well as being paid a salary. In STEM fields I'm not sure I know anyone who didn't have their MS paid for. Sure, some professors will push you to get a Ph.D. but you always have the option of just writing your thesis and finishing.
Open-plan offices make employees less productive, less happy, and more sick
Good point. The flatness of the design is irrelevant. The clarity of the communication is paramount. I agree that the OP may be favouring that particular design trend in his examples a little too specifically which is distracting from his (I think, good) message. Funny that he's championing "good content" but confuses his argument that way.
Er, https://www.tarsnap.com/download.html
It aledgely encripts all your data at the local machine, before sending it to the server.

Now, of course, if you are truly paranoid, you'll want to review their code first. I don't get why I can't simply mount a volume with encription and write there. Using code that is already on my machine (on the kernel, nonetheless) would make it a much simpler decision.
CSS DIV position analysis