skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I came from an engineering background to design -

My advice would be to use a few principles to get you started for UI design:

- map visual hierarchy to information hierarchy (more important titles bigger)

- use legacy (familiar layouts such as a top navigation don't require a learning curve)

- use visual metaphors / skeuomorphism to hint to the user where they are and what they can do (buttons look clickable, draggable elements have ridges that the user could imagine gripping, overlays have a shadow to imply something is above another)

- keep things simple - people tend to be more interested in utility than ornaments when it comes to design but once you gain a bit more confidants you can start looking at adding in more little details as 'delight ears'

There is a bit of a gut instinct element when it comes to spacing things out but some grid templates might help with that to start with.
Hang on, you're now arguing the rather vague second amendment is inviolable but the first caused Hitler? Come on.
Does your startup need a trip to Silicon Valley?
If you have a VM where strings are immutable and interned, you're right. Java doesn't guarantee that strings are interned (though you can ask the VM to intern it), so Clojure treats them differently.

Also, Java declared java.lang.String as final, so Strings can't be extended to implement clojure interfaces to get nice behavior, like IFn and IKeywordLookup.
Why not Windows?
Suspicions High as US, China Summit Nears
Want to help the poor and transform your economy? Give people cash.
Arq is fantastic! :)
Thank God. Can this fad die yet?
As a junior web developer currently looking for my first full-time job programming in San Francisco, this all rings very true, and is a great summary of the job-hunting experience in the city. In my experience, referrals helped more than in the original poster's experience. Usually a referral skips me ahead to step 3 in the process (as laid out in the post).
31k gun deaths in 2010

http://webappa.cdc.gov/cgi-bin/broker.exe

On average, 33 gun homicides were committed each day for the years 2005-2010 -- WISQARS Injury Mortality Reports, 1999-2010
From the beginning my comment has been restricted to the regulation of knives.
Linux user since 1996. Not going to change - I like having an OS that's open to the core, and behaves how I want it to. Focus follows the damn mouse, for instance.
Its funny that the game in the opening of "Sight", released 10 months ago, is similar to one they had at Google IO this year. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqOluB4e-q4
We know from the article the VC had flown into town to see her and had the rest of the day clear as well, which suggests seeing her was a priority. Not calling to say he'd be late certainly suggests a lack of judgement (although we don't know the reasons/excuses behind that) but refusing to see him to prove a point smacks of arrogance, even if she didn't need the investment by them. I bet she'll miss a few scheduled appointments "on her way to building a billion dollar company" too.

The whole article reeks of sense of entitlement: I guess it's easier for the article author to feel a lot smarter than an industry when he's already persuaded it to part with >$70million to try to get his company to profitability, but he'd be in a stronger position to lecture the dumb VCs if and when he actually produces the return that proves his superb judgement negated the need for their suggestions and everybody that hesitated to offer terms should have called him earlier.
On average, 49 gun suicides were committed each day for the years 2005-2010 (WISQARS)
You say that you quit in the past and still find yourself in this situation. It's time to quit for good. Delete your account and never look back. Don't worry if your are missing out something, eventually this feeling to check everything will fade. I delieted my facebook and twitter account about 2 months ago. It was taking up too much of my time and I'm glad I did. I still use Google+ but I feel like it doesn't take as much time from me as the other networks, I don't even check it every day.
Fair play, and it all depends on the project - although in this case I'd rather sacrifice readability (remember, you can do summaries like http://500px.com/terms to great effect) for peace of mind. Knowing it's been professionally done lets me sleep more soundly!
How I went from a 9-5 job to being a startup founder
Like Scala/Clojure on the JVM, F#/ClojureCLR on .Net, or Coffeescript/Typescript on Javascript, it adds higher-level programming language semantics to programs running in a browser, NodeJS, Rhino, or any other javascript VM.

Features like namespaces, immutability, fast persistent data structures, and, if you are already using JVM Clojure in the same application, the Clojure language. Not to mention, the EDN data transport format, which means you can unify the server-side language, the client-side language, and the data transport format to Clojure (just like what javascript champions talk about with JS, JSON, and NodeJS).
"Set phasers to stun...."

Agreed with travisby, and in fact, we and the police are only legally allowed to use lethal force to stop, not to kill per se (internally, killing is reserved to the judiciary). We just don't have anything even on the horizon that comes close to the stopping power of firearms without also bringing its own dangers to life. In fact, pretty much all of those instruments of force are called "less lethal" to underline that using them might result in death, e.g. pepper spray and allergies or asthma. The very connotations of the word "force" tell you a lot.

The other gun owning members of my family wouldn't, they're all hunters first and foremost, and we don't bow hunt in part because we don't consider that humane. There's also issues with wildlife pretty much every place we live.
It takes a cold dead hand to earn profit from firearms in America.
With Gorgeous Dorms But Little Cash, Colleges Must Adapt
Microsoft got this right, and I expect they have the metrics to show it's true.

Some things have changed, though. Coders don't need a bookshelf when they can get a Safari subscription. Nobody needs a fixed-line phone. For 90% of coding a laptop is fast enough. So I would think that a "hotelling" style arrangement would work now, before, a coder might be holed up with a pile of books, big, heavy CRTs, and desktop computers. Now that Drive has a "scan" command, even the whiteboard can come along with an engineer between work and home.
"I would argue that if the designer is doing their job properly and working with and for users, then they will be usually right, and if you don't like it, you're wrong, and you should go somewhere else..."

Canonical claim that they user test the Unity interface. The test tasks appear to be geared to 'end users', although there is a nod to 'power users'[1]. This focus on testing and iteration would seem to be at variance with the idea of a 'design dictator'. Does anyone have hard evidence of user testing of the Gnome 3 desktop?

[1] http://design.canonical.com/topic/user-experience/ [list of blog posts showing range of activity]
The point that suxnoll is making, though, is that the cost is not nearly high to begin with, b/c the data is dedup'ed and compressed. You're justifying an issue that doesn't quite exist.

The query that suxnoll responded to supposed that you have 400 GB of data with small deltas. But that's only possible if you're filling your harddrive with files created from random noise from /dev/random and updating all your files monthly by more random noise.
Abduction should be solved by physical surveillance.
An AK-47 does not accept "clips", it accepts magazines.
It's true that some governments have killed their own citizens unjustly and en masse. I don't think that my own government poses such a threat to me. If you're a US citizen who feels like their government was designed to efficiently kill its citizens, and if you think that you can prevent that, then we probably can't have a constructive discussion.

I don't know if people just want to start a interesting conversation, or if they feel like disparaging government somehow refutes my point. I hope it's the former, because it doesn't. If you understand why I don't want people to have access to tools designed to kill people like me, but consider government to be an existential threat, it should still be pretty obvious that the list of priorities is something like 1. handguns, 2. rifles, ..., N. governments.
Cant the companies that would be affected just split off the operational side of the business to be outside of US jurisdiction, you know like some do to avoid paying tax (not to grossly over-simplify the issues...)? You know facebook could still exist as a US corporation encompassing the intellectual side of the company but create and icelandic company that actually deploys the servers and processes the data. Or something.
So wide of the mark that I almost feel faint. Selected highlights:
> This cult is insidious. Its two main tenant are: 1. The designer is always right. 2. If you don’t like what the designer is doing, you’re wrong, and you should go somewhere else. Doesn’t sound very friendly, does it?
>1. Couple of fallacies here: you've set up a scenario in which your conclusion is supported (gosh, that doesn't sound friendly! This guy's a genius!), but it's also ignoratio elenchi: it doesn't fucking matter whether it's friendly or not, because who gives a shit whether the philosophy by which you design a product is friendly or not? It's like asking whether the philosophy is crunchy or gooey.

So wide off the mark, that you hit a guy on a wheelchair 2 blocks away.

It DOES fucking matter if "the philosophy by which you design a product is friendly or not" when you're trying to build that product in a community (as is the case with Gnome 3). He specifically mentions Gnome 3 as his example, and in the dynamics of Open Source communities friendly DOES matter. A lot.

Perhaps you could spend "fainting" (sic) and more time in reading and understanding where TFA comes from.

>2. I would argue that if the designer is doing their job properly and working with and for users, then they will be usually right, and if you don't like it, you're wrong, and you should go somewhere else (because you're probably a neckbearded engineer trying to design something with zero user empathy).

And I'd argue that he describes cases where the designers are NOT doing their job properly.

It's not like most designers working in web/software startups are trained professionals, profficient in the history of design, psychological and cognitive issues, HCI principles and user testing methodologies. A lot are just glorified graphic designers, if that. Especially the ones TFA article describes, and which we've all met, are the "I know better" BS types.

Also your whole argument is based on the premise of: "if the designer is doing their job properly and working with and for users". Well, TFA describes a case where the users are not happy with the designers work -- a case where a project (namely Gnome 3) lost momentum and users.

>Just another casual misrepresentation. DHH has not retired and is still working hard at 37signals.

Just another pedantic correction of a comment made in jest that was not supposed to be taken literally. Not to mention he doesn't say he's retired at all.

>>37 Signals made its products like it wanted to, and if you didn’t like it, you could suck it.
>WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? I'm giving up on the rest.

He talks of the same "FUCK" (sic) that 37 Signals themselves admit (and are proud of). That they make opinionated products, and that if somebody isn't pleased with them, so be it.
Nowadays developers seem to code without reading.

When your standard library documentation is so vast that it would take weeks to read and understand it all, and you'd never remember most of it anyway without context and experience using it, I don't think "coding without reading" is really a fair complaint.

We as an industry need to get better at documentation, and in particular about separating tutorial/overview documentation that presents a map and summary of what's available from reference documentation, or we're going to keep reinventing wheels like this.

Python is a particularly unfortunate example, because while its documentation is vast, it has very little tutorial/overview material beyond the very basics. For example, given that a substantial proportion of Python's standard library actually doesn't work very well in practice, it would be helpful to have a deeper tutorial/map document somewhere that introduced the various areas of the standard library and that also promoted the good ones and suggested popular alternatives for the not so good ones where they exist.
The ESL-voice was part of the charm. It adds a note of authenticity. :-)
For my part, I wouldn't necessarily disagree with the article (and I would need to read through the whole paper to know for sure), but I agree that most teams probably don't function well with open concept offices, but imo that's likely a function of how (in my experience), lower-functioning teams are probably made worse by unfocused background conversation.

Again, my sampling is based on the good fortune of working on really good, highly talented and focused teams. It's not perfect and certainly after months and years on the same team, you can lose perspective and think some things are worse (or better) than they really are. But I've been on really disfunctional teams as well, and some teams that I'd say were "in between". For those latter teams, I wouldn't recommend open-plan. To me, open plan is a high-risk, high reward proposition that takes commitment from the top down to make work over the long haul. But in my experience, the reward is high, and I really do prefer it.
On yet another hand, courtesy and manners are social inventions of aristocracy that constitute a tone argument, which is pretty low on the PG hierarchy and at any rate is an argument that benefits only the (in this case) VCs.
To my knowledge, any recent device should have them, and location services should be available on fairly old devices - Google maintains that as part of Play Services. If you don't have an iPhone, do you have an Android device? I'd be weary to suggest developing anything until you scope out competitors - there's a LOT of apps on both platforms.

You can use play.google.com if you didn't know for Google Play apps, so if you're not an Android user that's a good place to start checking the ecosystem out. Maybe you can do something similar with the iTunes client, but I'm not too sure about that.

Oh, and another point to consider is there's far more variety among features etc on Android devices. In an attempt not to be diplomatic, that's probably a bad thing for a developer. Probably.
I read this blog post with a french accent in my head.
EULAs are basically meaningless. Nobody reads them, and everybody knows that nobody reads them. Also you generally can't disclaim your liability for damages caused by your gross negligence, and a judge, not an EULA, will decide if you have done that, should someone be aggrieved enough to take you to court.
I'm increasingly surprised that this matters at all to software developers.

Software developers aren't afraid of changing UI. (In fact, they usually are the ones inflicting that upon others.) So, it shouldn't matter where your menus are, how you switch between applications, how the file browser displays files.

The technical differences between operating systems are huge, but they all support the same day-to-day features: they all multitask reasonably well, they all have or support reasonable filesystems, they all support a lot of different kinds of hardware (and most of what you're likely to need to use).

Worst-case scenario, you can fall back on multiboot or virtualization to fill in a few gaps.

Software developers spend most of their time in just a few applications: a text editor or IDE of some sort, a web browser, maybe an ssh client. There are perfectly usable options for each of those on each operating system.

So ... seriously, what does it matter? I have a mild preference for Debian/KDE, but I could do most of my work on MacOS (in fact, I did in the past) or Windows, with just a couple of days of tweaking and setup. The only possible spot where Windows might fall down a bit for me would be in supporting a locally-hosted LAMP setup, and even then there's WampServer (http://www.wampserver.com/en/).
100-150 square feet would also make a reasonably sized office for a single person to work in (mine is about 110 square feet and doesn't feel cramped). The thing that makes private offices more expensive from a construction point of view is:

- You have to put up walls and doors: studs, wallboard, painting, running cables through walls. And once you put up those walls and doors, you need to knock them down again to reconfigure the space.

- A closed office needs its own dedicated heating and air-conditioning ducts, power/network distribution, overhead lighting, smoke detector, sprinkler, etc. In an open plan, these can be shared among several work spaces.
Tufte is extraordinarily dry for someone new to design. Great recommendation though but it would be like going to Saul Bass and asking him how to draw a "stick man."

I would start by using grid based layouts and study those who have used them. Start with wikipedia article on the

subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_(graphic_design)
For the Bay Area these days, those numbers seem about right. Big companies pay 100k to new grads
Why DOJ didn't need a 'super search warrant' to snoop on Fox News' e-mail
I'm certainly an open-office hater, it drives me absolutely batty. Open office with frequent phone calls throughout the day by your neighbors? I'd quit.

I do like small open offices when working closely with people on a team. But everyone in that office has to be working on the same project. This is the scenario where it can be great. Even in this case, though, there are some periods where you need to step away to a silo to do your own thing for awhile in my experience.

I have heard of some mythical working environments with both public and private working areas that allow people to move as they will. I guess this would be the optimal solution.
As a developer, I recommend that you read "The Non-Designer's Design Book" by Robin Williams. It teaches design fundamentals, and it made me much more aware of the principles of good design, and I think it would be a good starting point.
If the only reason you want to learn design is so that you can do an end-to-end delivery of a product, consider just using a template, or Bootstrap. Most products do not actually require heavily tailored designs, and even fewer require them to be prove themselves viable.
What happened to four lines and '-- '?
Which, like "child proof caps" on medicine, they do a very poor job of, unless you're really rigorous in not letting them see how you get your self-defense guns out of the push button safe or whatever.

Plus or minus that age you have to also start "gun proofing" them, teach them how to handle guns safely, not to do it unsupervised, avoid the lure of the forbidden fruit, etc. etc. My father started with all of us at age 3, when he'd start taking us out for the safer types of hunting (not quail, where you're moving around a lot, albeit that would have exhausted us way too quickly). Don't remember when he started explicitly teaching it, but he did it by example starting then.
This might work for blogs, But working for an e-commerce startup gave me a different experience. Conversion flow for our e-commerce site goes something like this[1]:

Landing Page/Category Browse Page -> Product Page -> Checkout

Typically visitor will go back and forth between product pages and category browse pages (or simultaneously using multiple tabs). Any visitor not visiting a Product page is consider a bounce. It does not matter how much visitors paginate or browse the category pages if they do not visit product page they will not convert.[2]

I think bounce rate, conversion rate and any other fancy metric you use depends on your business, website, type of product, target audience, pricing, etc. As a startup the best thing to do is continuous experimenting untill you find the right success formula that works for your particular situation.

[1] Yes for e-commerce site with a few or one product this flow does not apply, Also this is for physical products with longer sale cycle with average order size between $800 - $1000.

[2] Yes we tried a lot of experiments, including adding direct path from Browse/Landing Page to Checkout. That particular experiment was a failure as it created clutter in the browse page and reduce product views and hence the conversion. I guess some day I will gather my thoughts and write about all the experiments we did and still doing.
Looks helpful for some enterprise people. It could be that the sample signature seems very enterprisy. Personally I keep mine short and sweet.

I didn't understand what "Remove Empty" button does at first, so clicking it, and filling out the form didn't do anything. Might want to look into fixing that workflow.
Are defense attorneys dumb for taking on the cases of guilty defendants? Having a specific mission is often helpful, and doesn't preclude having other systems to provide an appropriate balance.
I recently switched to OSX after being exclusively on Linux for 14 years (Redhat 6.0!!). My employer gave me an awesome laptop and I decided to give it a shot.

After hearing for so long how great OSX was I was shocked to find out how poor the experience was compared to Unity. Go figure.

I'd switch back _today_ but all distros have very bad support for the latest retina MBP. A few years ago I might have done it anyway but honestly one of the reasons I was so open to switching to OSX was that I just feel worn down by the constant battles with hardware issues in Linux. It is better than it used to be but still sucks and the last thing I want to do is dive into a known bad situation.

Sad.
webOS. By far the one that I find the most comfortable to use, especially with one hand, like a phone should be. The gestures help a lot.
There is metadata; whether you consider it interesting is up to you. The tarsnap client has to say "I'm machine X, and I want to store a block of data with tag Y"; and when you extract an archive, "I'm machine X, and I want to retrieve the block of data with tag Y". This could allow someone to figure out (a) that it's the same machine, and (b) that you're extracting an archive which contains data which was stored at a particular point in time.

Paranoia means encrypting everything which might be sensitive, even if you can't see any way for it to be abused.
Are these all working right now in iOS/firefox/chrome/ie
?
Tarsnap deduplicates first, then it encrypts.
> The company reserves the right, exercised in its sole discretion, to revoke your license at any time.

That clause makes sense for online services. But for packaged software -- really? If I buy a piece of software, I don't expect the developer to have the power to decide, at their whim, that I'm no longer allowed to use it. Even Microsoft EULAs (e.g. http://goo.gl/IE8RN) don't purport to give them that power.
The regular expression pattern checking is pretty awesome. I'll disagree though where they say you don't need any more server side validations. You can easily remove / change the pattern value in the DOM. Which begs the question, what's the integrity of client-side testing if it cam be bypassed so easily?
Signatures with any sort of graphics are terribly annoying. Keep it plain text people.
Timeout sort of works - though I think adding a scroll down event gives you a better idea of whether people are reading your material - for the most part (crazy monitor sizes or short blog posts withstanding).