skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I cant believe how quickly UI and design have fallen now that Jobs is gone. Things like childish gradients and terrible icons.
Don't even get me started on the contrast -- light text on fluorescent green background and the really thin font.
I could only draw one conclusion from the comparison of iOS 6 vs 7 --- it's as if Apple has done everything possible to make it unusable.

Steve would probably have fired the tasteless "designer" who came up with this utterly broken redesign.
Not following. Calling someone a traitor is definitely propaganda. My point is certainly not to defend that kind of behavior.
> It's getting to be somewhat annoying how many people are whining about Windows Phone and Android similarities. Design and engineering decisions are not made in a vacuum.

I agree, but the similarities are being pointed out precisely because Apple (and their major pundits like Marco and Gruber) makes a big deal about how others have borrowed ideas from them.

For example, the infamous "Redmond/Mountain View, start your photocopiers" lines, and Marco/Gruber's frequent quips like "Hmm, I've seen something like this before..." in regards to something Google or Samsung has done.

Apple's smugness is what's getting them, not their borrowing of ideas, itself.
why switch from mpesa which works well and has dominance? Better article maybe "why mpesa will soon dominate payments in western countries".
Yeah, inertia. What we've tried to do with IMPP is to roll all of the features that IM users actually want into the core protocol versus just saying "it's open!" or "it can be extended!" and hoping someone else does the dirty work. We build the server side and we build the client side, which is important; it means we're not off dreaming up pie-in-the-sky features that would be absolutely horrible for a client developer to implemement.

We have some experience reverse engineering the rest of the IM protocols out there as well, and they all have their own issues which we kept in mind when building ours. At the end of the day, our actual motivations were simple: publishing the protocol is the right thing to do and so we did it. It's been on our TODO for 6+ years. :)
You live in a Democratic country. Is it any surprise that the majority of educated people are committed true-believers in the Democratic process, despite all evidence that it may be broken?
iOS 7 foregoes borders, instead relying on colour to indicate interactivity

Good thing there aren't people out there who are color-blind, then...

Oh, wait.
What happened to the Don't fix what isn't broken mantra?
Finally, an author is doing a deeper analysis than complaining about the icon-set or font weight.

We'll see how this pans out but maybe this is that "the iPad is just a big iPod Touch" thing all over.
Arguably voters tried that ...

http://boingboing.net/2013/06/07/obama-promised-to-end-warra...
I feel he focuses on the best parts of iOS 7, which I admit are quite nice. But there are definitely a few things that, to me, don't meet the old Apple standards of great usability.

Just a few things I noticed:
The confusing unlock and initial welcome screen. They lack clear indication on which way to swipe or that you're even supposed to swipe at all (welcome screen). It's a subtle and momentary weakness that is addressed the moment you figure it out, but truly excellent design should avoid such issues; minimalism doesn't mean zeroing things out.

The month view being useless for showing upcoming events in the calendar app (the previous version would show you a scroll of upcoming events for the currently selected month).

Spotlight is summoned via a downward swipe, but is dismissed by an asymmetric action (either x out your search field to clear your search results, or hit the physical home key).

All minor quips, but it's the difference between UI designed by, say, your avg coder who trivializes the UX domain, and UI designed by a truly talented UX guy. But I'm hopeful since it's only the first beta.
I don't really understand this. Judges are part of the government, so how is allowing judges to actually judge things at the border a violation of sovereignty?
Or even better, are there any technical reasons why we couldn't just use email as an IM protocol? I'm thinking an extra header flag to denote that a message is an IM would be all thats needed to keep IMs out of your inbox (and then your mail app can separate IMs from emails). Or is IMAP not fast/powerful enough to handle this kind of messaging?
Facebook Apps Are Down
Try any application and you will get a http://www.facebook.com/4oh4.php
RandThemes
RandThemes is a place where you can find theme and template of your next project.
New podcast analyzing every minute of Star Wars, individually
The part that you are missing is that the media and people who have worked in government are calling him a traitor and suggesting many of things you have said the administration has not done. This means what you say is technically true but misses the important fact that the media has become a tool of the state. The administration can just sit back and let the agents of the state work in the media. See James Woolsey on CNN recently for an example.

Ron Paul said it best when he said "Truth is treason in an empire of lies." Snowdon may have broken the law but he exposed the higher law (the 4th amendment to the US constitution) is being violated at will all day every day.

I actually just hope that Snowdon exposed the worst thing that the NSA was doing. I suspect he did not.
Conditioning is a Sham
One of the big things we'd like to accomplish is building a book out of things the community needs. I've felt this pain myself. I'd strongly suggest you submit "idea" issues for the topics you feel most uneasy about.

https://github.com/clojure-cookbook/clojure-cookbook/blob/ma...
>Relying on color to indicate interactivity...That's been a best practice since I-don't-know-when.

I guess screw color-blind people then.
that's really great ! Can anyone comment on what type of emulation works well ? I assume neogeo should work fine but I'm worried about CPS1/CPS2 and can't imagine CPS3 working at all (I mean at 30 fps with sound).
This is exactly the kind of tone deaf developer suck-up attitude the article complains about. It doesn't really matter what you or I or person X thinks, the fact is that many many many user surveys have been taken and the majority despise Gnome 3. The Gnome developers have taken the exact same stance you do, that people are just not smart enough and have ulterior motives for hating Gnome 3. The only thing it's gotten them is being pulled from default on several distros and rapidly plummeting market share.

But good for them, it's easier to be "brilliant" and "forward thinking" with zero users to support.
I guess this once again proves that a lot of people simply don't read mailing list emails.
> 4. It is entirely legitimate to challenge Snowden's grasp of what NSA was doing, especially in the wake of his more extravagant claims....

Legitimate because you've seen the entire 36 page document and are basing your objections on actual evidence? Or legitimate because you are arguing from authority?

As far as I can tell, you either fail to understand the significance of the leak or are a shill. Case in point, questioning whether Snowden "understands" what the actual NSA documents say is meaningless since he did not write them and has never been alleged to have written them. So unless you are asserting that the materials are not in fact genuine, all you are doing is distracting attention from the only meaningful question: whether (1) the NSA is so grossly incompetent that it does not understand its own surveillance apparatus, or (2) the organization is in fact engaging in what most reasonable people would consider excessive and dangerous levels of data collection.
The downgrade is done outside the SSL/TLS protocol, by browser vendors (sorry, I should've made it clear that that point was constrained to real-world deployments of HTTPS, rather than a property of the protocol itself).

Browsers will start by sending a TLS1.something handshake. If that connection fails (due to a TLS alert, or TCP RST) then the browser starts the whole connection again with SSL3. This is to work around broken network appliances (of the sort made by Bluecoat and others) which cannot handle modern versions of TLS.

The only browser which has an effective countermeasure against this is Opera. CURL also does the right thing. I believe HSTS in Chrome also turns off this downgrade behaviour for hosts opting into HSTS.

I while back I surveyed the top 500 (Alexa) web sites, emulating the TLS behaviour of Chrome. Of the 321 sites supporting both SSL3 and TLS1, 86 (27%) chose different security parameters under downgrade conditions. Of these downgrades, 70 (81%) represented attacker-controlled loss of forward secrecy.
The appeal of App Store fame when fortune seems out of reach
You are arguing about what shows up on the NSA's radar that causes them to go searching, I'm talking about limiting what they can easily find. You're right about Broadwell's actions triggering the investigation, I'm saying his email wouldn't have been part of that investigation if he hadn't used Gmail and instead opted to secure the messages. And let's be honest: The director of the CIA should know better!

It doesn't matter what causes the NSA to go looking, what matters is what they find. Edward Snowden makes this point himself in the original interview. They have collected data on you for years, just sitting there waiting to be scrutinized for whatever reason.

Your second and third paragraphs are irrelevant to the point of condescension. We're talking about warrantless digital surveillance of US citizens not possible maybes and what-ifs.
I don't.

Microsoft has such a high level of not invented here (NIH) syndrome sometimes that I'd find it easier to believe that engineers on the ground are simply unaware of the competition.
What a bizarre setting. If that's "enhance text legibility", then the "off" position is "make text harder to read, please"?
This is honestly a valid critique. While many push flat or semi-flat as the successor of skeuomorphic/textured design (in terms of looks and use), I think in many ways it doesn't provide a completely better experience. An example for myself: it took me several minutes on the (flat) Google Maps app to figure out I could pull up the bottom card to do Street-View. Good luck non tech-savvy people!

These comments about the older generation dealing with flat design are also VERY valid. Apple hasn't gone too far into Metro territory, but it will be interesting to see how the useability end of iOS 7 goes over (never mind the criticisms of the look).

Either way, I think Apple needs to polish what they showed at WWDC. Let's start with the arrow pointing up on the lock screen lol.
It's cool that the Puzzle Palace was popular within the NSA itself.
New claim that NSA regularly "hacks" into network routers to get access to traffic without the permission of the router owners.
Man, iOS 7 feedback is incredibly frustrating for no reason that actually matters.

I feel like I spent the past few years falling in love with flat design, on mobile and on the web -- and I read article after article from historically pro-Apple bloggers/authors explaining that no, flat design was fundamentally a bad move: the strongest metaphor is that of the phone as a tool -- that we needed skeumorphism, we need hints for interactivity, we needed polish.

And now iOS 7 is out! And I'm excited, because the flat (okay, 'mature') design philosophy that I've been told is a bad idea is finally here -- and now it's suddenly a great leap forward because Apple decided to do it? When Microsoft decided that the average consumer understood what a smartphone was for and no longer needed the physical cues, they were wrong and fools -- but when Ive decides it, its because its time to move to mature and modern?

Here's the thing, though: I think iOS 7, on the whole, looks worse than iOS 6. The stock icons look outright ugly; interfaces like the call-answer screen and the calculator look poorly designed, and everything has the sense that it just needs another run or two through the review process. Not that it's irreversibly bad, but I don't think it's executing as well as WP or MIUI are. (With exceptions, of course: I think the translucency paradigm looks great, as well as the changes to the UI Kit.)

(People arguing 'its just a beta, it'll obviously change over time': what happened to Apple's relentless pursuit of quality before introducing something to the public? What's the point of secrecy if you're showing off v0.8 and not v1.0?)

I imagine actually using the new iOS won't be bad at all. It's just reading about it that frustrates me, which is definitely a sign I should be doing less of it.

(I own an iPad, iPhone, and MBA.)
I don't understand these posts. More, I dislike them a lot.

Gnome 3 rants are boring. Yes, people don't like the way the project moves. Some of those are very vocal and outspoken. Some rant on a blog.
The thing is: Either the author cares about the Gnome project, in which case this is _no_ constructive way to put it (Hey, why don't you work on a better legacy mode? Propose a Gnome Shell extension API?). No, the 'But I tried it before, over and over, and they don't listen' argument is no excuse.

Or the author just does't like the project and wants to bash it. In that case posts like this one might make some weird kind of sense, but I yawn skimming them, hit flag on news aggregators like this and wish the author good luck with a Gnome 2 fork or a different DE of his choosing.

Hi, my name is Ben and I'm a happy Gnome 3 user. I'm sure there are others out there like me. Maybe we need to shout more? That would certainly remove stupid 'Google suggestions' arguments or 'of all the people that took this weird poll, x % hate Gnome 3' pseudo-statistics from future rants.
SQL Server 2014: What's vNew For vNext
Voice-Activated Technology Is Called Safety Risk for Drivers
How An Introvert Learned To Be A Leader
Netflix Announces Zuul: dynamic routing, monitoring, resiliency, and more
How could I forget Kafka! Good save.
I agree about your point on abstraction, but I also think there are different methods to deal with it, and that those methods often get overlooked.

My experience with SAS and R suggests it is possible to somewhat re-create the typical excel workflow. The SAS IDE allows you to open the data sets created in your code, which means you can write code one line (well, more accurately, one data step or procedure, as it is called in SAS) at a time and inspect the intermediate results at each point. Similarly, RStudio allows you to inspect the values of data frames and variables, once again allowing the user to step through the code writing process and get relatively immediate feedback.

Regardless, there are going to be a large portion of excel users that won't or can't switch, and there are also a number of use cases where excel makes perfect sense (smaller data, simpler summaries), but I have personally 'converted' a few analysts, and think that, with more exposure, a not insignificant portion of excel users could be convinced to make the leap.
4 Tips To Help Overcome the Mighty Fear of MLM Rejection
1. Snowden will be called a traitor. The Speaker of the House did exactly this yesterday on Good Morning America. Second in line for the presidency. Is that good enough?

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/boehner-calls-...
Innovating with HTTP 2.0 Server Push
Well, you did say

Note though that nobody in the administration has called
Snowden a traitor;

as though fears begin and end with the Obama administration. A premature and telling defense.

It's in the title: "The US Government," not "The Obama Administration."
Prism: the problem is the law not the technology
That's me! I was browsing the new UI guidelines and couldn't understand what was and what wasn't a link/action in the screenshots that they used for examples! And I shouldn't need to turn on accessibility services for slight colorblindness... the design should accomodate for us.

The navigation looks lik the same color as the "Home" and "Phone" labels. Are those actions?
Borrowing ideas is only a big deal if you're ripping on those you borrow from. Like if someone from Apple were to say "MS just can't do design right, Metro is terrible start to finish" and then they borrow from Metro, that's newsworthy.

Following current design trends and adding a splash of your own flavor to them... that's status quo, isn't it?
Ouch.

> It is not what you do, it is what you sell.

This bothers me. Multiple companies I've worked at have made me want to work on some sort of Code Quality team to go in and rip apart and rewrite entire sections of shitty code that won't make any immediate noticeable impact. The business impact it will make is next time another programmer has to touch that code it'll take them a tenth the time to understand, use, or extend it.
Worse than Apple fans going ballistic on even the tiniest similarities on something that Apple was first on, Apple, let us remember, patents designs and sues people in court for similarities.

They need to be called out on this. "Everything is a remix" was brilliant in exposing Apple hypocrisy in this regard.
Snowden send 41 slides, only 5 have been released. The only 2 people ( Glenn Greenwald and Barton Gellman) that have the rest have no intention of releasing them.
They're just slightly more obnoxious than the deluge of comments lamenting the decline of hacker news comments.
Actually, let me put this another way... back in the original dotcom era, I worked at a startup that decided to write a BIOS. With the amount of hardware we'd be selling, it'd save a million dollars! Well worth six man-months or so of work, right? WRONG. That was six man-months of critical programmer time when the time and money was running out, and all we learned was that we couldn't do it in a 512k PROM (not with our design anyway), and upgrading to a 1mb PROM would have cost more than a license from Phoenix for their BIOS.

That's what happens when you let the inmates run the asylum.

Programmers are fools, for the most part. They don't understand what problem they're really trying to solve. We thought we were solving a cost-of-production problem for a fully scaled business. That wasn't the problem. The PROBLEM was NOT DYING. And that meant getting a working product out the door as quickly as possible, even if it cost more.
This is from 2011, part of the building of the ROME (http://ro.me) WebGL demo.
Not really. They sponge up massive amounts of money from the public in the form of subsidies, tax breaks, and other concessions.
I'm a happy Gnome 3 user.
Pretty much every single thing in here is false for my team.

The first thing he should have learned about Microsoft: every team is almost completely separate.
Must be annoying to be Google or Microsoft right now. There's something odd about all these platitudes for features and design decisions that were lifted from competing platforms.

Where were all these posts when Windows Phone or Android introduced these UI/UX ideas?
They could have toned down the affordances and gloss without totally removing the cues. They went to far to fast IMO. The market is not techies in Silicon Valley.
Humans (banks, PayPal, other third parties) are not required to verify transactions. It means you and only you have access to your bitcoins, and you don't need a trusted third party in order to use your money. You don't need a trusted third party to create bitcoins, either (like when governments print fiat currency).
You're missing the whole point of my comment. Yes, that's the status quo. But Apple's (and their pundits') history of snarky comments against this is why people are dishing this criticism.

"Some of their own medicine" as it were.
I thought about this too, but then realized it's a completely moot point unless you are black/white color blind (which virtually nobody is).

Differing colors are NOT being used to indicate differing actions. They're just being used to indicate interactivity in general, and it doesn't matter if you see that indicator as red or green (the most common form of colorblindness).
So true.

All kinds of work would benefit from being restated in terms of goals rather than specific tasks.
Maybe you should try reading more than 2 paragraphs before commenting, it makes you sound a lot more informed.
Been eyeing Coq for a while, and this is fascinating and motivating for me to take it up (well, after Rust, Clojure and Racket, that is.) Can anyone point me toward projects or tutorials where Coq's proofs are used to build great practical real-world systems? My thinking is i'd love to delve into induction and logics while building something useful.

I just wish HN were more about this and less about "iOS7". Sometimes the amount of Apple zealots around here frightens me, who would support a company like that, and the NSA stuff sharing space with their stuff is quite a fit.
http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Redmon...
I'm talking about from the advertiser perspective, I (personally) haven't seen great results with their product.
Vimium for entire OS on Mac?
Does anyone know of an app for Mac's that is like Vimium, but works for the entire operating system / all applications? I feel like I saw something like that on HN recently, but can't seem to find it and am thinking I imagined it now.

Thanks!
Indeed, Bitcoin offers just pseudo-anonymity. However, if you are very disciplined, you can severely limit or even totally remove the possibility of someone linking you to your Bitcoins. No one even needs to know a transaction happened in Kenya.
Did the human genome project really have a trillion dollar impact?
Cool, gotta check it out..
I am doing an internship in Windows and I have to say his first few points are right on the dot.

The windows debugger does have proper documentation. I know this because two separate people on opposite ends of Windows Org made a point to mention this. Yet the documentation itself is not more than one would expect from complex software's man page. This contrasts well with the software I am integrating with for one of my projects. The only mention I could find of said software was a slide saying "This software has no documentation, here is a link to .NET decompilation software".

One surprise I can add is that Windows does not have an internal package management system. I expected to see a apt-get like tool. Instead there are various download.com like sites hosting installers.
Swowden has already been smeared as someone who only worked for the NSA for "3 months" and lacks both an education and technical expertise.

They are essentially making him look like an amatuer, until more information is released there is no way to tell if this is true.
A lot of that comparative slowness was caused by mechanical storage, replacing it with parallel and lower-latency SSDs makes it a lot easier to get full use out of more and faster cores. It doesn't cost much to set up a system that's completely CPU-limited on OLAP database-like workloads these days.

I suspect that as more software stops being optimized for ~10ms serial disk I/O with huge caches this will become more common and more and faster cores will be a big(er) deal.
Send a Fathers day card via CURL
That isn't entirely true. While "giving back" may not be the norm, there are other relevant details to consider:

http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/04/linux-kernel-in-2011...

Legal departments also get in the way of contributions to open source. "We don't want any of our proprietary code to end up in that library" is a common theme found among legal teams that paint with too-broad of brushes. I am currently experiencing this.
Android malware loaded with Linux kernel privilege escalation exploit