skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How long until this flat fad fades?

It seems (to me at least) like very little thought goes into these designs apart from 'it must be flat.'

There also seems to be very little variation in the final products. The examples linked in the OP are indistinguishable from say, Microsoft's Technet : http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki

...I dont want everything to look the same. It's confusing and boring... Am I alone in this?
> Transmitter disguised as a pencil eraser

Let's not forget, resourcefulness is a greater predictor of success than raw intellectual ability.
Jams spontaneously occur after a certain road density is reached.

The sadistic side of me wishes they'd just close entrances to the highway whenever it's dangerously full.
I never heard about that's a problem. I checked several popular sites, Google, Amazon, Apple, Bank of America. They all use RSA.

Do you have examples for secure site (under this aspect) and background info?
Then whatever the new 3.0 default would be would become the "default bootstrap theme." That battle can't be won. :P
Don't take away my temporary relief!
Is it really deleted? Or are you simply opting out of having it displayed in your account's page? According to the FAQ, "If you remove items, they will be removed from the service and will not be used to improve your Google experience". Words are important. Your history is removed from the service, not the servers. It won't be used to improve your experience, but nothing says it won't be used for something else
I can promise you that there are schools in America where students and faculty see the knowledge gained as the value, it sucks that you're not at one though.
Jobs trailer is out
And I am Impressed!
I can't conceive a way to decouple the client's name from the fraudulent information, it's all ultimately a cheap trick that will likely be automated to disregard.
From an interview I did in 2010, no bananas:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20022541-281.html

The administration's defense of the controversial machines, which use X-rays to perform what critics have dubbed naked strip searches, has "many misconceptions, and we will write a careful answer pointing out their errors," said John Sedat, a UCSF professor of biochemistry and biophysics and member of the National Academy of Sciences...

Their letter to Holdren said "it appears that real independent safety data do not exist." In addition, the authors say: "There has not been sufficient review of the intermediate and long-term effects of radiation exposure associated with airport scanners. There is good reason to believe that these scanners will increase the risk of cancer to children and other vulnerable populations."
This is the relatively easily executed version of negative SEO: it's hard to negatively affect the SEO of a site, but easy to bury it with dozens of crafted pages - whether to hide an unfavorable result, or to discredit a competitor. $10,000 a month seems like an absurd number, but "reputation management" is a big business (albeit very quietly executed) and getting content on sufficiently high pagerank sites can be expensive.

If you look on sites like blackhatworld you'll find tons of people interested in services like this.

Seems like the business is booming, too: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=reputation%20managem...
The getsdone.io stack
the technologies that i used to roll up getsdone.io
"We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat."

I can't imagine how people can say it out their mouth. Just like when someone kill, due to fairness you kill too.

I am a Chinese, and I feel shame on this kind of Chinese logic. They use wording like fairness, human right not seek for proper, but their benefit, I have see too much ridiculous in my homeland.
Devil's advocate: grades are a stupid thing; if someone sits in class and learns and for the exam needs to cheat in order to keep up with cheat-driven-grades-inflation, we have not made a comment about that student's ability or anything. The elites may yet be elite.
> Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH), focused more and more on government work. In 2008 it split off its less lucrative commercial consulting arm—under the name Booz & Co.—and became a pure government contractor, publicly traded and majority-owned by private equity firm Carlyle Group (CG).

Carlyle is the lynchpin. Booz is just one of its assets.

An informative look at Booz and Carlyle right before the sale happened:

http://www.zcommunications.org/carlyle-group-may-buy-major-c...
As opposed to the elite in the USA...
It's much more of a career limiting move to work anywhere this would be a negative rather than positive signal.
This could mean a few years without graduates...
That is an awesome list, thank you. And though it's random, this, I dare say poem, on tent.io (which I hadn't heard of before and found via that list) really impressed me:

Before the sponsored updates.
Before the terms of service changed.
Before data stopped being private.
Before we sold our memories.
Before we forgot our rights.
Before everything that made media
Less social and more cynical,
There was one simple idea:
Our lives are our own.
What we share and who we share it with,
Our memories, our secrets,
Our lives are our own.
That idea is important
So we’re going back to before.
And in going back to before,
We’re going forward.
>>>>by professors whose only knowledge of programming came from Indian authored text books which in turn acted as guidebooks for technical interviews to Indian IT Service Companies.

I feel that the difference in the caliber of the instructors is a major factor. Majority of my lecturers were fresh out of college. There wasn't a single one in the whole computer science department who has published a paper. Compare this to the publish or perish situation in the US.

(I did my Bacherlors from a tier 3 college in India and Masters from a US university.)
Get Ready For A Flood Of New Hadoop Apps
Interesting story. I don't want to make any checks, but it seems the story itself could be false; in some way that's even more interesting. E.g. all the sites that are mentionned could exist, but have been created long ago to give this story credits.

This also makes me think to all those people that endorse me on linkedin, presumably so that I endorse them back.
That is a great system, but unsustainable for the volume, you are right. As a non-cheater who has been blessed with a lot of academic success, this article upsets me so much. my academic success has been dearly earned and I feel like cheaters completely undermine my efforts. True, cheaters don't have the knowledge and maybe I am a step ahead of them, because I actually put in the effort. But still, it feels like someone stole a taxi medallion and I bought one.
"I'm a spring 2013 undergraduate in CS, and this goes on in America just as it does in China. (the entire process is a charade.) I will admit it without hesitation."

www.de.ufpe.br/~toom/my-articles/engeduc/ARUSSIAN.PDF

The article is about a Russian mathematician who starts teaching in American universities. The same thing already happens in America with these 'business calculus' courses.
As I understand it:

1) Another friend had your name and your phone number or email address in a contact list.

2) Facebook got access to that contact list.

3) Facebook matched your entry in your friend's contact list to your Facebook account.

4) Facebook added any new numbers or email addresses of yours that your friend had (but that Facebook didn't) to your profile, but not anywhere you could ever see them.

I imagine two major sources of this contact data are 1) Facebook phone apps that access user contact lists, and 2) the functionality in which you give Facebook your email address and email password and Facebook logs in and scours your email for the addresses of your contacts.
It not about others caring, rather it will a major distraction for me and we are back with a uneasy interviewee (which was the problem with whiteboard coding).
I'm not trying to suggest that there aren't schools where knowledge is the goal, only that such is the case at a minority of schools. My education was definitely better off than most; I attended a good school. If you do believe there are schools where very little or no cheating occurs, I'd love to hear about it though.
How Caffeine Can Cramp Creativity
Ahh...that explains the seven users of Agda.
Ask HN: Can a New Zealand corp be sued over patents?
I was considering incorporating in New Zealand. And I have data/servers in Switzerland. I'm in the US but might move to New Zealand. Do I ever need to worry about software patent lawsuits (excluding embedded software)?
The problem with this is a very high rate of false positives.

Law enforcement already does too much railroading of innocent people who are convenient to target. This makes it easier to find a likely innocent person who is easy to target.
This has most to do with the student. If the student wishes to acquire knowledge, most American universities can provide the student with a great deal of knowledge. If you are not at such a university (unlikely, though some schools are significantly weaker in some disciplines than other schools, so YMMV), then such a university is generally just a transfer application away (protip: admissions standards are different for transfer applicants, it is generally, though not universally, easier to get into a more prestigious school as a transfer, having already shown an aptitude for college work).

No student at an American university can honestly claim not to have learned anything and yet be blameless for not having learned anything.

I will admit that many students are not ready to attend college at the age of 18. I think we should do more to allow students the freedom to take some time to explore their options and possibly even take a year or two off of school before deciding whether or not to attend college, where to attend college, and what to study once there.
Fresh SEO/Social Debian-News Service Online
> That makes these jobs particularly hard to fill, since most people with security clearances are almost by definition overqualified for janitorial work.

Lost credibility with this right here. Anybody can get a security clearance regardless of intellectual qualifications. I know someone who got a security clearance before even knowing what job he wanted, just as résumé padding.

Anyway, the rest of this article reads as fluffy and sophomoric. I'd read this one with a watchful eye.
PS: To quit the world of viruses and NSA backdoors which is MS Windows, download the most user-friendly Linux operating system, www.ubuntu.com, which is not explicitely mentioned in the list because it's based on "Debian" (which IS listed).
yes was just to reply to the commennt that you can't monetize :) impressive job btw, it looks so much better than the vevo one!
Why do you think/say so?

China sees its management of Hong Kong as a precursor for handling reunification with Taiwan. That issue (territorial integrity) is hands-down the most sensitive political issue in China which means that the government will think about fifteen times before taking actions which will cause problems with Hong Kong (relations are already at an all-time low).

There is simply no way the Chinese government will violate Hong Kong political independence in such a ham-fisted manner given the huge publicity surrounding this case. Which means that assuming the Hong Kong police decide this is an arrestable offense and take Snowden into custody (having just been in Hong Kong literally yesterday, my guess is that no-one knows where he is), the question of what happens to him will play out in the Hong Kong courts and the court of public opinion, and it is very likely that he won't be extradited for years if at all.
I assume designs will eventually begin to be more complex, but flat design forces one to focus on the basics instead of bevels and gradients. So I doubt we'll always have completely flat design, but I think design has changed permanently as a result of it.
Welcome to the People's Republic of China.
This ignores the fact that a huge part of a degree's value is as proof you've passed a lot of difficult filters. One of those filters is ability to do an institution's bidding for many years. For many companies, this is much more important than any particular academic knowledge. For jobs that really require deep knowledge, there are fairly easy ways to test for it that the employer can do themselves (i.e. by interviewing).
Défense d'afficher [Interactive Video]
I went to school in the US. Anecdotally, the top students genuinely cared about learning. Most of the cheaters just barely got by, if that.
Surprisingly, not The Onion.
If all your friends are using pencil eraser radios, then how resourceful do you really have to be to use one too?
I don't think Hong Kong has any political independence to violate. Decisions are already made in Beijing and then passed to Hong Kong's government to implement.

In this particular case the Chinese government has an official mechanism to override extradition decisions, but I don't think there's any reason for them to actually need it.
What makes you think that stops google logging what you're doing? They explicitly reserve the right to continue to do so.
At the engineering school I graduated from in Canada, which is ranked in the top 20 worldwide, cheating was prolific with nearly all unsupervised work being gratuitously plagiarized.

Although supervised examinations accounted for at least 50% of each grade, any student who didn't cheat and wasn't also very, very bright probably lost at least half a letter grade on their CGPA as a result.

It was common for me to do well above average on examinations and well below average on assignments, since I was not plagiarizing them.
You give them one more user, which is worth a lot when a software company negociates its value before a buyout.
If this goes on, pretty soon all garage door openers will have CPUs over 1Ghz and no self-respecting citizen will have less than 512MB of RAM.

The real elite will have scalable, enterprise-ready cloud-based garage door opener backoffice systems with parallel processing capability and huge scalability.
Well, there's flip side to this "fad" - with its simplicity, it is nudging us further towards content-oriented design. Or at least that's the general sentiment I'm perceiving.

The flat design movement is kind of a Überdesign, in Nietzschean terms. Tear it up, and build it properly from ground up. Or, that is the positivist view on the "fad".

Of course, I'm here ignoring hundreds of years of advancements in design, as a broad category. :) But we talk web/apps, so that's ok.
Needs a third option with font-based vectors (a la font-awesome)
> somewhat amateurish construction and maintenance of these sites

Maybe it's my misplaced faith in human nature but I think this kind of thing is almost self-regulating.

> not that I'm interested in pursuing it

Exactly.

It's funny how money works. I'm sure there's a lot of HN users reading this thinking "well fuck that, ten grand a month!" I guarantee you that after 6 months 99% of those people would be looking at themselves and wondering what they were doing with their lives. Getting a bit of money saves you from the wolves at the door - bills, rent, worrying about what you buy. And then you're in your nice, warm, fully paid up home and you get to face the real monster - the mirror.(†)

Which is why these rich guys are paying through the nose for this nonsense in the first place, of course. Because that guy in the mirror is taunting them. Take money for doing something you know is wrong and he'll taunt you, too.

The thing is, though, you can have as many fake philanthropy sites as you want, but you can't fool that guy in the mirror.

(†) Or the whiskey bottle. Same thing really.
I can't help but think that sounds like some fairly easy money.

Too bad I'd rather not help rich people that probably don't need the help, and likely need to know rich people to get into the market...
What people don't realise is that hardly anyone needs to use this sort of infrastructure regularly. We fixate on the range of a gasoline tank, thinking that an electric car must match that range if it's to be useful. In truth, long range driving is a very niche use case.

How many times in the last year did you start a trip with a full tank and need to refuel before you reached your destination? The mode answer to that question is zero. According to the Department of Energy, the average vehicle trip is just 10.1 miles. 98% of car journeys are less than 50 miles.

Battery swap technology is irrelevant and always will be. It's a great marketing move by Tesla, because it undermines one of the key arguments against electric cars, but it has little or no practical importance. The fast-charge infrastructure is what matters, because it's cheap enough to realistically become ubiquitous.

We're just very poor at translating our experience of car ownership to electric technology. There's a long thread of comments about peak demand, in which several people clearly haven't internalised the idea that you can charge your electric car at home, so you only need to use a fast-charge or battery swap facility if you've just driven 300 miles in the same day.
Snowden Leaves Hong Kong on Commercial Flight to Moscow
I dont want everything to look the same.
It's confusing and boring...
Am I alone in this?

Keep in mind that having all apps using Bootstrap or jQueriUI also make them all looks the same at some extent... So flat is not the reason the the similarity.
Interesting.

I read your article, expecting something totally different... which does not make your article less interesting.

I think that most of the time big ideas start small... in their respective non existing markets. Tesla was a big endeavor, but seen as niche (high end EV?), Facebook started as niche, etc....Even the Brazilian demonstrations or the Arab spring started "small".

The problem of many entrepreneurs I see is that think so big that they cannot think small and so they cannot start. Their product is fluffy and fails miserably.

So today, at 40 years old, your friends don't understand Snapchat. And yet, at some point, Snapchat may cross the chasm and Jay-Z will spend money to advertise his shows there, and in an era where privacy is going to become important again, Snapchat might - who knows - actually become the poster child of the evanescent private Internet.
"What's Snapjoy? We're building the smart photo library in the cloud"

s/We're/We were
Creating a Personal PaaS with Dokku on HPCloud
ون بيس 601
Tracking bug on activist in New York
Hence why you should only use these type of services for backups (or also syncing), not as a primary storage mechanism.

Or, from the opposite perspective, my hard drive is a backup for my Dropbox account.
Are you sure? google.com uses ECDHE_RSA here.

eta: You also asked for background info. It's been discussed on Hacker News recently: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_forward_secrecy
Did a fun experiment like that here:

http://thepenzone.com/svg-image/
I got a mail from FB with the exact same message saying they had screwd up. The most wtf moment of the email was when they had my contact number listed in the email, I have never uploaded my contact number on my fb profile.
Here is a nice nugget: Carlyle also owns CRG West (which has since been sold/renamed) -- CRG West was one fo the bid Datacenter owners - and even at one point owned MAE West.

How do you think the NSA taps get in place?

http://coresite.com/data-center-locations.php

Those are major hub/ingress/egress points...
I would never try this myself mind you; I hate pissing people off in the road in the states and I'm happy to outsource my driving to a taxi driver in china.

However, it's a simple matter of utilization, if everyone waited properly in line, traffic would seize up in Beijing as many intersections would become blocked by single lines of cars next to empty unused lanes.

We are talking about saving minutes, 10s of minutes, or even days [1]. Funny how Americans haven't seen real traffic before and think they know the right global solutions.

[1] http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2010/08/23/129376194/tra...
Same here! It feels bad when people think that cheating is a RIGHT!

I'm from India and 70% of people in my class think that cheating is fine. They'll copy assignments, cheat in tests and even exams. Though situation is not so bad here that people DEMAND for cheating but everything else is same.

I guess this is because of society and pressure. I don't know about China but in India, professions are like fashion. When doctors seem to be making money, there is a large portion of students wanting to be doctors and there is pressure from parents and society as a whole. Academic qualification is treated as the ONLY thing that one will be judged on and this also leads to parents stopping kids form going into sports, music and arts.

And poor kids who can't cope up with all this have to cheat.
"Political noise"? Rather discussing trivial things is a political statement as well, and to my ears the true cacaphony in all this.

Those who lead the country into the abyss
Call ruling too difficult
For ordinary men.
Ah, what an age it is
When to speak of trees is almost a crime
For it is a kind of silence about injustice!

Bertold Brecht, "To Posterity" (1939)
I'm sorry if this sounds selfish or xenophobic but this is in all honestly such a relief. I graduated college in 2008 and I remember being incredibly scared all the programming jobs were going to be outsourced to India. I remember blowing an interview trying to get the employer to prove to me he wouldn't outsource my job then took the first stable job I could find (even though I was never really happy there) for fear of not being able to find another one. Now that we've made it through the financial disaster and computer science jobs in this country is at an all time high I feel a giant weight lifted off of my shoulders.
Bill Clinton on NSA: Americans need to be on guard for abuses of power by US
I see non-Swartz posts. There were 2 non-NSA posts the day it blew up. I actually told myself "Ah, HN is obsessing with something today, looks like it's privacy this time".
Maybe the key is in the secrecy.
Well, that's anti math. Granted their are behavioral positions, but this not one of them.
This is what HBGary did for the USG....
It's not a fad. The reason we are moving towards flat design is high resolution displays. Flat design emphasizes typography which isn't ugly anymore.
Plants 'do maths'
graycat - remember this is a 7-week course and the lecturer, Pascal Van Hentenryck, in the initial video is stirring up interest imitating Indiana Jones - he's on a quest, he's passionate. So it's not the Hillier and Lieberman textbook approach to Operations Research of old. The whole point was to make the difficult problem of combinatorial problem solving fun and attractive to a wide audience.

I agree with you that many managers haven't a clue what to do with an OR graduate. So it does depend on how you position yourself. One reason for taking the course is to be able to promote your skills passionately (try making a video of your skills in every day parlance like the introductory video to this lecture) using current terminology - which as Prof Van Hentenryck says are in demand at INFORMS conferences (go to the analytics conference - rather than the main conference which is more academic).

I agree with you that many execs haven't a clue what optimization can do - or care - in fact most managers satisfice. That's why it's important to find the right boss who does value your accomplishments. It's also important to update how you state your value to others - which is one reason I'm doing the course.
I hope you stick with it - and I'd be interested to know what you think at the end of it.

Is the point of your argument that the leaderboard ranking forces people to try for an optimal solution, when in a business situation a solution at 99% of the value might be good enough?
Does anyone here have any idea how snapchat intends to make money? Or will it try to sell itself to Facebook/Google eventually a la Instagram?