skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apple Gets Pwned, SF Store Is Now Advertising DVD Jon’s doubleTwist
Microsoft would love it if this were true. They may even convince themselves that it is-- that their stuff is just as good as Apple's or Google's, just not as fashionable. But it isn't true.

As companies, Apple and Google are both obsessed with making great things. Not with fashion, with engineering. Ask the people who work there. Microsoft isn't. Their history as a company has convinced them that there always has to be a shortcut to dominance-- that they don't have to obsess over craftsmanship, because they can use money or power to buy market share. Their plan to spend $100m marketing Bing shows their priorities haven't changed.
List of Awesome Helpful Articles 
Here are some helpful articles centered around the business of being a graphic designer.
Made me motion sick, but I am prone to such things. I hate actions on mouse over. Mousing over is the byproduct of what I actually want to do, which is select things. Having an ever-present, single, cursor is a huge limitation of interfaces. Using mouse-over as the primary interface modality reinforces this limitation.

Edit: the subtle change in color or background that shows the potential for activation is an exception to hating mouse-over responses.
These guys look like being advocates of mediocrity. I haven't seen such radical egalitarianism promotion even from junior managers.

I especially disliked the moment when they interrupted the criticizer who was talking that there are a lot of evidences of geniuses existence and highly productive programmers in particular.

And rather than advising to learn from the best programmers, they are advising to learn from ephemeral "community" and trimming ones ego and ambitions.
Illustrator Tutorials 
Illustrator is arguably the greatest vector graphic design app out there. Below are some tutorials that every graphic designer should see.
I believe Google Search was developed internally.
Well, you certainly don't need to log and rethrow them at every call site, because Java exceptions contain a stack trace. Sometimes rethrowing is necessary, because of Java checked exceptions. Sometimes exceptions are benign. The best rule I've seen is the follows: never catch an exception if you can't handle it (either by dying, wrapping it to work around Java lameness, etc.).
Personal Injury Boston
Homan & Sullivan PC specializes In wokers compensation claims and work related personal injury law in the Boston, MA area.
Interesting site, but I really cannot understand why the mouse click is a "bad" thing. Having pages do nothing unless you explicitly click is a great thing, that site showed me exactly how annoying it can be to control an interface that wants to rearrange itself all the time based on mouse movements. Moving the mouse to a link and having the link move AWAY because you happened to move across one of the links between it and your mouse is simply annoying.
The Bing interface is prettier and is as-fast-or-faster than Google. That's 'better/more' enough for the typical computer user.

Remember: If you're reading Hacker News, you're not a "typical computer user". You're not the type of person that's lining Google's pockets -- you're probably a cost.

Most "typical computer users" don't hate Microsoft. They're happily using Word and IE, love FreeCell, and couldn't tell you what Emacs or The Gimp were to save their lives. People stopped reflexively typing 'yahoo' and 'altavista' pretty easily when their friends recommended 'google' and could do the same for 'bing'.

Keystrokes aren't a switching cost and Google isn't nearly as invincible as you might think.
Looking at the handout too...,

I am a bit disappoint this talk was not an effort to address the old cliche that some programmers are ten times as productive as other programmers and similar things.

I already hate kind of thinking but I would like to have hard figures to use in arguments against the kind of people who believe this bolox. I agree with statements like "lose the ego" but I don't think that would fly in arguments with my manager.
No secret, just google. I speculated the distribution may not be symmetrical, thinking there could be an excess of strikes along the ecliptic being fed by the asteroid belt and guessed what terms would crop up in a paper that discussed the topic (I find that is the best way to search for something - don't ask the question, but search for what you think the answer would look like).

Actually what I thought I would find is radar data showing actual counts of meteor strikes, but no joy - I suspect the military knows what they are but they are not saying.

Of course there could be more recent papers hidden behind a paywall, but ADS didn't bring up any obvious abstracts.
Austin Personal Injury Lawyer
Mark Hefter is a personal injury lawyer in the Austin, TX area and operating on cases with dignity, determination, and integrity.
quite old but its a really good experiment, while clicking seems fine for now, its a nightmare a lot of the time on touch screen interfaces, even clicking with my trackpad is annoying.

while its not completely without its annoyances, considering the limitations it handles itself pretty well, and is certainly a worthwhile experiment.
When people are searching google, they don't want pretty. They want bare bones functional, it works. Bing looks cluttered, busy, and reminds me of why everyone switched to google in the first place - to get away from all the idiotic 'portals' that were trying to have as much stuff on the search page as possible.

Let me quantify a little more... People associate microsoft with bad things, and the past - their operating system crashing and dying. It's a necessary evil for them (Until they discover linux/osx if they ever do). Google on the other hand is associated with providing good search results, and allowing them to find what they want to, quickly.

I agree, google isn't invincible, but I believe if it is to be replaced, it'll be by a startup. Not a rebranding of a god-awful search engine by microsoft.

>> "That's 'better/more' enough for the typical computer user."

It's really not. You're talking about changing everyones behavior. Why would they do that? Because it looks prettier? You're delusional.
Well, Mars exploration can be a potential commercial enterprise in real estate, travel, and natural resources (unsure on this one). Regardless, I think the point of the article was to point out there needs to be 1) focus on a tangible benefit/gain, and 2) be able to scale from small to big, similar to most startups.
I don't think that these special schools are sorting.

However, their opponents do. They argue that letting kids out of crappy schools makes things worse for the kids who are left by denying them role models or somesuch. This is a curious argument because the kids left behind don't do worse when left behind.

I think that the opponents are wrong. (I'll even go so far as to say that almost all of the kids in the crappy schools would do better in these special schools but when you say that, the opponents figure out that you're accusing them of defending crappy schools.) However, my point is that if they're correct, they owe the "good kids" something for the sacrifice that they're asking them to make.
It sounds like this is the part where the dream gets replaced by the job. With luck and a bunch of work it can switch back.
Since the "don't click" style of interface is diametrically opposed to the very idea of selecting text to copy and paste (well, unless they rework it to use key commands from text editors) I have to screenshot and transcribe this from the site:

"DONTCLICK.IT is the final artwork of the author's diploma in Communication Design at the University Essen-Duisburg, Germany."

I was wondering who on earth would research user interfaces that diametrically oppose the instincts and conditioned behaviors of nearly all computer users. Now it suddenly makes sense.

This isn't to say it isn't cool or interesting, but it seems awful in usability terms.
I was mentally replacing "Wave" with "Azure" and it made the article much more accurate. Just sayin...
Exactly, when scrolling though a list the first item stays on the top and the next item on the bottom. This is a horrible interface. They could "improve" it by having a navigation area, and a viewable area as separate things, but then you need to exit the navigation area to get to the next stage. But, then you need a complex mouse movement to exit the navigation area and get to where you want to be. The true value of a click is the clear delineation that this is what I want.

On the other hand it looks cool.
I'm curious to see how it works. I rarely use facebook chat, if that is a data point.
It may be an "old cliche", but also happens to be true. Maybe you can quibble over whether it's a 10X, 100X, or merely a 5X difference, but some programmers are clearly much more productive than others.
Ok, first of all, it's unfair to say that they're "fighting for the #2 spot" because the combined total console sales of last generation + this generation put them in #3. They're in the #2 slot for this generation, which is all that matters at this point. You don't gauge market position by looking at product sales over multiple generations.

Second, the Xbox division is profitable. Does that mean they made back their sunk costs? No, but they're on their way, and I think the original point was the MS has so much money that they can enter a market big, pour the money, and wait for things to turn their way. The Xbox is a good example of that.
We proved that our socialists, if funded by taxing capitalists, could beat their socialists funded by socialists.

What a ridiculous statement!
Firefox Inside Firefox Inside Firefox Inside Firefox
Enter chrome://browser/content/browser.xul in a Firefox address bar. And you'll have Firefox inside Firefox!

A bit old, but nice for those who have not seen it.
Alternative phrasing: to make something good I find I have to be thinking about it all the time. If I think about it all the time I talk about it every chance I get, ask for help, comments, feedback. It's easier to ask for help if the thing you want them to help you with is a click away.

So make it public.
This past March, I paid my own way to SXSW. Meanwhile, Vidoop picked up travel for Kveton (by now some kind of VP of Open Technologies), Sontag, Matt Selbie (VP of Marketing), and Scott Blomqist (CTO) who all shacked up in some sweet pad somewhere outside downtown Austin.

...

I’m writing this post not because I’m bitter — most startups fail and I knew this when I joined the company [...]

Seems more like that your typical consumer security / authentication company is going to fail when it pays for four key employees to go to SXSW, especially when it's in dire financial straits.
Slightly OT but this app looks phenomenal. Simple, focused app with a clean interface. I am buying it now and can't wait to use it.
Your error is to conflate "mental illness" with "mental disability". The former is frequently treatable and sufferers can rejoin society as productive members of the community, as in this example (alcoholism being considered a mental illness).

Someone who is mentally disabled, as in unable to take care of themselves, would not be able to survive long-term homelessness.
I have a hard time seeing compassion being an important determinant of economic policy. Small communities yes, aggregates no. Not an economist, but I'd be surprised if mainstream models actually take that into account.

Take pharma for example. Seemingly a noble industry, but rampant extortion on the people who precisely cannot handle it. The incentive for compassion is indirect: it is tied to PR, then probably profits (even in this case, I suspect in many cases the PR loss is nothing as long as they are legally operating, from advantages of oligopoly).

Or, if your model of economics includes things like happiness and societal health quantified into a general utility function. But this would seem to be an avalanche of variables that try to tease out things like the utility of eating junk food.
Really? I thought it was licensed from Stanford.
It was a very good experiment; it proved to me it's a bad idea and could never work. No sarcasm. Negative results are results.

It's demo-ware. Part of what I mean by that term are things that look good in the demo, but it turns out the demo is pushing the idea to the very limits. A demo of a good idea by necessity can only scratch the surface, not exhaust the idea. With demoware, it only works as long as you don't bring the idea into contact with the real world. It looks great as long as you stay in demoland, but that's it. See also: Purely visual general-purpose programming languages, 3D avatar-based chatting (not a game that also functions as a limited chat room, pure 3D chat).
Blame Drew's Cancer
Correcting a minor oversight by saying... Thank you. ;-)
It seems the age of intelligent agents may have finally arrived. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_agent)
So this makes sense, which, lumped together with the other 2 responses, is a general living quality issue.

But, does it really work out that way? That is:

cost of providing housing and essential care to homeless + cost of treating any of those with mental disabilities < economic benefit from increasing general quality of environment.

Sure housing prices would rise, but the left side of the inequality is direct tax payer money. The right side comes indirectly from sales, public facilities, and property. Knowing that prisoners are locked away in interest of lowering crime rate, at a $20K+/year/prisoner [1], that seems, on a hunch, difficult.

It looks quite intricate. And, knowing that modern corporations will have no business in doing this, it is a public service; some people might not be interested in paying this tax. Hence, doing nothing seems to not be very far from optimal, as it looks.

Or, is that inequality correct, and RHS - LHS gives a good number?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisons_in_the_United_States
These guys look like being advocates of mediocrity.

Yup. They wrote Subversion and continue to encourage people to use it.

Perhaps they should tone down their egos and realize that Subversion was not really that great of an idea, and there are now several competing tools that do everything Subversion does, but better.
"Parser" said the really wrong thing to me. Notification and normalization seems to be what's going on but you still need to parse the Atom feeds. "Parser" says to me something like http://www.feedparser.org/ . (Kind of by definition, a "web service" to "parse" another web service is absurd.)

I'm not saying this to be critical, just to let you know what I saw when I tried to read your site.
Request A Hack: Turn Flickr into The Big Picture
Some friends on Twitter came up with a great idea: convert a photo site to have a layout like The Big Picture. I'd love it for Flickr, Posterous, Tumblr etc.

Someone could probably build that with a greasemonkey script really fast.

http://twitter.com/ibeching/status/2047379234
http://twitter.com/hartsell/status/2049714995

It would be cool to see someone here post a solution. It would build some cred in this community.

On a meta level, if you like the idea of posting requests or seeing them done, make a "request a hack" yourself.
Genius exists, but is not a sufficiently good excuse for being an asshole.
A lot of the problems SVN ran into was trying to use cutting edge technology and standards before they were really ripe. WebDAV, for example, or the endless, endless iterations of Berkeley DB corruption. It is, in a lot of ways, an excellent illustration of the dangers of trying to solve the wrong problem.
The author rightfully points out that many sites use IFRAME tags for ads, and that can slow down your site.

However, the alternative is to use a Javascript ad tag. I've learned from painful experience that if the ad server doesn't respond to a JS ad tag, the entire page will stop loading until the ad server times out (up to 10 seconds).

I'd rather have a page be 10-20% slower with IFRAME tags than use JS ad tags that are effectively a single point of failure for my site.
Just in time for WWDC too. Epic.

And I'm going to take a second to hijack this thread for a tangentially related announcement:

280 North is co-hosting a small event with Sofa (http://madebysofa.com/ - they're responsible for Cappuccino's new theme, "Aristo") on Monday for Cappuccino developers and anyone else who wants to join us.

http://cpcoder.eventbrite.com/

7-9PM, Martini Room at Jillian's in Metreon across the street from WWDC (Moscone West).

Also, Francisco will be speaking at CocoaHeads on Wednesday at the SF Apple Store (the one mentioned in the article) http://theocacao.com/document.page/606 It's open to the public but get there a little early as it will fill up fast.

We've got some competition from dozens of other WWDC parties (http://blog.quazie.net/2009/05/wwdc-partiesevents/) including Loopt :)
It really astounds me when people think that Microsoft has to instantly beat Google. I think they're looking at it from the wrong point of view - They only really need to beat Yahoo at this stage.

Microsoft are throwing $100M dollars at an advertising campaign, when you compare that to the tens of billions they were willing to spend on acquiring Yahoo for their search business last year, its a cheap investment.

Hell, I'd wager that since they'll be recuperating some of the costs through search advertising, that the $100M spent will only be the beginning. I think we will all see more advertising spent in the future.

If Microsoft is serious about search, this $100M is a cheap gambit.

Let's say, hypothetically speaking, that Google's users are so entrenched that they wont be able to steal any of them, yet they do manage to take all of Yahoo's users, that means they still would control essentially half of the search volume that Google would control.

$100M for a glimpse at that outcome is cheap, especially when they have the cash reserves to do it.

So like I said, they just have to steal Yahoo users, which then puts them in a really good position to outdo Google.

If history has shown us anything, when it comes to technology & consumers, the more technically superior solution doesn't always win (eg, betamax vs vhs or IE vs Netscape)
Well, I hate flash and those popup link things because they break my learned work flow.
I use the mouse to keep track of where I am in the text, to highlight, pop links into new windows, do Google searches and most importantly as an outlet for my ADD/OCD.
So when the interface starts doing random stuff I get forcibly removed from my concentration.
I am not against this kind of thing, but it belongs in certain specific places with lots of warnings before it happens and an opt-out if you expect me to use your site.
If factoryjoe.com is down (it is for me), a mirror is here: http://www.iterasi.net/openviewer.aspx?sqrlitid=xbgjos4wt0wq...
Four reasons I don't think the new iPhone will be available on Monday.
That's a really slick design and app.
So awesome. Can't wait to see it in person. (Flying out to WWDC Sunday)
it didnt prove that to me at all.

see the iphone, a usual way of scrolling it to click somewhere around the scrollbar, that obviously sucks especially on a small touch screen, so they use clickless gestures.

while this experiment may not have directly influenced the iphone devs, it may have, and its in the same direction.

our interfaces are terrible at the moment, anything that pushes innovation into smarter ways of working with computers is good in my book.

I do agree that as a demo they pushed it to its limits, and that a lot of the cases its impractical, but there are positive lessons to be learnt that can be applied in real situations (like the iphone)
i COULD build a startup around it. but it would take a great deal of time that i just can't spare right now.

i don't expect wave to hit shores for at least a year, if ever.
It depends a lot on the area. For example, tourism is a large source of income for San Francisco.

http://www.onlyinsanfrancisco.com/sfnews/?p=926

If there are lots of homeless people panhandling in tourist areas, then tourists may want to spend their dollars elsewhere.
The impression I get from this summary is that Google built a really nice web app and then decided to call it a "protocol", but it's actually just a high-level description of their architecture -- you cannot use the "protocol" without creating something functionally identical to their architecture (compare to, say, email and FTP, where you can create a trivial client or a rich one on the same protocol).
Last time I saw this I was in a lot of pain from RSI, it hurt to click on things. I spent a long time looking to see if somebody had found a way to replace the Mac OS X buttons with "no click" buttons like they have on that site.

Next I looked to see if I could find software that would let me use a key on my keyboard as a mouse click. I didn't find anything that seemed easy or free...
Ah, ok, another interesting point. The reason why "disability" came out, was because many years ago, I was complaining to a friend about the conduct of beggars in NYC (not the begging part), and I was told before that a significant proportion of the beggars in NYC were mentally disabled.

This is the insanity defense. There are two outcomes of this.

First, insanity defense stands, and they are absolved of responsibility over their actions. I did indeed conflate the two, and it is part of the reason why I thought doing something different may not change the optimality of the current situation. (They have a switch they cannot turn off unless you constantly medicate them (very expensive), and so if the social burden isn't great, do nothing.)

Second, it doesn't stand, then perhaps there is a conclusive economic value and societal benefit in a program that helps reassimilation. But it's not that simple: suggesting it is a non-innate trait implies that there was volition involved in their behavior. Again there are two ways to look at this:

1. they are consciously obstructive and antisocial (technical definition) members of society, which is, in a way, criminal.

2. they have a tendency to lapse into such illness, which comes around to suggest, again, something innate.

Alas, I don't have a resolution.
From what I've collected, Smalltalk is pretty close (the non GNU varieties, at least).
Quản Lý Hồ Bơi
Excuse my ignorance per this industry, but what about a Will Call or prepaid option for the scenario zackattack mentioned?
I think there are also Fire Code issues with stairwells.
They can act as giant chimneys that create a draft which will accelerate a fire and spread it rapidly.
Another secondary thing that's very convenient for me is that I can make many small changes and push them all at once when I'm happy with them--because they're small they're easier to review. But this is a workflow issue, it's not that one couldn't do this with SVN.

This is part of the problem with DVCSes - you do your work off in a cave, and then when it's "perfect" you submit it for inclusion.

Note that SVN doesn't lack this problem - it can even make it worse. It's just far more common in my experience for people to do work in a cave somewhere with a DVCS and then throw it all over the wall in a huge hunk than with SVN, because it's so easy to maintain that fork off in neverland.

After all, just look at the comments (on this article no less!) about how "once I clean X up, I'll put it on {github,bitbucket,google code}." That's the kind of attitude that means it'll almost never (statistically) be seen by anyone other than the original author (which is likely true anyway, only one of my projects has ever really attracted anything resembling attention).

Note that Ben isn't convinced that this risk of DVCSes outweighs their (admittedly large) benefits. It merely aggravates a very serious problem to a point where it becomes a complete nightmare.
"they use clickless gestures."

This is some fantastic new definition of "clickless" which I have been previously unaware of. You never remove your finger from the surface of your iPhone? I think you may be doing it wrong.