skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been working on a theory that they produce awful UIs as a disinformation campaign. Consider a scenario where an unmedicated paranoid dude thinks GOOG is sniffing his wireless, recording whereever he goes on the internet, and sharing it all to the NSA, CIA, DHS, and his local HOA zoning committee. Unfortunately this is all true, except for the HOA thing, but the dude is crazy so the point isn't if he's accidentally correct or not. Lets say he tries to spread the paranoid meme to an angry gmail user. The gmail user is going to respond "heck no, these guys can't operate some incredible elaborate spying program, they can't even write a simple email UI after email UIs have been in continuous development for about four decades". Thus the public impression of the "don't be evil" is maintained.

I think if the Mighty GOOG ever divorces itself from .gov / .mil then we'll see them release sane UIs.

Unfortunately I'm not sure how my theoretical model applies to .com with UI issues like APPL. Perhaps they're a mere manifestation of the Cthulhu Mythos. Or something else... it would hardly be the first time that totally different root causes leads to similar appearing results.
Designing In The Open
Thanks for the tips. I'm a non-profit client.
Yes, which can be misleading. In Japan for instance, there are three main body types and a narrow genetic variation (theorized because Japan may have been originally inhabited by a small group of shipwrecked sailors).

Averaging these three body types results in a picture of no-one in Japan.
It's ironic that the full name of the university is "Duquesne University of the Holy Spirit".
Have you blocked javascript?

I believe you have identified the cause. Switching javascript off and on between queries makes the define: operator stop working and then return to working. I block cookies and don't log into google in both cases.

Silly, lazy, javascript-loving google, it used to work just fine without javascript and I don't see anything particularly special about how it works now that should require javascript either.
Ahh, fair enough, I hadn't realised that was a direct quote.
> We apparently don't value teaching French very much, and I can't really argue that we should value it more.

I don't understand that statement. Why should we not value teaching more? Anything we, as programmers, do relies on knowledge. It was taught to us at some point, by people who taught us, by people who wrote books, by examples put out on the internet by somebody. By our math teachers who laid the foundation for a logical understanding of code. By the philosophy teachers who taught us logic. Teaching is the most important way of shaping ours and other peoples minds, so why is it hard to argue that we should value teaching higher? Is teaching french less "valuable" than teaching english or C or Fortran or Prolog just because it's french? Is it all of a sudden less work because it's just "french", a pesky natural language that's hardly understood by computers and only spoken by a handful of people that happen to have invented the croissant? Shouldn't be all teaching be paid sufficiently, so that teachers will enlighten your kids or your friends kids, handing off the knowledge of mankind to the next generation?

I, personally have no problem arguing that learning french, just as learning any other language expands your mind, shapes and improves the way you think and thus teaching it is one of the more valuable services that people can provide.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6430077 - HN post/comments
And that's exactly how they're picking some of their drone targets, too. If you've talked to the leader of al qaeda, it doesn't really matter what you discussed (maybe he was just quering about the neighborhood or whatever), you'll probably end up dead.

So yes, metadata is very much "content", and can be very, very dangerous in the wrong hands.
you'd think no one needed to line up at all seeing how the oversold the most common estimate by 3 million phones.
Interesting! Guess I should have checked Wikipedia. Would a logic grid puzzle be solved via constraint programming?
So they knew she was in a bad place financially and still terminated her contract? There's not much to their response that changes this story. They didn't dispute her lack of benefits or the amount of her wages and they confirmed that she was in financial distress (so much so that the priests invited her to live in campus housing but still later the university stopped employing her).
I've seen someone complains about this somewhere, and it happened to me on another website, quite confusing. Thanks for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6430521 explanation
> the fact that working in academia can be a worse career than working in retail

I agree; it is exploitative.

But why do people keep showing up to do it? For every person who quits finally there are another dozen lined up to take the job. Perhaps that may be a little exaggeration, and no doubt it varies by region and subject matter, but people doing adjunct work must be getting compensation that is not salary or else why are they doing it? (Maybe I should say that I work in higher ed; I've often been puzzled by people's motivations about this.)
They're not wrong, though. It's all about priorities. With an MS product you do get good support, and someone to shout at if something is not behaving as expected. With open source tech you can submit a patch to fix it yourself.
The local story (in short) actually is: The director of the museum saw a documentary about a plane graveyard in Bahrain that was aired next to the Formula 1 race there. He saw the Buran in the background, contacted the relevant people and got one short after :).
What companies like Google and Facebook are doing right with technical hiring
I think it's funny how people put down a technology (ASP.NET) that was released in January of 2002

Because it is still overwhelmingly used today. MS themselves admit that MVC is a tiny proportion of ASP.NET deployments.
You bring up two really good points there. I will add a screenshot to the Github repo and there is an opportunity to use a directive for the color picker.

I'm not sure about the quantity picker though, what's that going to look like in the HTML? One element in the code gives you all of the quantity fields?

My use of directives to date has been rather limited so I look forward to exploring that more in some upcoming work.
Can't resist mentioning my small timer site from several years ago: http://clockster.net. Takes RESTful urls, like http://clockster.net/3min30s.
This 18 year old pirate wants to enter Austrian parliament.
WordPress powers 1 in 5 websites
9 million sold. 47 were available in gold.
Simple Regard For A Fellow Human
Well I read several folks ranging from 5-8 mil. I think even Piper said 7 mil possible. Either way they blew through them all.
Never connected with my Google account, always works for me (define:) the timer didn't though.
It'd be interesting to see a by-country breakdown of sales, given that they added 2 new markets to this release, China and Puerto Rico, having 1.35b and 3.6m populations, respectively. This first weekend could have been great....or it could have been subpar in comparison to the last release, depending on markets.
That's my feeling. The new gmail is a piece of garbage and no matter what justifications are thrown at me all I can think is "Fix it."

The new interface is so poor that a legit suggestion now is to use a dedicated mail client so that you dont have to use an interface that was once useful. Terrible!
It goes to show you just how hungry people were for change on the platform. Next up has to be screen size which would result in a similar massive weekend for the 6.
And... AAPL is +6.9% pre-market.
It implies downloading a file onto the users machine without user consent which is, in itself, a problem. More importantly, an attacker could craft a torrent file that exploits vulnerabilities in the torrent client. If, just by visiting a site, an attacker can download an arbitrary file onto your machine and then have it automatically opened in a known program you're in big trouble.
What comes after flexible phone screens? Flexible processors
When I was overseas, I just used google.us, which redirects to google.com, since I only searched in English, I didn't speak the language of the country I was living in.
Django Vanilla Views 1.0 released.
This was just their minor release cycle, so yeah it will be crazy to think how the 6 will sell.
Schneier sets up and knocks down a strawman:

"Back in June, when the contents of Edward Snowden's cache of NSA documents were just starting to be revealed and we learned about the NSA collecting phone metadata of every American, many people -- including President Obama -- discounted the seriousness of the NSA's actions by saying that it's just metadata."

The NSA and Obama aren't "discounting" the NSA's actions because it's "just metadata." They're defending the legality of the NSA's actions by saying that it's "just metadata."

The legally relevant distinction isn't how informative data versus metadata is, but who generated and controls the information that's the subject of surveillance. AT&T's metadata about your calls is generated by AT&T's equipment, stored on its servers, and is generally not even accessible to you. That not only puts it squarely within the domain of the third party doctrine, but makes it very hard to argue that it fits within even a common sense lay person's reading of the 4th amendment (which guarantees "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects."). Arguing that AT&T's data is your data is an uphill battle to say the least.

Now, maybe third party doctrine is obsolete in a world where people voluntarily give over to third parties every detail about their lives.[1] But it doesn't contribute to that debate for Schneier to totally mischaracterize what Obama is saying.

[1] In my opinion, privacy is obsolete in a world where people voluntarily give over to third parties every detail about their lives, but reasonable minds can differ on that point.
One thing I cannot stand is that google tracks links in my email. It's one thing to track links in the search results, another very different thing to track links in messages, which to me is unacceptable.
Interestingly I have no sound when the timer runs to zero, and no blip on the windows sound levels.
I couldn't watch it in one go... this is staged right ?
It's a good thing that we can use ORM libraries to implement different database backends ;)

In all seriousness, it really depends on a lot of things. We've pretty much crossed Oracle from the list because it's just way too expensive, but it's mainly the availability of experts and the ecosystem around SQL Server that makes it an 'easy' choice for most shops in my area.
I don't think laziness has anything to do with it - they want you to have JS turned on. For instance Google Analytics, their powerful tracking tool, is crippled without it.
50 days of "The Scientific 7-Minute Workout"
A part of their entire lives instead of just being for their work life.
You can use any Python to write high-performance webapps cause the performance requirements for "webapps" is low and the backends are usually servers/services and/or are more constrained by datastructures/algorithm/disk than execution speed.
The biggest risk of exploration today is carpal tunnel
I think Steve Jobs himself would have cried if he saw either IOS 7 or the iPhone 5C. One looks clunky and amateurish; the other is simply hideous and was designed specifically to increase margins while delivering an inferior product to the customer(sure its still well made, but most people would rather have an all metal case.)
Metro largely threw discoverability out the windows.

(ps: I had the same problem)
> I would love to run mono in production, it's just so slow and buggy that this isn't possible.

Is that the general opinion? I've never seen a consensus on mono for MVC.
Jetpack to be available in 2014
CSS Property Usage - Popularity
Typical Google. Uninformative, trite, bland, uninspired user experience. That's the best auditory indicator they could find? The following may not be a popular statement here, but it seems Google is still overrun by engineers that are humanoid-challenged. With all due respect to engineers, engineers are not human readable.
In any case, I was wrong. Their web site says:

> SFLC is directly involved in its clients’ FOSS license development efforts, ... and offers licensing assistance, particularly license development and implementation consulting, to FOSS developers other than its clients.
Re-read what josefresco said - because this is the reality.
The quiet succes is B2G. If there was no Government spending and CalPERS gambling, there would be no SV.

A perfect example is the South African who would be a one and done without our Rich Uncle Sam borrowing to invest and subsidize his markets.
people are digging for http responses https://gist.github.com/gregclermont/6669056
Woz on smart watches: 'I want the entire Internet on my wrist'
So this woman spends some time in a cash checking place and now knows why "poor" people don't use banks?

Poor people don't use banks because you don't need a bank when you live check-to-check. One doesn't need to make a deposit when the check they just got doesn't cover their expenses from last month. So her concluding statement of "the banking industry needs to develop different fee and service structures designed to accommodate lower income depositors "makes no sense.

It's not a choice, it's not like people are like "Hmm, well I could deposit my money and make 0.5% back next month", it's more like "shit, I'm behind on my gas bill and can't have my family freezing again this winter."

The fact that the teller at the check cashing place is like "family" and they speak spanish isn't really a reason why the poors go there, it's because they don't have a choice.

As an former academic who made it out of the poverty system with some serious work and lots of scars to prove it, this article really pisses me off. Not only due to it's lack of perspective, but due to it's lack of due diligence to actually answer the question they claim to answer in the title.
I upgraded from a 4 as well. I could not be happier so far. There were many apps that I had thought were just complete sh that now zoom on the 5s (spotify, g+, and a few others). Finger print reader is surprisingly useful, although a minor feature. Possibly the most noticeable thing for me from the 4 to the 5s is the speaker. I always have podcasts running as I walk around the house and noticed a huge difference in quality and volume. With the 4 I often had to plug in headphones to be able to hear over an AC unit or a my car's engine. The 5s speaker cuts through a lot better.
The latest version is not available for Windows.
Nothing moves the stock like a successful product. I am glad they did not bow to market pressure and announce more dividends or stock buybacks. Stock buybacks are just dead money. They should instead use that money on their business and not to satisfy investors over the short term.
Which was exactly the sentiment of my manager in previous org: "You can use open source as long as they have commercial support".
Or Paradox.
I’m honestly not too sure about that. Knowing the split between the two would be very interesting.

I would imagine that they can make tons of 5c phones while the 5s may be more problematic. So the balance between the two may be more even than it seems. (Also, I would be really interested whether the 5c or 5s is the more high margin device. I could imagine that at least for now the 5c has a higher margin than the 5s – well, at least the 16GB 5s.)
Clearly they are going out of business. Not to mention only 200 Million devices running iOS7 so far.
Lemonade, a simple credit card payment for freelancers, for sale
That is a cool feature, actually.
I know, I was just being facetious. It amuses me that logical positivism fails its own verification principle.
Lessons from Valve: Why Your Next Startup Should Be Flat
I make no claims that the post is a good one, or that its title is particularly apt. In fact I think its a bit vacuous, a better title could have been "I'm young and in love and I'm amazed to have found someone I can share my geekiness with and I want to tell everyone about it". Unless you know the guy personally there's not much point to reading it, but I'd say there's also not much justification for inferring sexism.
The author of this library wrote an article about how it was built with some new demos at http://flippinawesome.org/2013/09/23/creating-a-realistic-ra...
The Google redesign seems to be about creating a walled garden, tied together by Google Plus, Android, and aggressive highlighting of other Google services on each page.

Maybe they fear that if they don't trap the users, Facebook will. Either way, the continued high user figures at Yahoo show that it's possible. To do it, they need to stop being a search engine (to discover others content, leave the garden), and become a portal, the only web experience you'll ever need.

I think this becomes necessary because on a tablet, people use apps, and if those aps are deep enough, they may never escape them. You could make a tablet that just ran the facebook ap, an a subset of users would be happy. They need a counter trap.

To me, to them, any other GUI changes that crept in are likely incidental. Does it tie in with Google Plus? Will it work on a tablet?, Does it look like our tablet ap?, would be the primary question.
I wouldn't be so sure. The 4S sold over four million units on its opening weekend, which is pretty close to the 5's five million, but way more than the 4's 1.7 million.

Personally, I'm deliberately on the "S" upgrade cycle. I started off with a 3GS, then got a 4S, and now have a 5S. I figure I'll let other people deal with the bleeding edge, and I can get the model with all the refinements afterwards. I'd be willing to bet that a lot of other people think the same way. I don't doubt that the 6 will sell really well, probably better than the 5S, but it may not sell vastly better than the 5S.
[...] and stealing Soviet spy satellites

Wow, now that you say it that seems logical that the shuttle could steal a satellite, but did that ever happen? I'm really hoping for some cool declassified stories from one/both sides of such a mission. :)
Startups, VCs Now Free To Advertise Their Fundraising Status
Integration testing with pyVows and Django
Harvard University Announcement: No tuition and no student loans
I'm a .NET developer by day, and I'm definitely a fan. C# is a great language, I've worked on many fun projects, and I've even worked in a .NET startup environment. Many of my experiences do not echo that of the author. Perhaps I'm lucky, but a legacy project for me is a project running .NET 2 and an older CMS version, and compared to Java I'd still pick it. I've used .NET in a number of agencies too, and I'd preferred using it to using PHP. We've even taken a number of failed WordPress projects and have taken them over to Umbraco, and the clients couldn't be happier.

That being said, I consciously made a decision a few years ago to force myself to develop with different tools for personal projets. While I think ASP.NET is a great platform, I've worked in enough .NET shops to see that many .NET devs tend to "just" write C#. They're more than happy to dedicate their entire career to Microsoft, and to disregard any progress made on other platforms.

The biggest blocker for me is using Windows to develop applications. I'm also a big fan of Python, but I'd be lying if I said that I haven't struggled with the transition to using Linux to develop. The terminal is just so powerful, and even though Powershell has made Windows a much better platform to script on, I really don't think it can ever match the terminal. Perhaps I'm alone in this, but I would like to be comfortable with the knowledge that if I lost my job, .NET were to stagnate/fall apart, or if I were offered a great job using Python, that I'd be fully capable of putting my .NET hat down and moving into a mid-level role writing Python on a Linux-based environment.

My problem with .NET isn't really a problem. It's a worry that the the Windows platform could alienate me from progress made elsewhere.
GraphViz101: Why Use Exploratory Network Analysis?
First lesson in a series of posts on the basics of graph visualization.
Realistically, I'd estimate somewhere in the ballpark of 4,000, which is only slightly less absurd than your joke. From what I've heard, Apple stores typically only had ten or so gold units each available on launch day. That's what it was at the store where I was, and I've heard the same from others. Multiply that by the 413 Apple stores worldwide and... that's not very many. Pretty crazy.
First time Siri user? Tell her "OK, Glass!" ;-)
irb(main):001:0> RUBY_VERSION
=> "2.0.0"
irb(main):002:0> class Foo; def hello; puts "hello"; end; end
=> nil
irb(main):003:0> X = Foo.new.method(:hello)
=> #<Method: Foo#hello>
irb(main):004:0> X.class
=> Method
irb(main):005:0> class Bar; define_method(:hello, &X); end
=> #<Proc:0x007f93d087a2d8 (lambda)>
irb(main):006:0> Bar.new.hello
hello
=> nil
The last update to WPF was a year ago when .NET 4.5 was released. The current trajectory has major releases about every two years, or whenever there is a major update to .NET itself since it's built-in. Given that Visual Studio itself is now built around many WPF libraries, I don't necessarily see it being deprecated anytime soon (I mean, you can still develop and deploy WinForms-based software even though there aren't any new features on the roadmap). But only time will tell.
Beirut’s Coders Convene for Community and Social Progress
Twitter IPO: 'company seeking $1bn loan ahead of Thanksgiving flotation'
> Google is constantly breaking one of the most basic rules about UI design: "Good Design" is not about making it pretty. "Good Design" is about making it easy to use;

I suspect that the problem is that for established products, like gmail, "easy to use" just means "the exact way it is now": user familiarity trumping every other metric.

And I suspect there is only so many times a HCI design team can say "we ran a study and we should do nothing" before they are deemed useless. Eventually things have to be changed to preserve jobs and since the only metrics of "good design" in HCI, currently, are "ease of use" and "looks good" it usually results in something that "looks" easier than the old one through hiding (or removing) features and padding the shit out of everything.
How is this anything more than a self-interested puff piece? (As an investor, the founders' success is his success, right?)

The topic is an interesting one, and an article exploring the net impact of under-the-radar companies versus the high fliers on the Silicon Valley, US and global economies, particularly one that presents some data, could be very enlightening.
It's clearly a gigantic whale holding an umbrella (well, that reference may be to cryptic for people who don't read French or didn't read the awesome Le Génie des Alpages comic book by F'murrr).
If a person who debugs is a debugger then the person who wrote the bugs is...
Check this also. It's old but personally knowing fan boys, I know they would act exactly like this- http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rdIWKytq_q4
ASP.NET MVC is fairly solid but the problem is not so much the framework but having to run on Windows. Managing windows server is a horrible experience compared to Linux. The automation tooling for Linux is just far better.