skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Little to no problems. There are a couple of miss alignments here and there, but overall they did a great job on iOS 7 from an UX point of view. There's even a countdown timer on the lock screen when snoozing an alarm. There's more important information shown to the user thanks to this over simplified interface.

"Content first" was one of the main topics in the UX crowd lately, and frankly, iOS 7 is a good example of this concept.
Any change can be construed as kicking a percentage of users to the curb. I just don't think it's reasonable to hold back design for them. If they learn, great. If not, maybe it's a sign that you should be spending more time teaching your grandma.

PS. Your grandma says you never call. She knows you're busy but still, a phone call once a week never killed anyone.
The API that's available to iPads with keyboards is substantially different from the one available to Macs.

If your Mac software relies on keyboard behavior that third-party apps cannot produce (like CMD+C doing a logical copy of a selected item instead of copy this text) it may not matter how many iPads have keyboards.
I guess it is a counter-reaction to Einstein not getting more than one Nobel prize for all he did.

Back then, experimental physics was perceived as the 'real' physics, and guys like Einstein were 'mathematicians' meddling with physics.

Source: Einstein and Feynman biographies.
That's how I want to surf, too!
3 Killer Ways On How To Drive Quality Traffic To A New Blog
Over and over again I see the pattern that if you reduce friction to let people pay you, you will make more money. Also, discount bundling is smart and works all over the place. Smart combination.
One of my favorite childhood games was Aerobiz [1]. Probably not an accurate simulation of starting an airline, but that is what this submission made me think of.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerobiz
I had an iMac hard drive die somewhat out of warranty. So upgraded hard drive it is.

FWIW, I didn't find the iMac all that hard to get into, certainly no harder than unibody MBP. There are a lot of screws, and you have to pull the display out, but that's the cost of a sleek all in one. I did appreciate that there were no sharp sheet metal edges to cut my fingers, like my cheaper towers.

I'm not sure I'd buy another one though -- I'm disappointed with the display. It's ghosting/burning in, the backlight is uneven, and it doesn't profile worth a damn. I suspect that the issue with the dead HD was heat, and that also affects the display.
Google still can, though.
please sign the petiton :

"Around half of all clinical trials have not been published; some trials have not even been registered. If action is not taken urgently, information on what was done and what was found in trials could be lost forever, leading to bad treatment decisions, missed opportunities for good medicine, and trials being repeated unnecessarily."

---> http://www.alltrials.net/
This was exactly my first thought When I came back to the software industry: "IF I mess up, at least I will not kill 195 people".
>Emphasis mine. If pushing a door counts, so does changing the user agent header or auto-incrementing IDs. The key here is "without authorization".

I'm not so sure about that. If it's not pushing to request record 334, why is it pushing to request record 335?

But I digress. Normally making standard web requests is analogized to looking, without touching. You have explicit authorization to go through the front door, and anything 'bad' you did inside was restricted to what you looked at.

>I believe this use/break distinction exists, but the distinction isn't something that's determined by the code or the vaguer "design of the code"; it's determined by the purpose of the service.

But then you get into the realm of having TOS be a legal, no matter how inane they are. This seems a far worse alternative.

>To drive that home, the library's hapless database admin who foolishly decides to update the list of books using her own SQL injection bug is not hacking, because she is authorized to fiddle with the database, even though, in your terms, it's bypassing the design of the code.

That's why I only said they lose the presumption of authorization. If all you know is someone SQL injected, you have to resort to other means to figure out if it was authorized. For example, if they already have equivalent access through non-code-bug means, and they simply prefer SQL injection, then there is no problem. But if they were doing it to avoid audit logs, there might be a huge problem.

>In other words, authorization is not the same as the technical artifacts involved in authorization. More generally, I don't think being bad at making software justifies people accessing it when they know it's not meant for them.

When it comes purely to accessing it, when it's non-HIPAA/etc. data, I don't think there needs to be very much justification.

And I don't see 'has no password' as a technical artifact. Details of web servers don't need to be involved here. The design is wrong on a fundamental, user-understandable level.
Managing Your Multi Cloud Storage from One Single Location
Just to be clear: you are seriously suggesting the intuitive usability of went down in OS X? As opposed to the label-less icon buttons in the control strip that you had to click/drag to get it to show and hide?

The release of OS X, and the subsequent program rewrites to support it, put apple back on the tech map. I find it hard to believe this doubled as their usability death sentence.
Sign Petition to Repeal MA Software Use Tax
Basically the time it would take to add a hard drive to a moderately fancy looking single unit machine like the iMac is equal to the dollar amount of a USB 3 or possibly even thunderbolt external drive enclosure.
This ending of the article kind of had me going???:

> AWS is expensive when you compare only the raw server costs and do not use reserved instances. But that premium lets you focus on building your product far more than going with a self managed machine. Especially for early stage startups or projects this makes all the difference in the world.

Well, which one is it? The article spoke from the beginning about that they use the idea of tearing down VM's on a daily basis. This is kind of a not having your cake or eating it scenario. If you want to have reserved instances you, well, have to reserve them. Once you've done that (unless I've missed something looking into reserved instances on EC2 before) you can't really remove and re-create a new instance just like that without paying the up-front cost for the instance again.

Really that then takes away a lot of the power, even though you're saving money in the long run. At that point, why not just go with a managed dedicated server provider? You get a whole lot of hardware these days for not a whole lot of money (People have talked endlessly about the different solution providers out there, so I won't repeat any).
"Raising our prices and adding a convenience option paid off big time for us."

Since reading this, we've changed up how we're going to handle the pricing for HookFeed.

Breaking it up into individual feature upgrades, and easy options/discounts for buying all of the features. Also increased rates.

We won't know until we test it. But it seems like a much more attractive offer. Thanks for sharing!
Hello. Nice article. I just wanted to point out a small mistake where you forgot to fill in an amount: "our users who would have spent an average of $."

Hope this helps (and that you read this).
"Concretely." I have no theory about it. It's just my personal observation.
"AWS is expensive when you compare only the raw server costs and do not use reserved instances. But that premium lets you focus on building your product far more than going with a self managed machine."

Sometimes it's faster and more cost-effective to use AWS. Other times -- such as when you spend a lot of time and/or money making up for the performance limits of the platform -- you lose. It all depends on what you need, and there are clear engineering trade-offs at play.

The problem comes when you don't make rational choices. If you're writing blog posts about how you're "all in" on one platform or another, you're either linkbaiting (this seems most likely to me), or you're not being rational about your choices.

Let's be honest: it isn't that hard to manage a rack of servers. Any competent engineer should be able to do the basic sysadmin tasks necessary, and aside from the setup costs, the amortized maintenance costs should be on the order of a few hours a month. Certainly, the wildly overblown claims of entire teams spending months to set up a few colocated servers...well, those teams are either completely incompetent, or there's some exaggeration going on.

Don't be afraid of colocating. Just be rational about what you need.
Exactly because the iMac is Apple’s main desktop offering for consumers, they need to know who the buyers are. I have no doubt they know exactly what their target market is and they’ve described it over and over:

– People who want an easy to use computer

– People who want a relatively hassle-free experience (good built-in apps, little chance of malware, good support from the manufacturer)

– People who value build quality and aesthetics and who are willing to pay for that
In China? Good luck with that.
On Writing Interfaces Well
Naming Overcast
Another question is 'What kind of great developer?'.

The best developers I've seen in terms of producing awesome technology tend to be quiet, methodical people. They are highly disciplined, and have a routine.

This regular, structured way of doing things means that they consistently practice out of hours, commiting regularly to an open source project while mere humans like me flit around playing with new technologies. They develop expertise.

Would you want this kind of developer evangelizing your technology? If you sat them with a client, would they have the soft skills to drive the conversation where it needs to go? Would they enjoy, or avoid these parts of their work?

I think people are people, and people are different. It's worth recognizing this and looking for the sort of person you need.
"To date — the ‘unlock all’ has been our highest grossing option." Love this.

And although it sounds so simple (just add a button!) there's really more to the success of it behind the scenes and you did great job highlighting those factors (ie: perceived value - convenience, etc.)

Super motiving post :)
To speak to your point about the Q10, the lack of affordances for moving between apps was a deliberate design choice. It creates a small learning curve when you first get the device, which is supposed to be ramped up through a short tutorial after unboxing (I'll admit the effectiveness of this is problematic and there needs to be more effort spent here). The gesture for moving between apps is consistent everywhere so user interface and hardware design can be drastically simplified. It allows for a focus on content and not 'administrative' UI or hardware buttons, and speeds things up drastically.

I think that kind of UX contributes to the divisive nature of BlackBerries; people either love them or hate them. The ones who love them are all well past the initial speed bump of learning the gestures and the ones who hate them pick it up in the store, get in to an app, get stuck and throw it down in frustration; the same people who stumble on to Vim would (and no doubt do every day).

The difference between iOS7 and BB10 is that the lack of consistency and affordances in iOS7 seems to result from inconsistent design choices, while in the Q10 it's a deliberate design choice designed to speed users up.
Another problem standing in the way of it being an obvious dock for newer MacBooks is that it doesn't yet support USB 3.0.
Schools should be made aware that open source is better
This reminds me of a friend's response to the idea that the TouchID in the new iphone could be a way for the NSA to get your fingerprints: "Just imagine the shitstorm if they put a camera in there. Or a microphone."
StrongLoop | Node.js and Mobile News Round-up – September 24, 2013
So if the site is secure (HTTPS) it can get the referrer and thus the keyword?
I've had better luck with my Dell Ultrasharps than my iMac, but the sample size is small. (1 imac, 2x 20", 1x 24")
Trading Strategies and Market Microstructure: Evidence from a Prediction Market
Durability is more than feeling solid and not having moving parts. Lenovo do some crazy durability tests [1]. Does Apple do the same?

[1]: http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-11-26/news...
Pretty much every airline offers exit row seats for something like $25 more or an "Economy Plus" that's a step up from economy but far from first class.
Not really...

What parent said is that marketers cannot now measure funnel progression (I had to google that) by keyword.

Google cannot do that, since it has no way of reading the server's data. (If the server doesn't have Google Analytics injected, of course.)
Reserved instances are not bound to any specific VM. When you start a virtual machine and there are reserved instance slots free it will charge you the reserved instance amount. If you provision more machines it will charge the standard amount.
You want to "defrag" a live database? You're brave. Dump it and rebuild it - you should be able to do a node at a time.
Heh, but do you enslave entire worlds in StarCraft 2? I've found that enterprise is like real time strategy games a little bit, there are a lot of things all at the same time that have to be working well for you to be successful, but if you can put your head in the frame of mind that its just a game (or game like) then you can set aside a big chunk of the tension of doing it for real. The Flying Wallendas (high wire act) would have people walk along a tight rope that was 6" above the ground, and then point out that if you could do that you could walk between buildings, it was just not thinking about the 'bad' things that you weren't planning on having happen anyway.

So at some level when you're spending millions of dollars instead of tens of dollars you're still not planning on losing it, but recognize that if you do it will be a problem. And you are working through a checklist and getting stuff done and correcting for unexpected events. Some folks find that really invigorating, others find it completely paralyzing.
> The general feeling I've gotten from people around me is that they like iOS7.

More anec-data: whilst I personally like it and have run it since beta 1, most of my non-tech compatriots (young users) either actively don't like it, state "this is going to take a while to adjust to" or are entirely unconvinced this is better. At least two have posted on FB asking if anyone knows how to take them back to iOS 6.
Hopefully those said experts will also out their money where their mouths are and get busy making a competitive alternative that addresses the issues identified.

As bad as the critics make it out I wonder if they have seen it used in the wild by someone non-technical. My mother in law asked me about upgrading her iPad on Sunday. She did so and I expected a bunch of confusion and questions re: photo's and email; the two apps she uses most (besides mindless games that aren't affected by any OS changes whatsoever).

Her comment last nigh? "It's really different I really like how they organized my photos for me."

So that's an n of one. But it's closer to observing it in the wild vs. a small circle of tech savvy perfectionists.

If the critics want me to take them seriously they should not focus on themselves so much but the average person and their experience immediately after upgrading, a day later, a week later and a month later. Otherwise, IMO it's just a whiney tech pundit fishing with link bait.
> as bad as

>> you need to look at motivations and intent

Sorry to wax philosophical, but that's only true if you're a Deontologist. I am not. :)
>How is losing all your booty not a big enough deterrent?

If that's all you lose, it's not a deterrent at all. If the punishment for stealing is simply that I have to give back all that I got caught stealing, I would never not be stealing because there would be absolutely no risk that I would end up worse off than my present state.
Not sure that this would really change the analysis that much. If you were buying physical servers and installing them yourself then sure, this could very well (perhaps even will) cause slowdown. Most everyone that does bring up using physical hardware for start-ups on here instead discuss leasing managed dedicated servers. You can just as easily spin instances on those up/down as needed, and many of the solution providers out there will even have Openstack/VMWare/etc. available pre-installed so you don't have to do any of that legwork.

I think engineering for 'The Cloud' can be just as time consuming if not more so for start-ups. For Amazon at least you have to engineer for failure. With a dedicated server configuration you still do need to engineer for that, but you aren't worrying about if depending on the solution providers block storage is going to take certain aspects of your architecture offline when it goes down (yet again), or if the portal won't allow you to bring up/down new instances during a very critical period of time, etc.
Well, Delta did buy a refinery last year. It was a crazy move but I haven't heard much about how it's going since then.
Part of the reason this is interesting is the possibly intentional inflation of Romney's odds (from the paper) for non-monetary gain. Indeed, losing 4 million dollars:

It does appear, however, that price manipulation by a single trader who accumulated a large
directional position on Romney may have been a factor. This trader accounted for one-third of all
bets placed on Romney during our observational window, and lost almost four million dollars in
the process. This position was accumulated by placing large bids for Romney and large o ffers for
Obama that eff ectively created a firewall, preventing prices from moving in response to incoming
information. This resulted in remarkable stability in Intrade prices for several hours on Election
Day, and at other critical moments of the campaign, even as prices on Betfair were moving sharply.
On Election Day, these orders were removed just as voting ended in Colorado, the last swing state
to close its polls. The e ect was a sharp price movement and immediate convergence to the Betfair
odds. Financial gain though correlated changes in stock prices seems an unlikely motivation for
this activity, since these correlations appear to have broken down in 2012. More plausibly, this
trader could have been attempting to manipulate beliefs about the odds of victory in an attempt
to boost fundraising, campaign morale, and turnout.

And the biased vs unbiased numbers:

Manipulation aside, one of our most striking findings is that 86% of traders, accounting for 52%
of volume, never change the direction of their exposure even once. A further 25% of volume comes
from 8% of traders who are strongly biased in one direction or the other. A handful of arbitrageurs
account for another 14% of volume, leaving just 6% of accounts and 8% of volume associated with
individuals who are unbiased in the sense that they are willing to take directional positions on
either side of the market. This suggests that information fi nds its way into prices largely through
the activities of traders who are biased in one direction or another, and diff er not only with respect
to their private information but also with respect to their interpretations of public information.
I believe google analytics does still track keywords because google add some JS to each page to track there.

Kinda sucks if you run a competing tracking service though.
The big question is if there'll be a backlash to the no-services nickel-and-dime-fees style airline business.

I suspect that the U.S. market will continue the race to the bottom, but elsewhere quality will continue to thrive.

Scandinavian Airlines' advertising is currently all about: "luggage: free. card fees: zero, online checkin, assigned seating: free, coffee, newspaper: free, breakfast on board: free, canceling fee: waived within 24 hrs" to capitalize on the passengers who have been burned by picking the cheapest option.

Also meanwhile in Asia, I don't think any of my flight searches have ever turned up Singapore Airlines as the cheapest, yet they're doing amazingly well.
Feedback requested on the OCaml.org redesign
Apple refreshes iMac Line, MacBook Pro Next?
I think you misunderstood the point of my comment.

The context was whether or not "Linux users" will pay money for software. In this respect, the closeness is only relevant insofar as it is useful to discuss "Debian users" in the same breath as "SteamOS users."
PyCharm Community Edition (open source)
Reconsidering History: Ancient Greeks Discovered America Thousands of Years Ago
Mars hopper concept 'is feasible'
No, as Google does not include the keyword in the referrer either. They moved it from the query string to a hash tag, which is not part of the URL sent in the referrer header.
Great read, but I don't see how this wouldn't be implemented from the start. It's a lot of clicking, adding up what you're spending and authorizing for in-app purchases. One click and authorization with a discount seems like a necessity.
Well what do you mean by it will charge the reserved instance amount? Do you mean by that just the hourly reserved costs, or the up-front payment that varies based on the instance period or instance type? If the former, then I stand corrected!
To be fair, a degree in physics is pretty killer. Of all the PhDs you could get, that would be the one, for my money. Physics folks are highly intelligent, by and large. In fact, I don't know if I have met a single person who got a physics PhD who wasn't also smarter than me. People who matter will respect that. Probably still a net financial loss compared to going directly to industry, but not nearly as bad as many of the other PhDs out there.
Google Not Provided 100% Of All Organic Search Queries
Startups Twitter Heat Map
Haha, that's a great hack for checking if an email is an iMessage account. Can you gist the code :)
I just started a stats course on Coursera and it's being taught with R. R is pretty fun, and super easy to create vectors and matrices.
Delicious.com updated
It seems like the iPad version of iOS 7 isn't nearly as polished as the iPhone version.
With terabyte sized databases, thousands of tables, not really an option to dump and reload.

Alter and optimize are already possible on a live innodb table, in theory it should not be exponentially harder to optimize ibdata.

Note that oracle solved this problem on their commercial database product.
Immune system remembers cancer in people who've never had it
> It always struck me as a human posing as a spambot because it was too clever and poetic

I dunno, I've seen some pretty clever and poetic quotes from my own markov-chain powered IRC bot:

http://quotes.shishnet.org/quotes?search=MrCuddlemews

(#cuddles on darkmyst to poke him yourself; hilight by name or by starting a line with "@")

And the inspiration: http://www.jibble.org/montyquotes.php
Google Analytics doesn't have a special exemption. The keyword from secure Google searches shows up as "(not provided)" in the relevant reports.
That's fine, but the context was whether "Linux users" will pay for software or not. I basically agree with you in terms of the facts, but speaking primarily in terms of user behavior, each of those platforms is manifestly different.
We have employees and stuff
I would merely make the point that if porting was as painfully simple as you suggest here, non-first-party publishers would be making their games available for every platform (in most cases) without a second thought.

Even though multi-plat development is infinitely easier today than it was even 5 years ago, I still think getting titles onto multiple platforms is much harder and time consuming than you are giving it credit.