skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In 30+ years on this planet, I have never lived in anything that resembles the shotgun shack that is the "Home" icon. (To me, the canonical home is either a ranch or a brownstone, which look nothing like that) I think the kids will be OK with a 3.5" disk icon without caring what it represents.
"..Shouldn't the Steam UI, you know, let you know that before you go about buying and downloading that 30GB game??.."
Yeah, wouldn't that be the point? It seams like Steam wants to be a platform, and the point of the steambox would be to own your living room (as well as your computer room).

I would think that the Steam environment will do a lot of your thinking for you. It'll check your hardware, suggest upgrades (since the boxes will evidently be upgradable), etc...
This works if, and only if, the cost of you failing is limited to the cost of your time. If you're starting work on a metal lathe, ask before trying (the cost of failing is your life). If you're working with an expensive physical material, ask before trying (the cost of you failing is the loss of that physical material).

More relevant to HN viewers: If you're doing work on a production server, ask before trying. The cost to your corporation of you failing and bringing down a mission critical service is typically greater than the context switch of one additional person to make sure you're doing it right.
I think this depends vastly on the number of rogue tor nodes. However, picture this: NSA isn't the only organization going after TOR right? Probably there are others.So if you are China, Iran, Syria, Russia, etc. What do you do? You set up your 'own' poisonous tor relays. What you end up doing is disrupting and diminishing the potential of a single agency or a group of agencies of controlling a big % of tor traffic.

So all in all, might be a good thing and way more difficult thatn it was 7 years earlier. Not to mention that at the time we were browsing through tor at 50 kb/s while now we browse at 400 kb/s.
When referring to a knight you use the subject's first name. So, Sir Jony.
If Apple can convince the networks that they will be better off with Apple than with the local cable company, then Apple can win. I can't help but think that if Steve were still here, he could get it done (much like he did with the music companies for iTunes and the original iPod). I'm not so sure that the current crew at Apple has the right stuff. What I mean is, Steve would have said "this way is better. You can give me a bunch of reasons why you don't think it will happen, or you don't think it ought to happen, but I'm telling you that it is going to happen, and I am making it happen. Now are you with me or shall I run you over?" There were a million reasons why iTunes could never work. He made it work. I understand the reasons you list for why TV is not going to work. I just wish Steve were here to make it work.
I think the rising ubiquity of the omnibar will lead to something else entirely: from a non-technical standpoint, the TLD will lose importance. You type the company or phrase into your browser and it'll appear.
OT, but I've been seeing this around a lot lately.

It's "toe the line", and not "tow the line": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toe_the_line
We'll see. In the short run, most good design tends to overshoot a bit (remember the first iteration of Aqua?). I suspect we'll see some affordances come back -- on the whole iOS7 is mostly a step in a good direction (e.g. the indicator of an interactive widget vs. content in iOS7 is, pretty consistently, color -- I think it works well and eliminates a lot of cruft).

The idea of banishing icons is, however, kind of nutty. Icons serve both a practical and aesthetic role, and switching to fluid layers of words is going to both be aesthetically limiting and confusing.
Running Meteor Apps in the Browser with Nitrous.io
Yup, thanks for the clarification.

As an aside, I discovered the RCS bit after our perforce server had some trouble and started throwing back some error messages with 'RCS' and ',v' in them. :)

I'm not much of a Perforce expert, so I had not noted that the docs mention RCS.
Boost your workplace productivity with the klik
The same goes for software design as far as I can tell. But no amount of effort can make up for a deep well of imagination.
Exactly; having symbols that are stable and which everyone understands is very helpful. Everybody knows that the "floppy disk" icon means "save". What would we replace it with? An image of one of the many common shapes of an SD card? And what if next year a different form of storage becomes common? Do we change all the UIs?

Not to mention that it's nice to have UIs that carry over from one device to another, so that you don't have to switch to a whole new set of symbols when you go from your laptop to your phone.
Right, and people also have released a stable free driver for nvidia cards. ATI made it slightly easier, but the point was that neither one has really embraced the OSS driver scene, and neither one has "played nice" to an extent that deserves special commendation.

I don't want to give the impression that I'm ungrateful for the help that ATI offered the implementers of drivers for its cards, but I think when we take all the facts in balance it comes out in a wash or even with nvidia slightly ahead: nvidia has been consistently producing a high-quality, near-performance-parity driver for Linux for a very, very long time now, and it's almost always compatible with new kernel and Xorg versions prior to their release. ATI has given docs for basic functionality in the free drivers, but they've utterly failed to produce good, performant drivers for Linux machines, closed or free, and in fact they are now on the verge of being two Xorg releases behind.

nvidia may not have "committed to help the open-source community" until recently, but they've done a great service for Linux by being the only vendor to provide consistent, solid, high-performance drivers for Xorg and the kernel. Intel has shaped up recently and gone full-bore OSS, but nvidia has a much longer track record of good [closed] *nix support.
Who the hell was that jerkoff?
Well, I somehow doubt that attorneys take payment in bitcoins, so they didn't have to find or seize the bitcoins. People forget that they're all publicly stored in the blockchain, so everyone would have a reasonable suspicion which bitcoin addresses are used for Silk Road. If Mr. Ulbricht decided to liquidate some of those assets into a bank account, even if he used one of those "launderer" services, it would be clear that a certain amount left that bitcoin address, and somehow that exact amount in dollars ended up in the account. Not exactly good for defending your innocence.
This looks really nice, and the zero-code aspect especially. A friend of mine just released a zero-code SaaS that specifically handles the dunning aspect called ChurnBuster[1] which is already saving customers on the order of thousands of dollars in LTV. I also talk about how to properly handle Stripe events in a Rails app in my ebook Mastering Modern Payments, if that's more the thing you're looking for. [2]

[1]: http://churnbuster.io/

[2]: https://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern-payments
I guess the post is a rant, because the author doesn't actually say what is supposed to replace the icon.
Time to disrupt these arseholes.
That's a fair assumption, but I don't think that was the case at the time of the posting. :)
That was a great use of casual bigotry. 5/5 would scoff at again.
As others pointed out, this was a different era - more the Yahoo era than Google's, when organizing the Web still seemed (to some) an attainable goal. I worked for the guy behind this at the time, though not on this project, and it seemed very odd to me even then... this is not only a product of its time, but very much a product of the unique and quirky museum technology culture.

Shorter names weren't seen as necessarily good - at least within some of the conversations around this TLD's inception there was some scorn for the overly techie, terse TLDs and domain names.
From what I've seen, the "hard core" crowd isn't that impressed by the next gen console specs. They already have hardware that can run games at resolutions better than 1080p comfortably at 60fps. We're now seeing stories about launch games not running at 1080p, something which many people expected to be standard for next-gen console games.

But, back to Steam Machines. I don't think it would be a good idea for Valve to try to get Steam Machines down to console like costs. They're not in a position to sell hardware at a loss like console manufacturers have traditionally done in the beginning of a cycle. The Steam Machines should offer quality.
Why wouldn't the plan be "buy a new one" like it is with consoles, pc's, and every other electric device when they either break or the newer models are that much better?
What in the world are we suppose to replace it _with_, though?
I'm still on 4s with ios 5. don't use siri.
I'm sure the plan for that is the exact same as the plan for the current situation. Steam machines have specs, the steam client can read those specs and tell you if a game is playable or not. It's not as though gaming on PCs is a new concept.
Let's see if I remember any of this. If we assume the null hypothesis that Teslas have 1 fire per 20 million miles same as other cars, then P(0 fires in 100 million miles) = 0.67% and P(1 fire in 100 million miles) = 3.4% from Poisson distribution. So the odds that you'd have no more than 1 fire in 100 million miles is 4%. So I reject the null hypothesis with a p value of 0.04. (edit: fixed values)

This seems a bit dodgy since I'm "designing the experiment" after the fact, but I'm not sure how to correct for that. Any Bayesian experts?
What is the Blackseed oil for?
So in this case he probably is DPR and probably is guilty of at least most of what he's accused of. But because they don't have to prove guilt before seizing assets, they could easily just grab some random person, say "You ran this online drug ring, so we're seizing all of your assets" and then leave you with a public defender.

And that's pretty messed up. It's also messed up that being stuck with a public defender is messed up, but that's another issue. The concept of assuming guilt before trial with respect to your finances is obviously a violation of the spirit - if not the actual letter - of the Fifth Amendment.
So the control group was given Heinlein and they were measuring empathy. Lols
Valve are definitely in a position to sell machines at a loss and make it up on content and new customers ala Amazon and Kindle. I would expect if they were to subsidize the price it would be far below console levels to pursue the billion or whatever casual gamers that don't use Steam, not merely to try and carve out a piece of Microsoft and Sony's pie.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidewalt/2012/03/07/valve-gabe...
The answer is just a flat and obvious, "No".

Firstly, symbols have been around for thousands of years. Our written language is built around them, and our everyday life is surrounded by them. These aren't going anywhere and are a required abstraction for higher thought. These aren't going away.

Second, logos are prettier symbols, but they are pervasive in our world. Every single business has a logo and tries to push that logo and brand at you every chance they get. These aren't going away.

Third, icons are logos and/or symbols. It stands to reason that if the previous two aren't going anywhere, then icons aren't going anywhere.

Until we have telepathy, that is.
Yeah a HUGE world wide sport that has been around for decades and has one of the largest sporting events in the world has more viewers then my nerd watch habit??? GO figure????

Millions upon millions of dollars are being made so sure eSports is a big deal.
CLIs do a pretty formidable job of killing icons, I'd attest.
Regarding the mainstream news cycle and from a PR perspective, you want bad news to come out late Friday to minimize exposure. The typical audience is ready for the weekend and paying less attention. Also staff journalists tend to be off which leaves a weekend crew to man the ship---they're less experienced and have fewer resources available. Since you're likely not going to be pressed for a comment until Monday, the extra days might mean the public outrage subsides by then, or another news story becomes more important.

A lot of bad news comes out late Friday, government reports, financials, etc. It's obvious that the Washington Post was sitting on this particular story and decided to post it only after today's Guardian reports. WaPo has done it quite a lot since the leaks came out, either they aren't particularly interested in breaking these stories, or they're abiding by an earlier deal with Snowden since they wouldn't agree to his release timeline.
There was a post on the EEVBlog recently about how Altium is probably going to introduce a hobbyist/hopefully free version of their software.

I've seen some videos of Altium and know PCB designers who swear by it. Seems like very good stuff and I'd be excited for something available to me: I am not a professional and so couldn't reasonably buy it at the current price.
What is all this "native" digital medium that he mentions three times in this post?

While a lot of metaphors to old ways of doing things (office work, etc.) may be clumsy, the "native" interface to the computer is really far too low-level for everyday use.
The burden of proof is on the government.

The thing is, proof beyond a reasonable doubt is not mathematical/logical proof, it's (as I recall the jury instructions I've seen on this) basically proof to a degree that a reasonably diligent person would use in their most important business dealings.

Multiple sources of evidence that point in the same direction, even when there are theoretically possible innocent explanations for all them, can still constitute "proof beyond a reasonable doubt", which is not "proof beyond any doubt".
I think that is correct. If so, it's also screwed up because it actually favors the guilty. An innocent person who believes in the justice system would think that they have no reason to retain a lawyer in advance. A smart criminal would do so as an obvious precaution.
> into the trash

"skeuomorph!"
There is a well-established due process scheme for seizing assets. It has a lower standard of proof because it establishes only that a crime took place and that an asset is linked to the crime, without establishing culpability.
A Point of View: The man who dreamed of the atom bomb
Not if the "mobile site" is the same as the regular site and well made.
>You can't use the proceeds of crime to fund your defense.

Sidestepping the due process issue for a moment, is that even a meaningful concept? Money is fungible. If you make $5,000 earned from your day job, and $5,000 from selling drugs, and you spend $5,000 on a car, is the money you have left drug money or honest money?
Continuing with "b", I think there's some benefit to having both distinct shapes and distinct colors (which often gets thrown out in modern design on high resolution, high color-depth displays -- you can have any color you want in the UI so long as it is blue, silver, or white!) Anecdotally, I think there are some people who distinguish shapes more quickly and others who distinguish colors more quickly.
BGP was designed for AS-level routing, but that doesn't mean it can't be adapted to work at a smaller scale. iBGP is for in-network routing (as compliment to eBGP), although I couldn't say whether they are using it directly or a variant.

When you talk about 'slower than a spanning tree', that's presumably for route stabilization. But that's also largely irrelevant - routes would change infrequently enough that extremely fast stabilization isn't especially important (and on a LAN, BGB would still stabilize quite quickly). In comparison, BGP lets you add all sorts of routes to your internal network, and spread load among them without hotspotting. It can handle routes of varying sizes, loops and parallel paths, etc. Spanning trees on the other hand will pick one path from point A to point B, which won't necessarily be the best general solution for a network topology. Say you want to add a 'skip list' of rack-to-rack connections, double up others, and use two parallel DC-level tree networks because you're hitting backbone throughput limits with just one. BGP will be much better able to capitalize on this crazy mesh of connections then simpler protocols like building spanning trees.
GUIs did a formidable job of killing CLIs...
About the price - I say always pay full price. It is somewhat more than that even now (base model of 5s will cost over $1000 New Zealand). If more people treat the carrier as a dumb pipe, they might actually start doing that well to differentiate themselves.
why didn't you? if you were in the US, you have 30 days to return and cancel contracts on all major carriers.
I feel like this argument is one of semantics, so I'll just attempt to clarify.

Justice Roberts, the swing vote, would have struck down the penalty but for his characterization of it as a tax, as well as having characterized that tax as a flat penalty against which modifiers were imposed. As a result of its tax characterization, it violates the Origination Clause of the Constitution, which has never been remedied.

Whether not the House approves of a new tax is at the discretion of the House. You are clearly correct in that both wings of Congress need to approve of it, but either party can reject and be simply done.

I appreciate the corrections, but much of them were, I feel, implicit in the tone of my original post, though yes, I did overstate the NFIB decision.
We've been using Blender[0] for electromechanical rendering. Lots of importers available, and Python backend to hack. We've had some fun using Shapeways[1] for 3D printing of Blender models.

[0] http://www.blender.org/

[1] http://www.engineering.com/3DPrinting/3DPrintingArticles/Art...
And "Diamond Age", for that matter. The concept of "phyles" is not unlike government as a service.
> CLIs do a pretty formidable job of killing icons, I'd attest.

CLIs (and textual environments generally) also use icons that have long been divorced from the real-world things they originally represented. And in ways which have nothing to do with their original iconic uses, anyhow.

I'm not sure how that's better than just using icons.
> prepend //

Then the technical people think it's a comment, not a web address. Maybe :// would be better? Wait, that looks like some weird emoticon...

I like http:// because it's precise. EDIT: Wow, HN highlights that as a link. It goes to about:blank (on my browser at least).
Why is this on hacker news front page?
Articles like this help to show all the work involved in the path from a vague idea to a finished product. That's the hard part. Guess that's why they get upset when some other company just sees the end product and just makes a clone of it, without having to face all the hurdles to arrive there from the initial idea..
The economic explanation is good; the conclusion that the country needs legislation to take control of the Gerrymandering makes you want to smack yourself in the face.

Yes, we KNOW that. Except, the only people who can pass that legislation are the people benefiting from the current situation.

The fact that even a such an august publication as the Economist can't come up with a better solution than that is terribly depressing.
Icon consistency is far more important than flat/skewmorphic artistic concerns. For example, my kid has never seen a 3.5" disk, but knows the icon means "Save", probably because it is consistent among the UIs he uses. Even if you find the best icon metaphor for Settings, changing the gear icon to something else will cause pain for lots of people mainly because it is new, more than any other artistic consideration.
Wonder if some 4s were worse than others. I still use a 4 and have never dropped a call. I have poor coverage everywhere I use it too. I do have calls go straight to voicemail, but it's usually in my pocket when this happens.
Regarding the floppy disk icon, the post says:

"That’s holding onto the past; and providing a lack of recognition for young people, who will literally have no idea what one is."

I don't see what's the problem with "holding onto the past": everyone knows there was a past, that the world didn't start when they were born. One way or another, we get to know about things that existed (and disappeared) before we were born, and we accept it as something natural.

Going by the line of thought the author suggests, we may as well, for example, ditch files and folders - not just the icons, but the complete organizational concept. I guess we could just use "libraries" and "galleries", but look at where those are going... in some years, using these concepts could as well mean "holding onto the past".

"Imagine a native digital medium"

In my humble opinion, "digital" and "native" don't combine very well. "Digital" is far from being something every human is familiar with, at birth (so that it can be considered "native"). Killing the icon is actually going to have a negative effect on the creation of a "native digital medium", because icons are many times representations of real life, even if poor representations. For the medium to be native, it would need to actually be closer to what we see in real life, than to be even more abstract.

And let's not forget the fact that after knowing their meaning (regardless of them having any meaning in the physical environment around us), icons are an easy and quick way of recognizing certain functionality even on never-before-seen UI screens, which gives a better first time experience of any software.
Amazing how backwards the industry is to have to be strong-armed into improving something. Visual voicemail is under appreciated.
> Tax returns - or the lack thereof.

And how is it determined (beyond a reasonable doubt, with a vigorous defense) whether or not you committed the crime of tax evasion?
This reminds me of a scene from The Diamond Age where a child read animated characters instead of static letters and words. While you could switch to the old style, the animated ones were easier to distinguish, and so preferred by him.
Of course it's not a universal statement. Estimates are never aimed at outliers.
They could produce an 'experience index' style number like windows does. It's the only effective way I can think of to distil an entire PC's performance into a single value.

edit: or maybe a triplet, CPU index, GPU index, Storage index.
My compulsive need for things to be alphabetical is going haywire because Pull Request is after Push
Or, as translated from Apple-spin-speak, according to the allthingsd story, Apple wanted to commoditize the Maps data, Google wanted more say over the app, including for it to be called "Google Maps", and feature things like Latitude and other features Android had.

In short, Apple wanted the maps data, but did not want it to be "Google Maps".

If it were really just about withholding features from iOS, why then are most major Android features on iOS, including Google Now, and including a version of the new Google Maps before Android even had it.

Sounds to me like Apple was pulling a John Boehner, refusing to compromise.
The prototype is your friend (if you care about perf)
The design is not scaling, not the language.
That part was confusing. I suspect though it more or less refers to the crux of whatever point he's trying to make, so maybe he needs to run it through a couple more drafts and clarify. Sounds like voodoo to me.

He talks about having users provide their own gestural icons... which just seems like it would be a pain to have to come up with a new kind of flourish every time you installed an app, and I supposed speech recognition, which like gestural commands has a place but I don't think necessarily surpasses the utility of "the little orange and blue round thingy makes firefox happen". I mean that's just perfect.