skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure you are asking the right question. If you goal is to reduce eye strain which can lead to terrible headaches simply getting a monitor is not the total solution. I went through a few doctors and even an MRI only to discover accidentally that my new vision prescription and new phone/computer habits fixed it right up. You are getting older every day. This is what works for me, try it and see if it helps:

1) keep ALL screens at arms length from your face
2) code at night with a lamp on
3) 2x 27 inch displays (new toys!)
4) Look off into space here and there

I tried f.lux but I don't think it did anything for my sleep or eyes.
By this logic, you can trivially prove any UI to be a bad design. Find a single person who finds it unclear, and voila: the UI must be bad.

As blcknight alluded to, this rule is only relevant when the proportion of users for whom it is an issue is non-trivial.
Man, I don't know. I feel for this guy, but not every computing tragedy is the software's fault. The author never says what he expected would happen when he moved stuff out of the Google drive.

I learned along the way never to make assumptions about how file syncing works. There's no right answer to what to do in all situations, so your expectations aren't always going to match what the programmer/product owner decided to do.
You can't make backups of gdoc files, the content is never stored locally, it's only on googles servers.
Sorry about that :( But why load test before I had to? It works well in a low-traffic setting, and I had no idea the HN gods would be so kind to me. But now that I have early feedback, I can make a better decision about how to proceed.
Why I'm Taking A Blogging Sabbatical As A Developer
According to the FAQ in FF it's using IndexedDB, what's it using in Chrome/Opera/IE? LocalStorage?

Also, what do you do about FF's seeming need to pluralize all store names, default out-of-order keys, and clear cache issue?

edit for clarity
Note that this wouldn't have helped him in this case.
The .gdoc files are only "links" to the online version, which he deleted from the online interface, while clearing the trash.

Backuping them over Dropbox/Box/Skydrive/* would have been useless, as he still has those .gdoc files anyway.
To actually get a backup, he would have saved the files as .doc/.pdf/any other classic format from Google Docs.

I'm not saying that backups are useless, mind you - Only that they wouldn't have helped in this specific case.
Google Drive does that
Dropbox does that
Skydrive does that

All of them have poor user interfaces?
It was a 3 year project with requirements changing up until the last 4 months where end-to-end was managed under waterfall (some pieces/contractors used agile like methodology)...and there was 2 weeks of final end-to-end manual QA...what the hell else did they expect to happen?
But this is how EVERY DAMN cloud drive works.

It's how EVERY DRIVE in the history of computers work!

If I take my files out of my HD, they will be deleted from the HD. If I move my files out of my flash drive, they will be deleted from my flash drive.

The only way that I would be surprised by this behaviour is if I had never used a computer at all in my life.
Dropbox lets you recover a file if you've deleted it recently.
Well, he deleted years' worth of Google Docs files because of a poor user interface, but he lost the Google Docs files because of an irresponsible backup policy.

Sad, to be sure, but there's no kind of critical document storage that doesn't need a backup.
No, it sounds like in his case, they were just pointers. I wonder, too, what happens around offline access.

"The steps I took were to move files out of a Goole Drive folder on my local computer thinking that the files were all there. In fact they are there, but the .gdoc files are just empty links with no data. I see a list of everything I wrote in Google Docs, but can never see the actual content again."
Its a great move by Salesforce. If they get 10K developers it is almost a wash for them. And suddenly they have a huge number of new developers looking at their platform.
While this is a good strategy for real files, the .gdoc files in your Google Drive folder are nothing but links to web files. They contain no real data.
I created http://site2pic.com/ a couple years ago, it also hosts the screenshots. Not sure what to do with it.
Actually we drive less and less per person since ~2004. And the total Vehicular Miles Travelled has been the same since 2004, even though population is growing. This is a significant trend. http://www.theatlanticcities.com/commute/2013/07/yet-more-ev...
No, the point is that if you see a bunch of ".gdoc" files on your computer, and you move them to another directory on your computer, you would reasonably expect that those files contain the document data, not that they're merely "pointers" to online data. That's "kind of the whole point", as you yell.

I agree that the user wasn't being super-careful, but it's entirely reasonable to think that, if Google docs appear on your local hard drive, that they are files that can be manipulated just like any others, and that copying/moving them to another folder would preserve their data.
Great article. It looks like the women described in the article sacrified years of their lives to become kind of alpha males - lawyers, professionals, etc - in which time the real alpha males got young and willing chicks who are just that what alpha males are interested in - hot young chicks. So, now all these professional and I'm sure very successful women in their 30s are left with are beta males. How came I don't see it as surprising? Wouldn't you think that by trying to take social role of an alpha male while you are a female, you will fail? Probably in both roles? Will fail as a woman and in the perceived alpha-male role? Look, once she gets this beta guy to have children with, she will stay at home just so he doesn't run away to look for another willing 30-something successful woman. So her career is broken at that point too. Whoever the socialist that told women that they have to be just like men - thank you! I never knew it will work so well for my gender. After years of listening to this socialist BS, to see it fail, makes me feel good. Full disclosure: I'm a married male with a kid, so I won't take advantage of the situation. Just like to see how the laws of nature triumph over marxist craziness again and again. But some people never learn.
Except for the part when they tell you.

http://i.imgur.com/ijTQTTq.png
"... the .gdoc files are just empty links with no data. I see a list of everything I wrote in Google Docs, but can never see the actual content again."

Google does not sync the data to you, just a tiny file with the same name as your data that bounces you to the website.
But how could that possibly work for a document that's edited in a browser? What file format would such a document be stored in when there's no local editor available for it?
Apparently not always. With this logic, free software should have 100% of market share.

Edit (in response to jgreen10)

>Are you suggesting no one has a car?

No, I am suggesting that the logic "cheaper stuff outsell more expensive stuff" is wrong.
It's not possible to schedule an occasional job that copies everything from Google's services to a local hard disk?
No, the files in your drive "look like" they are files, but they are actually just links. So him moving them to the local disk did not actually copy the files to local disk.

The real failure here is that you shouldn't be able to move the drive links out of the drive folder, since semantically that does not actually move the files.

(Filed a bug, but I'm not on the Drive team so I can't really take responsibility for this getting fixed. It does seem like a problem to me, but I don't know their infrastructure nor the limitations of shell extensions, so I can't really comment on whether a fix is feasible either.)
Can you explain how that would have helped him at all? Backing up gdoc files is useless if the underlying file in the cloud has been deleted.
It looks like indeed it's the latter -- the .gdoc files are just pointers, and moving them out of the google drive is akin to copying the pointer/shortcut...

But, more than that, moving the .gdoc file pointer out of Google drive moves the actual cloud file to the trash? That was my best guess after re-reading the OP, and that does seem like a UX issue. From a UX point of view, moving a shortcut to a file should not move that file to the trash somewhere else.
The links thing is stupid, but it does tell you. http://i.imgur.com/ijTQTTq.png
"Coming from the construction industry, there isn't a contractor in the world that cares about things which aren't in the contract."

In the construction industry, a contract might not explicitly say that the building has to comply with local building, fire and electrical codes - that's taken as a given. To construct a web site that deals with sensitive information without taking security into account is like building a skyscraper with no fire exits - not something that any honest or competent builder would do.
We've become so heavily dependent on Google, it is kind of sad that the author's email (listed at the end) is a gmail.com address.
I bet that your professor tried to write content from his own knowledge rather than strictly from published sources.

The problem is that anyone can claim to be a math professor with expertise on graph theory. For this reason, everyone - even experts - need to cite sources in order to add content to Wikipedia.
You might be missing the point. How was he supposed to back up a .gdoc file? In fact he did, it's just when he put the file back it was deleted.

Google Drive gives you this fake file pointer that it wants you to think is a document, but then when you try to use it as such (backup and restore), you find out the files actually got deleted.

This is a case of shitty UI, plain and simple.
Rubygems and Python packages are source packages. When you used the package management tools in those languages, these packages are downloaded to somewhere in your path and used within the code you are writing.

In fact in Rubygems, you can point to a Ruby git repository (like github) and have dependency management happen from there - no necessity for a centralized repository (like maven.org). This is how you share a ruby gem - http://guides.rubygems.org/publishing/#sharing_source_code . I can now specify in my Gemfile to pull a particular branch/tag/version of the gem directly from revision control.

The same thing happens with SBT or leiningen, except that they are JARs. I believe this comes from using maven as the backend. Therefore, either you need to setup a local repository or publish to Sonatype or some other place. This is how you share your scala code - http://www.scala-sbt.org/0.13.1-SNAPSHOT/docs/Detailed-Topic... . Remember, publishing means packaging into a JAR. If you were too lazy to package your code into a jar and publish it ... well, then it's cumbersome to work directly from the repo.

I really, really wish scala/clojure would enable the ability to work directly with source as packages - the big, big reason why it's not is the maven backend.
I still like http://hn.premii.com
> they try to find others to blame instead of just fixing the damn issue.

This is for two reasons:

1) Fixing something makes it appear, politically, like it's your fault, or at least savvy opposing politicians can spin it that way.

2) The incentive to fix the issue <= incentive to shift the blame. If one party points their fingers, the other must point back, lest the public think the first party is right. Shifting blame is easy, one can do it without working too hard, and it can fuel public debate which forgets about the original issue.

Many politicians care less about fixing problems and more about getting/staying elected.
Google drive doesn't actually sync files, just links.
Dropbox also doesn't have the (IMHO) unnecesary "trash can" metaphor. You can easily recover deleted files through the web interface. If you want to delete something and make it unrecoverable, it's possible but you really have to go out of your way.
Google Drive started in April 2012. It's been a year and a half, approximately, not 6 years.
The simplicity of this answer speaks very loud. Kudos to YC. All others should listen closely, and try to emulate it.
Interesting. I found the 1.3 to 1.4 upgrade only took a few hours. The 1.4 to 1.5 was a bigger deal because of the new syntax for the {% url %} template tag. Especially since this had to be dealt with in third-party packages.
Sad that the parent is being down voted for being 100% correct.

He designed his system to have a single point of failure. The government then exploited that fact because it would allow them to get access to the data they want. This is Lavabits fault, not anyone elses.
I went to toastmasters once. It's weird but I actually enjoy public speaking. People in my class used to love when I gave a speech but never did I hate public speaking more than when I went to toastmasters.

Maybe it's just me.
Good question. Seems a pretty simple solution: the browser is the editor, even if the files are local. We use browsers to interact with local files all the time, for example during local web app development.
Who knows? I don't know the internals of my Word or Pages documents. Why should anyone care what the internals of a .gdoc file look like? It could be anything. But nobody expects it to be a mere "pointer" link.
Sounds like the UK where you can be jailed for a tweet.
Why do you have to characterize it like that? You're attacking a straw man.

Men are attracted to women based largely on factors that are more immediately apparent -- such as physical appearance. Women get more attracted the more they invest into a relationship. This follows from biological differences - see that article.
Tsunami advisory in northern Japan after 7.1 magnitude earthquake off coast
I propose not distinguishing the "winners" and "losers" by sex to understand who has the upper hand, but by those who act on what they want and those who don't.

It sounds like you didn't make it through the article, because you didn't manage to capture the central model it discussed. (I can't say I blame you.) Nevertheless, the central model isn't about winners vs losers: it's two functions: sexual-market-value over time by gender, and what people want over time by gender, and how each gender selfishly maximizes in a way that leaves older women out in the cold. Really, it's just a re-hash of the ancient maxim that "women grow old; men grow distinguished".
Google definitely jumped into Drive and Apps without putting any thought about privacy or recoverability into it whatsoever. There's a reason why they keep launching in beta - because they get an MVP out the door and then people start using it as if it's ready for production.

Further, everyone I know that uses Google Apps / Drive has no idea how to use it properly. One common thing I see is people will send a link to a particular document not knowing they've unwittingly given the person access to all of their documents. One person sent a link out to a spreadsheet that had a beach house signup in it. A couple of clicks in the unfamiliar user interface and I find myself looking at the filenames of all his docs - one of which was potentially very embarrassing. For his sake, I didn't mention it but only sent him an article later on about how to secure your Google Drive files.
https://code.google.com/p/gdocbackup/
If files weren't completely deleted when the trash was emptied, then people would be kvetching about the horrible security implications and the only way to be sure was to keep files on the local disk so that when you emptied the trash, the files would be really gone....
Thanks! You've no idea how much I appreciate the kind words. I've put a good deal of work into it, and have a number of new features currently under development.
Glad you thought it was obvious. I just learned it after reading the OP's article. Not obvious enough, apparently.
How about a proprietary binary format that would reload the data if it was synced back to Drive/Docs at a future time? As the format evolves, an online tool could at least extract csv/text versions of older data from the original files.

Edit: HDF5 is great for storing OT data too, even if the operations and handling are proprietary.
> A solution is for the government to develop a series of security standards that cover a wide range of IT projects, and each project should declare that "implementation must conform to Security Level X, Category Y"

Well, you'd think so, which is why that's essentially already mandated:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Information_Security_Ma...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Information_Processing_...
Dropbox does not do that. I can't speak for SkyDrive.
Tech Failures Tied to Solar Storms?
I hurt my first girlfriend with behavior that was a problem in the marriage. I thought I'd addressed it, I hadn't gone anywhere far enough. Unacceptable.

We all make mistakes but I want to fix what I can.
Your first question is answered here, under "Browser Support": http://pouchdb.com/learn.html
Except when you copy files from your hd or flash drive, you except the copies in the new location to actually be files. That's how every drive I've ever used works. That's not how google drive works.
I was using it and it's great but the biggest annoyance is the fact that if I wanted to comment, I still had to go to the original HN... So I started using this extension:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/helvetinews/jebgog...

Now I just use regular HN with it.
Where do you work? I live in LA and bike to work every day, but I live 3 miles away from work in Santa Monica.

I would never consider biking downtown, at least not yet.
On the Exploitaton of APIs
Ex-NSA Chief Overheard in 'Off-record' Interviews on Train
"CouchApps" have worked like this for at least four years ... they've been replaced by erica[1] which is described at: https://github.com/benoitc/erica. It's broadly compatible with BigCouch.
Related (albeit a bit dusty):

http://www.advogato.org/article/1069.html
The problem with going to reddit meetups is you stand a high risk of meeting the kind of person who posts on reddit.
Might worth having a look at backbone.rocks too, does a lot on top of backbone for what knockouts has to offer.

https://github.com/devmatters/backbone.rocks
But there is no way to backup Google Docs files, is there?

What exactly was the "responsible" backup policy supposed to have been?
"From what I've seen, personally, we need a LOT more honesty in our discussions of gender roles and careers and child raising."

For what it's worth, I really recommend everybody take the time to read through some of the "manosphere" stuff, for this reason. It has people speaking honestly due to it being a counterculture thing where it's already read that the current dominant culture rejects the ideas wholesale.

You probably won't agree with all of it; you may not agree with any of it. I'm not endorsing it the content. But I will endorse it as the sort of thought-provoking thing that anybody who thinks of themselves as an intellectual (as opposed to merely posing as one) ought to expose themselves to, and chew through. There's some thought-provoking stuff in there. Even if you disagree with it, if you consider yourself an intellectual you ought to be able to muster a higher, more refined level of disagreement than merely slapping a "misogynist" label on it.
My reaction to the "many men and women ..." sentence was "I think that's the most insightful comment I've ever read on HN!"

Take a closer look at it. The use of "many" does not imply a platitude - 35.22% of the time it's a kinder way of saying "most," and 63.09% of the time we don't have a precise percentage, neither of which negates the validity or importance of the observation.
And for that extra API goodness you could do it through node and expose your fancy wide-screenshot-app to the world : https://github.com/alexscheelmeyer/node-phantom
There is no doubt we are not living in a police state.
Then keep the damn spying on terrorists, not on politicians and CEO's. But let's face it. They can't help themselves. Even if they agree to roll back the spying a little bit now, they'll go back to spying everyone again in a few years, if they think they need that data for economical purposes.

That's why there needs to be drastically more oversight, that's a lot more effective, and with members of the Intelligence Committee who can declassify information at will in congress, without anyone's approval.

Also the FISC needs to either be abolished, or disbanded, and create a new process for electing the judges, and creating a Court with much more transparency.
Turn of CAPS LOCK and read the article!

document.gdoc is not a file, you are mistaken
Nope. http://i.imgur.com/ijTQTTq.png
what kind of evo-psych bullshit is this
Spend the fuel tax on a rebate given equally to every American. People can use it for gas money or, if they take the bus, to buy a sandwich.
That's not how Google drive works: the gDocs "files" stored on your computer are not actually files, they're just links to files that are accessible on google drive. to test this you can turn off your router (or just disconnect from the internet) and then try opening a gDoc, you'll get a "cannot connect" error.

There is very little you can do about this, google is okay with it because there's no official offline gDocs viewer/editor so in their minds it doesn't make sense to fill up your harddrive with real files that can't even be accessed on your computer. Also they warn you that those files aren't real under certain circumstances (I've seen the warning before, though I don't remember the context).
I just had an intuition that the choices of gals in this article are kinda similar to various strategies for innovative products. Some products target the alpha consumers, e.g. those early adopters and innovators, while some others target beta or gamma consumers.
Did you delete this post?
Bitcoins seized from Dread Pirate Rogers (144kBTC ~= 25mln$)
I have a Skydrive synced folder on my computer. Files I put in there are copied to Skydrive. If I remove a file from that folder, it is still a physical file on my computer. Google drive local "files" do not contain your data. I don't know about Dropbox.
But it will be WEBSCALE!!1!

/s
Something like https://code.google.com/p/gdocbackup/ combined with another backup (on physical media or in the cloud).
There have been many alt HN interfaces. I try them all, yet I never end up sticking with any of them. I feel like HN meets its needs pretty well and I like that they have resisted change (whether consciously or not)
This was the same argument given about why Google was foolish to start a search engine. A good search engine should keep you searching longer to show you more ads. In reality people flocked to the search engine precisely because it worked. If a dating site were very very good, it could advertise something like "We're so confident you'll find someone with X months that we only ask you to pay a one time fee to join instead of monthly."
SteamOS could really help desktop Linux adoption, says Torvalds
Yeah, like I mentioned, "There were cues which the author missed, but they were obviously not prominent enough which is a (the) design flaw." I focused more on the lessons to be learned but the situation is absolutely very sad for anyone who goes through something like this.

Glad you read the article though, now you're not going to fall for this flaw in the future.
A/B testing is great when the value you're trying to optimize can be easily measured, such as short-term conversion rate. If your goal is "users should think the site is aesthetically pleasing", that's going to be a hard one to monitor.
Anybody who uses 'alpha' and 'beta' and similar to describe dudes and ladies is, ipso facto, an asshole.