skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You've told us why these things are the way they are, but I get the feeling you feel that this alone justifies these gigantic UI holes.

- because it serves as both the Dialer and the Contacts app all rolled into one.

Is this a good idea? When I'm in my Dialer, presumably I only want to call people. Surely the system should sense context (likewise, if I'm in the email app, it should show contacts for whom I have no email!).

- or Google for the proper file that tells the PC that your G1's SD card is actually a music device

Basic, fundamental functionality should not involve Googling for anything.

- Open the contact, long-press on the desired number, and select Make Default Number.

Invisible and undiscoverable except by accident - this is a UI failure. The fact that this is not displayed implies to the user that it cannot be changed. At least show which number it dials (e.g. on iphone it's "mobile", "home", etc).

- Because of the way Android handles apps. When the screen rotates...

Not a good enough excuse I don't think. Yeah, that's the way Android works, but it's still a huge UI failure that snaps users out of the experience and takes away from the fit-and-finish of the software significantly. Note that iPhone can do this transition smoothly, and applications can still pick up new resources, UI layouts, etc.

... at the end of the day there are a few rules of thumb I think:

- Users care far more about the fit and finish of your software than they do about its strict functionality - i.e. you can get away with lacking functionality, but nobody will forgive you for poor UX.

- Users don't really care if "there's an app for that" when it comes to what they consider to be basic functionality. Include the basic goodies (PDF reader for example, music sync software for example) with the box or your users will walk, regardless of how much you point at the app store.

This is the gist of the article I think. Android is a capable platform, but so far nobody has gone over with a fine toothed comb like Apple has and gotten rid of all of the little annoying bits.
Hey! I thought this question was philosophical! If you could save me two hours a day of commuting in heavy traffic by teleporting my body I would pay $ 39,000.
I love what science-fiction author and orthodox Roman Catholic John C. Wright said recently:

http://johncwright.livejournal.com/255380.html?thread=763381...

"I do not value a human because of the biological fact that they share my genus and species, no. The biological fact is indeed indifferent to the more profound moral fact: I value Man because he is Imago Dei, the image of God.

"Spock of Vulcan is not a member of my species, but if he were real, I would value him, and say he has rights, and protect his life, and so on. I value Vulcans because they are also Imago Dei, rational creatures as God is. For that matter, R2D2 is an intelligent being, capable of moral decisions, and great bravery, and yet nothing in his biology -- he is not, properly speaking, even a living thing -- makes him human. He clearly has a soul, however, or whatever you want to call the thing that makes for courage and humor and loyalty. The robot is also Imago Dei."
This is excellent advice. I constantly experiment when writing code. It is one of the main reasons that I'm such a fan of using a scripting language like Perl to shake out an algorithm before committing it to whatever language I'm really working in.

I particularly agree with the comment about rewriting code. I typically force myself to re-type the solution at the end of an experiment (or I'm forced to by the fact that it's two different languages), resulting in clearer expression, better comments, and just generally cleaner results. The reason is that the second time through, I can focus on presenting the solution rather than finding it. (Moreover, it is not that uncommon to find bugs in the process of thinking about how to make it most apparent to the reader that the code is correct). I am of the opinion that rewriting an essay or a piece of code almost always improves it, and in some cases this is a sound investment.

One advantage the OP doesn't really discuss is that the short dev cycle encourages you to more fully characterize the behavior of what you've written. When plugging a solution into the larger app, it's tempting to say, "huh, looks like it works," and move on. But if you've got it isolated and under the glass, you can poke it a bit. Call it in funny ways, give it unusual inputs, think about how robust it needs to be. It doesn't really take long -- a few minutes, maybe, if you've got the framework already set up -- and it cuts down immensely on subtle bugs. Confidence that you understand how important sections of the code work is an immense boon, and can result in weird long stretches of simply . . . writing things that you know are correct.

Overall, I agree wholeheartedly with experimenting. I think it is a faster way to work that also produces significantly higher quality results. Just don't get carried away -- like comments, you should only indulge when it's useful to dispel uncertainty.
Is code the next universal language? What about Esperanto?
Is computer code the next universal language?

Umberto Eco's take on universal languages in his search for the perfect language.
They did a good job by being honest and I think it is probably a great idea to get out of the online job recruitment sector.

I just wish they would have read over that goodbye note, or at least spell checked it.
The best languages for writing quick-and-dirty 15-minute scripts are never going to be the best languages for million-line, mission-critical applications, the best languages for embedded programming are not going to be the best languages for web programming, and the best languages for beginners are not going to be the best languages for more advanced programmers.

So perhaps programmers sometimes give up too quickly and could do better on all those fronts, but it's not some limitation of the real world that forces the tradeoff: it's the fact that different decisions regarding things like syntax or the type system do have a real impact on the suitability of the language for different purposes, and you can't be all things to all people there. Sometimes you want a very loose language that doesn't get in your way; sometimes you want a very strict language that ensures correctness; sometimes you want a language that lets you manipulate things close to the metal; sometimes you want a very simple language that's easy to learn because it doesn't have too many concepts; sometimes you want a very advanced language that gives you lots of different ways to solve problems.

No language can or should be all things to all people.
The G1's hardware does support multi-touch, but Apple requested that it be disabled. http://digital.venturebeat.com/2009/02/09/apple-asked-google...

The Palm Pre supports and uses multi-touch in the same manner as the iPhone.

It would seem that multi-touch isn't Apple's sole intellectual property, though they have IMO implemented it the best.
Not only that, he made his wife witness his death. The low just got lower.
I agree, but I did have an intense moment with Fortran II that effectively launched me into a compiler-writing career.

And actually a second point was a zero-knowledge dislike of COBOL. This faded when after a couple years of RPG-III, a COBOL compiler was installed. Felt so much better.
Or write speed-critical Python iterator directly in C.
Python source is the best reference: http://svn.python.org/view/python/trunk/Objects/dictobject.c... (look at the end).

Python/C API rules.
In addition to space constrained applications such as SMS (and artificially space constrained applications like Twitter) shortlinks are also required anywhere humans are required to remember and/or enter them - that is, when they are printed, recited over radio or displayed on televisions. This is a very important use case that people often ignore.

Sam
And yet, all the rage in hiring processes is to present some ridiculous coding problem and hire the first person who can guess the right answer quickly and explain it over the phone within 30 seconds of thinking of it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for thinking on your feet, but if you do anything remotely hard at your company you need to hire people who are willing to experiment rather than arguing the first solution that comes into their head.

(Sorry, still a little bitter about that last interview...)
If the police cannot just grab records and look at them why can they be notified without warrant if records are updated, it seems that that behavior is counter-intuitive to what the law says about privacy, ie the government doesn't have a right without warrant to know what I use my account for but they do have a right to know if I use my account at all without warrant. This is a contradiction to what existing privacy laws already say.

As for witness testimony, it's vastly different because they aren't solid records. I don't have the ability to be private out in public, obviously. Plus people have different definitions of privacy, I would mind if my friends or family members alerted the police to where I was for any reason even if I had nothing to hide, because this kind of behavior will just repeat and against other suspects. Suspicion doesn't imply conviction.
too bad, undoubtedly a result of the collision of a bunch of bad circumstances.

good to see that they're able to analyze and learn from the situation at hand and have the fortitude and responsibility to make the call to shut it down before they crashed and burned.
Hello, we implemented it this way since eBay is the most popular auction site out there and that's how they've always done it. However we do understand the confusion here. Do you think it's better to change the wording or simply move away from a proxy style auction? We hae been debating this internally as well but always deafult to eBay's functionality in these cases. You can use the contact form to request a refund. Just give us your username and it will be done right away. Thanks for the valuable feedback.
It did say the school was subpoenaed.

But only after they alerted the authorities based on a previous request for a heads up. I'm not even sure that would have held up in court here (nl). I'm sure a competent lawywer would have used that if it was possible statesside though, so what with him being convicted I take it that it is legal.
A friend's Hyundai had the indicator stalk on the left, this was several years ago though.
It depends of what you consider suspect. I always saw PG's account of the Viaweb days in the light of the .COM 1.0 bubble.
If by "real-world" you mean "sending signals to a display within certain timing constraints", sure.

My point is that software is inherently virtual, therefore there are far fewer constraints placed on its shape, size and smell than any similarly elaborate construction in the real world. For example, if I want two cogs to interact with each other in the real world, they have to be physically adjacent. If I want to things to interact in software, I just say so and it is done.

And that is what gives programming language designers the freedom to do a much better job. Most of the languages in common use today are the way they are because they are essentially exposing an underlying architecture with some syntax over the top, or doing the same at one degree removed. Just because we've always done things in a particular way doesn't mean that we need to keep doing them that way.

Which goes back to my original point that we have essentially artificially constrained ourselves by insisting that anything we do be reasonably similar to everything we've done before.
TechCrunch CTO, Nik Cubrilovic, in Singapore for Crunchpad
I see what you mean here. In general our users are using credits they already own, but when you have to buy the majority of them it can get quite annoying as you said. For the time being, rest assured that you'll have no problem returning unused credits. Thanks again for the feedback. This is one of our first high-vale items and we are monitoring the dynamics of bidding and buying credits :)
It would remove an economic distortion, and I'm all for that; charitable giving, too, needs to be worth what you pay for it.

Nonetheless, your example illustrates the point quite well. Simplifying the tax code, and making it do what you want it to do, are not the same problem.
Shopping is broken, by Scott Adams:

Let's say you have a problem or a need or a want, and you're sure there is product somewhere in the marketplace that would help. You Google, and a handful of web sites pop up that offer promising solutions. But obviously you don't believe anything you read from vendors, so you check for online reviews. Then you wonder if the favorable reviews are planted by the vendor, and the bad reviews are planted by his competitors. Can you trust reviews from anonymous strangers?

You ask your coworkers and friends if they have ever used the product that you're interested in, and no one has. What now?

Shopping is broken.

How much more stimulated would the economy be if the people who have money, and are willing to spend it, could be reliably connected with the products that they desire?

What the world really needs is some way to connect you with the people who already use the sorts of products you want, and are willing to answer an e-mail or two about the topic.

About a year ago I had surgery to fix my voice. The information on the Internet about that particular surgery was outdated and didn't address my questions. The only way I could become a consumer of that surgery was by communicating directly with people who already had it, which I did. And since then I have answered questions for dozens of people who have the same questions that I had.

Likewise, as my wife and I make a zillion decisions for the home we are building, we prefer products and solutions used by people that we have spoken to personally. The Internet is virtually useless for any of the hundreds of product decisions we have made so far.

And what about choosing a destination for a vacation? You're much more comfortable if you have spoken to someone who visited the same place.

The obvious problem with connecting past consumers with potential consumers is that while people are generally helpful by nature, no one wants a million e-mails asking how they like their new can opener. So how do you strike the right balance?

Imagine a system that works like this: When you buy a product, you agree in advance to answer up to four e-mails from future potential customers, beginning no sooner than one year from when you make your purchase. It's totally optional, but agreeing gives you access to people who already bought the product you're considering today, to help you make your own decision. It would strike you as a fair deal.

For privacy reasons, this imagined system would disguise your e-mail address. And the system would have to be administered by some third party, not the vendor selling the product, or you wouldn't trust the strangers giving you advice.

Maybe you have a better idea for fixing shopping."

From: http://www.dilbert.com/blog/entry/shopping_is_broken/
Scotty Iseri pits Danes vs. Aussies
If Denmark wins he will record a version of any Scotty Got an Office Job song in Danish and he will chug a Tuborg

If Australia wins he will learn how to play the SGAOJ theme song on a Digeridoo and chug a Fosters.
Except for a couple of typos ('are' instead of 'our'), this is an extremely articulate and informative statement which will no doubt help them justify this decision to future funders or employers. Very impressive.
And the manufacturer to do this? Nokia.

Frankly, if the N97 only ran Android and had a better touch screen it'd do most of what this article recommends.
Almost everything I read about NYC seems to reinforce my prejudices against it. :)
As to the changes in the wording, if you switch to a regular style 'highest price' listed I think you'll find yourself doing a lot less in refunds, and you won't need to change the wording.

Right now the only wording that would be acceptable before signing up or at least before paying for credits should be:

"Beware, the highest bid you have seen on the item that you are interested in may be an arbitrary amount over the bid displayed"

and

"Second highest bid" on the item page, or a big fat disclaimer that in spite of the two-stage payment process you are using a proxy bidding system, which means that the chance is very large that your bid will not be the winning bid after you place it, and that you'll just end up buying a bunch of credits, which you can only spend on 'poorly drawn giraffes' and other stuff of that nature.

Or some way to test if your bid would be the highest bid before you commit to buying the credits (that would defeat some of the advantages of a proxy bid though, because it would allow people to figure out the real high bid).

Also, it is good practice to make it as easy to do a refund as it is to sign up.

I know ebay does proxy bidding, I've bought plenty of stuff on ebay, but I pay after winning the bid. My obligation to pay starts with the bid, but I'm not required to pay until winning the auction, my card is not charged until after the auction closes.

The scenario to go through is the one where a new user of your system buys enough credits to pay for the item that he/she is interested in. Only to find after going through all that that the amount is not high enough and that you need to buy still more credits (but not how many) in order to place a successful bid. You can't really do that imho, it feels like you're being taken for a ride.

That request for a refund should be in your inbox.
You have to sign up and list a item to get 500, if I understand correctly.
Tr.im to be Community-Owned
You gave it a go, which is more than you can say about most people. So, good job.

Good luck in whatever endeavors you head to next.
Why not switch away from the pre-pay system ?

Simply do a pre-auth on the card for the amount and charge when the buyer wins the auction ? Customer satisfaction guaranteed, 0 refunds and a lot less people like me that will get confused and / or pissed off.
True, some times performance is the primary issue, but not always.

When it is, Python is probably simply not the right langauge. Unladen swallow and future developments may change this, but for now if performance is a major issue than Python is not for you. C++ is generally a much better option for that, and there are a few that are even faster if you are willing and knowledgeable enough to do the optimizations.
I think the best guideline is to imagine the percentage of time someone has to work. Although some people are lucky enough to work reasonable hours for high pay, many are not. Assume that an hour of their free time is basically priceless.

Having said that, some people will also be more efficient. Imagine if you have a car, versus walking or using a bus; you might complete 5 errands in an hour by car, that wouldn't be possible without a car. To "save an hour" means different things to these people.

Time can even be a bit of a paradox. If you make a task 1000 hours faster, you don't necessarily "save" 1000 hours of free time, due to multi-tasking. Consider a small, repetitive task. If it takes a few minutes to finish, I will switch to something else, or maybe go get a drink, effectively compressing the elapsed time to zero. Whereas, if it takes just a few seconds, I'll probably sit and wait, which is dead time. In the end, I'll waste more time on the "faster" task than the slower one!
I think you've misunderstood my use of "pattern matching" in the post above. The way you've used it is a bit like saying "C is the best language for if statements".

A pattern match in ML is something like:

fun f 0 = <do something>
| f 1 = <do something else>
| f n = <do something in the general case

This goes really well with the ability to build up arbitrary datastructures, for example:

fun sum_tree (Node v) = v
| sum_tree (Branch (left, v, right)) = v + sum_tree(left) + sum_tree(right)

Which would sum up all the values stored in an integer tree.
I'm not so sure Apple will fix this. I mean, why did Apple tether themselves to AT&T in the first place? AT&T was a giant turd that everyone hated 2 years ago, just like it is now. If anything it's gotten far better in that time, and the iPhone has racked up serious sales. It wouldn't surprise me if both parties are very happy with their relationship, and AT&T willing to concede even more for exclusivity.

They did it because they thought they'd make more money that way, and maybe they did, and maybe they still will. Maybe they knew they'd sell 1/2 as many phones that way, but make 3x more per phone and therefore come out ahead, and maybe that math hasn't changed. Certainly AT&T will cling to the iPhone the way the Cavaliers will to LeBron.

Verizon doesn't need Apple. They'll steamroll AT&T with turds like the Blackberry Storm if they have to because they're far and away the best network in the U.S. and everybody loves them. Apple needs Verizon far more though, which means they won't get anywhere near the deal there they will from AT&T in terms of money, control, etc.

So if I had to bet (with someone who doesn't have insider info of course) I'd say we see continued exclusivity with AT&T. I wouldn't lay odds on it, but I'd take even money.
I agree that Macs will physically last longer than just about any other brand out there (other than the old IBMs), but the question I think is why you would want to keep a machine that long, and what good it will be if you do.

I had a 15" old-gen MacBook Pro. Ran like a dream, and physically much sturdier than just about any of the plastic crap out there. I had it for 2.5y before what I wanted to do outstripped what it was capable of offering and I switched to a unibody MacBook Pro.

That's what the previous poster is getting at. Yes, the Mac will remain functional for a long time, but what's the point?
Is this the charity? http://www.pinestreetinn.org/ How are you affiliated with this organization? I'm curious as to why you're even doing this, or how the idea even came into fruition.

You are like the last person in my mind who would ever consider capitalizing on his/her status as a celebrity, but given it's for charity I guess how you doing it (donating to charity) doesn't really matter.
Is just me or do they guys come off as being entirely childish over the "twitter/bit.ly walled garden"?

Everything I've seen them post about tr.im lately has a half-dozen whining comments about twitter/bit.ly.

If their product has no value outside of Twitter, then what exactly did you expect? If tr.im is a valud URL shortener with some value to it, then it should be able to stand on its own outside of any other 3rd party service. TinyURL has been around for more than a decade, long before Twitter was even a programmers wet dream.
That, my friends, is what's called "missing the forest for the trees." Yes, every single one of my question has an easy answer. Yup, just need to install this app or activate this hidden preference or tweak my Xorg.conf, or learn to live with the problem...

Using this device is like the death of a thousand cuts. None are even remotely fatal, but over time there's just a mounting list of little annoyances. Everything's 95%; nothing Just Works. I stopped using Linux on the desktop because I didn't want to have to be a sysadmin on my personal hardware; having to monkey with my phone is even less my idea of a good time.

My iPhone bit the dust, so I've been using a G1 that Google graciously gave me for free. I really want to like it! After just a couple days with it, though, I'm nearly ready to plunk down cash for a new iPhone. Google's seriously got a problem if they can't even get me to use their platform at the price free (actually, I'll save $200 if I stick with Android, so it's even worse).