skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm confused by how the plastic chair receives such high praise for its design, affordability and ease of maintenance, but adding wheels to that same chair somehow makes it an example of a "useless" product with poor design.

For $78, the organization is able to produce and ship a wheelchair around the world. They are able to use or augment existing products, which drastically reduces the cost of development, tooling, and production. As far as I can tell, the next cheapest option would cost a minimum of $150, with an equally cheap production quality.

Is it the best quality product ever made? Not at all. But it's not meant to be. It's meant to effectively serve the most number of people with the smallest amount of capital. In that sense, this product meets all of its design and mission goals. To declare otherwise based on some arbitrary "prettiness" factor is pretentious, at best.
This is usually put more colloquially: "x is alright, till they open their mouth" (and is not gender specific, although it's often used in that way).
I love Evernote and I think Libin has done a fantastic job overall.

Although, on this particular aspect I am not so sure. It is possible the article has diluted his comments but I don't think this holds true -

> We went from desktop computers to laptops, and then to smartphones and tablets, and now to wearables and connected devices. We use desktop computers, or laptops, for two to three hours, and we use smartphones for two or three minutes at a time, 50 times a day. On computers with long session lengths it makes sense to use powerful software with files and databases. On phones, it makes more sense to use apps for our two-minute interactions.

I use my computer for a lot longer than 2-3 hours a day. I cannot envisage wearables being able to replace the labour tasks most knowledge workers are forced to perform on a daily basis.

How can a wearable design a webpage, code an app, edit a document or blend photographs?

It is arguable whether smartphones or even tablets can perform the functionality required of desktops and laptops.

It is possible native apps will be obsolete but I doubt apps in general will be replaced.
CF is so easy to hate on, and for good reason. My only issue is that the idea behind CF (work till failure, repetition, and so on) isn't bad in and of itself. Doing 50 cleans isn't bad, per se, it's how you do it that makes it bad. And CF tends to be run by people who propagate bad form, too much weight, and that leads to people getting hurt.

I think it brings both good and bad things to the table, and gets loads of hate because the bad is really bad.

I still won't do CF though. And it does tend to be much like a cult, as ZenPro said. That's weird as well.
No shit, I have days where I look at advertisement, graphic design and marketing and can't help but subscribe to this view of Bill Hicks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj2K0wo
Why was WePay monitoring the owner's twitter account at all?
"A woman may very well form a friendship with a man, but for this to endure, it must be assisted by a little physical antipathy." - Nietzsche
There is a blog post on OKCupid that discusses the same concepts:

> the more men as a group disagree about a woman's look, the more they end up liking her

http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-mathematics-of-beauty/

If everyone agree you're ugly, that's bad. But if some people lilke you a lot and some people dislike you a lot, that's much better than if everyone agree you're "okay", or "cute".

However, the OP has a rather floating concept of uniqueness that they seem to conflate with intimacy or friendship; of course once you become friends with someone they're unique to you, but that doesn't mean much about their "uniqueness" as a property of their being.
Always Hungry? Here’s Why
> Software of this type is needed to do a chore, and honestly if the tools are in place, it could be re-created in an afternoon rather than extended when the time comes.

I agree that it's supposed to do a chore, so it should be as easy to churn it out as possible. However, if we were to follow your printer analogy, the proper way to do that with a printer would be to just build a machine that makes it very easy to create a custom printer that types out exactly what you want it to type out! What we have instead is a very general typesetter that can be convinced to print a particular picture (by feeding it an automatically-generated program in e.g. PS!).

The application in question is pretty much a simple CRUD that generates a report in the end so that whoever is ordering knows what to order and from where. IMHO, just like printing doesn't require the user to know PS, this should not involve programming. It's not that programming should be easy, it's just that the CRUD model is so easily understood and so orthogonal that building one should not require anything more than a wizard asking you about the data it should collect.
Nothing inherently wrong with it, in the same way there's nothing inherently wrong with a relationship based entirely on casual sex with no attendant intimacy or commitment.

In both cases, though, in practice, you're likely to find one side is getting exactly what they want out of the relationship, where the other is holding out for more.
You don't think drug laws were zealously enforced during Prohibition in the 1920s? Or during the 1950s? I'm just not seeing it. There have been moral panics over drugs leading to ludicrous overreach (at various levels of government) on quite a regular basis since well before "Reefer Madness". It didn't start with "crack babies" and "glue sniffing" - claims that the latest new drug (whatever it is) is different and more addictive and more dangerous than any prior drugs and this makes users extra dangerous to deal with which justifies using extra force or even shooting people with higher caliber weaponry, goes back at least a century.
This logic doesn't work. People steal and rob to buy BMWs, nice clothes and big TVs. You wouldn't outlaw luxurious goods because their lust for them is the root cause of illegal behavior in part of the population.
I feel that this could have been stated much more simply:

1) There are personal attributes which are easily observable (mostly physical, also charismatic and possibly social status). This is basically what we can know about a person from appearance alone.

2) There are personal attributes which are less easily observable, and these include temperament, interests, response to various situations, behaviour outside of group situations. To know these things requires much greater time interacting with a person, possibly in smaller groups or one-on-one.

People's tastes in #1 are mostly uniform. Someone rated highly for #1 by one person is likely to be rated highly by any other person. The same is emphatically not true of #2, where ratings vary wildly.

As exposure to #2 increases, it increases in importance over #1. Let's say that #2 constitutes 80% of your overall "rating" of a person, and you really like them so they're a 9 despite scoring only a 5 on the initial assessment. Their total score is 8.2. Someone who scores a 10 for #1 but a 4 for #2 scores 6.2. These numbers might be off and they might vary between people but I think it's a pretty simple idea.

Most people are taking this as a suggestion about their own attractiveness, but the flip-side argument is possibly even more important - the person you're most likely to be really attracted to isn't necessarily the person who scores most highly on #1, and if you're using #1 as a filter then you're ruling good people out.
I've only done it at http://www.crossfitv16.com so my experience may not be typical, but in the classes I've been taking, there's a strong emphasis on good technique and no pressure to push yourself past reasonable limits. It's definitely a bit amateur compared to what top coaches can offer, but it's also affordable to amateur athletes.

Finally, the workouts are clearly not optimal for strength gain, but the idea is to train coordination and balance as well.

So I guess my point is, YMMV when it comes to Crossfit gyms, perhaps unsurprisingly given that it's a franchise.
This is totally misguided. The simple facts are that 'great design' is not the single factor in success or failure of any kind of product, and that not all things created through charities are failures.

Of course if you want to peddle the opposite then you can support your weak position by selecting examples from the real world underpinning it but these are just instances and not generalizations. You could just as easy argue the opposite using different examples (capitalism is the root of all evil and nonprofits are the way forward).

Neither of these positions is supported by all the data available, so like in many other cases the situation is more complex than what you can easily catch in a soundbite and a blogpost.

The monkey video embedded makes a completely different point than the one that the author wants to extract from it: that two monkeys doing the same work side-by-side expect equal pay. It has nothing to do with 'products' or 'design'.

I get the dig at the prosthetic arm (the writer is co-founder of http://madebybump.org/#global), but since that's a non-profit I have no idea why the capitalism angle is emphasized so much.

"""Have you ever wondered about how a homeless person on the side of the street and the leader of the free world consume the same fizzy soda drink just to have a fleeting moment of happiness?"""

If your happiness comes from drinking cola then you have other problems.

Maybe this is some kind of elaborate satire?
Especially if you are not handsome enough you are immediately thrown into the "creepy rapist" bucket.
My personal thought on this topic:

When you work at least 8 hrs/day, 5 days/week (because somebody wants your product/service), you should be able to have a normal/decent life.

If not, you're simply being ripped off.

EDIT: In other words, western societies have more than enough wealth for everybody to live really decent lives. If we still see horrible things like homelessness, etc., it's because society accepts structures that result in this. And personally, I don't want to be part of a society with such values.
I kinda hope it passes - it'll be a very interesting experiment.

A disaster for Switzerland of course, but someone has to do the experiment.

The best case scenario is a massive increase in cost of living, more likely is a huge increase in imports (since they are cheap now), together with a drop in exports (since no one can make anything affordable). That's not a good position for any country.

But, maybe I'm wrong, that's why I kinda hope they do the experiment.
> I've always thought that women didn't go to extracurricular activities to find dates, and only men do this.

According to the article, if you feel you're lacking in immediate mate value and want to emphasize uniqueness instead, you shouldn't be trying to "find dates" but just to expand your social circle. That fits with my experience pretty well, actually. The idea isn't to meet a woman that you can ask out for coffee the next day; the idea is to start spending time with a wider range of folks, get them acquainted with your uniqueness, and increase the odds that one of them will either find your particular traits attractive or introduce you to someone who does.

As a side benefit, you'll also be meeting new friends and broadening your horizons.
That is not necessarily a bad thing.

Free-market-oriented economists since Milton Friedman have strongly criticized the efficiency of democracy. They base this on the argument that voters are irrational, among other things. Their criticism towards democracy is that voters are highly uninformed about many political issues, especially relating to economics, and have a strong bias about the few issues on which they are fairly knowledgeable.

No more is this point evidenced than on news forums regarding current events. There is every possibility that the journalists diverge from the masses because the masses are incorrect.

If I had a $ for every forum commenter that talked about the oil in Afghanistan I would be richer than Peter Thiel.

Have a read of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_democracy and just consider whether in some circumstances the consensus opinion may be the wrong one.
Thank god that javascript isn't required! An enhancement of allowing the user to use javascript to navigate to the next page is a nice extra.
Apple and Google declare patent truce, will dismiss all current lawsuits
A lot of the "war on drugs" in other countries happened because of US pressure, because other countries want to kiss US's ass.
.Design - business, building, or birthday card - is iterative.

To.a first approximation, no 'latest idea' works.
Help him iterate.
What I actually like about Google IO, it's its geekness. From homepage to the actual event. Also, Google has proven that geekness could have aesthetics.
I think it's optimistic to think that the two axes would be respected. People could still go for the heavier downvote out of spite. Slashdot tried to address this by being selective about who gets downmodding rights. It's not obvious that making things less simple works better.
Every Bozo downvoting this has obviously never lived in China
Where's the money coming from though?

Assuming no import/export (a false assumption of course) then increasing the minimum wage just increases costs, and you end up exactly where you started.

There was a time when resources were a large percentage of the cost of good - those days are long gone, today wages are the largest part.

You pay people more, so you have to charge people more, and they have more money so they can afford it so prices are successful in going up. Net result: Absolutely no change.
He added(?) a note explaining that the default is 4GB and will fail if the user has limits which is common in HPC configurations.
I don't recall ever getting hassled by an addict. Plenty of drunk people though. Why don't we ban alcohol too? (Hint: it doesn't work.)
> The best case scenario is a massive increase in cost of living

I absolutely do not think so. Social justice is already excellent (compared to places like the US), wages have already a certain level allowing for an OK life (so not a lot of jobs would have to be cancelled due to higher pay), but it can definitely still be improved.
Why I don't do CrossFit: I got tired of getting injured.
The commerci product coca cola has massive market reach.

So much so that live saving and very cheap oral rehydration salts were being put in the same cartons as coca cola as a method of delivery with specialliy designed boxes that fit between the bottles.

http://allafrica.com/view/group/main/main/id/00028535.html

> NAIROBI, 2 March 2012 (IRIN) - How is it that the world's most popular fizzy drink reaches even the farthest-flung corners of the planet, yet vast numbers of children in developing countries die for lack of one of the cheapest and most effective preparations known to medical science?

The original concept has expanded the range of items being delivered (water purification tablets; vitamin A supplements) and allowing local businesses to sell these items.
Absolutely. Coca-Cola (the drink, not necessarily the company) is a scourge and always has been. Giving access to Coke to everyone is the last thing we should want, but it is happening.

The One World Futbol the article seems to think is good costs $40 for two, and is supposed to serve the poor? How does that make sense? The truly poor make footballs (soccer balls) from garbage; will a $20 ball do anything really positive, or will it be used as a status symbol and perhaps stolen?

Another weird thing: the article praises the Casio F91-W wristwatch which is supposedly a favorite for making bomb timers. Sure it's ubiquitous but they could have picked something without such a troublesome reputation.

There is here an idea that people in the third world ought to have what people in the first world have. In some cases they might be better off without.
Romance is funny. On one hand, people believe in some intrinsic uniqueness in people that make a few of them destined to be their "soul mate". This is purely a matter of being-who-you-are, which can't be measured as objectively good or bad, but is perfect for the few that are your destined "soul mates" (some people won't call it 'soul mate' or have such a mystical aura around it, but may believe in the same thing just as well).

On the other hand, people believe that people can be objectively measured and that they can be assigned a dating market 'value'. Then people have to assess their own value in order to be realistic about who they can date, lest they (gasp) overshoot and try to be with someone who is out of their league.

These two viewpoints are polar opposites. Yet it seems that people seem to either concern themselves with one or the other, at some point in time.

There is nothing like this league-stuff for friendships (perhaps except for in high school) or any other human relationships. Why? Perhaps it's because of the seemingly almost universally accepted concept of monogamy.
On the positive side, and assuming sufficient divergence by then, at least that will only affect about half of the ssl web instead of nearly all of it.
Well, for one thing, welfare funding ultimately comes from tax money, and those noble job creators fight tooth and nail against social benefit programs just as they do against minimum wage increases, and anything else that threatens to make the world a better place at a cost to their bottom line.

The US in particular suffers under an entrenched and insidious myth that work is inherently virtuous and people who can't work deserve to starve. Reagan's imaginary legions of welfare queens have taken root in our national dialogue and made widespread, substantial improvements to public welfare virtually impossible. If you feel that progressives are grasping at straws, it's because that's all we have left.
> You pay people more, so you have to charge people more

Or maybe some overpaid positions will have to accept a cut that they will never even feel in the slightest way.

An INcrease of, say, $500/month to reach $4000/month can "change a World".
But a $500/month DEcrease to reach i.e. $39'500/month will never even be felt.

In economic terms: The marginal benefit of an increasing wage decreases. There is a fuzzy limit where more money does NOT make you more happy.
Jsb 2.0.0 released
Cause of Death (preliminary coroner's report)
as do complex art projects. one does not just whip up a 20 ft bronze statue in an evening...
> Source please.

Maybe it's different where you are, but in the Kentucky area I see plenty of people in their 50s and 60s working in fast food, gas stations, and Wal-Marts. Have you really not seen this?
I don't know about a $25.00/hr wage, but one of the many
brilliant things Switzerland does is ties fees/fines to
income. So, if you are a rich man and get a speeding ticket, it will pay substantially more. I think they
tie fees/fines to all aspects of working/living in Switzerland? A poor person who gets a $800 speeding ticket
could become homeless. A rich person getting a expensive ticket is like getting decaf at Starbucks. People, will
counter saying oh the rich pay more in income taxes. Yes--
in many cases, but I still feel fines/fees should be tied
to a persons annual income. I feel it is so important it
should be an admendment. I had a friend in college who dropped out after getting a $500 red light ticket. He wouldn't admit the ticket played a part in him dropping out, but I think it was a factor. I will always remember how he
felt when that ticket arrived in the mail, while just finishing top ramen. He was a poor kid from an ethnic family. He was maxed out on loans and grants, and just
always on the edge. Oh well, I hope you are doing well Max.
When someone asks you a question you are in no way obligated to answer.
Disclaimer: I've done crossfit for over 2 years at this point.

This is actually one of the best written anti-crossfit posts I've come across. Most are anecdotal "I went to one gym that didn't focus on form so all gyms must be bad" posts, which are tiring. This post goes over some great details which as a crossfitter I would say are true.

That being said, after doing CrossFit for 2 years I have a few tidbits of advice:

* Find a gym that focuses on form over workout. They exist, and crossfit is popular enough at this point that you should be able to find it.

* If you don't plan on being SUPER into CrossFit, ask for substitute workouts for the gymnastic moves: handstand pushups, most things with rings, parallel bars, etc. It just isn't worth the time learning how to do these, and you can hurt yourself. Just do something simple, they always have substitutes.

* I personally, like the author of this post, don't do deadlifts and rarely do kettlebell swings. I am not a professional athlete or trainer, but I really primarily only heard of people getting hurt with these workouts, so I chose to avoid them. Sounds like this was a good decision. There are substitute workouts for each.

My goal with CrossFit isn't to be ripped and exploded. My goal with CrossFit is to remain in good physical health based on the fact that I sit (or remain still standing) for 10+ hours per day. To that end, its been a HUGE success. The team environment of CrossFit is a great motivator both to workout hard but also to show up (social pressures). The diversified workouts of crossfit keep my strength up pretty high.

All this being said, listen to the linked post of this entry. It has really good info.
موقع اليوم السابع كايرودار نتيجة الشهادة الابتدائية 2014 برقم الجلوس
The DIR in the video is such a lovely moment, somehow very touching to me .. I've always believed we should not retire computers, and indeed have my own swelling collection of old stuff that still boots and can be used for some purpose.

Old machines never die - their users do. Keep the Expensive Machine running ..
I have always seen the friend zone as a term to describe the dynamic where the girl is using the bait of relationship and sex to make the guy do things for her.

I guess other people see it as the guy being too clingy and not getting the message.

These are two entirely different concepts which both carry the term "friend zone".
FWIW. Here in Oslo, everyone has to do a weekend-intro just to become a member. And instructors are here are really thorough. Other than getting a personal trainer, I don't see how you could get more attention/correction than going to entry-level workout at my gym.
It's really interesting to compare and contrast the Cabal method and the idea of design by committee[1]. This must be one of the very few stories I've heard of where a committee with a rigidly defined structure actually succeeds at pulling off something creative.

The bits that really struck me were this:

During Cabal sessions, everyone contributed but we found that not everyone contributed everyday. The meetings were grueling, and we came to almost expect that about half of the group would find themselves sitting through two or three meetings with no ideas at all, then suddenly see a direction that no one else saw and be the main contributor for the remainder of the week.

and this:

The Cabal consisted only of people that had actual shipping components in the game; there were no dedicated designers. Every member of the Cabal was someone with the responsibility of actually doing the work that their design specified, or at least had the ability to do it if need be.

So, focusing on the quality rather than quantity of contributions makes sure that people don't just chip in ideas for the sake of chipping in. Also, making sure that the people on the committee are those who personally have to implement these ideas makes sure that everything is actually achievable.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_committee
That email was from GiveForward, not WePay.
"aaaaaaaa is not a shit pkg name"

Ok, let's use that then!
And here is a picture: https://www.flickr.com/photos/osr/14043543694/in/set-7215764...
SSH Tunnel – Local and Remote Port Forwarding Explained With Examples