skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I didn't say they posed UX problems. I don't even think the author of the article suggested that.

The article literally says that there a still many rough edges in OS X. I don’t see rough edges. There are small inconsistent details and extremely minor legibility problems. It’s not worth mentioning and Apple won’t listen anyway.

> I merely suggested that small problems add up to a less than optimal user experience.

I believe that this is only true if you delude yourself into thinking these minor inconsistencies and flaws matter.

There will always remain some "rough edges" because costs rise exponentially when approaching an optimal design. People have lifes, deadlines etc. and Apple is no exclusion to that. Of course they could find and fix these problems if the threw another $10MM at it, but they don’t because they’ve already reached 98% of optimal and the last 2% aren’t even worth thinking about. There are much bigger problems elsewhere (both from their perspective and from customer perspective).
this blog does some really fantastic analysis if you like to dweeb out about nsa minutae
I had a couple of professors that didn't allow cell phone use in their classes, and it was annoying, for all the reasons the original poster listed.

I can understand not letting high school students use phones, but in college you are an adult with sometimes conflicting responsibilities.
Because a good lecturer will do more than just read off his or her slides, and if they tell students the slides will be available than many of them won't show up, and will miss out good material.

Video-recording the lectures is another thing entirely, but if the students are going to actually go to the trouble of watching them they may as well actually come to class where they can ask questions, get feedback, and get involved in class exercises.

(I do realize that there are lots of horrible lecturers out there who do nothing more than read off the PowerPoint that comes with the textbook, but I think the correct approach to that is to re-work the tenure system to promote good lecturers as well as good researchers, not abolish lectures.)
Alternatives are:

http://mastercoin.org

and

http://nxt.org
Tell HN: Show me the damn shipping fee
If you sell product that requires payment and shipment, and you want to improve your purchase conversion rate, please calculate and show the damn shipping fee right away!

I shouldn't have to create an account, I shouldn't have to type in payment details, and I shouldn't have to dig around your site to see what the amounts are.

Just have a box for me to enter my shipping address — maybe even on every item's store page! (and remember what I typed in) — and show me the cheapest shipping option. If/when I check out you can give me all sorts of crazy shipping options to choose from.
I hear you on copy & paste. I think the last line effect is real, because your attention moves. Interesting article.
GP is not making a very clear argument, but you are piling on a fat helping of hubris.

First you appear to believe the specious nutritional myth that weight gain is a matter of calories in vs calories expended. Of course that appeals to scientifically-minded due to the comforting immutability of the laws of thermodynamics, but it ignores the fact that the human metabolism and satiety mechanisms are extremely complex and powerful. Even if you had a magic meter of all calories going in and out it wouldn't begin to solve our nutritional problems at a society level.

Second, things like the paleo (little p) approach to diet and health are not about "ancient wisdom". It's about the fact that we evolved under certain conditions, and while those conditions were constantly changing, the rate of change accelerated exponentially after industrialization and have completely been completely decimated in the last 60 years (less than one lifespan). While western medicine has made amazing strides in the last century, nutrition is still very much in its blood-letting dark ages. Looking to ancestral lifestyle clues is just good sense given the paltry information we have available. None of that is to poo-poo the scientific evidence we have, but understand that human nutrition is far too complex for nutritional science to yet provide convincing answers.

A lot of folks around here are so quick to look down their nose to people are too "granola" and make seemingly un-scientifically-subtantiated decisions like not eating processed foods or preferring "natural" or "whole" foods. But you know what? In the lack of sufficient knowledge, these hippies are making far smarter decisions than the geek who decides that since we don't have proof we might as well carry on with the average American diet. We pat ourselves on the back for our scientific literacy and rational decision-making, but deep down we are animals subject to the same conditioning and addicted to the same heavily processed foodstuffs which are almost certainly leading to all kinds of nasty health outcomes. We don't want to change our diet not because it's the rational decision, but because it fucking tastes good.
Anyone have a link to a more detailed writeup on exactly how this was implemented?
http://www.camlcity.org/knowledge/kb_002_shared_library.html
In contrast with Facebook, one of the reason why
FourSquare has yet to succeed is due to significant
problems with their initial design decisions ...

I would find this much more convincing if they had made predictions about Facebook and FourSquare when they were both in their infancy.
Coding forms? No. Commonly available CRTs were designed for 525 line alternate frame TV, which really give about 262 lines of resolution. That gives a just-barely legible 10 dots for a text line on a 24 line display.

-dB
Is the optimal situation where everyone can see what the note-taker is writing? Has anyone done this?

To stay engaged, I've used the scrawl now and type later method, which means the notes never get out early enough. They do allow me to reflect on them though.
I can post the code. It just doesn't work anymore since they fixed the hole.

Edit: https://gist.github.com/joshfraser/819308dbae43ff70d892
Finding Opportunity Online with the Mass Affluent
VCs don't invest in business models. They invest in the possibility of getting a big payout. We cannot assume that a given business model is immutable. You can only evaluate it's current state, which might be only loosely correlated with financial success.
I'd prefer a startup with traction and a team that might figure something out. I'm pretty sure you'd get more mileage learning how to spot sketchy people, rather than looking if the current model aligns with current-often-vague-and-inconclusive social sciences research.
I would presume because it is a long, distracting and unpleasant process.
I'm curious about this, it located me down to the intersection in SF, and I have Chrome set to ask when sites try to geolocate, but it did not ask me on the site...
Tbh, probably fairly bad atm. I haven't done anything empirical but atm Silk will create a record for every SQL query executed during the request/response cycle effectively doubling the number of queries. Not only that but it also saves down any non-binary HTTP body to a TextField, and this isn't yet configurable.

I think the Elasticsearch/Celery option is a good shout if this were to ever be used in production. Celery would help with the issue of response time but it wouldn't solve the load impact on the database (although I guess could also configure a different SQL database in Django).

I will certainly do some investigation into this at some point :)
SUGGESTION: You'll probably want to include your tagline "Convert your website into native Android and iOS" in the homepage title tag...for SEO purposes.
Uber Valued at $17 Billion in New “Record-Breaking” Round
College students are adults, why don't we let them decide how they use their class time. If someone wants to pay to go to a university just to waste class time on a computer, that's their loss. For others, note taking on a laptop might be more efficient. Personally, I have terrible handwriting and would prefer to take notes digitally.
If someone is seriously distracting people around them, then it makes sense to tell them to put their laptop away
Congrats to the grantees! I was one of the 120 applicants who was not selected for this program. But I do hope I could work on something equally as exciting this Fall at my first job.
Couldn't agree more. Just because someone lectures about something doesn't mean it will stick in my head. Banning laptops is not he solution.
Ask HN: What is the best way to scrape HN profiles?
I'm currently working on a small weekend project where I need to get the HN karma value for a given subset of users. (It's just a fun exercise and I'll share it once it's ready).

I'm using the HN API provided by Algolia [0] but I realised it's just updating the values every time there's a new post or submission from that user.

Anyone aware of an API where I could grab this value without getting IP banned by HN like i probably would if I access/scrape 1000 user profiles every hour?

Thanks!

Edit: If it's updated once every 24h that's perfectly fine for my use-case.

[0] https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/users/dewey
Why will this do any better than the Leap (which arguably hasn't seen major adoption)?
Please do, it would be interesting to see how it works.
Our current codebase has had iterations in ASP, C#, ColdFusion, Ruby, and others. At different times, we chose the best platform and language for the job. I was actually a technical reviewer for some of Wrox's first .NET books back around 2001-2002.

I don't think there's a lot of value using terms like "haters". I think that implies uneducated opinions.

You CAN run .NET in a non-MS ecosystem, the same way that I can run Ruby on Rails on Windows Server. My Rails app needs Redis, which really doesn't run on Windows; most (almost all) of the .NET tooling and resources out there are built on the Windows ecosystem.

The .NET "hate" is Windows hate. Everytime I try to eject a USB drive from a Windows machine and it tells me some randome unidentified process still has a file open, it reminds me why I no longer use Windows. Add on licensing costs, etc, and you have the basis for wanting to avoid the Windows platform.

So again, "but you can run .NET on Linux". Sure, but if you're building a solution and the use case calls for open source, is that really the best choice at that time? I personally think the push for Mono isn't because C# is the best language (it's pretty good though) but to preserve investment in existing code and resources.

When people think .NET, they think heavy tooling, configuration screens, and GUIs. They think tooling sold by "sales engineers" with glossy brochures filled with bullets points. "Consultants" with perfect teeth and perfect belts, as opposed to the guy in the hoodie hacking on code. We know this may not be a reflection of reality (look at tools like Powershell and the increased open-sourcing of Redmond), but culture is often as important as technology.
Do you have some concrete suggestions? I personally think that the place for high-tech solutions is for homework and maybe lab sections, not disrupting lectures.
My experience buying stuff with Bitcoin on Amazon using Purse.io
For those wondering, the original title of the HN post (changed just minutes ago) was "Git 2.0 is here and it's full of goodies"
Hey, wow, I just saw you guys are in the Rossmor's where that tshirt factory place used to be. I used to live right above there! I brewed my first homebrew in that apartment.

That's a great location - I will definitely have to check you guys out the next time I'm in StP. Very awesome.
> A relevant point that the article failed to mention was, laptop/tablet/smartphone usage distracts not only the user, but those around him as well [1]. Just having such a device in view lowers the comprehension of material.

If you can't concentrate because the person next to you is on reddit you're going to have a hard time in an open office.

Full disclosure, I only skimmed this paper, but I'd say this study has very little in common with the actual scenario of a good professor giving a stimulating lecture.

People learn and take notes differently, students should be granted the respect to do whatever works best for them, professors' egos be damned.

EDIT: Not to mention these students are paying customers....if they choose to waste their time in class, that's up to them.
Personally from my college experience I know that I have used my laptop in lectures for both good and evil. I have legitimately used it to google work, ideas and to open tabs on papers/etc. to read later. I also used to write code in all my programming lectures because programming lectures were dull otherwise, might as well make use of the time. However, there are many times I have opened up reddit or HN during lectures and 'checked-out' as the article suggested.

Sometimes I have paid for not listening to the lecture but the majority of the time it doesn't matter. The idea that I learned my college curriculum in lectures would be a joke. As a computer science student I learnt my trade in the labs and tutorials and interactive courses rarely from listening to a lecturer explain X, Y or Z.

The better the lecturer or the harder the module the more laptops that were closed in my lectures. My compiler design course for example, infamous for being the most difficult module no one dared open the laptop as there was too much knowledge to consume.

Lecturers can easily do a self-assessment survey of how engaged their class is and how interestingly they are presenting their material but how many heads are hidden behind laptop screens.

For the one lecturer who did ban laptops I have to say I went to absolutely none of his lectures unless I had coursework to submit. I found it a bit presumptuous that he could demand I close my laptop, I was not distracting him or disturbing the class.

You don't learn in lectures where lecturers read their slides to you laptop open or not. If the lecturers are going to waste my time with pointless reading of slides then I might as well do something useful on my laptop like my coursework or just read hacker news.
Blog appears to have some issues:

"Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL extension which is required by WordPress."
Portability isn't a concern here. Realistically, an extremely small fraction of your users have unsupported browsers. Maybe some forums won't let you embed video, but if you're building a product site you have the freedom to use whatever you please.

Wouldn't it be nice if your marketing wasn't covered in artifacts? Every GIF on this page is full of artifacts. Would it be valuable for users to be able to pause and appreciate a feature they think is neat?

It's high time for GIFs to die. HTML5 video is a worthy replacement.
The Coffee Machine
Ask HN: Any recommendations for business insurance in CA for SaaS companies?
Does YC have a recommended insurance list they can share with the community?
Not as well as the site I linked in my comment ;)
It has the same problem the Leap has: It has intolerably high latency between movement and execution of input. (Judging from the video in some cases almost a whole second, but generally over half a second.) It might be useful for niche applications, but if i need to take over ten times longer to do simple tasks with it, it will never be part of normal daily usage.
Facebook vs. Google WWIII
Doesn't work for me. Mac Chrome 35. Clicking search does nothing, tried with extensions off too.

On the idea itself I did this myself using R a few months back for the pubs in Islington to schedule meetups with friends when the sun was out for the weekend. Good to have it as a site.
Postback creating a stateful web. The web is STATELESS.

Doesn't every language attempt to create state? WebForms puts pretty much the entire state in the client, but other platforms pass some sort of session ID at the very least.

ClientID's making javascript an absolute pain

I don't think approaches like the asset pipeline in Rails are much better, IMO
> "A wealth of studies on students’ use of computers in the classroom has accumulated to support this intuition. Among the most famous is a landmark Cornell University study from 2003 called “The Laptop and the Lecture,” wherein half of a class was allowed unfettered access to their computers during a lecture while the other half was asked to keep their laptops closed."

The problem is the lecture!

Teachers who don't engage students -- and lecturing rarely engages anyone -- push students away from material they don't care about. If students are engaged and laptops impede them, they'll put them away themselves. If you didn't engage the students, no amount of banning things they care about more than being lectured at will make them care.

If you have to ban something, ban the lecture and teachers who rely on lecturing at the expense of empathy and compassion for students.

Students are people like you and me. We use laptops in our work when they help and put them away when they don't. If we want students to learn about the world and how to succeed in it, let them work like we work, solving problems like we solve. Experiential, project-based learning does this automatically, at least with effective teachers. Lecturing doesn't. If you had a job you couldn't quit where your manager lectured at you all the time you'd get out your computer too.

HN just had a thread -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7739378 -- on the problems with lectures based on a Science Magazine article, "Lectures Aren’t Just Boring, They’re Ineffective, Too, Study Finds.” Here is my blog post with related notes from that thread -- "Why I avoid lecturing when I lead and teach" http://joshuaspodek.com/avoid-lecturing-lead-teach
C++/Java/Python and turtles all the way down.

More seriously, as a more researchy/deep-tech startup, most of our stack is homegrown, to address the very specific needs of web-scale machine vision.
"Awkward." That's the gut reaction I got while seeing the person in the video using this device.

That said, touchscreens still feel less satisfying than physical buttons, so maybe I'm just being nostalgic.
Earth also loses helium and hydrogen. The current rate of loss is about three kilograms (3 kg) of hydrogen and 50 grams (50 g) of helium per second, according to Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_escape
This is so true for me though. I've discovered that I learn more when I'm not taking notes.

Especially in Maths or CS where classrooms are great for building intuition or easing into a subject but textbooks are ubiquitous and easy to read.

Copying down a proof doesn't help me at all but doing it along with a professor (each mental step is easy to hold on to) gives me so much better results.

I imagine that I'm not the only such one.
Oh, hell, how did a Daily Mail link get to the front page? This is a british tabloid. You may as well be debating the veracity of a story about a wolf boy discovered in the wild.
It increased the quantity demanded because of a weird artifact of human psychology that isn't typically covered in economics 101. There is a discontinuity in the demand curve as the relevant norms change.
Yeah, irreplaceable is probably the wrong word. But in an industry where personal relationships are a huge part of the business and a single person can really have a large effect on the bottom line it makes sense to do something like a partnership.

If I am personally bringing $5 million in bookings each year why would I stay at a firm that just pays me a salary when I could just go out on my own. Whereas as a programmer it's not quite as cut and dry.

So the partners aren't irreplaceable I guess but their bookings have such a direct impact to the bottom line that the marginal value of them as a person is almost 100%.
> I've seen professors actually stop their lectures to yell at some student in the back until said student puts his laptop away.

I had a professor that would make the student using the laptop come up to the front of the room and finish giving the lecture. He said he picked it up from Nabokov.
I'm not sure what this thing is supposed to be doing... I opened the article up in a new tab... I clicked the new tab, then I moused down to click on the button and a modal dialog popped up thanking me for stopping by.
I think things like this are pretty stupid, but this has a few bugs in it.
In my experience, LaTeX is not really a worthy alternative to writing formulas by hand. Sure, you should absolutely use LaTeX for typesetting mathematical reports and the like, but LaTeX does not stand a chance against pen and paper when it comes to taking notes or doing calculations. The world needs tooling that is much more similar to writing formulas on a paper in its interface. At the moment, I also fail to see any benefit at all in using laptops in mathematics education.
Gutsy move, posting to HN about a security vulnerability at Amazon. And using WordPress to do it. I'll bet this guy loves playing on cliffs, too.
I normally avoid negativity in my comments, but I'm afraid I really can't see the purpose of this site.

I only seem to be able to access the JavaScript section (no matter which options I pick), and am immediately presented with, what to a child, would be indecipherable code.

What is jQuery?
What is CSS and how is it able to render certain Scratch Blocks?
What is a var?
What is setTimeout?

Children need to have things explained, and it appears that the creator has had zero contact with anyone with pedagogical experience.
My favorite design is the one that looks like mountains, followed by the bars on the white page. Great stuff!
Sorry about that. I tried to push the POC code to my blog and forgot that Heroku doesn't like the version of Wordpress I'm running. Should be back up now.
Most pressing mails can wait few hours and lecture will most likely end up after 90 minutes or sooner. Your critical bug will not be solved withing five minutes and campus newspaper's website being down for few hours is no big deal anyway. Finally, I would really like which school newspaper has so hot stories that you have to run to.

And if it is really so critical, they can send text message on your muted phone and you will have to leave the lecture anyway.

I'm not saying I want to ban laptops, just that your examples are very unconvincing. I get it, the class is very low priority to you, but if you are going to regularly fix bugs or write emails and then ask other to fill you in, you will be disturbing to others.
People don't look down their noses at those who say things like "eating food that has been processed less is probably better for you".

People do, rightly, criticise those who claim problems with diet are all fixed with a single thing - paleo! Keto! No HFCS! No carbs!

Also, it's easy to deride calories out : calories in but it is fundamentally true that if a person eats fewer calories than they use they will lose weight. The fact that some people have gut flora that helps them stay thin and others have gut flora that makes it easier to gain weight and other people have a small genetic influence does not stop CO:CI being true, it just means that CO:CI is very hard to follow for some people. Suggesting that those people receive cognitive behaviour therapy and exercise programs along with lifestyle change to help them lose weight is usually met with stiff disagreement about the efficacy of these evidence based interventions.
There are tons of web-view based apps in the App stores. Phonegap bases their entire business on a similar concept.
The Leap has something like a 5 millisecond latency. Have you even used one?
I don't think he's implying you can't be a good company without it, just that there's a lot of hardship and lessons learnt that can be avoided by having a researcher do academic diligence. You can learn those lessons the hard way in practice, but it might be more efficient to do the research instead.
The Top 5 Claims NSA Defenders Have to Stop Making to Remain Credible