skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"All of the decisions revolved around the central fact that a typical Gmail user was receiving only about five emails per day, most of which were of promotional nature, and as such, required no response."

So, they designed Gmail around people who don't use email? That explains a lot.
> Crowdfunding science asks the 'Average Joe' to decide what's important in research

Well, why should the average Joe not be enabled to say "hey, I'd like to take some of my money and put it towards a research project that interests me"?

>and as i shouldn't have to explain, research outcomes aren't as cut and dry as when you fund a video game or movie.

I'm not sure what the criticism is here.

>A professor asking for money on indiegogo circumvents this process, which acts as a validation of the authenticity and legitimacy of said research.

All it does is act as a pre-filter. It's not like funding guarantees publication in a peer-reviewed journal. And that filter also blocks out a lot of potentially useful research.

I'm guessing that filter is very useful for large, expensive research proposals. But advances in technology have made it so that far more research can be done at a much lower cost. With greatly reduced risk, the need for such a filter is also greatly reduced.
Cool telephone picture
In fewer words, Inbox started as a UX redesign, was met with so much resistance that the team lead had to write a "You are not the target user" post internally, and to salvage the sunk costs, they released it as a separate interface.

Personally, I hope that Inbox gets some of those currently missing features added back in, starting with support for Google Apps accounts. The ability to snooze emails is too powerful (followup.cc turned it into a business model) to allow it to get thrown into the Google Labs graveyard.
If you want to tag a tweet about this with #bayeshack, there is a prize for most popular project on social.
I would also like to encourage you to have a look at ConTeXt. It goes the other way for LaTeX and wants to think you about layout more. I use it to create all my slides and have far more fun than with LaTeX beamer for that.
>This looks more like a donation than crowdfunding.

Those aren't mutually exclusive concepts.
> APIs are something a service offers when it needs help to grow. Once the service gets big, the API goes away, or becomes a pay service.

This isn't so cut and dry. iTunes offers database dumps, for free, to any developer building music discovery sites and apps: this is why virtually everything has a "buy this on iTunes" button. Walmart has an API for people who want to add "buy this from Walmart", as does Amazon (also Best Buy and Sports Mart, but they are not clearly dominating like Walmart and Amazon in their respective markets). There has to be something different about how this plays out for Netflix than for these other companies.
The problem with this "You are not the user" criticism is it misses the point, which is that the users that totally rely on your product are the ones living with the edge cases. Most of the other users could just switch elsewhere and it's not going to bother them one iota. This is why MS Office has held on to the market so strongly, as seemingly every finance department is reliant on a different obscure feature that isn't replicated in alternatives.

This has been happening over at Apple too, where the power user experience has deteriorated dramatically now that they've decided that lot are all stuck in the ecosystem already. It's a dangerous game, and it's what caused MS to get unstuck as Linux rose up. Right now you'd be hard pressed to consider OS X, Windows, Android, Chrome OS or iOS as headed in directions power users (or content creators) want or need. This will lead to a division like in the early 90s again, where to do serious work you need a "workstation" which will be quite different to a normal machine.
You can have the best of both worlds (TeX and WYSIWYG) with LyX and possibly other editors that I didn't use much (Maple used to render to LaTeX 20 years ago and it worked kinda nice).
Right, I think the basic hardware has not changed in 20+ years. It's a pretty weird situation. Although I kind of feel like they should get with the times and produce better hardware given the ridiculous prices they still charge, it leads to a really interesting community.
internet drama he said she said
yawn
I really wish XMPP had taken off. Perhaps the most important place for standard protocols is in chat applications - i.e. how we communicate with each other electronically. Email is unlikely to go away but if I want to communicate with all my friends I need:

* Google Hangouts

* Facebook

* Twitter

* SMS

* Whatsapp

* iMessage (cost prohibitive)

When really I should just be able to log into xmpp.voltagex.org and talk to everyone.

(Also, why isn't there a standard for "dialling" email addresses yet?)
I prefer having coffee for breakfast than LaTeX.
A perspective from a comedian: "The trouble is it's very difficult to say when you are choking to death". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itordNWNRM8
On a side note, while the visualization at the start of the paper is quite nifty, does the rotation make it annoying to read for anyone else, or is that just me?

Also, from a visualization standpoint, it's an interesting and original figure, it's rather hard to interpret. I'd argue that two or three separate conventional figures showing the same thing would make the point more clearly in about the same amount of space.

That having been said, it's a unique and compact way to display the data. I'm just not sure it's an effective communication tool. (Of course, I'd be rather proud of it if I'd made it...)
It works well with source control, but be careful to split long sentences over multiple lines. Most merge tools are a real pain with long lines.
That sentence in context applies to Inbox, not Gmail.

Edit: Not sure why downvoted. I'm not being sarcastic, please read the article, it's right there.
What does the OP mean when it refers to Inbox as "standalone"?

Surely, it runs in a web brower; does it not?
The speed of that dynamic scaling sprite routine is ridiculous. I'm very impressed. I've written 4x4, 8x8, 12x12 and 16x16 sprite routines on the 83, but had never considered dynamic scaling. My hat's off to Hayleia and Badja.
One thing which might be of (tangential) interest here is the novel The Songs of Distant Earth, by Arthur C. Clarke, where the replenishment of this sort of ice buffer plays a prominent role in the plot.
Lyra: An Interactive Visualization Design Environment
I'm not at liberty to give details and I know very few of them after early 2012, but this doesn't seem accurate to me. The original design of Inbox was the work of Michael Leggett (https://www.linkedin.com/in/leggett) and while the project has always targeted the power user, its evolution was not so straight-forward as this article suggests.
Javascript is a fine language to learn. It should teach you the basic elements that all languages have. That it is asynchronous is the only major thing that is different than some other languages.
How are you calculating the Lives-At-Risk Score?
He means separate from Gmail.
Also if you want to read an essay that talks more about how Frucket came to be from a personal problem of mine, feel free to check this out https://medium.com/@jameshwang/the-story-of-frucket-ddc42c60...
> Why can't the government entity only build in rural/unprofitable areas, by imposing a tax on city connections? More: why can't the government entity simply subsidize the bills of rural users, adjusted to the extra cost of wiring their areas?

Because charging every customer the same price regardless where he lives is widely accepted - but just imagine you had a "city tax" appear on your telco bill. You'd be outraged by it...

> Thinking even wider, must we wire? What's keeping wireless point-to-point connections from working here?

That one is easy to answer: people these days are afraid of radiation and high-voltage lines (NIMBY phenomenon). Also, you would not gain much from point-to-point-connecting a rural village as you'd still have to dig fiber into the village center which you then distribute to the individual houses. But as you are already in the village center, you could also just put a FTTC DSLAM box there and be done (this is what Deutsche Telekom is doing right now in a load of rural areas!).

edit: (microwave) point-to-point communication also usually requires expensive communication gear as well as individual (!) licenses from regulators. In addition during heavy rain, fog or snowfall communication quality decreases drastically, and heavy wind may displace the dishes.
> There is an inflection point below which votes do actually matter.

Yes, that's true. In theory, as fewer people vote, the value of each vote goes up, and presumably there could be some equilibrium reached. Of course, I doubt that experiment would be allowed to complete without the government making significant fundamental changes.

But there's another closely related issue, which might explain why lots of people still vote despite my claim that it's irrational. My claim only considered the costs and benefits of the impact of a vote on the outcome of the election. But there are other benefits that many people receive from voting, namely, the feeling of doing one's civic duty (which many people are instructed to do from a young age) and the feeling of being part of rooting for a group (like a political party). The trouble with this class of benefits is that they are enjoyed by the voter whether or not the voter invests the time to research the candidates and issues (which is much more costly than the physical act of voting, but is ostensibly required according to the traditional civics class explanation of democracy). This theory predicts that voter education on the candidates and issues would be low, which is certainly the case in a few relevant polls I've seen.

> The question then becomes what is a better way to "aggregate the preferences of a large and diverse group of people" ? Perhaps, such an aggregation is not practically possible.

Plenty of suggestions are out there, but they're all obviously considered very radical in mainstream Western political philosophy. Most radical political philosophies you've heard of probably either aren't fundamentally democratic (like propertarian/market anarchism, anarcho-capitalism) or are democratic in a different sense (like direct action or direct democracy in left-libertarianism). For an alternative that is slightly less radical, though still politically unfeasible for any major government in the foreseeable future, take a look at futarchy, which combines democratic voting with (money-based) prediction markets.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futarchy
Ingress will do this on a Nexus 5 - except for wall chargers that are delivering the full ~1.7A (which are very very very few)
It's a bit finicky but it's possible. Text is vector so as long as you use print-quality images and shrink them down to screen size using the width and height properties, you can have something that looks pretty good on both print and screen.

(I've self-published a book that way and was surprised at how well it worked.)
That's not how I interpreted the article, but I may be missing something. I haven't used Inbox, but the description below indicates it's for advanced users, not somebody's Aunt Floe.

"In parallel, the Gmail team would begin working on a standalone product specifically designed from the ground up for advanced users who have to handle a firehose of incoming emails every day. And that’s how Inbox was born."
An iPhone-using friend of mine constantly points out how lacklustre the battery performance in Android is - the Nexus 5 has a bigger (?) battery than the iPhone 5 but the iPhone 5 will last for a full day with similar use.
How is Message Security Layer HDCP-for-sockets? I saw nothing in the article that seemed outrageous. The only thing it looks like you could be objecting to is the fact that they want to use device cryptography if available, which makes sense.

Of course, the DRM premise is flawed and these things don't need protecting like they talk about. It's great business for Netflix to pretend so, to ensure competitors have a harder time.
I find it interesting that the American Heart Association is taking any kind of stance. It's not directly a heart issue, is it?
>Inbox started as a UX redesign, was met with so much resistance . . ., and to salvage the sunk costs, they released it as a separate interface.

You have it backwards (if the OP is accurate): the UX redesign that met with resistance among Googlers became the new version of Gmail.com (new as of a few years ago, that is).
What the name for when a company seems to have stagnated, based on the lack of change in their front-end, even though you're sure there're engineers diligently toiling away at things?

Netflix's frontend has not have any real improvement in quite a while. "Share on Facebook"? "Kids Mode"? "Watched by Piper Chapman (Orange Is the New Black)"? C'mon!

Where's the Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB integration? Why does their search still have zero options to help you search? Where's Netflix's rendition of A Better Queue or Instant Watcher?

The shutting down of the public API wouldn't be such a big deal if they paid more attention to their frontend. It also seems that Netflix thinks that if they don't bring up the fact that there are movies that aren't on Netflix, we won't notice.

The next company that comes to mind is Craigslist. I know there are engineers there working on hard problems (the scale they operate on is amazing) but in the midst of the current mobile and UX revolution, all they've manged to do is add a frame around the results page so it's easier to search again?

OKCupid is another site that comes to mind where it looks like the front end is just stuck and has stopped progressing.

(Gmail gets a pass because Google just gave up and made Inbox instead.)
Go for it - it's simpler than you'd imagine. You may find this beginner's guide a useful starting point: http://www.andy-roberts.net/writing/latex/

[disclosure: I'm the author]
Also https://developer.android.com/training/monitoring-device-sta...
Alternatively, lobby your democratic representatives to change the damn law? The UK has similar laws, but they don't create perverse incentives.
I know this is being downvoted, but there is something to this statement. There's a lot in LaTeX that is getting obsolete and needs to be fixed... I personally think that a JS-based "cleanslate" alternative to LaTeX would be awesome.
I agree it is shortsighted.

It is probably a business decision to 'own the data' and control the storefront/display for margins. However not realizing that the data/api part is what helped them along in the first place and all this means is they lose control of the data.

Cutting off the API does nothing to stop scraping which will happen more now and not funneled into a controlled/throttled/tracked usage of that data.

Worst for Netflix is that other competing services will own more and more data instead of relying on theirs. Another streaming service could come along with that type of developer love again and catch Netflix high centered.

This is a very business over technology/open decision here for a Netflix that has moved away from developer support with things like the Netflix Prize, that time is done and over.

The argument of public vs private api usage that Netflix states how public api is only 0.3% is not valid because most public api usage just pulls data to cache and rarely hits the endpoint where private apis they use constantly track progress/settings/state etc.
No, it doesn't. "The decisions" refers to those that the design/product team made (see paragraph preceding the GP's quote)---the same changes that were made and roundly panned by Googlers.

Inbox, on the other hand, is "specifically designed from the ground up for advanced users who have to handle a firehose of incoming emails every day" (last paragraph of the article).

To summarize the article: the Gmail team decided that Gmail should be geared toward non-power users; power users of Gmail (Google employees) hated this decision; Inbox was born as a product specifically for power users. In the meantime, (some) power user affordances were kept in Gmail, but better hidden.
Most of he problems we solve with computers are mundane - from batch programs to update files from data tapes in the 1960s to making a phone UI talk to a CRUD back-end in the present day. This kind of ordinary programming doesn't really require much computer science and never has. However, there will always be more interesting applications (or interesting sub-problems of otherwise mundane applications) that stretch the limitations of current knowledge and technology, and these will benefit from advances in computer science and from developers who keep up with CS research. But it has never been the case that every programmer needed to be a computer scientist.
Year is wrong, BTW.

I remember reading this a few years before 2011.

Edit: here we go, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1173226
(Submitted yesterday with one comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8609790)
> ... the usual "fair use" things that DRM usually inhibits does not do so in the context of streaming.

Sure they do. Video rentals were based on the first-sale doctrine[1]; the video store bought the movie, the video store rented their copy to you, and you could play it on any device that was technologically capable.

There was no end-to-end control over the production, distribution, and viewing pipeline:

- Anyone could run a video rental store.

- Anyone could develop and sell a VCR.

- Consumers could watch the movies in any way they wanted, with any device they wanted, rented or purchased from any store their wanted.

With DRM, that healthy competitive market has been collapsed down into:

- Content distributors must license the media specifically for digital distribution, granting full control to the content owners (and increasingly are the content owners)

- Only playback devices that are approved by the content distributors may be used.

If you think Netflix is your friend because they support net neutrality, consider what it means when the distribution mechanisms for the content you might like to consume over that internet (apps, games, music, movies) are far from "neutral".

Netflix — and other companies — don't simply want to be the pipes, any more than Comcast wants to be a commodity pipe. If they fight for net neutrality, that's a happy accident of their own commercial interests, but we'll have even less choice and competition than when we started if the Netflixs simply replace the Comcasts.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine
Thanks for the suggestions!

We’re definitely planning to make private and moderated documents. Ping me at dwwoelfel@gmail.com and I’ll let you know when it’s ready.

For the document explorer, do you want to see the documents that you created or just interesting docs that anybody created? Either way, we just pushed up a way to export a doc as an image by appending .svg to the end of the url--I’m excited about using them as thumbnail previews in the explorer.

We set up a twitter account @prcrsr_app if you want to follow along with our progress.
> AIRCRAFT INCLUDING A PASSENGER CABIN EXTENDING AROUND A SPACE DEFINED OUTSIDE THE CABIN AND INSIDE THE AIRCRAFT

So then they're not deck chairs on top of the plane? I'm not much up on plane design, but where exactly is "outside the cabin, but inside the aircraft" ?
> How are you trying to do it? If I hit the search icon on the chat pane, I can type in a number and call from Google Voice. It opens a new Hangouts window, but that's what it's been doing for as long as I remember, and certainly the last year at least.

If you run your own XMPP server, you have to disable google Talk, which disables the calling from gmail (in addition to much more)
The only thing that needs to change imo is space. If you got an extra ft width on the seat and an extra 2-3 ft between each row the increase in comfort would significantly improve the experience. I'm not a big guy or a very tall guy (6ft1in) but space is my one complaint about air travel. I can deal with all the other BS but being uncomfortable with practically no way of improving it when on a flight longer than a couple of hours is so frustrating.

Edit: Obviously this is from the perspective of a passenger. Planes could become more energy efficient, faster etc. etc.
Have you ever had a violent man -just released from prison after servig time for a violent offence- say

"I'd do a lot worse than rape you. I've just got out of prison and would happily do more time to see you berried [sic]. #10feetunder."

Caroline Criado Perez was not complaining about one or two people sending a few dozens of messages that were a bit mean. She was inundated with thousands of messages, from many people, threatening sexual violence and death. One man was sending 50 messages per hour, over about 12 hours. Another woman sent hundreds of messages. Perez's "crime"? She campaigned to have a woman on British banknotes after the Bank of England phased out Elizabeth Fry on the £5 - leaving no women on the banknotes.

> Twitter is not necessarily personal, and avoiding those you don't like is pretty simple.

No it isn't! That shows complete ignorance forthe scale of the problem. Women are not complainign about one or teo trolls sending one or two unpleasant messages. They are complaining about floods of credible death threats - the threat-maker knows where you live and work and what car you drive.
Read more closely:

- Leveraging specific device security features would require hacking the SSL/TLS stack in unintended ways: imagine generating some form of client certificate that used a dynamically generated set of device credentials.

- Whenever possible we want to take advantage of security features provided by devices and their software.

- Some devices may already contain cryptographic keys that can be used to authenticate and secure initial communication.

- However service tokens can be cryptographically bound to a specific device and/or user, which prevents data from being migrated without authorization.

Device keys are hardware/OS-level DRM
> Common ligatures are essential to professionally typeset text.

I like the idea, and they're aesthetically great, but I think they're too rare now for it to be wise to use them. People will be confused and distracted. I have only one anecdatum, which is that Slack chat uses a font with ligatures, and I have heard several confused comments about them. For niche professional documents, like research papers, I'm sure it's accepted and expected, but you're probably already using LaTeX for those anyway!
Kim Kardashian is a genius
I just added a working example of DefineJS which shows the way that the regular AMD format gets implemented.
That's just it though. A video rental represents a physical object, a stream does not. There is no first sale doctrine on OD streaming content.

Are you arguing that selling access to an ephemeral thing shouldn't be allowed? The physical copy of a movie and a stream of a movie are two different items, with the second one having far less value due to its nature.

Here's where we diverge. If I go buy a movie, then as the first sale doctrine and common sense implies, I should be able to digitize it, format/time shift, etc.

Rentals confer none of those rights, either legally or morally. You are paying for temporary access to a thing under the limited terms offered you by some third party. If you want more rights, buy instead of rent. This is not a new or troubling development!

As to whatever you perceive Netflix's ambitions to be, I prefer to castigate them if/when they start abusing their position and become enemies to a free internet. They have shown zero evidence that they are doing this, quite the opposite in fact.