skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Animations are really valuable anytime someone doesn't come to the table with a complete mental model of how something fits together already.

This argument conflates the problem (lacking a mental model) with a solution (animations). This Mr Programmer is confused by elements flying around in front of them. Maybe regular users get confused too?
Yeh, the controllable opacity is really important to the utility of the device IMHO.

I've yet to study the linked patent so can't say if that solves it but it's not as simple as just a layer of LCD pixels, as they would not be in focus.

It's sort of the same as the light-field generation problem - to generate images at arbitrary depths you need to control both the colour and direction of light rays. To generate sharp occlusions at arbitrary depths using a single 2D "masking" layer will require the layer selectively passing or blocking rays depending on their direction.

The patent mentions variable diffraction gratings, which I suspect might be part of the solution to controllable opacity based on ray directions, but I don't know enough about optics really to say for sure.
Show HN: Burner 3.0
Rails Unfit for Microservices?
Ask HN: Review a job offer
Please advice on competing offers (one from a new company and another a counter offer from my existing employer).

My title at current organization is a lead engineer.

Offer (Firm offer/no negotiation possible)

Title: Senior Software Engineer (indications that this will grow into senior roles as the company is in growth phase)

Company: Solid startup in northern SF with high probability of going IPO in 18-24 months.

Base Salary + Bonus: $135k +0-15% of base (with 8-10% company average) = ~$146,000

Stocks : 14,000 (which are worth $300k as they anticipate the company to IPO at $2B)

Counter Offer (From current employer)

Title: Lead Engineer (With high chances of becoming engineering manager in 6 months to one year's time)

Company: Solid startup in peninsula and probability of going
IPO in near future is not high.

Base Salary + Bonus: $140,000

Stocks : Bumping up the stocks significantly to make them currently valued at $200,000. Vesting schedule of new stocks not very clear but seems it will be partly vested and some part going to vest in future.

Wife and I live and work in south bay and so living in SF will be the only option to make it work if I were to accept the first offer. The cost of living is going to be significantly high living in SF compare to South bay for us.

Work wise, I will be doing a similar work at both the companies. The tech stack is familiar so not many new things to learn here.

I really like that first company has growth and high chances of going IPO soon. But the role is still going to be an individual contributor role. In the existing company, I will be able to learn new skills (management/leadership) in a familiar environment.

Considering the cost of living in SF and the salary numbers, the offers seem to be very comparable in dollar terms. However, I am not sure about future growth in either of the scenarios and would want to see if there is some advice that you can give me on making a decision.
Uber Gets the Buzzfeed Treatment
UK's first 'poo bus' goes into service
Nope. The three dot menu has Schedule, Day, 5 Day, Search and Refresh. There is no Month there.

By the way, limiting to 5 days is at best inflexible. Many people want to look at 7 days because, you know, that's a week.
Your developers aren’t slow
Protip: If 100% of your argument is just posturing with no evidence then it's not a good argument.
next :) We started with these two because they are both available in Algorithmia now.
Baby monitors and webcams from UK homes and businesses hacked by Russians
After much work, a major design overhaul, the addition of MMS picture messaging across all US carriers, and a number of productivity and iOS 8 features designed to make it easier to integrate Burner into your workflow.

Would be happy to hear any feedback or issue reports.

EDIT: Chrome extension here: http://brnr.me/a5jo
Abine's DeleteMe[1] service will take care of removing you from these sites, though it's not cheap. They will keep re-checking and re-removing. I've been using it for a few years, and it seems to work pretty well. IIRC there was still one site that I had to call and deal with myself.

1. https://www.abine.com/deleteme/
Worst auto correct ever, btw. "Franken"
I actually think it depends on the analogy. For some reason, people love to compare programming to art and music. The article Dabblers and Blowhards[1] is a great response to these types of claims. A better analogy for programming is that it's like math. Once you understand how the operations work, you appreciate the value of a calculator.

1: http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm
How about the vast majority of games out there. Don't get me wrong there a useful tool and can mask a slow UI, but just becase a cruch is useful to mask problems does not mean you should see more heathy people walking around with them.
You can change the view to give you a summary of all the events for each month... You click the top right menu button, and select 'schedule' instead of 'day' or '5 day'.
I don't doubt that Chrome has a lower CTR, I just doubt that its particularly because Chrome users are more tech savvy.
They pretty much had a weight target (not leaving things up to chance). Every pound of equipment you don't take back is another pound of moon rock you could take back.
11 little known facts about walking barefoot in Stockholm, Sweden in November
I always just want to be aware enough that I have a choice. I want to be able to separate discretely what I've learned from the state or condition my mind was in before I learned it, and I want to be able to determine whether I am better or worse for it.

I practice what I call 'conceptual destruction', where I identify the foundational elements of a thought process, and I practice thinking without being able to use them. It can sometimes be difficult, but my ultimate goal is to have a sharp, stable, quick, flexible, cautious, careful, discerning, and so on, mind, that I created myself. I don't know if I am fooling myself half the time with things my mind does anyway without my explicit direction, but I like having a vast, partially independently established, pedantically defined and carefully organized system for 'ways of thinking'.

It's the only thing I really truly care about maintaining myself: having the capacity to condition myself, and having the intuition to be able to detect and identify when someone is trying to do it for me, or something is doing it for me by chance. I don't like having to depend on culture for how to think, I want to be able to know how to think on my own. It just makes the world less scary for me; it's an ability to rely on myself.
Remember when everyone threw a fit because facebook changed their UI? Now, no-one seems to be talking about it. Although this article raises some good points, I'm just not motivated by "it's not what I'm used to / trained myself on" arguments.
This comic is from this year if I'm not mistaken
In the article they mention how robots drumming the perfect beat is off-putting, or less desirable to a listener. The current state of affairs in the dance music world is exactly opposite of that. Most songs are created using programs such as ableton, cubase, FL studio etc. As such you can create a 'perfect' song that will do well.
Utah legislature considers shutting off NSA’s water
Posted this yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8629809
Slides from that talk: http://www.slideshare.net/grugq/opsec-for-hackers

Edit: and discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5729860
What about a source for that?
Coupling CPU-based rigid body simulation and GPU-based fluid simulation in OpenGL
Edward Snowden: Heroism in the Face of Tyranny
Hmm. If the only ones that we can see are pointing at us then it seems really unspooky that we should be able to look at quasars that are very far apart and see that they all appear to have the same orientation. The ones which have any other orientation are being filtered out. I'm guessing the astronomers must have somehow accounted for this though? Seems like if all of the quasars really were aligned then there would appear to be a lot more quasars when observing in a direction which was parallel to the common direction along which they emit light.
The Patriot Act is not going to expire in 2015, it's going to be overwhelmingly renewed, probably with broad bipartisan support, but mostly by the new Republican majority.

This bill isn't selling liberties, they're already sold, it's just trying to win some back.
Show HN: Hacker News iOS client using the new official API
The Standard Model is a list of fundamental particles (electron, muon, tau, their corresponding neutrinos, and 6 flavors of quarks: up, down, strange, charm, top, and bottom) as well as their interactions (electroweak force & strong nuclear force). The input to the SM are around 20 numbers controlling the masses of these particles and the strengths of the interactions, as well as a few Higgs parameters. After that, everything is fixed, so that the SM makes definite predictions about where to look to find new baryons and mesons (things made out of quarks). It's not quite so simple as "add up the masses of the constituent quarks" because the strong interactions translate into mass (essentially via E=mc^2)---exactly how big an effect the strong force has requires calculation.

So the SM is a map telling you where to look, but a very sneaky kind of map. In the sector where the strong force matters, it's as if someone encrypted a map, and for every new destination you want to find out about, you have to expend computational resources to decrypt it. In principle, you have all the information, but in practice it is hard to extract predictions from the theory. That is a very peculiar situation for scientists to be in: to have a definite, precise theory, and the opportunity to do experiments, but to struggle to compare the two!

Anyway, these particles are predicted by the SM, where "predicted by" means after expending a lot of computation to understand the strong dynamics one finds out that these particles (which are quarks held together by gluons) should be there.
> You obviously have no experience in construction or civil engineering, have never looked at a building code book, and generally have no idea what engineering is:

I have very little experience in a architecture project decades ago, I just described my experience a couple comments above - I haven't claimed any more than that. I don't know what reasonable claim you could have to affirming I have never looked at a building code book - I more than looked at one, implemented in software the rules in there following the direction of an architect, and was generally amazed when I saw how real engineering works. I also spent five years attending an engineering school before working in large "software engineering" projects for 20 years, which I don't think are an instance of engineering at all, but hey.

Enjoy your faith in software engineering, your ad-hominems, your cynicism, and your real engineering career. Good bye.
I wrote up a rant about Google Maps the other day[1], from the perspective of an Apple user. As a Google Maps user since the start, I've been surprised to find myself reaching for Apple Maps more and more, both on my phone and on the desktop. Despite its flaws, Apple Maps just feels like a much better product in terms of UI and performance these days — and there's still time for them to catch up in data.

[1]: http://beta-blog.archagon.net/2014/11/20/what's_up_with_goog...
The upcoming alarm notifications seem to work exactly the same way for me. If you have the alarm notification expanded there's a dismiss option.
This is a dupe of a post that was flagkilled (inappropriately in my opinion).

If we chimps can quell our knee-jerk reaction to the F word for a minute... we'll see that this page is a web application that allows the public to edit a book.

How is that flag-worthy?
I have the opposite experience. I liked the maps that came with my phone a year and a half ago.

It keeps getting upgraded. I lost the zoom buttons (pinch to zoom is very dangerous when driving, so basically a major feature loss for me). And recently the whole thing goes so slowly on my older phone that I have usually found the destination before the phone has managed to load the screen.

Recently I founds that I can uninstall all the updates, and I am back to the basic version that came with the phone. Far nicer. Less screen space, and search history is not as integrated, but at least it is usable in real time. If only I could go froward by two or three updates, then there is probably a version that did everything I want.
Get Fit, Healthy and Lose Weight
Actually, I play guitar, and read sheet music, and this analogy is less about programming and more about an aspect of learning a subject. If you take the easy tool based route, then you're dependent on the tool you use. If you take the harder more universal less tool based route then you have more generally applicable skill.

Given the quality of most guitar education though, I wouldn't take their lack of using analogy as any kind of bonus. Guitarists are notorious for bullshit education that's basically, "No look at me do it. I can't explain how I do it. Just like this. No wrong!" If they were better at explaining and bridging concepts using existing concepts people have then they might be better at teaching it.
I will optimistically assume I am being downvoted for off-topic rather than further whitewashed.
What's odd for me is that I feel like I should be making more typos with the new keyboard, yet I'm actually making fewer. I'm not sure if that has to do with the keyboard mapping being more accurate or me focusing slightly more while typing due to the "buttons" blending together.
A big unanswered question I have is what the level of transparency is going to be when the display is inactive. For me it needs to be basically 100% to enable an "always worn" piece of hardware. The patents around the lightfield waveguides suggest polarization is used to allow independent optical paths for rays from the real world vs rays coming from the virtual image. Again, I don't know much about optics so wonder if there's an electronic way to have that polarisation turned off for areas without any virtual content, or if there's always going to be a darkening effect on the real world.
It's just an example, not an exhaustive list.
Exactly. Not to mention, these changes make many users feel like they are getting something new (for free even). Even if it just a style change, my girlfriend really enjoys seeing the new look of the phone. I actually purposely let her do the updates on my android phone because I'm not overly excited about the changes but I know she is (she is an apple user so can't experience new android stuff otherwise).
I'm curious to see how this might stack up against Subsonic, which has some similar features (multiple players/streams, chat rooms) but doesn't -- to my limited knowledge -- have the never ending stream, requests or multiple collections. Subsonic also has Android and iOS apps, which is a major plus for me.

Or even how it compares to Nicecast or Github play (https://github.com/play/play) neither of which I've used, but have read about and seem closer to this particular application.
Why not men too?
I don't doubt that Chrome has a lower (real or, even moreso, measured) CTR, I just doubt that its particularly because Chrome users are more tech savvy.

Tech savvy isn't the only explanation for CTR differences, especially measured CTR difference; ISTR a while ago discussions of what was possible in Chrome v. Firefox for adblocking, and from that it seemed that Chrome ad blockers would still download (but not show) ads, while Firefox wouldn't download them. Don't know if that understanding was accurate or if it is still the case, but that could conceivably result in Chrome impressions being overstated (and CTR being understated) relative to Firefox.
This specific example is surely meant to represent the wider range of accidents involving guns and children [1], and through that the yet more general issue of gun safety overall.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/us/children-and-guns-the-h..., for instance
https://twitter.com/kingofpol/status/525755692318457856

Keywords "gamergate knife".
That was definitely an eyebrow raiser. Here's to hoping you guys keep this sort of thing up.
I loved Rainbows End. Recently I read Daemon/FreedomTM, and it paints a very different picture. But this technology could be used to create the Darknet the alternative web/economy in the books.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(book_series)
This is an important point, especially considering so many startups dub themselves with "a gorgeous/beautiful way to do X or Y". This concept, generally regarded as "aesthetics", is considered a universal principle of design:

"The aesthetic-usability effect describes a phenomenon in which people perceive more-aesthetic designs as easier to use than less-aesthetic designs—whether they are or not."[0]

Point is - something that looks good may "trick" the person into thinking something is more usable even if it's not.

[0] https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/universal-pri...
>> Google sucks at UI. Period. They had one good UI: the original Google home page.

> That was a textbox. You can't build an OS around that.

That sounds like Unix to me. Seems to work just fine …
Huh? Conclusion does not follow from premises, at all.
Essentially, they just made Pro version free for small companies and individual developers, and open source of all size.
It's not that simple in the real world, there's politics involved. The people who own a successful product aren't going to give up half their team. The success of it gives them an excuse to keep them all and keep growing the team. Which is counter-productive and hurts the product and the company, but helps certain individuals in the short term.
A few thoughts:

* Google has a large and very competent design team. They are not changing things "for the sake of changing them." More often than not, changes are made in response to issues discovered during usability studies.

* You are not the user. I am not the user. The designer is not the user. In fact, for a project as large as Android or Gmail, there is no "the user". You're always making trade-offs between power vs. common, new vs. existing users.

* Existing users are inherently conservative. By definition they mostly like things as they are or they wouldn't be users. You have to weigh their needs vs. those of future users. A big part of that is understanding how many people are upset about the change (all vs. vocal minority), how quickly they get used to it (if ever), and how you can mitigate this.

* Ideally, you want to make "Pareto efficient" changes, that make everyone better off. The only thing easier than doing what you've always done is when the new UX is so easy and intuitive you instantly understand it.

* You do not want to version your UI, just like you don't want to make everything a setting. This is a recipe for maintenance headaches, and endless wasted cycles supporting an ever-shrinking minority of users.

* This being said, it's very helpful to release a redesign as a beta, and let users switch back and forth for a while while you iron out the kinks. This in itself gives you good data.

At the end of the day, design is all about trade-offs. It's very easy to criticize a change because you don't like it, but it's a lot more interesting to think through why a change might have been made. If we're going to be critical, let us be constructive.
I just hung out with an old friend last week and while he's into his tech, he doesn't work in the industry. he expressed the same sentiment in the last line of your comment.

UI versioning sounds like a ridiculously difficult challenge, so difficult that it's worth thinking about more, because most people won't (because it's so hard). I'm gonna take that idea and run with it a bit...

A few things come to mind:

- Added complexity - apps would have two unique versions at the same time "Oh i'm running gmail 15.2 with UI v 12.0"

- I wonder if another ways of achieving something similar is keeping legacy UI by calling it a "theme." While, politically, it might be difficult to get funding for a "theme" over a "redesign," with such an important and widely used application like GMail, it makes total sense to me that there are 2-4 interaction schemas that people could use if they'd like. Maybe "theme" is too weak of a name,--maybe "Schema"? Something else?

- What sort of protocol would a "theme" use to improve? Let's say that "we want to keep the important parts of this theme as much as possible, not mess with them, just add this new feature." How universally possible is that, or do a majority of big new features inherently complicate a UI and the mental models of its users?

- Getting into the nitty gritty details, though, there would almost inherently be splintering--different themes would have microinteractions and microfeatures that others would not. While that's probably good for the end user wanting to differentiate between them, it would make the "Do we add big feature X?" conversation across all "Theme Teams" AND development even more difficult.

- Would the themes themselves have versions?

- In a way, themes are already available as versions. Ex: I am running an older version ("theme") of twitter on my ipad because i just haven't gotten around to updating it. but It still works. What would be great is if twitter could allow me to switch between this version and the newest one so I could see if the newest version worked better for me. I could switch back if it didn't. Right now, I can upgrade, but I can't switch back, so upgrading is "switching permanently and hoping for the best."

- what are your thoughts?
New Business Data Providers in Apple Maps
The past couple EVO tournaments for Street Fighter (which is, for people who don't follow the FGC, the largest tournament in the US for fighting games) have been won by some pretty unexpected characters, which I like; nobody really considered Gen to be a powerhouse until Xian pulled it out, and I'm pretty sure Rose was thought to be solidly low tier until Louffy demonstrated that she could make really effective use of her normals (and also lucked into some people who didn't understand the Rose matchup and e.g. kept on spamming Sagat's fireballs when that's a pretty terrible thing to do against Rose).

I feel like there are a lot of characters in SF who are pretty viable, and some of them just require a lot more work than others. It's pretty well understood how to play a shoto like Ryu or Ken, but the downside is that when you pick them, everybody knows what to expect from you. If you can put some solid work into a low tier character, you can often pull off some really unexpected stuff and occasionally shift the tier lists.

Another good example of this was Canada Cup 2013, 5v5; NE Asia's Dakou picked Dee Jay (a decidedly low tier version of Guile) and ended up destroying a bunch of people who really expected to win. The commentary on this set is a lot of fun just because you can tell the announcers are so surprised: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcMwzw6EbMg
I don't know what "whitewashed" means in this context, but you are definitely off topic and your comment reads like you are trying to justify some pretty terrible actions. The fact that other bad things happen to other people in no way excuses the bad things that happened to female game developers.