kulkarnic

Pen+touch+type seems like a great idea. It is something no other manufacturer has tried to do. I think the devil will be in the details, but this sure is interesting, because Apple's strategy is "people should buy multiple devices-- iPad, Macbook Air, Mac Pro...". MSFT wants one device that is a lot more versatile.

ClearType has been around for a very long time. It's basically subpixel-rendering that improves the visual quality of text (sort of effectively tripling the LCD resolution). Last I checked, Microsoft had patented the hell out of it (and I last checked a few years ago).

I think they're right about touting a technology that effectively triples text-display resolution.

And for your other observation about the whole enchilada, look around you-- do you see people that use external keyboards with their iPad? These would be willing customers for a tablet that is actually is pen+touch+type (ditto with people who try and augment their iPad with screen pens, even on a screen that has trouble with palm touches).

Lastly, I'm skeptical about "companies-with-taste". Steve Jobs certainly had good taste, but I'm not sure the whole of Apple is comparably good. I think, sans Jobs, Microsoft is doing the best they can-- prototyping for months and trying to understand where they fit into a market.

I agree with you. I think it's better to use transparency to show density-- here's an example from ggplot2: http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/graphics/25464f1f2c009d435b862debca... and the page in general at http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/geom_point.html

And if you do this overplotting with partly transparent data points, you can even continue using scatterplots (which have several benefits over binned color density plots, such as showing the actual data, rather than summaries).

In my experience, I think smart people often think others are smart. And that's sometimes a problem-- because they believe that others are smart as well, they should think everything through the way they do (Also, I'd really like to say we here, but pride is never good karma :-))

Then you start wondering why they are doing something so obviously unwise, and then tend to rationalize it with some enormously complicated theory. Perhaps, this is the reason why Hanlon's razor is useful and recognized-- without it smart people are kinda lost.

I'd rather have a link to the actual Atlantic web page for this story, not the Print view. It's at http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/05/how-th...

I think directly linking to the print view is dishonest: telling the Atlantic you plan to print an article, and instead posting it to HN is essentially stealing their ad revenue.

PS: Even if you claim ads are distracting and this is actually a service to the community, I'd rather install ad blockers and make such decisions myself.

How does ranking between plugins work? Is the order arbitrated in advance?

Yes, it is rebranded SmallParts. From their FAQ (http://www.amazonsupply.com/help/200223050/ref=sp_ft_au):

What happened to SmallParts.com? SmallParts, Inc., joined the Amazon family in 2005. In the past seven years, the dedicated team at SmallParts helped us expand our service and selection until we have grown well beyond our original focus of tubing, parts and fasteners for the medical supply and research industries. We have chosen the name AmazonSupply to help communicate our new, broader selection....

I am very loathe to trust this article because a) there are 8 reasons mentioned. If you're trying to change your design, you want the top 2 or 3 that give you the most bang for your buck.

and b) because the author doesn't say where s/he got this data from. Was it a diary study? Interviews? Observational studies? Introspection?

Without knowing how hte data was generated, I don't see why it should be trusted (yes, it may be valid, but would you spend the next 8 hours "fixing" your site based on someone's quickly written article?)

I think an even better policy is to let the browser prompt if the permissions that the extension demands are grossly above those required for its purported purpose.

It may seem like a hard machine learning problem, but it seems to me that one could catch the most blatant offenders easily-- changing background colors at \.facebook.com should not require the ability to communicate with malwarehost.com or the ability to read data across all websites.

Combine this with the fact that most extensions people install are not* malicious, and you already have a decent training corpus (to treat this as a one-class classifier)

Edit: escape characters

I think education at a great University provides primarily four benefits:

1. Great instructor-driven education 2. Great student peer-group-- folks that are truly smarter than you and teach you to think in ways you hadn't imagined (and those you pay attention to, because they might someday change the world) 3. Great networks/connections and maybe even a brand 4. An opportunity to immerse in great research.

I think online education courses do a great job of approximating 1. They sort of try to do 2. And they fail at 3.

I don't point this out to say "yes, online ed. could change higher learning forevermore" or "no, this is a flash in the pan", but to highlight that traditional Universities do have a role-- they may simply be a place where people watch online videos and build stuff together, but they add value beyond a guy in his den watching a video (to be poetic predictions of the death of traditional learning are greatly exaggerated).

e.g. As a Stanford student, (1) above is certainly lowest on my list of great-things-Stanford-provides. (2) is high, and so is infrastructure. On (4), I think the Gates building has a astoundingly high great-ideas/sq-m. None of these can be replicated online easily.

It is interesting how blatantly Paypal has copied Square. They don't even seem to make a secret of it.

>>"The key differentiator is that it comes from PayPal, a trusted brand in the online payments industry"

My translation: "Nothing innovative or groundbreaking. But we're a trusted name"

Perhaps it's a strategy that'd work, but really, Paypal could do better?

Got it. It is a very cool demo. Thanks!

Perhaps I'm missing the point: besides a cool demonstration for what CSS can do (when aided by JS), why is this a useful idea?

For anything practical, would one not be better off not being a purist, and using images etc? After all, image formats were meant to store graphics. I'm sure I'm missing something, since I've lately seen a lot of these "pure CSS" things. But what is it?

[Edit: apparently, it is meant exclusively as a demo. And it's pretty slick at that]

Well, rare earths are not all that rare. I think the actual short term problem is actually Lithium. AFAIK the only economically feasible producers are Chile and Bolivia. But I actually don't believe these crises are all that bad: if the electric vehicle market becomes large enough, we'll find a way to use another more abundant resource.

Related link: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2008/1124/034.html

I am planning on using my Amex everywhere they take it. I know they're not non-evil with their commissions, but I'm picking from what we have.

Not so. The specific tactic the NYC recommends is questionable, but it is possible to surrender your boarding pass for the onward flight. (Say you no longer want to fly: there's nothing they can do to stop you).

Note this is also possible if you check luggage: the airline is not obligated to let you get the luggage off the onward flight, but there's no airline that wants to carry baggage for a passenger who's not on the flight anymore (for security reasons).

If you're planning such a stunt (with baggage), try to have around 3 hours hop-time; else you WILL be delaying the onward flight with your luggage.

Layovers > 4 hours are considered as off-the-airport stopovers (domestically, US). That means the fare you'll get for SFO->DFW->BOS = SFO->DFW + DFW->BOS (made up routing). Exceptions: DEN for UA, ORD for AA, SEA and ORD for AS etc ("transit hubs", that is); where stopovers are free.

>> There is no doubt that Socialcam looks much better with the red line in place than without. So we needed to keep it.

Let me just say that if it's that subtle a detail, you'd rather spend engineering effort on something that gives you a greater return on investment.

Is the red line going to make the program functionally better? Will it increase reliability? (It'll probably reduce it if not coded properly) Will it add significantly to user-delight?

While it is useful to know how to do what you did, this is, in my mind, a case of not knowing what to do.

Hey, pgbovine, I think you and I go to the same school! Also, I think this is true of other organizations too (I've met people through Barcamps, gyms, hobby clubs...)

I think I am too late to the discussion already, but I think all of pg's a), b) and c) are caused by people who think that this is OK-behavior.

I think a new user should, by default, get "read-only" access. Once the account ages, so the user sees what is acceptable behavior, should you get write-access.

Another idea is to actually make good the name of the site (Hacker news). EITHER a) Show us you actually are a hacker-- do you build things, or just troll? Is your relation to technology deeper than "I read techcrunch?" This could be a simple matter of adding a text-field or a mandatory homepage/startup URL field, and asking (say) 3 longtime HNers to decide if the "applicant" is interesting enough to the HN community.

OR b) get invited by a long-time HN-er to join (There should be a strong disincentive to invite indiscriminately: for instance, everytime a person you invite gets downvoted, you lose 0.2 karma points).

I know, this scheme sounds elitist. And it is. Yet, I can't think of a single interesting HN-er this would filter out.

It isn't about US vs. India immigration. It is about US immigration vs. the cost/effort of starting up a company in India (by an Indian citizen).

No one's competing at this point to make it easier for "young people from African countries... to emigrate to those other countries". The low-hanging fruit is people of Indian/Chinese/whatever origin returning to their homeland and starting up the next big thing there, instead of the US.

In general, I agree with the article in that the US immigration policy is rather arrogant. It may have made sense at some point in the past, but with the distribution of opportunities changing, the US needs to make a better sales pitch.

Well, you are confusing "complicated" with "difficult". While this is true in general, automation reduces the difficulty of working with a complicated system.

For instance, the build system is extremely "complicated". But all you really need to do is to make sure your code compiles, you pass all your local tests, and the BVTs, and you are good to go (oh, and a code review; anyone who objects to a code review is probably shouldn't be coding).

When, you, as a developer, satisfy those local conditions, the system automatically works at the global level.

Don't get me wrong, complexity is an evil that I'd rather avoid, but it is a necessary evil for creating systems that are useful in the real world; and it is an evil that can be tamed with automation.

[Full disclosure: as a former MSFT employee, my thoughts are heavily influenced by the company.]

It certainly looks like the industry is run with a bunch of shell scripts. Buddy scripts, of course.

[Edit: Or maybe they're "features", not bugs.]

What are you talking about? And how does it matter to the story? The guy found a way to stick it to the man, with no prior training in law.

I think a demonstration that you can do today what was unthinkable a little more than a decade ago is a point well worth reading whatever you don't like about the home description.

I wonder how exactly these results figure into the ranking algorithm. How authoritative does a link shared by a "friend" on twitter have to be in the page-rank sense, for instance? Depending on this threshold, it might suddenly become even more important for a website to have a good social media presence (alternatively, spamming on twitter might become more attractive).

Also, I think Bing launched something similar over a year ago, at least from Twitter and Faceboook (see http://www.discoverbing.com/facebook/) .

I have no idea why the first question is actually relevant. Still, to answer the second question: common sense.

.co.in is the .com equivalent of India; and Facebook should have bought it long ago if it has any decent domain strategy (heck MSFT even tried to get mikerowsoft.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_vs._MikeRoweSoft).

I don't think this is as unethical as you say. I sincerely believe all Bing is doing is using the toolbar to get (long) search trails.

Using search trails is a near-standard practice--to guess intent, find deep links, yada yada. Does Google want Bing to special-case links going out from their site? Or all search-engines maybe? What about techniques like this? http://www2005.org/cdrom/docs/p66.pdf

The paper authors sure call it innovative, not cheating :) (Also, techniques like this search+wrapper are great for Product Search, and I'd be surprised if Google doesn't use them).

I think Google's stance is rather unfair. While Bing may have "copied" results, I feel this was just a side-effect of trying to build a good index, rather than a case of "oooh.... let's see what's google returns for this, and just copy the result").

Some people still think that software is a handicraft industry and you can get by all the time playing it by the ear. I hope "the author" doesn't believe that his "weird preferences" are gospel enough to make funding decisions. At the very least, some background reading into actual research done on this topic would help.

Start here: http://macbeth.cs.ucdavis.edu/distributed.pdf

I'm sorry I don't buy this argument: When someone searches for "sushi stockholm" on Google, they aren't saying "Show me a map with all the sushi places in Stockholm". They are saying "I want to know more about getting sushi in Stockholm. Can you show me a webpage that can show me that?"

That webpage could well be the Google Maps website; and to level the playing field, Google could use a similar blue-link to the Google Maps page that highlights sushi places (or alternatively, show a map from the author's website).

I wouldn't, however, hold my breath. On the Internet, it's NEVER going to be completely fair. If they could, simple, personal geocities-based recipe sites would prevent AllRecipes and BBC from taking over "their" expertise (some of those old homepages had seriously awesome recipes!)

I actually inherited this book from my grandfather. It's actually quite a nice book, and for the times, seems like a introduction.

I remember being pretty impressed by punch-cards for some time after I read the book--my attempts to find one at school were met with some quizzical looks though.

I agree it's a useful tool. However, I'm usually choosing a bunch of colors, and it helps if you're seeing the colors in context.

What I'd really love is a color-dropper plugin that lets me choose a random color on a webpage, and change every pixel of that color to a different one specified by me.

SASS does something close with its CSS variables, but it lacks the real-time interaction.

Sorry this is so off-topic, this seemed so close...