skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm really like your site and product so I'm more than happy to give some feedback to this update. Must have been a rough ride to design for 8 months.

First Impression of home page
- Clean, simple, to the point
- Too monochromatic, a few subtle hints of color could add some intrigue
- Empty sofas that are toppled over? Is the party over?
- Gut reaction: Not sure what to click on first? Maybe have a small promo for your coolest product. Maybe add a call-to-action below each section description. Call-to-action could be your best content in each category
- I was "confused" what happened when I clicked a section. I understand what's going on, but it didn't "feel right". Possibly display the new content first and then scroll, instead of doing both at the same time. Possibly try a easeInOut for the animation. Check out how rga.com pages fade in/out, found it a nice solution
- The orange/red highlights doesn't work for me, go either orange or red

Product Sections
- Tagline is a little hard to read since it's so light.
- Maybe make the illustration and the product name clickable, too

Product Galleries
- Nice and clean
- Please add a description of what I'm looking at. All screenshots are beautiful, but some text info why it's awesome would add depth
- Add a "Close" button
- Increase hit area of small grey circles (didn't realize initially that you can click the image to go to the next one)

Company Section
- Since the left and right columns are very tell, I have to first read the left one, then scroll up and read the right now while scrolling down again. The layout you have for products is nicer, since my reading behavior is top-down without any breaks
- The about section text is a bit confusing. Why are the awards in that position without an "Our Awards" title. Maybe just reorder.
- Awards don't list which product/design you got it for. It's a missed opportunity to promote your products. If anything stood out about the award, e.g. you beat 1000000 people, also put it there
- Like the pictures. Adding color on mouse over without being clickable doesn't add much. Maybe show a goofy picture of everybody on roll over instead, which might make we want to see everybody's goofy faces

General
- Add a footer navigation to all pages. Currently I'm stuck at the footers since you provide no exit points
- Your logo is not clickable on sub pages

Ok, reply is getting way too long, I'll stop. It's a very beautiful site, I'd just add a little more color in some of the more monochromatic area and tweak each individual section to give users clearer paths to travel, which is the "evolution" part you wrote about.

Great job, you clearly have put a ton of thought in the site with great results.
> It has closures, but until py3, they clashed with the implicit declaration syntax.

Could you elaborate on what you mean, here? The only issue I know of with Python 2's closures is that there's no scoping keyword for non-local, non-global variables. But that only matters if you're trying to re-define variables in a parent procedure's scope, which is probably not a good idea.
A number of Rackspace hosted sites are reporting problems like this, unrelated to WordPress vulnerabilities.

So calm down with the WordPress crying (yes, its basically a dropper) as it may let an unrelated vulnerability off the hook.
It was property rented by the government for the event and so it was therefore temporarily public property and a public event.
I realize we're nitpicking, but I don't really get it: Why isn't it predictable (in the sense that any execution time for an HTTP request ever is)? You run http_load for x seconds and see how many requests got served, then make change y and do it again. Obviously there are other variables but it's possible to get a fair idea.
Inequality in times of crisis
2nd Generation iPad Spotted (PICS) | Technology
You reckon? I would have thought Wikipedia a textbook case for a great big cache. I would have guessed that the great majority of their views were read-only by unregistered users, with the pages in question following a power law distribution. Hm, would be interested to find out more about that.

update: I went and looked it up. They do indeed have a great big cache, many of them in fact. In fact their Amsterdam presence runs only cache! From what I can tell, it seems their bottleneck is actually Apache, and presumably a lot of that is PHP.

Interesting presentation here: http://wikimania2009.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Media:R...

Also check this out: http://ganglia.wikimedia.org/pmtpa/?gw=fwd&gs=Wikimedia%...

Go down to the MySQL section. Plenty of headroom, but the Apaches are working hard.
Why can't you? Cement causes silicosis in thousands of people when used and handled properly according to current legislations.

This product wouldn't cause silicosis when used correctly, even if it does it'll have to exceed the percentages reached by long-time cement layers to be concerning. So really, why can't you see it being approved? Do you know of a legitimate reason, or is it a personal opinion?

I've worked in construction, I've had my hands blister from some materials I've used yet you can pick them up at any hardware store without question. There's no instruction on fiberglass insulation that states face masks must be worn despite its fibers can cause rhinitis and lung irritation.

Hell, Talcum Powder with over exposure can have the same effects on the lungs as asbestos and it's used daily by millions on their infants.

There's many things approved for the general public that are exceptionally dangerous when they're being used correctly. There's an even bigger list for when things are being used incorrectly, even down to detergents.
Efficient collaborative resource allocation in software engineering
Thanks - QuickLZ does look good, unfortunately we're planning to release certain versions of the software we're developing under GPL and others under a proprietary license, and the $1200 for QuickLZ are a bit steep for an as-yet-unfunded startup. (this is the only time so far that I'm wishing I was a lone founder ;-) - the license would only be $100 then)

BriefLZ on that comparison page caught my eye, however. It uses the same license as zLib while being more than twice as fast. We'll have to test that, it would be a good starting point. (and the code is short and clear enough to be understood and reviewed; can't afford to have buffer overflow bugs in it) We can upgrade to QuickLZ or LZO later when we can afford them. Somehow, BriefLZ that seems to have been missing from all the other compression comparison pages I've looked at.
That is pretty cool. Article titles should start distinguishing between touchscreen and multi-touch screens, however. The usability of multi-touch input is, IMO, much better than that of single-touch input (essentially just mouse emulation), so the differentiation between the two is important. For me, it's the difference between me caring and not caring.
Some necessary but not sufficient criteria for our intrepid programmer to consider himself a master of his language:

* He's written a non-toy compiler for the language.

* He knows how to choose between more or less semantically equivalent ways of writing the same code because he understands the tradeoffs involved.

* He's explored many or most of the dark and mysterious corners of the language and knows when and when not to invoke them in production code.

* He is familiar with the contents of the standard library and uses it whenever appropriate.

* Knuth is his homeboy.

That's all I can think of for now.
Not completely. A lot of it was built by explorers and entrepreneurs. There is a difference nowadays; but lots of parallels too.
I wrote a long article on the subject of online community and the problems of scale: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/12/33338/3000
> Languages aren't "fast" or "slow", it's programs that can be fast or slow.

We can say that "C++ is faster than PHP", because most, if not all, programs using the same algorithms will run faster when written in C++ and compiled to native code.

> If a higher-level language lets you implement a smarter algorithm, your program will run faster.

PHP is generally easier to master than C++, but both are high level enough to provide adequate tools to write efficient algorithms with comparable amount of effort, provided one is competent with the language at hand.
Ruby on Rails 3.0 Release Notes
It's not so much that China is going to be the lone superpower - it's going to be more of a multi-polar world again as the US is still light years ahead at least in terms of military tech.
My biggest qualm with Sass is that it introduces a speed bump in my workflow compared to using plain CSS. This is due to the fact that I can use tools like CSS Edit to create, edit, and verify my CSS all at the same time. If these tools also supported Sass I'd be all set.
Interesting comment today ( http://blogoscoped.com/forum/166868.html#id166957 ):
"A couple of people here got it just right....
I can't tell you more guys.
"
> I fail to see how intellectuals are deeply at fault in your list of Godwinian examples. Each nation's military was far more deeply involved in all of those horror stories yet we love our troops and our military.

The intellectuals are deeply at fault because it was the intellectuals who gave the orders. The militaries just carried them out.

You can argue that the pilot of the Enola Gay had some responsibility of the bombing of Hiroshima. However, it's absurd to argue that FDR and Truman had less responsibility for that bombing.
Yeah, I just didn't think a person deserved to be insulted for what I saw as a relatively benign comment based on an assumption which was reasonable for a person who only saw the video clip.
Try looking from the east side of the Berlin wall.
Except for the part where Wasabi powers FogBugz, the main product of Fog Creek Software, and enough people pay for this software to keep that company running very profitably for 10+ years.
I'm no expert in any of the Lisps, but find that the learning curve with CL is massive. Of course, the return on your investment in learning is huge as well.

Depending on what your applications are, you might find something that really hangs together well, like newLISP a better fit. And it's very simple to intergrate libraries written in C.
> Also, the older generation is more likely to have the family structure where the man works and the wife stays at home. I would think there would be financial incentives for a wife to over report her age for senior benefits and her husband to under report so as not to be forced into retirement.

Census forms are not used to determine a individual benefits from govt programs or by companies to "retire" people.
Don’t Hash Your Secrets, Here’s why in Python
It takes over 800 days for the more efficient solution to gain over the less efficient one. Think about this, 800 days in which the less efficient solution is less expensive. That is two years and two months.

Let us plug in more realistic numbers for the cost of labor, shall we? Let us say that the labor cost is 80$ per hour (which is still cheap). At that point, it would take close to 5 years.

This piece makes some excellent points that any start up needs to stop and take a minute to ponder.
Right. Python is not 4-5 times faster than PHP. That was my point.
Agreed on the rockstar thing. I started to see a lot of people complain about this, so I wrote about it here: http://thesethings.posterous.com/rapping-grandmas-and-ninja-...

You're exactly right with the overuse. It didn't have to be innately bad to say "rockstar," just a couple of things have conspired to make it so...
If, as the author claims, this one process was chewing up resources by doing a lot of random i/o, the right tool to fix the situation is really ionice(1). ionice(1) modifies the i/o priority of a process in the same way that nice(1) modifies the CPU priority. It's such a handy tool -- I'm always amazed more people don't know about it.
What they don't teach you in CS departments
In summary: the author really likes Python, except for all the Pythony bits.
> How does this person have the audacity to criticize Python?

I complete agree to your infallible logic and invite you to read an article I wrote about how wonderful ad hominem attacks are:

http://www.zideck.com/blog/article.php?id=4
Oh now, she just wanted to hear someone explain what happened.
Your questions are not annoying at all.

For moderation, I implemented a point system, just like Hacker News. Users can vote replies and topics up and down by one point. Once a reply goes below -5, it gets collapsed (like Digg). If a user has a lot of negative points, they get warned or banned.

I also thought about giving the topic creator extra tools to moderate but I see that as an "I'll fix it when I have it" problem right now. A similar solution could give users with (for example) 5000+ total points moderation power.

The point system has a lot of potential as an incentive system. For example, would be great to gives users an "on-fire" badge if they have been very active over the last few days and their content has been highly rated.

If the unthinkable happens and this takes off, I'd see my advantages two-fold. I'd be the first person in that space and I put a lot of focus on simplicity and execution. It's very easy to copy things, especially simple concepts like a public message board. It's very hard to create a engaging user experience, even if you copy. Not sure if that helps if somebody decides to get in this space with millions of dollars in their pockets, but that's probably always the case, no matter what you do.
Yep. Mainly because people like to think that Joel is a completely incompetent idiot that quite naturally would do something like inventing a new language for no absolutely no reason whatsoever, never mind the fact that he's running a successful company making a successful product.
Exactly my thoughts. To further support your statement, theoretically, it should be possible to create a CPU that interprets C++ source code as machine code (not sure why would anyone do that though.)
Simple command-line password vault : CLVault
btw, I still have YellowBox (WebObjects 4.51) installed on my machine. Haven't used it in a while, but still....
Uh, SVG?
This link off of that page is also good: http://www.redmonk.com/cote/2010/01/27/oraclesun/
That and the filters. It's kind of interesting to think about those posts that appear on HN but not on reddit.
Performance: Using dynamic code to copy property values of two objects
Communicating Event Loops talk
Yep, I was sitting in my cubicle in Colorado Springs, and I remember exactly who came in to tell me about it. Just like it was yesterday.
Point taken, but that doesn't touch on the large majority of flash games and web applications that use the keyboard as the main source of input.

This helps for Flash on these devices IF the developers build in support for them, but that defeats the original purpose which is to give users the ability to interact with the current content on the web the way it currently exists.

Adding support for mulitouch in Flash does not solve the issue of keyboard input having prevalence in Flash-based games and web applications. Nor does it touch the issue of the many that currently track mouse movements. Sure, developers could all rewrite their games and applications to support this feature in the future, but that is hardly a solution to the present issue.
Making Money from Lost
ABC’s hit television series Lost has returned for its sixth and final season. This is the last season of Lost and a perfect time to profit from their enormous fan base.
Many Twitter accounts compromised; sharing passwords with torrent sites
Yes, I can easily imagine even people outside facebook adding to the HipHop effort in adding other languages. Easily imagined and easily executed aren't the same thing, unfortunately. By the way, I'm out of my element when it comes to compilers.
Offhand, I'd bet VB will open up a larger raw number of job opportunities than Perl. So why doesn't everybody jump on that bandwagon? After all, every major language is Turing-complete, so obviously people are just nitpicking when they could be choosing a clear winner.
You can tell from the video that was a cold day. It not only "looks cold," but someone has wrapped a sheet around a shrub to protect it.
James Britt wrote the definitive post (in my opinion) on the use of Haml: http://www.jamesbritt.com/2009/4/29/thoughts-on-haml
Survive a 6 mile fall
Agreed, it's really the repetition that is somewhat annoying. Announce/launch days can be doubly annoying. The truth is, there's only so much to their products - especially the 'locked down' ones - that we don't really need THAT much information, speculation and punditry.
Though I agree that most single sites wont benefit from this. We have a single site serving 100 pages/sec and php is not even close to becoming a bottleneck.

The other application where this may be helpful is the cloud. In a system like this you have 100s or 1000s of sites on a single machine that may reach the combined traffic where this optimization can come into play.
SSD Poised to Become Drive of Choice in 2010
This would also rule out people like myself, for better or for worse, who refuse to use Facebook.
Older Brains Need Less Sleep?
Driving home that day I heard the song "Alive and Kicking" by Simple Minds, and now I get chills whenever I hear that.
Would you like to expand on your claim? Be quite clear that i dislike both languages. VBS is the worst of the two though.
A suggestion for Giles would be to link back to the HN conversation of each link. I think its not the foreign content that people find useful on HN, its the conversation around it. (fjabre also pointed this fact out.) Especially considering that the majority of content on HN derives from a few websites - something which I think should be a goal to change. Personally, I love the fringe stuff and being introduced to new blogs that I don't normally come across. Through these fringe postings, I have found some very interesting people that I now follow. Alternative insights are awesome.
It's hard?
So if compression not only saves space, but increases performance, it seems like its past due for disk manufacturers to actually include compression in disk controllers.
Did anyone notice the little haiku (almost) at the end:

Beef Cows Dairy Cows
All Cattle Cows That That Have That Have
& Calves Have Calved Calved Calved
You have a Chrome problem on PC. I haven't checked on a Mac yet. Apparently, Chrome is up to 6% of browser share, so it is probably worth supporting.

I opened it up in Safari and it looks amazing. Really, your work is fantastic.

The navigation threw me off for a second. Considering your audience, and that you are trying to show that you can come up with newish UI, design, etc. I think the coolness of the effect is worth the potential confusion.

After reading your blog post, I think it is an improvement over the last iteration, especially when it comes to the copy. The old copy looks a little daunting. Too much text, in too small of a font. The newest version seems to shorten things, and spreads out the copy. It is a lot more reader friendly.

Everything looks great really. Nice rework.
Big Giles fan - as he well knows - but the constant beating about how the newspaper format is "better" than vanilla Hacker News grates on me. Better for him (and a bunch of others, I'm sure) and his reading style but I far prefer the vanilla HN site.

I don't want to use a client that's arbitrarily censored at the whim of whoever built it - that's what the upvotes and flagging are for. Further, the newspaper site doesn't seem to properly laid out horizontally (all the cells seem to have differing, inconsistent widths) so it's even harder to scan than HN's simple list (which isn't perfect, I know).
Sure. The filtering may be added value though it feels like it goes against the concept to me. The newspaper snapshot is almost a representation of the zeitgeist. Using those associations and filtering at the same time seems almost like propaganda.

I was talking about the layout mostly though.
Those were pretty much non-reasons. I'm supposed to be outraged that Python doesn't give you an implicit "this"? Whatever.

There _are_ some things that are really wrong. The biggest of these is that Python is slow. This limits where you can use, and pushes developers toward using C libraries. Which can solve the slowness, but tends to make for less stable applications. After all those years with "Pure Java", this is a pain I don't feel I should have to endure. I don't care so much about purity, but other languages have managed to be both reliable and somewhat fast...

The other thing that bugs me about Python is the arbitrariness of the features. It has beautiful list and generator comprehensions, but weird support for lambdas. It has a "dicts all the way down" approach to names, but weird closure bugs. Etc. I've read the "Zen of Python" but I still find myself scratching my head. (Then again, I think the same thing about many other languages.)

It's still a good language, though, on the scale of languages. I'd rather write Python than Java (usually).
Explain to me a pain point of Macports that Homebrew solves

It doesn't require you to install a second, shadow Perl, Python or Ruby in order to install other packages. Instead Homebrew uses the Perl, Python and Ruby that OSX already provides. (This may be a con, depending on what you think of Apple's treatment of those packages. I grant that.)

I found the Python issue to be a particular pain in the ass, since MacPorts's Python build requires tk, which requires some GUI libraries, which ends up building more or less an entire X11 sub-system on OSX that I will never ever use.

I ran into this when trying to install Getmail. My solution then was simply to download Getmail and install it the old-fashioned way. I was a little surprised that Getmail built so easily using the system's built-in Python. My first thought was, "If I can do it that easily, using what I already have, why does MacPorts force me to download and build all this other crap?"

What annoys me about MacPorts (which I love in many ways, don't get me wrong) is that it is not easy to customize builds. You can edit the portfile easily enough, but every update undoes that.
There's also quite a lot of oxygen dihydride in this material - a dangerous chemical that can cause asphyxiation when inhaled.
But of course, for the average user, losing all of his personal data is a lot worse than losing the default OS install.

(For non-average users, the hacked binaries will secretly steal your personal information, so that's bad. But this only happens in real life... well, never.)
"I'm thinking the author needs to try out Ruby."

Yes, but also Lisp, awk, R, and Prolog. Or something; you can't be Mr. All-Java and then Mr. All-PHP and be in a position to adequately judge programing languages.
Bingo. You need to cater to two audiences - those with a passing interest who'll gloss over big text and an image (often screenshots in the case of start-ups) but hopefully remember what they've seen, and the more dedicated who will get interested and read the long-format copy, researching before purchase.

Ogilvy forever pushed this style of selling - here's an example:

http://www.annoyingdesign.org/blog/2009/08/04/ux-print-ads/