skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You don't need to learn "everything you can about graphic design."
Your audience is other hackers. They don't care that much about visual goofiness either- you want a clean, minimalist site, then that's what you should have.

The one single thing you should do is make your site more READABLE.

Right now, this page is too big. Limit the width of a column of text to around 500 px. That will do wonders. I suggest fixing your body to 900px, and then splitting it into two columns- a main content column of 556, and a sidebar of 344. (Golden Ratio always looks nice).

Next- typography:
Obviously, stick with web-safe fonts. Arial and other sans-serif used to be the way to go on the web, because low-res screens didn't display serifs very well. But now it's 2010, and all the print people know that for regular text, a serif font is more legible.

font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;

Beyond that, you need to make the lines the right distance apart. They need enough room to breathe, and paragraph breaks should have as much space between them as they would if there was another line of text there. Something like:

p {
font-size: 12px;
line-height: 22px;
margin-bottom: 22px;
}

or you can use ems or whatever you like, but notice that line height is a little less that twice the size of the font size, and that the margin on the bottom of paragraphs is the same as the line-height.

If you just did those few things, your content would be immensely more readable.
Finds on the Google Code Repository
Any one who has actually read a food label will realize that serving size != package size and for things like cereal my bowl != serving size.

It's hard to believe how touchy people are. Will people really take increased serving sizes as a signal to eat more? Probably not. It won't change anything for those who don't pay attention to calories/serving sizes nutrition. People who count calories will shit a brick and hopefully start eating less processed foods.

This is all really pointless anyways. If the FDA really wanted to address obesity they need to take a hard stance against processed foods and high fructose corn syrup. That will never happen because food companies will lobby to protect their empires and a large portion of Americans can't afford to eat real food.
Tracking the Google Streetview Car in Berlin
Airbrushing their previously stated decision to terminate with extreme prejudice the domain Kenai.com and all non-Sun projects hosted on it? (Which got a lot of people upset if for no other reason than that Kenai had Netbeans support you couldn't find elsewhere; read the earlier comments, which they didn't touch).

They told everyone they had to evacuate by a date certain (end of March as I recall), that the tools to do so were incomplete but that they were working on them, etc. etc.

Their old position was unequivocal: if you don't work for Sun evacuate. And from the Sun Maxine project (a metacircular JVM) I know this was also going to be disruptive for internal Sun project.

I guess they got so much push back they're now doing something semi-smart (changing the terrible brand of kenai.com (what does that mean???) to java.net).

I can live with that, I don't expect the merger to be entirely smooth, but if they can reverse stupid initial decisions (however they decide to save face), it's a very good sign.
The Sporting Mind
W3schools: Chrome Has Surpassed Ten Percent Share
I talked to a lot of people at the Business of Software conference (basically a conference by and for boot strappers) and a huge number of them had five hard years followed by easy street. I know for myself, the three years we've been going have been as much about learning new skill sets as they have about building customers and product. Three years in, things are opening up a tiny bit, but I definitely feel like we're on a five year plan.
Agreed completely. But I was just trying to wonder why they had the policy in the first place. In large bureaucracies, policies inevitably have weird edge cases.
Ahem...that's a humor web site...
Good points, but I think it would be a lot easier to keep paper dry than microfiche cool; the former can be done passively, the latter requires active systems for most of the world.
So, only two more years to go!

That timetable makes sense. There's just so much to do and learn, and the number of people involved is inherently limited by the resources available. Three years is probably the time needed to build something wonderful and learn about the environment within which it exists, and then you've got two years to learn how to sell it!
My god, this is old; I read this or an older version of it on a printout taped on the side of a computer in the summer of 1977....

(And needless to say they weren't as sensitive about the issue of rape back then.)
Since I'm hungry I want to talk about restaurants for a second.

You can usually tell quality restaurants by a signature dish more than their napkins.

For example, Pho places have to have good Pho. Pho is a touch dish to make requiring lots of detail to assemble complex ingredients in the right proportions over many hours. Good places are famous, bad places die.

Around where I live the best Pho place is "Pho 75". However, eating there is like eating at a cheap cafeteria. There's almost no decoration, everybody eats at long, fold-up tables like you might see at a middle school. They don't really have much of a menu and it's printed as cheaply as possible and then laminated so they don't have to print more. Napkins are the $2/1000 type you get at institutions, the silverware is so cheap it's possibly dangerous, and the chopsticks and soup spoons are made of heavy grade, dishwasher safe plastic. There's almost no service from the staff, they get your order and come back to drop off soup.

There are fancier places, with better napkins and silveware, tableclothes and expensive statues of dragons and such in the area. There's a few places that try to make Pho hip and trendy with modern lighting and fancy, custom interior decorator designed decors and fancy napkins.

But Pho 75 regularly beats them all. The line at lunch is always out the door (even in frigid weather), usually giving you about 10-15 minutes to actually eat the steaming bowl of soup. Yet from appearances to new people, it's a dive.

Anybody who's asked says they go to Pho 75 instead of some other place because of the quality of the soup. Not because of the napkins.
People who count calories have the ability to figure out that 18 chips @ 150 calories/6 chips implies "OMFG, I just ate 450 calories! I'm going be fat and you are going to leave me! This is all your fault for buying chips!"
Microsoft research is very good though not all of it makes it into production. I would certainly call them a leader in research compared to other companies. http://research.microsoft.com/apps/dp/areas.aspx
A hierarchical filesystem is an implementation detail, and it's unhelpful to expose it to the user. It doesn't really match the mental models.

It's interesting to see how the lack of filesystem is handled in the iPad. The video for iWork where the slides are flicked backwards and forwards (like pages in the iPhone Safari) doesn't look like it'll scale. Maybe you have to use a search interface when you get more docs than you can comfortably flick through?
How the iPad will augment the physical environment
It is interesting to see how one competitor assesses the demise of another but the author does not really offer much to show that "VC is a competitive disadvantage" or that it really was instrumental in EventVue's failure in this instance.

The EventVue post explaining the failure (linked in the post) identifies several key mistakes involving flawed execution but not suggesting that the company had overextended itself on account of its funding. The money raised was apparently a small angel round, with a somewhat larger follow-on round, one would assume from the same angels. At some point, they determined that there was no good market worth pursuing and shut it down.

I don't see anything here to implicate VC funding as the culprit. In saying that, I would add that I love bootstrap companies and believe that, in general, they represent the wave of the future for the startup world. I just don't think anything in this piece supports the idea that VC funding kills companies (VC funding, whatever its shortcomings, is and always will be an integral, and major, part of the startup world and, indeed, of its premier segment).

A prime strategy of many of the bootstrap companies I work with is to use bootstrapping, coupled with angel funding, to build valuation while deferring any attempt at VC funding and, then, once initial goals are met, to approach VCs from a position of comparative strength and high valuation so as to get good terms. Others, of course, seek to bootstrap their way toward an acquisition. I would say only a minority plan to build for the long-term in the way the author of this piece discusses (this path can be treacherous in fast-changing tech markets).

The post itself is a good one. I just think the author assumes rather than proves his point about the effect of VC funding on a startup.
You need to have at least Snow Leopard, I believe. Apple recently moved plugins to separate processes, which prevents the entire browser from crashing. Flash will crash, but it won't take down the whole browser.
That's neat, but I wish I could click and drag to change multiple pixels at once, instead of clicking and clicking and clicking.
While I agree that the article title was linkbait, I think the author had a valid point in noting that mentioning that the app was a finalist in a big competition does help in vouching for the app's usefulness. This isn't something that Apple should be discouraging, and the fact that they do does make them seem, well, petty.
Josaphen (sp.) junctions

I think you mean Josephson junction:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephson_effect
LCD Projectors fit 1080p in ~0.75" diagonal for roughly 3000 pixels per square inch. That seems to be roughly the limit of our technology.
Selling to enterprises
If nothing else, be sure to check out the Ken Perlin's homepage (he's the guy behind the second font). http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/
Смоленкин Андрей, молодой художник из Магнитогорска. Smolenkin.ru, Art Gallery
Молодой художник из Магнитогорска Смоленкин Андрей, представляет вашему вниманию графику, живопись, рисунки животных и путевые зарисовки. The young artist from Russia Smolenkin Andrey, represents to your attention the drawing, painting, sketches
What is the CMOS speed trap?
'There's value in more than money'
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!
NEXT had an existing customer base and a larger hardware operation, it's valuation was higher.
Gtkfilesplitter 0.1.4 su Ubuntu
But counter examples along those lines are plentiful. I remember reading a breathless writeup on a tour of a new VW plant. The cleanliness and spotless floors were apparently the main important factor there. Yet VW cars are well known in the industry as having serious quality issues with everything from blistering paint to the continuously faulty electrical systems of the New Beetle.

Here's a video of said plant. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nd5WGLWNllA

If this dog-and-pony show was representative of VWs efforts to reach parity with the mechanical quality of say, the Honda Civic and Accord, then I would say this "quality is fractal" idea would have some merit. But even a cursory review of something as basic as mechanical reliability in consumer reports or on true delta shows VWs to regularly be just "meh" in terms of reliability.
If we could render Hacker News with this system, think of how many more stories we could get on the front page. I vote Aye.
Oh, there are already many discussion/tutorial sites about yo-yoing. I don't intend to replace them, but to offer something they don't: a single place to coherently store pictures of, and more importantly, data about, your yoyo collection. Most of the message boards allow photo uploads, and you can always write descriptions in the posts, but that data is scattered.

I have thought some about montization (mostly in the context of "If this thing grows, how will I pay for hosting beyond my own personal/hobby threshold?"), and have two ideas:

1) fremium - subscriptions for the "serious" collector (more data fields, etc.)

2) ads from yoyo manufacturers/organizations (there aren't many, hence I don't think AdSense would really draw much revenue; plus, I actually have a few contacts at Duncan)

If I had to pick one of those, I'd rather pick #2 - I can't imagine this site, as I currently plan to build it, would add enough value to justify subscriptions.

Anyway, if you want to pick it up again, I recommend:
- http://www.theyo.com/yoyo/ and http://www.theyostore.com/
- http://www.yo-yoing.com/news/
- http://www.yoyonation.com
- http://yoyowiki.org
Microsoft lost its way quite a long time ago. In the 1990s it was pretty much invincible, but after that things began to unravel. For me the lowlights were:

Windows ME - it self-destructed on me after a few months of usage

Internet Explorer 6 - gave me the best possible incentive to move to Firefox

Windows Genuine (Dis)Advantage - for me was really the final straw

Windows XP was highly successful though, although again they really failed to do anything very innovative with that OS other than keep it stable. By the end of 2006 I'd stopped using most of their products, having been a MS stalwart since Windows 3.1, and I havn't looked back since.
I vowed after my first startup never again to build an enterprise product for this reason. Plus I don't like golfing and drinking with some random guy in Omaha trying to convince him my product solves one of this top three problems.
I don't understand the purpose of this article.
Perception is interesting here. I have worked with startups in Silicon Valley since 1984 and remember the ever-increasing dismay throughout the period extending right up to the early-to-mid-90s of the "UNIX guys" (that is how I saw them) as they were almost ready to explode watching Microsoft apparently taking over first the consumer desktop and then the enterprise with what they saw as crappy products relative to the far more robust systems they worked with and developed. All they could do was shake their heads in dismay and bemoan the fact that consumers and enterprise customers could be so forced to conform to the lowest common denominator that DOS/Windows and their progeny begat - all the while complaining of Bill Gates's "evil empire."

I mention this only to emphasize, for those who are younger, how all-pervasive this dispirited mindset was back then. Of course, this all changed with the Internet and the rest is history.

I think this piece reflects that mindset perfectly: Microsoft sucks? Of course, it always has!

I don't even know that this is fair characterization of what Microsoft did or did not achieve back in the day (I am not a techie guy) but I do know that it was how Microsoft was overwhelmingly perceived by many of the tech-savvy people even as it was crushing all competitors.
BTW, if you want to quickly see how this text looks on an iPhone, etc, I made a shortlink direct to the demo image so it's easier to type on there.. http://bit.ly/tinytext
Hadoop / MapReduce alternatives for parallel computing?
This is true, but for all intents and purposes MSR is a separate company. For a research lab, where the metric for success is not how much makes it to production, they are quite good indeed.
What's with the confusing system? Maybe it's from growing up with it, but here in Europe the system makes a lot more sense: all foods specify the calories/ other food info per 100 grams. This makes it easy to compare different foods. Since the weight of the pack is also given in grams, it's really basic level math to figure out how many calories eating half a pack of something gives.
Better HN: Take HN discussions everywhere
I've recently released a new version of HN Comment Embed, a greasemonkey script that embeds HN discussions into the webpage being discussed.

You simply browse to a posted page, and the HN panel pops up on the side.

This version relies on searchYC as its main source, but also parses HN's newest posts page to attain full coverage.

http://share.shmichael.com/hn_comment_embed.user.js
Clickable http://share.shmichael.com/hn_comment_embed.user.js
This page crashed flash for me! Wow!
actually, I meant every word I said, and I think, along with Patrick's comments, my comment is one of the only comments on here with any content. but arguing with people in general is a waste of time. you get mad, your argument's logic goes out the window, and it's just a bunch of emotional name-calling.
It would be nice if there were a nutrition label for the entire package. Until then I can use Wolfram Alpha, which has quite a good database.

And I agree with you on the fructose. It is bad stuff, at least in the concentrations found in processed food.

It is a bit comical that the EPA is raising holy hell over carbon dioxide while the FDA turns a blind eye to HFCS.
Steps to get Adobe to fix this bug:

1) Create a flash ad with this bug. Set to go off randomly
2) Put ad in a low-cost adwords campaign
Once upon a time, charlatans killed people right and left because no one regulated who could claim to be a doctor. Once upon a time, a mob could ransack your house and steal your belongings because there was no law. That's why we invented government. Government starts regulating behavior whenever enough people are adversely affected by that behavior that they demand the regulation.

Rather than simply giving in to anarchy as you suggest, let's try to improve democracy.
They manufactured a whole wafer of the the things at once, rather than one researcher hovering over a microscope to painstakingly construct one or a handful of transistors. It speaks to the manufacturing-readiness of the process they use.
During my 3 years doing enterprise sales at Akamai, I learnt a ton of things from my customers and met some really interesting people. Not all enterprise sales involves golf and drinking and schmoozing.

Edit: I would also add that you tend to learn a lot more about your product from your customers. In addition, once you target a certain industry and speak to all the major players, you get some insight that helps with product, sales, marketing.
I found that book a little too precious.
Actually at the time Apple was working towards what was termed the Common Hardware Reference Platform or CHRP in which the main goal was to be able to run the new NT being developed, on Apple hardware. It actually happened too, for a brief time there was a NT 4 PPC version that ran on the CHRP platform. The thinking was we will give it our all and if all best efforts fail we will just become a high-end windows platform. The management at the time really did not understand the dynamics of their customer bases.

To this day, I am dumbfounded as to how they survived. That first iMac landed at a crucial time and took off like wildfire. As well someone started listening to the right people because if I remember correctly there was some pretty open Steve hating on the board, how he ascended to power again is another one in a million shot.
I should have made it clear that we opted not to use Duby for this project because a) the Java version was almost done and b) it still seems immature. Android development depends on a prerelease version of jRuby, so I wouldn't consider it production ready.
Let's take in mind that the first sentence acts as a disclaimer

"The web developer-focused w3schools releases browser statistics every month."
Matching Balanced Constructs with .NET Regular Expressions
Don't forget a 'linefeed' character that indicates where lines join into paragraphs. Something Project Gutenberg forgot with their ASCII texts.
Yeah I didn't mean to sound like that's ALL there is. But I was time and again surprised how often buying decisions had nothing to do with the product, company's need etc. I guess I was perhaps a little naive :)
I think "IBM's demise" is refering to when they were the in place monopolist, and ruling the computer field completely. Which was way before Dell selling PCs
Didn't NeXT sell their hardware operation before they sold themselves to Apple?

They did have a customer base, and it probably was larger than Be's, though.
Far from being ludicrous, the original rules served a valid purpose: weighing the conviction of those participating in the debate. By forcing a speaker to hold the floor, the original rules allowed someone with deep conviction to stand against a majority in a test of will. Even if the speaker ultimately failed on the floor, he would have drawn public attention to his point of view and ensured that it was considered.
I'm forcing myself to try to understand what can be likable about it. The energy it creates? The consistent enthusiasm?
I downvoted it as well. Not because it's trolling or anything like that. I downvoted it because, well, it just isn't very funny. This is the third page like that I've seen this week.
Isn't that anthropomorphizing NT a bit? I mean, it's an OS, not a being. And the "promise" turned out to be mostly hype, at least in the 1995-1996 time frame. "A better Unix than Unix", "The Best Designed Operatings System", stuff like that is almost totally illogical, just an emotional appeal really.

If you read Helen Custer's "Inside Windows NT" you might have been excused for thinking you were reading about Mach 2.5, but I'm not sure what relation the OS described by "Inside Windows NT" (1st ed) had to the real Windows NT 3.1. So I'm still confused about what "promise" NT had.
FlipSide Makes you Forget You’re on A BlackBerry
Each mobile platform has major advantages and disadvantages. BlackBerry has email, but it also lacks application memory. Android has openness on its side but it also comes with some UI issues. The iPhone has its fabulous UI but it lacks flexibility. It is always fun to download an app that enhances your phone in such a way that it takes one of the major down sides of your platform and flips it on its head.
I disagree. How many grams of Cereal did you just pour into that bowl? How many Chex Mix grams did you just chomp down? How many grams of Tang did you mix in with that water?

Sure, using grams is great for comparison... But getting the average person to find out how many grams of xxx they just consumed, unless it is easily quantifiable as "all/half/quarter of the total amount" is pretty hard.
Yes this is a great way to weed out all those stodgy kids-movie-and-video-game animation studios.
So was I when I started. There are so many reasons folks buy that doesn't involve our product or company, it's mind boggling.
As impressionantes esculturas do concept art
Confira essa fantástica coleção de esculturas voltada para o cencept art, processo que serve para que se tenha uma base sólida do que vai ser o personagem ou ambiente quando pronto.
it's also interesting to note that Microsoft, a company that many software experts agree makes inferior products, is also a huge market leader. This hints at something a lot of technically minded people oversee: Sales and marketing is what drives a company. Microsoft is probably the most savvy tech company out there when it comes to sales. Yes, they are stuffing things down people's throat, abusing their monopoly, and generally being a nuisance. But it works, and it works well.

This steve Ballmer quote sums it up pretty well "well, we've been accused of a lot of things, but not being able to make money isn't one of them"
Citation? I've heard lots of people talk of the dangers of HFCS, but I've never even heard of a scientific explanation, let alone seen a study.
Does Chroem work well on the Mac yet? The two times I tried it was terribly slow, especially in scrolling.
Wikipedia has an aggregate table of several market share companies estimates: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Sum...

Currently, most put Chrome at between 5% - 6%.