skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been working on Brightspoke (part-time and bootstrapped) for a couple of months and while there's a lot more left to do, I feel there's enough of the MDP/MVP in place that hopefully you should be able to see where I'm headed.

For fear of tainting your first impressions of the site, I won't say a lot more right here, but I'd be happy to go into more detail later in thread if anyone has questions about the site, technology, vision, business model or process that led to here.

I would greatly appreciate any and all feedback, from design to copy to coding to features. I've been looking at some parts of this for so long I can no longer tell whether some changes are better or worse.

Note that some bike pages are a bit more robust than others (a function of the data currently in the system), for example:

http://www.brightspoke.com/b/2010/surly/steamroller.html
http://www.brightspoke.com/b/2010/surly/karate-monkey.html
http://www.brightspoke.com/b/2009/khs/flite-team.html

Also, this page:

http://www.brightspoke.com/t/bike-stem-calculator.html

has proven popular on some cycling forums.
"With myself taking the lead and keeping to the genchi genbutsu principle all of us at Toyota will tackle the issue in close cooperation with our dealers and our suppliers."

If I were translating his statement I might have put an explanatory note there: genchi genbutsu is a reference to the actual location and the actual materials at issue. It is sort of a catch phrase for Toyota -- one of their management principles is "genchi genbutsu genzitsu" -- roughly speaking, "Go to the actual location and see the actual machine/materials and you shall know the actual truth." Compare to delegating an underling to diagnose the issue over a phone.

Obligatory disclaimer: I work in Nagoya, but not for Toyota, to the extent that anyone in Nagoya can be said not to work for Toyota.
Identifying the Most Preferred Vendor for Promotional Pens
When you are buying your promotional pens as part of your marketing campaign, it is good to identify the most preferred vendor so that you are not spending a lot of time each time you need to buy your promotional pens or logo pens. Though it may take a considerable amount of time in the beginning to track down your preferred vendor, it is worth the trouble because you will save a lot of time on the long run.
Still surprises me just how many people put website names into google instead of just putting the address into their browser. It's like AOL keywords or something :/
Facebook Advertising for Lead Acquisition Case Study
OMeta (http://tinlizzie.org/ometa/) is a more recent investigation into this area.
More details: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/02/08/vs-2010-ne...
You should watch this video about Aubrey de Grey: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3329065877451441972...
UK Google Alphabet. We are obsessed with shopping, weather, holidays - official
The most common search in Google is 'Google' apparently...
Cloud Hype and de-Hype
As usual, a very good article from Paul. BTW, what would be those three key features of iPad?
Those three well-executed features need to be done in the context of marketing/sales magic, otherwise the product won't take off. GMail by all rights should be the dominant email client today, or at least every other surviving email client should have copied the conversation view from GMail. FriendFeed should be bigger than Twitter. I'll admit that twitter got the "few things" part, but I don't think they won based on doing those few things well.

EDIT: More discussion at http://friendfeed.com/paul/e75a7022/if-your-product-is-great...
Continuations are a nice tool. And intuitive.
Django Advent, Day 2: Multi-DB (Alex Gaynor)
I don't know. I don't think there is enough information released about it.
It's because they don't know how those tools work, and assume that the academic staff is incompetent enough to let slip a homework with variables/methods/classes names changed.

Unfortunately for such students, since we are talking about source-code which has a parsable grammar, such a tool usually does pattern matching directly on the syntax-tree, and it's not the names of the nodes that are relevant, but the tree's structure, and a single routine copied from somewhere can give you away.

But even if some of them realize it, they still try (since the effort of changing everything to pass the screening can be greater than the effort of doing it yourself) with a wishful thinking ... I don't know about Stanford, but it really depends on the teacher that's reviewing the homework, since many of them don't use such tools.

I imagine that in the future we'll also have such tools for essays / natural language, making it easier to detect plagiarism ... I'm suspecting PhD awards will drop :)
Yeah.. I agree. I generally prefer single player games too. I mean, I like the idea of playing with other people - but those same other people also turn me off because I can't enjoy the game environment, gameplay and experience without someone else imposing what they feel it should be on me, even if thats not how I want to play.

I play a few multiplayer games with friends sometimes and the experience is much better because we can agree how we want to play.

Having said that, occasionally I do play multiplayer games with people and have a lot of fun doing it - counter strike a few years ago, rainbow 6 vegas 2 last year and modern warfare 2 this year.
Totally agree. But I think that even in hindsight, it's not always obvious which of even just 3 qualities was actually crucial for success.

With google search, it was fast, uncluttered, had a patented pagerank algorithm and didn't sell search placements. Though "the algorithm" was seen as crucial, I've heard people argue that it wasn't (though it added a PR factor). I remember comparing it with other searches early on, and it wasn't that different - but it felt a lot better to use, probably because fast, clear, honest and cool.

With gmail, it was 1 GB, fast, and used search and tags instead of hierarchical folders (btw what was new about conversations?) - but how can one tell what was crucial for its success? Perhaps the 1 GB was the main thing? (was there evidence showing how crucial each aspect was?)
There was some discussion previously, here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1067154
Some good points! Thanks for pointing them out.
Fortunately for Apple, marketing isn't a problem because they're Apple. But you're right, like many others we've discovered that lack of features is a marketing problem.

There's no clear answer. Demonstrating that we had something which was clearly better than the alternative for a specific problem has got us a long way. People will forgive an awful lot if you can make their day easier.
Think Before You Post
How to identify missing clients and visitors
And of course, once the vendors get with the HTML5 and CSS3 programs they'll release new firmware packages including the new version of the browsers for all the old devices that have archaic browsers, and then your users will all go and download the new firmware and install it on their phone, and, bingo, you don't need to worry about supporting the archaic browsers.

You're obviously new in town, so I'll point out the two flaws in your reasoning:

1) The vendors won't ship updated firmware for all the old devices they've already shipped to market. There are just too many different combinations of devices and firmware versions (each network typically gets a custom firmware build to include their links and logos), so the cost would be huge.

2) Even if they did ship updated firmware, most users won't bother installing it.

The mobile market just isn't like the desktop market - what you're effectively saying is that people can't use your web application until they upgrade to a new phone.
New Windows 7 Track on Microsoft’s Certification Game
Try this too: http://www.google.com/search?q=Security+chip+that+does+encry...
On the subject of anti-submarine naval warfare, I would strongly recommend "Three Corvettes" by Nicholas Monsarrat.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Three-Corvettes-Nicholas-Monsarrat/d...

From WW2 rather than WW1 - but I don't think the North Atlantic had changed much.
What Writers Can Teach Programmers
Bliink Web Design Competition for Texas High School Students
FriendFeed is about discussion. It's back and forth. There are lot's of software/site/thing on the Internet doing this, in many forms.

Twitter is about publishing. It's one way. It's a minified blog without comments. A mini-blog for everyone is a need, apparently. Only Twitter is doing it.
Human rights 'threatened' by Digital Economy Bill
Quite so, treating feature sets as a laundry list or a shopping list is a recipe for mediocrity. The most important features of every product are implicit: usability, performance, efficiency, aesthetics, robustness, etc. Every product has these aspects, if you ignore them then you will fail to deliver on them.

The really slick companies, like Apple and Google, have these concepts baked into their DNA, which is why they seem to be able to take everyone else's lunch money whenever they damned well feel like it.

It's better to try and succeed at making something simple, coherent, and excellent (like a well seasoned, perfectly cooked steak) than it is to try and fail at making something overly complicated (like a 12-course meal, which ends up as 7-courses, some of them missing key ingredients, burnt, or raw).

You don't get points from the judges for degree of difficulty.
Words that Zing
The Problem with Passwords
"My question for reddit: what would you do if you had $20M in the bank?"

Well, you could deploy 1mm or so in angel investments.
This person's doing some interesting work with concurrent javascript: "Stratified JavaScript and Multitasking": http://www.croczilla.com/blog/18
I'm sort of a target user for your site (family of five, don't own a [working] car, bike everywhere, don't know much about bikes)

I like what you've got; your site would be much more valuable with a lot more information. Things that come to mind

1. Maintenance of all kinds, how to change a spoke, what is a chain whip for?, truing rims, adjusting rear derailleurs, etc.

2. Classified information for bikes; you might think craigslist might have this locked up but I bought my bike from there and the guy who sold it to me was really frustrated with people calling him with random questions he didn't understand. A convenient form with blanks for relevant stats would help us newbies.

3. Events page; cycling events happen all the time, an RSS of rides in my area would be nice

4. Forum: war stories, racing strategy, a clubhouse for cyclists.

5. news/blog cycling related legislation, celebrities on bikes

6. Bike mods page: DIY propelled, row cycles etc. showcase interesting inventions

Basically a community site with really great technical info and lots of pictures could be really compelling I think. To fly I think this thing needs more meat on its bones.
Geez, way to generalise about an entire gender, and quite negatively at that. There are certainly people (both men and women) who say one thing and mean another, but comments like this do nothing but undermine those women who actually mean it when they say something (like "let's not spend too much money on our rings"), which I have to assume is most of the ones that bother to say stuff like that in the first place.
First results from Large Hadron Collider published
One must acquire the habit of thinking on the margins. If there are millions of people and billions of dollars attacking problem A which kills millions of people, and dozens of people and hundreds of thousands of dollars attacking problem B which kills millions of people, ceteris paribus your next marginal dollar is likely to have a bigger impact on B.

With that said, my own efforts are going into AI, not aging; the negative side of AI (recursive self-improvement by an agent with non-human-aligned goals) is something that, for all we know in this epistemic state, could happen at literally any time (hidden NSA lab finally achieved AI a month ago, it improved to superintelligence a week ago, cracked the protein folding problem, emailed some DNA strings to protein synthesis labs, got nanotechnology an hour ago, whoops we're all dead).

So if you're one of those people for whom problems don't exist unless they at least might destroy your self of tomorrow and not just your self of thirty years from now, I actually am spending my time on one of those problems.

But mostly I regard immediate temporal proximity as an invalid constraint on philanthropy.
It makes me feel old that 300 baud modems were around 45 years ago.
Designing for donations
Whoah, there. While your software may have nothing in common with games, there's a lot of software that does.

Products like TurboTax have similarly tight schedules and limited ability to patch. Business platforms like Oracle have massive game-like performance-intensive C++ codebases. Operating systems like OS X or Windows 7 also have big teams, tons of art assets, and a fixed ship date. There are a ton of software shops out there that can learn something from the author's original post.

Many of us on HN have the luxury of building server-based web apps. We live in a very pleasant world with minimum viable products, small codebases, and rapid iteration. However, let's not fool ourselves into thinking that this is the world that everybody else lives in.
Normal S3 pricing applies to each version of an object. You can store any number of versions of the same object, so you may want to implement some expiration and deletion logic if you plan to make use of this feature.

Hehe. Users of VMS learned pretty quickly the DCL command to set the number of versions to 3 or so. That way, they would only have "note.txt;32", "note.txt;31" and "note.txt;30" around, instead of running out of disk quota with all the versions down to "note.txt;1".

One of the filesystems for CDs (UDF ?) supports this.
Lithium-Ion Battery Life Could Reach 20 Years
My first impression was that I accidentally typed in the wrong url and went to one of those fake-website landing page sites that just run ads all over them. I'm pretty sure it has something to do with your color scheme and blatantly stock picture. One thing that might help is to soften up the background with either a gradient, texture, or just a more pastel color.

Would be helpful (for me at least) to have some sample search queries so I can get a taste for what I will get even without having to fill out the form. Show don't tell. Maybe a "popular" gallery or a "best deals" gallery etc. Filling out that form takes way too much effort for the "unsold".

Lastly I was pretty sad to find no pictures of any bikes whatsoever! Pictures are pretty important.

Your design really is not "bad" it just gives off the an iffy/questionable vibe as to the legitimacy of the site.
So maybe just kill two birds with one stone and focus on getting juicy pictures of badass bikes in a nicely laid out gallery. I actually don't know much about bikes, but would like to, so I'll be rooting your site on.

HTH
Seemed more of a confused, high level ranting to me.
It seems the performance of the IDE is much better, which is a welcome improvement. Unfortunately we will have to wait 2 months for the final version:

".. our launch event is currently scheduled for April 12th." - ScottGu
Unclear if this is aimed at bike experts or bike newbies. Is this to help me find a bike? Then help me understand WHY the data points are important. Even your front search frame dropdown: alum vs. steel? I don't know, why should I pick one? This assumes I already know the reasons why these filters are important.

The data dump for each bike is nice, but again, no context, no comparison feature, nothing to let me know why each data point matters.

If you are going for an expert audience, then consider expert tools: experts all already have a bike, so they want to consider upgrades and alternative bikes for alternative uses. So why not allow users to search that way: Given that I have a, say, Trek 7.2 FX, what's the next logical upgrade level/search features from that? It would be differerent and new, afaik.

So, it's a fine data aggregator, but I would love to see some smarts via a more bike-thinking way to search, and a more useful display of the data which allows me to know that some frame angles are "race ready" and cause you to lean down while riding, or that some frame types are better for vibration but may not be necessary if you ride short distances on pavement, etc. That context can also be provided via on screen comparisons: 1 variable across 10 bikes, or comparing 2 bikes across all variables.

I agree with danteembermage around community features; these days, it's hard to get far without them, either built in or by allying yourself with an existing community.
Wow. That is one cool mayor. And debt-free, just like North Dakota!
Bad corner of the Lisp world? Socket libraries are the Skid Row of Common Lisp.

The reason it's hard to create a good library comes from an interplay of 3 things: streams, lack of standard character representation, and lack of standard foreign function interfaces. The latter two are sort of advantages in that if they were standardized in 1989 or whatever, we would probably have wound up with something stupid involving DOS code pages and Fortran on VMS.

Streams are convenient and most CL functions expect them. They're also a really inefficient way of using BSD sockets. Especially when your Lisp implementation's character encoding isn't UTF-8. So if you want to write fast network code in Lisp you basically need to use the raw POSIX FFI functions and byte arrays.

Then you get into fun stuff like vectored I/O (which you may or may not be able to do depending on whether your GC moves arrays around), and event-based I/O (which people disagree as to how to do properly). But it's ok, because none of the existing socket libraries try to support this anyway, so you're back to calling POSIX functions via FFI.

(I gave a presentation about this stuff last year: http://carcaddar.blogspot.com/2009/11/november-montreal-sche...)

If your socket library is dependent on any third-party libraries, pray that the latest versions will not completely change their interface and make your library fail to compile. Then multiply all this by the half-dozen or so Common Lisp implementations people expect to be supported.

Just like Skid Row, this has been a recognized problem for many years (well over a decade for certain), and it's kind of hard to make it better. Flexi-streams over usocket is the best off-the-shelf solution, so you're probably doing the right thing.
That'll be why your vacation photos are in the lossless but patent encumbered JPEG-2000 format, rather than the less efficient, but patent royalty free JPEG?
Sun rooms & Window replacements Chapel Hill,Durham,
Southern Exposure Sunrooms is the most recognized and respected designer, manufacturer, and builder of products that bring the outside in to enhance your lifestyle, make your home more livable, and increase the equity in your most important investment.
Yes but only geeks know how to download that...
I just don't know what your product does for me as a user, at least not yet. As a serious bike geek, there's nothing I couldn't find at one of the better-stocked dealers, some of whom will provide very rich and specific data. I've spend stupid amounts of money on bikes, but they've all been carbon-framed, drop-handlebarred, with 20 gears, rendering your advanced search not nearly advanced enough.

Your tool could be incredibly powerful and useful for me if your database held information on weight, allowing me to shop on a dollars-per-gram basis. Comparison shopping features would be very useful and provide you with a substantial revenue stream in the form of affiliate fees. A database of parts and a wish list would allow me to configure a home-built bike or an upgrade.

If I were a casual cyclist, I can't see your site making me any less confused than the front page of the first cycle dealer I pick out of Google. If I found my perfect bike I'd still need to Google for a dealer that stocked it and potentially get tripped up by different model years, different specs etc. I don't really know what any of these terms mean, how many gears I would want or which material I want my bike made out of - I just know that I want a nice light bike for buzzing around town, or something plush and comfortable for pedalling round the park, or something that will carry my shopping. I see the mouseover popups that explain some of the terms, but they don't clarify things all that much and it seems like I'm stumbling around at random.

As it stands, I just don't know why I'd use your tool instead of going straight to a bike retailer. Your stem calculator is useful because it provides information I can't really find anywhere else. The rest of the site feels like you've built it because you can. I can't see the problem that you're trying to solve.
SAP serenely promises to be less bad
Google forced to use humans to support Nexus One
Putting a full set of electric buses on those streets would still leave a big chunk of that $700mil in the bank.
ChoColatY FaCts oN ChoColAte DAy
seems like a cheap rip-off of this: http://mindprod.com/jgloss/unmain.html
Milun Tesovic: How a Canadian entrepreneur Built a Multi-Million lyrics Site
ComScore Reports December 2009 U.S. Mobile Market Share
This is aimed at helping bike newbies become bike experts, although frankly it has been easier to gain traction with experts. I try to imagine it as a bike expert looking over your shoulder while you're looking at bike specs explaining why you might want or not want feature X (the online equivalent of what good salesperson might do at your LBS).

There's a bit of that in place here and there on the site (for instance, the nascent "undestanding" articles, or trying hovering over the frame or fork parts of a bike details page). I guess it needs to be more in your face.
However even Jim Weirich doesn't like Rake being called a "DSL".

I think Piers Cawley was dead on by calling things like this a Pidgin

refs:

* http://www.infoq.com/interviews/jim-weirich-discusses-rake

* http://www.bofh.org.uk/2007/08/08/domain-specific-pidgin
When you spend money developing a mobile app, you have to future proof it so that keeps up with the apps/sites of similar functionality, otherwise people will end going to your competitors (obviously that statement depends on your service, but its certainly the case in my sector). People with smartphones wont want to use a site that is so stripped down it would work well on a crappy handset.

We are sitting on the edge of a large explosion of smartphone devices and (potentially) users (with lots of Android handsets coming out this year). In the UK you can now get a Android powered device for £20 / month with a free handset. If you want a smartphone (and therefore probably interested in using the web), you will be able to afford one this year (at least in Europe!). This is going to be huge.

The iPhone is the standard they all will judge themselves against, and therefore the iPhone is the benchmark device.

I would suspect that the 50% smartphone / 50% other phone traffic statistic will be way higher towards smartphones in 12 months time.
You've got the quotation on the front page wrong, it's, "Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the human race.".
This is a deal breaker IMO. Pushing responsibility onto the application isn't going to work.

What was needed from S3 was something more like filesystem snapshots, where the cost is proportional to the amount of changed data. Or deduplication.

I was hoping S3 would get this right so I could just fling database backups at it and my bill would increase, but only a little. Maybe JungleDisk will work out a way so this can still happen.
If you're interested in weights, you should check out http://weightweenies.starbike.com/
Oops, fixed that, thanks for pointing it out.