skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am hacker who had made a fair amount or progress in learning graphic design.

Here are the things that helped me:

a) read as much as possible on graphic design. The non-designers design book is a great choice. But there are tons of articles across the web on fonts, spacing, coloring, contrast, etc.

b) pick out sites that you like (and that people with design sense like), and practice copying them exactly. If there is some button or styling you do not know how to reproduce, find a photo shop tutorial for how to reproduce it. As you do this, you build up a toolbox of great design techniques. Gradually as you get better and learn how to make pretty sites, your old designs will become embarrassingly deficient to your eye.

c) as you make sites try to solicit detailed feedback from people who know how to design.

Here are some thoughts on specifically why I think your pages do not look so hot:

For your home page: http://www.welton.it/davidw/

The text in your logo needs to be anti-aliased, the edges look jagged. The alignment and spacing of the menu links are off (the horizontal distance is not consistent). Again the text is not anti-aliased so it looks jagged. The spacing between the headers and the text feels off, the header should be closer to the paragraph it represents, not the paragraph above. The top of your bio pic is not aligned with the top of the paragraph. Finally, as a general point try and avoid pure black (#000) on pure white (#FFF). Using slightly grayer font ( #555) softens the page considerably. Also, don't use the default blue for links, use a better looking color. The Adwords look very tacky.

For Dedasys: http://www.dedasys.com/

Again, anti-alias the logo. Try being creative with the font too, maybe download a font set and try making the logo with a more unique font. Alignment of the menu items looks off, centering them does not work. The bullet points should be aligned left. Even better, use a custom designed bullet point rather than the browser default. The colors for the page overall are terrible. To get good colors, I often download a really nature picture, then use the eye dropper to pick out a couple colors. Doesn't always work, but can be quite useful.

Overall, great design is not about being glamorous versus simple spare. Its about getting all the little details right. The balance, color, alignment, etc. And it's about adding that extra little touch in a lot of places - the custom icon for bullet points, the creative logo.

Getting good just requires a loop of reading/study, practice, and getting feedback.
DRM issues aside, the game simply wasn't good enough for me to recommend it to anyone. The early play experience was decent, but I quickly found myself losing interest. In particular, once I got onto land and found myself facing MMO-style grind quests...yeah, that quickly drained my interest. I tried to stick with it, but couldn't.
Well I think this article has its place on HN because it questions values that are so consensual they are never discussed.
Ethics sure is a tough ground to venture on, the author goes there but not only, and makes a few points.
It would largely depend on how gracefully you degrade your service to those other 200 users. Take any game server with the concept of queues. They could (depending on the game, I know this isn't universal) take in more players than they allow at a time, but the quality would drop significantly. Instead, they give you a number, and say "You are number X in line. Please wait". While it isn't great, and is very frustrating for players, it is a decent solution.

On the other hand, you have Monopoly Street View, which launched with a massively higher number of players than they expected. The end result was a game that was playable for a very, very small group of people, and no one else even knew what was going on.

In general, you need to be able to balance the two. There should be a point where you have an absolute cutoff, no more users/requests beyond that, but you should also have a sliding scale. Of course a server only processing one request at a time will be faster, but you need to be able to degrade somewhat, while still providing good service.
If Colleges Worked Like Health Care
Willow Garage Creates Awesome Open Source Telepresence Robots
Nobody who is an expert on e-mail marketing would ever wander in here. They'd be too busy driving their Ferrari. I came in here by accident and came away with a prime example of why Hacker Newspaper doesn't link to comment threads. For every one intelligent comment by you, Patrick, there's a hundred by a bunch of people getting into bicker-y little soap operas about who voted for who. I study the Bobs and I can tell you they're all too busy for that shit. :-) I'm a little too busy for it myself.

Anyway, for the record, I will happily get any story on the front page of Hacker News for the right price. I'm not kidding, I've done it before, on purpose. I once set out to teabag Hacker News and get a story about my own balls on the front page. It only took me two attempts. My e-mail is gilesb@gmail.com and I am more than happy to take your ducats.
'jump to content' link

These are also really important for visually-impaired users. Every page should have one.
Rapid City, which is in the Black Hills Region of South Dakota is #10 lowest unemployment in the Nation. It's also the nastiest part of the state with gangs, crime, etc. I'm making no judgments, etc, just giving you some info.

However, It is IMHO no worse than the outskirts of Philadelphia which I visited for the first time as a high schooler. I won an essay contest and was sent to Valley Forge. I couldn't believe what a sh*thole Philadelphia was and the surrounding area. People sleeping on the streets inside the city. People sitting on rocking chairs on the porch of old ramshackle cabins outside the city.

Again, what do you make of that? People are the same all over. I'm really tired of this "people who live in X are Y" crap. Whether it's America vs China vs Europe or Red State vs Blue State. It's mostly bunk generated by our own biases.
"I'd like to noodle on that for a while"

Is that what the VC hipsters are saying these days? For some reason it just sounds like an idiotic saying to me. I'd probably give the person an awkward glance and then leave the area. A similar reaction as though they had just passed gas.
Thanks, that add-on can be hairy to get working.
FWIW, I did a diff of [one version of] the Hebrew: http://blog.purepistos.net/psalm-14-53-hebrew-diff.html

I took the text from here:

http://www.ancient-hebrew.org/hebrewbible/Psalms_14.html http://www.ancient-hebrew.org/hebrewbible/Psalms_53.html

and split it (more or less) into one word per line.

You'll notice that, in some cases, even when lines or sections are technically different (characters do not exactly match), there is a similarity of words (same roots).
I wish it were so, but I do not think it will be for some time. First, even if the technical means for remote work exist (and the means have existed for some time), inertia delays their adoption. Second, even if business switches to remote work, people will still move to business centers for a while, again by inertia. These two delays are considerable enough that I think it is more likely for us to see another paradigm switch than current trends coming to completion.

Near futureshock: change so fast we barely have time to comprehend current developments until the next shift.
Clear Climate Code. "To produce clear climate science software"
Thanks for the advice. One comment though: neither my personal site nor the DedaSys one has 'logos', just text, which Firebug says has the computed style: "Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif" at 48px. So I guess the issue is more one of "things don't render the same in all browsers - use an image if you want consistency". I don't care too much for my personal site, but the DedaSys one I'd like to look nice.
I agree with everything. We've been having to use a ton of hacks to make Rails work the way we want it to. I'm going to be ecstatic when I can use all of this goodness in production... Many thanks to everyone that made this release possible!
Once all the back-slapping and hyperbole has died down, I'd be interested to see a comparison
I tried it out, but it doesn't seem to be working with Mongrel/thin yet (the most popular web application servers) so I haven't been able to get a good picture yet.
It wasn't fun. It tried to be too many things, and none of them were sufficiently polished or really all that entertaining. I think the Real Time Strategy portion sucked the most.

Also, the game was very simple -- If it had more complexity it might have been more fun.
I think it's about 10% as fast as a high end GPU, and around 2x faster than a CPU.

Edit: That's flops not instructions, it could be faster than that if it's doing multiple flops per instruction. Also GPU's have significant limitations so it's not really possible to get those speeds on a generic workload.
In that case I'm guessing that you are personally responsible for a value-generating product and that you figure any extra profit the company keeps from this project that is above their average profit margin is money that should be going to you instead?

IOW, company had a net margin of 10%. Your project makes $1M/yr revenues and the company claims $200,000 revenue on that, a profit margin of 20%. You figure that they should reallocate half of that $200k to you so that you are paid commensurate with your contribution and they keep the remaining 10%?

That makes sense and I suppose the math is pretty easy in a smaller corporation or with a specialized product.
Indeed... So by clean you mean looking for usages of certain C++ features that should be avoided?

How can you "infer" the design only by looking at a pile of C++?
How Peyton Manning's obsessive-compulsive behavior makes him great
I have no idea how far they may go in censoring the Internet in Venezuela. It is possible though to selectively censor twitter. The China firewall is capable of doing so. It takes quite a bit of filtering horsepower, but its possible.
"... is free from the barriers to access or reuse ..."
I think all the valid points have been made; maybe it's time to flag this out of existence(meta).
Please remove the ads from your website. Those ads bring you SMALL income now, but they affect your FUTURE income strongly. Removing the ads is delaying gratification - you give up the amount they give you now so that in the future you will earn more (from the larger number of people who will bookmark your site to be read later)
The Next Leg Of The Housing Crisis In Five Simple Charts
Industrial-Strength Fungus
Want to succeed? Try failing
Always tough to be in the in-between stages. Providing an index is something we'll probably consider in the near future. We did a survey with our users and found that a fair number would like to have an index of our/their crawled data.
You can subscribe to Patrick's HN comment feed on searchyc. I highly recommend doing that (for a couple different people); that's how I read comments here for the most part.
There are many advantages to having your leg amputated
You raise in passing a very good point to consider when someone proposes grand social engineering plans: What does it mean for a given person?

It's all very well and good to promote "equality" uber alles, but that means that you're going up to a talented person and telling them that they will not be allowed to shine, or that there is no point as there will be no reward for it. Or to open another potential firestorm, when we talk about getting more women into computing that may very well manifest for a particular person as basically saying to her "Look, I know you think you want to study biology, but you really want to study computer science." (At the point where women are the majority of college students, I think there's a certain arrogance involved in telling this mass of women what it is they want to study.)

Basically what I'm getting at is that the micro can't be separated from the macro. If you want to tell your children they can be anything they want, you can't end up with a perfectly egalitarian society as a result. If you want a perfectly egalitarian society, you can't tell children they can be whatever they want because egalitarianism will do a lot of choosing for them. (Or perhaps rather you can tell them that, but you will be lying.) And that's just one example. A lot of other "things everyone believes" about the macro and the micro can't be reconciled, and trying to force it won't make things any better.

You can't have it all. Ever.
Ask HN: Should TechCrunch Reveal Who Paid For Posts?
So TechCrunch has been pretty transparent about this, which is admirable - and as other threads here and there have noted, it was quite clear who the offending intern was. He has since penned an apology http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1103069

But, in addition to 'An Appology To Our Readers' should TechCrunch reveal who got their play for pay? As dannyr noted 'It takes 2 to tango. If the intern was punished, the company that bribed him should also be punished.'

Edit - Here is another angle: http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/02/05/was-deleting-all-daniel-brusilovsky’s-posts-an-ftc-blogger-guideline-violation-bruhaha/
Oh, What a Lovely Standards War
And they don't let any app record phone calls anymore...

Are we surprised at their arbitrary nonsense anymore?
Not sure at all why this article is this particular forum (neither Hacking nor News is contained). It's socialist proselytism, laced with logical fallacies, pseudo-intellectualism, and bizarre non-sequiturs regarding societies vs. organizations.

It probably works on 16-22 year-olds.
Learn to wireframe and sketch out your websites ahead of time. It is much easier to try ten different layouts on paper than starting them in css. Some people like to mockup in photoshop, but I prefer paper. It is just faster for me.

Some people already mentioned "Non-Designers Design Book" - Robin Williams

Some other good ones are:

"Design of Everyday Things" - Donald Norman (Conceptual, but gets you in the right mindset)

"Dont Make me Think" - Steve Krug (Usability matters)

"The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" - Edward Tufte (he has a set of 4 books on information visualization, all of which are good)

One of the key concepts that I've taken from these books is that everything in a page has a visual weight so you must consider how everything in a page balances out together. Never add stuff just for the sake of adding it, because it will distract the user from the information they are trying to gather.

And most of all just build more websites and try to improve each one. Design is still a lot like programming. If you dont like the particular look of your site you can refactor it. I know you don't get the benefit of seeing it, but some of the best designed sites out there have gone through multiple iterations.
It looks like you require a user to create a login that is specific to tuneto.us in order to use it. If the goal is to share music via social networks, why not provide a way to use Twitter or Facebook to authenticate?
Old news: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1067584
Is Amazon Building a Superkindle?
Why can't people choose how to spend their own money?

People choose to live in more expensive homes. They choose stainless steel appliances, solid wood floors, etc. All things that make the houses of the 70's look quite paltry.

Again, the only reason we care in general is if we have to bail this people out because they chose homes they couldn't afford.

In the natural order of things (if there is such a thing), if a homeowner couldn't make their mortgage, house goes back to bank. Banks don't want houses (no profit) so they naturally try to avoid people who are likely to stop paying their mortgage.

Enter gov't interference, guaranteeing loans, etc and you have a huge distortion.

So we(as a nation/gov't) probably should't have gotten involved in the housing market in first place.
Clicking the "Browse" link takes me to "Browse Random Files". First, I don't believe that the uploaded songs should be thought of as "files." People want music, tunes, and tracks. "Files" almost makes me weary of having to download something.
Second, there needs to be some structure to browsing - by artist, genre, year, popularity, etc. Presenting a person with a few random tracks when your database has 1000s of them makes it difficult for users to find anything specific.

On profiles, the url pattern needs some work. You mention in your blog that you would like bands to say "check us out on Tune To Us." However, if they're uploading their songs and want people to hit their profile they'd have to say, "Check us out at Tune To Us slash profile slash view slash 2934." Perhaps adjusting to something shorter with more significance. A band/user should be more than just a number.

I believe your site's has potential, but it also needs some work to make it useful to the masses. Good luck with it. I'll keep an eye on where it goes.
Why is the startup culture so eager to forgive unethical behavior?
I am an avid amazon prime user.

If it's not at amazon, I doubt I'll buy it anymore.
Youtube costs two million dollars a day to run. If you are planning on hosting music, better sites like www.grooveshark.com already exist. Furthermore, everyone is fine with uploading their audio files to Youtube. All the lectures I listen to are through iTunes U along with all other audio files. Indie bands can distribute their music through iTunes using sites like www.cdbaby.com.

The url is horrible.

You want to be Youtube for lectures and music and have a social media aspect and be last.fm with a radio functionality and twitter integration. Your idea is too broad.

Apologies for being overtly negative. You seem to have your idea thought out so I thought I'd give you some perspective.
I don't believe this is alone because of location.

Building codes in cities are usually considerably stricter than those in the suburbs and ex-urbs, and meeting code itself requires more expensive design choices. Additionally, you're not going to build an inexpensively built, unnecessarily gabled raised ranch with a portico in the middle of a city, mostly because you wouldn't get approval because the aesthetics would conflict with the existing neighborhood.

Price and location are not independent. I looked a while back in an MA suburb where 2300 square foot homes were being sold around $300K. I looked into buying an equivalent-sized empty plot just outside that subdivision on which to build a 1150 square foot "atomic ranch", and I was looking more at $500-550K for something half the size on a similarly priced plot.
I'm shocked, a dictator wants control over information?
I wasn't trying to imply that unemployment is an overall drain, I was simply pointing out a countervailing factor. Overall, I really don't know how these various factors add up. I imagine the result varies widely from place to place, and it's a very difficult empirical question to answer.

In fact, ultimately I suspect that the variation from place to place is the exact opposite of what would be optimal.

As you say, Detroit auto workers are on the wrong side of every variable. I expect that they also vote for generous benefits. In contrast, a place with a hard working "get off your ass and get a damn job" culture will probably vote for stingy unemployment benefits even though generous benefits would not be (locally) harmful.

It's a bit of a flaw with a democratic system.

However, a proposed solution which addresses both aggregate demand and disincentives would be to make unemployment benefits as unpleasant as possible while still providing monetary benefits. For instance, we could create a social stigma around receiving unemployment benefits. Or we might require unemployed people to submit to weekly adversarial interviews about their job search at 3AM in a cold/hot building with no chairs.
Pecking order: What chickens teach us
One of the facts many people like the ignore is the fact that median income has stayed flat throughout the last decade.
Symbian makes its smartphone software open source |
I don't know what you're talking about, and I'm not entirely sure that you do either.
Adobe Flash on ARM processors runs the exact same swfs (with stricter memory limits, obviously) as Adobe Flash on the desktop. Adobe Flash 9 has also been on the Nokia N800 for a very long time, which is another ARM powered device.
Interview: HTML5 Standards Author Ian Hickson
Having had to resort to http://github.com/rgrove/larch recently to move a decade of email onto Google Apps because Thunderbird was putting new IDs on each moved message, I fully agree this problem is evil.

What version? This doesn't happen to me on 2.0.0.23
Some basic spec comparisons:

A Intel i7 900 series processor has a die size of 296 mm^2, with a process size of 45 nm.

The GA144 has a die size of 21 mm^2, at a process size of 130 nm, which is a couple generations old. If the i7 900 series was manufactured at 130 nm, it'd be 2488 mm^2.

So, it's smaller. A lot smaller.

I'd compare MIPS too, but that would be worse than useless, since it implies that it actually means something, which is far from the truth. Comparing raw instructions per second values between different architectures means nothing.

(Plus, Intel have passworded their datasheets!)

But it really doesn't look good. The Greenarray guys might manage some deep magic that makes their processor twice as fast per transistor, but it's still 118 times smaller. There's just not enough silicon!
Spreadsheets are not functional, they are spreadsheets. Try to re implement a complex spreadsheet in another language sometime and you'll see what I mean (hint, any change propagates through the whole sheet instantly).
we use it @ pitchfork for internal analytics and a few other projects that'll be live soon. im also using it (and mongo) to query retrosheet's game log data quickly and, well, sanely.
I can vouch for Philadelphia. I live right across the river from it. The city itself is really is a hole. There is rampant crime and the infrastructure is literally crumbling. North Philadelphia, is essentially a war-zone, and across the river in New Jersey, you have the urban decay of Camden and Trenton. And to think, all of this is in the most heavily populated region in the country, the Northeast megalopolis (Northeast megalopolis). Of course, there used to a great deal more manufacturing in those places as well--for instance the shipyard in Philadelphia.
Exactly. There is always a "deployed system limit" even in horizontally scaling DB layers as deployed with sharding etc.
Did the company do anything wrong really though?
As several people have pointed out, the core 'problem' is that it opens the door for less scrupulous activity in the future. I think we all have a mutual respect for the intellectual capabilities of the current HN'ers in regard to not blindly submitting or upvoting stuff.

However you can't ignore the fact that as HN gets more readers there's more skin in the game for startups. Getting your story to the front page could get you some of the momentum you need to attract that first angel investor, or to find your first seed group of alpha users. There are plenty of forces that will tend to corrupt the process as HN gains more readership.

We can't just consider the issue at hand, you must also consider the precedent this sort of thing sets and how that could evolve in the future.

Edit: I find it a tad ironic that the people saying this stuff isn't happening are also linking your comment in IRC and asking for it to be upvoted. Point being: it just rings false to 'lobby' for votes. Nothing personal, just an observational, I get that it is at least partly tongue in cheek.
50 Free UI and Web Design Wireframing Kits, Resources and Source Files
If those are the numbers, it seems to me that -while certainly an interesting concept- it has no future in practice, unless it is extremely cheap.