skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you need to organize the information
and a little bit of typography.

------

hecl is just fine. (looked only at the home page)

But squeezedbooks needs some work IMHO

* Login/Signup seems to be just thrown in there. There is another list of links just below it and ideally it should belong there

* "What is squeezed books" block also seems to be placed wherever there was space. First think about whether you actually need that block. Why can't the info go in about ?The answer to "What is squeezed books" seems more like a tagline than a real answer. You already have the tagline in the header which is remarkably similar

* Too many horizontal lines in the header. It would look better if you your menu list has a background color and looks like a horizontal strip.

* Mixing of intent. "Recent summaries" and "latest comments" are list of stuff. But you also have "Write a summary" styled the same way. That is a call to action. Ideally it should look and act like a button.

* Long text: The last comment is very long without paragraph breaks. It looks like user generated content, so you can't do much about it but limit the amount of text displayed and add a "Read more". This will make the comment section look more consistent.

* The latest comments is a a list of li. That is probably OK but you should definitely lose the bullets.

* Play around with font-size, line-height and different fonts. If you want absolute readability, see what the readability bookmarklet is doing. Don't copy blindly because the font-size set by it is pretty large for a normal website. But looking at your site, you could probably do with increasing font sizes.

My 2 cents. Not a designer but is trying very hard to learn
design.
I forgot to add, the best way to focus on design for me is to use photoshop (or gimp...whatever) create a mockup and get that 'perfect' before you implement your CSS. It is much easier to think about design separately from the method of the design (css, html), that way you can quickly test out several designs on paper, and pick the best one to implement.
Carroll Transportation, Inc | Limo NYC
Since 1968, George M. Carroll Transportation, Inc. has been the provider of choice for New York City, the tri-state area and the Hudson Valley. Family-owned and committed to fully serving all of your transportation needs.
and then the last person browsing on IE6.
Great advice. I have done something similar (save to delicious certain sites that I've loved)
http://delicious.com/philfreo/design+inspiration+amazing
Another addition:

My grandmother just played a Wii for the first time. Now my Grandmother has NEVER seen the thrill of video games since she first saw them 16 years ago. I mean she had no desire to play any whatsoever. When she saw me with the Wii she actually said "looks like fun, can I try?" and we played a game of bowling on the Wii. She didn't quite get the buttons but the motions she did and she had an absolute blast.

Its all about interaction with the computer, and letting people interact with it in a natural way. Geeks care about "multitasking" on a computer, non-geeks care about their computers always running at top speed for any application they use. They don't care that you can have 100 windows open at a given time, just the fact that 1 is open and works well and they'll close it an open another. How many people here enjoy the fact that the blackberry allows multi-tasking and you have to spend time worrying about background processes sucking up your cpu?

I think this is the reason why the chrome os has tons of potential.
What's easier, to build or to destroy?
When people say it is easier to destroy they mean to demolish, like blowing up a stadium or something. But obviously the original metaphor that claims an easy destruction is not intended for the case of complete destruction, at least not as it applies to our lives hopefully.
There are a few fundamentals I see lacking in your sites that would be a night/day improvement:

1. Grids

2. Typography

3. Thorough understanding of CSS

Both of your example sites are accessible but good minimalism generally emphasizes #1 and #2. Think Apple. You can find plenty of books on those two topics because they are so fundamental to good design.
Learn by example, just like you read someone else's code to learn a lang or framework, find sites that you like e.g. from http://www.designmeltdown.com/

Open a few up in the background, fire up photoshop and start getting inspired by the layouts and themes around you. Once you've done this a bit you'll find you suddenly have a much larger vocabulary of design elements to pull from.
Wow, I never thought about things from this perspective before. Quite a lot of things I find weird about American culture -- in particular the politics here -- make a lot more sense viewed through this lens.

I'm not sure I agree with the conclusions, but I do find the various points raised to be really thought provoking.
I found The Non-Designer's Design Book pretty useful.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321534042/

It provides a list of simple typographic and design rules to follow, and explains why they're important. As written on that Amazon page, they are contrast, repetition, alignment and proximity.

There's no reason why you can't have a simple site that also looks 'good'. There are some fundamental issues with your sites that wouldn't be fixed by merely making them more complicated. The lack of repetition and alignment in your sites particularly jump out at me (once you've read this book, you'll see mistakes everywhere).

Look at the Squeezed Books site. The "Home" link isn't aligned with the links below and above it. The text in the logo in the top left is nearly aligned with the "Log in" link, but is actually centered within the image. Even if people don't consciously spot it, it will likely feel 'off' to them. You've centered the "What is Squeezed Books?" text. Centering looks messy and feels weak. A good rule of thumb is to avoid it entirely until you know when it's appropriate to break the rule. As for repetition, I simply ask, how many different font styles do you count on that page? There are too many.
Ask HN: Do you need angel funding?
The last (and, thank God, only) time I was laid off, I was serious about getting a job even before my severance pay ran out. Damn good thing, too, because the search took me ten months.
This change, while dramatic, isn't necessarily a sign of problems. Over the past 35 years, and especially in the past 10--15 years, the US (and most of the rest of the world) has progressively urbanized; in many areas, it has become the norm for people to live in condos rather than detached houses.

I can't find any relevant data on the US Census website, but I strongly suspect that if you add duplexes, condominiums, etc. into the mix, you'll find that while houses have become relatively unaffordable, housing has not.
The form submits here: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AvP564P3eSROdGtnQ2N...
The thing is, I think even this really overstates what actually happens there. I'd guess maybe 10-20 votes on any given day to all of HN stem from things being mentioned in there. It's not like the channel actually controls the site. If it's a conspiracy, it's a pretty ineffective one.
That is just a PR. If something was named flash player 10.1 (assuming the same product as on x86) it is just a marketing move. ARM is a complete different architecture, so ti should be a complete different product.

I agree, that there is something which could be installed on certain devices to view some video clips, but to call it the same name as x86 product (read sse3 plus directx acceleration) is total bull crap.
EPIC Seeks Records on Google-NSA Relationship
Number stations
http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM

A solution to all our problems.
All of these meta-police postings are starting to get ridiculous.

I get that you're outraged because someone asked you to read or post something, or vote for something; but come on - surely you have a little more faith in the intelligence of the people here that you don't think that we're just going to blindly submit things because someone has asked us to.

This sort of submission doesn't accomplish anything except starting arguments. Even if a thousand people vote this up, nobody is going to stop asking other people to vote for their submissions, nobody is going to stop emailing people from out of the blue and asking for them to submit stories, nobody is going to stop posting links to their submissions from other sites with a plea to upvote it.

Instead, the top story is now about how someone was once again done wrong by the dark and terrible forces of the internets, conspiring to destroy the very fabric of Hacker News.

It's the sort of story where everyone can weigh in, because there's no barrier to entry for having an opinion. You can already see the race to the right margin starting, and this has only been up for 2 hours.

Good content has its way of making it to the front page. I can generally tell when I submit something if it's going to make it to the front page; I haven't had to ask anyone for any votes and yet they get there.

I guess I'm a little irritated about the insinuation that we don't have the capability to make decisions as to whether or not we vote or submit something. The suggestion that we can't is just getting old.
Semi-bizarre ruminations about why kids from the midwestern U.S. leave home when they grow up and don't come back. As someone who did just that many years ago, I can sum it up in a much shorter way: because there is nothing going on there.

Maybe I could have succeeded at the local meat packing plant, or in my local 4H club, or at the smokestack plant down the road but I doubt that I or anyone else would want to be told, as we look out at the world of possibilities, that someone had decreed that this is what we were stuck with for our life's opportunities.

A kind of reverse snobbery atypical for the midwest (where people are generally as friendly and easy-going as one might imagine). Very strange.
Feds Worry iPad Could Clog Wireless Networks
For the YouTube deprived, here's a text based interview talking about this concept...

http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/bez0int-3
This is a constant issue for me. I get excited by good design - it scratches a purity/elegance/zen itch in me. Can recreate it? No chance. I've even had one of my sites defined by one HN user as "...like a domain parking page".[1]

To loosely paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart: I can't define good design but I know it when I see it. [2]

The reality is I need to engage professional designers earlier in the process but, being self-delusional, I'll always give it a bash anyway.

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=902408
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
1. Show me url where I can get JRE for ARM-linux-gnu.

2. Show me #ifdef ARM_XXX in JRE source code.

Thank you!

btw, Clojure is a brilliant marketing move - an attempt to reuse existing JVM and the java class library to create something which looks like lisp. That's why there are so much hype - one buzzword and one magic world were put together. =)
Rails 3.0 beta features merger with Merb framework
Does that mean that she was the face of Bo?

I'll get my coat.
For a self-professed arch-conservative Catholic monarchist's take on the equality vs. freedom debate I recommend "Liberty or Equality" by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn: http://blog.mises.org/archives/006326.asp
In that case I'm not sure I would worry about it too much. You could spend time doing better designs or you could spend that time coding. A site should carry it's own weight. If the site is making money and could do better with a redesign, then I would think about hiring someone for that, otherwise, ignore the haters. ;)
Some day they'll post the code.
> If it's a conspiracy, it's a pretty ineffective one.

That's what they want you to think.
The fact that a company - any company - is not posting material on its own behalf suggests that it is attempting to rely the poster's reputation to get it promoted rather than pure the merit of the article quality.

I don't particularly see anything wrong with this as long as there is a degree of transparency and the poster adds an initial comment to the effect that:

Bob from example.com asked me to post this and since it is clearly neat, I have.

or

Bob from example.com asked me to post this and since he paid me $500, I have.

... as appropriate.
Installing Fuzzyfinder_textmate: Textmates' Cmd+T in Vim
Well, I don't think they'll be able to selectively censor twitter, They'll either have to completely ban twitter or live with it.
When the premise is that flyover country is rotting because all the really smart people leave and never come back? I'm bailing out of the article.

If anything, I believe high-speed internet will give rise to a new agrarian society based on technology workers.
learn C.R.A.P.

* Contrast
Elements that aren’t the same should be very different so they stand out, making them “slightly different” confuses the user into seeing a relation that doesn’t exist. Strong contrast between page elements allows the user’s eye to flow from one to another down the page instead of creating a sea of similarity that’s boring and not communicative.
* Repetition
Repeat styles down the page for a cohesive feel â€” if you style related elements the same way in one area, continue that trend for other areas for consistency.
* Alignment
Everything on the page needs to be visually connected to something else, nothing should be out of place or distinct from all other design elements.
* Proximity
Proximity creates related meaning: elements that are related should be grouped together, whereas separate design elements should have enough space in between to communicate they are different.

...and ask girls for feedback. they're better with color for some reason.
Long but worth the read, because insightful, well researched and written.
It questions a value that can be so deeply rooted in our paradigms that i got a bit of a "shock" myself.
I love to read something so refreshing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_Revolution
Small apartments in a large city often cost more than a house in the suburbs.

http://www.condo.com/ForSale/United-States/Virginia/22202

vs

http://www.homes-for-sale-by-owner.info/5223.htm
I don't know if that's a good excuse because most of the competitors are students.

But yeah, programming competitions are not a high priority for US universities.
Reporters don't compare jobs to population growth
Only if every part of your system is perfectly horizontally scalable. There are very frequently some singleton aspects of a system, perhaps the most common example being a single central data store with a fan out of web servers. The web servers scale by adding more, but it's an architectural change to add a second DB.
It's not about 'haters' (the negative comments aren't nasty, just "I don't care for it"), it's about wanting to improve what I do. Sure, I'm not going to go out and start working as a designer (that would be a fast path to starvation), but I'd like to do better, and am casting around for ways to do so.
And there I was thinking we actually made a difference some of the time...
Also, now there is a story about the site on HN. Congrats, free PR. Leaving it alone would have been better.
Have you read Jakob Nielson's work? - http://www.useit.com/

Designing Web Usability would be a good start - http://www.useit.com/jakob/webusability/

And Homepage Usability is good for screenshots with examples - http://www.useit.com/homepageusability/

I would take what he says with a pinch of salt at times, as he can be very metric based. Sometimes it helps when to know to bend the rules. I remember for years he was very strict about hyperlink colours insisting that they should always be blue for unvisited and purple for visited.
In Latin America, the probability that a publication is left-leaning is slim. Except in Cuba, of course.
I'll give this a shot.

I'm expecting you don't want to spend tons of time on graphics and the likes, but you don't need to in order to drastically improve your sites as they are now.

Your typography definitely needs to be improved. A lot of people say they can't tell when they need to fix their typography, so here's an easy test: paste a chapter of a book you are reading into your template, and see if you can stand to read it there, instead of in the book. The shorter the amount of time you can stand, the worse your typography is.

As for colors, first pick a primary color. This'll usually be some pleasing shade of blue, red, or maybe green. Draw some blobs and lines of different size and thickness, and see how the color holds up. Then pick a complimentary background color. For example, when I use red as a primary color, I don't set it against a white background. The red will appear too jarring. Instead, I use a pale cream or very faint yellow. Your background doesn't have to be white, but it should be very light so that your text still shows up well. The point of having an off-white background, though, is that it changes the eye's perception of your primary color, and makes it look like it 'fits'. Test out your primary color again on your background color, and tweak the two.

I think, actually, your color choice is already good on your personal site, but it is being marred badly by two things.

The first is the navigation. I know that the two leveled effect is on purpose, but what it looks like to the user is that you had one very long navigation bar that wrapped around. The structure of this navigation is poorly conveyed here. The second navigation strip is supposed to be "under" David, so to speak, but you don't convey that at all in your design. Here's an extremely quick and dirty example of what might be better: http://mkbunday.googlepages.com/2010-02-05-091156_1024x600_s... Note you still wouldn't want "Padova Chronicles" taking up two lines.

Also, please, please remove the ads from the top of the page. The whole "above the fold" thing is overrated... however, above the fold is where the user develops their impression of your site. When I see those ads right in my face, before I've even gotten to read the first paragraph of text my immediate association is with a cheap Yahoo Sites page.

You might want to ask yourself how much that ad revenue is really worth. My guess is that it's not exactly a significant portion of your income, and you would be better off removing the ads and having a more favorable professional appearance.

Minus the ads, the site looks a lot more favorable already. http://mkbunday.googlepages.com/no_ads.png Look at how front loaded the content is! The user can get right to the point, and read about you, rather than some really not that relevant ads!
I find the drama tedious. There's already enough of it in the world. Why hype more?

This site is very simple. Post article/comment. Get feedback. Post more. Why make it more complicated than that?
Net trick: Inkscape svg files can be rendered directly by most modern browsers.
Bogus.
Lowest unemployment is in "flyover" country:
http://www.bls.gov/web/laummtrk.htm

These parts of the country have been booming for 10(20?)+ years.

Yes, the parts of the country he visited (especially the Black Hills) are full of the same crappy towns that have always been there. The Black Hills region, although naturally beautiful, is covered by a blight of ramshackle old buildings and trailer homes. And so it has been for some time.
Microsoft to patch 17-year-old computer bug
Yes. I know "Trusting trust". And the backdoor will be in the original source code, and after it has passed into the binary you get rid of it in the source.
Looks like it's not just me... http://www.buzzle.com/articles/color-blindness-facts.html

More men are color-blind
I highly recommend the book "The Principles of Beautiful Web Design" from Sitepoint. Get the basics right first.
Read Michael Pollan's "In Defense of Food" for a more nuanced look at the relationship between "technology" and food. One of the reasons "food" is becoming cheaper is due to eliminating much of the nutrition and through ignoring the externalities of environmental costs.

The improvements in health care seem to be offset more and more by our poor food, sedentary lifestyles, and fractured relationships.

Maybe technology has made it cheaper to build a house, but that seems a wash as the dominant cost of housing is the property on which it is built.

In general, yes, technology improves our lives. But can not solve every problem in and of itself, and can exacerbate underlying problems if misused.
I did the same thing. However, it was more out of fear what the DRM would do to my system than an unwillingness to have any DRM. Granted, I heard the game sucked, but I would have still gotten it if the DRM had not had such a bad reputation.
About the only thing that could have improved it would have been a Feynman voice-over.
You don't understand how recruiters work. Imagine a candidate, you. Let's say you want a $100/hr job. Let's say there are no such jobs that recruiter knows of at the moment, and they know (statistically) that such a job shows up once a month, on average. However, they have a bunch of contacts that offer $80/hr jobs. Do you think they will wait for a month looking for your $100/hr requirement? Hell no. They will try to convince you to take a lower paying job, and then switch to the next candidate. In the end, they make more money by selling more recruits rather than just a few recruits with higher salaries.
I was afraid that the usefulness of HipHop would be as limited as is regarding that it's not an easy feat to create a PHP-to-C++ compiler that handles C library dependencies (which PHP has a lot!) well.

BTW It was the second time in a week that there was a product that created incredible buzz in HN community without anyone able to trying out the product (the other was iPad of course) and I was amazed at the amount of well-informed opinion based on such little information.

PS. This blog is a good reading if you are interested in Facebook architecture, scaling and design issues in general.
"The population of the world keeps increasing."

This may not always be true. In rich countries, the problem seems to be avoiding population decline, not over population. As more people become wealthy, we might achieve some steady state of population.

There is still the problem, of course, of even a stable population exhausting non-renewable resources (fossil fuels, for example).
This compares the median income of 2001 with the median house prices of 2008... while no doubt it illustrates a point, the numbers a likely off.