skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's definitely a problem with the readability of the graphs in particular, and with some of the sentences in the summary.
Thanks for the helpful feedback. I keep hearing positive things about usertesting.com and today our team decided that we're definitely going to incorporate it into our testing plan.

However, easyusability.com has a much more powerful call to action and seems to be a newer competitor to usertesting.com. I'm excited to try both.

100% on having the whole team see the videos live. Makes the necessary changes obvious to everyone without getting egos involved.
It's fairly easy to deactivate or delete your account. Account > Account Settings > Deactivate Account. To preempt any objection that you want to be able to use Facebook, you just _also_ don't want them to analyze your status updates: that's nice, but they are not willing to offer you service on those terms. I guess it's fine to complain about it in hopes that something will change, but the winds are not blowing in that direction, Mr. Quixote.
This is the key to it. Technology development isn't the point of an investment in a company like this (though some new tech will be needed and created). You need to find editors, create partnerships, advertise (as dirty a word as that may be) and provide runway to iterate. A question site on graphic design might be different than one on cooking and even more different from one on the finer points of SQL. I do think the land grab comparison is fair. If you can get into the verticals quickly and establish a lead in content it is that much harder for the next guy.

I like 37S, but I don't get the compulsive need to criticize anyone that takes funding or sells their company as a sell out.
"... Did Facebook ask me if I would be happy if they did this kind of data-mining on my status updates? ..."

Good question. You may not have realised you gave Fb the rights to "infer" from their server logs & interactions when you created your account. However there is a solution. Get back your right to say who can peek into your server logs by owning your own servers again. Listen to Eben Moglen and his "Freedom in the Cloud" talk to understand how ~ http://www.isoc-ny.org/?p=1338
LA Ruby Conference: Luigi Montanez on Civic Hacking
> 37 Signals is a small business.

Are they really a small business? I have the impression that they have a large user base - and IMO a better set of products than Stack Overflow.
Right, that's why the hope is that politicians will put aside their irrationality and do what is best for the people, even if the people don't want it. It's a pie in the sky idea because it would require politicians (and those who would replace the ones who get voted out due to popular ire) have moral backbone and courage to do unpopular but right things.
1 in 1 people die.

i'm leaving this comment here and not on his blog because, while true, its not very graceful.

death is a part of life for all of us, and yet we cant process it. i don't blame him.
This is a fantastic development for people who want a general purpose linux on netbooks.

I've tried several times to use Moblin as my primary OS, and it's just too half-baked and incomplete at this point. The browser is buggy, and email lacks a lot of basic features. The network services are also unfinished or missing. The calendar doesn't sync with google calendar, there's no facebook integration, there's no address book synchronization. There's also a lot of missing UI niceties.

What's frustrating about is that all of the infrastructure is there to have those things. They've developed a nice abstraction layer for hooking into web services, as well as a great UI toolkit for building slick-looking applications on a small screen. They've also got awesome power management, and an amazingly fast boot process. Moblin makes your little atom-based netbook feel amazingly responsive.

My hunch is that Moblin has been building things from the 'bottom up', i.e. power management, networking, display drivers, and tools. Maemo seems to have the opposite approach, where they have a lot more UI polish and finished applications, but they might not have the robust underlying infrastructure code.

If both companies play to their strengths, then we might get a pretty nice linux for small screens. If that happens, I'll jump ship from Ubuntu in a heartbeat.
A reason I am not optimistic about crime in the USA is the continuing escalation of so-called smaller issues. With crime, "a stitch in time saves nine." Catching a small incident and having the person change behavior leads to enormous changes over time.

For an example that many consider trivial, cursing is at an all time high. Cursing's purpose in life is to convey and share anger: it is not conducive to high quality, cheerful life. There is research in psychology that shows that expressing anger leads to more, not less, of it. I actually consider quitting HackerNews entirely due to the poor quality of auto-removal of cursing in titles, text, and remarks. I am very repulsed by the ruby community for the same reason. For exaple, ruby sub, an email client has an homepage that features cursing. I just feel ick and don't even want to try it any more.

A second glaring example, imho, is vandalism. Nowadays, when I accosted a vandal in NYC, he gave me the NY Times' justifications for his crime. He said "it's art!" and "I'm black and I'm angry!" He has absorbed all the anti-capitalist myths; I am sure he never read Atlas Shrugged! The amount of property destruction is enormous. That is crime and that is way way up.

In some ways, the world is getting alot better: Ayn Rand's philosophy is being developed and publicized. Those who uphold her ideas of independence, rationality, etc, are very civilized. Thus it's a race between her ideas and those of Kant.
"... It's fairly easy to deactivate or delete your account. Account > Account Settings > Deactivate Account. ..."

Is all the data deleted? cf: Eben Moglen ‘Freedom in the Cloud’~ http://www.isoc-ny.org/?p=1338
Stress Testing Capacitive Touchscreens (Droid vs iPhone)
If you read carefully, the more jobs situation was 40 years later. This means that at least for some time, unemployment was higher as a result of the automation. The thing to remember is that you can't mothball workers, you cant say "hey dont eat or live untill the job creation curve from this new tech catches back up, you'll be in demand again". So while the net effect of automation is more jobs, it still doesn't make the immediate (within a workers lifetime) impact necessarily better.

Another thing the article mentions is a 4400% increase in the number of jobs. This is not population growth, (it is only 3 generations assuming child labor), so where did those people come from? Were they more skilled workers earning good wages replaced by automation? Were they unskilled workers whose previous jobs had been automated away (ditch diggers and the like)?

In one case you have a net loss in liquidity in the hands of people, this is the net equivelant of lost jobs. In the other case you have a potential gain in liquidity. Once again, not making a case for or agains the automation, just discussing if the employment is equivelant.

To use your analogy its not like me asking if we should continue with the rugby at all. It's more like me saying "Hey guys, I know that the mechanism is different, but can we also look at the fact that 100 more teams in the cup might dilute the quality of play?"
A fundamental change due to industry: before modern education, it was the teacher's fault if the student didn't learn. You don't tell the local nobleman that his son and heir did a C- job. Today, we see education as an opportunity for students to demonstrate how hard they've worked, usually as part of the job-qualification process. Actual learning is still important, but secondary. (Will this be on the test?)

Democratic credentialism is probably better than elitist humanism, but in a niche-and-network economy education has to be applicable and customizable. If it won't fit in a few blog posts, today's internet has a hard time teaching it.

-nb-- Education's medieval structure died in the late 1800s when the ancient religious universities (Oxfords, Harvards) swapped it for the PhD model. Some of them were still pushing the geocentric universe at the time.

The PhD developed to meet the research staffing needs of the German chemical industry.
Having been developing on a high traffic site for a while, these things are very on point. We always joke that our inputs are superpositions: all combinations of inputs are possible into our site, due to the sheer number of people visiting a day, and the # of crazy people who will attempt to inject nonsense into their POST requests.
It's kind of shocking how bad the Motorola Droid is. They're finally releasing the Droid in Canada this week, and now I'm wondering if I should wait for something more accurate.
I think they actually make an attempt to do so when you delete (not deactivate) your account. However, this goes beyond the promises they make to you in their Terms of Service and beyond, in my opinion, any moral duty they have to their users.
I got the impression that Joel just wants to give the big risk venture with a big payoff for success a go. As he says Fog Creek is build the safe slow constant growth way and he always has that to fall back on.
Considering that they're successful taking that route, though, they do have some first-hand experience to back up their claim that you can be successful without going the VC/startup route.
Small business in the sense of few employees and little in the way of capital assets.

Just because you're making money hand over fist doesn't mean you're implicitly a "big business".
That's just as bad or worse, if a tech savvy user can come to this kind of erroneous conclusion.
Heh. My "when Linux was bad" story was when I was 14 and trying to bootstrap mkLinux for PPC on my PowerBook 1400. It had a problem that whenever an interrupt would happen close to an HD ACCESS, the text {IDE TIMEOUT} would crawl across the screen until you pressed the debugger interrupt switch, after which it would continue on. This meant that any form of input while it was accessing the HD would result in the interrupt switch being hit, or even transferring data from the CD to the HD would take for-ev-er.

This meant the normally 45-minute install process turned into about two-and-a-half-hours of babysitting the poor laptop. I also became very conscious of memory/swap usage early on, so I had to use a rather light window manager (I think I settled on AfterStep as a decent combination of features and light-ness). I also learned how to tune X11 color requirements, since only 256-color mode was supported.

A good way to cut my teeth initially. Later on I got my parents to purchase a 7200/75, which was the cheapest Mac I could find that would run the official Linux/PPC distribution. That box carried me a hell of a long way - used it as a print server and as the family NAT router, compiled my own kernels for the first time, even wound up doing a Linux From Scratch build at some point.

Good times, those.
A healthy dose of inflation?
Your point about DHH having no experience with VC is somewhat valid (they don't think Bezos counts), but your point about "small business" versus "startup" is completely devoid of meaning. You don't need to take VC to be a startup, and you don't need to exit inside of 5 years to be a startup either.

An uncharitable summary of your argument: 37signals has been too successful to know what they're talking about.
It appears, at a minimum that Clojure, Scala and Kawa Scheme are known to work on Android. It's also possible, as I understand it to compile to native code for everything but the UI if you prefer.
Color e-reader uses butterfly-based technology to save power
Adobe joins Linux-phone group to spread Flash
In an effort to spread its Flash technology as widely as possible, Adobe Systems has joined the LiMo Foundation, a group devoted to putting Linux on mobile phones.
Adobe's Flash Player is ubiquitous on computers, but the company's Flash Lite effort hadn't met with much success extending the programming foundation to mobile phones. With a new generation of relatively powerful smartphones on the market, Adobe is trying again with a full-featured but lightweight version of the computer software, Flash Player 10.1, due in the first half of 2010.
Flash is missing from the highest-profile smartphone, Apple's iPhone, though, and the upcoming iPad, a situation that has left Adobe unhappy. By joining LiMo, it gains a new avenue for corporate alliances, including some big names in the mobile phone market. Other LiMo members include LG Electronics, NEC, NTT Docomo, Orange, Panasonic, Samsung, SK Telecom, Telefonica, Vodafone, and Verizon Wireless.
Adobe said its Creative Suite programming and authoring tools for Flash will be able to create Flash programs for LiMo devices, a move it said will simplify building Flash into those devices.
"Bringing the Flash Platform to LiMo opens up a significant opportunity for Adobe to further its goals of open standards and multi-screen interoperability of rich mobile content," said David Wadhwani, general manager of Adobe's Flash business.
The San Jose, Calif.-based company announced the move in conjunction with the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona.
It may be that DHH's last point (taking money off the table) is the crucial element here. I.e., this could be an easy way for Joel and Jeff to get their second or third homes without destroying their baby and their darling developers at Fog Creek.
Why Does The iPhone Still Have The Best Touchscreen In The Industry?
What is your concern?
I liked some aspects of 3, although it didn't really feel like the same game. I watched a couple of multiplayer replays and the way people mass units in this game makes Starcraft look like Warcraft 3 by comparison.
Sounds like a need for more transparency on swaps and swap accounting, not more Bank bashing..
>Some of them were still pushing the geocentric universe at the time.

OT: Have you heard of Relativity? What's wrong with choosing an arbitrary reference point to be local.
I concur with Matt. In addition, it is going to take you a long time after you turn AdWords on to the point where a) your account has built enough history to get decent pricing and b) you have gotten good at writing copy/landing pages for your niche. Start learning early for cheap. After you find the magic, pour money at it.

I think I was on AdWords for, crikey, over a year (at $1 ~ $3 a day) before I figured out that if I took advantage of Conversion Optimizer I could profitably exploit remnant inventory on the Content Network. Since that is widely held to be total drek (and priced to match), I do pretty decently.
Where do you get the idea that stackoverflow doesn't make money? It appears to make enough money to pay for its own hardware, its bandwidth costs, the salaries of several employees, and more.
Ask HN: Where do I report HN bugs?
I came across a strange bug on news.ycombinator.com earlier today that I'd prefer to report privately in case it draws undue attention from people who want to exploit it maliciously.

I apologize if this has been asked before elsewhere, but I couldn't find any pointers by searching or reading the guidelines and FAQ pages. How can I inform the site administrator(s) about this?
free to own much of the resources/land/factories/IP

One of these things doesn't belong.
Maybe I'm a cynic, but I wouldn't presume Joel has great answers for these questions. As DHH says in his post, he may just want to capitalize on the service's early success and take some money off the table.
Entrepreneurs turn to 401(k)s to fund start-up businesses
"Some of them had refused to accept a heliocentric solar system before until that time."

Are you saying that's unclear? I still find it hard to believe, so I can't tell.
I don't even think Starbucks needed the culture, except for branding. If they make it into your morning ritual, you -- one individual customer -- are worth $1,000 a year. Every store they drop down is just another vending machine to recruit $1,000-a-year walking bags of money. This gives them expansion imperatives similar to a bank's desire to situate branches, or a cell phone company's desire to site stores.
Am I the only one disappointed that this link didn't go to Fermat's Last Theorem?
This was done 10 days ago:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1103801
There's a difference between "first mover" and "first to market". First movers enter a market space first. First to market means that a company has launched an actual product within that market space. Startups all the time get funded with "just an idea," and even generate "buzz" or whatnot, but the real winners tend to be those who have their niche well-planned enough to effectively utilize those traditional market-force "forces" to their advantage. There are five of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_forces
Start With Why - How To Run A Better Business & Live A Better Life
Wow, so much great startup and business knowledge in one place.
Frameworks are just reusable classes, this is most valuable when they're your own reusable classes. Coupled with something like less or sass to extend CSS to allow mixins, having parameterized reusable classes is awesome.

The problem with other peoples frameworks is, well... they're other peoples frameworks. Develop your own and you'll love it. Such frameworks allow you to factor your CSS and eliminate repetition and patterns you use often.
Excellent question, and thanks for the suggestion. I'm going to look into it!
Disable auto-capitalization for iProducts.
StackOverflow getting VC funding is a recipe for disaster
How to publish to Twitter and Facebook from Google Buzz
Linux has totally arrived. As someone who occasionally gets asked to help fix friend's computers(as I'm sure many HN'ers do) my latest approach is to just recommend linux and then just do the install for them. Everything works out of the box, old computers breathe new life (and speed) and with the addition of a few proprietary fonts (which come with Adobe Acrobat Reader) the OS looks BETTER than OSX. I like Kozuka Gothic Pro.

I think that the pretty OSX apps are mostly a myth. The only one I really want is Skitch and I'm doing OK without it.
Everyone always assumes that the value of gold isn't based in its intrinsic properties. They don't see that gold:

* Is easy to arbitrarily divide
* Is scarce
* Can't be inflated
* Is easy to transport

These are the properties that make it valuable as a currency, not some irrational desire for shiny objects.
I guess I am trying to find out whats HN's definition of small business. Not sure why I am getting downmodded.
Send an email to pg@ycombinator.com
Please don't parrot Nack's talking points.

Flash on Windows has only had hardware accelerated video decoding for about 6 months, on minority hardware, in beta versions of Flash 10.1. It hasn't been released yet. No cellphones with full Flash players have been shipped yet either, despite breathless press releases going back years.

Unaccelerated Flash on Windows handles video decoding just fine, and has for years, with no special hardware or APIs available. It's squarely Adobe's problem.
In my opinion, not having a unified package management system (as Windows and OSX do not) is a serious usability and security bug.

How many users accidentally install malware b/c they don't know exactly the proper workflow for installing security updates. Many older users (60+) are fearful of installing any security update b/c they have heard that that's how viruses get there.

For OSX there are some alternatives (mac ports and that new git based one) which look awesome, but it's not the same as having it fully integrated into the OS and automated security update notification and/or install for all apps.

OSX is not immune to the security bug -- as it gains in popularity people will begin writing viruses for it and it'll be the same windows nightmare all over again.
Jonathan Schwartz Blog
there is a difference between Demand Media and StackExchange...howto sites get linked to, Q&A sites do not. eHow is a PR8 site, while SO is a PR6 site. Original content will always outrank Q&A.

I covered it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1128146
Half a Billion Dollars to Dispose of a Ton of Material Worth $4600 Per Pound?
Statistics for Programmers (part 3)
One thing that's bugging me about Android right now - there's no widely accepted location standard for storing data on the SD card. Some of the "in the box" apps put all their data inside the Android directory, but others use "data", some use the Java-style reversed DNS (com.example.App), others use the same but with dashes (com-example-App), and others again just dump their guts into the root directory (espeak-data, amazonmp3) etc.

It all reminds me of DOS days when people would install their apps in subdirs of the root directory, or even worse, neophytes who installed their apps in the root directory itself. It really makes me feel like I'm living in the wild west when I put files on the SD card - the data might be safe today, but what if some app tomorrow happens to choose the same directory name?

There definitely needs to be more guidance given here. A harder line like, store app-specific data in Android/data/com.example.YourApp, media of kind x in <here>, etc. would be very helpful.

For example, it's the blind leading the blind here:

http://androidforums.com/updates-cupcakes/5930-definitive-an...

And calls for clarification go unanswered:

http://osdir.com/ml/AndroidDevelopers/2009-08/msg00721.html
I too am wondering the HM definitions. Big/small business versus startup. What is the definition of startup? I don't understand why businesses that go for VC funds have the monopoly on the term "startup".
I think the one thing that SO is missing is one of their claimed features, being a "community wiki". If they could somehow leverage that content in more of an article format then they could have that "article site" aspect. Right now they just look Q&A.
A favorite blog I read, Free Range Kids, follows this trend in parenting and attempts to counter it.

http://freerangekids.wordpress.com/

The dangers to children from very mundane sources and activities seem just as exaggerated as the dangers from crime. The trend has been developing for a long time, too. When I look at the sort of stuff my dad got to play with as a kid in the 50's, I'm downright jealous.
True, but having experienced both I can say that there's a big difference between someone in their 80s dying - we expect that, to some degree - and someone in their 30s or 40s dying way before they should.
That is more or less what I meant by culture: to become a part of a city/office/industry/person's culture. The culture was forming and if they didn't become part of it, some other cafe would have been the place where you go for your morning brew, George and Jenny meet on Tuesdays or the theatre school people go to use the internet.
I know that this is 37 Signal's thing. They like to be hip, contrary and different. They take a popular post, and they take an opposing view, stir the pot and raise a ruckus. After all, they are "rock stars". But really, David?

Why do you care what Stack Overflow does? Why do you presume to know more about Stack Overflow's business needs than Joel? Why do you presume to know more about the VC funding process and it's outcomes than Joel? You've run a successful business and you manage a great open source framework. That's to be commended. You chose to not take VC, and you have been successful. Congratulations. (We'll ignore that bit about Bezos investing in you for now.)

But, there are hundreds if not thousands of successful software companies that have indeed taken investor money. Presumably, it was the right decision for them. Why do you insist on criticizing those decisions and put people down for those decisions?

When I worked as an ER nurse in the inner city, we had an expression for this behavior: "Up in someone else's kool aid, not knowing what the flava is".
If people are scared, perhaps it makes their lives worse.
Tell HN: A book about Twitter that isn't full of bullshit.