skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's the first time I start using a productivity app instantly. It's simply beautiful!

A couple of suggestions/bug reports:

- the Manage users button is hard to find and nearly invisible

- After 5 minutes of clicking around looking for the button the project completion percentage went from 18% (correct) to 0%. It seems to be 18% when the page is loading and then immediately goes to 0%
I like her quote on this page: http://jessicahische.com/spendstoomuchtimeinternetting/?p=15...

The work you do while you procrastinate is probably
the work you should be doing for the rest of your life

The fact that she uses unreadable urls and text-images argues strongly that she's right about NOT hiring her to design web pages.

She writes well though and, once you print her work, it's beautifully readable.
I think that one of the keys is to incorporate the user's desires with some of your own special sauce to make what hey want. Basically give them what they want, but add a little to it, or give it a cool twist. If you constrain only to their desires you end up with all kinds of bad things because users often have trouble articulating what they want.

Agile methodologies seem to do an excellent job of targeting users. By moving from a monolithic development and release cycle to a faster set of more limited releases, you can get feedback from the users much more quickly. Instead of spending a year building feature x with all of the possible sub-features you can think of. Spend a month building a rudimentary form of it, and get users to provide feedback on it. It's amazing how guiding the users in this way gets you excellent feedback, plus it makes the users feel empowered, like they are helping design the software.
Google messed with email. Email is one of our oldest electronic media; we all know how it is supposed to work. Changing the default privacy rules of your email inbox and address book without asking you very clearly and explicitly in advance is... well, sabotage. Also: Bait and switch.

Facebook is a sandbox. People kind of understand that. I sign on to Facebook knowing that (a) I don't know for sure what it is; (b) its inventors aren't quite sure what it is, either; (c) we're going to find out by trial and error. Whereas I sign on to GMail because I want a personal email system, which despite all its flashy trappings retains the underlying semantics of email. If I wanted a social network, or another sandbox, I'd have signed up for one. And I'm not sure anyone wants a thing that impersonates a personal email system for a decade and then decides to become something else overnight without warning or clarity.
This is a good match, especially if the designer is willing to get their hands dirty in the code, or go out and do sales, at least a little. Otherwise, I think designers will be sitting on their thumbs a lot once most of the initial design is in place.

That's not to say I don't value what they do, just that it seems their work is mostly front-loaded. Once you're launched and the design is fairly stable, the designer needs to be willing to switch hats and pick up slack where they can.
Spirals
If they don't pay for your living expenses I would classify you as a co-founder, not as an employee. The share you get should correspond to how much you contribute and how much they have done already. Anything from 15%-35% can be reasonable, but it very much depends.

The real questions are:

a) can you afford to take this risk? Can you take the risk financially and qua opportunity cost?

b) do you think all three other founders have valuable skills?

c) are the other founders smart and willing to work hard?

d) do you think they have common sense?

e) do you get a say in the way the company is run, or are you expected to shut up and code?

f) do you trust the other founders not screw you over? Are you absolutely sure they're trustworthy?

g) do the founders get along great with each other and with you? Are they mentally stable?

If you can't answer these questions with a confident YES! you should probably pass on the opportunity. If you have no doubt that other founders are going to accomplish great things, and if you're willing to take a risk, don't worry about having 5% less equity than you'd like to have. A 15% share in a great company is a lot better than a 35% share in a flaming train wreck.

Oh, and get things in writing, just in case.
Mint.com founder Aaron Patzer on making Intuit more Mint-y (video)
This is the kind of epic dumb you don't usually see in companies outside of the record industry. Apparently they are sharing execs now.
SVN's UI is generally hidden. There's AnkhSVN which is a plugin for Visual Studio, for instance. And one that follows the standard Source Control plugin structure, rather than working in a non-standard way (as the Git one does).
Infographics by Michael Paukner: Earth, astronomy, geometry, fiction, art
Or just make it a stackexchange site
(I kid! don't hurt me)
I would be far more comfy as a founder in an organization with strong business development, strong product design, and strong technical abilities than I would in an organization missing any of these three.
RE: Express 1MX shirts. I buy a fair bit of clothes at Express but I've never been fond of these shirts. They seem to wrinkle excessively and some feel a bit cheap (they're made of varying materials, though. I have one that's fine. YMMV.) I prefer wrinkle resistant stuff, so one thing I do is lightly pinch the material while at the store to see how prone an item is to wrinkling.

You can probably find equivalent (or better) dress shirts more cheaply if you can find brands like Kenneth Cole discounted at big stores like Macy's. This happens fairly regularly. Note that "modern fit" shirts will fit more tightly around the waist/stomach. You should try it on, even if it means unpacking the damn thing and pulling out all of the pins.

A simple and versatile item is a black (modern fit) dress shirt. Sharp and serious with slacks, or you can wear it untucked with jeans for a casual look.
Which do you mean? Git-GUI is not "very nice" by any means. TortoiseGit is decent but a new Git user is hardly guided there (compare that to: http://mercurial.selenic.com/downloads/).

Also, my point wasn't specifically about GUIs per se but about usability overall. Git developers have only very recently, and only very grudgingly it seems, accepted that usability is even a serious concern. Considering that a developer will have an enormous amount of interaction with source control tools (almost as much as with an IDE or build tools in general) usability is obviously a huge factor. Git has a lot of the technical aspects nailed but I would be shocked if it won the current battle for revision control system of the future.
Useless announcement, it adds nothing to what was said in the video linked last week on HN...
They should have at least added a proper features list.
I am not an economist, nor am I an exec or anything so it is all observations but:

1. When we talk about joint academic/industry projects we talk about numbers of dollars on the order of 1M and 10M not 10K and 100K.

2. Lots of conversation from various people along the lines of "we just hired some guys to get ready for FOA-xx" or "we picked up some guys to integrate with the new NERC requirements" where FOA-xx describes one of the many stimulus grants -- at the time many had not been awarded. Now that they have been "awarded" many companies are hiring people to do the jobs. The contracts w/ the gov't still arent signed, so this money is not actually listed as spent yet. I am personally involved w/ a couple of these, this is how it works.

3. Industry meetings/conferences have gotten bigger in terms of # of attendees. Many of the people selling software are new entries to the market.

As for:

* Do you really think that the borrowed money wouldn't have created any jobs? * I have no idea what you are talking about. I never said anything about borrowed money. Which borrowed money? Sure more money may have created more jobs, but at least in the power sector, even when credit was good and easy there wasn't this level of interest and job creation.

About your last statement I totally agree: money spent on something I don't like doesnt enter the economy, therefore cannot possibly be helping things. (actually thats unfair, you seem like the type susceptible to poe's law so heres a bit of help: that last sentence was sarcasm).
More amazing is that requiring Live to save doesn't in anyway enhance the gameplay. It's not like you can play this game wherever you want and have a shared pool of saves.

At least Valve has the decency to keep your game purchases on file so you can install from scratch again with any hassle. The DRM needs to be a tradeoff, bother me a bit, but give me a useful feature.

Playing the game at all is not a feature.
If it's only the login being monitored, copy+paste might be a workaround.
drupalgardens.com from Dries' (creator of Drupal) company Acquia seems to fit the bill.
As long as you make it explicit upfront that you're doing this (i.e. have it in your contract) then there shouldn't be any problems.
Why We Can't Stop Email Fraud
Can I invoke Poe's Rule on this statement?
Finance Startup Kublax Saved?
May we have a "try it out without first signing up" space where one can create and play with a list that only lasts for the session or something?
Casual Shoes. Women notice shoes. Seriously. It's really interesting how much they look at your shoes. You can have everything else right, but if your shoes are big blocky white gym shoes, you have failed.

I've noticed this phenomenon as well, but it's worth expanding on. Women who are seeking status/money (most of them) look at your shoes. Women who are seeking a companion will overlook it.

Fancy shoes are useful if you want to find a woman to sleep with. Sneakers are useful for filtering out women unsuitable for a real relationship.
Relax, Agile Development IS Growing Up
visions of agile methodology clashing. regulatory compliance is still a reality for many agile teams?
CMMI and ISO will be served with agile sauce?
True but it really depends on how important the technical aspect (at least in the coding sense) is in relation to what the others are doing (or are capable of doing).

For example, I have a client today whose founders are guys having ultra-strong backgrounds in devising enterprise solutions, with major high-level contacts in the relevant market and reasonable prospects of parlaying all this into what eventually may become a $1B+ company. A "technical employee" could reasonably be thought of as "first employee," as opposed to "founder," in this type of case and could make a rational decision to take a whirl with equity instead of salary. It all depends on the nature of the opportunity and the credibility of the founders (I don't deny, though, that there can be a high risk of taking a sucker-bet in routine cases where equity-only offers of this type are made).
Why don't we hear more about people flying planes into buildings in China? Or students (or even teachers!) losing it and shooting up their schools?

Is it just that they have better control of their media (so we don't hear about it), better control of the people (so they don't get a chance to do it), or something else?
The thing is, the last one wasn't even bad at all. I don't think he actually made the usual "if you're not doing anything bad what do you have to hide" argument, I think he said "if you have something you want to keep secret, maybe you shouldn't be on the Internet" which I agree about.

Though I guess your point is about PR, and I guess I have to agree it could have been phrased more positively.
America's democracy A study in paralysis
I don't buy speedreading. I tried different schools but if I really want to grasp a subject I need to read it carefully, often more than once. Unless, of course, I'm reading just for the sake of reading.

I believe that with speed reading you are naturally ported to skip parts and words that you don't understand, but that way you are learning nothing new.

I'm still able to read 50 books per year (1 book per week), with an average of 5 hours of reading per week (sometimes less), but definitely not by speed reading.
I'm still amazed that there are companies with no business model that people will invest in. I understand this works out (occasionally) but I still really don't get it. I mean if you're spending millions and don't make money, and don't have a plan to make money, juts a plan to spend more money (i.e. acquire more users) how is that a business?
Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors - 2010 CWE/SANS
I understand what you mean, and why you say it. I do, however, disagree. From a pure business stand point, it makes sense. From a technological stand point, I think it hurts them. I'm having a hard time expressing this nicely, so I'll say it plainly as a I can. Hopefully no one takes offense.

I don't want Google wasting time on things that are only there because people are dumb. I'd rather them spend time on things that help people get smarter, not allow them to remain ignorant.

Again, this is a lot harsher than I intend, so hopefully you understand the meaning. My apologies in advance.
> Facebook is a sandbox. People kind of understand that.

Which is why I tend to cite Beacon as their biggest failing.
What are the different Types of Sports Essay Topics
Sports essay topics are easier to form when a person has an in-depth knowledge on the particular sport for which he or she is writing. To put it in a crux, a sport can be defined as a physical activity to keep a person fit. It is an organized art which is very competitive.
IS THE SINGULARITY HERE YET? (View the source code)
That's a really good idea - thanks! I'll see what I can do.
First, they've already issued their apologies for the confusion publicly. I don't see the need to repeat what's been said. Secondly, I don't find anything wrong with what he said. Again, it might not be popular, but I can't find fault in it. After all, they can't very well apologize for things that didn't happen, and it would be insulting for them to try.
By the way, do you know if there are any digital cameras with `analog' knobs and dials?
I think that a designer can design as much as a developer can develop on a product. The best designs are the ones that are iterated and iterated upon. A designers work is never done, etc.

All founders should switch hats! :)
So now we have, Gnome-specific config storage, KDE-specific config storage, and the rest all uses its own config storage.

No. If Gnome-specific and KDE-specific config did not exist, we all would have standard ini-style config files sitting in /etc (for system/root) and in ~/.gnome and ~/.kde respectively with each program owning a file named after itself.

Also, the biggest problem with windows registry isn't its internal structure: users don't care about that. The issue with registry is that it grows over time and never shrinks due to buggy and forgotten programs that leave junk in there. That's #1 reason why people complain about their computers getting slower. GConf happily inherits this fatal flaw because find ~/.gconf/ -name "program" won't find anything.

Again: gconf-tool is an example of a non-standard little turd that I was referring to when expressed my annoyance with managing multiple configuration systems. And how is placing ~/.gconf under git helps me to quickly restore configuration for selected apps? Have you looked inside of .gconf? Have you seen wifi.conf file in there? Those who have would no doubt pick /etc. One more time: gconf is not find/awk/grep/sed friendly, hence it is a maintenance nightmare.

Yes. Why not run a daemon? It eats maybe a few hundred KB of private RSS.

How typical for a 2010 technologist: "I want this little tiny toy feature which will eat only a few insignificant hundred KB...". You know what? Users have hundreds of little tiny little needs that would enjoy running all time time. I can keep naming things forever that a computer is capable of doing, and if you multiply those hundreds by your "few hundred KB" very quickly you'll end up with something like Vista: functional yet barely capable of running itself. Moreover, are you sure gconfd eats hundreds of K? Care to look again?

Sending configuration change notifications is NOT a significant feature to have its own daemon. Even Windows is smart enough to run a single svchost.exe service that groups tens of little background features like that into a single process.

No, I think your fear for 2010 technology and your tendency to stick with 1970s stuff is more of a disease.

The industry seems to be voting my way: it is simple 1970s pieces of Linux tech that dominate competition, yes - those that read their config from ini files in /etc. And your 2010 "pluggable technology" is still waiting for a year of Linux desktop.
Now, that's how you do PR!
Glad you like it! Thanks for the feedback too - I'm working on the project completion stuff at the moment, trying to do a bit of caching here and there.

I'll up the opacity on the manage users and edit links - that should help a bit. I guess there needs to be an actions pane somewhere.
Apple's Steve Jobs takes aim at Flash during WSJ iPad demo
This is kind of related but the National Geographic special "Drain the Ocean" is a great watch.

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/episode/drain-the-ocea...
Extended:

http://i.imgur.com/Behcf.jpg
Step by step guide on how to publish a book – Lessons learned from xkcd
"very clearly and explicitly in advance"

This is the problem. They did ask for these things, just not clearly and explicitly. However, they did have these things in place, and people did use them. Just not everyone did.

So, what does he apologize for? A mistake that didn't happen or for mistakes that did happen? Granted, the popular opinion wants them to apologize for the perceived slight, but doing so would be admitting to something that in reality, didn't happen as popular opinion would suggest.

Either way, any apology would be bad. In this case, being honest is probably the best thing to do.
It's probably wise to use a more common framework. Even if you are more productive initially being able to hire people when you're off focusing on some other aspect of the business is important too.

I'm not sure there is a huge productivity difference between the modern frameworks unless you really know nothing about what you're getting into. I'd choose something mainstream that you all know at least a little and can use and then get to work.
I love how this appears next to an article about "DRM from Hell" and here's what amounts to a free advertisment for a DRM enforcement company that is generating dubious piracy statistics and offering a service that will reset your password in an attempt to "irritate them into submission" every time you type one handed while eating a sandwich, get a sticky key on your keyboard, or use a phone or tablet device to access it.

The actual technology is cool, but these guys didn't invent it, they just found a really annoying use for it.
I don't believe Buzz was a mistake. I think it was a deliberate action that had an unexpected reaction. I think the execs at Google thought that people didn't care as much about privacy as it turned out we actually do.
True, but that means we will have to stick to Java even though we are Lisp, Python, Erlang guys here. That also means that we will have to muck around with JavaEE crap even though we can build the same thing much faster using something else; all this to be future proof.
Most digital SLRs have analogue controls for at least focus and zoom, and usually one or two more multi-purpose knobs in addition.
You are twisting his words (or at least your comment makes it seem like you are). He doesn't suggest that you shouldn't do these things. Rather that the reality is these days, if you don't want people to find things out, the only guaranteed way of preventing that is by not doing it. This isn't his view on privacy; rather, it's his view on the state or privacy. Where it currently stands.
I don't want Google wasting time on things that are only there because people are dumb. I'd rather them spend time on things that help people get smarter, not allow them to remain ignorant.

I think we are in violent agreement on this principle. In the case of Buzz, I think they failed us both. I understand we shouldn't have to build software that throws up massive confirmation dialogs "Really, REALLY publish those public photos on Picasa of you mountain biking on a "sick day" to the following 12 frequently emailed people at your workplace including your boss and the dragon lady in HR?"

But at the same time, making people smarter shouldn't mean making people figure out the non-obvious consequences of the choices you give them. I still can't figure out exactly how the original Buzz worked or didn't work... I think it boiled down to whether you created a profile, but I'm not sure and I'm not going to try it to find out.

I hope Google find the middle ground and do a better job of designing software that has great user interfaces, software that makes its affordances visible without nannying or nagging users.
Man, I wish the FBI still had a mandate to investigate communist fronts. Another thing about Einstein: In his later years he had a lady-friend who was a Soviet spy.
The PDF properties says 1999.
Sounds like Anarchists were the Terrorists of the early 20th century; unless contained they would bring about the end of Western Civilization as we know it. I wonder what new amorphous threat we will worry about a hundred years from now.

From Part 1a, Formal Charges:

We are informed and believe and charge that Professor Albert Einstein is inadmissible to the United States on the following grounds

a) Albert Einstein believes in, advises, advocates or teaches a doctrine which, in a legal sense, as held by the courts in other cases, “would allow anarchy to stalk in unmolested” and result in “government only in name.”

b) Albert Einstein advises, advocates or teaches, and is a member of _and_ affiliated with groups that are in “militant” and admittedly ”illegal” opposition to the most fundamental principle of organized government.

Edit: It has been pointed out that these formal charges are made by The Women Patriot Corporation, not the FBI.
It doesn't work too well in IE7, particularly the drag functionality.
Who's really to blame for the Windows XP Patch BSOD?
You miss the point. The problem is that you think "Subversion is the Windows of version control" is an insult. Windows is the world's most prevalent desktop operating system, by a huge margin. Windows is responsible for around $4 billion dollars of profit per year for Microsoft. Only a fool dismisses a fact like that as irrelevant, obviously Windows is doing something right.

Both Git and Linux are very ideologically pure in their design and construction. This has considerable benefits in some areas (I'm a huge fan of Linux as a server) but leads to a degree of maniacal zealotry in the developer and fan-base which ultimately causes the projects to become self-limiting.

I like Linux. I like Git. I think the technology underpinning both is fantastic. I'd like to see them both succeed. I'm just sad that there are so many zealots peddling the idea that any flaws (and there are many for Linux on the desktop and for Git as a tool for every dev in the world) can be swept under the rug because of the awesomeness of the ideological purity of their construction.
Google Mobile Shopper Android-app launched (Video)
Same here, I also started using it instantly. Great job!!

whats it written in if you don't mind me asking?
No, that's the HN title post on creating buzz. When I saw the bait-n-switch I clicked back. I have better things to do with my time than wait on sign-ups for yet-another-stack-overflow.

Now, if that link had gone to a well-written blog post discussing their process and some data to back it up, they would have gotten a viewer, not a misclick.