skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here is my idea for a different direction to go in, but I think it digs at what you are trying to do:

You should change the description from "reusable todo lists WTF?" to "Sharable workflows for your everyday life", that would be a succinct description that markets it better.

You could argue that checklists are helpful: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lloyd-i-sederer-md/is-your-doc... and that you help enable the creation and sharing of the knowledge required for processes.

You could then enable people to tag their checklists with uses "budget planning checklists", "software design checklist" etc.

But even still, there's not a lot of meat on your "app", it's basically a ReST cookbook application right now.
Categories are definitely on the way. I don't know if I want people to have to sign up/in for anything, but I am all for viral pushes.
I convert PDFs to audiobooks using an osx service and then i listen to them on 2x speed. i'm a slow reader, so it isnt a huge difference in time for me.
This seems like off the top of the head M$-style ranting- he hasn't used an actual device so this is just guesswork.
It's mostly a proof of concept, but you have given me some very good ideas. A big brother may be born in the future.
I'd have a minor quibble with that -- as someone who's done both application/product development and "dev ops": there's a difference when you write software that you yourself are the end-user of and when you write software for others to use/operate. That was the biggest challenge (initially) for me when I transitioned to "software engineering".

I've found that for infrastructure projects (especially open source ones, which may not always have dedicated QA resources available to them) it's a great idea to do "adversarial" testing/documentation: someone other than the developer must be able to follow the documentation and use the software in an environment other than the developer's desktop.
It is funny to read an article saying the iPad will be about X, when there are so many X's out there. The iPad represents the refinement of a platform (tablets) that has a shot at transcending the models of computing we have had so far. Just look at where the iPhone is at as a platform now with 3 revisions under it's glassy screen. The iPad a few generations down the road (30 inch, Multitasking) will change the computing landscape.

In the 1990's (Thanks Jeron) we were all expecting VR to be the next step away from the 2D windowed computing environment. For some reason that didn't take off. At the same time there was a lot of academic hype around the idea of ubiquitous computing. I think the iPhone/iPod Touch was the first tentative step into this direction, but without the real estate for effective daily work. I think the iPad will solve a lot of these issues and therefor go way beyond anyone's expectations.
I don't think illumin8 is trying to argue that it could have been done with anything else at that exact point in time, just that they identified an opportunity and the technology that could make that happen. That the technology was flash, is in this instance mere coincidence.

That said, I agree that flash has been an enabler for many advances on the web. Unfortunately, the flash plugins just seem to be bogged down more and more, and don't seem to evolve very effectively.
Ask HN: Please review my startup (fantasy sports mashup)
The Three Ingredients Of An Entrepreneur’s Return
Well, it's got only 2 rounds of betting and complete information. I can't say it without trying it, but it doesn't sound very dynamic. Also the action will be stalled because the cards have to remain there face up for some period of time, so there won't be constant motion like there is in hold'em. It sounds like correct strategy in most cases will be pretty obvious, though the choice of 8 cards with half passed is interesting as it prevents you from, say, holding a flush.

I can see it be interesting in one spot: if you see your opponent has 4 hearts, you don't pass them one regardless, unless one of the other 4 cards they would be required to pass you make if they held the 4 hearts would make you a full house. Then it's just a game of chicken.

It might be improved with the addition of hidden cards and splitting the action over 3-4 rounds of betting.

Of course, I'm a little biased. After playing lots of 2-7 triple draw and Badugi, I'm honestly not even interested in poker variants with as little strategy as Texas Hold'em anymore.
I have a ton of respect for Tufte, but I think he is wrong about a few things here.

After using the Zune for a few months, I'm surprised to see him say that it looks like it was designed on a larger device and then shrunk down to fit a handheld.

The UI is quite effective, and I believe the 'negative space' is actually quite effective at training the user to recognize scrollable areas vs. non-scrollable, as well as providing some breathing room rather than a full screen which would look too busy.

I do agree with the comments about the animations. Many animations on the Zune are very well done, and effective, but some (like the swirling name when going to an artist list from a currently playing) does seem to break context and takes a bit too long.

I'm sure they'll be tweaking the animations in future updates.
If I were Apple, I'd love for ChromeOS and Android to win. If that's the "losing" position for Apple, then they're sitting pretty. By the time that would happen, Apple could just roll their own Android that can run legacy iPhone apps, and even have their own high-end, high-margin Apple walled garden there.

Who's not sitting pretty? Microsoft. They've got to connect a Hail Mary pass with WinMo 7 to survive and stay relevant. They may do it, though.
Tell HN: My Co-Founder Finder App
I've been enjoying the looking-for-co-founder lists that have been floating around lately, and I've put my name on all of them.

They all work well as directories, but finding interesting people to talk to didn't scale very well. Scrolling through and reading a couple hundred descriptions felt inefficient.

So I wrote a simple app. You put in tags to describe who you are, you put in tags to describe who you want to meet, and the system shows you who you overlap with.

I want to get this out there to the community for feedback, please let me know what you think. In case you can't tell from looking at the site, I need UI help. Bad.

http://amb.itio.us/
I've got to give Microsoft credit: they tried! For the first time, it's an interface which isn't shackled to the ridiculously inappropriate desktop metaphor. They've designed something genuinely new for the phone.

On the other hand, I'm disgusted by the UI. Incredibly low information density, unbalanced visual elements, and many actions required to accomplish simple tasks. The transitions are beautiful, but they really should have focused on a concise interface suited to small displays.

What designer thought allocating 30% of the screen to show the second half of the word "Pictures" would be a good idea?
3500 calories ~ 1lb of body fat. So eating almost 1800 calories over the recommended would mean gaining 1lb of weight every 2 days, or roughly 14-15lbs a month. 182lbs per year.

Basically in the 45 years when your calorific consumption should be the maximum between ~18 and ~60+, you would gain around 8 tons of body weight.

I'm sorry, I love taking a shot at America for the obesity problem, but an 8 ton man? Really? Did the people who wrote that study even think that figure through? They factored in imports/exports, but they didn't bother to even guesstimate a percentage for food actually consumed in a household.
some stuff i always did as i never really read either one of them. i'm not interested in the opinions of celebrities in the non-tech world and i'm not interested in the tech world.

from time to time i've read a joel or yegge or pg post but i don't religiously seek them out.
You're the essence of the problem, messieur.

What's so pessimistic about it? Whatever floats your boat, pal. If books enrich you, keep reading. Do not force everyone else to do so, though. Might be that there are other sources of enlightenment. Nature, nice chicks, long discussions, Italian restaurants etc. It's pure symbolic violence what you do right now, pal.

Easy test, though.

Speak to a random literature folk, who graduated five years ago, or so. By average, he is completely clueless. You recognize he is smart, uses much complicated buzzwords than you've ever heard of, but chances are, you do not expect him to change the world, nor get laid.

It should be obvious what's my point. If you're smart, books might help you. If you're average, books won't change it significantly and sometimes might make things much more worse, clouding your mind or hiding your ignorance behind overly complicated concepts. Accidentally, most of the world is not that smart, and it's perfectly OK.

That's why I say that books are overrated, and we should ask yourself a question whether we really get so much from them as we think we do. Chances are that some people will keep reading but others would be more happy dancing, drawing or being next Sasha Grey or Stoya, without this guilt they don't read enough books.

By the way, I don't say that there is "nothing" in books. Nothing can be something, too. However, the knowledge about Humbert Humbert and a little girl he loved, is, for me, nothing significant.
Don't think of it as substitution. Think of it as telling the computer (and thus the world). It also provides a log, so the next time you're happy or mad at them, the computer can remind you of a good thing they did.
Oh, then maybe I missed how I can up vote a deal and become a fan. Or have you got some algorithm to figure out the popularity of a deal.
ARORA, A Random Or Real Array
The last comment here got me downvoted; not sure why.

When I read it I was 50/50 as to whether he was being sarcastic or not. I guess I came down on the wrong side. :)
We use them where I work, a mid-size arts and media non-profit in Brooklyn. Their services are very nice and unique. That's the end of the good news.

They charge for EVERYTHING. Need more attribute fields for your users? That'll be $500 for 5 per year. Need access to the API? That'll be $2000/year. And on and on. Their UI is atrocious and unwieldy. And their documentation is 10x as long as it needs to be and impossible to ever find what you need. That said, their phone support is good.

If you're excited about the text message marketing capabilities and integration with social sites, and you're willing to pay for it, it's probably a good solution. If you just want to send out nice HTML emails and track the results, go with MailChimp.
Joel mentions in the linked article that Fog Creek now has 32 employees. Given the hundreds of applicants he alludes to for every open position and the fact that he spends several days a week focusing on his blog I'd say the odds are good that he didn't personally reject you.

Most companies don't call back. You can just assume that they had at least one candidate in the pipeline who was a better fit in terms of culture, location, salary expectations, or skills.
Short of that, what do you think we can do? I'm extremely disappointed in the US govt. for pushing this, and especially in secret, but I'm not sure what can be done directly.
TRANZ-file sharing among phonebook friends.
With all the new socionet tools available, we strongly believe that one’s mobile contact book is still the most active and relevant social network and reinforcing this belief we developed TRANZ-a mobile application that lets you share music, pictures, videos & docs with your phone book contacts, i.e.filesharing on a closed group social network.
http://www.gotranz.com/
It's hardly a rant when it comes from a guru like Tufte. The guy has literally written the books on displaying information, so he has a lot of experience to speak from.

Also, he provides specific examples (negative space by cross hairs, top & right margins on home screen).
I look at online company blogs as their What's New section.
If you want an invite, email kyle AT forrst . com and mention HN and I'll get you one.
One first-order approximation is 100 calories per mile for 180-pound person.

Say you walk 2 miles; you've hit about 200 calories. So a wash, and you had to wolf down your food.
Aaron is pretty young and acts it. He often comes out with incredibly naive posts, especially on topics like the economy, or politics. But the counterpoint is that his reading (especially re history) sometimes means he comes out with counter-intuitive or enlightening stuff.

Speaking for myself, I find other people a real energy drain. I don't live alone, but I feel delight and a deep sense of relaxation when I get the opportunity to have the house to myself for a few days. Company can be good, but in moderation.
I am by no means against working out, but forcing this dichotomy may dissuade people from taking a simple an useful step that could even be aggregated: Stretch out your previously brief ice cream consumption while doing your normal schedule AND go for that walk. BAM! You're an even bigger winner.
We have had multiple discussions with the Facebook folks, and are well aware of the complexities of both sites. I believe you are actually underestimating reddit's complexity.

Here are some examples:

When you load a comments page with 500 comments, there are 1000s of data points that have to be loaded. For every comment, we have to check how you voted on it to draw the arrows, we have to check if you are the author, we have to check if you are allowed to remove that comment as a moderator, we have to check if you can edit it, if the author is your friend, and so on. And we have to do that 500 times.

When you load a listing, we have to pull your subscriptions, and then merge the results from all the reddits you subscribe to. Then we have to check most of the same things as we do for comments.

After all that checking, we have a to render a page that is customized just for you. Some of that will come from the render cache and some from the data cache, but it is still highly customized.

The big difference is that Facebook doesn't have any logged out users, whereas we do.

Akamai takes care of our logged out users, but rendering the page for a logged in user is extremely complicated.
My definition of Evil includes coercion. Apple doesn't coerce you into using iTunes. They market an iPod to you, which you buy voluntarily. It's only after that you have to use iTunes. And even then, you don't really have to, since there are alternatives for software.

If you can opt-out and just not pay for it, then it isn't evil. It still might be "shitty practice" but you can still vote with your feet.
Sure, grab one of the data warehouse books from Kimball. Inmon is the other big data warehouse author out there, but I'm not as familiar with his texts. Kimball's stuff is an easy read and not platform focused in any way.

If you are aiming to do business visualizations with the data, you might want to check out Stephen Few - he's written several books on business data visualization (think Tufte distilled for charts and dashboards).
Well, we know standard docs work in that situation. I hope once the Series Seed docs are out, someone will publish an analysis of the diffs between them and the Series AA docs.
I'm a recent new user of Forrst, and while I do like it, I was convinced that it wouldn't achieve much market popularity without really great news articles done about it.

I've been thinking about it as a Pownce-like app, in more of a Twitter-based format, but I guess the reason for its success is the same as HN's, which is the focus seems very narrow.

I like that about it, and as a programmer who designs (that hadn't ever categorized himself in that way before) -- I realize it's a very apt cross-section of what I've encountered on Forrst.

Seriously though, it definitely gets a thumbs-up from me, though not necessarily for the masses.
Django's johnny-cache, and evaluating cache strategies
I remember in college always being hammered with "break down problems into appropriately sized, manageable chunks." This looks like a great approach to it. Focus on a specific issue for a 2-week block, design-develop-deploy, and move on.

Key quote: "Late nights are a sign of scope failure. Hero mode is a sign of scope failure." Bingo. If you're regularly going into those modes, it means the problems weren't broken down into right-sized pieces.
Which makes them better loved than Microsoft, which for long stretches got away with taking advantage of people and doing mostly mediocre work.
One of the more interesting games I've seen is coöperative poker solitaire. In poker solitaire, you are dealt 25 cards and lay them out in a 5x5 grid. You try to make the best possible poker hands. The general scoring works by trying to make the bets possible hands working down from a royal flush. So if you have the cards for a royal flush, you have to make that. If you have the cards for a lesser straight flush in the same suit but can't make the royal flush, you don't have to make the lesser straight flush.

Anyhow, the really interesting game is a coöperative two player variant. Thirteen cards are dealt to one player, twelve to another. Players cannot see each other's cards. The player with thirteen places a card on the table, then turns alternate. Once played, cards cannot be moved. At the conclusion of the game, the cards must be arranged in a 5x5 grid. So technically the first two cards could have three blank spaces between them diagonally, horizontally, or vertically.

Pairs cannot communicate via any means other than the cards they choose to play. So to play well, pairs generally work out a system for signaling what they have, i.e. opening with a strong card and so forth.
Ask HN: What do you think? FatStudent - The student job board 
Hi Guys, www.fatstudent.co.uk

what do you think of FatStudent? Any comments and suggestions would be really appreciated.Thanks!
I participated in another $400 beta from Archos back in 2000. I see they didn't change much since then - it all looks very familiar.

Later on someone developed an open-source firmware for the Archos mp3 player, so there is hope.
Yeah that's really the best part. The other thing I really like is that it doesn't try to make you use some sort of DSL in place of SQL like other libraries do.
The search machine is its own database. It feeds its data from the masters for consistency, but the searches themselves run against the search database.

I think the MD5 thing was covered well below.
Of course the food industry is well aware of this. Given that their goal is to sell product, process foods are designed to have texture that rapidly breaks down into easily swallowed mush.

Here is an experiment. Get a some chicken and cook it yourself. (If you need an easy recipe, try http://www.recipefiles.org/view_recipe.php?id=551 - my kids love it.) Buy some pre-cooked chicken from a fast food restaurant like KFC. Attempt to eat pieces of both chickens. You generally will need to chew the chicken you prepare yourself about twice as much before swallowing. The reason is that the preparation for the fast food chicken involves breaking down all of the internal texture of the chicken while injecting a mix of sugar, fat, salt and water to plump it up and make it more tasty.

If you want to look at this another way, stop looking at processed food as food. Look at it as a drug delivery system. The drug is a combination of sugar, fat and salt, and easy administration of the drug is an explicit design goal.
I've been doing the paleo diet for a while and I can echo the energy level increase is great!

http://thepaleodiet.com/
Have you ever played Chinese Poker?
The "restore" link behaves oddly... I can't seem to figure out any rhyme or reason to why it checks or unchecks certain boxes. Sometimes it unchecks items in the "done" list, sometimes it checks items in the "to-do" list (though it never moves an item from one list to the other). It doesn't seem to do either of these things consistently though...
I haven't used a Zune but I'd really like to. Have you used an iPhone or Android and, if so, do you feel like it's easier to tell scrollable vs. non-scrollable on Zune than them?
The worst part was being unable to play games that had trophies offline. It may be an overblown worry, but I couldn't help conceiving future scenarios where I couldn't play titles in my game library in the future (after this generation of consoles).
Clickable: http://amb.itio.us/
I think there is a deeper unreasonableness. What would a truly scientific hiring process look like? What might a large organisation, such as the British Civil Service do to make sure that it hires the right people?

One idea is to score candidates on many measures (100?) and make use guessed weights to guide initial hiring decisions. A decade later the organisation can compare the initial assessments against the hires subsequent progress up the organisation. This leads to a re-assessment of the weights.

Notice that the new weights were computed from the poputation of hires, not the population of candidates, and the hires were chosen using the old weights. The new weights are causing the organisation to hire people that it would have rejected in the past and it has no solid data on how those people would have performed in the organisation - it didn't hire them! There are other problems. The whole approach has too many parameters to calibrate it reliably from the data available. The linearity implicit in a weighted sum is implausible, a more sophisticated model with the number of variables squared or cubed is clearly required. The time scale on which the success of the hiring decisions becomes apparent is long, decades. It is the time scale on which things change. So the new scientific weights might be no better than rebooting the whole process with new, guessed weights.

My point is that organisations don't have substantial reasons for their hiring decisions. They have a process because they are forced to chose, and they consequently have procedural reasons for their hiring decisions.

A small organisation, such as Fog Creek, that has scientifically trained personnel, may be well aware that it hires the wrong people. Those in charge know that they hire the wrong people and that they cannot fix the problem. They also know that business is competitive, they only have to do better than their competitors, and since the problem is pretty much impossible, their competitors cannot fix it either.

The serious answer to the hiring question is "We don't know how to chose. We make wild guesses and then pretend that we have good reasons for them so that we don't feel too bad afterwards. The whole topic is really embarrassing. You shouldn't have asked."
I was also interested in his replies, but it seems he has a different answer ready for the HN crowd and different one for the world as pointed by his tweets linked by jfarmer.

For me, changing a statement like this is pretty close to lying and is probably worse than trolling.
I'm not going to buy this piece of garbage. I want something that just works, and has every detail (hardware and software) thought out beforehand. That's why I'm going to buy the first 3G-equipped iPad that I can get my hands on.