skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is great. Kudos for having the guts to radically innovate while everybody else just complains.

A few notes:

The interface seems very cluttered. I know you have lots of exciting features, but if you want to make it about the content, then you need to find a way to hide this complexity. On my mind: http://uxhero.com/ux-theory/ipad-pages-vs-microsoft-office/

The right bar is really distracting and throws off the weight of the page. I really don't care what other random folks have read the document. Not really relevant until I'm tied in via FB.

I don't really understand why there are the different modes. Slideshows should be in slideshow mode; text should scroll. I still have to scroll with book mode, so what benefit does it offer?
It looks great in Firefox, but it's completely unusable in the latest Opera.
Use the zoom.
Why was it much needed? What reflected this?
does fullscreen help? what's your screen resolution?
secondspeak.com is currently unregistered, and makes sense to me as a name for a site for people learning a second language.
Not even that. Consider apps that are used for screen or desktop sharing, e.g. LogMeIn Express and such. It is basically a Flash version of VNC viewer. I don't think these can be done in HTML5.
Nice post. I've always thought that scribd provided a service for people who wanted to share correctly formatted documents, even if it had the downside of being locked into Flash it was better than nothing. The HTML5 reader is a lot nicer.

I'm still planning on copying all your social features.
I don't have an account. I don't understand why I want an account yet :) The value proposition of what Scribd solves, is still puzzling to me... But thanks for the info.
That would have potentially made me a criminal. But sometimes you need to stand up for what you think is right even if there are consequences.
I worked as a trader, and I can confirm that this is not the way trades are hand-entered.
Sorry to hear that and not to be insensitive - but I think that number is probably a rounding-error to a good chunk of traders out there! Imagine all those who had margin accounts and got wiped!
At the risk of training people to wait.
The main parts to this puzzle are ECNs, hedge fund algo trading, and scared and bruised investors.

ECNs make transmitting and execution of trade orders quick and easy.

Hedge funds and proprietary trading desks (basically hedge fund-like operations within investment banks) within banks often run "black box" models that have rules built into them which determine when to send a buy or sell order down to the exchanges (some larger funds even have their computers / algos co-located at exchanges to bring down latency).

All these different firms have different models, but they surprisingly have a lot in common, especially when things are going south quickly.

When a 6 stdev event (or whatever the hell today was) occurs, all those models spit out sell orders, which push prices down more, which results in more sell orders, etc. etc. and the race is on until we get to zero OR until someone with a stomach for risk comes in and starts to buy (or some other algos come in and pick up on "value stock" opportunities). Given the last year or two we've been through, there aren't too many of them around so the effect is magnified even more.
The link was dead when I checked it. Also the link provided by the google crawler was just as dead, so it could not have been a mistyped link.

So I was correct that the link was dead when I said it was. It is possible that that blog post was so popular that a WSJ server holding it crashed while the rest of the site remained online. Or it is possible that that the WSJ saw my post and said "damn, he is onto us, bring it back up!" Anyways, I am keeping my mind open :)

And regarding "inventing shadowy conspiracy theories where they don't exist", well they do exist now, since I invented them!
Agreed. Maybe instead of auto hide, always leave it on with an option to hide it.
"All told we are probably out ~$2,000 and one years worth of work."

Clearly all businesses should be ROI positive after $2000... let's give up!
I just noticed this redesign removed a feature I used all the time - you used to be able to type a word into Google, and then hit the "definition" link. As far as I can see, they removed that.
That No SQL Thing: Graph databases
Try clicking the 'zoom in' button in the bottom bar.
Yeah, I'm getting that a lot on here. I think it is a hard name for people who only speak English, or speak English and other languages that aren't latin based. (Our Spanish speaking members really like the name.)
It amazes me that you ever had faith in facebook. Why did you think facebook would be different than other social networks? Did you think facebook would be around forever? Did you think all the work, energy, and time you put into facebook wouldn't simply evaporate?

Imagine if you had invested all the time you put into facebook into your own life. Making your life better. Making the physical world around you better.

That's what saddens me the most about facebook. All the hours that are going to evaporate. All the productivity there could have been.

Facebook is like a battery that stores everyone's labor and we are all about to collectively chuck that battery in the trash. Well, not "we all"... I never signed up because I knew this is how it would turn out.

Not to pour salt in the wound. Quite the contrary. It's more like a caring hug when it all falls apart.
I know, you're not being insensitive. :) I'm not making a fuss about it though, it was a part of the risk anyways and it was an experiment in the spot market. I built that 1200$ out of 200$ of initiation cash, so there actually is little to no damage anyways. But you bring a valid and disturbing point, there are a lot of folks out there now that lost tons of money and got margin called - most of them probably over leveraged, not a pretty sight.
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-05-06/nasdaq-says-inve...

"Eighteen of the trades were executed on the CBOE Stock Exchange and were canceled. The first trade that sent Accenture to a penny was executed on the Nasdaq Stock Market. That transaction has yet to be canceled, the data showed."
Why don't you start the story off with your email. If they are interested, they will click through to the rest of your pages.
While that was convenient reading, what you did was still copyright infringement. If you don't like how Rupert Murdoch runs the WSJ, find another news source, and make the WSJ obsolete.
How Geeks Get Us Around Town (opening of public transit data)
- when I change zoom mid-document, scroll to the same position in the text I was before

- modify default zoom level depending on the browser window size (I had to zoom twice before the size was reasonable)

- put the document-action keys on the top (the bottom is for statuses). It took me long enough to realize the bottom pane was where things were that I would have left if this were a paper I came across on HN/prog.reddit

- don't force registration to download, that's just rude
First of all, the HTML5 documents look great.

However, how do you deal with font licensing? You are using @font-face, but this is still not permitted for many commercial fonts, even if they allow embedding in PDF.
Here is the press release: http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/TraderNews.aspx?id=ETA2010-30
I personally would like the pages of the document scroll horizontal rather than vertical. What would be really cool is identifying the columns in a pdf document and formatting them such that it shows two or three narrow columns that I can scroll through. Basically something similar to this (http://amarsagoo.info/tofu/) on the web. This would make reading on the web a lot more easier than it is today.
Screenshots? More details?
It's ideal, every change means an immediate refactoring.

Why put it off?
Latexlab: Google Docs + Latex
I don't think the $2,000 mark is really of any significance in deciding whether to move forward or not. If we had a business model that I truely believed in I would be happy to invest a significant amount of money into it. As it stands at this point I don't.
> But making a living writing code, maybe even important code? Far more likely than you'd like to think.

I've never seen developers who work this way: not in industry - not even in college.

In my experience, the "mess around with the code arbitrarily until it works" style described by liuliu is the programmer's equivalent of a moral panic. Everyone talks about it and laments it, but it doesn't really happen.
> But the languages that I'm currently happiest with are statically-typed, compiled, and run on the JVM.

But you are sane. So many here...aren't...
Facebook's usage is starting to decline, so they have to do everything they can -- while they still have users -- to maximize the value of their graph for the investors who are going to do whatever they have to with that graph to salvage what is left of a crumbling social network.

People on facebook right now are going to be getting spammed for years and years and years, in the mail, on their birthdays, to their cell phones...

You have no idea the lengths to which people will go to salvage hundreds of millions of dollars...
What iPads Did To My Family
Actually, this is the best push for Python i've ever seen. Its not a great production grade language, but I agree, getting people interested in programming is more important than getting them to grok the hard parts of programming (C/C++)
We totally love your j/k keybinding idea. Consider it implemented. Maybe we'll additionally do s/w, a binding that comes more naturally to people unfamiliar with VI, but familiar with computer games :)
Hey! I see that Accenture finally got a rational valuation and price!

No, I'm not a big fan, having experienced them as long ago as "Anderson Consulting" days.
That's exactly right, except the investors are also the customer and they have to be satisfied as well.
>The key concepts in the lisp-like languages (closures, higher-order functions, garbage collection etc) are easier to understand in a dynamic language IMO.

How so? F# and Scala, and Haskell aren't dynamically typed languages...
That's a really interesting idea. Given our other view modes, I don't see why we could not do a horizontal scroll as well. I'll keep this in mind.
This is the Internet. If you're looking for a job, and something impressive with your name on it gets to the top of HN, Reddit, Slashdot, or even Digg, you'll have ample opportunities.

Heck, the only reason I haven't quit my job yet is I'm working on something potentially impressive right now that isn't done yet.
We're looking into releasing as much of our HTML5 conversion as possible as open source. For starters, basic technical details on how our conversion works will appear on our tech blog http://coding.scribd.com in the next few days.
Wow, a house full of technology and it can be replaced by a single ipad. Makes you wonder why they never did more with all the stuff they've got, it seems like they were seriously under-using it before.

Good thing nobody ever had a complicated spread sheet, a document on letterhead for the office or a small programming job to do!

It's genius how Steve Jobs managed to identify that most people now use their computers as a media consumption device, I see mine as power tools.
this is really impressive -- high fidelity, search, scrolling, no waiting for flash to load. congrats guys! we'd love to get this kind of previewing on dropbox
They will keep it forever and ever. It takes a long time to make millions of dollars off an address list.
As somebody who has dealt with ActiveResource in a production environment, thank-you!

My company noticed an absolutely whopping performance boost when we dropped XML in favor of JSON for a transport format, fwiw. Ruby has quite possibly the slowest XML parsing libraries on the block (even when you wrap libxml), and we avoid parsing XML at all costs now.
A number of our engineers, particularly those who made this all possible, will be adding posts to our coding blog in the coming weeks. They should help kickstart any effort to render as we have.

http://coding.scribd.com/
Your Brain Wants Chocolate Cake
Who else clicked on a link to see what the heck is Omni Giraffe for iPad? :)
I'd argue it's a change for the better. While the first search result has changed its position relative to the document, it has now lined up with the input of the search box at the top of the page. In the old version it did not. I would think that users eyes' are drawn to the search box, and this new format aids scanning.

Edit: These images may support my contention: http://www.google.com/images?q=google%20results%20eyetrackin...
> Facebook's usage is starting to decline

I've had that feeling for a while now, do you have any independent figures or is that a gut feeling?
After two years in Japan, focusing almost exclusively on Japanese companies as a target market, and now also preparing to move back to the US (for different reasons), this report rings true.

Japan, by and large, does not reward innovation.

This quote sums it up:

"So what do you need to create an environment where innovation and thus knowledge/ creativity thrives? What do you need for a thriving post-industrial economy?

You need a culture that can deal with change. You need companies that are small and agile. You need incentive structures that reward ideas over performance. You need a government that is not stuck in bureaucracy. You need a thriving VC investment climate with Angel Investors that are willing to take risk. You need entrepreneurs that take risk. You need an education system that rocks. And guess what, Japan has none of that [12, 13]."

I'll take exception to the one statement that Japan is not able to deal with change. If you look at the history of Japan, they are probably the only country in the history of the world to go from a medieval society closed off to foreign influence to a global power in less than 75 years. The reasons for this ability are complicated and may only work at the macro level, but it does demonstrate an enormous capability for change.

The article is right, however. If the other factors are not there, the outlook for Japan's entrepreneurial culture is not great in the coming decade.
Everyone Chillax!

Here is the story: Today was a big bill auction day. Ok. Just chill out for a minute and let me explain.

China ain't no fool. These erroneous trades were made 10 minutes prior to a bill auction. This is just to make sure that selling these bills will get a high return and low rate. It was a great time to sell at the stroke of noon.

Chillax.
Hey guys, I'm trying to understand Scribd's purpose as it's written.

Re: purpose 1) For publishing a body of text, or a hosting literal file type, there's already Posterous and, any free file hosting site.

Re: purpose 2) Discovering interesting content .. appears to be served pretty well by the likes of Digg, Reddit, Twitter-link-mining apps, etc. Sharing, there's many bookmarklets and "share this" buttons.

If the value is in unique content, but the content is provided by the crowd, then for an individual content creator, what's in it for them? E.g. if I have some really interesting content, I could post it on some public hosting site, or own my own web site, and if it genuinely is interesting, it'll hit the main page of a site like Digg/Reddit, and therefore sell itself.

I think the move away from plugin prison to HTML5 is great (am myself a developer), but we know that the mass majority don't buy based on techie cool-ness (if they did, then Apple's developer un-friendly-ness would drive them all to Android!)

Sounds to me like you guys want to be the YouTube for documents? (which IIRC wasn't that the goal in the beginning?) I guess like Smugmug's founder's interview, there'll always be a high-end niche of any market (are you trying conquer the "high-end" and "niche" documents? If so, then perhaps it might be a branding problem?) As in, if people perceive you as an expensive brand, then naturally people will _want_ to publish via Scribd. If I was writing an article about animals, I might be better off publishing the article on National Geographic's blog vs. my own no-name blog.

Other than that, awesome product! I guess I am still just trying to figure out why I should put my documents on Scribd.

Always a fan of YC-startups. Good work, guys.
Makes sense. From re-reading the blog post I wouldn't classify it as a failure as much as a "it's time to move on"-ure.
In this case, Google is even worse because you don't even have to use google to be tracked by their systems. You can avoid facebook's privacy violations by not using facebook, but you can't avoid google's privacy violations even if you don't use google. You have to explicitly block their ad servers to do that and they have lots and relatively noone knows how to do it.
A new Dallas incubator, Tech Wildcatters, begins program with five start-ups
This is seriously impressive stuff. It's wonderful to be able to right-click and run 'Inspect Element' on everything. Of course that's not the motivation for doing it (you laid out the real reasons well), but it helps in winning over geeks like me.

Also kudos on executing things in the right order: start with commodity tech but build out innovative and useful features. Then rewrite the underlying tech to make leaps in the level of refinement.
I upgraded to Django 1.2 on our internal tool set, and then used it for our new site we just launched today. Granted, our internal user base is only 10 staff, and our sites are only in the thousands of visitors but no real issues when upgrading or using 1.2.

The Django devs are very good at keeping bugs out of the way, even within the trunk and as long as you follow development, it's easy to either avoid the bugs, or patch them with the solutions pre-trunk-merge.
Full disclosure: I'm one of the founders of CollegeJobConnect.
It's a kickass toolkit (and my toolkit of choice) for cross-platform desktop apps. Just keep in mind that it's GPL licensed for free apps and that the commercial license is expensive for a one-man shop.
Actually a channeling market is better for arbitrage strategies, where you are basically earning the spread.
I'm very glad to see you guys moving in this direction. I, frankly, hated Scribd before, even though you guys had a relatively nice PDF reader.

The only suggestion I have right now is to have the full screen button take into account the longest side of the page and the browser window size will scaling. I think it would be more useful to have the shortest side of the window be the limiting factor with the scaling, rather than scaling to the longest side of the window. That way, content isn't hidden.
I hope that you were running that van empty.

It's completely crazy how fast people will drive vans on the German autobahn, 160 to 180 is no exception. Big problem when you're hit by a gust of sidewind. (that's when being loaded comes in handy again, but you can't really have a good stopping distance and good handling at speed).
Google Latitude Has 3 Million Active Users, Check-Ins Likely On The Way
I think you need to reaccess who your paying clients are. People that are so desperate to learn they'll try anything - expats in a new country for a job (or dragged along by a spouse), contractors dealing with workers and language barrier, esl teachers, travelers who want to be prepared to communicate with the locals, etc. Less fun, and more solution based advertising. I know I've seen Rosetta Stone ads highlighting it's use with diplomats and the like.
While there probably are some proportion of programmers that program in flash want to stay in flash because they don't want to try new things, sometimes, it's a more practical matter.

Hell no I don't want to maintain 4 code bases for each of the iphone, android, palm, and blackberry platforms, especially if my app doesn't depend on anything special that one platform provides.
That is great feedback. With an undertaking such as this, UX is definitely going to be a big issue. While we were careful and thoughtful in creating the current interface, we surely have plenty of work to do in terms of the overall experience. That's one of the aspects I am most excited about, though. We have so much more to work with - we will be able to make great strides in usability over the coming weeks and months.
if you think about it, that's what the employer is doing as well.

That's true! It's "obvious" but that thought hadn't occurred to me - thanks for the insight :-)
Really amazing work. However, when the scrolling to the images at the end of the paper, it kinda slows down my Firefox 3.6. Chrome 5.0.369.0 shows it smothly though (all on ubuntu 9.04)
And Apple got 30% of that? Such a rip-off to developers.
A great template for startup financial models
If you are like me and don't love spending days in excel creating investor bliss with pro forma statements, this is for you too.
Just a gut feeling. I've... we've known something like this was coming for a long time. Remember, MarkZ is a bit of an egomaniac. Have you seen what happens to egomaniacs when their world starts to crumble around them? Not to get overly dramatic, but you know the Russians gave him hundreds of millions of dollars. That's a lot of money.

You know, in startup land, we tend to think the world works differently than the world works. Mark's investors are probably putting a huge amount of pressure on him right now and the activity on the web over the past few weeks has sent FB users leaving in droves.

HN used to be full of FB fans, API fans, technical fans look how that has turned in just a couple weeks...

If you were facebook and you saw your subscriber base growing and growing, then plateau, then start to decline rapidly -- uncontrollably, what would you do? What would you do if you knew that your worth was dropping just like that.

Imagine having millions of dollars in the stock market today when this mess happened. You'd be sick right now. That money won't come back. Facebook's users won't come back and Mark's chances of keeping his paper billions is evaporating right before his eyes...

I can see it. I can feel it. The writing is on the proverbial facebook wall.
Sucks to be me, I sold at the beginning of the drop, but outside of the range of canceled trades -- now it's over my sell price, so I lose money for being quick :(.
It was the #1 iPhone app in numerous catgories shortly after it was released, probably where that statement is coming from.
According to pretty much every site that ranks websites according to traffic / visitors facebook is currently #2 and rising, some hard proof that that is more than a gut feeling would go a long way towards substantiating that this is not just a tech sector issue.
I'd like to see larger up/down scrolling buttons. Fitt's Law is working against me when I try to click on those. I think they should be larger because it's the controls that users are most likely to use. Maybe Marco Arment's Instapaper pagination will give you some ideas: http://blog.instapaper.com/post/414438490

Overall, a huge improvement. Good work!
Yep. In most of the western world "accidental" trades are normally reversed over a handshake, japan has a much more mercenary attitude of "you screw up you lose".
Thats the thing, for the average user there is almost nothing they do on a day-to-day basis that requires a complete computer. The future that the iPad is bringing will be back to a family that has one computer (desktop or laptop) stashed in a corner that people use when they need to do something intensive, and an iPad (or similar tablet) for everyone that they use most of the time.
Nice of them to provide that as a pre-cooked option. Maybe it should be the default?