skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd love an answer for this too.

I asked in a post on HackerNews for a designer earlier this week and received no comments or responses. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1363053
Numpads Gone Wild
Don’t design for early adopters
Remember Occam's razor: The simplest explanation is usually the right one.
Apparently the error and response time graphs are expressed in dimensionless units of relative suckiness.
The ones at the top of the article do but the one further down doesn't and that was the one I clicked on first.
They also raised $200M in May 2009.
I have a weird routine.
Wake up at 5 am and turn on Windows machine.
Roll out of bed onto the floor and do 1000 stomach crunches (counting with Pi)
Get online and email girlfriend who is 7 hours ahead of me (Hawaii to Nova Scotia)
While emailing I read a page of French and capture new words. Then practice 100 flashcards.
Then practice my calendar savant skills with a little program I wrote.
Memorize a deck of cards.
Practice mental math and some conversions
Go out in the back yard and eat a papaya or mango.
Then I'm good to go.
Basically 5 books for the price of 1, sweet. I really like having real copies for reference, so this is a no brainer.

- Understanding the Linux Kernel
- Linux System Programming
- Learning Python, Fourth Edition
have only reviewed the following
:- Android Application Development
:- Enterprise Recipes with Ruby and Rails
:- Linux Appliance Design
Net Worth of Every U.S. President from Washington to Obama
I put an ad for graphic designers on a local job board for a short term web design contract and got plenty of applicants. I also browsed istockphoto and directly contacted designers whose work I liked.
Compare that graph to Google, though:

http://www.quantcast.com/google.com

Even YouTube shows a similar curve:

http://www.quantcast.com/youtube.com

I suspect this is a reflection of Quantcast's measurements, rather than something specific to Facebook.

More "top sites" data from Quant: http://www.quantcast.com/top-sites-1
Here's a few recent buys:

- Javascript: The Good Parts (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517748/)
- High Performance Javascript (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596802806/)

It's always a good time to buy a few classics:

- Information Architecture for the WWW (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596527341/)
- Javascript: The definitive guide (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596101992/)
- Beautiful Code (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596510046/)
WakeMate Photo Op
The Secret to Apple's Success
If I had an iPad I might consider it to see if I can read on that, but I've found that I only ever read books when printed on the pulped, mangled, processed bodies of brutally murdered trees.
I'm faced with this problem everyday.

I have posted in Freelance Switch with good results.

You can check this designer for example: http://www.lorenzociglioni.com (based in Rome, really cool guy)

Other than that you can check out http://www.sortfolio.com (form the 37signals folks)

I'm sure that in HN are a few.
Same on my Nexus One.
There's another benefit to doing $17k/2 - you get to build up your YC alumni at over four times the rate of $80k/2.
As a percentage, but not as an absolute number. YC is actually run very cheaply, but the amounts we invest are so small that any expenses seem high in comparison.
The "turbo entabulator"
The day that I hear that google is trying to write search engines that do anything other than rank based on relevancy is the day I stop using google.

TFA suggests that google is pushing people towards results that cause people to worry about the health concerns associated with nanotech, rather than the possibilities. Why would google jeopardize all their goodwill over such a relatively obscure topic? I don't buy it. (It later admits that it might be the mainstream media that is skewing the availability of evenhanded article and sites, and google is just transparently passing along that bias).
And the phone manufacturers are also a year behind on updating older devices. The article talks about the new Android 2.2 being great, but there are still phones shipping with 1.5 and no firmware upgrades in sight.

I realize there is no incentive for a phone manufacturer to fix bugs and add features to a device that's a year old. But Apple has done a decent job with the iPhone firmware updates.
Does how much you charge really depend on how much you want to make?
Several years ago, Rockwell International decided to get into the heavy duty transmission business. They were getting ready to tape the first introduction video. As a warm up, the professional narrator began what has become a legend within the trucking industry. This man should have won an academy award for his stellar performance. Remember this was strictly off the cuff, nothing was written down.

I think you will enjoy this once in a lifetime performance.
Correct, the price of the phone is about the same and I'd say my Droid Incredible is quite comparable to the iPhone in terms of quality and experience (I had a G1 before, which I loved, but could not quite say was on par with an iPhone). But there's another price- being locked in to AT&T, being locked in to phones made by Apple, being locked out of web sites that use Flash or apps that Lord Jobs has not blessed. The original point still stands, IMHO.
Given that there are Flash players which simply wrap around H.264 files, there's no reason not to use <video> on browsers which support it, and fall back to Flash on browsers that don't.
This poll is so stock-full of mistakes and biases that it's practically worthless. If you bother to click through to the source it even says at the bottom of the blogpost they got it from: "Please bear in mind that this poll is not scientific and is provided for information purposes only."

And I'm not even mentioning that computerworld finds an online poll written up on a blog credible source material.

Shame on them.
Ask HN: do you have troubles buying shoes?
Just curious, because for me it is impossible to buy shoes that fit. But my size is on the fringe, so the selection is not so big. Maybe for most people it isn't an issue. At the moment I don't own a single pair of satisfactory shoes, and I don't even know where to turn to find some.

Since it is a recurring problem for me, I keep thinking it would be great to have build on demand shoes. Atm I don't know anything about how shoes are being made, but who knows, eventually I might just be annoyed enough to get serious.

I have considered getting handmade expensive shoes, but then I heard they are actually even harder on the feet. But I admit I haven't really talked to a shoemaker yet.
That's a big help thankyou.
WebSDR: Software-Defined Radio receiver connected to the internet
2 Months Out, 74% of Latest Y Combinator Class Funded or Profitable
Even Geeks Have Generational Conflicts
It's funny. Every blog post Adobe makes about improving Apple support has complaints like this in it. But every one about improving Linux support has complaints about Apple support.

(Although lately the Apple complaints have changed from "make it suck less" to "screw you we don't need you".)
Hey, I'm a designer. hajrice@gmail.com I had a post on HN recently. Anyway, here's a few samples of what I've done last week.

http://imgur.com/KRbNx.jpg
http://imgur.com/w8S4A.jpg
http://imgur.com/DlHDb.jpg
http://imgur.com/qfhbv.jpg
http://imgur.com/KedPg.jpg
Starting a start-up will risk your marriage in plenty of other ways besides financially.

And those people wouldn't be willing to go all out killing themselves like the start-up myth around YC funded companies seems to more or less ask for. That's self selecting to some extent because one of the demands YC makes (drop everything and move here for 3 months) only applies to young or at a minimum fairly unattached people willing to take a fairly large risk in return for a shot at a potentially larger success.

Founders with 'lives' are a lot less likely to take that plunge, even an 80K investment would not be enough to provide the required security for a team of four to get to the break even point, after all that depends not on the size of the investment as much as to how long it will take you to get to 'ramen profitable' and that point is a lot further in to the future than you'd be with 3 or 4 'cheap' people.

The problem is to get monthly income to become greater than monthly expenses, and to get people that would require more payment during the launch phase the whole picture becomes terribly unattractive as long as there are plenty of young guns willing to try it for a lesser take home pay.

Their chances of success are better, they are less demanding and they probably have more energy (even if less experience).

You are in direct competition with them and I don't think that from an investors point of view there is an incentive to change the formula if it already works. The chances of those larger investments tanking is just as large or larger as it is with the small ones.

And a nice side bonus is that younger people are less set in their ways and more likely to listen to good advice.
I have plans for adding all the leagues, but I figured targetting baseball was a better idea since we still have the rest of the summer. By the fall, I hope to have the NFL, NBA, and NHL ready to go.
The web as a CMS for data
"From what I've read plenty of people have done just that in Ruby because of monkeypatching."

Tends to be the people who think of modifying open classes as "monkeypatching" who fuck it up because they still see it as some sort of quirk in the language rather than just another part of the language ecosystem.
Good point on your first sentence, but I disagree with the second. From the keynote they put on yesterday, Google has made it clear that they'll put a ton of effort and innovation in. They basically called out Apple the entire time. Apple has dominance now because of their huge head start and loyal fan base, but it's looking like Google is quickly overtaking them in innovation and features. Apple will always retain a loyal fan base, but I think they're going to need to step up in adding new features to avoid losing more customers to Android, and that's without considering the factor of people getting annoyed at Apple's paternalist (or "draconian") philosophy.
Ouch. I'll have to find another data source. I have to look into FanFeedr, which someone mentioned, maybe that'll work for me.
But old browsers are forever.... witness IE6
I've fallen for both 2 and 3; they are absolute killers.

There is a fourth too; stagnation. I actually had a startup a little while back (actually before hanging out here). I had the idea nearly 5 years before and spent about 3 years building it in fits and spurts (major warning signs there).

We went through about 4 rebuilds before I got bored for the last time (through total luck I was able to sell parts of the code/company).

[this is somewhat of an aside] I think it has made me a bit of a cynic about starting up. I see all these big ideas but there is little or no money in most of them.

I know the current fad is to fund lots of small, lean ideas. But ultimately I think a better approach is to contemplate your ideas, get hooked onto something really significant to you and then build it. I'm still looking for mine - but it feels the "right way".
They don't need to "go" anywhere. They can just quit.

I deleted today. I'm not looking for a replacement, I already have email. My email privacy settings haven't changed in twenty years. Oh, wait -- I don't have privacy settings. It's just "private."
Fitness of Parrot as a Target Platform
How much do you pay good designers per hour? I find many times designers are under appreciated.
Apple is fighting - no doubt about it - but it may be fighting using the wrong strategy. If jobs is really serious about saving the world from viruses, third party apps and porn, he's going to lose a lot of customers.
Wow, thanks for the detailed account of your support experience with AdWords. Makes you realize that if it is a monopoly, you can pretty much treat customers as you wish.
Microsoft's Ballmer admits Windows Vista "was just not executed well"
http://www.amazon.com/Motorola-A855-Android-Verizon-Wireless... $20
This seems to be heavily depended on the file types you use. I have some experiments with many different, short, sound files running with <audio> just fine - in Chrome, FF and Opera at least.

Ogg Vorbis and (of course WAV) works quite nice, MP3 doesn't. For Safari, maybe AAC would be the right choice. Still, as you said, the <audio> implementation is quite buggy at times. But I have no doubt it will get better!
Hmmm. I got my unlocked HTC Desire for £350, and googling for 'sim free iphone 3gs' shows me prices in the £600 range.
If it is true that it is impossible to create a video codec which doesn't infringe on existing patents then surely it is impossible for anybody to argue that there isn't something wrong with the patent system? My understanding is that the idea is to force innovation to find new ways of getting things done, not preventing them from happening all together. A compressed video file must be obvious enough for the concept itself not to be subject to patents.
Agh I knew I'd get downvoted but it's true! I don't want to be the trouble shooter for my friends who use windows. It's typically like "try rebooting, uninstall and reinstall drivers, do a malware scan, ......" And I've been using a mac for so long now, I wouldn't know where to start when trying to fix vista.
But it would never be 4x more likely to succeed, or at least not in any way that you can prove in advance, and statistics are against you anyway.

Batting averages do not vary considerably based on the size of the investment, and having 'graybeards' on board is no guarantee for success, at best it is neutral.

The only real case I could make for investing in a company with older people with a lot of responsibilities (distractions!) is that they have a lot more to lose.
The problem with saying "you can do things in whatever
way you want in Ruby" is that the moment you have more
than one developer it collides rather drastically with
the "principle of least astonishment".

I've solved that problem by actually talking with the other developers and agreeing to some common practices.

Not every problem requires a technical solution. Social solutions often work just fine.
The author isn't saying that no one ever meets new people online and then decides to meet them in person; he's saying that it's not as common as Gates' vision would suggest.
i.e., "Make it easier to put risk capital into people who are more risk averse."

A mortgage and family are a handicap in something that requires high levels of uncertainty and huge amounts of time. It seems you'd want to bias selection towards those who would take the plunge despite that handicap rather than offering a work around with a 6 month expiration date.
I did a search and I was served a domain parking Ad as a landing page. WTF am I missing? This search engine looks like a spam to me.and I wouldn't have cared if it hadn't shown up at HN.
This is why I love threaded comments, especially in reddit's style. You can just hit that little [-] button to collapse and ignore the noisy threads, and find the valuable discussion much easier. Even if half of a topic there is just terrible puns, usually there's some actual discussion further down the page. Actually, one place I've found is very good to find discussion on reddit and HN is in response to the greatly downvoted trolls. Usually the trolls don't have much of a point or terribly flawed arguments, but the people responding to them actually seem to do a decent job of being serious most times.
http://pick.im/
As a member of "the West", let me reply to this Iranian paper's contest with this statement: Don't care, go on, whatever. See that, we aren't hypocritical on this... your turn to stop caring about the Mohammad cartoons. The ball is in your court.
Very quick comment: Pick cleaner URLs. All those + and % characters in a long URL is asking for trouble.
Battery recharges debate about U.S. manufacturing
I also see Diaspora like a third-party candidate in a US election, but in a different way:

They won't win, they never stood a chance, and beyond a small legion of die-hard supporters, never had any public traction with the public beyond "oh hey, did you know what's-his-face is running?". And like most obscure third party candidates, they will impart no significant force upon the major candidates' policies or views.

Sorry to be a debbie downer, but I have a hard time treating seriously a team that has no track record nor even the slightest bit of code written. Come on, we've been around that block to many times to be fooled by this, haven't we?

Don't get me wrong, it may very well be that some agile startup will come along and eat Facebook for lunch. Hell, it'd be great to see some real competition in this sphere - but from everything we've seen of Diaspora, there's no real reason to expect them to do anything but sit around, write a bit of code (if they even get to that) and then fizzle out.
Pac-Man Celebrates 30 Years
Does apple not support their older notebooks with new OS upgrades like tiger to leopard? If they do support them then I see no real reason why hardware cannot innovate with respect to android in a similar way and still provide support to older hardware styles just as new OS versions do.
If you think that's good, check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ol3qQ4CEUTo (AVES Game Engine).

They benchmarked Canvas, and found that it was faster _not_ to use it for their engine.
Why Google TV Makes My Current Television Really Boring
You know, I'm sure the Wakemate product is going to be stellar and really useful.

I can't help thinking they've made a mistake in their approach though - everything I have seen from them has promised more, even this which has actual "stuff" on show promises bigger and better.

They should have:

a) waited till they had the physical product reasonably ready for distribution before announcing. All the hype from the intial launch is lost now. And if they hit unseen snags there should have been open and running updates so people stayed with them.

b) the web stuff and the phone apps are great and useful - but that's stuff you can develop and iterate over time. What you need to do with a physical product (and I have bitter experience here!) is get the damned thing out the door and into the hands of your users. So long as they realise the web/app is a work in progress all will be fine.
I'm guessing Microsoft has gotten a licensing deal with Tribune to get and share the EPG data for Windows Media Center. As far as the video stream, I wonder then how Microsoft/Hauppauge get away with it?
Google powerless to compete? That seems like a fairly strong statement given how deep their pockets are.
Eclair is so good, that I can not switch to iPhone, even if I was paid to do so.

Froyo just increases the advantage.
I suspect American student loans aren't (more or less) de-facto interest free. Interest on UK student loans supposedly only tracks inflation, although that doesn't seem to be quite true in practice. Nevertheless, interest is low enough that you can actually benefit from arbitrage if instead of paying back the loan you invest in high-interest savings. (except there's no such thing as a high-interest savings account right now) We did this for my girlfriend's student loan for a while, but we're just going to pay as much of it back as possible before interest goes up to >4% in September. No arbitrage possible at that rate, not in this economic climate.

The other aspect is that UK student loans are probably much smaller for the majority of people.
For values of "everything just works" that don't include standard developer tools. Getting a new macbook into configuration for (for example) web development is a PITA compared to any distro I've used that came with a decent package installer (apt, yum) out of the box. You have to hack up the damned keyboard settings just to get home and end keys to work.
Yes, that's true. I forgot to mention that, but it is now a very deliberate strategy. When we started YC we didn't even realize we'd produce an alumni network, but it is becoming more and more important.
I'll say it, as long as you realize that the "make this look good" part is on equal footing with the app development and are willing to compensate them as such... you can find them on http://collabfinder.com
If I were a Wakemate pre-order, I wouldn't be happy to see three mobile apps before anyone shipped me my device.

The Wakemate team seems dedicated and smart, but as an outside observer watching the it all unfold, their communications skills are sorely lacking. Hopefully a great product will overcome in the end.

edit: On second thought, they have got to be just crazy. How is it possibly the right idea to have three unfinished mobile apps than one that works?
I'm still waiting for my unit... Not very happy tho.
Stop Playable PAC - MAN Doodle On Google
Sure, but that's not how 99% of people get their phones, especially here in the US. From the perspective of a typical US phone buyer, who purchases a phone along with a 2-year contract, the prices are about the same.
I'd argue those of us who do either #1 or #2 are the ones most likely to succeed anyway. So "natural selection" gets the projects out the door.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1367518
I've tried all sorts in the past from Elance to 99designs. The problem with both is the same - communicating the idea and lack of real buy-in. Elance was difficult because of the differences in timezone and language barriers. 99designs - well, I was quite enthused by the idea to begin with - I didn't really understand the concerns of the no-spec movement. After posting 2/3 projects there I can safely say I'll never use them again. The amount of effort you need to put in responding to a bunch of people who only half get what your trying to say (if you're lucky) and who don't really share your vision or have much invested in you and the working relationship is quite overwhelming. I'd advise against spec work for these reasons, and that the quality of the work is poor in comparison to designers who listen to your vision and buy in.

I feel quite fortunate as I've since managed to find a smallish (but growing) agency not to far from where I live that I couldn't be happier with. For the past couple of projects I've met them face-to-face where we've talked over goals and ideas while they presented options and suggestions. They're not afraid to call me out when I'm being too prescriptive but they make an effort to understand. What I like most of all is the working relationship, the communication and, above all, the quality of the finished product.

I found them by searching for designers within driving distance of where I live, digging through lots of portfolios trying to get a sense of whose work I enjoyed most and whether I thought I could afford it.

If you're having difficulty coming up with a shortlist http://sortfolio.com/ by the 37signals guys might be a good starting point; you can restrict agencies by geographic location and budget.
Google's Pac-Man doodle is a subtle jab at Jobs
This doesn't look so active, but it might hold promise:
http://collabfinder.com/designers/
I preordered when it was announced earlier this year and they said that they would support both iPhone and Android phones on the sales page, and possibly Blackberry (I'm not 100% on BB). Today's post wasn't to announce that they are doing 3 apps, its to show they are working.

Why do you think they should not of worked on all 3 platforms at once? For the sake of a minimum viable product?
Whoa, you make a pretty stellar UI :)