skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I do agree that the "improved" mockup is easier on the eyes than the current Stack Overflow design, but I'm not convinced that Stack Overflow's success is "despite its poor design".

Maybe Stack Overflows... umm.. how shall I put this.. distinctive design is actually part of whats made it so successful. I mean, let's face it, when you're googling around and land on a Stack Overflow page, you KNOW you've landed on Stack Overflow, even if you weren't paying attention to the URL. It's look is definitely distinctive and unique. Maybe that's more important than being pretty. It does seem there are a lot of famously ugly sites that are also famously successful (CraigsList, PlentyOfFish, etc) I'm also reminded of the recent HN post about those long ugly salesletter sites, and how they convert much better than attractive web 2.0ish sites.

Maybe (for web sites), being pretty isn't all it's cracked up to be?
Ugh, I didn't see that and it's too late for me to delete this submission. Perhaps people wouldn't mind flagging it?
Steven Blank and Eric Ries talk about a "customer development process" - you might want to look that up. I am going through it myself these days and it feels like they are talking directly to me.
I actually have come to enjoy java servers/services this summer at my internship, but there is no way in hell I'll ever do anything with JSP, ever.
Relative to whatever's evolved to be the youtube standard level? I generally keep my speakers tuned to that, suspect many do. If the relative volume of two videos is not consistent between viewers, maybe it's a matter of equalizer filtering?
your last sentence may come off as rude
I've recognized this phenomenon in myself in the last several years, but I never articulated it this well. I would just tell people that I had a "one-track mind," and that even though I find myself analyzing things a lot, it tends to gravitate towards whatever I happen to be working on most.

I have observed this several different times in my life: When I thought I was in (actually out of) love in high school, that was all I could think about, and I put out a ridiculous amount of poetry describing my "anguish". At various times I got caught up with different games: Everquest, Chess, Minesweeper, Battle for Wesnoth, Poker, and Chess again; at each point, I found myself spending all my leisure time on a single game, and all of my idle thoughts considering different opening sequences, or mine layouts, or starting hands: whatever was applicable to current "addiction". When I have been in relationships, I find that I tend to be consumed with not only the small disputes (as pg describes), but with things like "sweet" things I can do or say to make my s.o. happy -- thoughts tend to drift toward planning, anticipation, reconciliation, and any number of other difficult bits that are part of a serious relationship. At various points I have also found myself wrapped up in technical things like math, physics, computer science, and startups in general. And lately my top idea has been the nature of life, human relations, introspection, and psychedelics.

So for me, it basically seems to be whatever is currently consuming the majority of my consciously-used brain power. Some social problems are hard and require a lot of brain power to try to solve. The same goes for philosophical or cash flow problems. Of course, topics in math or science or engineering are most likely to take up this brain power, but for me at least, those are the things that I tend to procrastinate on the most.

So even though I find myself inclined to consume my top idea space with relevant technical stuff, I tend to nudge those out of my mind when I'm thinking consciously, instead focusing on more immediate topics (entertainment, socializing, paying bills). The worst part is that I know that if I'd only restructure my free time to actually work on worthwhile things, I would see my productivity increase many-fold due to the "Top Idea Effect". I'm really not sure what's stopping me from doing that.
10 Stunning Movie Websites
One of Hugh McLeod's rules of creatives is that it's impossible to do art unless you have a day job. The mechanism is probably the same. All of my ideas I have while sitting on the rowing machine, to the point where once I've run out of sufficiently good ideas I know it's time to start getting back in shape.
What sort of easy changes are people making that verbosity and static typing would prevent? I get the heebiejeebies trying to imagine that...
For me, water in general has a calming effect, letting my body relax and my mind wander. I can stand in the shower with water flowing over me and get lost in thought or I can float in a pool and not realize where time went. I find I have more technical thoughts in the shower and in the pool I tend to lean toward more creative ideas.
It seems like the crux of his argument is speed. 1.8.x isn't fast enough, so they want to move to 1.9, but the community isn't moving to 1.9 fast enough, so they're moving to V8, which is fast.
Corollary: stop working so intently on the problem, and give yourself time to let your mind wander. Being a workaholic actually impedes creative ability.

No need to stay in the shower for hours. Go dance, swim, skate or climb a tree: anything but startup related work.
Good front-end developers should have a functional understanding of design principles, just as good front-end designers should have a functional understanding of CSS, JS, and HTML.
"When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years."
-- Mark Twain

snark/
Flipboard CEO: New ’social magazine’ de-uglifies the Web
Millions, billions, zillions
I finally got the facebook part to work and they ask for every privilege you could imagine, including "access your info when you are not using the app". Too bad.
For what it's worth I had a nightmare of a time with it. Especially Tapestry 5.0, 5.1. The documentation is atrocious and out of date. Also, it could have been a novice mistake that resulted from days of all nighters in a row, but I had a critical bug that prevented me from delivering that, as a TA later discovered, was resulting from my form validation occurring once for each form element on the page rather than executing once for the entire form.
> Nassin Taleb calls this "glander."

So do all french speakers :)
It wasn't offensive and I wasn't offended. Sometimes it's a better use of my time to stop reading an article half-way.

Anyhow, this post is in the same vein as the AA redesign by Dustin Curtis. The criticism is interesting and useful. The complete redesign attempts are however a step too far. IMHO. You can't suggest solutions to identified flaws by completing changing the parameters of the problem.

(I'm not specifically talking about OP here, it's more about redesign posts in general.)
Hugh McLeod is wrong.
Similarly, Corkscrew allows you to do the same thing, but with an HTTP proxy like Squid:

Host foo
ProxyCommand corkscrew proxy.domain 3128 %h %p
Fair enough but url shorteners break the web[1][2]. That is quite clearly not a good trade-off. I avoid url shorteners unless they be absolutely necessary.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_shortening#Criticism_and_pr...

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1416090
i've started using Riak and i've fallen in love. I still love couch but my new db of choice is Riak, for both Erlang and Rails projects.

My recommendations (to my friends) on noSQL:
1. If you're doing replication with devices, or the replication endpoints are not in your control, use CouchDB.
2. If you need speed, and you don't mind losing your data, use mongoDB.
3. Otherwise, use Riak.
Yes, its a useful trick I often use. However, does anyone know if Chromium or Opera can do the same DNS request tunnelling? (Firefox+Linux is sluggish for me.)
That's how Apple would have priced it.
Push to new shocking extremes to give people something to discuss afterwards.

This is the pattern I call "pickling the shark", after a piece of artwork carefully calculated to do precisely that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Physical_Impossibility_of_D...
What exactly do you mean by replication with devices?
There's something rather worrying when you deem "a monkey for hire" to be more noble/proper than an artist shopping his art to prospective buyers. Whose tune have you called lately? Which artist did you commission to create your portrait?

Patronage is inherently a limited, elitist, classist system. I don't exactly approve the load of crappy art we see these days, but to go back to begging for scraps from power elites is a thousand times worse.
And if only the Android client ON Verizon's network would allow you to make calls when connected by Wifi. It's all backward!
It's a fairly light read, but who knew that Brian Kernighan wrote for the Daily Princetonian?
I realized while in college that I did my best thinking in the shower/bath tub. But I always forgot my good ideas in the process of drying off/getting dressed, before I could write them down.

So I went out and bought an underwater slate (divers use them to communicate and record information underwater). It's probably 6"x9", made out of plastic, and has a pencil attached with a cord. I can jot down notes/sketches/doodles/whatever when I come up with an idea, and take the slate with me when I get out of the shower to record in a more permanent fashion. To erase, I just scrub it with a green scrubber sponge. I love it - it's paid for itself many times over.

I also tried bathtub crayons. They're good in that you have more surface area to write on, but they wash off more easily and it's not as convenient to permanently record whatever you wrote down (it's hard to take the shower wall with you when you get out).
ManyBooks.net
May be a coincidence, but I have been an active reader here for a bit now. Just never commented / signed up. So I'm real. Don't know about anyone else...
There is a lesson here about lawsuits, which will drain you of both money and peace of mind all at the same time. Sometimes you can't turn the other cheek, much as you would like to do so, and have no choice but to fight. Having the guts to stand up for yourself (or for your company) is in itself a virtue and there are times when it is best not to walk away. Unless you are in such a spot, though, always consider that the engagement will cost you dearly in just the ways pointed out in this fine essay - it will consume your waking thoughts and may even pop up in your dreams (or nightmares) (and it will cost lots of money, enough to sink most startups as a matter of course). Therefore, when it comes to lawsuits, use your best judgment but always count the cost before proceeding.
Thanks for making my wish come true!
I'm guessing that tactic doesn't win too many repeat interviews, unfortunately.
Well written PG. I sent this to a lot of friends with whom I've had issues describing my tendency to ignore details, pointless worries, and simplify my surroundings and lifestyle.

I personally find that keeping schedules in my head is a particularly distracting practice. If kept in my head there's always something I'm afraid of forgetting and continually think over it in my mind to keep the thought fresh. When I use a calendar or have very consistent days my thinking is much clearer.
The Over-Exaggerated Death of Flex and Flash
I think it says something rather worrying about modernity that at some point we rejected the notion that "he who pays the piper calls the tune". From Shakespeare to The Beatles, there is a tremendous history of great works being produced by avowedly populist artists.

The patron used to say "You there, I hear you are a painter! I shall pay you a handsome sum if you will paint my lovely wife." And Leonardo would go off on his own practicing, maybe have the wife sit for some modelling sessions, come back with the Mona Lisa, money changed hands, all was good.

Somewhere along the way the piper-payers, not content with being the financial enablers of greatness, decided that they had to get involved somehow. So now we have the present situation where children's cartoons are created by TV and toy company execs who can't draw; and Orson Welles is micromanaged in his delivery of voice-over copy about frozen peas. And working for hire lost its cachet.
Ask HN: Quitting Job in a month. Whats next?
Friends - I have been trying things on and off in part-time for long. One way or another way things didn't work. But I am not tired. I am quitting my job next month but i don't have good idea ( Was leaning towards personal expense tracking site where u can enter expense via email, SMS, online, mobile or just send your receipt or receipt picture ). But market survey indicated that people not that kin on spending time to do that daily budget work. Majority of things are already covered with Mint so...

Anyone want to give hint on where I should start? Some of your pain point can help me start ball rolling
Spycraft and technology: A tide turns
Well you can play with the aperture rings.

I think there are too options for shutter speed and ISO. could do with less.

What I didn't get though how it measures exposure? or you are supposed to have a light meter with you?
http://www.haskell.org/communities/05-2010/html/report.html#...
It's too easy to wrongly believe you have a good Type 2 optimization. One might be tempted to replace their language's brute-force string searching with Boyer-Moore... after all, it obviously uses fewer comparisons. But brute force is usually fast enough in regular text for non-search intensive applications - it can find the last sentence of Moby Dick in 5ms on my laptop. And most of us aren't searching through Moby Dick each time a webpage is loaded. I hope.

Optimizations should really only be made at the Type 1 level. I'm all for cleaning up and refactoring code. Your Type 2 example is really a Type 1 problem in disguise, since it's not the simplest way to do it! If you want to do a Type 2 change, measure it and prove to yourself it's worthy of your time. Just solve the problem simply and cleanly and hope for the best. The huge performance hogs are almost never where you expect to see them anyways.
I would say yes. But not in the sort of way most people would hope to. Meaning, you can't just pick any new ground state and change to it very easily. Instead, you must educate yourself in new areas and you'll find yourself being driven to new ground states that were impossible options before your new education. Now you are 'falling' back into something that is, more or less, the same concept... but far more powerful now that you've given yourself more tools.

For example, my ground state used to be browsing the web and aimlessly brainstorming business ideas when I was in high school. Seven years later I've thoroughly taught myself how to build concrete business models and virtually test/evaluate them with thought experiments and many other similar concepts. Now my ground state falls to that: effectively the same sort of ground state but amplified with skills and knowledge.
I've worked in image processing and pattern recognition my whole career (~20 years). My last position was as principal software engineer. I don't have a graduate degree so it is certainly possible to work in the field without one.

Many places divide the work between two groups: an algorithms group and a software group. It's going to be harder to get into the algorithms group without a graduate degree (without experience anyway). But if you join a software group, there will be lots of opportunities to solve pattern recognition problems. And if your love is machine learning, you can move in that direction as you prove yourself to others.

I know nothing about natural language processing, but that's my $.02 from my pov.

PS.
Hey jbooth: I took a look at your web site. You guys do cools stuff!
No, that's the part that's been debunked. Look at the graph in my link: the biggest jump in happiness is from 75-100K to 100K+.

The correlation isn't high: there are lots of unhappy rich people, and lots of happy poor people, but the correlation is statistically significant.
Before the days of the iris diaphragm, interchangeable stops were all you could get!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterhouse_stop
A Peek Inside the NYC Venture Capital Ecosystem
I agree for the most part, it was a very poetic, feel-good way of saying that entrepreneurs look at the world differently.
I think so...
But I would say, it should also provide a way to read other Apps like Reddit (which I like very much) and Digg.
On the subject of dispute as a distraction; I've observed this almost every day for the last 4 years as a Wikipedia contributor.

You jump into article looking to improve them - add content, format, tweak, source and so on.

But within hours someone disputes the use of a word or the reliability of a source. Which usually gets sorted in a quick discussion - but often takes ages, drags in other editors and winds up with a month long discussion on various noticeboards and talk pages and edit wars on articles.

And you can see four or five of them start a week.

All over a single sentence. :)

So, yeh, I can relate a lot to what Newton was saying.
Many very useful tools, applications and websites require a little of bit learning. That's not a bad thing just because you're unfamiliar with it.
I guess it's because of their network architecture. They probably need major changes in the way they initiate calls to make this possible.
only people that care are stil their target, mission achieved.
Inception isn't a classic. Or a masterpiece. It's a slapdash confluence of popular trends within the community of filmmakers:

* Dealing with unreality, with hinted-at promise of imagining fantastical worlds, but really providing an excuse for more car chases, explosions, and gunfire than is plausible within our current legal framework (The Matrix)

* Multiple levels of unreality and ambiguous ending (Vanilla Sky)

* Leonardo DiCaprio isn't sure what's real anymore, and is haunted by visions of his crazy dead wife (Shutter Island)

* Statement about filmmaking itself (perhaps every auteur film in the past ten years)
منتديات برامج هوم *^* Yabroudonline *^* BramjHomE
you're welcome. :)
I mostly juggle between what I call work thoughts and life thoughts. Work thoughts are strictly work related and life thoughts are buying house, paying mortgage, buying car, paying loan, planning vacations and the like. I am having this trouble only after I got married.

Does anybody having similar problem? Which ones should be your shower thoughts: work thoughts or life thoughts?

I think my problem could be resolved if I start taking shower twice a day!
Many industries pay different salaries to similar-looking jobs without mutinies: sales, traders & investment bankers, management consultants, managers (bonuses), sports & movie & TV stars, etc. Every IT goon on Wall St. gets paid differently for the same job depending on perceived success that year, much more than a 10% difference.
This is especially useful when dealing with directories with too many files in them - say around a million files. Regular globbing won't work, and most regular tools won't work - but tar works great.

Also - another trick is to give it -c blowfish to use a lighter/faster cipher for the transfer to save on CPU time.
Ask HN: Can you give me some advice regarding Blackberry Apps?
Any advice you wish you had before you built one. What is the best way to make it so it works with all BBs. Any advice you can think of would be awesome!
Garment Factories, Changing Women’s Roles in Poor Countries
I can see how it could be annoying for new or low-engagement users. But for me (and I imagine many other regulars) I love seeing that bar. It means something good has happened on something I care about. Someone answered my question or commented on an answer of mine or I got a badge or something else I'm interested in. It never shows me things I don't care about.
You might be thinking of an article that was on HN several months ago -- "The Benefit Of Being Naked":

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1244308
Personally, I have resisted becoming an SO user because, and only because it's so fugly.
No, not deliberately. We're just so used to these terms that even if we use them incorrectly we know what we mean. It's like the speech engineers develop, they know what the other engineers know even if he doesn't say it correctly or fully.

But I'll take your critique into consideration and I'll try to use the right terminology in the next videos not to confuse viewers.
A better title would be "Reddit search is now powered by IndexTank". As it stands right now, it sounds like Reddit launched a new general purpose search engine.
What My Refrigerator Taught Me About Cognitive Mapping
MyDeco are doing something with enabling (furniture) designers to turn their ideas into products. Perhaps worth a look?
My ground state appears to have consisted for some time of sitting down and reading discussion boards. Somehow, over the last month, I seem to have replaced it with instead working on my music project. It wasn't really a conscious decision, but I found I started to engage the same pattern of either completing or losing initiative in whatever I was doing, pacing aimlessly for a brief period, then almost automatically starting up my recording software instead of a web browser.

Maybe it was just as simple as finding inspiration. I've become slightly obsessed with a couple of albums recently, and have been composing more in the past few weeks than I did in the last six months.
In the very near future, every website in the EU will need something like this or face legal consequences.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_on_Privacy_and_Electr...
Argh, I'm drowning in the programming goodness. Thanks :)
I am sure you can, there is nothing that would prevent it. We don't use flash to display the content so it should work from iPad.

I don't have a mobile or iPad so I can't test it but it should work. We'll test it on these devices later.
One of the reasons SO was created is cause forums are usually so bad at serving as Q&A sites.
But this doesn't have to, and shouldn't.
That is not really a good parallel. Online advertising is very competitive and much cheaper than newspaper advertising used to be. You cannot possibly say that google creates an artificial scarcity by buying out competitors as the papers used to do. Google makes money by simply ensuring they are the best solution for the fields they are in. But it is a market that anyone can enter and google cannot stop them.
Same here. I like having multiple projects active at the same time, mostly because of the 'switch when stuck' possibility, but also just to give my brain some time _not_ to think about the project. I think I'll go crazy if I had just a single top idea.

On the other hand, when inspired, working for a longer stretch (couple of weeks) on one single thing also works really well for me.

Ah, well, I guess it is a matter of balance (like most things in live :)
Another OReilly 50% off e-book promotion - ends 7/30
Similar to the previous wildly successful promo, enter code BXGXF at the checkout and get 50% off your books (must be an even number of books).

I'm thinking about buying "Search Patterns: Design for Discovery" and "Beautiful Data".
But IronPython is FOSS. The fact that it is being bundled in a closed source plugin seems like an implementation detail to me. If Firefox wanted to they could expose this very same implementation of a python runtime engine.
> Python clearly has Django,

To be fair, the picture on Python isn't totally clear either. You can choose from Django, Pylons (my preference, btw), Turbogears and possibly others... and you have the choice between SQLAlchemy and the Django ORM, etc. Picking Python definitely does not alleviate the need to make some evaluations and decisions.
Only fashionistas shop online?

I'd say their big miss right now is not having a "virtual sizing" model for women. As far as I can tell from their site, they've only got a male version.
Agreed. That's one (valid) metric.

But I think once you take at least two into account...