skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
it's loading really really really slowly.

I don't like this sentence: "Make great graphs and charts easily on the web."

Why not "Easily make great graphs and charts for the web - it's simple, and free"

Your transitions of the graph examples are too fast, and I can't manually click through them. they're also not that interesting. got any interesting data to plot?

The "click here to learn more and see it in action" feels like a distraction from the sign up button. do you need both? why not put that link below the charts, it feels like if the user cares enough to focus on the slideshow they might want to read more. You shouldn't really need an additional page to explain your service though.

Whats your nearest competitor? Guess its like, Excel? What are the pain points there and how do you solve them awesomely?

The blogger/student/designer links are too subtle, it isn't clear what they update. (eg: scroll down 20% and click them - nothing happens)

There is probably too much text. Try stripping out all the detail for each benefit (eg: Works with popular data formats) and have a simple bullet list of every feature. maybe tapping them shows more information regarding them to the right.

Chances are different people care about different features, it might be clever to reorganize bullet points based on what role they tap, eg: designers might care about themes, academics about latex, marketeer about pdfs.

From a design point of view I think the site looks nice, the logo at the top is maybe too high and pushes your content down 75px too much, the buttons are quite ugly. The twitter button stands out a bit too much and the free sign up button doesn't really pop - I like green for primary CTA.

The 6 examples of visualisations aren't clear and feel like I should click them and a light box will pop up showing an example.

the sign up page needs some polish. make the fonts consistent, change the heading from "Pretty Graph Basic Account Beta" to "Pretty Graph Registration" or some such. Scrap the line about the pricing, capture the data then tell them. When i clicked "sign up" it redirected me to a 403 for /users.

The "Creating account" text is too obscure, it should probably be a spinner, a nice rule of thumb is that if you need a spinner - do it faster.

i just accidentally reloaded, so i'll give more feedback in 15 minutes when the page has returned ;)

disclaimer: i am math retarded and charts confuse me. i do however know a thing or two about product messaging/marketing (IMHO)
A few random thoughts, as I write them. Disclaimer: after looking it over, I'm not really interested in using the product (right now, at least), I'm talking about the process up to that realization.

* The design of the front page itself is nice and pretty in general. Having said that, there are a few problems.

* The initial pitch is clear (make pretty graphs), the first two questions I had were "so what does this software look like" and "what would I use this for".

* To answer the second question, I clicked on the big "Blogger" button. For some reason, the text above it was updated, totally not what I was expecting (and I was close to missing it completely). I'd change that.

* The text "Click on the red button to sign up for a free beta account." is kind of superfluous. I'd remove it, the button is pretty self-explanatory).

* At this point I would normally just close the tab, since the three points you made for bloggers didn't seem too interesting. But I kept looking, and:

* Apparently, you can click on "Learn More". This page has most of the stuff I was looking for on the front page, like a video showing the software, and larger explanations on what it's good for.

* I would either make the Learn More button stand out much more, or (even better) put its content on the home page. Also, I'd put a "home" button next to the "Learn More" button and have it highlighted, to make it clearer that it's a "tabbing interface" and not just background noise.

* If you're putting the video on the front page, I would tweak it a little to make it more focused on showcasing the actual software (skip the whole login process, just get to where data becomes graphs).

Anyways, those are my quick first thoughts. Definitely looks interesting, but I'm guessing your hardest challenge will be to convince people they should use your software instead of Excel, all the more reason to put a video showcasing why your software is better smack-dab on the front page.

Best of luck to you on your startup!
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> You can purchase or rip music from anywhere and put it on any Apple device.

Unless it's in FLAC format.
FWIW: I built 10 Minute Mail and am happy to answer any questions about it.
well i can only agree with you.
to me lessons here are quite obvious:
1) history channel is not a right pick if you want to learn some history.
2) if you take any complex story and try to make popcorn story out of it - you most likely end-up making something inconsistent/unbelievable for some curious minds(like HN readers)
What ads did you run?
I'm a designer (and front-end coder)
Razor Burn: A Flood of Fancy Shavers Leaves Some Men Feeling Nicked
a 13.3" Aluminium MacBook with Snow Leopard, 4GB ram, 24" Philips TFT, Magic Mouse and a Logitech DiNovo keyboard in combination with a Webfaction account and a Linode VPS.
history has been shoehorned into a narrative that fits well with the motivations of the victors. that this narrative is childish, condescending to its audience, and inaccurate is hardly surprising.
This is an interesting question after reading your box. I started off with my computer infatuation with a setup very much like yours. But lately, I am so much more interested in portability that I have gotten rid of everything except for a HP dv4 (ADM dual-core, 4GB RAM) that I run Ubuntu on th ssh into my webfaction hosting account and writing my thesis in latex.

The size can't be beat, and it does everything I need it to without being the size of a house (granted I don't game on it...) Maybe if I had more space than a 600sqft apt, I would still have a mini-supercomputer, but laptops are amazing lately.
If you are a UI designer looking for work, my company is looking for a designer. My personal email is in my profile.
When I am in the car driving, it is a great way to dictate notes to my self and others (to edit later), hands free. I end up forgetting some of those ideas when I don't get them recorded, and it's easier than going through audio recordings.

The cool thing about speech to text is that there seems to be a learning algorithm behind it, so it does just keep getting better.
Often, those who say this haven't been on the receiving end of much evil.

Also, please name a government that hasn't done anything evil. There's none! Governments are dangerous things.
Thanks a lot edanm. Those are really useful points. I should have a nice introductory video ready later this week which I will put up on the homepage. I will make a more prominent link to the Learn More page.

Edit: I replaced the "click the red button" text with a link to the Learn More page. Thanks!
Someone should do a post or web comic about pig projectiles in warfare.
Phones are a bit different though.

On the Internet, we saw a lot of 'personal home pages' which were basically globally accessible bookmark menus.

Those had limited utility because they were public and only available when on-line.

By comparison something as 'easy' as Frontpage would be great for making a personal single-purpose app for your phone. It doesn't have to do a great deal to be useful - perhaps it would just show the RSS feed from your school events society. Maybe it would just make a ping sound when you touched the screen, or be a really simple game just for the fun of it.

If we are talking about 15 minutes of setup and build time then the apps really don't have to do much, and they only have to be useful to one person to get made. But it makes owning the phone much more interesting to people who are a bit geeky but don't code, which is important for Google.

(Compare to the iPhone - where the easiest option is to set up a web server and build a single-purpose web site. That's easy for us but for a 10 year old it's a huge barrier.)
Sorry about that. I think the server's not liking the traffic.

Edit: Changed the sentence as per your suggestion.
I'm seriously considering getting my beard permanently removed via laser hair removal. It's getting affordable, and not having to shave every day, or every other day, seems like a luxury I might now pay for. I'm thinking of asking for next birthday and Christmas getting the cost covered.

ADDED IN EDIT:

I personally don't like having a beard. Been there, done that, don't like it. Also, my wife would be 100% happy with me being (effectively) clean shaven all the time. Stubble is much less welcome.

Unfortunately I've started to get grey patches, and laser removal is less effective on grey hair. So just as I'm getting to the point where I could afford it, I'm developing the characteristics that make it less plausible/possible.

Typical.
Now that's cool.
because it's awesome?
Desktop: Quad Core 2.5Ghz, 8GB ram, 6TB raid-5, arch linux running xmonad.

"Old" laptop: Macbook Pro, 4GB ram

"New" laptop: Asus EeePc 1201N running arch linux.
The Next Best Alternative to using Pretty Graph would be using Excel, for most people. How much better is Pretty Graph? Better enough to convince people to "pay" the extra cost (of using something new, via a web interface, rather than something they're familiar with running quickly on their computer, probably in the same place as their data sits)?

I'd suggest thinking about how Prezi came up with an offering that is sufficiently much better than Powerpoint to persuade some people to make the switch (or at least give it a try). What about animated graphs, a la Hans Rosling (see TED talks).
Good book. Recommend taking advantage of this deal if you haven't yet read it, its a easy read that will get the gears turning.
I agree. BCC is legally bound to be objective
Is there new content compared to whats available for free online anyway?
How to import and convert MPG to iPhone (iPhone 4) on Mac OS X
You might have some MPG files (downloaded MPG movies or camera footages) somewhere on your Mac. If you have an iPhone, say iPhone 4, you probably want to put these MPG videos on it. To achieve the task,this iSkysoft iPhone Video Converter for Mac provides optimized presets for iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4, so you don't need to worry about the settings.
App Inventor for Android
Vestibular Migraines - vestibular migraine causes and symptoms
Corei7 930, 12G Ram, RAID mirror 2x 140GB 15K rpm drives + 1TB storage, NVidia GTS 250 (Bought pre-fermi will update to a tesla soon), 24" Synchmaster
Stop hacking, start fixing
They are arguing that in fact people did NOT know what they were getting into. People were signing up for 2 year contracts with AT&T while Apple had a 5 year exclusivity contract with AT&T. Meaning people were locking themselves into 5 year commitments without realizing it.
Six Artificial Barriers to Startup Innovation
Because the media wants to make you an idiot where drowning and cold water are concerned.
Of course, Excel is the default. However, I'm aiming to solve use cases which are either really hard or not possible to do in Excel or can't be done very well in Excel:

Making multiple panel graphs, boxplots, plots with error bars, heatmaps etc. Very useful for quickly summarising large amounts of data.

In research, a lot of people spend a lot of time adjusting figure margins and title sizes etc. I want to save them time by giving them something that just works.

Applying the same graph theme or formatting to a batch of data files. I'm trying to bring the power of R scripting to the masses who do not have any interest in learning programming.

A lot of people, such as PR and marketing firms, specifically don't want to use Excel to make charts. They use nicer looking alternatives (mostly Flash based solutions). I am making a simple web-version for them.

Those are some examples, there are more.
My only machine is an 11.6" Acer Aspire AS1410. It's a great machine, especially for it's very low price. Plus an external 27" display and a few 2.5" hard disks that's all I need.

My DE is Gnome, at home and at work. I live mostly in Emacs & chromium anyway.
"these guys are worse or on a par for atrocities with anyone ever, real or imagined"

If you look at the total number of people killed, hitler's atrocities pale in comparison with those of Stalin and Mao.
I'm a UI designer working for a VC funded startup in boston. I still love doing freelance on the side.

Checkout my latest designed (and coded) project at http://www.liftrr.com.

and I have more recent screens if you'd like to see more work.

Email & portfolio link is in profile.
I think you guys are being a bit too short sighted. This shows some pretty neat "out-of-the-box" thinking about photography. In the past you were restricted to taking lots and lots of photos to possibly get one that worked. With video streams you can capture all you want and then go back and find the gems; probably stuff that you didn't even see the first time through.

Think about a play at your child's school; while your concentrating on your kid some other kid on the other end of the stage does something funny. Now you can go back "in time" and grab both shots and even a short section of video for context.

The whole thing makes me think of Blade Runner and the ability to shoot such high definition "streams" that you can "zoom - enhance" them all day long. Pretty cool if you ask me.
I saw this on twitter this morning and noticed a glaring similarity in the GUI design and that of MIT's SCRATCH programming language geared at teaching children how to program. They both utilize the concept of visually displaying code segments as "building blocks" which fit together like puzzle pieces to give a visual representation of whether or not code will work.

I commend the approach to get more parties interested in programming and mobile web application development. Perhaps this opens up a whole new world of potential for getting mobile applications development into the classroom at a very young age. On the downside, we might end up with an influx of even crappier Android applications in the market. I already have a hard enough time filtering through the craplications as it is.

Here's the link to SCRATCH for those unaware:

http://scratch.mit.edu/
There are more designers here than I thought. I do some freelance design when I find a project that is both interesting and well funded. I spend the rest of my time on my startup. (http://www.guestlistapp.com)

Edit: I should add that the reason its easier to find coders is because designers are typically underpaid and treated poorly. It is rare for a designer to stay a designer for more than 5 years. Certainly after 10 years most of them have moved on.
13.3 MacBook Pro, 4GB ram with Snow Leopard
I was merely replying to the “PHP does not have access to IDs of HTML elements” statement, but good job on the additional explanation.
Quad core 2.8Ghz, 8GB RAM, 2TB internal, further 2.5TB in rats nest of external disks. 2 x 19" monitors. Running W7 and Snow Leopard via VM for iDev,

Plus a crappy old laptop I had to upgrade to 1.5GB RAM after it came with 512MB and Vista. Used only in cases of extreme laziness.
2.66GHz i7 15" Macbook Pro, 4Gb RAM, 24" monitors at home and work. Mac keyboards, MS mice, a few TB of external HDs, wireless headphones.

Used to be into self-built machines, but prefer stuff with a combined warranty that 'just works' nowadays.
Well, in my case it worked the other way around. "We need to see the marriage license at least two weeks before the wedding."
Since January I've been using an Apple iMac 27inch, 2.8GHz quad-core Intel core i7, 8GB ram, 1TB hard disk, Apple GB keyboard (not wireless) & Magic mouse running on Snow Leopard (Mac OSX 10.6).

Before January it was an original Intel iMac 24inch running Tiger (Mac OSX 10.4) which I'd been using for over 3 years: http://transfixedbutnotdead.com/2006/12/14/my-workspace-with...
Good point! To be perfectly safe, `$div.attr('id')` should be escaped before it’s used. I’m not sure in how many browsers this could be a problem though.

FYI, the `.append` line is missing a closing `)`. Also, you probably don’t want to use `$(this)` in that case, you could just use `this`.
Thanks Peter. Those are really useful points - definitely something I was looking for to refine the site design. I've been tweaking for a long time, but decided to just put it out there today and see what people think.

My problem with the copy and general message of the site currently is that I have a lot of different types of target users in mind. I'm finding it hard to make a site which does justice to all of their different interests and needs.
A lot of similar material appears in both the book and in his essays posted online, but there's also some unpublished stuff in the book as well.

As to the ratio, I couldn't say. But as with Hacker Monthly, I find reading a print edition to be a new experience anyway, even if I've read the online text beforehand.
All of the people hand-wringing over the possibly of amateur developers making crappy apps for mass-distribution are missing the point.

This isn't a tool for allowing non-programmers to develop apps for mass sale/distribution (although I'm sure there will be plenty of that). This is a tool for allowing non-programmers (like me!) to create tools for a mobile platform to make our own custom apps to fulfill our own niche needs.

This could be huge - yeah, I'm sure the apps won't be as polished, fast, or optimized as an app written in the native language and using the native API's, but I'm a professional mechanical/acoustical engineer who spends my time working on my job and I don't have the time (or inclination) to learn to be a software engineer/programmer. Similarly, programming my own DSP filter in C would probably result in a more efficient analysis tool, but Matlab/Octave gets the done while allowing me to concentrate on my engineering projects rather than dealing with memory management, etc. Don't look at it as a developer's tool, it's a high-level RAD environment like VB, Excel, etc.

Now of course the proof is in the pudding and we'll have to see how it works in the real world. I will say that I'm a current Nokia smartphone user who has been sitting out the iOS/Android war, but if if App Inventor works well, Google will have brought me over to the Android camp.
Sorry, I guess I wasn't clear enough in the article.

The point of the low PageRank is that it identifies the low-competition keywords/key-phrases. i.e. If you have a HIGH PR site, then you can rank pretty well for any key phrases, but if you have a LOW PR site, then you'll only rank for the key phrases that nobody else ranks for.

So, as you regularly post a range of topics on a low PR site, you'll only see search referrer traffic coming through for the subjects that have a 'gap'.

It's not really about the brand, that's just an aside.

Also, of course, ranking on Google is made up from hundreds of factors; PR is just one of them, but it's indicative of lots of the other factors (number, quality and diversity of incoming links).
Work: custom-built dual quad core Xeon E5520@2.27GHz, 12 GB RAM, dual 22" dell monitors (Ubuntu Lucid)

Home:

* custom-built quad core AMD Phenom (Ubuntu Lucid), 8 GB ram, single 22" monitor

* Lenovo T400s (Ubuntu Lucid)

* Macbook Pro (rarely used, bought during period of irrational exuberance on potential app store sales)
An end-user app development tool? Pfui
i7 920, Windows 7 64 bit
12G RAM
nVidia 275 (Almost 2G of RAM)
22" Monitor ATM, as the wife is using the other one)
320G primary Drive, 1TB slave, 1.5 TB backup
Plantronics Wireless Headphones
3 Printers. Yes, 3. 1 Canon Jet, 1 B/W laser w/fax/scanner, 1 laser color. Really, don't ask. Blame my wife for them.

The most difficult thing at the moment is the single monitor at only 22". Really looking to invest in a nice 27", but with so many other things needing doing, I really can't justify it at the moment.

It's a nice system. Before this, I was usually a generation behind. This was the "let's really splurge and go all out" system. =) Encouraged very much by the wife. And yes, I do end up using the system and it's resources quite heavily at times for video rendering while still using the computer.

It's a funny story how I got this system. See, my wife is a Mac Geek. And she's not some clueless Mac Geek. She was installing and running Debian back in the 90s. She knows her networking, hardware, and computers. Her Mac love came about when she went back to school for compute graphics. Anyways, she's a Mac Geek, so for several years now, our home has been a Mac v.s. PC environment. Good forbid something happens with my PC (or her Mac), as the other won't waste any time before coming up with some snarky comment. She's really good at this.

Anyways, when I saw the new iMacs, the 27" i7 version caught my eye. With the constant struggle of getting a Mac and PC to work together, I finally informed my wife that I would be getting a Mac, selling my PC, and moving to Apple.

She rejoiced.

We made plans, but with me starting a new job, and with wanting to wait until after the new year to give them time to fix any potential first-run defects, we planned to get one in January.

However, come December 25th,I learned she decided to buy me Windows 7 (which I had yet to pick up, mostly because I'd just been too lazy to do it). This resulted in me deciding that I should upgrade my computer, and that, as we say, is that. She had her chance.

Anyways, sorry for the long post, and the rambling. >_<
totally the right thing to put it out there and see what people think. can never do this too early.

if i were you i'd pitch the initial messages as why you > excel, and then let users specify who they are and they can dig in from there.

video tours are a big deal btw, might wanna put that on main page.

also, targeted landing pages for each customer. (do this)
Programming isn't for the author because they're obviously a business person first and foremost. Suits and programmers are two different worlds, right down to temperament and interests. You can tell just by looking at the language in the article - how they wanted to "execute" on their idea, and how they "just need to build the backend" which of course "wouldn't take much." To me it sounds exactly like those shady craigslist "entrepeneurs," where the pitch is that they've "done the hard part" and now all they need is "someone to do a bit of coding for us." They even go so far as stating that they dream of making sales calls and doing marketing.

quote: "But hacking, programming, whatever you want to call it—it’s not like that. Its something you have to invest real time in to, and you have to have a special drive to become good at it."

Gee, you think? Could that be why people go to college and get degrees in computer science?

Programming isn't for this person because they're just not a programmer, period.
Ask HN: Who is going to be at HOPE?
The Next HOPE conference (http://thenexthope.org/) runs July 16th-18th @ the Hotel Pennsylvania, NYC. Just wondering who all will be there, perhaps we can have an HN meetup.
That's fantastic news, thanks!
Or maybe the author has heard people like Thorvalds Linus and Eric Raymond refer to themselves as hackers.