skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apple's UX quality and attention to detail definitely helped make me a convert. Or a re-convert: I started with Apple II+, then got into IBM/Microsoft PC's, then came back to Apple a few years ago.

This is why I'm frustrated by the UX of iOS 4.0 running on my iPhone 3G. It is plagued with these unpredictable freezes, especially in Safari, which makes it unusable sometimes. We're talking total UI non-responsiveness for anywhere from 15-120 seconds, right smack in the middle of you're doing something. Very let down by them in this area. I've already learned of an unofficial way to downgrade back to 3.x, however, I've been reluctant to do it because I have some legacy contract projects who want me to support 4.0, so I need to keep something running it.

Other than this issue, though, Apple provides an awesome UX and has been a no-brainer choice over Microsoft -- a company I had also noticed many times in the past was copying the surface aspect of what a competitor did, often Apple, but not getting the fundamentals right, and making themselves look like idiots.
In other words the entire basis of this post could be a chance statistical fluctuation that should be ignored.

I agree that the particular stats referenced in the article may not be statistically valid, but I wouldn't argue that those stats were a supporting detail rather than the entire basis. The main point as I understood it was to illustrate, more or less, why a 100% increase in conversions to the purchasing page does not equal a 100% increase in conversions from the purchasing page to actual purchase.

They are saying that once you start attracting traffic beyond the early adopters, your additional traffic is now comprised of a different group of people who exhibit fundamentally different behavior in how likely they are to make a purchase even once they've hit the purchasing page.
Introduction to Design Patterns in C++ with Qt4
Sad, but true.
This is the most incredibly self-indulgent piece I've read all month.
Fuel Efficient Airlines Comparison
hmm.. explicitly uses myisam engine in mysql. Not good.
Thanks this is very helpful information. He introduced himself as an "Investor", but his linkedin profile shows his job title as an analyst. I'm guessing that is probably at or below the associate level.
above is what our community is missing, and what our Radio Shack stores are missing.
Definitely all three of these...

Plus recently "Made to Stick" has really changed how I think about ideas and sharing them with others. http://www.amazon.com/Made-Stick-Ideas-Survive-Others/dp/140...
He also has cute dimples.
Exactly.

These aren't game mechanics, they're psychological hacks. Classic game designers used all these 'mechanics' as a sort of spice, to enhance the solid gameplay already in place. Games like Farmeville are refined and condensed spice. No meat, just flavor.

Personally, after playing Diablo as a kid for god knows how long, I vowed to never play a 'grinding' game again. I suspect (but definitely am not certain) that most new casual gamers will go through their own experience, and come out the other side more immune to these hacks.
Heh, I can't stand any kind of blinking light. This whole trend has me going nuts every night as any random peripheral not utterly killed dead and smashed with a hammer is liable to suddenly decide to start blinking in the middle of the night and wake me up.
From the article:

NASA has since rebutted those reports, saying it could come "100 years away or just 100 days"

Although that doesn't have quite the same ring to it as a 2012 disaster.
You've got the right idea but the wrong influence.

Jobs doesn't do the actual industrial design - he knows what he likes, and he has a great eye for it (or so I hear) but the man behind Apple's design aesthetic is Jonathan Ive. And he did design Eve.

http://gizmodo.com/389772/wall+e-movie-is-jonathan-ives-late...
Distributed, peer to peer mail.
That sounds like something from a sci-fi novel.

I can see it now - you sign up and log where/when you're going, and how much space you have to take packages/letters with you. Some algorithm matches your as a courier up with people who need stuff taken where you're going.

The service is free if you act as the courier (...or mule, I can totally see that being misused rapidly).

I don't know how you get around the depot and 'guy who goes door to door' model though.
The big place where I notice this is in the "flick" scrolling on Android vs iPhone. Android just has this very tiny jerkiness, a just slightly less natural motion. I can't even define what it is about the motion, I just know it is perfect on the iPhone and almost but not quite on Android.

(And for the record, I love Android and would gladly cast every iDevice I own into a fire if I didn't need them for work).
Oh! Maybe that's a good startup idea - some kind of 'mail is here to be picked up' notification for the USPS, which could then optimize it's route and only hit places it had mail to deliver/pick up from.
I go days with no in or outgoing snail mail, but the poor postman has to walk up to my mailbox and check (no flag, it's inside the building).

In a way, Fedex/UPS already do this...
Flash drive crippled Pentagon
> Why are the zoom/minimize/close-or-sometimes-quit button so small and difficult-to-acquire targets? I'm not complaining, mind you, I'm just wondering what the rational is for that.

My guess is because these are rarely ever used. I just use expose instead of minimizing windows, and I typically kill an app before I consider closing its window.
Medical reporting in the lay press does the public a disservice
There is something really cool and compelling here, but I found it deeply disappointing that I wouldn't be controlling my drawings in battle. That makes it less of a game and more of an animated art gallery.
Not sure how that's considered a rebuttal? 100 days
Whoa! Seems like this article is a whole jumble of conflicting information starting with the title (Hit with the force of 100 bombs) whereas in the body of the article it says "the blast will have the equivalent energy of 100 million hydrogen bombs." and it doesn't say who made this claim (despite the HN title seeming to attribute to NASA). It sounds very dramatic to say "hit with" but if it's actually something that's happening on the surface of the sun that's a very misleading way to phrase it.

And then when I read articles elsewhere on the web it sounds like NASA back in 2006 was predicting a big storm in 2012 but now they're saying the calculations were wrong and it will actually be unusually small. http://thecosmicheart.blogspot.com/2009/11/no-more-2012-sola...
December 21st, 2012.
Absence of evidence is evidence of absence. No-one has ever observed electric blue swans. How likely do you think it is that they exist? If this seems like an unfair question, that's kind of my point.
I'm not sure the intent was commutative (if a then b, but not if b then a)?

Your bad employees will be loyal.

That doesn't mean your loyal employees will be bad.
Ask HN What are the best designed website?
I love the minimalistic design. I got inspiration from tons of website. I like few of the below design
facebook.com
quora.com (inspired by facebook)
280north.com
github.com
airbnb.com
dropbox.com

Can you guys please give me your list of favorite minimalistic design. We thought a lot about the design, and we come up with one simpler style for our project http://www.codesnipr.com but thinking to redesign it again. Any thoughts on this?
a fantastic example of open source software being pigeon-holed.
This isn't meant personally, but from a wide anthropological perspective, I suspect "giving certified professionals money to take care of your children" is farther from the norm than "having trusted friends in your community take care of your children". Just a small aside, possibly worth some thought.
Got math?

It's going to depend on your field of course, but it's pretty easy to get between 0.5 & 1% clickthough and 10c per clicks. That's between 50c & $1 per 1000 pageviews, and I said $5 per 1000 visitors (ie, uniques). If you double the CTR (quite doable with optimization) and get 2 pageviews per visitor then that's $4/visitor already...

If you prefer, look at it like this. The lowest Adsense eCPM I've seen over any medium period by anyone I know is $0.70.

Posterous is doing around 1.5 million pageviews per day (http://www.quantcast.com/search.jsp?domain=posterous.com) and Tumblr is doing over 60 million.

Getting revenue with that much traffic wouldn't be too hard.
My 10k html5 canvas game - last man standing
No, srsly. It's astronomy.
How to Go from a Engineering Student to an Entrepreneur
Of course Dell's blinking light timing was different. They didn't want to violate Apple's patent.
This is my first game inspired by the http://10k.aneventapart.com/ contest.

I submitted an earlier version to them an hour or so before contest close, but this version is a little tighter.
What imaginary world is this guy living in? Everything he mentions- the trends are moving in the exact opposite of where he sees them going...
I read your comment from my iPhone while stuffing my face with cookies. Reading from the iPhone implies zooming in heavily if I want to upvote. Eating cookies implies having one hand covered in crumbs. Thus, I had to finish my current cookie, clean my cookie hand, and then zoom in before being able to upvote your comment. However, I found your comment worthwhile enough to do so—thank you!
I second the "would like to look at the source" and I've got a html5/css3 button maker just waiting on a color picker. What kind of license are you going to distribute it with? I wouldn't want to use it if you weren't aware.
Except you still have to manage your windows.

Since the whole point of a window manager is to manage my windows so I don't have to, I use xmonad. If you want simplicity, give that a try :)
What would the purpose of stretching the dock across the bottom be? If you have few icons, they'd only be really spread out. Not necessarily beneficial.

What they do right on the dock and menus is extend the hit area all the way to the edges of the screen and adjacent items. You can drag your cursor all the way to the bottom of the screen and still hit the icon in the doc even though it's ~20px above. Likewise the apple and spotlight menus can be activated by clicking the the very corners. Much easier to hit because they have "infinite" height.

"Edges and corners of the computer display (e.g., Start button in Microsoft Windows and the menus and Dock of Mac OS X) are particularly easy to acquire because the pointer remains at the screen edge regardless of how much further the mouse is moved, thus can be considered as having infinite width.

"Similarly, top-of-screen menus (e.g., Mac OS) are easier to acquire than top-of-window menus (e.g., Windows OS)."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law
3 is a great point. Having competitors washes out to a boatload of free R&D. A bunch of mistakes you don't have to make. Learn everything you can about what your competitor has done and move forward. Who knows -- you might hit on something interesting mid-way through and pivot to an even better idea.
Westerners vs.the World: We are the weird ones
Speaking of attention to detail...

"12-20 breathes per minute" should be "12-20 breaths per minute"

"40 blinks per second" should be "40 blinks per minute"
This looks really awesome. I mean, I really like this. I can't wait to see how my little guy will develop and behave.

EDIT: The $5000 pledge on your Kickstarter page says that you get to design a character that defies the visual rules other players are held to. But I didn't see any visual rules on the site, and the "Send us a sketch" button just opens an email. I'm afraid my character may violate some rules. Just let me know. /EDIT

It's a late night in the office, so I sent you a whiteboard sketch of my company's robot mascot, Jango Webbot: http://cdn2.alfajango.com/images/jango_web.jpg?1279741285

I would love to see him battle our other mascot, Alfa Automabot: http://cdn1.alfajango.com/images/alfa_web.jpg?1279741285

Funny story, my co-founder and I designed these guys to be sort of an odd couple, so this seems like the perfect outlet for them! I had actually forgotten all about these little mascot guys until just now.
Inspirational. Thanks for posting this.
Or both :)?
While admitting that News.com.au is my default site for online, Australia news, I must confess to a household saying we have based on News' local newspaper the Courier-Mail: "Is it true, or did you read it the Courier-Mail?"
Quibble: bonobos are apes, not monkeys.
yeah, but didn't we already know that we couldn't excel at everything? For me, its enough to know that I can excel at the thing I care about most and then excel at as many things after that that I care to devote myself to.
Does anybody know if a solar storm of a sufficient magnitude would cause data loss on magnetic-based storage mediums safely grounded here on planet earth?
It's a puzzling approach. Are they hoping early adopters/influencers on the hardcore geek end of the curve convince the less tech savvy in the middle?

I don't buy it as a good strategy, if that's what they're after. Android, from a UX perspective, is an odd mix of feature phone and high-end ATM. (I mean, really, it's like a Bank of America cash machine and my old RAZR had a child together.)

It's not immediately apparent how to get around, at times, and the mystery meat behavior of the hardware back button is often baffling.

The iPhone, of course, was first a hit among nerds before it exploded into the wider market. The big reason for that was that the phone was just genuinely better than what most people were carrying in their pockets. So while techies influenced adoption, they were only channels for that influence, not influencers themselves.

The real influencer, of course, was a focused, enjoyable UX.

Android still has catching up to do; it's far more likely to leave a toe-in-the-water user cold than inspire buying behavior.
I actually work for Columbia and my brother graduated from their engineering school, SEAS. Now I think it's called Fu, no joke. Yes Columbia is elitist, like the other Ivys, but they do let a number of poor people in (like my brother) and give them just enough money to make it affordable with loans. Could they do better, ya I think so. But eh, what are you gonna do about it? In reality, if you are willing to become indebted to student loans and have decent grades/test scores you can get into a number of elitist institutions of higher education that will give you some sort of hardship discount.

In regards to your second point, I also happen to live just a few blocks from where that whole eminent domain thing took place. Believe me, it's quite blighted but has been on the up and up in the last 5 years or so. The handful of people who held out were operating storage facilities, gas stations and mechanics shops. One of the property owners is himself a developer developing property in Westchester. Every single one of them were offered a considerable amount of money to relocate. I've seen the plans, I've been to the meetings. Columbia will bring a ton of jobs and money to the neighborhood many, many times more than the current state of affairs. Not only that but I believe they will also be opening a grade school of some sort open to children from the area. Oh, the campus will also be focused on science and technology. You know, things that have a better ROI for society than storage bins.
When the next solar maximum arrives, this is what you do. You keep your eye on spaceweather.com. When a big X flare erupts there is an increased chance of aurora after a couple of days. When this happens and the chance of aurora looks good, go out around midnight and look for it. Usually nothing will happen; be patient. After a few times of going out at midnight and seeing nothing, you'll eventually get an aurora display you'll never forget. But get away from city lights.

I did this and watched the aurora on the beach on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. You can even see the aurora as far south as Florida or Mexico if the conditions are right.
MIT, I suppose. If you can make use of it, great.
I can't imagine that 80% success rate for second time startups is anywhere near correct.
"How to avoid acting like an asshole"

It has a nice ring to it.
Skype is obviously concerned but I wonder if this is also part of a longterm "Google Me" strategy against Facebook.

Facebook already has email and chat, so one logical next step would be video chat and then calls. People already list phone numbers in their profiles and when I look at FB contacts through their mobile interface, Calling is always an option.

This is, of course, just speculation, but I wouldn't be surprised if both turn out to be true
Google Wave is a big deal...what a visionary...LOL
Right now we aren't limiting drawings with rules because we are gathering data for all the different types of drawings that can be thrown at it. On Kickstarter the reward means you get a character that can pretty much do anything you can imagine, because we can program specific moves for it that are not in the move pool.
Dear Google: Big Brands Aren't Enough
I've never done anything with canvas, but I've written jquery plugins. Let me know if I can help. And let us know if you post the source code.
Afraid of what?
How Children in Obesity Can Use the Sun for weight loss
Its great to hear an update from you! Your post-mortem blog was/is a great resource for all of us (in the startup world). I think sharing such detailed lessons is very valuable. I'm personally keeping a log of my startup's strategies/successes/failures and hope to make it public someday.

Best wishes for your next endeavor!!
Let's assume the event could happen anywhere between 100 days from now and 100 years from now. This gives us, roughly and without compensating for leap years for simplicity, a 36400 day span. 2012 will occupy 365 days of that span, or 365/36400 = ~1% of that period.

Basically, NASA made a blanket statement about a possible solar storm occurring at some date, and journalists are doing everything they can to force that date to be 2012 so they can play off of all of the apocalypse prophecies.
You have what percentage of each gender have ever been prostitutes, but what are the comparative market shares of either gender? What percentage of paid sex in a given year is satisfied by female prostitutes, and which percentage by males?

Maybe that 1.6% of women sell way, way, way more sex than that 2.0% of men. It's certainly plausible, since there's a higher demand for heterosexual sex than homosexual sex. So while more prostitutes seem to be men, perhaps most prostitution still involves female prostitutes.
What do you do? Dusing at row27.com
I'm really glad you brought that up, many of people say that when they first hear the idea. However, we assure you by not controlling your drawing, its actually much cooler. Its not really about me vs you, its about my ninja vs your dinosaur. We are bringing these drawings to life. By letting people control the characters it would belittle the intelligence behind the game and be like every other fighting game out there.
It is much more rewarding to see your character preform an epic karate kick because you have drawn long legs and a headband rather than just pressing the B button. Its more of a strategy/design/creation game rather than a traditional fighting game. All the fun is had with a pencil and paper.
"Nobody cares how pretty your design is if you can't mass-produce it at low cost."

Really?
How I Sold Red Swoosh to Akami for $19m (audio)
Yes, this is what economists call the "backwards-bending supply curve for labor". Turns out if you pay people craploads per hour, you get fewer hours out of them, not more. This is unlike every other supply curve--if you pay $1,000 per hour of labor you get less labor than if you pay $100 per hour of labor, but if you pay $1,000 per gross of self-sealing stem bolts you get way, way, way more self-sealing stem bolts than if you pay $100 per gross of self-sealing stem bolts.

The worst you get from ordinary supply curves is diminishing returns. If you paid $1,000,000 per bushel of apples, well, you're just throwing away money--I'm sure we'd max out the earth's apple-growing capacity well before $500,000 per bushel. Labor's the only supply curve that actually bends back.
I'm guessing you need to be pretty established in order to draw the traffic for this testing to be meaningful. Otherwise how can you build traffic with no rep. and nothing concrete?
What would the purpose of stretching the dock across the bottom be? If you have few icons, they'd only be really spread out. Not necessarily beneficial.

The icons don't need to be evenly spaced. Windows gets this part right. When you don't stretch it out all the way then the position of the elements keep changing as apps get added to the dock. So, for example, dropping something into the trash or opening a new finder window (or any other app you have permanently in the dock) can't be done by muscle memory. You need to locate it with the mouse each time.

What would you do with the extra space on the 2 sides of the dock anyway? You can't really populate them with windows since the dock will, in all likelihood be covering part of the window.

I agree with the menus at the top. That's the classic example of Fitt's law at work.
Ok, I know this has been submitted before. What I want to know is how/why/when Orson Scott Card wrote this (if he really did).

Any insight?
I wouldn't really call it a superpower, I have it too and it's more of a curse.

Also, the worst are cheap projectors that seem to alternate between red, green, and blue, so you see a rainbow every time you move your eyes between the projector image or your own notes.

It's so frustrating to me, but no one ever believed me about it, so I guess not everyone has this curse.
I really like the idea. I have a very similar idea on my to-do stack, but with one major difference: the characters would be controlled with neural networks. Then the game becomes about not just drawing your character, but also designing sparring arenas that they can train on, etc. It's more of a you-draw-it real-time pokemon'ish game.

> it is not cheap, so we are looking to raise 20,000

Why not just submit to YC then? You'll get $20K and much better publicity and VC connections.
Donations for a startup? Are you serious? You should be offering equity if you are going to profit from this.
RE the dock: that's an awful lot of screen estate to waste - and how do you do it? make things space out wide when you only have a few items in the dock? (which increases the need for more precise mousing).

The screen space at the sides of the dock are already wasted aren't they? Do you keep anything important there (without it getting partially covered by the dock itself)?

The items don't need to be evenly spaced out. They can just be packed in from left to right.

remember that the dock can go the full width; you just have to fill it with crap. :)

You can do some plist magic to make the dock flush to the left or right but can't make it take up the full width, alas.
The statistic is misleading - it says, "90% of business are not a going concern after 5 years." That could mean they were acquired, or closed down for a good reason. For instance, if you built a startup with a great product but not much traction, and that attracted the interest of a company that hired you for a $250,000 per annum salary, that would be a "failed business" in this statistic, but obviously it worked out pretty well for you.

I've ran companies that are no longer going concerns, but that delivered things that made customers happy, paid employees well in an awesome work environment, and the founders made good coin and had good experiences. Now everyone's moved on to other things, but these aren't failures (even though they'd be counted so in that statistic).

Also - Companies fail. Persistent entrepreneurs succeed.
Touchless Gesture User Interface
exempt from vehicle license tax is the de jure meaning. The de facto meaning is much more broad.
Best story of the day, bar none. Many thanks!