skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If the author had wrote this article pre-Magic Mouse, pre-Magic Trackpad, I would have fully agreed but both of those devices are quite good. I don't find gestures on either one to be difficult but of course there's a small learning curve if you've got 20 years of muscle memory on a regular mouse. For the MM and MT there is a solid physical button click and with various utilities you can configure more than 2 buttons. On my MT I have actions setup for 3 finger click and 4 finger click. It really comes down to personal preference. I'm not sure anyone can make one mouse that is perfect for everyone.
Kindle 3 first impressions
Themes by Woothemes are fantastic, but...aren't all website going to look the same?
I really like the way 37signals re-designed the Basecamp homepage. It's a little bit different than usual.

Your opinion?
This is pretty interesting, my own personal experience with trackpads on laptops have been quite poor. Not the quality of the trackpad itself just it being highly annoying having to move the mouse around with one, i always like to plug in an external mouse.

One of the main things i dislike is it not naturally being on my right, obviously all laptop makers couldnt do this because of the lefties of the world. The other issue is the actual size of the trackpad on a laptop, its too small, again, not easily fixable on a laptop.

So i suppose the external trackpad would solve both these problems, but until i try it out, i'm not sure if i'd like it or not. Certainly interesting though.
Be that as it may, it's still not, in my experience, a good mouse. Nifty idea, cool looking design, but I found the ergonomics of it really uncomfortable. It's just awkward trying to move the thing around at all compared to other mice, and the "2 buttons masquerading as 1" thing remains an unpredictable annoyance. I've wished for a long time now that Apple would just give up, admit their mistake, and accept that 2 button mice are the superior option.
Timeless Advice from a Father to a Daughter
Kant did not attempt to destroy reason at all. He mapped it.

His map allows reason to be employed more effectively in certain intellectual domains.

And I am a big fan of deontological ethics.
Honestly I don't know why you even need a marketing site like this if you are just working on your MVP. I am working on my MVP and am just collecting emails and working directly with potential customers.
Need a friend? pauldino@openspora.com
I smell a designer.
Even if i had a limited experience with it this doesn't surprise me, i still don't understand how big site can use or have used (list on openx site) this script to manage their own ad network.

Lots of issues with the db and with the upgrade procedure, sometimes has weird issues hard to identify and solve(i.e. things that stop working without any apparent reason)... Maybe i'm too critic, but i felt it was just another crappy php app.
Over and over in business you'll see people avoid decisions they don't deeply understand (e.g. the average VC knows nothing about gaming, the average PHB knows nothing about databases, the average techie knows nothing about your market), and to paper over their ignorance and demonstrate they are in control and providing value they'll suggest a change to something they think they understand (advisor shares, the design of the front page, your pricing relative to a bowl of ramen).

This rarely works well, particularly when the two decisions are in fact related. One coping mechanism is being able to ignore advice (if you haven't taken their money, you can probably ignore their advice). Another is having a list of knobs people can twirl which are off the critical path (salaryman survival skill #1: distract the boss with rearranging a Gantt chart which can't kill anyone).
Nice designs but I'm skeptical. WooThemes spam?
What a great essay, if out of date - I suppose maybe Windows' PowerShell might have changed his opinion of NT?

I wonder if the whiff of elitism he mentions is still a reason for people to avoid UNIX, or if the availability of Linux has changed that.
Are there competent programmers who could solve puzzles such as these and yet dread going to work every day?

Passion is thinking of better code while you're in the shower, or getting so excited about a new idea that you can't sleep.

Finding a great mind in this way will have a similar outcome to finding a great vocal artist through first round American Idol eliminations.
Very very far from it. I pay someone to do all of my design work.
Personally, I agree with others that the $35 minimum may be a little restricting on new developers who are trying to build site experience.
Maybe a new developer rule could apply in which for the first 5 or so jobs the mandatory minimum is waived when they're sending in offers.

You could also have something like Gold Star, Silver Star, Bronze Star rating for new developers so as to alleviate anxiety from selecting a bid from a new buyer.

New user star rating earned by things like, experience and references from their LinkedIn, Open Source attributions, and a rating on their website (by standards, how many posts their website has - don't tell them that can help their ranking though. Also could include in the ratings formula any tests that they completed on your site if you implement that (maybe make it so the highest rating they can be without completing any tests is Silver Star even if their resume is above and beyond).

I agree with everyone else who mentions escrow (most definitely) and testing for developers.

What hasn't been mentioned yet is some kind of work tracking system. I personally don't like systems which seem like big brother is looking over my shoulder as I code (you know which sites I'm talking about), but a system where the dev could post a snippet of what they're doing or even the ability to post the updated source (to be archived and viewable by you only of course, to be seen in cases of a dispute in hours).
This approach does not massage one's nerd G-spot as effectively, but you can disable it like a normal person by clicking the link to the right of the search bar.
Signed up to see how things worked. Is there an easy way to delete my account?
You say "on a laptop" in the general sense, leading me to wonder if you've tried Mac trackpads recently. I used to feel just like you do, but Apple's trackpads honestly are vastly superior products to any others that I've used.

I know this sounds like fanboyism, but that's just been my experience. FWIW, I agree completely that Apple's actual mice are awful.
“Seconds still matter.”

Yes — for Google to make money a lot more than for you as end user.
Quadrocopters can now fly through thrown hoops, the end really is nigh (video)
Yahoo rebuffs Alibaba’s attempts to buy back its shares.
cooper@ubuntu:~/Downloads$ file libflashplayer.so
libflashplayer.so: ELF 64-bit LSB shared object, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, stripped
cooper@ubuntu:~/Downloads$

wow! they finally managed to build it! I can't believe! ^_^
http://openspora.com/people/

is a really usefull page. I am Meno@openspora.com.
presumably you already know the business model. Do you intend to be a serious host? Do you understand the challenges of being "rock solid" (quoted from Heroku.com)? This is the type of business that I doubt few kids in a basement can put together--It seems that you need a real team, with real credentials and real funding. What do you think?
Our moral code is out of date
Bikeshedding: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bike_shed
Fundamentally, science is simply this: Observe. Theorize. Repeat.

Intervention via experiment is another fundamental part of science.
You see, Europe is pretty diverse. $35/hour is an entry-level wage here in the UK, however it is a very good wage in some parts of Eastern Europe (Ukraine, Russia, etc). Which means that coders from these areas (who are quite common on other developer freelancing websites as well) will easily outcompete North American / Western European developers in jobs that would normally pay a lot more than $35/hour. I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing, just sayin'.
is it possible to get pg to filter out the utm_source= google/feedburner querystring params on submit? it would filter out a lot of dupes...
If Apple tested a version of the iPhone that had four buttons on the front, it probably would have tested better because one button was unfamiliar to users and would have seemed inadequate. The point here is that sometimes good design requires challenging and educating users - doing the right thing instead of the easy thing. Apple's delight of their users is often when the user realizes he didnt actually need something he thought he did. Of course, I am describing a process involving risk, which can be mitigated through some testing, but will always be somewhat correlated with reward.
Changing phone number is broken and there is no way to delete your account.
There have been a bunch of articles about VCs being replaced by Angels and Bootstrapping, but really those articles should just be saying that software businesses have matured to the point where VC funding might not be necessary at all.

At what point can I walk into a bank and get a normal business loan for my web app company? I think we're approaching that point.

In my mind you can bootstrap the average web app company, and when you actually acquire some revenue and need capital to grow, get a small business loan. Is the risk in these kind of companies any greater than the average restaurent? I don't think it is. Software has lower capital requirements at first, lower operating expenses, lower overhead, but for some reason the norm is still to trade equity for cash. Forget that, just trade debt for cash like a normal business. I'm not sure banks will go for it yet but I think we're approaching that point when it is possible.
NASA's Ames Research Center has a fascinating site called "Using Color in Information Display Graphics":

http://colorusage.arc.nasa.gov/

It has articles, tools, a bibliography, and an entire section called "Designing with Blue":

http://colorusage.arc.nasa.gov/blue_2.php
I like my 3 button mouse. At least how the third button is used in X.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExWfh6sGyso
Case Tests Whether Circulating News About Expunged Conviction Is Libel
Sorry, not yet. We can have your account deactivated.
I can't use a mouse on a Mac for extended periods of time due to the mouse acceleration curve problem. I've never experienced them as unreliable or garbage, but I just don't like using them.

Using synergy and an external Linux PC to drive the mouse solves the problem. But I like the Mac touchpads so much that the mouse problem sort of disappears, especially now with the new external touchpad. Now, I find even using a mouse (or touchpad) on other Windows / Linux computers is slightly annoying.
Why the fuck has my insurance premium gone up?
I think the author is forgetting that IE used to run on Mac OS a long time ago. Before Safari came out, or was any good, on MacOS you had the choice of either Netscape, IE5, or Opera, and honestly, IE5 was the best of the bunch at the time.
The best monospaced font I've used - Pragmata - is €20 until the end of Sept.
Why include a screenshot? We don't sell software, we sell the concrete improvement software will make in the customer's life. Show her having success with the software: she is a lot more interesting to herself than your app is. Plus, if you are me, your app is fugly anyhow.

My MVP used a cheap ThemeForest theme for the Rails part which shows minimal functionality, but the hero shot image is a racially ambiguous caryoon character, showing the successful businesswoman busy killing it because she was smart and bought my service. It is downright frightening to the engineer in me how radically that increased the number of requests for info I got from ladies. The marketer in me has to soul crush him some days.

This point stolen shamelessly from slide 9 of my Business of Software 2010 talk on selling software to women. I spent all day today on it today (well, when not breaking into Diaspora).
The sad thing is that logitech doesn't make the MX Revolution anymore -- the replacement model is the Performance MX, with less functionality. My MX Revolution got drowned in water and though the Performance MX is still a really good mouse, it's a noticeable downgrade. You can still buy the Revolution online but it comes with a $20-50 markup since it's not being made anymore.
Is there a way to remove my account from Diaspora?
Yeah, we would love to take advantage of a service like that.
YouView.com - the new IP TV system from UK broadcasters
Run for Your Life! Robots Assemble a Huge, Black Wave
Companies using tests aimed at separating stars from duds
The stakes in Skyhook's suits against Google: It's the location data, stupid
I went there and got:

Please, stop that.

We've been notified about this issue and we'll take a look at it shortly.

Does not bode well.
More info:
http://www.youview.com/questions/

And most importantly: http://www.youview.com/developer-zone/

Old info site: http://www.projectcanvas.info/index.cfm/objectives/
Providing the option for the developers to show github and stackoverflow profiles might be a good.
But if a restaurant goes under, you have all the capital right there (pizza ovens, tables). Software consumes its capital. Banks aren't the answer. If it fails, what are they going to get back? That year of your life?

What we need is crowd-sourced, micro-equity. Anyone who thinks an idea is good to invest small amounts for small stakes of equity. The barriers have been regulatory legal issues, but those will be soon eliminated. OpenStarts is one such initiative working on this.
Forward and backward buttons can actually be extremely handy, when not used for that purpose.

If you map them to something else (say... modifier keys), you can do all sorts of useful things. Like hold down one of the buttons and click on files to select more than one. Or activate Spaces if you click the middle button, but activate Expose if you click the middle button while holding the back button down.

If back/forward buttons had to stay back/forward buttons I'd agree that they are pointless. They don't though; they can be super useful.
It does indeed seem a bit strange to require a username when an email-address is enough. However, my point was that even though they use usernames, they still allow you to simply login by using their e-mail address. That's a lot better than sites having a 'lost your username?' link IMHO.
Hotels.com Has a Skewed View of “Once a Week”
I've been told that the rules are more flexible for LLC deductions than they are for sole proprieters (freelancers), especially when it comes to writing off parts of a home or equipment that is not 100% business use.

The advice I was given was: for a sole proprieter, you have to prove that a thing is used exclusively for a business; for a corporation, you have to prove only that a thing cannot be used exclusively for non-business reasons.
Stack Overflow, GitHub, HN is already included.
I have used all previous versions of the mac mice(previous to the magic mouse) and they are all terrible.

That being said , I'm not sure if the author has used a Magic Mouse or not, but I love mine. Sure it doesn't have a million buttons or anything, but in my experience it works great for things I do at my computer(Write Software, surf the internet).
Kill Whitey- It’s the right thing to do.
Features Vs. Benefits – The Showdown
Google plans to employ 50-60 people to run the data center. So far they have found four, so they have some head hunting to do.

Google Maps says Hamina is a 2 hour drive from Helsinki, can any Finns comment on if this is an accurate time? Or is it one of those 6 months of the year the roads are dead sort of thing?
Couple this with a DHTML editor and automatic revision control (new revision on every save) and I would love it. DropBox has been great for hacking client-side apps across multiple machines, but for web apps it's kind of a chore.

You know, Google Docs + some sort of web-based VIM + CodePad.org would be the bees knees.
This is exciting. If you can get groups of people to collaborate on topics of shared interest then you could build dedicated pages ("information hubs"?) for every conceivable topic, sort of like wikipedia, only better. Then advertising would pay the bills (and probably very well) because those hubs would be linked to often and come up frequently in searches. To build momentum you could crowd-source by offering users a cut of the advertising revenue depending on their level of contribution.
He said very clearly: it is a continuous integration server. I don't understand where your analogies with Heroku are coming from. Here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration
The password conundrum
> Second Amendment privledges

The Bill of Rights are privileges? I thought they were, um, rights. As far as I'm concerned, you could throw all the guns in the world in the ocean, but if your site is to be unbiased your terminology should be too.
Skyhook is kind of a sad case.

Their technology is undoubtedly one of the things that made using my first iPhone such a great experience. Now Apple has created their own competing tech and won't be using them anymore. And I learned from this article that Google is now getting in on the act as well.

Aren't technology leaders who come up with a good idea supposed to get better outcomes than this? I'm not sure what the lesson is.
Always check Snopes:

http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/where.asp
Klaveer[1] is a decent little template too. It's more targeted at freelancers than products though.

[1]http://stefangrambart.ca/klaveer/
It seems like his complaint is really that Google Instant isn't incremental enough for him. It "tests poorly" with him in exactly the way that a really innovative design should: it requires him to adjust how he uses it.
As far as I know, there really isn't much out there when it comes to open-source. There is OASIS (http://oasis.sourceforge.net/), but I don't think it is in active development.

Personally, I'll be moving a couple of openx installs to Google DFP (http://www.google.com/dfp/info/sb/index.html) in the next few days. I've heard some good things about AdButler (http://www.adbutler.com/) but I have yet to use it myself.
Metrics - Vanity vs. Actionable
We are discussing this topic on LeanTalk.
I don't really see how one could speak about wide adoption of the personal computer and not count Microsoft in the equation. The "diverse", as other fellow HNers have kindly put it, computing environment of Atari, Apple, IBM et al was a complete nightmare for developer and user alike. Even if it weren't needed, since Z80, 6502, Motorola's 68000 as well as the variants of CP/M were entering oblivion, Microsoft slowly helped change that gradually, and slowly came to dominance with Windows (the reasons are obvious now, with hindsight).

Yet how one may deny that Gates brought the PC to the masses with knowledge of the above are beyond me. Maybe a comparison with GEOS is in line..
Gotcha. It's my mistake. I was thinking of Continuous Deployment. CI seems like something I should be doing though.
>You cannot A/B test frustration, or confusion, or discomfort.

You certainly can. You can measure bounce-rate, abandonment, etc. They are all proxies for the real thing, but are much better than anyone's instincts.
See www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-11313738 for a recent example
Ah yes, ad hominem, the great refuge of the HN peanut gallery. Many want to be judged on their comments alone. But commenting on a website is easy, far easier than any of the things in Gates' career that you claim were easy. So I was wondering if you had done anything in your career that I would consider hard. If you had, I might be inclined to give your comments more respect than they deserve on their face. But it sounds like you haven't, so you have no standing to criticize Gates in my book.
I switched from a 3 button mouse to a magic mouse after using my wife's magic mouse. At first I thought it was weird, but after an hour or so I ordered myself one.

The biggest improvement is in scrolling. Momentum scrolling is addictive and useful.
The page should also mention that this software is pre-alpha release. Even on HN people are freaking out about things not working properly, sucks that this is already giving people bad feelings.
The only "systems language" is one that an OS with its accompanying device drivers are written in.

Would you consider C a systems language? well, C is useless under a LispOS, for example. Ditto for Java. If you wrote the whole OS in Java, presto, Java would be the language to write device drivers.

IOW, "systems" is a relative term.
i had no problem with just holding down the volume switch for a second to mute it. but i guess this does have the advantage of muting/unmuting without requiring the iPad to be brought out of sleep state and unlocked. but i prefer the lock switch the way it is now and i will miss it (wish there was a preference to reassign it).
Yes, good catch, sorry I didn't clarify. So essentially, the 1065 + K1 has 2 main purposes as I understand it. 1) Report the business income / expenses, and 2) report the respective percentages that each member takes of the business's profit / loss (notice there is no (3) for the LLC actually paying taxes, this was my main point).

With a single-person LLC, it's even simpler, because there is no (2). This is why single-person LLCs can file a Schedule C as a simple attachment to their own taxes, which gets reported on personal taxes as other income, just like the K1 would. And Schedule C is still reporting all of the company's income / expenses separately than the individual's other financials, so there is still no "muddying up" between business and personal finances.
But isn't it also true that "crowd-sourced, micro-equity" can easily be understood as, you know, SELL SOMETHING to SOMEONE? No giving up equity and you still get the "funding".

The thing is, that's called bootstrapping and the problem with bootstrapping is that it's just very damn slow. Sure you can do it, but you won't get the anorganic super fast growth you need to compete against the whole world. It works when you're doing stuff locally, now that everybody's shooting for global markets via the internet it can be a dash troublesome no?
Looking at the colour maps here, were I to start a social network, I would go for a scheme in the yellow/orange/red spectrum to separate myself from the dogpile of sites lumped in the blue area.

Is it good to be different merely to "separate yourself"? You could go with having white text on a black background to differentiate yourself too, but that wouldn't necessarily be a positive..
How culture can invert genetic risk
Never heard of Google DFP. I wonder if the data lag is similair to Adwords.

The nice thing about OpenX was installing it on your own hardware.

Thanks for the links.
Gary Vaynerchuk visits Austin, TX
I think that the community itself matters significantly. IMO, the articles that I get from Hacker News are much more valuable than the articles that I consume from Reddit or Digg. In fact, I have seen a steady decline in the quality of content that I get from Reddit because of the surge of mainstream users.
The Price of a Hard Drive
I once used quicksort to sort a few hundred CDs.

I needed a big table for my stacks, and when the stacks got small I reverted to a "just put the suckers in order" sort, but basically it worked really well. I was done a lot quicker than I expected.
BTW: Ubuntu has something called 'tasksel'

sudo tasksel install lamp-server
I think I broke it by posting it here. Still works for me whilst logged in.
Facebook Spending $50 Million a Year on Data Center Space
IE9 team asks Reddit for feedback...
It is funny, because I agree with your statement. But I never thought of Reddit as made for discussion. Maybe I miss out, but I always have a terrible time following the comments on Reddit (granted I don't even try on Digg and comparing Reddit to HN might be apples to oranges). The comments are usually confusing and non-beneficial to me.