skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Couldn't agree more about how a poorly designed backend can increase costs, however pretty and well-designed the frontend is.

We have a situation at work just like this: the inherited backend code is dreadful, full of WTFs due to poor implementation, lack of knowledge and lack of planning and design. It's eating away our profit margins. New features and customization take far longer than they should, and time estimates are impossible. Bugs, from simple UI stuff to server issues, are numerous and end up adding to customer support costs, not to mention reputation.

Do the management understand this ? Nope, they just consider these costs to be the normal cost of doing business in this sector. We have pleaded time and again to rewrite and refactor the code, but never given the time or leeway because the sales team want the latest shiny feature to sell to the client.

The irony is that we have a healthy and growing user base and top-rank clients. An outside competitor (of which the developers are aware, but about which the management are oblivious) are about to eat our lunch because they can simply execute better and faster.
The guy in the slashdot comments complaining about the duckduckgo toolbar warning against his site is amusing. His legit domain has a warning on it because formerly it was parked (or perhaps worse, he doesn't say) and he refuses to go through any process to get this undone because he thinks the practice should be stopped. Well I think that's the main reason I use DDG sometimes, the basic index is worse than google, it's slower, but they filter out a whole lot of the SEO blogspam crap and that improves many of their results vastly (along with the bang domain specific syntax).

Google should do this too, or at least provide an option. I don't ever want to see a link spam, expertsexchange (yes I know scroll down, I don't care) type site again. Just like I don't ever see spam in my inbox, there is no difference to me between search engine spam and email spam. Both are cognitive overload caused by opportunists.

I worry about DDG's eventual revenue model though. As I still use google a fair bit and so paying for DDG would require a few more features. A DDG/stackoverflow/email/linode-like slice big enough for your irssi sessions could be rolled into a service with a focus on privacy/spamblocking and adblocking I think many would pay for.
Myth about Cyber War - Just a Publicity Stunt by Hackers
Akamai releases similar data in its quarterly State of the Internet report with download speed broken down by location and other data that it collects. There's quite a bit of advertising in the report, but it has some interesting information as well.
Apple has 3% market share, but 39% profits share.
Which one would you choose?
Akihabara is more interesting if you're an anime geek as well as an electronics shopper. It's also really nice, coming from a part of the US that has essentially no electronics retail specialists left (Newegg.com is really good, let's face it), to be able to buy things like my new Fujifilm 3D camera after actually trying them out and browse around in retail stores.

Also, good advice in any part of Tokyo is to look up -- often, the ground-level stores are just the beginning of what's available.
That is the point of DRM. If you already paid for it once, you are likely to pay again.
Nike Blazer High Black White
They're a safe harbour under the DMCA, as long as they respond to all takedown requests. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmca
I would have thought that top VC's would be smart not to say a word about this that isn't vetted by their lawyers. Except maybe Dave McClure :-P
Youtube, according to court documents, was well aware that by far the majority of their early traffic was related to unlicensed copyrighted material. They did fine and I"m sure as long as justin.tv seems responsive to claims, they will do fine as well.
A long article about laptops, queues at the app store, iPhones just to say that iTunes is a bloated software crammed with different features?
As If it was big news.
Seems like this prediction came true: http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20100921/ts_csm/327178
What you're seeing strikes me as the empirical approach to the often gut-based product decisions that happen when building software. Is the gut method as effective? It all depends on the gut. Systematizing these decisions probably leads to more consistent results, but costs time.

As others have mentioned, it's probably more common to cut as many corners as you can get away with, then refine the experience later as resources, talent and feedback allow.
You need to decide why you need to get education for,

Get educated because you love it, go ahead and do it. Get educated to get rich? Yes that's a way but also there are hundred other ways to get rich, so why bother? (Assuming you got some skills)
I also agree. Given that the pinned menu isn't even rendered in the browser it seems strange to describe this resource in a page. The lifecycle doesn't fit at all. If the content of the pinned menu changes I wouldn't expect to have to reload a page in the browser. Windows will be making a request for the page resource and then completely ignoring the html.
I'd say it's stupid. I'm sure that most of the content doesn't need JavaScript to provide the functionality, it's only a typical example of the "developers" being lazy ("everybody must have that what I have" syndrome). The "you need JavaScript" should only appear for the interactive segments that do need it, not for the whole sites.

Second, their servers already got my browser identification through my http query, so presenting the table with all old browsers is also very stupid.
Regarding #8 -- that is unfortunately a standard practice at some of these sites (except vWorker, of course). PeoplePerHour has a similar "rule." That's why I press people so hard to read the terms and conditions of these sites before signing up with them!! Some folks have no idea of what they're walking into until something goes bad and a service decides to randomly enforce its rules.

As far as alternatives go, vWorker clearly stands out from the rest. Just read its TOS to see for yourself.
>I don't have any experience with their audio file (MP3, AAC, etc) fingerprinting

I do, via the desktop program [Picard](http://musicbrainz.org/doc/PicardDownload). It really works well for properly tagging mp3 files (and renaming files to fit the tags) -- once they know the tracks. That often isn't the case with obscure, new releases. But you can't win them all. It's a program that's really worth using.
Interesting concept.

One technical issue i've noticed: I can click on the "inspiring" counter of a person (let's say it was 5) and it updates it by one (now 6). When I reload the page it's back to 5 and when I click on it again, it updates to 7. I seem to be able to do that repeatedly.

Also, links to external resources such as Wikipedia might be interesting on the detail pages.
...

Perhaps what you mean is you hate the escape characters used to switch between html and sql.

Perhaps what you mean is you hate the MVC separation.

I do not agree with swix that drag and drop is that solution. If there is one thing that has burned me too many times it is visual programming. Visual programming, to me, converts somatic gestures into black-box code. I love casting magic spells, but the lack of tools make them hard to fix: You must start from scratch for a small change.

I believe the solution is textual: Where different text means different things, and text can be edited to correct your mistakes. This means SQL will stay.

On another subject, I can see how Model/View separation is causing great pain. Separating a simple view into 2+ files makes a distinction without a measurable benefit. How often has your model changed without touching the view? And when it did, would having it all in one file make that change harder?

From my little experience, the majority cases leave Models and Views in a 1-1 correspondence. I agree with swix that current languages make those cases needlessly difficult.
Planning ahead to save time will really reduce your stress levels.

Order in lots of easy to cook but healthy food so you dont have to go to the shops when a deadline is looming.

Cook a few meals at a time- a couple of tins of tomatoes, onions and garlic cooked in a big pot then stored in tupperware will give you a sauce you can quickly throw over tuna, chicken, veg etc.

Have an emergency stash of money.
It also gives you a better experience - I can go and buy a DVD in which case I have to find some place to put it, I have to switch the disc when I want to watch another (and I have to actually find it) and I can't easily bring a bunch with me.
It's all about selling for survival
Orkut: 'Bom Sabado' virus infects social network
Now all we need are Stillsuits, Spice miners and the Grand Palace and we have Arrakeen on Earth :D
No More Haystack
Yep, that's UX. Of the methods you mentioned I find card sorting to be particularly effective when you are trying to figure out what to present to the user.
We could have empty places interspersed in the city in which people living in the city could use as their spontaneity desires. It would also leave some room for upgrading etc
I use DDG for the simple reason that it gives me results in English all the time. I travel A LOT and Google is always trying to guess what language they should serve me my results in. If I'm sitting at a customer's site in Germany I'm not interested in German results. I also might not be able to login to Google on this computer so it gets my preferences.

It might sound like a silly reason but it's a big deal for me.
WSGI is now Python 3-friendly
14 Bizarre Kids Cereal Boxes
Children’s cereal is big business...Bright colored boxes and loveable characters are the key for a good sale.
It's a well done parody. But there's a message here that I'd like to refute. I would guess the gist of this project is: built in browser dom api is fine, we don't need any abstractions.

So... what changed in the last 6 years? I would say: nothing. The dom is still a clusterfuck of an api. Poorly documented, and with core things still not cross browser compatibile (like setting attributes).

Luckily jQuery has taken over. Not that it's perfect or anything (I have major issues with lots of it), but it provides a base level of functionality that any sane web developer needs.

Hell, at this point, browsers should just bundle it (only loaded locally if the specific version is requested, falling back to http).
> Everything else is padding for syllabi/books/industry workshops.

I would say, more, that UX design tools are made to let people collaborate on a design. They're useless for a "smart imaginative person" because said person has no need for collaboration.
But then you need to know the magic words (scale as opposed to "make bigger" or "zoom" or some other combination). Point and click context menus try to fix this -- "oh, it's 'scale'"
anybody interested in duckduckgo could read about it on Gabriel's blog 6 weeks ago...
Astounding Sci-Fi Predictions That Came True
Windows Phone 7 Doesn’t Support Tethering
Just to clarify, which I also did on /. & reddit, that toolbar is no longer offered. I think you're right about what happened though. It had been identified as parked and then went unparked before the bot had a chance to get there. It would have been (and probably has by now) removed automatically.

The toolbar never asserted it was evil, just that it might be "useless." His users extrapolated the rest. And if he had emailed, it could have been removed quickly.
The odds are stacked against you if you don't know the area you are in. This is because you can't control the competency of the people you hire or the work they do, so you have a random factor that has a direct and long lasting influence on your companies success.

After my first software startup I tried a hardware product and failed miserably because of my lack of knowledge. To remedy this for next time I am formally learning the areas where we failed (electronics + cad) and when I'm ready I will try again.

Theres so much that can go wrong with a startup that it's just not worth adding another element into the mix.
Such a big discovery!

If you have spent billions and billions of borrowed dollars and got nothing, but interest payments for your increased debt, it surely seems like you've made things worse.
It's one thing for a random comment, but to see it on an actual, real live blog post by the likes of Zed is irritating.

"couldn't care less", please. How can you be hackers if you can't get some basic logic right?
everything is generated in code. this is what makes it so hard
Bjork.com news in russian
The problem with putting it all on the line...
Free High Resolution Grass and Leaf Textures
This is amazing collection of Free High Resolution Grass and Leaf Textures, this post contains Grass textures and Leaf-Leaves textures, enjoy to download the image you want and don’t forget to check the license given by their authors.
An Essay for Programming Students
Tell HN: New way to increase earnings from your Amazon links, feedbacks ?
In a few words : we add behavioral targeting to your amazon affiliates links and make them smarter. We are running the platform since months on test sites and we are seeing very good CTR increases. We will monetize the product this way : Free 30 days trial, then charge for a small monthly subscription fee. Thus the sales you make when people click your links and buy the products, will still be paid to you by Amazon itself. An MVP will follow in a couple of days. Feedbacks?
Joyent's Node SmartMachine Rollout This Morning - Announced on JSConf
This morning they rolled out the new Node SmartMachines, first featured during NodeKO. Now everyone can get a coupon code via the API and provision a machine.

API URL: https://api.no.de/
Node URL: https://no.de/
I've heard this expressed many times from various people: law schools love engineers because they already know how to think analytically and don't have to be taught that. This is independent of whether they learned any form of engineering in school or not.

As far as the bar exam being a joke, if that's true, that's broken. If the more important thing is going to law school for 3 years, then why put so much emphasis on the bar exam t all? There are people who graduate to law school but never pass the exam, or the ones who try and try again and pass it on their 4th or 5th try, if they went to school why isn't that meaningful? Either the schooling isn't all that it's cracked up to be or the metric doesn't measure the right things, but either way there's an impedance mismatch which means the system is broken.
Just one point on Cooper and the Inmates book... it was written 11 years ago. Cooper being a vaguely smart guy has learned stuff since then and has quite a different view on the way development and ux folk fit together now.

Folks interested in a look into his more current thinking might want to take a look at his keynote for Agile 2008 http://www.cooper.com/journal/2008/08/alans_keynote_at_agile..., and his keynote at Interaction 08 http://interaction08.ixda.org/Alan_Cooper.php.

And from his involvement in things like the http://www.andersramsay.com/2010/02/04/notes-from-the-agile-... things are moving on from there too.

There's a large chunk of the UX community that's moving away from the developers-as-enemy attitude. And vice versa for the developer community I hope :-)
This is not a trivial question when you touch on mining-related issues. One can only become that rich by an artificial scarcity that is created when one person/company "owns" a part of land it bought way below value (since the true value should include all the billions of mined material). Also, anyone could mine the land, so it's not like farming, where skill really matters.

I don't think there can be a trivial answer to this question of who has the money that, in practice, is just lying there for the taking
It seems like a bit of hyperbole to pitch it as "a new way to monetize websites" if in actuality it's a way to increase CTRs on websites already monetized via Amazon referrals.
But these places arise precisely from the fact that they're not empty. Most chinatowns/koreatowns are in places where, back when the immigration wave was happenning, there was cheap housing that was close enough to local commerce. As soon as one or two immigrants went there, friends and family followed, and soon there was a powerful support network for immigrants, and the community thrived. You can't build that in an empty space.

And upgrading is handled well enough today by (a) knocking down old buildings and build new, bigger ones (except this doesn't sit well with planning) and (b) expanding the city to a different direction that can be developed according to market values and needs, which also undercuts planning (since these new areas won't at first have the infrastructure of an urban center).
Yes, you are right. Corrected that in the headline. and thanks!
Social network for developers
Depends on a lot of other factors. In 1989, Apple enjoyed huge profits from the Mac. The management at the time made the wrong decision to focus on profits at the expense of marketshare.
Thank you, that's very interesting. You can't get everything right the first time, but yes, it doesn't seem to be something magical that you don't have any control over (other than praying to some UX god), either.
Just to be clear, get your account: http://smart.joyent.com/signup

Then,

$ curl -k -u user:password https://api.no.de/heart -X POST
"Last Minute Hero" iPhone Game (10 week project breakdown)
The problem with that is that widgets are your language, so you tend to think in them and analyse the problem in terms of widgets. It's sort of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis applied to UX, it's hard for someone to think in widgets they don't have.
Ask HN: Why is HN CSS not loading?
Anyone having a problem with the styles and images on this site?
Drive: The surprising truth of what motivates us [video]
I don't like either of them, but I'm not a VC! I find the following things annoying and distracting: repetitive music, fast moving text, text keeps moving around the screen so it's hard to read.

For some reason, I felt stressed watching the video, really having to focus hard to find out your core message. I think a simple narration with the website itself in the video would be a lot more effective in getting your point across.

[Edit]: As per the YC app guideline, I'd at least do away with the whole suspense building and state the idea clearly in the first 10 seconds.

There was a really good mixergy interview where a top entrepreneur gave very good step-by-step tips on how to pitch to a VC. But I can't remember who it was! If you have time, it might be worth emailing Andrew Warner or searching through the site.
4% when your median purchase is +600USD(huge margin) is as much as 41% of 60USD phones(and low margin).
If anyone is interested in actually following along, TP 5.5 is freely available, though you'll need DosBox or similar if you're not running a 32-bit install of Windows

Or there's Free Pascal, which is cross platform and backwards compatible with Turbo Pascal: http://freepascal.org/
Thank you for your feedback! It's true that it's similar to those two services, but, in my opinion, it's different enough to have its own space.

As for registration, don't you need to specify a username when you use instapaper? The problem with using historious without an account is that some features won't work, plus you won't be able to access your account from a different machine/browser. Many users have requested it, though, so I'll try and make it happen!

Thanks again!
NextDayFlyers.com Giveaway – $50 Printing Credit
Next Day Flyers is an online printing company that delivers top-quality printed marketing materials with one of the fastest turnaround times in the industry. They specialize in full color printing of custom business cards, brochures, greeting cards, postcards, as well as specialty die cuts and other marketing materials.
TeX is a very good typesetting program.
Tell HN: The submissions move too fast in the ranking. It was better before.
As far as I remember, there was a change in the ranking algorithm of both submissions and comments, the bias for the newer ones was substantially increased. This results to a frantic (by the old standards) movement of submissions in the first pages. In the old days a submission with more than 100 points would stay in the front page for days. Now I see submissions with more than 500 points getting lost in oblivion really fast. If I don't visit HN for 2-3 days I will not find them unless I browse through all pages and even then if I feel like commenting, it's too late, The window of commenting opportunity has been narrowed to a point you have to be lucky to catch it and I believe this to be detrimental to the quality and depth of the discussion.

It would be nice to hear what everybody else thinks, do you prefer it fast or slow?
You don't say what eventually happened to those people, you learn the best by failing.

A teacher at my school was in signed band in the early 90s, released a couple of albums, travelled the world though ultimately their second album flopped. He still had time to train as a teacher before hitting 30. He got a lot of respect from the kids in class as a result of being in that band.

The former U.K. prime minister was in a band in his youth which failed, doesn't seem like he did too badly afterwards. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugly_Rumours_(band)
What I think people are refering to is Technical Risk vs. Market Risk. Before Silicon Valley companies were working on stuff they don't know will work but if they did, they were basically guaranteed customers, Technical Risk.

For instance building a faster circuit, a startup whose goal is achieve such a mission has no way of knowing whether it would work, but if it did work there would be tons of people buying.

Lately, people are working on stuff with market risk. Stuff that are market risk tend to be well understood technically, but there is no guarantee that people will buy. For instance a Facebook clone, the chances are slim that people will move from Facebook to this new web application but there is no doubt on whether someone can build it.

Technical Risk generally has the property, if you can build, they would come. Market Risk generally has the property, everybody will build it, more than likely nobody will come[except to one or two].
Exactly. And this is still a preview. From Ryan's presentation:

"The first 150 people can generate a coupon code for
creating a no.de Smart Machine."
Co-founder search
I certainly understand and respect that these technologies are uninteresting to you.

At the same time in the past month, I've talked with government officials from 2 fairly developed countries, because they are trying to learn what makes Silicon Valley tick. In both cases, they understand that they will never be able to compete with Silicon Valley, but at very least, they want to cross pollinate their technology sector with ours.

I noticed that your profile says that you work at Yelp. I'd respectfully suggest that I haven't seen tons of interesting R&D happen up in San Francisco. There are an inordinate number of social media companies and iPhone app companies up at the tip of the peninsula. But, I tend to hang out in Mt View, Sunnyvale, San Jose and Palo Alto, and there's a much different flavor to the companies down here.
umm..what's DDG? (yes, I googled it)