skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Disclosure: I am a designer.

YES. The value that a design has in a first impression helps with that first bit of traction so so much. I've had projects fail because of crappy designs, and crappy projects succeed because of - subjectively - great ones.

Invest, it's not even that much compared to some of your other costs. Look into students (like me!) who may need the money and the recognition, though don't abuse them.
Author here. Part of the reason I built this is so that I could skip a day or two, and still come back and see what was posted. Unfortunately, that means finding this thread 11 hours after it was posted. I'll respond to the comments.
Unless I misinterpreted the purpose of your link, the denial of a conversation by a politician's PR flunkie does not mean it didn't happen.
You need to try it or you'll never know for sure...
Not at all surprising. My personal relationship with Digg was entirely destroyed by the redesign.

It basically went like this:

"Huh. My RSS feeds don't work anymore... Oh. Digg's redesign is out. Hmm... looks like I have to do a bunch of chores before Digg becomes useful to me again." -click-

And I haven't been back.

You have to be on drugs to think you can pull the rug out from under your users that way and actually keep them.

Evolving product is hard. Yes, sometimes you're going to have to cut features, re-imagine functionality or reconfigure the user experience. This creates a little grumpiness at first. If you stay true to the original mission of your product, users will deal with it because it's in the furtherance of getting to something great, and they care about that.

But: You've only got so much elasticity to work with in terms of your users being good sports in these transitions. You can't make a name for yourself selling turkey sandwiches and then "upgrade" to exclusively serving roast pork. There may be a union between the turkey people and the pork guys but a decent chunk are going to drop you and find the next-best turkey sandwich cart.
Sure, I could. Which is why I didn't.
Note to self: it's probably not worth reading a site that disables context menus for no good reason.
So, RRW updated with actual stats from Reddit. which isn't a fair comparison.

If Hitwise's Reddit stats are wrong, then their Digg stats are probably wrong too. So you can't compare Hitwise Digg stats with Reddit real stats.
I think I fixed the bad link; thanks for letting us know.
There are a few newspapers in French mentioning the story:

http://www.leparisien.fr/faits-divers/le-gang-a-l-aspirateur...
http://www.lefigaro.fr/flash-actu/2010/09/22/97001-20100922F...
If you go to the about page[1], you'll find extensions for both chrome and safari. These extensions will highlight new comments, as well as make comment threads collapsible (a la reddit).

http://hckrnews.com/about.html
Tips & Tricks For Your Business’s Facebook Fan Page
Scala rich wrapping performance
Here's my list for entrepreneurial books:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021570
What fallout would this have in terms of existing companies who currently hold patents vs. new companies who have to innovate under a climate where there can't protect their work to the same extent? Wouldn't this create an unfair advantage for companies who already hold software patents?

I'm all for a reversal of the patent stupidity in the software sector, but unless it is retroactive to some extent I can see it scaring away innovators.
Prosper is good, but I think the application and bidding process will be pushing the 12 day mark.
Poll: Why don't you have your email in your HN profile?
Reason for poll: I am just curious as to how people think about email in a pseudonymous environment.
I'm avoiding spam
I haven't gotten around to it
I'd rather stay anonymous/pseudonymous
I don't want to communicate with other HN users
TechZing - Only The Best Tech Podcast Online
I think you're thinking of NaCL (http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/)

In contrast, Google Frame is designed to make the deployment hassle for new browsers simpler (user still clicks on "The Internet").
Completely disagree. You just assume that corporations are going to be rolling out truck fleets without providing any evidence of the fact.

The point is not that we know that they will. The point is that once a profitable niche exists it will eventually be filled. Whether some existing restaurant chain starts putting a truck on every corner, or whether one of the current truck entrepreneurs grows to be so big that he can afford to put a truck on every corner, if food trucks aren't regulated they will eventually be annoyingly prevalent.

It's independent restaurants that are starting food trucks and it's CORPORATE interests that are colluding with local government to stop the threat -- precisely because they know they CAN'T compete with the decentralized system of street vendors.

No, they're objecting because they have a huge investment in the current way of doing things. It doesn't mean they can't switch to a new way of doing things if they have to.
> However, I still think the multiple-window model is powerful when single-tasking with multiple tools.

Oh most definitely. Having multiple tools available all at once (particularly monitoring tools) is really powerful and can shorten up certain work cycles immensely.

One area where I can definitely see the maximize window concept of Windows falling down is the huge screen real estate available on some monitors. I don't have a problem with it on a 22" monitor, but say...a 32" that may end up just being too big. I can't keep the entire screen in my visual field anyway.

Ircle: I know, old software, even with warts, can sometimes still feel best. Like an old pair of shoes.
Oh really? I do. I ride a bike 3 miles to work every day through Cambridge MA. This Shweeb idea would solve the weather problem, as well as the unshakable "oh god I'm going to die" feeling (since cycling with cars around is pretty damn dangerous), and probably be faster to boot.
That last one does deserve a 'wow'. There's just something about them that makes me say 'no'.

Grados, on the other hand, are full of gooey retro goodness: http://www.gradolabs.com/product_pages/rs1.htm I have an 80, and it's amazing how many random music geeks will start talking to you just because you have them on.

Since you've used some: have a recommended starting point for Etymotics? I've been looking for something isolating to complement the I-can-hear-that-ant-tapdancing-through-my-music of the Grados.
Super angel McClure unveils 'micro-fund' for Twilio apps
Drum accompaniment, what a great idea! But can we do it in Visual Object Cobol 98++?
Should probably have an option on there for people to respond that they have their email listed, if only to see what proportions of people who read this thread have email listed vs. not.
I have my email listed in my profile
Operations Research Tools developed at Google Open Sourced
Yes.

I'm a programmer by night / business type by day. I have a website soon to be released in beta and I hired a designer I trusted (and could afford) from a previous job. She worked wonders for the project -- seeing the new design also reinvigorated me.

A few tips: Hire a friend if possible (you'll probably get a friend-rate), if not work by referral. You want someone you can sit with face to face. Avoid 99Designs and the like if you can. Pay your invoices immediately and you'll find the designer will likely continue to be super helpful. Also, get an hourly rate up front since you'll probably find things that need to be adjusted. Lastly, I wouldn't use the designer for HTML, just have them hand off PSDs, the markup tends to be not so good. Insist on PSDs, not flattened images.

By the way, I'm happy to give a refferal for a trusted friend. Just email me at juliuss at gmail.
Hitwise and Reddit both reported the same trend. It just happened that the reality was about ten times better for Reddit than Hitwise reported.

Given that Digg didn't immediately chime in and say "hay u guyz, it was only a 2% drop," who knows? It may be Digg's reality is even worse than reported, and Hitwise remains conservative.
From American Heritage below. They seem to indicate that this has been "misused" for a long time. I use ding people for this, but now I think its overly pedantic, and now I think I'm technically wrong to even ding them.

"Usage Note: For more than a hundred years, critics have remarked on the incoherency of using literally in a way that suggests the exact opposite of its primary sense of "in a manner that accords with the literal sense of the words." In 1926, for example, H.W. Fowler cited the example "The 300,000 Unionists will be literally thrown to the wolves." The practice does not stem from a change in the meaning of literally itself -- if it did, the word would long since have come to mean "virtually" or "figuratively", but from a natural tendency to use the word as a general intensive, as in They had literally no help from the government on the project, where no contrast with the figurative sense of the words is intended."
There is a Google Klingon page:

http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=xx-klingon

The translator would be really awesome!!
Am also a designer.

v1? Just get the damn thing out. Don't worry about whether it has the perfect design or interactions at this point since the hardest part is simply launching (and you're going to change your idea/design once you get feedback anyways). After that, I believe a designer is invaluable, for taking user feedback and results and crafting the product into something that promotes more sales/views.
In that case, no people are born every moment.

Every few moments dies a man,
Every few moments one is born.

But that's not the case, because born is present tense as well, not only past tense. "Babies are being born".

Every few moments one is (being) born.

Alternately, born is a variation of bearing - a woman carrying a child around is bearing it from A to B. Afterwards, it was born from A to B. In that sense as well the original wording makes sense, with a different meaning.
What OS/browser are you using? What is your issue with the font? edit: Others seemed to be saying the same thing. I switched to a sans family stack. Let me know if that is better.

As for the column thing -- this is something I use every day, so I designed it mostly for repeat usage. I didn't want to pin a header or add extraneous text to make that clear. Use it for a while, and it should become second nature that points is closest to the story description.
If guerilla chefs can set up trucks, so can Starbucks[1]. How would we feel about Starbucks launching a fleet of cafe trucks and parking them right near independent coffee houses?...But I don't want every neighborhood restaurant in the South Loop replaced by Potbelly's, Jimmy Johns, and Dunkin' Donuts, which is exactly what will happen if food trucks make the margins on brick-and-mortar restaurants untenable for independent operators.

I'd like to ban bikes which are not sold by specialty bike shops, because I'm worried that competition from walmart (and their $35 bikes) might put Trek and my local bike shop out of business. How do the people who don't want to spend $300 on a bike feel about this? Screw them, their desires are irrelevant.

And don't get me started on automobiles! I don't want every neighborhood buggy whip maker replaced by a Ford dealership, which is exactly what would happen if automobiles make the margins on buggy whip manufacturers untenable.
A few of my coworkers are obsessed with the Clover Food Truck in downtown Boston. It's a very nice place to get food cheaply. One guy goes there pretty much every day at least once and for awhile twice.

I think it's a great development to let people who have limited capital get started. It's a nice way to test the market for what you're serving too. I have a few friends who are considering trying to get a food truck business going.
My son is 5 and has proven to be a total scientist. His current favorite book: H A Rey's The Stars, A New Way to See Them. We take that, a red flashlight, and binoculars out back before bed. He insists on learning the stories. The "kit" of the book, binos and red light sit on the coffee table by the back door, ever ready.

http://www.amazon.com/Stars-New-Way-See-Them/dp/0395248302/r...

Here's a new topic, please tell us about great books you recommend for boys: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1724596
Perhaps the idea that punishment should always be individual, never collective, started with Zoroastrianism (I haven't a clue) but individual punishment predates it by a wee bit.

For example (got this all from Wikipedia; you can verify it there), the Code Of Hammurabi predates Zoroastrianism by hundreds of years. Wikipedia lists seventeen examples from the code; each example describes an individual punishment based on individual responsibility for an infraction. (Since I can't stop surfing Wikipedia now,) the Code of Ur-Nammu, "the oldest known tablet containing a law code surviving today," also prescribes individual punishments for individual infractions. It dates from the third millenium BCE, predating Zoroastrianism by over one thousand years.
This is why you should be using Google AppEngine and free providers, so you don't get on the hook like this.
Schmidt says requiring stock Android violates 'the principle of open source'
But if they did, why would be go about saving them? Where's your evidence that a few brick & mortar restaurants is better for society than multiple food trucks + a park?

An awful lot of American downtown areas already have too many shuttered shops and too few parking spaces. Driving business out from commercial real estate and into public space will only exacerbate that trend. And if you're proposing knocking down all those restaurants to build parks that people can sit in while they eat their foie gras hamburgers, who is going to pay for that? It's a massive transfer of wealth from the pockets of the city and the owners of commercial real estate (whose value plummets before their buildings get bought by the city and knocked down) to a bunch of dudes with vans.
Yes. Shop around just like anything else.

But, you'll be even better off if you have someone with good design skills working for you if you plan to be able to do revisions, ongoing changes.

I worked for a small company that outsourced some design for logo, but ended up hiring someone full-time to do photography and design. It was a bold step since they were a telecom company, but the polish and sheer amount of the work by having someone in-house differentiate them from their competitor.

At first I thought they were foolish (for years actually), but now that he is still working there, and seeing where they are, it was sheer genius to have hired him.
What are great books for boys?
I'll start:

The Way Things Work (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0395428572/) and pretty much any book by David Macaulay (http://www.amazon.com/David-MacAulay/e/B000AP72G0/)

The Stars, A New Way to See Them, by HA Rey (author of Curious George) (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0395248302/)

and another collection (not intentionally for boys) over on Edward Tufte's site: http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00018v
> a climate where there can't protect their work to the same extent?

Nobody is safe against patents, not even Microsoft, IBM, Google or Apple. And patents are only for 15 years so it's not like you'll have to wait 100+ years like with copyright.
Yeah, lots of the differences are just differences.

> and windows 7 has definitely fixed a lot of the clutter that really annoyed me with the taskbar and makes it a lot less annoying to minimize a whole bunch of windows.

I agree, it really is a completely different way of operating. I used to spend a lot of time trying to get the old taskbar out of the way, with Win 7, it feels really nice, operates even better, and in many ways makes a lot of sense.

> and the whole "minimize to tray" was just a way to get around the taskbar clutter

Truer words were never spoken. The process tray is really quite abused. Do I really need 37 icons in there. At least with 7 you can configure the behavior a bit.

I do like how OSX's dock operates, and how it indicates running programs and the like. I think Windows 7 copied very liberally from this in terms of function, but it looks quite a bit different, with some updated ideas.

I still think Apple can optimize the dock and toolbar and notification area of OSX a bit more.

> my fav trick for quitting apps is holding cmd, tabbing to the app you want, then pressing q to quit.

Yeah, that's almost as nice as Chrome's tab closing operation.
It's an auto-antonym, a word that has two opposite meanings.

Wikipedia used to have a good list of them, but it looks like they just deleted it. Thank god for revision history: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_auto-anton...
Hmmm, that is strange. I did test it in Firefox a while back, but I must have changed something in the meantime. I run Safari and Chrome personally, so I never noticed that. I'll see if I can fix that.

edit: It should be fixed now. Thanks for reporting the problem.
I suspect that most HNers don't really think that the current site has many issues.

The lack of contrast between text and background is an obvious problem though, and one that the redesign linked here doesn't really help too much, imo. Also, the alternating rows are actually kinda distracting.

However, if you are looking for more style (I suspect that most users are NOT), you can check out my project: http://quippd.com
I'd -love- to take a Python course from Zed but this site makes me uneasy about following through. Not enough information and the site simply doesn't look professional enough to be sending in payments of $200+. The 404 on the follow up course is a big red flag too.

-- "Find courses you're interested in from our course list. After you've selected a course, we'll send you more information about our Web-based learning system. "

I kinda want to know before signing up, selecting, and/or paying what your Web-based learning system is about. From what I can see on the site, there will be some directed readings, evaluated assignments, and a place to do Q&A. Those are nice benefits but I'm looking for a quality teacher to pay that premium. I'd like to know if there is audio/video lectures, what the required texts are, etc. Unfortunately there is no FAQ and the only obvious way to ask is the "Contact Us" link which takes you to a generic feedback page.
Facebook Places Launches in Canada
Indeed, if you're in an area where food trucks are common, an app providing a real-time look at where all the food trucks are would be a great thing to write. You could also provide reviews, or perhaps charge the food truck operators for promoting their business.

I'm sure somebody is already doing this.
Thanks! I'm glad someone appreciates it. Seems everyone else is very worried about my spare time and how I wasted it... :)
I haven't done this myself (not enough experience) but I saw a similar idea discussed years ago - for an experienced programmer learning a new language, reimplement something you have already written in the new language. Supposedly, the fact that you had written the first application shows that you understand the problem domain, so you can concentrate on the new language.
I applaud what you're trying to do, but it may be a tad idealistic. The US is filled with legacy code, and there are lots of vested interests in keeping it the complicated way. As programmers we are trained to be purely logical, but politics and governance is 99% emotion, 1% logic.
> Just email each individually

And do so by having the "To" line be yourself, and the addressee in the "Bcc" line - that way the addressee will think others are getting it too.
I wrote about this here http://newslily.com/blogs/103 ...

To paraphrase, digg can still be saved.

1) The layout is freaking horrible. Yes, it's very CSSy, but you're not getting very much content (at least not stuff you really care about) without scrolling. Compare this to HN, or Reddit where it is just a list of stories. This is much, much meatier. Compare "Foreign Affairs" magazine with a free college-town newspaper or something like that. The former is all content, the latter is some content, and a ton of adverts.

2) A lot of the stories that were making it on digg were blogspammy nonsense, for the most part. It was lots of top 10 lists, 7 reasons why list, thinly veiled excuses to feature half-naked women, etc.

The problem was that is there is a market for people who want both 1 and 2, but these people mostly don't want to have to work to find this stuff. Digg v4 means that they have to do more than they are willing to (this is all subconscious) in order to get what they want.

This is the problem with digg v4. There were people who were tolerating both cases because of the few good stories that did make it through, but digg took these away and showed them nothing but top 10 lists until they find people to follow. Bad move.

If Kevin (or whoever is steering the ship now) wants to save it, they need Kevin to get on the air and publicly say that he screwed up (even if it wasn't him), is sorry, and that they're going to go back to what they had before.

Honestly though, it might be too late. A lot of digg refugees have found reddit, or HN, both of which are hugely superior websites in terms of both content and function.

Mostly, digg needs to admit they were wrong, take it back, and play some heavy PR.
I'm so thrilled that Carl Malamud/Law.gov got $1 million. His tireless devotion to using technology to shine sunlight on the government over the past 20(!) years literally has changed the way interact with our government. (ex. his skunkworks project turned into SEC EDGAR, the database of all SEC filings that's sliceable and diceable) It's a goddamn shame he has to live on a shoestring personal budget.

EDIT: If you'd like to donate, go to http://public.resource.org and scroll down to the PayPal Donate button. I just gave another $100.
An electrical circuit does not "do physics." It relies on physics, but it does not "perform physics" in the same way that a computer performs calculations.

This is why software patents are always framed in terms of a machine performing an algorithm. The "machine-performing-an-algorithm" construct is not itself mathematical, though it does rely on mathematics. The FSF's argument there is that having a machine perform an algorithm is now sufficiently obvious to fall under the obviousness restriction (while perhaps it was not so obvious back in the 1950s). This leaves only the algorithm itself, which is mathematical.
>I'm pretty sure there are lots of people that played video games a lot and turned out well.

Not only that, there are lots of people who had access to video games restricted and ended up worse off for it.
"Toxie," NPR's adopted 'toxic asset,' is dead
Profit is a major component of sustainability. Businesses that put off making profit long enough tend to go poof much more often than become sustainable or profitable in the end.
Rackspace is a little different than most hosts. They want you to sign a paper contract, and will give you better prices if you commit for at least 12 months.

So its possible the OP had a good bit of time left on a contract, which he's now on the hook for. It would also make sense for Rackspace to take a smaller payment in such a case, as they wouldn't have rendered the services yet anyway.
I like my Portege, thanks, very low weight (~1.1kg for my model), yet still including DVD writer etc.