skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, what i think is missing is this link that explains exactly what this dude is writing about:

Thanks for everyone’s input on the new logo! We’ve had
the same logo for 20+ years, and this is just one of the
things we’re changing. We know this logo created a lot of
buzz and we’re thrilled to see passionate debates
unfolding! So much so we’re asking you to share your
designs. We love our version, but we’d like to see other
ideas. Stay tuned for details in the next few days on this
crowd sourcing project. [1]

So, in this context, i think the rant makes a bit more sense. Equally funny is iso50's description of this as "a tropicana,"[2] which is a zing i never thought i'd hear.

But, i want to throw out there that this impulse to violently reject or passionately protect logos has an analog in language. "All living languages are always changing"[3] and same goes for logos and brand identities. Much like language or fashion, logos evolve and whatever.

And for everyone that's all "oh that's shite, i could do better," I invite you to really try your hand at this sort of thing with actual real life constraints and (gasp!) real life clients. There's all sorts of design work you can do without a client, but it takes a special type to actually, you know, design for somebody else and more hopefully, design with someone else.

[1]: http://www.facebook.com/gap/posts/159977040694165
[2]: http://blog.iso50.com/2010/10/06/gap-redesign-contest/
[3]: http://www.lsadc.org/info/ling-fields-change.cfm

edit formatting goofs always get me
Sorry, I don't see the change. I tried different browsers...
Main purpose must be repositioning of the brand - their largest competition is American Apparel. Place the new logo between the old gap logo and the AA logo, the thread linking all three will be pretty obvious.

Wouldn't surprise me if a buy out was on the cards.
Just signed up for saucelabs. Newbie question: Do you guys let me export my selenium scripts so I can also test it manually later?
Full disclosure: I'm the author.

Depending on your definition, nothing in JavaScript is "fully functional programming", because then it would have to be side-effect-free, and JavaScript is very much not that language.

Calling them "functional helpers" is mostly a way of distinguishing the style in which you use them, as opposed to the object-oriented versions of the same helper functions, which can be found in libraries like Prototype.js. The idea here being that you can use them in a functional style without having to extend native objects.

As I mentioned above, calling "map" with the iterator as the final argument isn't a limitation here -- it's a feature. There aren't many (any) situations I've ever seen in real-world JS where you'd want to curry together a list of iterators, and then map them together across the array, all at once. And if you do want to do such a thing, you can accomplish it either like this:

_.map(list, function(item) {
return convert1(convert2(convert3(item)));
});

Or, if you want to get fancy, take a look at "compose":

http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/#compose

_.map(list, _.compose(convert1, convert2, convert3));
Interesting how odd it feels to use check boxes in an actual checklist, rather than in a form dialog.
They wanted to be representative of the "...well-structured, maintainable, and high-performance web applications of tomorrow."

Obviously that means writing in other languages and compiling to Javascript.

</sarcasm>
Richard Feynman: Fun to Imagine (video series)
Nice idea, but ultimately it is impossible to know if the customers in your store are resellers or people buying for consumption.

The way to prevent resellers from picking through your inventory for arbitrage is to correctly price your books from the start. With accurate pricing you can still undercut resellers and not make each book a commodity -- Resellers incur a multitude of costs: time, shipping, 15% amazon fee, etc. If you raise your prices to resaleValueOfBook - resellerCharges + $0.01, you cut out the combing by resellers and still offer a sizable discount from Amazon.com
The original post is a rebuttal to this:

http://www.idsgn.org/posts/gap-turns-to-crowdsourcing/
I thought this was going to be an article bashing designers, I kept waiting for the punch line. I understand what he's saying, but it comes across very pretentious. And I say that as a designer.
or professional photographers whining about microstock.
"Sure, you could chalk it up to jealousy of success, but the reality is that there are people out there who are in it for more than money, and sometimes it hurts on a visceral level to see mediocrity succeed wildly."

Mediocre is a relative term. What is this based on? To you it might mean graphics to me it might mean the storyline.

This happens in more than just the gaming industry. Look at how much attention instant youtube got a few weeks ago. The developer just slapped together some ajax using a pre-built API. As a developer, I could have written the same thing in a relatively short amount of time. Yet, it got him lots of attention and a job offer.

I also say the same thing about things like Django. Rather than knowing how everything works, developers are putting blocks of pre-built code together to build applications. I am almost certain the assembly guys were saying the same thing when C became popular.
> You can't express yourself if your skills are poor.

Bob Dylan is not a very skillful singer, and he is far from the best guitar player (especially early on, when he used very few chords). The same can be said of Johnny Cash. Yet they both expressed themselves very well, and their art was good enough to propel them to stardom.
I am getting a crypto score of 3891 for v6 on the Firefox 4 nightlies, and 2630 for v5... seems like a rather drastic difference given they supposedly didn't change anything in that part of the benchmark.
Thank you for clarifying, I appreciate it. There are some very nice data manipulation functions in underscore, and its speed is impressive. I will definitely look into it more.
Good C#|Java|Python habits == good MooTools habits
Furthermore, if you search for work too long and don't find it (I believe 12 months?) The BLS classifies you as a 'discouraged worker' and removes you from the labor force. (You become 'marginally attached')

This has the effect of juicing the BLS statistics over time by reducing the unemployment by definition. (i.e. if you've been unemployed long enough, you're no longer considered a part of the labor force, regardless of what efforts you may be making to find a job.)
All I am pointing out is that wealth does not equate intelligence. There are many many intelligent people who do not end up rich. I didn't say Zuck isn't intelligent, I just think that it's only one piece to the puzzle--timing being another crucial aspect, and yes luck in the sense that FB took off virally. I didn't bring up his personality at all so I don't know what you're responding to.

Look at Tesla, he died poor, in debt, and not very well respected. Only now is Tesla regarded as the genius that he was. Neither, Einstein or Edison died wealthy.There are many more examples (Socrates, Oscar Wilde, John Milton) I can go on if needed. Not to mention all the unintelligent wealthy people: Paris Hilton, Tom Cruise, Britney Spears, etc.
My point is that if you want to evaluate quality you have to leave metrics behind and start looking at opinions. And opinions are like assholes in that they're ubiquitous throughout the population.

Of course you can make up metrics based on averages of everyone's opinions, or weighted averages where you weight by the "sophistication" (in some sense) of the person's opinion. But nobody will believe such metrics anyway, in that you'll never catch anybody saying "I hate this game/book/album, but this reliable metric says it's good, so I guess it must actually be good!"

If Farmville is bad, it falls into the "fascinatingly bad" category of things that are derided by professional opinion-makers but still vastly popular. Genuinely bad games, books and bands are a dime a dozen -- check out a publisher's reject pile, an open mike night or a twelve year old programmer's hard disk for examples -- but fascinatingly bad things like The Da Vinci Code or Nickelback or Farmville deserve a lot more analysis.
Isn't 37signals like Rubyist central?
Republicans have no less a fetish, in practice.

Just as in practice, Republicans have no interest in the abolishing of the DoE, chest-beating silliness aside. Fringers say a lot of things and some pols might try to appeal to them, but at the end of the day, it's what the mainstream wants - in both parties - that rules. Some larger groups may have occasional influence, but only when they can convince other people (at least temporarily) that they are right.
This is the coffeescript version of underscore.js.

BTW, these beautiful documentation webpages are auto-generated with a tool, as pointed out in the underscore.js post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1767897

There are equivalents for several languages.
Yes, sorry, you're absolutely right, wrong choice of words. (in my first language we have the same word for 'hypothetical' and 'theoretical' hence I sometimes mix these two words up)
From the comment I responded to: "...unless you lost a bundle w/ stop-loss orders..."

If you placed stop limit orders, you didn't lose a bundle and you also didn't harm the market very much. If you placed a stop limit on Accenture at 40, you lost $1/share. That's a hit, but not a ridiculous one. That's the penalty for telling the market that Accenture should be priced at $40 when it should really be priced at $41.

A lot of retail investors actually did place stop loss orders. That's why Accenture traded at $0.01 (note: those trades were broken). Bargain seeking HFT's and daytraders bought at $0.01, sold at $0.05, and quickly pushed the price of Accenture back up to $40.0 or so.

The market will hurt you if you give it bad information. The worse the information, the more you lose. If you don't understand this you should not trade.
The guys who do the interrupting power dynamic thing don't do it to their bosses - only their subordinates and competitors. This, too, is part of the "skill set" they bring. The attitude of their manager is extremely important in this - some people actually admire the people doing the bullying and think it shows potential for advancement. I'm not sure why, but it explains a lot...
I'm not good with plugs and self-promotion but we are building a solution that may turn out better than wp-plugins.

http://plugik.com/
"I suppose we could debate this all day."

In other words, the concept of minimalism is multi-faceted, complex, full of myriad options, and above all...not a minimal concept.
I have some confessions to make too. I did what this guy did but in a much more automated, scalable fashion. I did online book marketplace arbitrage.

Basically, I wrote software to automatically find books for sale on one used book site on the web and listed the same book for sale (with a markup) on another site. If my listing was purchased, my software would automatically purchase the book from the original seller and have it shipped directly to my buyer.

In the second half of 2007 I did over $200K in sales and had 10s of thousands of books listed for sale at a time. If anyone has any interest, I might write a blog post about it.
Four Reasons Not to Hosst Your Own Open Source Project
Cautionary note: this version is slightly out of date, and needs to be updated to reflect the changes in Underscore 1.1.1 ...
Fun and engaging are ridiculously hard to quantify. :P
If a resident owner does not pay a $75 fee for the house, the assumption is nothing in the house is worth more than the piece of mind the $75 fee gives.

I suspect the firemen went there to asses whether there was 1)a high degree of danger to lives of people and 2)uncontrolled spread of the fire.

If there were people in the house, they would have more than likely used their expertise voluntarily to extract those people from the flames. But a house is just a house, even with sentimental value. (My dad is a bit of a hoarder and literally has junk that he holds on to because of "sentimental value.")

All in all, the priorities of the fire department were on the straight.
Out of $200K in sales, what was your take home?
> "have to do with scaling that system, and those problems were solved long after Zuck was no longer hands-on with the code every day."

seldo covers this in his original post. The assertion (correct or otherwise) is that the difficult parts of scaling Facebook occurred after Zuck stopped working on the code himself.
Because market makers purchased them at a discount with the hope of selling them for a small profit sometime later in the day. That's what market makers do.
There have been a ton of other designs submitted to ISO50. Some aren't too bad: http://blog.iso50.com/2010/10/06/gap-redesign-contest/
I’ve redesigned your logo. It’s behind the post-it above. It’s unbelievably good. Fantastic, even. I’m convinced it’s what you need.

aaaaaaand it turns out to be crap. Your policy of 3 (or whatever) "redesigns" turns out to give me 3 more crap designs and then, according to the contract, I have to pay you anyway. I spent $5,000 like that. Never again.
If Prop.#19 passes, market will accept bonds backed by marijuana taxes
Interactive Text Adventures (Zork etc.) for your Kindle/E-Book
Multiple file types-paperclip-different urls/styles for different file types?
Unbreakable Oracle Linux-  and Unshakable-Libre Office-
Forgive me, but it's still not clear (in terms of the outcome) to me what the difference is between:

var a = new Array(); and var a = [];

Would someone shed some light on this?
Hmm

Social network has superior directing and writing IMO. But they are similar in many respects.

PoSV simply tells the story in a pretty straightforward way, while TSN is structured more as a search for the true story. It's structured as a bunch of flashbacks from the depositions of Mark, Eduardo, and the Winklevoss twins. Each party tells their version of things, and as a character says at one point, 15% of typical testimony is lies, the remaining 85% is exaggerated.

The movie doesn't try to take sides, and leaves it up to the viewer to decide who was right and wrong (if anyone.)
Looking at the old logo, I'd say it looks like it's aimed at a fifty-something demographic -- I don't blame them for wanting something that looks "younger".

But the new logo is a mess, and looks like something you'd come up with in Powerpoint in five seconds without changing the defaults. There's nothing wrong ideas-wise with san-serif "gap" over shaded blue square, but it comes out looking bad.
Yea, that response was a little to happy. Feels planned to me. Bad gradients and Helvetica are almost guaranteed to piss off designers.
Answering my own question, I found this in the Advertsing Age:

http://adage.com/article?article_id=146353

I don't think this is going to end well for Gap.
There are some good ones there. Personally I like number 42.

It seems to me that a place called "Gap" should have a gap somewhere in its logo.
Actually no. Under a theory of quantum meruit (something having worth), the firefighters could bill the homeowner unless he asked them not to assist. It requires showing a defendant knowingly received a benefit from the plaintiff and retained it afterwards - in this case, a house still standing.

Here's a recent Ohio case illustrating the principle - first fire-related one I found. Although this is about a bill for boarding up a property after a fire than actual firefighting, it explains the idea very clearly: http://www.supremecourt.ohio.gov/rod/docs/pdf/9/2010/2010-oh...
You've got to see this, one of the better ways to pass 2 minutes. Also do not miss the discussion on Reddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/dnu8o/program_o...) some very interesting points are made. Rushkoff's main point is that when we learn a basic skill in a medium (e.g. reading, writing) we not only learn to consume but to create it; ergo, if you don't know how to program you will be manipulated by others who can or at least have to live in a world they they've built.

This analogy is old, e.g. Eloi vs. Marlocks in The Time Machine.
There's a bit of caution to be given here. My tax person said that switching between W2 and 1099 work throws up a red flag with regard to the IRS willingness to consider you as truly independent.
Lawrence Lessig has an interesting take on the movie:
http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/78081/sorkin-zucke...

He basically says that it's old media (Sorkin and Hollywood) casting new media (Zuckerberg) in a bad light, compared to the good guys - the honorable and respectable lawyers (of all people).

The real point of Facebook's success according to Lessig:
"Instead, what’s important here is that Zuckerberg’s genius could be embraced by half-a-billion people within six years of its first being launched, without (and here is the critical bit) asking permission of anyone. The real story is not the invention. It is the platform that makes the invention sing."
We're never perfect. We're always pretty good, but we're always trying to be better.

words i live by
Let's suppose the chance of a fire is 1% every 10 years. So 100 houses pay 100 * 75$/year * 10 years = 75,000$ per fire. Now if the house is worth < 75,000$ then paying the cost of putting it out is not worth it to the property owner.

As to why it might cost that much per fire, it's probably low probability event so you need to pay for all the time, training, and equipment that sit's unused between emergency's. Add in the overhead in showing up to events like this one where they receive zero compensation and you have a major free rider problem.
The new logo looks worse than bad. It looks like an accident.
86 Ways to Increase Conversion: Part 5
The Four Essential Presentation Skills I Learned From Sesame Street
How to form a habit
One thing I really liked was that the purchase price for the domain on Network Solutions was historically accurate - back then they were still charging $34 for a .com domain..
it is great! easy to use, and it works to make regression testing automatic. i haven't used sauce labs yet.
Why is REST relevant to a web apps success?

In the comments he mentions "it makes the app shareable on blogs, email, social media if every resource/page has its own URL". That's true, unless of course when 75% of your URLs are behind authentication, which is true with every paid app.

So the connection between sharing and REST doesn't make much sense.

Why not just say: make it easy to share? Or provide clean URLs for APIs?
This is incredibly misleading.

1. You don't need access to my newsfeed to grab PUBLIC posts to my newsfeed, only private ones.

2. Posting is NOT required for sharing, only for "sharing" without the user's explicit permission. You can always use stream.publish, show a FB lightbox and share. Or user share.php.

3. You don't need to "login to FB every time you go to the site". An app can re-up the access token if there is a logged in Facebook account. If there isn't, you can ask the user to login. Again, this is typically used to pull data when you're not logged into FB at all.

Shady.
Rejection Therapy
What do you think P[genius|success]/P[genius] is? (i.e., how much more likely do you think it is that someone is a genius given that you know they are a success?)
I genuinely don't get the author's arguments.

Unfortunately, the term, and therefore the way the technology is understood by tech writers, is causing some fairly serious problems.

The thing is, the core problem isn’t that the name is too fuzzy. It’s what the name implies.

The truth is, the “completion” of HTML5 is absolutely irrelevant.

Basically, the tech press shouldn't use the term HTML5 because they don't understand it? HTML5 is a major milestone for the web and the term carries much more meaning than previous buzzwords (AJAX, Web 2.0, DHTML, etc.). HTML5 is a new technology unlike AJAX or DHTML which defined new ways of using existing technologies (AJAX = Javascript + XMLHttpRequest API, DHTML = HTML + Javascript DOM manipulation). Unlike those terms, HTML5 is very well defined and therefore quite hard to misuse. Am I missing something?
Bit.ly Raises $10 Million Series B, Still Growing Like Crazy
$7,205.02

http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl
The lisp one. :-P Seriously, HN has its own very limited markup syntax and blockquote has never been in it.

http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
right; my point was that if you have significant ownership, becoming a bully likely hurts you (because it hurts the company) more than it helps you (because who is going to promote you? you own the place.) My point is that the traditional rules for office politics are designed for an environment where the actual owners are absent, and what you have left are the middle managers arguing over control of other people's money. The equation works out quite a bit differently in a startup where the boss usually owns a pretty significant chunk of the company.

It's the "at startups" bit of the title (which doesn't seem to be supported by the rest of the article) that I object to.
I actually priced doublewides before posting earlier. It's not $75,000. In rural areas, you can get doublewides for under $20,000. A crappy one might go for as little as $15k list.

In any case: I simply can't get around the fact that we're talking about a guy who deliberately moved to a locale that didn't have fire service. I can't understand what moral obligation could require the fire department from another city to come to his aid. We're all hung up on the fact that the fire department "stood by" and "watched his house burn down". But it wasn't his fire department!
ITunes App Store - the name matters
But even if the Oscar for Best Sound Editing goes to a terrible and unpopular movie which happens to have good sound editing (e.g. Pearl Harbor, 2001) then there's still a lot that can be learned about sound editing from that movie. You can, for instance, hire the sound editor from Pearl Harbor to do the sound editing on a good film.

I'm not sure what the authors of mainstream fiction can learn from Harold Pinter, though.
Instead of having a single person working on UX/design everybody should be thinking about it. While eating your own dog food (you are aren't you?) think about how many mouse clicks you can remove, about how many settings options you can remove, etc.
Great link, that really sums it up. A note, though: some people report that fb_sig_is_fan does work. Worth at least trying out before you switch to <fb:visible-to-connection>
I've been really digging oh-my-zsh recently for extending zsh, comes with a great plugin architecture and all sorts of cool shit: http://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh
I'd actually disagree. It's just a brand - your mind should associate the name and logo with connotations and feelings regarding their clothes and their shopping experience (and probably sex, it's a youthful clothing store). You shouldn't be thinking about what the word "gap" literally means - it's orthogonal to the meaning of the brand.
IMO, Facebook did well for two reasons, brand recognition and phased roll-out.

After it started taking off at Harvard, you had the Harvard brand, which is a pretty big deal, to encourage uptake at other colleges. By going college by college, critical mass was easier to achieve, as it didn't need a lot of people, it just needed a lot of people at your particular college, to encourage the non-early-adopters to join in. By the time it was actually competing with MySpace, etc, for non college users, it already had a sizable user group in the key demographic, and as I recall, the "started at harvard" branding was still to be heard.
Rumor: Microsoft is looking to buyout Adobe