skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just watched Frank Chimero's talk at Build. He mentions his search for what a designer is. It's a pretty great talk. Chimero puts out some incredible work and his thoughts on design are hardly about the "design" most people think of.

http://vimeo.com/17084347

The designer you want isn’t the guy that just knows photoshop and delivers .psd files (or the html-illuminated designer that delivers html+css).

Are you suggesting that this person was ever a designer? As if the definition has shifted in the past few years? I don't think that person should have ever been considered a designer. It seems like the internet came up behind what design really is and shook it around for a while. Now the dust starts to settle.

Or maybe not. The guy who can throw together a PSD and the people who hire him aren't going anywhere until our thoughts on design spread outside of the design community. We're kind of insular, aren't we?
Possibly, but just saying "communication" doesn't get across the fact that designers are always working within a myriad of constraints.
By social networking, I was referring to its use in Silicon Valley -- as opposed to merit alone.

And one can criticize computer science based on its claim that it is the best way to study computing.
Labels And Magazines: Help To Generate Gigantic Returns
When it comes to the labels and magazines, they are absolutely useful products at all. That is why company offers matchless labels and magazines printing services to its valued customers cheaply online.
Not really. Readability is for content that's already online. His 'competition' is sites like pastebin.
We are similar that 3 of us are in the same city, but not very close. The 4th is out of state, but travels at least once a month. The major difference is that we are all full time on our startup.

IM/Voip (Gtalk/Skype) for daily communication
Email (Pretty much goes without saying)
Skype Screen Share/ GoToMeeting when required to view things together.
RedMine for bug/issue tracking

We actually never use video calls, don't see it adding to much. I already know what they look like. When we have major design or planning sessions, we will get together for a face to face meetings, scheduled out in advanced. We also try to get together for lunch/dinner/meeting every month or so.
Note: if something is being given to you for "free", but you still need to sign up, the product is YOU.

I suppose I could go trawl BugMeNot.com or something, but eeh.
This is not what is happening.

Comcast is an ISP. Just about every CDN out there pays to peer with Comcast to deliver bits faster and cheaper to Comcast eyeballs.

Level(3) is an ISP. Because they carry traffic Comcast customers want they have been able to peer at no-cost to Comcast historically. Now Level(3) is building and selling a large CDN. Level(3) is taking advantage of these existing peering circuits to be able to offer lower-cost CDN than their competitors because they don't have to pay Comcast to exchange traffic. As a consequence, their CDN has grown very large. They now dump far more traffic onto Comcast's network than Comcast sends them. Comcast says their peering policy is based on equal traffic ratios. Therefore, unless Level(3) can balance their peering circuits, they will be forced to pay.

This has little to do with Net Neutrality and has been happening between various ISPs over the last 10-20 years.

In IPv6 it's even worse. If you have Cogent as your ISP you can't reach Hurricane Electric's network over IPv6 because neither of them has transit and they don't peer with each other. :-(
Business Idea
Fair enough. :-)

I also know they're not writing pieces like this - which I see as a problem. I do think awareness to the shifting role of the designer is necessary at this point.

But I still don't agree with this. If anything, I think we need more designers to step up and say "The idea of a 'designer' is dead. Stop pretending like it's possible to be a professional in this day and age; we're all amateurs of differing degrees. There's more to learn than you'll ever be able to learn, so all that matters is that you learn the things you care about learning. Stop wasting time defining things, separating them into canons and non-canons, pretending like success necessarily defines designers or adds an extra meaning to their work."

I'm primarily studying advertising right now — though it's certainly not my only or even primary interest — and one thing that attracts me to the study is that the top advertisers on the planet have been saying this for a decade. Agencies like Wieden+Kennedy and the Barbarian Group turn out some work that's so beyond the kin of what we recognize as advertising that it forces you to acknowledge that the old definitions have been thrown out the window, regardless of whether some people insist they're still there.

Design hasn't gotten there yet: It's a more conservative field than advertising. (I mean, so is everything. That's the whole idea of being in advertising.) Even the people I just named tend to be more conservative with their designs than the half-generation following them is going to be. Of all the ones I named I think only Inman and the Twitter team are really doing something new, and even they aren't off-the-walls crazy. Not that there's anything bad with that.

But certainly one of the reasons I'm not primarily a designer is that it's one of the few artistic fields whose education focuses on old tried-and-true standards rather than on the crazy things that happened last week or yesterday or earlier today. A whole lot of design feels appallingly stagnant.

(I'd love to talk this with you more in-depth, by the way — would you mind if I shot you an email?)
Can someone explain to me if the Universe is supposed to be 14,000,000,000 years old, how can it be estimated to be 93,000,000,000 light years wide?

Assuming the Big Bang, doesn't that imply the 'outer matter' must have an average velocity of about 3.3 times the speed of light?
Comcast is not filtering traffic.

They are "peering" their servers with L3 servers at the datacenter to bypass regular networks. "Peering" is when you basically interconnect the servers directly (more or less).

This saves on costs greatly and improves latency and congestion issues.

The problem here is that the peering is now imbalanced by a ratio of 5 and this is not a fair deal for Comcast.
"copying won't happen until something has momentum in the marketplace": interesting point. Thanks!
ever googled for 'pizza delivery near me'? (where 'me' is suburb)
I've also created an API to look up URLs that have been posted to HackerNews.

http://api.ihackernews.com/getid?url=http://uploads.unground...
Sarah Palin said today that he should be hunted down like Osama bin laden.
I have to ask though... why submit this again to HN when all of these other download methods were linked on the other thread already?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1953637

These two threads basically show what I have always said... PDFs are wrong for the web (and any 'tool' that displays them).
This depends very much on a project. Ideally you should have a good test suite assuring that a given revision is correct before merging it into the mainline. If this is the case then every commit on the mainline should be considered an acceptable branching point.

The advice in the article certainly makes sense for the kernel, but could be an overkill for well-tested small and medium projects. Keep in mind that the kernel is a special case both because of its size and the fact that such a low-level and hardware-dependent code cannot be comprehensively unit tested.
And let's not leave out Level 3 and the perennial rumors that it is a prime acquisition target for Google in order to gain a strong fiber backbone (not that I think it will ever happen: I don't).
Joke all you want, it appears the tables of what constitutes a free country have turned dramatically.
Inside the labs at Microsoft, HP and IBM
I had assumed that battle robots of the future would be remotely controlled by a 11 year old boy with an Xbox controller.

[This is based upon my experience of trying to keep up with my son playing Halo rather than Ender's Game]
The stereotypical danger isn't that they'll make fewer mistakes than a human, it's that the mistakes they do make will be much bigger--continually offloading decisionmaking and decision enforcement to AI without a coherent theory of friendliness is like using Martingale betting: You don't lose often, but it only takes one to wipe you out.
online ad spend: $12B p.a

local ad spend: $170B (US only)

/thread
Yay Let's Play (Website) Copycat
Deep Meditation
Thanks for the feedback. Much-much appreciated.

I was thinking of adding an "author" field, and now that you and some other people mention it, I think I will follow through with it.

Honestly, you seem to have put much more thought into URL shortening than I did. I am using just letters for the character set. Shortening the URL sounds like a good idea. And removing the O's and l's is also something that I think I would do. Great suggestions, thanks!

Markdown is actually in the code, but commented out for the "release" =) So it should be coming soon.
Thanks again.
Scary indeed. Here's an image of my helmet after I crashed in a race a couple years ago. Not fun!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/davemabe/5220685015/
You would need to double the whitespaces if you wanted new paragraphs.
John Robb has been writing about these kind of tactics for a while, he calls it "Open Source Warfare": http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2010/11...
There's also the factor of brand recognition - "Groupon" is becoming the "Kleenex" of daily deals. Having worked for another deal site which had an entirely different model, every time I explained it to people, I had to make clear the differences between it and Groupon. Any new player, besides the technical and sales aspects, would be saddled wtih the burden of differentiation.
Does it have a ⊄ key?
In McLuhan's words: The medium is the message ('massage').
i considered it in the past, and i might make the switch with all the internal crap going on with CI. but my biggest current project is CI-based and making the conversion would be...tough. plus, their docs suck.
According to general relativity, space can expand faster than the speed of light. So while what we can see is limited by the speed of light, the size of the universe is not.
Autotest is not CI. A key component of a good CI setup is having a "pure" system that builds your application code. The purpose of this is to ensure that a machine, other than your own, can actually build your software. This is to reveal hidden dependencies, or sometimes differences between your dev box and the production environment.
Tell HN: A realization about working for myself
So I have been a web developer for a while, since college I would pick up contract jobs, making sites for customers etc. And though it brought in some nice side income, I was never really driven to do it. I didn't wake up thinking about my client's websites. Part of this was that they were usually simple projects, never really web apps, just simple websites or blogs.

With my recent project Shove.mobi, though it is just a week old, I realized something critical. This was something I wanted, for me, and that I hoped might be useful to others. But largely, I was building it for myself.

I used to think, based on the motivation and lack of drive for contract work, that I wasn't really cut out to be self-employed. But I realize now that I'm not cut out as a freelance web designer/developer. I want to develop apps that I come up with or that I am passionate about.

Has anyone else had this realization moment?
Anytime someone asks for help on installing Ruby on Ubuntu I tell them to avoid the package manager.

Use RVM, it's a small bit of overhead that greatly increases productivity and reduces headaches.
Because the distance has also grown since the light travelled. It's expanding.

http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmology_faq.html#DN
> Note: if something is being given to you for "free", but you still need to sign up, the product is YOU.

Is that inherently bad?
Your second (technically, third) paragraph won me over - you are absolutely right :-) That needs a more prominent place to live than a comment here at HN - people need to read it.

I don't mind you shooting me an email - not at all. I'm swamped with email, however, so I may take a bit to get back to you. But I definitely will.
Neal Stephenson wrote something like that in Zodiac. The protagonist mentions his philosophy on riding his bike as the assumption that he is wearing a fluorescent vest, and there is a million dollar bounty on his head - if a car sees you and has to consciously make the decision to not kill you, you're already wrong.
Am I the only one who thinks you shouldn't "hack" your sleep. The human body isn't a computer or a program and shouldn't be treated as such.
Hahaha. Don't worry too much about being inflammatory. My old HN account was frozen due to my habit of using naughty words; I don't mind them being aimed at me, as long as we can still shake hands afterwards.

I do think your art/design comparisons are a bit un-thought-out, obviously. Art can't be masturbation when you do it alongside a bunch of other people. It's more an orgy than anything. Design, meanwhile, would be like prostitution if prostitutes had the option of sculpting you a statue instead of... er, this simile has gotten silly and I'm going to cancel it immediately.

The problem with treating design as a strictly commercial enterprise is that the standards required to be commercially viable are laughably simple. I self-taught myself enough about design to be getting paid commissions in my late teens. The ability to simply typeset a paragraph and add padding is so rare (compared to the rest of the populace) that if you've got it and parade it loudly, some people will be convinced enough to give you money.

The real challenge of modern design is this: How do you manage to be competent and memorable? Memorable is the challenge, because it necessarily means doing something that nobody else is doing. Which is hard. On the Internet there're maybe half a dozen people who are able to be reliably memorable — and we'd disagree if we started naming which people we thought counted. But a part of being memorable necessarily means doing crazy things that don't work in an attempt to discover the rare brilliant crazy idea that somehow pays off. You'll never get that if you don't strive higher than is strictly commercially necessary.
I see what you're saying, but I think we'll have a to agree to disagree. I think maybe it's a difference of politics more than anything else.
Check your hosting provider's spam reputation before you sign up
"I didn't wake up thinking about my client's websites."

No, but I wake up knowing that I have the freedom to wake up anytime I want, be it 8am or 2pm.
Google Cache is the new WikiLeaks
I agree with the comments of hugh3 here.

I also have to point out, though, the lack of substance in the original article. It reads like a High School essay. It's basically an anecdotal tale (I rode my bike...I fell down...my friend Jen was there...so was my husband...I remember a PE coach once saying....). Yes, there's a Dr. Lowenstein referenced, but is again just more anecdotal insight (such as those gained standing around the water cooler). In the end, nothing is really learned (except for quite a few tiny details about the writers life).

In summary: junior-level NYTimes reporter needs to submit a story, yet it's a slow news cycle. So, she leverages her bike mishap into a story, getting her friends names in the paper, and some free advertising for Dr. Loewenstein.

I'm sad for journalism, but that's another common story.
Weeeelll... I was somewhat inspired by readability, so a resemblance is not coincidental.

I have seen posterous, but I was going for something even simpler. The email to post idea is pretty cool though.
Thanks a lot for the feedback.
Would be interesting if by the time Senate hearings get around to looking at this (if they ever do) that a simple demo will show how useless the actions were in the first place...
I use CakePHP (actually forced to). You can't compare the bake tools with Django admin. The UI of Django admin is usable in fact it's actually nice. I've had lot's of clients who like it. But the generated CSS by the bake tools is non-usable. I usually end up having to write the views for admin when using CakePHP compared to not having to do anything much when using Django.
Good idea, good functionality but get a designer on this ASAP. To users, design of the app IS the app.

One quick fix on the front page - "What does it do" and "Start Exploring" should have matching capitalization schemes.
This is a great event and I would encourage entrepreneurs to attend. I presented at it last year and LOVED IT. I met tons of great entrepreneurs there. The 3 minutes deadline seemed crazy but I think I ended with 25 seconds to spare so I should have slowed down a little bit!
Google's thoughts on the European Commission review
In short, because the other submission has a link to the scribd site, and the direct links were buried. But submitting this separately I gave people a chance to decide whether they want to access the direct version(s), or the scribd one.

Ideally a site that eventually replaces HN, or an update to HN, will have a single location where similar submissions can congregate, and then we get a single discussion thread. In this case we could then have put the direct links as alternative sources, and retained a single discussion location.

But we don't have that, so I provided an alternative source that was close to the surface, instead of buried in a thread.
I don't think he is saying that shipping a product will prevent others from copying... what he's saying is that shipping is the cure to overcome the fear of having others copying your idea.

Once you ship, it doesn't matter if others want to copy you, because you are already out there... there is nothing else to fear. It's your chance to execute faster and better than the others who were already there and the ones that join in (new competitors).
Quantum entanglement, meet Heisenberg
I figured something like this would happen soon. Yodlee did it right. When I was doing my own Googling for "bank account API" they quickly came to the front.

This will give future finance-based YCombinator start ups a magnificent head start.
I have to use some kind of euphemism to describe them to convince myself I still like bike commuting. I'm still picking scaly pseudo-scar material from my elbow.

Of particular note: the first big crash was due in part to me being inexperienced, only back on the bike for a few months. I wasn't riding the way I should have been, and I was not prepared for the situation. The second crash happened because I spent too much time scanning the road for cars and road hazards, and not enough time noting my surroundings. A co-worker saw me hit the deer (he was a few cars back) and says he saw it in the field from the top of the hill, before it wandered into the deeper brush that it'd eventually jump out of right in front of me.

Taking some of the blame and acknowledging that both crashes were ultimately avoidable has helped keep me on the bike, and it's sharpened me up a bit while riding.
Just Released: Windows Azure SDK 1.3 and the new Windows Azure Management Portal
How about: Review my "Ask HN: Review my "coming soon" page (scholr.ly)" post?
Scannability: How to Highlight Text on the Web
It would be interesting to see some data on fraud rates in different industries.

It is easier to see the thief's risk/reward proposition when ordering a large screen TV with a stolen card than then signing up for a $50\month service. There as soon as you are discovered you loose access to the data that was the whole point anyway.
Hey,

we just uploaded some screenshots - http://bigtuna.appelier.com/screenshots.html

Demo will come soon.
No, it's not. There are always counterexamples, but in your argument you completely ignore margins in the PC and laptop market.

Just to digress for a minute, a related memes that I keep reading is "Apple is comfortable in their very profitable niche".

Through most of Apple's history, their niche was remarkably unprofitable. In 2001 Apple lost $52 million dollars, while Dell made $3.19 billion. How does that play into your theory? In 1997 Apple lost $1.08 billion dollars, while Dell made $747 million.

I could find counter-example after counter-example.

The smartphone market is relatively small and new, as is Android. The race to the bottom has just started.

Competitiveness is indeed just kicking off in earnest. No company is immune to it, and pointing to Apple's tremendous success at leveraging iTunes and their iPod franchise into a lucrative smartphone initiative in no way can be applied to anyone else. Again, there are endless counter-examples (how's Amiga doing these days? Atari? The ST was a pretty great machine, so they must be storming the margins), yet you demonstrated a perfect and remarkably myopic confirmation bias to demonstrate a competitive lesson.
Odd that they didn't include codeigniter in the test
Thanks for the suggestion. The website is actually in need of much cleanup, even though it is small. I was trying to roll it out asap, in fears that otherwise it would never see the light of day.
Gluten sensitivity ranges from the coeliac disease on the extreme end of the continuum down to mild inflammation of the small intestine. Gluten sensitivity is NOT just about coeliac disease. There is a growing body of evidence that gluten is in fact a problem in our diets and it's not as clear cut as you present that if you don't have coeliac, you can eat all the wheat you want. I'm not sure there's any "should" to eating wheat/gluten. There are other more nutritional ways to get protein.

Since this is an article on hacking sleep, I think it's worth mentioning. Try dropping gluten/wheat/bread from your diet for 30 days and see if your sleep improves. I know that mine has. If it doesn't, great, you are golden. If it does, you've learned something.

Facts or not, the article is about improving your sleep. Some people are sensitive to dairy and wheat. Try going without them for 30 days and see what happens. It's all a big experiment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluten_sensitivity
Assuming ~100M the P/E 60x and not 600x, which is high but not terribly high, considering their rapid growth. For example, Amazon is worth 79B with a P/E of 71x
Fun interview with Reaper DAW guys in Tape Op 80, Reaper user PDFs it (PDF link)
Invitations are usually welcoming. "We can't stop you" doesn't really strike me as such.
I've had some of those moments, and then things change for me a bit. Been self-employed for a number of years now, primarily doing freelance web app development, but also some training, publishing, and a few other things. There's not been one thing that has yet clicked as my lifelong passion, but that's been OK. I didn't find things clicked when I was taking fulltime w2 gigs either, so it's not been much of a change in that respect.

Congrats on finding that moment for yourself - I hope it lasts for you :)
I use No(t)Script to whitelist sites I trust. Noticing there was blocked JavaScript on a page of simple text would prejudice me against it.
Be sure to try BigTuna. We had the same issue ;)
I conceded that point about the datacenters, but we both know that a lot of tech companies in California offshore their manufacturing, call centers, etc. Get some of that to stay with state policies.

Reason has some more evidence why the article is bunk:

http://reason.com/blog/2010/11/29/is-californias-decline-jus...
No, I just don't feel like paying that particular price. I lurked on HN for years before I signed up. All the content here is free for the consumption of the world. I really just don't want to have yet another company with my email address and yet another password I have to remember for the two times per year NYT has exclusive content I absolutely have to read.