skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah I don't disagree despite what I wrote. Perhaps it's better put that interchangeability is a very powerful thing in software, but its more of a gimmick in music where no component takes nearly as long to describe and making parts that work independently is not seen as a good thing. The chords and tonal systems ensure interoperability anyway.
Using the Socratic Method to teach binary arithmetic
hmmm? PG's a serial entrepreneur? really? no disrespect meant but really?

EDIT:saw speling mistakes
Adam and Eve, open source libraries from Adobe used to build Photoshop
The quote is from appendix A:

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html#a
Google Facebook App Off To Problematic Start
It sounds like the aluminum is consumed. Aluminum is plentiful stuff, but energetically speaking, it's very costly to refine. I sure hope this goes somewhere, but I'm not holding my breath, all the same.
I guess it depends on what you mean by encapsulation. If you're writing music with functional harmony, it's a very useful concept, although you typically work in reverse.

The encapsulated idea might be the dominant part of a V-I cadence, which you can replace with an extended, embellished pattern that has basically the same function but is much more interesting. V->[I-ii-iii-IV-V/V-V]

I-vi-ii-V-I
I-vi-ii-[I-ii-iii-IV-V/V-V]-I

And maybe at the beginning, you can reinforce the tonality with a little pattern instead of just plunking out a I. So I->[I-vii-I]. Then you have a progression like this:

[I-vii-I]-vi-ii-[I-ii-iii-IV-V/V-V]-I

Then, you can map that pattern onto a rhythmic framework. Maybe with a generalized mapping function that you could use for a number of different patterns. Anyway I'm rambling now. Maybe I'll blog about it at some point.

(note that the vii should really be vii-diminished. The forum doesn't appear to support the little circle superscript.)
Followed by:

"Hey Sergey, take a look at what these guys at Overture are doing..." - Larry Page
> The fact that Norman was a great-grandchild of Norwegian immigrants to the US makes one wonder how many talented people are going to waste given the current almost epidemic prevalence of xenophobia in the US and in Europe.

In what universe are Norwegians discriminated against in the US? In this universese, there are whole states populated with Scandahoovian immigrants and their descendants over the past 100 years. Maybe the Swedes and the Norwegians throw down in America, but the rest of us can't tell the difference.
Subversion was how we did it. Works pretty well. Maybe overkill if you don't already have a repository set up.
Crystal Tower, the startup dorm, loses elevator service
I did it in text form in Google docs, allows for simultaneous editing.
Find a hacker-designer, even if it means expanding from 2 to 3 cofounders. Or become that hacker-designer.

Good design and flow is critical, especially for consumers apps. I'd say that 2 of 3 of our founders consider design as one of our core competencies and I think its made a huge difference.

But even if its not a core competency, make it one of yours! Our 1 non-designer cofounder learned about and talked to other startups about design, and ended up coming up with our biggest design improvement to date - removing the whole "website" from the frontpage. If you go to Anywhere.FM, you'll notice we don't take you to a "website" and this change reduced our bouncerate by 50% (compared to the Alpha release). This certainly trumps most technical feats we've accomplished to date.

Finally, its good to have multiple opinions (but not get locked up in minor details), so that the UI targets a wide audience - not just the audience the designers are most in tune with. Its easy to target only yourself, and we probably still suffer from that today.
You are misinterpreting that statement. What they are referring to in the above quotation is when search results are altered due to change in advertiser dollars. Kind of like when Yahoo used to have top advertiser links above the normal search results, and undifferentiated from the content.

Google, as a result, made a separate, distinct location for advertisement links. Because they separated the location of advertisements from the search results, they preserved the integrity of the search results.

This structure has not changed, as you can clearly see sponsored links are separated from search results:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=pizza
Copy it to a texteditor and pass that around.

Or use Versionate.
Videohybrid 3.0: I Can't Believe This Hasn't Been Banned Yet
Fred Wilson: Favoriting Ads
You are taking this way to seriously.
so far I see iminlikewithyou.com and likebetter.com. woot!
Don't call me a software engineer
Ok more good examples of a sort of encapsulation in music. In general all I meant was that writing parts of music for the purpose of reuse would generally be considered to lessen the musical quality because of the lack of originality.
We started sending it around by E-mail and then switched to Google Docs when that got too cumbersome.
Our resistance to an epidemic 3 million years ago may have exposed us to the risk of HIV today
Design is very important, I'll say its as important as code, If your code is great and your UI is just bad, people won't use your app.
It's a huge advantage to have a designer in your team, mostly because a startup changes so fast that depending of an outsider to redesign or add new features will just don't work.
I think design is not just looking good, but being easy to use and understand.
Depends whether you count YC as a startup. It is in some ways, isn't in others.
To figure out the CSS thing I recommend:

Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML.
Awesome book, does anyone has read it?
Yes, just what we need... more ways to make webpages look shitty, bloated and unreadable. Over the past 4 years, I've personally done at least two dozen usability studies and every one of the tests showed that simplicity always trumps elaborate design. No matter what you're trying to accomplish, you're always better off sticking to what people expect. People are used to Verdana, Times, Arial. I hate some of these fonts but people will test better if you stick to those fonts. Also, a lot of fonts just don't look great on screen and test even worse on readability. MS spent a lot of time on properly hinting these fonts so they are easy to read. By giving beginners this web fonts option, you're giving them more bullets to screw things up.

Now, one place where you think this stuff would help is Linux. Since Linux doesn't come with these "standard" web fonts, you need to substitute. Problem is that you cannot just put a link to these fonts inside your CSS since they're copyrighted by MS. So we're back to square one.

Rant: I wish Opera, MS etc. spent some time working on getting CSS2 working properly! They're already pushing for CSS3 and yet BASIC stuff, like box model, is all over the map and you still need hacks to get stuff working in multiple browsers. How about these companies (cough, MS) spend time getting the bugs out of current code so they can pass all those CSS tests instead of pushing even more useless stuff? Opera's JS is still subpar and supporting it takes a lot of tweaking.
Anything that lets designers get closer to their intent is good. You can't blame tools for bad design.
First post!!

Very inspiring, saw this on digg. I am glad to see some women internet entrepreneurs. Also, that sector of the market is very hard to break into, try doing a search for myspace layouts. These websites are plagued with ads. She said in her article she focused on user design and branding which is key.

As much as we all hate myspace. We have to think also, there is a new younger breed of myspace users that are learning html, javascript, css, etc. becoming web designers/developers who might not have learned or wanted to learn elsewise. That is what I think is still great about myspace and other customizable sites.

- Joey Primiani
Why do so many big-name webpages use automatic slideshows? Does ANYBODY--and I mean, ANYBODY out of 6 billion people on earth--sit and watch auto-refreshing slideshows?

Damn, there's a lot of youtube clones out there.
The crowding is not due to too many people. There are lots of places on the planet with very few people; it's just that many people (when free to travel) prefer crowding to solitude.
FWIW, there are plenty of people who don't grok that the top-of-results ad placements are ads.
has repeatedly stated that taking steps to decrease the rate of population growth

Read: Has repeatedly stated that the apocalyptic-scale problem he caused should be solved by someone at some point by some means.
I agree, and I agree with the reasons the author listed.

But ultimately, I'd dismiss this as a minor irritation if it weren't for the efforts to license Software Engineers under the EIT/PE path. In the end, I don't care if they call me a hacker, or a programmer, or an analyst. If it didn't matter, I wouldn't even really care if they called me an "engineer" (though I'd put something else on my business cards). I majored in math and got a grad degree in Industrial Engineering. Call it math, call it engineering, call it hacking. Whatever.

But I truly agree that any attempts to license the people who create software under the PE path - ie., undergraduate ABET accredited engineering degree, followed by the EIT exam, an apprenticeship, and the PE exam, would be utterly stupid. The exams are difficult and rigorous, sure, but what to they have to do with code? Very, very little. I think that 5% of the questions may have something to do with software, and they're pretty lame questions. The path would deny entry to the most talented, and give a peripheral group tremendous power to decide what talented people can and can't do.

While the term "engineer" is pretty general (think "sound engineers" in the recording industry), I'd still rather avoid any ambiguity here. I absolutely deny licensed professional engineers any claim whatsoever over software development, and I'll avoid the term to ensure that I don't continue to confuse them and others about where I (and almost all the good hackers I know) stand on this.
I like the new layout. If I had some criticisms, I think the design is a little too cluttered. Also, when there is a video posted on the homepage, my eye goes right to the video instead of the news. Therefore, it should be separated. I am sure the reason why the wanted to combine it was that the video page was getting far less views than the news page. Most people submitted videos to the news page to get the most hits. This design also gives room for more ad space.
Feature request: Best list
Pardon me if it already exists, but how about a "best" list for HackerNews?

It seems like it would create a nice, evolving library of previous high-ranked posts.
I cannot dispute that "eventually" many things will happen:)
The example conflict of interest they used was a top-rank page that advertisers would like to bury. That problem is not solved by keeping ad links separate. Further (and this is what makes the link interesting), if Google were to start altering page rank to serve advertiser interests, it would be difficult for anyone to prove or even know they did it.
Re: your rant

This is exactly why I'm seriously considering Flex for my next project. Progress in browsers is now moving at a glacier's pace. It still sucks. It's still incredibly limiting. Appealing to the W3C and Microsoft to fix stuff is like getting the government to act swiftly on something for which there is no immediate need. It basically won't happen.
well, wait for 10.5.
PG: Will there be a point when you can talk about the other one that got acquired or is it going to be permanently off limits, at least for the foreseeable future?
It's either love it (because it lets you get things done easily and quickly) or hate it (because you were good at iMovie '06). But the goal for iMovie '08 was to be able to make a movie in a half hour with no experience. And I think they've met that goal.
I'll see your Norman Borlaug and raise you a Julian Simon.
Fact is, people don't care about design. They care about usability.

Another fact, "ugly" sites sell better too: http://www.sitepronews.com/archives/2006/mar/27prt.html
The Surprising Truth About Ugly Websites (they perform better)
How many of us only know about Norman Borlaug because of Penn Jillette talking about him?
Controlling Your Visitors Eyes
This guy is confused. There are a lot of ugly sites that perform badly too. In fact, the average ugly site probably does a lot worse than the average nice one.

I think what he means to say is that (a) simplicity is so
important that simple and ugly works better than beautiful
and complex, and (b) if you have enough drawing power by other means, you can get away with bad design.
They keep telling us we'll be able to talk about it soon, but they've been saying that for a while. It was actually the first acquisition, many months before reddit.
Google Phone
Ugh. I hope it's fixed next week when we move in.

On the top (12th) floor.
FormSpring looks for beta API testers
19 groups wasn't too bad (from a founder perspective). You won't get close with everyone, but the community is in full force.

Just don't pig out on the rice at dinner.
It is distresssing to see how many mistakes we made.

Luckily that was then.
OK, it was a bad example. None of them seem to have a formal grounding in music theory, except Chad Hugo who dropped out of college before finishing.
I always thought Orville Vogel was the father of the green revolution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orville_Vogel Must have been regional bias.
How Google could beat Facebook at its own game
Google could obtain a social network graph quickly from gmail accounts.

Moreover, it could release a platform similar to Facebook but take it another step further by providing free hosting on its massive computer cluster.

There would be some sort of revenue sharing system in place for apps created using this platform.
Deja vu: Sony again uses rootkits, charges F-Secure
Boingboing redesigned: nicely minimalist, despite all the ads
Perhaps most interestingly, they enabled comments with the help of a (full-time?) community manager to keep things from turning into the Techcrunch comments.

It makes me wonder how much money they make. Anyone have a ballpark figure?
I agree. They could but will they? Google has been executing well only in the ads area... they've performed poorly in all other ones.

If Google were smart, they could combine Gmail, Orkut, Picassa and Blogger into a single social platform. But that would not guarantee success.
It's back up... and for some reason it seems like without the heavy traffic, the quality of posts on the front page is way up. Could just be a coincidence, though...
It's a feature, but not a good one.
Rich Skrenta: Counting stuff is really hard (everything is harder in a distributed system)
Why does it matter? I don't think entrepreneur implies startup. Someone who starts a restaurant and then a dry cleaner and then a hair salon is still a serial entrepreneur.
Right on. Another factor is the content of the site. This is something I only recently realized.

I always used craigslist's success in spite of ugliness as my reason for not thinking hard about style. But people expect classifieds to be ugly. People don't expect the place where they put their photos to be ugly. I've contracted a designer.
Weird how he does that PC thing of gratuitously using the feminine. That peaked in the early 90s and has mostly disappeared now. It rings especially false in this industry, where female CEOs are so rare that they're automatically famous on that account.
> Fact is, people don't care about design.

As if designers only make things pretty. I'm amazed at how people get easily confused by this.

Interaction design is essentially the first step in making a useful system. It's more important than the tech-cool aspects of a project, and is contained in that nice phrase "make something people want"

Today's tools to make a webpage are worse than the options available to designers for print media. That's too bad.
Entrepreneur implies starting a business. All startups are businesses. But not all businesses are startups.

A start-up differs from a business because it is intended to scale really quickly. That's what the 5 million in VC cash is for.
Social Networks Edge Toward IPOs
I think it would be a good move to make. Instead of hiring so many software engineers worldwide, they could "out source" much of their app development to entrepreneurs.
He caused a problem by solving another apocalyptic scale problem. Like Julian Simon, I am confident that new technology will emerge to solve any overpopulation problems.
That's the first thing I noticed also. It looks much less busy despite having significantly more ad space.
68 points? what happened today? it has been because reddit has been unavailable?
I guess, at best, you're making the argument that you don't need to go to conservatory to make pop music. While true, I think it's fair to say these guys are all really musically minded. In particular, Rick Rubin and Pharrell cut across genres really well (from rap to rock and stuff in between), which is decent evidence that they're not just lucking into popular singles.
Line Rider - lots of fun
So if I said I was going to give you immortality by copying your consciousness, but you wouldn't be aware, wouldn't you feel gypped?
It accomplished its goal, which was to catch your attention. Even little subtleties have a purpose.
Yes, I thought an understanding of all of the above was implicit in my post. Did you mean to dispute something I said, or just clarify my point?
I'm sorry, I misread your post ... so you can take my post as a clarification. :)
They essentially do this already by scooping up interesting startups.
> They care about usability

I don't think so, I think most users will put up with a painfully unusable site if its the first one they come across that fulfills their need. Only software designers care about usability.
A Scientologist in Congress?
YikeSite Product Launch
How to Blog on Company Time Without Getting Dooced
My SXSW panel, Blog on Company Time Without Getting Dooced, will discuss the various ways you can avoid being fired (or not being hired in the first place) for your blog/online profile. And ways you can use your on-the-clock Internet time productively; by blogging or pursuing other online business ventures withouth nailed.
But they don't scoop up that many. Outsourcing app dev to entrepreneurs would result in thousands of apps. Google could then focus on making the infrastructure and dev platform better.
Look at free online dating. http://www.plentyoffish.com has terrible design and is almost unusable. http://www.okcupid.com has great design, yet plentyoffish is ten times bigger. Same with i'minlikewithyou.
How much do good designers cost for a typical modern web application?
On valuing freedom more than cushy jail cells (Doc Searls)
Terrible? No money up front, pay what you want later

Decent? $30/hour.

Good? $60/hour

Great? Whatever they want to charge.

http://programmermeetdesigner.com/ is a good place to get bids for a design. I got bids for a logo ranging from $25 - $600.
I'd buy it.
Advertising:New Shop Promises Results Clients Can Gauge
Sony Ericsson's new Virtual Lab enables testing of phone apps through your browser
100 Fastest-Growing Tech Companies
Where'd you get 4 times revenue? Even that is low-ball for a company with a million in revenues and nearly zero costs. Of course, in most tech acquisitions it's not an all-cash deal and lots of stock in the new owner comes along with it.

But still 1.6 million for a company with a million in annual revenues is an offensively low offer. Whoever made it ought to be ashamed of trying to take advantage of a 17 year old girl that way. Good for her for not being overwhelmed by the big numbers. Even if sales topped out today, and she never saw any more growth, that's a business worth tens of millions over a lifetime. And, worst case, if all of the markets she deals in dry up over the next three years...she still makes enough to retire comfortably on (and a lot more than a measly 1.6 million). I suspect that with her business savvy, though, she'll be able to continue to build into new areas.
It's a fantastic story with a lot of appeal to young entrepreneurs? (Reddit also sucks these days, but I don't think it's all recovering redditors traffic.)
but $60/hour is meaningless, at least for me. how much time is needed to design a web app, say like reddit.com?
So do I give an upvote if I like the ad, if I approve of it, or if I'm actually likely to follow up on it with a purchase? An ad could easily be one of those and not the other two, and I don't want to send mixed messages to advertisers. Of course, I use adblock and flashblock on most sites (a few sites I do allow ads), but if this caught on enough to convince advertisers to stop using crappy / annoying ads, maybe that would change.
how about software architect
At one point Ebay wasn't so ugly, it was more par for the course. While it was rocketing to popularity it had a simple and clean design (iirc). Of course, since then it did two things wrong:

1) never kept up with current design expectations
2) never really refactored despite a feature influx.
What would their business look like if Adpinion worked with someone like Cox News?
http://www.coxenterprises.com/corp/home.htm
http://www.coxnews.com/index.html
I recognize that 4x revenue is a lowball offer and she probably wouldn't take it. But a standard 10x revenue seems way too risky to me in an emerging market of teenagers. I'm sure I could find better things to put my money in, if I actually had money to invest. There's also no telling how much worse the company will do if the former founder becomes a complacent employee.

It was an "associate" of Myspace cofounder Brad Greenspan who made the acquisition over. Brad Greenspan was the guy who accused Rupert Murdoch/News Corp of defrauding investors by undervaluing Myspace. Even more insultingly they came back with an offer to give her $700,000, a car, and her own internet TV show which is clearly much worse than the previous offer.
PC Mag Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites
I'm not sure, it depends on how good the designer is. Why don't you post on programmermeetdesigner and let us know what kind of bids you get?
I hope it has some programmer-friendly features. I crave a small, inexpensive device that would let me leave my laptop home on trips. I.e., it would allow me to program on it. The problem with this dream of mine is that it necessitates having a text editor on the phone, and tiny keyboards means it's hard to issue Emacs commands.

Now, I do think Google will do a better job than Apple has in letting their device be "open", so I think that will be good for programmers. We'll see.
> ...it's hard to issue Emacs commands.

But not vim commands :)
Oh boy, a new generation of annoying, unreadable websites!

This along with Flex (who needs to copy/paste/bookmark things on the Internet?) is going to make the web of the future really fucking annoying. I can't wait! Dare I say, it is a GAME-CHANGER. Yeah, I said it, whatchoo gon' do?
Honestly, if that was the only thing preventing me from using a device like this, then I'd probably suck it up and learn how to press 'i' before I wanted to start typing.
Free Zelune Proxy Script - Students can make their own sites to get around firewalls
(fake) Michael Arrington's CrunchFood
You have a 1 in 20 chance of being chosen by YC.  Pretty good odds!
If we assume there will be 500 applications and that YC will be accepting 25 of them then that's a 1 in 20 chance.

Throw in the fact some applications, maybe as many as half, are broken (thirteen year old founders, clones of existing ideas, etc) and you've got a great shot.

Anyone that still has cold feet, get in there and apply!
There must be a way of making the operators irrelevant
Would reading this article have stopped you from making those mistakes?
Thanks for your advice; I just submitted 20 applications. :)

On a serious note, can one apply as a single hacker who doesn't care about which project he takes on?