skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dont do it. I dont think the returns are high for the caliber of your blog. I think you should be able to find a deal much better then that and with much higher returns. As others are saying you tell them exactly what deal you want. Dont accept their offer. Now I know i would be lost as to what to ask them so you should consult someone who is already running a profitable blog.
The demo version is pathetically useless. Stops after 5 minutes, and you cant save anything.

A 30 day trial would be useful. Most people arent about to drop 80 bucks on an app after only using it for 5 minutes.

Any have any alternatives? I've used Axure for a while. It works well, but the aesthetics aren't great (meaning.. its ugly). Plus it only works on windows, so I have to use it through Fusion.

EDIT... disregard this comment...
>the hammer comes down hardest against poor people and ethnic minorities. I don't have a citation for this, but I think this is the case. Can anyone improve on my stats here?<

Compare average prison sentence for possession of cocaine (rich white) versus crack-cocaine (poor black).

The discrepancy is unnerving.
I actually meant the original article, not a quote from some New York Times summary. I wanted to know whether the study corrected for things like people who are teetotal only due to some other medical condition.

I'm prepared to believe that there's health benefits to a small amount of alcohol every day, but I really can't imagine it being anything on the scale of the health benefits of not-being-morbidly-obese. Morbid obesity is a huge risk factor for just about everything.

You see plenty of 90-year-old teetotallers, but not many morbidly obese folks past their fifties.
Actually, at a million years per second, the age of the universe (so far) would go by in five simulated hours. I don't want to speculate on how long we have until heat death, but I doubt it's long enough to simulate a single human lifespan at a million years per second.
That's an ad hominem argument write large. You can't dismiss a study just because it was funded by someone you disagree with. You have to take it on its own terms. If the study is flawed, show the flaws, if not, it shouldn't matter who funded it.
Hi. Peldi here (the guy behind Balsamiq Mockups). Thanks everyone for the feedback, and thanks tortilla for posting the link here.

Mistone - thanks. I am not planning to offer a subscription model right now, reasons here: http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/?p=59

snprbob86 - I also like drawing on a whiteboard. After using Mockups for a while though, it has become my favorite way to prototype my UI ideas, I find it to be faster and more flexible than paper, and the results are clearer (sometimes you only understand a paper prototype if you were present during its creation). Of course, I am biased, but I have heard others feel the same way about Mockups. In other words, when I only have paper and pencil, I miss Mockups.

- JimEngland: polish in a mockup is the enemy of usability. People get attached to gradients, icons and whatever element is more polished in a mockup and forget to think about what really mattes, which is the layout and choice of controls. Mockups is designed to feel like paper, but be collaborative (via wikis) and immediately digital.

- tortilla: collaboration/interaction is enabled in the wiki version of Mockups. I have a sticky note and callout controls that can be used for commenting, and I am planning on adding more meta-controls like this in the next few days.

- nirmal: I tried to offer only the functionality that made sense and nothing more. Of course, my judgment could have been wrong. What controls don't behave as you expected, aside from the Calendar?

- mmelin: yes, I'm not super happy with my home page either. The problem is that I'm selling different versions of the same product, each priced very differently from each other. I'll work on it more.

Again, thanks a lot for the feedback, keep it coming! I'm @balsamiq on Twitter or you can contact me at peldi@balsamiq.com
I refuse to download any color scheme plugin from a site that uses blue headlines on a black background.
What's the relevance between Gawker and his syndication deal?
Hi. You can dismiss the nagging dialog and keep working for as long as you'd like. And you can export the mockup as XML and save it into a text file if you want. I'll make the text in that dialog more clear.
Rails employee expected to spend 50% of his time doing what he desires
I'm just looking for some spare cash to deal with credit card bills, rent and so on.
I think testing things like connections, caches, etc are outside the scope of unit testing. What you probably want to unit test is how your code handles a malformed NICK command in an IRC connection, or random input, not the entire connection as a whole.

You write unit tests for these handlers and when that's done, you can write scripts that are grander in scope and nature. They can build and tear down connections, or perhaps drop it in semi-random intervals. As far as I know, unit tests are made to test fairly small-scale blocks of code and bigger frameworks and scripts can test whole subsystems.
I guess twitter is too busy (not) scaling to add features that only take 18 hours.
Limited features, low complexity and fad factor.

In many ways that's not a detrimental thing to the success of your app but it does mean that you can be copied easily and the value that you provide will be limited.
because it is flavour of the month.

plus the simple nature of twitter and an API allows a (low functionality/complexity) site based on it to be up an running quickly.
Possibly Twitter's API gives them an easy source of data to manipulate. I've noticed other apps that use RSS feeds for data and the like.

One could probably build a Craigslist clone (or a subset of features) in limited time and likely have something that's easier to look at, but the lack of data would overwhelm everything else.
Hippies had fun, grew up, and now want to make sure none of us enjoy what they had.
building things quickly and cheaply is easy to do only when you know how.
Premature optimization, another perspective
"You see plenty of 90-year-old teetotallers, but not many morbidly obese folks past their fifties."

That's true, but then again people also naturally lose weight as they got older. Lower testosterone causes muscles to atrophy, and reduced sense of smell leads to a loss of appetite. I'm not sure how many morbidly obese people live long enough to get to this point, but it's at least worth considering.
It's great to see more and more web services being open sourced.
That's indeed the way current painters work. I think what the author says is that it wasn't when oil paint was invented.
Is it me, or does this seem suspiciously like an ad for their job board? I mean, I see what they're getting at, but still...
Ah, thanks for the note. I'll keep using it. Like what I see so far!
But graphic design, as most people (not Escher) mean it, is significantly different from painting. Serious graphic design is functional in a way that painting isn't. It's as much architecture as art.

If you had written an essay called "Hackers and Graphic Designers", the rebuttal we're discussing wouldn't have been written.
He also seems to be stuck in the past on a few features. For example:

[On Ubuntu] First off, immediately, before anything: the rotating desktop. Damn, that is totally cool. You click an icon in the screen’s lower right, and the desktop rotates to a fresh view. Remarkably, you can have up to 16 different desktops.

Apple introduced the same feature (Spaces) with the Leopard release of OS X.
You down with THC?
Hey you know me!
I just found it ironic that many of us who do good work 80 to 100 hours per week

You found it "ironic", did you?

and come here for a break among our peers find a student who needs to resort to drugs to cope (or whatever) with his difficulties at #1.

I don't see any evidence in the article that the student "needs" to "resort to drugs" to "cope with his difficulties" -- that seems entirely to be an interpretation you're reading into the article. He chooses to smoke pot, and apparently that annoys you -- fair enough, but your reaction doesn't appear to have much relevance to the substance of the article.
> It’s not just cool, it’s great for workflow. You can have files and documents open on one desktop – maybe you’ve got four browser windows open, researching something – and a single click takes you to a fresh desktop, with documents and apps open as you like.

The article was written on May 2, 2008, well after the release of Leopard which ships with Spaces.

> The results come up in different colors, which helps you locate things. (I think.)

The article is filled with little nibblets like this that scream novice user.

> And what the heck is ‘KDE’?” The Linux desktop needs to eliminate that extra choice if it wants to reach a mass audience.

Probably the most significant thing in this article: I wholeheartedly agree that for everyone else, it should ship with one desktop interface--likely the more popular one. I imagine that would be Gnome. I agree with him that if someone like my grandmother tried to start up Ubuntu for the first time would see this and think she had done something wrong.
What about the electricity bill?
History of Gawker
I don't see any evidence...

Then why did he write it?
I'm really not sure how anyone could post something entitled "The End of Bugs?" to here without blushing.
Facebook making their own version of apps
Damn, you beat me to it. I love how this guy is _such_ an apple fan yet he isn't familiar with Spaces.

There's a lot of these ill-informed and vocal mac fans out there that give the rest of us a bad name.
don't forget depreciation of his keyboard
My experience is that it's painful if you don't have any idea of what you're doing; it's not the testing itself per se but rather the fact that if you're iterating rapidly on the code your tests will need to be rewritten over and over again. Large libraries of unit tests are invaluable for catching regressions, but they tend to impose a certain amount of friction on code changes and refactorings. So personally, I tend to do TDD when I know where I'm going, but for exploratory programming I write the minimal amount of high-level tests to test things end-to-end and make sure things kind of work at all and back-fill more detailed tests once the code has settled down a bit.
and depreciation of his computer
and his mouse
Plus discussion of design decisions, other approaches, problems and solutions, etc., as this makes for far more interesting reading and hopefully may provide a nugget of wisdom we may not alreay know :)
and his clothes
and depreciation of his display(s)
don't forget rent!
i bet he ate something while coding
and caused slight damage to his wrist tendons
I'm deleting this post and reworking it. Thanks for your input.
Interesting. I was telling one of the artists that I work with that a programmer is like a cross between an architect and a lawyer.

We build [abstract, conceptual] structures, but need to assign precise meanings to concepts. It's not as catchy, and it does not fully capture the engineering aspect, but I was pleased with it at the time.
what about his computer speakers?
This app is actually a good idea. Kudos.
Disagree also. I enjoy the hand drawn graphics. The ability to resize, rename, color, and place easily within Mockups is anything but crude. The adjective I've used in describing Mockups is elegant.
I can see this being useful if you have shortcuts to your bookmarks. At least it's not another combination of FF Extension + SIMBL package to do things cross browser.

In Safari use Command+N to trigger the Nth bookmark in your toolbar. Good if you're not into the whole mousing thing.
Presumably he wrote the article to discuss the role that pot plays in his life as a graduate student.

What he did not do is "whine" about why he "needs to resort" to smoking pot to "cope with his difficulties" -- the whole "whiny and irresponsible" theme seems absent from the article and is just something you've dreamed up on your own, as far as I can see.
IPhone Enterprise Anxieties
Another Mac user here. I gave Ubuntu a spin the other week, running in Virtualbox on my main machine.

I thought it looked slick and was very usable.

Then I tried downloading and installing Firefox 3.

I grabbed it, unarchived it and then.... then what? Where's the bloody installer.
Safari's video support and general works-well-ness was bad 3 years ago, but it's just fine now.

edit: he doesn't seem to know that macs have a command line
You guess wrong, josefresco.

You've never had a cup of coffee or tea, or a soda? Yeah right.
Forgive me, but spaces doesn't have the nifty cube does it? I think he just likes the 'eye candy' that comes with Compiz (which, btw isn't enabled by default).
You'll never get paid. If you figure they can sell ads on your content at a $2 CPM (which is generous), then you'll need $1000/$2/0.3*1000 (or 1.67e6) page views to get paid and that ain't gonna happen.
water bill for his toilet
Yep, age is irrelevant in terms of skill and making money online. There are tons of young people (< 18 years old) who are probably making more than the majority of adults here, all without seeking investment money. Then again, they also have the advantage of not having huge expenses (e.g., mortgages) and a lot more free time.
That hasn't been my experience at Yahoo at all.

Yes, it's sad. Yes, it would be way cooler if our search product was the market leader. But #2 is respectable, and still very very profitable. And, let's not forget that:

1. The yahoo home page is the single most highly trafficked url on the internet. (Though, I've heard that the main google search page takes a hit because so many people bypass it with browser search boxes these days.)

2. Yahoo mail is the most used mail client.

3. Yahoo news is the most popular news site on the internet.

Not to mention lots of other products. And it's not a bad place to work, besides.
The stock OS X box comes with enough of the standard command-line toolbox that if you are actually writing a "portable" script you are not going to have a problem running that script on OS X. The biggest differentiator is probably that OS X is a part of the *BSD lineage and so you will need to do more tweaking of a Linux script to get it bsd-ready than you will need to tweak a standard bsd script to move it from FreeBSD to OS X. While macports is closer to the freebsd port system, it is close enough to apt-get that you should really have no problems switching from one to the other.
I don't think so. He goes on to describe the enhanced productivity of using multiple workspaces, as if the same cannot be accomplished on a mac.
Yes, that's exactly the kind of trite understanding of history that the author is worried about. Well done.

... and no, I'm not a boomer.
You have trouble reading and writing and 'rithmetic, so you need a little chemical help. You pussy.

You still get your name published, regardless of "chemical help" or not. Who are you again?

Get out of cocoon, er I mean school, get a real job, get married. have a couple of kids, get a mortgage and a couple of car payments, raise those kids without worrying too much about the evils around them, visit Mom in her nursing home, do things for others in need, and, if you have time, have a nice life too. But don't drop a single egg while you're juggling.

Why should he make the choices you did? From the tone of your comment, it looks like these choices are making your life miserable. Why should he do what you say?

And don't you dare miss a day of work, no matter how mind numbingly boring or lame it is, or how sleepy or depressed you feel.

Why not? Why is going to work every day so important?

The only thing worse than the whining of a student is the whining of a pothead student. Grow up.

Actually, what's worse is a whining adult. Nobody actually cares about your car payments or kids.
I would be forced to do whatever bullshit job I had instead of trying my own path.

And, you'd have to post whiny comments here trying to get people to Follow Your Path to make yourself feel like you made the right choice.

Instead, most of the site already agrees with your choices ;)
Yahoo Ready to Negotiation With Microsoft
By some estimates, marijuana is the largest cash crop in the US. It's very much a local industry. (You probably don't have people in your neighborhood growing tobacco, but you almost certainly have people growing marijuana.)

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=2735017&page=1
My family came over from the USSR in the late 80s and although I was too young to remember the details, my parents told me that the USSR did not make it easy to leave: they had to go through a whole slew of questions that tried to show that they were perfectly well off in the USSR and there was no persecution.

Their story makes it seem to me that it would have taken a more than voluntary effort to leave the USSR, whether you were a Jew or not.

As an aside, before the mass immigration of the Soviet Jewry there was a whole group of people called the Refuseniks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refusenik) which were denied the right to immigrate but were not allowed to go back to their jobs.

There was a very good documentary made about them recently (http://www.refusenikmovie.com/) that I recommend watching if you are interested in this topic.
Having done TDD a bunch over the last five or so years, I couldn't ever go back to a world without extensive unit tests.

That said, there are interesting scaling problems with tests that I don't feel like many people seem to write about or know how to deal with; all the TDD books and sites describe techniques that work with simple, small code-bases but which often break down in the face of real-world problems. In particular, writing tests that only fail when the code is broken (and not just because the test is broken) is often incredibly difficult, and if you have (like we do) more than 40,000 unit tests, even a small false-positive rate like .1% will mean that a simple check-in could require hours of test rewriting not because the code is broken but because the tests are poorly written or make too many assumptions about implementation details. Even the best, most disciplined teams create some "bad" tests, and it doesn't take many to start killing you.

Similarly, in a real software environment where a code base lives for years and undergoes numerous changes, you often end up with stale tests that either no longer test anything useful or which enforce requirements that have since been changed.

So while the tests are invaluable and I can't imagine not having them, at the same time there are a lot of issues with test maintenance over the long term that become very difficult to deal with.
Actually, the rotating cube effect started with the OS X fast user switching feature and was "borrowed" by a lot of virtual desktop systems like Compiz or the OS X virtual desktop apps "Desktop Manager" and "Virtue Desktops". Since Apple already uses this visual effect for changing users it is not going to use it for switching desktops and therefore went with a different visual effect -- if you really like the effect you can get it with the previously mentioned third-part virtual desktop apps.
deodorant costs money
How do you find market research for your business? | Market Research Analyst
That's what he's saying though is that he likes 'the cube' as a feature, not the ability to have multiple desktops. That, or I'm misunderstanding. I do know though that when I show people my ubuntu box they go NUTS over the cube so I think that is really what he's trying to show. It's nifty!
i wonder if he had a fan on, or a heater. or a radio.
"Eeek! It’s a Command Line! (Run, Hide…)"

If only he knew the power of the CL...
The comments here are interesting. I think some people get upset as soon as they hear the name of an illegal drug, and instantly get ultra-defensive. You'd think people that claim to be among the most intelligent wouldn't immediately make such an emotional judgment. After all, when is the government ever right about anything? What they consider legal or illegal should not affect your judgment; 50 years ago it was essentially illegal to be black.

Anyway, if you read the article and substitute "coffee" for "marijuanna", I don't think anyone would be upset. If you are against "chemical help", why would you care about the current US legal status of the drug?

FWIW, I don't smoke pot, but I do drink a lot of caffeine. You could say that I'm a drug addict, and that's fine with me.
Lots and lots of vba written for Excel.
GM May Sell Some Brands to Help Deal With Shrinking Auto Market
That's correct, but we are now in a hypocritical situation. We can't say "history made Nicotine legal, but let's pretend that THC is illegal for good reasons". Yes, there may be good reasons for an individual to not smoke pot, but that doesn't mean there are good reasons for keeping it illegal.
Was he a transplant recipient or did he have AIDS? That seems to be the underlying issue (see http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,291735,00.html). In either case, I suppose I would strongly recommend avoiding marijuana.
Very interesting read if you have the time :)

The best part is of the article is how Denton turned his biggest competitors into his heaviest source of traffic by writing trash about reporters and scandals at the big publishing houses in NYC.
the core of his argument: that your insight about the relation between Hackers and Painters is superficial, and where it applies at all, it's built on knowledge of painting that is itself superficial.

Can you give an example where you feel he has successfully refuted something specific I said about painting?
Maybe black kids show a lot more bigotry in all forms, since they are not restrained in almost any way in that sense (they are answerable for sexism though). A white person that says he or she hates black people is considered a bigot, but a black person that says he or she hates white people isn't really criticized. Same probably goes for hating nerds. Incidentally, in black society, being a nerd is sometimes termed "acting white."
> Tobacco is a local industry. Marijuana is not.

You are kidding, right? Marijuana cultivation is one of the largest cash crops in the US (there is some question as to whether or not it is the largest, but there is no disputing the fact that it is in the top five.)

> The US was built with the money from Tobacco, not Marijuana.

The US was built with money from tobacco, sugar, and slavery. Not really a great mix for us to be crowing about. BTW, when you see period documents that talk about "hemp" and how all colonial settlers should be encouraged to grow this valuable crop you are reading an exhortation from the government to grow marijuana (we don't grow the same varietals now, but it is the same plant...)
For me, it just makes me paranoid, sleepy, or sick, which are three good reasons to avoid it. I pass no judgment on others, though. It's clearly a substance that should be legal, whereas tobacco should be banned.