skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
MSFT's failure is that some parts of it seem to get that, and others seem entirely oblivious to it.

Some of their products really are excellent -- usually ones that are largely independent shops that haven't been entirely squished into the conglomerate, like the Expression suite and a good many of the MS games.

It seems to me that the ones that have the most issues with inconsistency and usability botches are the ones that get the most micromanagement, like Office and the OS.
Facebook - Needle in a Haystack: Efficient Storage of Billions of Photos
OOPSLA. I'm hooked after listening to the podcasts of the 2007 keynotes (http://www.oopsla.org/oopsla2007/index.php?page=podcasts/). I want to associate with people who think about software in that way.

(incidentally, it has very little to do with OO, but it keeps the name because OOPSLA has become a strong brand.)
Hopefully your production machine has set limits on the number of processes a user can create.

Still, it is a pretty fork bomb.
DESIGN - the transparent menu doesn't look CLEAR or nice when it overlays the logos of companies.
Besides, the theme is about rounded corners so why is the dropdown of the menu rectangle, its positioning should be lowered by 3-5px and do something about the transparency.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=216833 - Beginner.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191171 - Design prototyping.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=128713 - CSS and XHTML.

Tags: [html] [design] [css] [xhtml] [newbie]
Not to discourage you, but pick wisely if you go the charity route. I've worked with some great charities, and with utterly incompetent ones rife with cronyism, bureaucracy, and flagrant wasting of donation money. It can be hard to tell which will be which before you actually work with it.
I think the way that you would be able to help the most is been able to educate them. A bit of a "teach a man to fish" mantra.

I live in South Africa and we have a serious shortage of programmers in this country, especially when it comes to the open source web based languages.
Good tale, however poorly written. Over half of the article told the story of the company. The story should have mentioned more about why it failed and it's rescue measures (the last third) instead of trying to draw the reader in emotionally to a business article.
Dan Cederholm is a high-quality designer with great jumpstart material. Namely, his books "Bulletproof Web Design" (http://www.simplebits.com/publications/bulletproof/), and "Web Standards Solutions" (http://www.simplebits.com/publications/solutions/).

If you can afford the time and expense, a one-day Carson Workshop from a CSS master can help a lot. This one is already past, but for example: http://carsonworkshops.com/design-dev/clarke/14May2008.html

For off-the-web inspiration, study Edward Tufte (http://www.edwardtufte.com), architecture (for example, Christopher Alexander: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Alexander), and cartography (peruse a great atlas like The Atlas of Oregon: http://geography.uoregon.edu/infographics/projects/atlasPrin...).
Some resources for entrepreneurs in the tech/biomedical fields
I'm glad they got crushed, this title should read "Domain squatter nets $100 million a year scamming, until Google closed the loophole". Nationalistic pride aside, there is nothing about this company worth keeping around. It sucks for the employees who didn't know the big picture, but certainly not for the CEO or the VC, they knew they were playing with fire.
Let me field that (I put together the list). The numbers are just a count (20 sites) and they are grouped by type (news / multimedia etc . . .)

The Runners Up are sites that I use a lot that were similar (enough) to the winners that I thought deserved a mention.

Sorry about the weird formatting.
It's quite different. In GWT, you write your front end in the Java programming language and GWT compiles your source into highly optimized JavaScript. GWT's goal is to abstract away JS/DHTML development.

It appears that obj-j's goal is to make JavaScript more like Objective-C and cappuccino's goal is to make it is easier to develop web UIs that look and work like OSX.
Somehow, fake gangsta-isms are even more irritating coming from Brits.

I know, I didn't think that was possible either.
A nice one in the center of the city, yes. Not so nice, or not so central, and it can go down as low as $1k/mo.

The most expensive one I looked at was 350gbp for a room ($700/week - $3k a month) but that place had it's own pool, which is pretty rare in London :)
Okay I really like the message that is being sent in this article.

But whether it works really depends on the company culture. You gotta remember that for each individual employee, his/her incentive is NOT to do what benefits the company the most. His/her incentive is to do what benefits HIMSELF/HERSELF the most. So it is up to the company to create a culture where doing what benefits the company the most also benefits the individual the most.

For many many companies this is not the case. Due to internal politics or the ego of managers, it is often to the benefit of the individual employee to shut up and do the stupid thing. GIGO you know. Why should I speak up and make the company $100 million dollars, if it means my manager will get mad at me and my raise goes down by 1%?
Not quite analogous, as Jim Clark always planned to make the bulk of Netscape's revenue off their server products. The exact quote was something like, I'm selling printing presses but first I need to teach people to read.
At work we have been using Google Apps for your domain for ~6 months as well and NO PROBLEMS. Everyone loves it, even the interface ;)
Value was : "search arbitrage"
In essence, taking a profit out of google's adwords/adsense program while google kept fine tuning its pricing algorithm.

The term may sound fancy, but this business model has been questionable from the get go. I've read a few studies, and this type of practice artificially inflated prices on certain keywords, the process would start by these companies buying a few ads on the main google page(via adwords), if a user clicked on the them, they were sent to a landing page with more ads of the type(via adsense), in the hope's they would make up the difference clicking on more ads....that's were the 'arbitrage' came in, Google didn't have the pricing model right: to the tune of $100 million a year, its certainly isn't illegal, these companies just figured out what keywords were being paid more on the content side and cost them less to advertise themselves.

As an added note, this type of practice or 'search arbitrage' tends to beget more shady practices, since the revenue margin is so tight ( and its been getting tighter ) practices domain tasting and domain kiting, I wrote a more thorough piece on this whole subject: http://www.webforefront.com/archives/2008/01/advertising_con...
( Toward the end is a news link on how Google is cracking down on this type of 'search arbitrage' which more than often equals: domain tasting )
I was downmodded for not seeing a feature that was deliberately hidden?
Digg hack to get imaginary diggs numbers
Digg hack to get imaginary diggs numbers
we're still based in LDN but consider NYC our second home
It's been a while since I've read an entire article all the way through. Good read.

Interested me because this happened about an hour from where I live.
The fact that an evolution denier got in shooting distance of the United States presidency is an absolute travesty.
I live in England, we have lots of great South African programmers here :-)
I buy from local shops in SP road, in Bangalore while in Delhi I used to buy from nehru place. Both these places are known for electronics goods at cheap rate in India.
Alarm Clocks,Duvet soft and home furninshings from Dunelm
>I wonder how non-technical people not knowledgeable about crontab and scripting deal with such things?

I don't know without knowing the contents of his crontab. I can't honestly think how using cron could help you become more stream-centric. I suspect he's using the wrong tool for the job.
If someone would like to pitch in, and has has at least basic python abilities, consider helping out with Aaron Swartz's project: www.watchdog.net

There are a lot of bite-size python tasks they need help with. It usually pulling in data from a very unhelpful format and converting it to a helpful format. It's not terribly stimulating but it might be rewarding to enable the data to see the light of day.

Check out things you can do at: http://watchdog.jottit.com/volunteer
Using Web 2.0 tools for medical research?
I am currently working with the University of Wisconsin Medical School in the area of translational research. Specifically, the program I am working for deals with Type 2 translational research, or the translation of results from clinical studies into everyday clinical practice and health decision making. In other words, we are trying to measure the effectiveness of, and hopefully improve, the process of translating research into practice. This means that researchers at the university (and elsewhere) need to make connections, and form partnerships with groups imbedded in the community in order to foster improved communication in both directions. The community groups need the evidence from research studies, and the researchers need to know how effective programs based on their findings are in the real world.

I am trying to find out if there are any Web 2.0 social networking type tools that would allow researchers and community health groups to connect amongst themselves and with each other in order to make this process easier, and to eliminate much of the bureaucracy that currently exists. Optimally, we are looking for a service that would allow groups or individuals to post information about either research they are doing or health improvement programs they have set up in a way that is easily searchable by others who may have complimentary interests. For example, researchers interested in childhood obesity could network with groups working on nutrition in schools, or exercise programs for children in a way that information could be easily shared in both directions.

Personally, I feel that the technology is out there, but the main hurdle would be finding or creating a service that is user-friendly enough to break the threshold where there are enough people using the service to make it useful. I would be interested to hear others' opinions about the feasibility of using Web 2.0 tools for medical research. Any reccomendations for services that may already exist, or even just some starting points would be greatly appreciated as well.
Crude's Decline Lifts Wall Street on Fed Day
Have you contacted http://www.geekcorps.org/ ?
Just time. Its inevitable.
Yeah, but it would be nice to force myself to get out of bed each time the alarm goes off, immediately, and without fail. This is somewhat of a tangent, but I think that when I set a bunch of alarms on my phone (for 9:00, 9:30, 10:00, and 10:30, for example), it's actually harmful because I'm training myself to not wake up immediately. I stand up when the first alarm goes off and think "Man, I am super tired.. My legs are like jelly. Hey, I can sleep for a little while longer since more alarms are set." The result is that I'm usually late for whatever it is I have my alarms set for, since by the last alarm I've already trained myself to just jump back in bed. It's totally illogical.

I'm still 20, so maybe this behavior will diminish with age. But I'll probably try some experiments, like only having one alarm set (with snooze disabled).
Rubbish (with one caveat). It is certainly possible to make change happen, even in huge companies.

The caveat - you have to do it the right way, and make the most of your advantages. (Being a new graduate or studying something work related, for example, is a massive advantage as it gives you a credible excuse for 'being keen'.)

The right way:

- Work out what should be changed and why. Condense this into a easy to follow thirty second pitch that is hard to argue against.

- Get friendly with your target's secretary. CEO's secretaries are people too, and spending ten minute's a day for a month getting to know her is a vital part of the plan.

- Sell the idea to your line manager. You are not asking for permission, just covering your back from later fallout (hey, you gave him a heads up and he didn't stop you...). His feedback can sometimes be useful too. His objections may need to be addressed in your pitch.

- Get your target's secretary to book you in with him for fifteen minutes. If your idea isn't good enough that she is willing to do this, despite your new friendship, it sucks and you need to rethink anyway.

- Pitch and cross your fingers. Your general competence, politeness and ability to cut through the system while working inside it will mark you out as someone to listen to. At this stage your idea might get bounced, but in my experience this is rare if you have a real problem, a good resolution, and a cost effective plan to go from here to there. Usually the only downside is that you get put in charge of making it happen - so be sure to have a list of things you need prepared.

You might think to yourself that this sounds like an awful lot of work to get an idea implemented, but it does work. It's also fantastic practice for selling your own product later, as these steps share a lot in common with a typical sales process.

The wrong way:

- Mumble something incoherent or badly thought out to your boss. When he 'doesn't get it' repeat it to his boss. Keep working up the chain, without ever taking a bath or wearing a suit, until every manager in the whole organisation thinks you are an irritating pillock. Then for an encore repeat the same unresearched assertions in front of the CEO (but more vehemently), having alienated your local managers to the point that they won't stand up for you.
Umm, they have a spammed to death page:

scripts.mit.edu/~cci/wiki/index.php?title=What_is_Collective_Intelligence%3F

Nice.
I salute you and take notes.
it died for one single reason: was it the name?

j/k - good post, thanks for sharing this, and glad to about the recent success of your other ventures.
It's something in our society that makes us feel obligated to save the world. But it's not as if our lives can be played like a video game where whoever does the most for others gets a high score. We just live in the world, and pursue our goals as best we can.

Put another way: In general, you are probably effecting a positive change if you are making money and are not in trouble for doing so.
Bezos Invests in Twitter
Article in short:

Geosign was doing "search arbitrage", which meant buying
keywords from Google and filling their landing pages with
ads from other providers (e.g. Yahoo).

Google didn't like that. The end.
http://www.healthplanone.com is where I got my individual coverage and those guys were GREAT. Their customer service was awesome and I got a plan with good coverage for cheap.
Can we please keep the poor language (or allusions to it) off the frontpage? It used to be the sort of thing that separated hacker news from the rest.
Banish Those Pesky Spam and Phishing E-mails That Clog Up Your Inbox
My apologies. Spaces.
Learn New Mobile Tricks
C'mon guys, it's a time tested business strategy.

Anyone remember Cartmanland?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartmanland
Ask YC: How do you define application requirements, PRD?
My company used to develop applications following the waterfall model and we are now trying to move to Agile development. We have implemented a hosted Application Lifecycle Management tool (rallydev.com) which is geared around Agile development using stories.

We have been struggling to find the right balance between the old paradigm of creating lots of documentation up front (Market Requirements Document -> Product Requirements Document -> Functional Requirements, etc.) We also have a hard time determining where the documentation should reside. Should it all be in the stories themselves? What happens later when you are trying to understand the lifecycle of a feature, how do you figure out how it was initially conceived and how it has been modified over time? Would a wiki be a better place to track this evolution?

How do big software development companies develop their software for example, GMail or iMovie? Do they start with UI prototypes? Do they start with extensive market research and create all the documentation MRD, PRD, etc.? Frameworks like Rails push semi functional prototypes, but do those give enough information for development? Is more documentation needed? What tools do they use to track projects and the related software documentation?
Wouldn't it make a bit more sense to signup with an organization that is already working on this:

http://www.geekcorps.org/

As someone that has wired networks, written code and taught some basic computer skills in Africa, I would suggest narrowing down your search a little. Africa is a vast continent and there is a big difference between what you might find in Tunis vs. Kinsangani.

There are probably many projects that could benefit from having geek help but do not think you can just "parachute" into many places without a great deal of preparation. Without concrete plans for things like where you are going to live, how you are going to get medical care, etc. you may end up being more of a liability than an asset.

Good luck and do not give up trying to find a way to help. I lived and worked in Africa for four years after college and it was a great experience.
I'm not sure that's 100% true. Some development idioms have you staring at HTML all the time, others don't: take a look at the arc code behind YC for a good example. Likewise view-based architectures like rails spend more time worrying about how to invoke/include the view than they do tinkering with the presentation internals.

And that "hint" that you want can be gotten many ways, it doesn't have to be a hard-coded event handler. Make it a class, for example. Or better, a class on the containing element (a collection of category selectors, whatever). That's even clearer than the event handler, because it's a statement of pure semantics.
Copy and mimic a lot to practice.

Then spend a lot of time tinkering. Always keep the basic principals of usability in mind.
The Millionaires Club Becomes Less Exclusive
Add an extra zero to the ranks of the millionaires club.

The number of people around the world with at least $1 million in assets passed 10 million for the first time last year, according to a new report. And their bank accounts are growing even faster.
Rumor: Apple, SproutCore, and Coherent
Ajaxian » Badging Flickr with Dojo
Houston, We Have No Problems
FF To Go Is Now Open Source
Poor language? "Fucking" is even starred out!
Kosmix Goes Horizontal
Heinz pulls British ad with men kissing
I can offer anectdotal confirmation: I've never used my snooze button, and I can almost always get out of bed, immediately alert, as soon as my alarm goes off.
I had been considering doing something similar in Ghana. I thought about it for a few weeks and kept coming back to teaching. Teaching programming in particular probably wouldn't be very useful, but teaching basic computer skills definitely would be.

If you worked with a small town (provided they had access to reliable power), you could probably have a measurable impact on the local economy. That is really the only way I could sustain myself in such a situation- by being able to see the good I'm doing to a whole community.
Our goal isn't to be the most Christian social news site. That's not how we want to be separated.
It's not a panacea, but if you can get ahold of the Combined Federal Campaign's big book o' charities, it tells what percentage of donated funds goes to administrative and other expenses, and which goes directly to the cause.
http://www.opm.gov/cfc/html/qfd.asp
You're assuming that the point is to hand out as many business cards as possible. Most people will throw them away. The Moo cards look nice and seem special because there are few of them. You'll think before you hand them out.
Mike Rohde's amazing sketchnotes from SEED 3
True, but as SwellJoe said, they are not that important, particularly in the space in which this topic resides. Their contributions regarding UI and design have definitely been impressive, but we're talking about dev tools here. The mass adoption of iPods and MacBooks hasn't yet resulted in an equivalent increase in Objective-C, and I would think that it would do so even less with web technologies.
More seriously, I spent some time in Africa after my first startup imploded. I volunteered in the pharmacy of a medical aid organization. Mostly I just got their ancient windows 3.1 machine set up with an ancient version of Access, (or something? I don't remember). I should have done a bit more teaching of how the system worked, but I wasn't even sure how it all worked. I'm pretty sure everything went to crap shortly after I left.

What I found more rewarding, and probably more useful than doing tech work, was helping kids have fun. The other bleeding hearts I was with were Ultimate Frisbee fans and we introduced the game to the local kids. We even had another aid worker bring a huge shipment of 144 frisbees into the country. This may seem frivolous, but one thing I noticed was that kids had tons of free time and were really eager to learn how to do fun stuff. Art, music, sports, etc. Computer programming would have been great, too... but there were hardly any computers.
That kinda sucks. It's already precisely the color I'd make it.
And then comes along Apache webserver!
This is an old example but look at that chart:

Edit: is there anyway to show a table?

Apple MacBook Pro	Dell Inspiron 9400
15.4-inch display	17-inch UltraSharp Wide Screen
Radeon X1600(128MB)	NVIDA GeForce Go 7800 (256MB)
4x SuperDrive(DVD±RW)	8x(DVD+/-RW)
10/100/1000BASE-T	10/100BASE-T
Modem	No	Yes
Built-in iSight	None
2 USB ports	6 USB ports
Remote Yes	No
S-Video Out No	Yes
Battery 60 WHr	80 WHr
Size 5.6 pounds 8 pounds
price	$2,049	$2,031

Dell's system had a larger screen, better video card, a Modem, faster DVD drive, 4 USB ports, S-Video and a better Battery but Apple's system had 1000BASE-T network, iSight, and it's lighter.

How on earth are these in the same catagory?

PS: Today I can pick up a good 17" laptop from dell with T8300 (2.4GHz), 4GB of ram, 320GB HDD, Geforece 8600M for $1,024.00 (Google 1720 Discount and the second result is a discount code N6DT1G$64M79BW for 350$ off).

The cheapest 17" Laptop from Apple starts at $2,499.00 (googled to find a $300 off MSR discount) and but that it only has 2gb of ram and a 250GB HDD. Granted it's CPU is .1GHz faster which would would add $125 to the dell or you could swap that in and downgrade the ram and HDD size. But RAM and HDD is worth more than a slightly faster CPU.
I don't see what value this adds
Exactly... stop telling me little stories. I don't read an article like that for its literary value. Get to the point!
> Our goal isn't to be the most Christian social news site.

"Our" goal? You.. claim to represent the hacker news community? And - I presume only - downvote me for my opinion?

I don't want it to be Christian. Just refined :) Just because it's a social setting on the internet doesn't mean it has to be trashy.

If someone goes through my comments and finds I've broken my own standard here somewhere in my history on the site then I admit my hypocracy in advance. I think I've been good though - hacker news tends to be civilised and there's a feedback loop in that.
The Peekaboo Grid
Wake me up when you have an actionable plan to solve a problem. That would be interesting.

Striking a dramatic pose, pointing a finger at your peers, and yelling "sellouts!" is not a plan, unless you're a punk musician. Perhaps you should start a band.