skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Scrolling is seriously broken. (ff3/OSX)

You display some articles, then I scrollwheel, and things go bezerk. I scrollwheel down and it jumps up and down like a kid with hyperactivity disorder. There's no scrollbar - I have no idea where I am in the list of stories. Trying to match up where I was with where I am now is pretty hard. You've put up/down/top/bottom buttons at the very top and called them "Navigate".

So you've reimplemented a scrollbar (Standard browser UI component), but very very badly.

Up and down keys don't scroll properly either. If I hold down a key, it should keep repeating. Pressing a key should scroll the amount I am used to. You seem to be scrolling by a lot, on keyup - not what people expect.

Sorry, but I just hate it when people reinvent something that already exists, is standard, and works. Especially when their implementation is completely unusable.

Why not just use a scrollbar like people expect?

Also when I click on an article to read it, I expect to click [back], to go back, instead of clicking on [return to the reader]. Once again, ignoring standard browser usability.

Also if you try to open an article link in a new window, or copy it to send to a friend etc, it breaks, and you land at the homepage (I assume you're using onclick etc). Another usability flaw.
Agreed. It was interesting, and I read the whole thing for some reason, but I don't think the writing was that good.

"Gregory’s bedroom is filled with paper; it contains at least a ton of paper."
1- Determination is what kept me moving all a long. I could've easily forgot about it, years ago.
2- This is what'll be trying to do.
3- They don't want to leave? What if they want to force a change?
4- I have my day job that I need to pay for my project.
Depends on who your target base is. Go for the hip and witty if you're looking to attract the TC crowd.

If you're going for mainstream America, you probably want to go direct. It not only conveys what you are trying to serve, but it's very useful in organic seo. People looking for car loans will try car loans dot com or throw it into google.

It's all subjective of course, and it depends on how you want to brand out.
Incompatible Browser.
As someone who is in your target audience (I work for a well-known Wall Street Firm), this seems to miss the point.

Also, it seems to me that you are going against Reuters, Bloomberg, finance.google, and finance.yahoo. What is your value added there?

Good Luck!
Two Decades After His Death, Visionary R. Buckminster Fuller Continues to Inspire ...
http://jobmatchbox.jobthread.com/ - has a great listing of startup/software company positions in DC area.
There isn't anything wrong with the wrap-around. If you're at the top of the list you shouldn't scroll up, you should be scrolling down towards the bottom.
Their accounting certainly was "innovative." Unfortunately innovation in bookkeeping is often a bad idea. For good reason.
As I said earlier, if you're at the top, you shouldn't scroll up, you should scroll down.
Hi,

I was responsible for Web Analytics in a Web Agency in Switzerland.

In my opinion A/B and multi-variate testing only has a real use if you have very high volume. If you have lower volume or are in a Beta or even a closed Phase of your site development cycle I would suggest to use direct usability testing where you watch people interact with your site and interview them about what the think about your site. This way I think you would get much better results for the same or less time and money.

Best regards
Agreed JavaScript like PHP has garnered a tarnished reputation. But really, it has alot going for it, first class functions, proper lexical scoping, closures(which I find the most fun of all to use), and all that Lispy goodness. It's Lisp in C syntax for crying out loud. I wish I could say the same thing with PHP though.
Have you watched someone actually use your app? Here's how it went for me: start at the top, scroll down a few days, scroll back up to the top, somehow end up scrolled back weeks. It's arbitrary to loop after a few days -- if you could collect data going back to the beginning of each company's history, that might be more sensible.

I don't see any real-world analogue to going forward from the present and ending up several weeks in the past, and having to embrace a brand-new paradigm in order to use the interface is perhaps not what you need to do to your users.
if they force for the change that you you disagree in totality then there is no other way then to quit and go on your own ... if you're busy with your day job then you need to find someone who is not that busy or who is available full-time for stock options

EDIT: somehow you have to make an agreement with your partners (if possible do it legally) that if they decide to quit or if your partnership is dissolved then IP (code) remains with you (because originally the idea was yours) and in the future they cant do something similar either, i dont know whether it is completely enforceable legally but i dont think if any company (say goolge or yahoo or MS) will let me pursue the idea on my own that was originally not mine - so in the same way you can have an agreement or contract with your partners too.
imho top management at nokia still have the same position. for me, this is just PR, they're still control freaks
It's good to see a British technology doing so well, when just about everything else has been Americanised.
i call bullshit. for so many reasons.

if you want to maximize your profits, sure, buy low and sell high, and repeat. this takes time to learn how to do well, though, as well as to perform the strategy.

if you don't have time or the knowledge or the stones or the money to lose as you learn lessons to play the market game, buy and hold index funds or solid dividend-paying stocks.
I could perhaps restore the scrollbar and keep the buttons if they are desired. I've barely had any issues with the scrolling, with the exception of Opera.
And the AU was probably smart enough to do the research and find out that it would cost a whole lot more to purchase, build out, and maintain their own mail infrastructure.

I've spent enough time in the hands of the NSW Department of Education to be able to tell you that any time they make the correct decision it's purely by accident.
They have a 6,5% share in Q4 and not overall, basically all those numbers out there only mention quarters and not overall market shares and that's very misleading. I have seen this on Techcrunch and many other blogs, where they put out 20% market share for the iPhone but if you consider there to be some 300 Mio. smartphones out there you get the real numbers ;).
Maybe in the corporate world, but if you are small startup then surely not.

The world changes so rapidly and most of what small startups offer are solutions to a current need. If you are doing it as a hobby or for fun/learning/charity then that is different, but as a business (the purpose of a business is to make money, and startups are businesses ultimately) it is unfeasible. As a basic proof, try pitching to investors/VCs. Even friends/family would be reluctant to invest as a business.
It might be a terrible analogy if you read the absurd part but missed the point. The point was that they announced plans to get rid of the old flavor. Get rid of it!

If Google announced that they would switch from the keyword/boolean model to something else, and there was no way to get the old Google back, their users would be annoyed.

How was Coke to really know that people don't buy a drink based on taste?

Munger has been doing these qualitative growth investments for about forty years. I am pretty sure he didn't think that Coke would be wiped out as soon as someone made a better-tasting drink.
It's the Inq, what do you expect? Microsoft has long been Intel's greatest ally (Wintel, anyone?) and they're still best friends despite whatever "Charlie Demerjian" may think. Vista is broken, no doubt about it, but that's a very far cry from "Intel is abandoning Microsoft."
The list of items goes back the latest 100 items. When you are scrolling towards the bottom and you reach the end, it brings you back to the top.
Knuth's own TeX series (TeXbook, Metafont book, etc) is on one of the shelves.
It's brilliant, exactly what I need. Excellent for hobby stock traders. I don't want to sign up for an account though, I just want to be able to edit that top bar. Till you implement that, I won't sign up.
Really really unintuitive.
Whilst I agree that user testing is very important for a site, surely there's a difference between giving a task to someone to complete (e.g. telling someone to find a link) rather than seeing if random users can find the information that want themselves.

Plus if you're bootstrapping, it's cheaper to use something like Google Web Optimizer (as it's free) to test real traffic than paying people to interact with your site
Why Nokia's buying Symbian
What I did, after my 2 years away from computers. It sucked, but I was in real pain.

- Switched to a big logitech trackball, which I use with my left hand
- Negative tilt splitted keyboard (microsoft natural 4000, I higly recommend it)
- setup my chair/screen height
- Xmonad (proper window manager)
- minimize GUI usage.

I've been doing ok. I even started drumming (hard!)
According to a study by the ACM in 2007, (http://nirmalthacker.wordpress.com/2007/06/07/acm-rankings-f...) University of Maryland is a great program. I'm definitely biased since I went to school there, they were ranked 11th in computer science when I attended and have consistently ranked high since then. They have a great BS-MS combined program that I highly recommend. http://www.cs.umd.edu/
How do you know you're at the top? There's no scrollbar to tell you ;)
New window link fixed. Worked fine earlier. Strange.
You would really rather input all your symbols every time you visit the site? Instead of filling out a 4 field simple form?
Idiocy.

Of course there is a difference with trading and investing, but there’s one thing that the two have in common: risk management. If you’re investing for the long haul, you still need to have stops in place and contingincies written out.

I love the idea that stop-loss orders are somehow part of 'investing'. So here's your scenario: you are analyzing ABC Co., which trades at $5. A careful assessment of their assets, growth prospects, and management makes it clear to you that the stock is probably worth $10. So you buy at $5. The next day, a well-regarded technical analyst announces that the stock has done a pigeon-toed triple-flopped oat-and-tree formation, and is destined to take a Fibbonacci retracement. The stock drops to $4.00. Suddenly, your 'risk management' system tells you that this stock, which you had purchased for fifty cents on the dollar, is a worse deal because it now trades at forty cents on the dollar.

This is like getting rid of all your clothes because a clothing store had a sale.

If you're buying because you think you're getting a good business at a fair price, the daily quoted value only tells you whether you can buy more at a good price, or sell some at a good price. It doesn't inform you about business prospects, or changes in the underlying value.

Also, buy-and-hold is a myth because of one cherry-picked anecdote? Look at a thirty-year chart of KO, PFE, MO, WMT, and, for that matter, BRK.A.

Making good investments is extremely hard. Making satisfactory investments is not nearly so hard. But adding in a bunch of gibberish about managing risk by selling when others panic will never help anyone.
Hiimok- an easy way to send gifts to your twitter buddies
I wasn't aware we were arguing or debating, so I may have been a little sloppy.

Which part in particular would you like me to reformulate?
It does a nice job of laying out information, so I give top points for information design. The scrolling is a killer though. sounds like you really love the idea you came up with, but unfortunately, its very annoying and very confusing. It was like that Star Trek episode where they keep repeating the same day over and over again. You need to give the user some indication they have reached the end, whether its the top or the bottom. I'm sure the code looks great, but its bad user design on that point.
No, I want to see Visa. I have no interest at all in any other stock. So I want to edit it and view the news on that, and I would expect the site to remember this for the next time. When I am more invested in the site and I plan to use it regularly, then I will make an account. But right now I'll put it on my toolbar and just lurk for a while, as I want to use it to see news on a single stock.
The site has great potential... but it's essentially worthless as is. Several reasons:

1) Only short code snippets. It does not take much to write a brilliant 10 lines of code. Give me at least code for a well-designed class.

2) No comments. Of the top snippets, I only saw one that had comments.

So it's kinda useless to go to that site. The idea's really good though, lots of unrealized potential.
Nokia to Acquire and Open Source Symbian
This reminds me of those adverts with a big red button and some uninformative text. Give someone a button and they're going to press it.

If the reaction they get isn't what they expected they may well hold it against you.
Even if Symbian went open source, it would still suck. Their API is just so terrible.
The source of Lua [http://www.lua.org/download.html] is extremely excellent. It's in super-portable strict ANSI C and is quite impressive in its ability to run pretty much anywhere. It's also very readable.

It's very instructive to read the source of the parser and the code generator for the VM. It's well commented and it just flows.
Facebook is releasing its versions in 55 more languages
Error loading news. Please try again or contact support.

Ubuntu 8.04, FF 2.0.0.14
I don't think you necessarily need a high volume. I think you just need enough that's statistically significant for whatever you're testing. And like another commenter noted, google optimizer is free.
Well, it opens it in both now... also you cannot copy the link :/
I second the scrolling problem. Once I scrolled down, trying to scroll back to the top was ridiculously impossible. I think that I might have reached the top, but then the list changed directions (?) and started scrolling on it's own. It feels like overkill to me. Just give me a scroll bar and hard stops at the top and bottom of the list.
I graduated with a BS in Finance a year ago and have been working as a financial analyst with a Fortune 500 company this past year. The pay is certainly good but the work is totally unfulfilling for me. The one positive takeaway is that I've learned a bit about the inner workings of Corporate America.

Can anyone offer any advice on making the leap to becoming a web developer (with a background in a different field)? I've coded as a hobby since before I was a teenager (I'm 22), and I've worked on a number of freelance web projects as of late. I figure the best way to go is to build up a strong portfolio of my own projects before applying for a gig that I want at a web company. I would also consider searching out a junior position in order to gain experience.
There's a cultural norm at MIT that you should complain about how hard your workload is, but I don't think that really counts as humility. Students are usually too busy to think about their social class.
Twitter is not simple service and faced many unique problems much discussed already here and on the web in general.

Also you should not be basing your offering on what the current hype is, but rather on filling a need and offering something people want and will use. When the hype fades, atleast then you will (hopefully) have something of value that will last beyond it.
Ok, the weird article scrolling is being removed momentarily. Thank you for the feedback.
China: new global advocate of capitalism?
Well designed, works very smoothly for me on FF3+Leopard. I love how quickly it switches back to the reader.

First two things that stood out to me: 1) I would like to be able to input a stock symbol on my own with out signing up, that would show how its valuable to me personally without jumping through hoops. 2) Search, I'd like to be able to search the multiple sources if possible. I'm guessing your just aggregating feeds, but it would be a quality feature.
Adams joins twitter as Senior Operations Engineer
UK video games degrees: 95% fail to hit skills target, more CS grads needed
now if only ie7 didn't butcher overflowed divs..
Yahoo Australia releases its beta homepage
Choosing the right things to say no to
Most definitely, otherwise you are really just eye-balling it and you don't want to find out that your small sample-set wasn't representative of your actual user-base.

This is important considering that during early stages you could have early adopters and other more tech-savvy types using your site more heavily than what you will end up with.
Biological evolution has thousands of examples of situations where a suboptimal condition exists rather than an optimal one because there aren't mechanisms to remove them. We have bits of code for butterfly wings in us.

How might GP deal with this, if at all?
$71m funding, "Dash Navigation finally released Dash Express, a two-way Internet-­connected dashboard traffic gadget that brings a kind of social network to the highways."

Seriously?.. An internet connected social network in the car. O...k... $71 million?

From their website - "offers a wide range of new capabilities available from the car that makes a typical GPS practically obsolete."

Sure, I'll throw my lousy GPS away and buy a "social network enabled" one! For $10 a month, I'm sure it's worth it...

Sorry to be harsh, but seriously....
I just don’t see how this relates to technology.
Keep on tweeting with twitabit when twitter is down
The Complete Oxford English Dictionary.
I'm at one. All IE6 here. I use firefox, but I'm an exception.
Is this really a frontier, or is it a well-trodden path?

Write an application that has another plausible use. Make it possible to view porn on demand and maintain favorites lists, yet protect the privacy of of the viewer. On top of that, give the porn companies some way of protecting their "IP." (That's just funny, when you think about it.)

Do all that, and you'll make money. Supporting example: Safari. It has another plausible use. It also has a "Private Browsing" mode. Result? It's used to view porn!
How many companies open source their products out of good will? Motives are not that important, results are. I'm curious about the results and don't care about the motives.
Most people in my firm (used to be one of the top wall st firms until, say, around march :) swear by bloomberg. So do the guys who bought us. You'll definitely need some sort of login system that allows chatting and a LOT more information if you wanna get these people off their bloomberg terms.
Also in that amount of time, technology will have changed significantly brining new issues (e.g. the need mentioned to make it look "web 2.0") and opportunities (for them and for others).

Even without knowing the details and complexity of solution, I dare say unless the value is in core algorithm/architecture design that can be migrated, much of what they have done will be outdated (based on assumption the technology-stack/tools/learning/knowledge they use is now getting outdated).
Quickly building up a portfolio and applying for gigs worked well for me. One thing I noticed was that small companies and startups are impressed if you've built one or two cool apps whereas larger companies are more interested in the size and breadth of your portfolio; after creating one fairly complex site I was able to get offers as the lead designer or developer at tons of startups, but I couldn't get hired as even a junior developer at more established firms -- the usual response was "Can you show us what else you've done?" and I had nothing to show them.
It's great that the CACM decided to run these excerpts in print form, but for the full experience, you really ought to check out the videos at the People's Archive: http://www.peoplesarchive.com
After asking your users for feedback, it's generally useful to listen to them.

Here you have a sample of users who are saying the wrap-around navigation is totally broken for them.

What's the right answer to that? Hint: it's not: "No, you're wrong, it works fine."
Testing's critical. But there's multiple levels of testing, as far as websites go. At the very most basic level, there's things like Google's A/B optimizer. At the other end, there's things like Amazon's obidos - a tightly-integrated testing/recommendation engine.

It's going to come to the point where if you AREN'T live testing on some level, you're going to flounder and fall beneath competitors that are. And the better your testing, the better you'll do.

(Disclaimer - I work for a Sitebrand, company that tries to offer a middle-ground in this area. We do personalization, similar to what Amazon offers, and A/B testing of various content. My opinions are very influenced by what I've seen, which is that companies that sign on with us see significant growth because they're putting in the work, the testing, and the personalization.)
this takes time to learn how to do well

If it's possible at all. If you believe that markets are efficient, then it's not. Even if they're not efficient, it may be impossible to exploit the inefficiencies because of the taxes and trading costs. Buying and holding an index of stocks historically outperforms an average actively managed fund, and past performance of a fund is not a predictor of future performance (so it doesn't help to buy funds that did well in the past.)
Things you should never tell your users: "You shouldn't do this, you should do that."

If users are doing what they shouldn't do, it's your fault.
You really need to look at why they are changing the concept and wanting to switch to another startup.

If you are reluctant due to the time/effort already invested ("letting go" is a common problem), then perhaps what the others are suggesting is actually in your best interest(s) and doing you a favour.
BS. Most people buy and hold index funds not single stocks! I can find tons of examples where it would be better to "time the market". Pets.com? I can find just as many to prove that buy and hold is exactly the right thing to do.

This assertion is totally bogus. Its not even a manipulation of statistics, just an out of context graph in a nonsense argument. Swing and miss.
I only got through #7. Srsly? "Instant voicing"? A social network... for ad targeting? "Our competition is the post-it note"?

Every one of these ideas --- at least up to #7 --- could have been launched in 1999, in the middle of the bubble.
Saying thanks in a conference presentation
How much oil does the U.S. have?
Talking with a Lisp - The true raconteur and I ain’t talking about Feynman
Well spotted, I hadn't realised these were for Q4 sales, rather than market share in Q4. The 7% for the iPhone makes much more sense in this context.
"if you're at the top, you shouldn't scroll up,"

Why not? If I don't know I'm at the top, my only choice is to scroll up. You don't give any visual clues as to where I am vertically - it's impossible to tell if I'm at the most recent headline. If I want to go back to the very top, my only choice is to scroll up until I can't any more. Ideally if I'm already at the top and I scroll up and nothing happens, that tells me I'm at the very top of the window.

Assuming the user knows he's at the top and so then 'shouldn't scroll up' seems like a bad assumption.
I was just explaining the idea behind it. I'm not disagreeing. I'm removing the scrolling mechanism for the article list completely.
Could you clarify please?
RailsConf 2008 - Video Interview with Phusion