skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can make just as obtrusive Javascript using jQuery as much as you can with any JS library, the point is that you should be doing unobtrusive Javascript.

If you don't know how to do unobtrusive JS, I would recommend DOM Scripting by Jeremy Keith:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/DOM-Scripting-Design-JavaScript-Docu...
I was thinking a lot like this, but recently I've changed my opinion. Just to contradict your 'only web devs like it', I'll mention that most of my work is done in Obj-C and Cocoa.

Web apps have some inherent advantages. Being 'installed' by clicking on a link, which lowers the barrier to a user trying your app. Having data available everywhere. Autoupdating that doesn't involve a download and relaunch.

Traditionally I've been opposed to putting full apps on the web. I didn't think I could deliver as good of an interface with it, but seeing SC and 280North changed my mind.

I should mention that though I'm looking at porting one of my desktop products, I'm intending to maintain the desktop app and the port in parallel and give customers a choice if they want to download the desktop app.
Handbook of Collective Intelligence
SymbolicWeb: Ajax and Comet with Lisp
Okay. But throwing out Vista and Silverlight, I contend that the XBox 360, Live Maps are both highly usable, well designed products that people want. This may be true of Silverlight too, if they ever wake up and realize that good webapp, flash and UI designers/developers tend away from Windows.
I haven't had problems with Gmail losing my mail, but I've found it hard to sift through conversations to find what I need. Search doesn't always help with that.

Maybe I'm old, but I still like Yahoo! Mail's old web 1.0 interface. Maybe that's just because I know all the quirks after years, but I can find what I need quickly and store messages easily.
This paints with a pretty wide brush. Would you like to share any specific instances where people Microsoft went that extra mile?
Hardware Communities and blogs
Maybe I should not be asking this question here but unlike WEB 2.0 there seems to be no worthwhile community or blog that a Hardware Engineer or a Assembly language programmer can turn to. Any suggestions guys?
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Learn how to make your phone collections better? Telephone Recovery & collection
NAM provide various type of Telephone recovery & collection.
reading the talk page on that was also pretty funny, someone summed it up pretty well

Scientific scrutiny works like this:
Scientist A publishes results.

Scientist B: A, I tried duplicating your experiment, but parameters x, y, and z that I need were not in your article. I need you to disclose to me x, y, and z that you used at the time. What are they?
A: x, y, and z are such and such.
B: Using x, y, and z, my result doesn't agree with yours at all. Are you sure you did the procedures that you claimed?
A: ...
B: You fraud!

Scientific scrutiny does not work like this:

A publishes results.
B: I have Generic Skepticism toward your article. Under code viii of the Publication Criteria, I demand that you give me all of your data!
A: ... ok...? It seems that everything you would need is already in the article. Did you have something specific in mind?
B: A has refused to attach all data he has ever used for the experiment. He is withholding information and thus hiding something.'
Only a fair deal. It's however sneaky from Google that they tried to take cancel his trademark, even though his service existed 4 years before google entered the mail market.
I'm going to make my own lemonade and sell it under the name Coca Cola around the globe (Except in the country where my company resides). Why didn't I think earlier of this?
Moo Grows Up, Gets Business Cards
6 things that killed Waifmail (another Diary of another Failed Startup)
If he did, it's surprising he didn't go years before this.
Quick comments:

1) Ability to add our own news/blog sources (good for you to expand news sources)
2) Remove username from registration (I realize it's only one field but it's one field less to fill in and don't see the point to it)
3) Make news sources font smaller and in different color. If hyperlinked, it will go to the actual collection of articles from that news source.

Simple stock news engine for hobby investors. Useful app.
Yes, XML syntax is better for writing and editing structured human-readable documents. eg. something like XHTML. The attribute/element dichotomy also makes a lot of sense in that context.

Regarding structured machine-generated data (which is where XML actually is used most today), s-expressions are arguably simpler.
Not surprising at all. You reap what you sow.

This is a company built upon bullying, intimidation, skirting the law, and violating ethical practices in order to shove its monopoly down anyone and everyone's throat. Anything except technical excellence.

So the rest of us suffer until the market finds its way around the lawyers and corrects itself (as it usually does).

This memo is simply a representation of all the B.S. that must have been going on for years between sowing the seeds of arrogance and reaping the harvest of crap.
How To Be The Next Bill Gates
Ask YC: Where to learn web design?
I already know how to do most css+html+js voodoo necessary to get a site up and running, but always with a crude and smelly design. Any pointers on books/blogs where one can get some tips?
I also liked that one. But it also reminded me that I often use synaptic on Debian when I am looking for applications on my system which is rather similar to the "add/remove software" on Windows. The only place where I can do a sane search (including searching summaries what the applications actually do) and get an additional good categorization of the software. Funny how the package manager on both sytems seems to have better information about your applications than for example the typical startup menu (which is usually a mess after a few months - also on both systems).
I found Revver to reproduce in higher quality than YouTube or Google video. Not all Revver videos get approved, and non-intrusive text ads are placed at the end.
Faceparty tells critics to F*** Off, suspends entire site
Across the Border to Spook Country: An Interview with William Gibson
Yeah, without the "cooler than it seems" comment, I would have surfed away immediately.
-sh-3.00$ uptime
08:36:21 up 254 days, 10:28, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
This might be more accessible:

http://www.wie.org/collective/

http://www.wie.org/j25/
They skipped a few things.

- Receive a $1 million gift from your grandfather when you're born.

- Go to an elite private school with the same computing power as Stanford University when you're 13.

- Bully your co-founder out of his hard earned equity. Take over when he gets a life threatening illness.

- Have a mother who serves on the United Way board alongside the CEO of IBM (How's that for a network.)

- Have a lawyer father who teaches you how to resort to legal tactics when technical ones fail.

- Have a partner who commits one of the biggest blunders in business history (IBM's failure to keep DOS proprietary).

- Do whatever it takes to defeat anyone else, regardless of legal or ethical considerations, or long term effects on the industry.

Am I the only one who is sick and tired of all this "honoring" one of the biggest bandits in history? Doesn't anyone remember all the evil Microsoft has wrought upon the world? They say that history is written by the survivors, but forturately, this game is still being played.

I say let the door hit him in the butt on the way out and let the market continue to correct itself so that we may finally have the long delayed technical excellence this planet deserves.
Have you tried Googling...it gives a good list of blogs.
From the headline I was thinking, "there goes techcrunch being sensationalist again".

But no, they're pretty much dead on here.
"... there seems to be no worthwhile community or blog that a Hardware Engineer or a Assembly language programmer can turn to. Any suggestions guys? ..."

Hardware hacking is the new web20... Try

- http://www.arduino.cc (my choice, cheap, open, good supplies)

- http://www.ladyada.net/learn/arduino/ (try also ex MIT grad http://www.adafruit.com for v.c hardware)

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumby (ok, commercial, but US only)

- http://www.buglabs.net/products (expensive)
HN: Here and then gone, flag experiment over?
I don't see the flag feature, introduced yesterday, anymore. Perhaps it didn't serve its intended purpose.
It's not obvious at all that "unobtrusive" coding has advantages. First of all, the line between HTML and what they call "behavior" is vague: many, if not all, presentation elements contain built-in behavior of some or other form, for example take any form element. JavaScript code that we write extends or customizes this behavior, rather than creates it from scratch.

Second, when we read raw HTML it's better to see explicitly that the behavior of a given element is customized. Even a small hint of customization in a form of a function call from within onClick, for example, would be a sign that a given element is different from the standard one.

Finally, less code always means easier to understand and easier to debug. There is no excuse for writing more, no matter how you call your technique, if there exists a simpler and clearly more concise way of implementing the same functionality.
Bonus points for using the word "chicanery."

About the post: It's like Steve Yegge and Maddux had a kid. Long rant and entertaining, but not much of a point.
"... They skipped a few things. ..."

And the most obvious ...

"... no startup can be the next Microsoft unless some other company is prepared to bend over at just the right moment and be the next IBM ..." ~ http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html
Seemed wordy and off-base. Are there really people out there who think all optimization is evil?
Fujitsu has some good, relatively inexpensive ultralights. I use whatever their 13.3 screen model is. Anything bigger is tough to use in an airplane/cram in a bag.
Good salesman have always known that people buy with emotion and justify with logic.

Functional software that perfectly solves a customer's problem without a good user interface never makes it to the logic step. It was eliminated by the user's subconscious before the game ever began.
I'm not so sure the level of detail is an indication that he's disconnected with his own company's products. The vibe I got was that he was trying to describe to the people who build this stuff what it's actually like to be an end user. I think the whole point is that they're the ones who are disconnected and completely out of touch. I seriously doubt that Bill Gates _needs_ to download and buy Movie Maker from microsoft.com like a customer would.

Even if he is the one who is totally disconnected I thought all of his points were excellent and a perfectly accurate illustration of how Windows has gone wrong. What I'm left wondering is what's been going on there the past several years. If these critiques by Gates are something new it's a real shame for Microsoft that he didn't start sooner. If his statement that it's his job to do this every day is accurate then I'd say they have even bigger problems.
I wish there were nice holiday-style summer curses for web design, as there are for classical painting.
I guess those people have a slight evolutionary disadvantage in our modern world.
The article doesn't say that hiring attractive persons is wrong The article says, or at least that's what I understood, that people hired attractive persons not knowing why.
errr... he did - he's been stepping out since 2001.
"Bully your co-founder out of his hard earned equity. Take over when he gets a life threatening illness."

I hadn't heard about that one. What exactly happened?
A Brief Guide to World Domination - Chris Guillebeau on Changing the World
One of my favorite quotes from it:

"Don't believe the hype about how crowded and noisy things are out there. When you finally come out with something truly worth caring about, people will notice."
You can see it in the comments view if you click "discuss."
I'm afraid that the "design" part will always evade me. I'm better at the plumbing that goes behind the walls. For my next adventure, I'm hiring a graphic artists/web designer who's previous work has impressed me.
pg made it less obtrusive: See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=227105
I actually might have used that. I have three accounts I check regularly, five I'd check every so often.

Any app out there like this now? Does Gmail handle that now?
I've read in interviews with IBM employees that the reason why IBM let Microsoft own the rights to DOS was that they were just coming out of antitrust litigation and were afraid of it happening again, not that they didn't understand the value of the operating system.
Thanks a lot bootload.. Buglabs seems good but yes it is definitely expensive.
or tumblr?
Isn't it like with hackers? I mean, that only good designers can recognize a good designer?
Paul Allen, who reportly did alot more programming work than Bill Gates, recieved less equity. Allen was working for another company at the time and so Gates argued that he deserved more equity as he was working on Microsoft full-time. The company he worked for was MITS and was Microsoft's only customer for BASIC at the time. So essentially Allen was contracting for Microsoft and really deserved equal if not more shares.

He resigned when he was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease in 1983. His father had just died and he decided that there was more to life than work and left Microsoft permanently although he remained a member of the board until 2000. It's also said he overheard Gates and Ballmer discussing how to get back his shares if he died and that really was why he left.
"It is my sincere hope that some readers might learn something from this exchange, even if you do not."

I loved that line.
I'd say people that uses Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice or eMule does know what they're using.
Their results would be similar: mediocre skills.

Just ask yourself how you'd rate someone's skills after summer programming course. (yes, programming; not typography, usability, information architecture, HCI, CSS, just "design")
Mimic great people.
Ask YC: Are You Guilty of Not Solving World's Problems?
Title should probably mention that this is about Yahoo...
I' m not really sure. A good design is more visible than good code, from outside (at least if you're looking without prejudice).
You might find this recent thread useful: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=204130 I recommended the book 'The Principles of Beautiful Web Design' there, and reiterate that.
I can only see the flag link for headlines. There's no flag link for comments.
http://www.socialbrowse.com/

direct link for people that won't click a techcrunch link anymore.
Apple products you're forgetting include: iMac, MacBook, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Mac Mini, Mac Pro, all the iPods (four types, I'm not gonna list 'em all), the iPhone, various keyboards, Apple TV, Time Capsule, Quicktime, iLife, Aperture, iMovie, Final Cut, Mac OS X Server (if we're going to count every permutation of the OS separately), Logic Express, GarageBand, Shake, WebObjects, and probably a bunch more.

It's true that Microsoft has more products in each category, but Apple (as a hardware/software/consumer electronics) company covers more categories.
Gmail lets you read other POP and IMAP accounts now, so it's most of the way to where we were 4 years ago. They don't yet offer support for Hotmail's wacky WEBDAV interface, but that's not really a problem since most everybody has abondoned Hotmail in the last few years.
How to be the next Bill Gates
MS having unusable products is like Exxon not selling fuel. Very quickly users will abandon windows in favor of Apple if it gets too bad.
While I agree that Kuhn's theory is pretty flawed, and only applicable to very rare cases, I really don't think that you can use "because David Deutsch said so" as an argument.
What's irrational about having a snooze function?
yes.

but only because the flexibility to solve the world's problems usually comes from having a backbone of less useful or niche-driven apps to fund your world solving work. imo.
Read Don't Make Me Think! by Steve Krug. Also watch this talk titled "Don't Make Me Click!": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuELwq2ThJE

It's really helpful to deconstruct website designs. So I frequently look at a website and think about sections I would redesign, how I would do it, and most importantly - why. Sometimes I break out an image editing program and redesign the sections or even the entire page.

The huge advantage with this approach is that the content is already provided. When I started learning web design, I would come up with hypothetical website ideas (like "I'll design a website for a law firm") and then try to create the content in addition to the website. But it doesn't work like that. You need content to work with before you can create the site. So you're much better off finding an actual law firm website, using their content, and redesigning sections or the entire page. Along the way, with a little help from usability resources like those mentioned above, you will also figure out which content actually belongs, which doesn't, and why. But the point is this: take something that's already built, break it down, and rebuild it.
Free streaming searchengine
Fnuz : A dedicated search engine to free online movies, animes, cartoons and tv-shows.
Not a marketing ploy.

My (old) firm used to represent the founder behind faceparty (Lance). He really is like that in person and would certainly shut the site to spite the users.

Good to see it has had a positive effect though!
i've not read any books on it, so i'm just going to throw up what i use and read for quality information and inspiration online:

http://www.zeldman.com/ (and his book)

http://www.alistapart.com/

http://www.cameronmoll.com/

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/ (inspiration and tools)

http://www.thinkvitamin.com/

http://psdtuts.com/ (for photoshoppy help)
Practice. Practice. Practice ...then practice some more. Only by crafting your skill can you really get better.
Am I the only one that wanted to sign up after reading the message? ;-)
How Smart Are You?
Man, YOU write jQuery's selectors yourself. Maybe you even could, but why would you want to?

jQuery's the most excellent basic "toolkit" javascript product I rely on.
If only it would be more obvious HOW to solve the world's problems.

Some photographs I recently saw really touched me, for example that series about child marriage. How do you go about changing something like that, which is going on in a completely different culture, in countries far away?

Not saying it is impossible, just that I don't know where to start (yet).

Maybe building shiny happy web apps also helps to solve those problems, though, because it provides an incentive for "third world countries" to aspire to our way of life.

Also, those touching photographs are being spread over phot sharing apps and blogs...

Presumably poverty is also the root cause for child marriage? If the kids were not poor, their parents would not have to sell them away.
The list contains the reasons of failures.

I suspect that lot's of people know this link already, however I think that it can be useful for HN community newbies (as me, for example)
Well, I can recognize that the guy I'm working with for design is great, even though I can't design the way he can. What he does really impresses not only me, but others who see his work, so I do have feedback besides my own.
BlogTalkRadio, a service that lets anyone host a live online radio show
An alarm clock's function is to wake you at a specific time. A snooze button's function is to delay that wakening. It's as rational as popping up an "Are You Sure?" dialog box.
I am guilty of not solving the world's problems.

On the other hand, the work that I do do generates economic value, some of which is taxed, some of which does go towards making the world a better place. Some more of that I donate myself directly. So I am not completely useless... Just mostly :-/
Damnit, there's no reason to downvote this man. He may not be right, but he's not detracting from the conversation.

A rebuttal: Unobtrusive coding has many clear advantages - not the least of which is the fact that your js files can be cached, increasing the loading speed of your app.

And more code in, say, a library can mean less domain-specific code that has to be maintained, making your app easier to understand and debug. I use YUI, jQuery, and the module pattern to create surprisingly concise and easy to understand js files. They're pretty much all cacheable, they're easy to read, and most importantly, related things are all in the same place.

This is actually kind of key for debugging. If you want to find out where the function call attached to a dropdown's onChange event, you check the YAHOO.Company.page.init() function. That's just where it is. You don't have to sort through reams of HTML to find the dropdown. This is better still if you have a function that prints multiple instances of that dropdown - the events are all attached, line-after-another in the js file, not hidden in a function somewhere in a different language.

Certainly there's downsides to it, but there's a lot to gain.
By this I mean learn by doing. It is generally the best way.

Look at examples/sites that make you say “wow” and try to disseminate them and rebuild them. Always challenge yourself to do something just outside your current ability.
When you start building (anything) you will usually suck. After n builds you will suck less. After 2n builds you be ok. After 3n builds you will be fairly good ...and so on.

Take the teachings/examples/tips you come across in the books/blogs/youtube and apply them to yourself and your work. Build a wiki (or any document) with what you find useful and tailor it to your learning. In due time, with persistence, you will find you start to get better/good.
T-Mobile will start a $10-a-month service
I get asked about my motives for my actions, probably about as often as everyone else gets asked. I've never been sure; the questioner has invariably regarded this as a sign of dishonesty on my part, while I've thought it to be a failure of introspection. Good to hear I've really just been avoiding the self-deception of conscious rationality.
Why do you need selectors like that? just give things IDs if you need to reference them...

Oh well :) Maybe I'll try a javascript library properly one day.
Good for them.

Running a social network is like running a bar (or pub in this case). If the owners get fed up and are willing to live with the consequences, why not lock the doors and go to the zoo for the day?
so are songkick moving to US?