skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Best resources to learn about design?
Being a programmer, I lack a natural sense of design, and not every project requires or allows to hire a professional designer.

In short, I want to become better at making things look good. I like to believe that I have good taste, as in recognizing good design as such, but am pretty hopeless about creating good designs myself.

What books/blogs/websites have you found helpful to learn more about design?

Some suggestions of my own:

- Usability overlaps with design quite a bit (making things pleasant to use, getting rid of clutter etc), so books like Joel Spolsky's user interface design for programmers, Steve Krug's Don't make me think, or Alan Cooper's About Face can help with design, too.

- Robin Williams: The Non-designer's design book. Short, to the point, and teaches the basic principles.

- Blogs: Smashing Magazine and Six Revisions.
> Obviously admission requirements will have to change.

This is where the focus needs to be. Big colleges get an enormous amount of applications. They do not have the man power to deeply analyze each candidate. So, they use metrics to filter candidates, such as required course work and a minimum GPA. The current high school curriculum is largely dictated by this, and I don't see that changing with your system because the incentives are the same, whether you call it 'passing an AP calculus test' or 'becoming a level 9 Math student'.

> For example, leveling up in Calculus would be about solving problems, putting calculus into practice, writing a project using learnt concepts.

This isn't that different from how schools work today. How was your grade decided in Calculus? By solving calculus problems. You don't necessarily put it into practice, or write a project, but teachers could certainly assign those things to you. Many science classes give you open ended science projects.

I agree with your intent, and I like you way of thinking, I just don't see it doing away with enforcement and standardization. Yet.
http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/articles-and-tutorials/ is a good place to start.
ASK HN: How does zappos work?
Hey guys,
I got some shoes from zappos this christmas and since then I've been intrigued by the company. I've been trying to understand how the company functions and if they carry (and have always carried) physical inventory.

How do they handle order fulfillment? Does anyone know how the rest of their value chain works?

Let me know what you think/know.
Queensland is wet, so I tried Mechanize
Same here. For me, the big time sink is not HN itself, but the articles. Thanks to Instapaper, I can postpone reading the long ones until I've time to kill.
Newcomers to any social setting have the disadvantage that you don't know them as well as people who have been there longer. You have less context for trying to interpret their remarks, so a joke or humorous remark can be badly misinterpreted. Also, as a site like this grows, you get more diversity and that makes it harder to figure out how to properly place people in pecking order and all that. I'm not a fan of pecking order, so I don't much care. I continue to struggle with my own questions, which greatly precede my discovery of this site, concerning social reputation/influence. On the one hand, it seems you can't get anywhere without some positive reputation of some sort. On the other hand, I am extremely leery of the tendency for people to abuse their influence and make "proof" about who said it more than about what was said. I don't have any good answers yet. Maybe I never will.

Peace.
I tried using 3g video calling on my phone a few years ago, but was never impressed. It was a hassle, really ... difficult to walk and talk at the same time.

However, one day I saw someone I saw using sign language over 3g video calling, and was impressed. This is a few years ago, actually. You probably don't need Facetime if you're on a decent mobile network.
It's the vanity one that resonates most with me - have you seen what you look like when you flip your phone round and take a picture of yourself? I'm no oil painting at the best of times, but that wide angle lens does no favours. This problem may not affect the iPhone because, as I have seen from the ads, people that use facetime are a photogenic bunch.
It's actually just the default bash config on openSUSE, nothing to do with Konsole. It works on text-mode VTs, via ssh, etc.
Even if you don't care about the GIMP/Photoshop comparison, make sure to check it out if you're a GIMP user. It has a bunch of little tips as to how to get photo and retouching done with GIMP; I've used GIMP for years now, but had never realised what Selective Gaussian Blur was really useful for.

(These sorts of tutorials are very thin on the ground on the GIMP side, and this provides some real examples of how to more-or-less pull off the effects Photoshop tutorials tend to talk about.)
Galileo on Infinity
In my opinion:
1) Frequent updates
2) Some nice (but not big) images
3) Using LinkedIn groups as "loudspeakers" - especially if your blog is business-oriented or technical
Watch more CCTV. You'll get a constant stream of subtle and not so subtle cues about how awesome and noble your heritage is and how your compatriots have been bullied by foreign powers throughout history.
Yes, but you have to consider very carefully what "poor grades" means here. Coming from a Caltech admissions offices, "poor grades" is anything less than about a 3.8 (unweighted), or anything less than straight As in math and science.

Anything less is beyond poor compared to Caltech's admissions standards.
Lean Principles #5 - Deliver Fast
Two new Behavior-Driven Development libraries for Objective-C (Nu/MacRuby)
Last week I have released two BDD [1] libraries based on Bacon [2] (a RSpec clone) optimized for NSRunloop environments. They should both still be considered ‘beta’, but I want to get the word out so adventurous people can start scrutinizing, err improving ;-)

* NuBacon [3]: A port of Bacon to the Nu programming language [4], but rewritten in such a way that it properly works in a runloop based environment. This means that running the specs does not halt the main thread and specs can schedule blocks with assertions on the runloop for later execution. For now it's only in time (seconds), but this could be extended to use KVO to trigger running the block of assertions etc. I'm still working on the iOS runner, but there is a bug with Nu on iOS that I have to work on first. However, if you do want to try this out please let me know.

* MacBacon [5]: A fork of Bacon, for MacRuby, with the exact same runloop-aware code I implemented in NuBacon backported to MacRuby. Nota that I haven't used this code in a project yet, but needed it for a project I'm starting on today. (If that's not test-first I don't know what is.)

Once I have done proper releases I'll write a few tutorials.

[1] http://behaviour-driven.org
[2] https://github.com/chneukirchen/bacon
[3] https://github.com/alloy/NuBacon
[4] http://programming.nu
[5] https://github.com/alloy/MacBacon
I'm talking about capitalism as organizing principle: where people create wealth for society as a whole by pursuing their own interests. Wealth does not have to be money, I was talking about the economic definition of wealth. For groups of more than a few hundred people (some say 50) this turns out to work better than any of the alternatives such as communism. But it does cause income inequality as a necessary side effect.

Nations label themselves in various confusing ways, as you point out. China may label itself communist but it is quite far removed from using communism as an organizing principle to create wealth.
Thank you for taking the time for writing this comment. I am sure it is quite helpful for many of us.
This is exactly how all databases work. Well, except for MongoDB ;)
There's one significant difference between posing the problem in terms of AIs and posing it in terms of angels: if AIs are going to exist we'll have to design them[1] and whoever's designing them will be trying to ensure that their behaviour fits (something like) our values; whereas if angels exist, they were designed by someone else whose values may be quite different from our own and it's no business of ours to decide how they should behave.

[1] Perhaps indirectly.

Yeah, I like concise writing too. Concise and clear is even better. Concise, clear and funny, better still. Yudkowsky doesn't do too well on conciseness, but I think he does just fine on clarity and humour. (You might want to bear in mind that the article linked from here is part of a lengthy ongoing series (perhaps I should say: series of series) that EY was writing at the time; it's doubtless clearer when read in the context of the rest of it.)

Although "epistemic" would have been better, I really don't think "epistemological" need have been such a roadblock. If someone refers to an organism's "biological makeup" or "physiological condition", I hope it would be clear that they mean the kind of makeup/condition with which biology/physiology is concerned, rather than the organism's pet theories about biology and physiology. So also with "epistemological state".

What do other users of such terminology mean by it? I just asked Google for <<<"epistemological state">>> and of the first page results I reckon: first one is this discussion; second one is EY's meaning; third is ambiguous; fourth is yours; fifth is EY's; sixth is EY's (and says in so many words: 'Philosophers tend to suppose that one's "epistemological state" is constituted by beliefs'; the authors are philosophers); seventh is yours; eighth is ambiguous but I think nearer EY's; ninth is a sort of hybrid, nearer to yours; for the tenth (of which I can see only the snippet Google provides, the rest being behind a paywall) I can't tell. Some of those hits are from people whose use of philosophical language I wouldn't trust for an instant, but at least four seem reputable. (I am not sure whether to be relieved or alarmed that the ones that look reputable to me on other grounds are also the ones that favour EY's usage; perhaps I'm suffering from some bias or something.) It seems like EY's usage is pretty reasonable. I still think "epistemic" is better; as you may have noticed, he's now changed it.
Yes, but how much longer?
Isn't this something HN's analytics should be answering?
"I would like to bring up a possibility, which is possibly controversial: a lot of these kids let themselves be trampled on by their parents. In addition to (probably) being bullied at school, they are bullied at home by their parents. I really wish they would do more to stand up for themselves."

I can imagine that only someone who has never been through years of systematic abuse / bullying would lay the blame on the victim.
The Suicide Of Bill Zeller
Probably the "great" blogs are ones which are "art". To me, art is some means to convey something deeply meaningful about our inner world (and that inner world can include personal expertise on some subject), regardless of the medium. I suspect if you do that, people will flock to it (if they can find it).
So did I. It was in the Apple commercial.

The article isn't arguing that Facetime won't succeed as a niche product so I don't see why you take issue with it.
Are you kidding?? You must have never watched a Mixergy interview. Some of the best guests have praised Andrew for his background research and thoughtful questions.

no journalism and the questions are basically "how much money did you make?" instead of diving dynamically into how they learned and grew their businesses.

If you had to describe Mixergy interviews in terms of what they are NOT, you've nailed it.
If you ever get a chance to poke around a large corporate data center -- see if you can check out a SL8500 or one of the TS3500 units.. They're the big things with all kinds of flying robotic arms and crap-loads of storage. Just don't try and walk inside one while the robots are moving.

For reference -- an LTO5 Tape holds about 3TB of data. (and has decent compression -- so that could go much higher)
Tapes are the new Hard Drive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape_File_System

A Random Access Filesystem that runs on LTO5. (And it even supports OSX!) Cool hack. Just don't ask me why they bothered.
You can't say that these children who do not make it to the top, do not make it anywhere? Obviously a lot more study needs to go into this before anyone can make such blatant remarks either way.
Simple Truths Smart People Forget
Successful Business Man Giving Away 1k to 10 people
Encryption in the cloud is exactly what needs to happen. We give up our rights for convenience. This will continue getting worse until we accomplish something like that.

I admire Wuala.com for refusing to create a cloud client because of the lack of security and ownership, regardless of the convenience.
This may be the short term quick-fix solution, but the real solution is to campaign to politicians and tech. companies to change the current system.

If twitter managed to keep all the rights they want over our data, while also being able to prove that, legally, we own the data not them, then they could respond to subpoena requests with "you need to direct this to the user". (IANAL, I'm not sure whether to get to that would require a change of law or just of Twitter policies, or both.)
I agree. My position is not that capitalism is infallible, far from it, and the distortions of incentives you mention can and should be addressed. But you will find even worse excesses in nations organized around communism.
Anybody who has has tried FaceTime with their kids, neices, nephews or grandchildren knows how wrong this prediction is.

You can get an emotional response with video calling that the traditional phone just cannot deliver - which is exactly what the Apple commercials drive home.
And how far out is 1.8?
Some clarifications:

1. Presumably you don't have to satisfy everything in each level to be considered satisfying that level; otherwise if your entire family dies in a plane crash, you can never achieve MH3 again, and if you never got MH5 before that, you're permanently fucked.

2. If you get to MH4, but then your town gets hit by a neutron bomb, killing your wife, family, and friends, you get your MH3 knocked out, but your MH1, MH2, and MH4 are all still intact (MH4 because you telecommute most of the time, so your career is intact). Are you immediately eligible for MH5, or do you have to regenerate your MH3 first?

3. Interesting corner case: Say you get to MH3 by virtue of being raised in a rich American family. At age 18, you fly somewhere to visit a college by yourself, and your entire city gets blown away by a neutron bomb. You now have no friends or family, but life insurance on your family pays off handsomely, so you are at MH2. You decide to become a soulless driven businessman, and you do fine; you get promoted, everybody respects your competence, you respect other people's competence, etc, but you have no friends and no companionship. It would appear that you have reached MH4, but you never got there while you had MH3; does this count as MH4? Or do you deny the possibility of this scenario? (I made it up, so that's perfectly valid.)

(These are not leading questions; I'm curious as to how the Maslow viewpoint deals with corner cases.)
Leverage Your Email List
far far too often.
care to enlighten us with what you deduce to be advanced JavaScript?
Slightly embarrassingly (is this bad form?), I feel I should point out my really rather new and beta shell, Urchin:

https://github.com/Spakman/urchin/

I really like a lot about existing shells like Bash and Zsh, so it operates much like a standard shell - pipelines, job control, redirections, tilde expansion, aliasing, globbing, etc.

However, actual shell scripting feels really grim, so sometime in the near future (hopefully) it will be able to pipe into Ruby when needed. This will let you write Ruby directly on the command line, without escaping quotes and such and should make loops and custom shell functions much more fun for a Ruby programmer.

I also fancy experimenting with some things I've not seen in other shells - fuzzy filepath completion, per-project history, etc.

Any ideas are welcome!
I have no first hand experience, but I'd guess the widespread use of SMS text messaging was a much bigger boon for those with hearing difficulties. Not quite as "sexy", and difficult to portray in an ad (particularly as you'd be even more insane to try and claim this was an innovative feature of your platform) but still out there making people's lives better. I'm fairly certain the same is true of the web generally despite occasional steps backwards with Flash, unsubtitled and untranscribed audio and video etc.
Surely the underlying problem is that GIMP is and has been underfunded for years. Where as Photoshop costs $100s, GIMP presumably has very little revenue if it can only pay for two developers.

Firefox is able to develop quickly due to the deal with Google, maybe GIMP needs something like that, e.g. a app-store for plugins or a kickstarter funding drive.
Can you represent each channel as a double? Or will that take up too much memory in the long run?
Australia Floods Update
That has happen to me sometimes with Chrome and every single time I think how cool it is that it updates itself and how cool it would be to just keep the bug free version around.

I rely heavily on the information saved by Chrome every time I use a form and I noticed how it doesn't save it when I use the beta version. Now that's fine because I can just use the last non-beta release just like everybody else but on the current one (at least on Windows 7) I can't access those saved values if the form is loaded by ajax into some iframe. It's really annoying.
Maybe they should keep less logs then, or delete them more frequently, or anonymise those which can be. Or a combination of the three.

DuckDuckGo manages to run a search engine without logging IP addresses or user agents...
10 bi quyet de tro thanh nha lanh dao tuyet voi
Dưới đây là 10 lời khuyên bạn nên thực hiện để có thể trở thành một nhà lãnh đạo ngày một hiệu quả hơn. Hãy chọn một trong số đó. Ứng dụng ngay hôm nay. Những điều còn lại bạn sẽ từ từ thực hiện từng ngày. Chắc chắn bạn sẽ trở thành một người lãnh đạo tốt hơn, hiệu quả hơn trong vòng hai tuần.
Book Of Mormon Tickets 
If you are looking for a night out at the theatre, TicketsMate is the ultimate stop for all the Book Of Mormon Tickets you need. We have a massive inventory of stage entertainment shows from musicals to dramas and we offer some of the most inviting deals so just grab your Book Of Mormon Tickets and enjoy the show!
Telling insomniacs to "Get some sleep" is a really helpful advice. Thanks.
Ugh flash...pass
I found the diagram "Diagram illustrating relationship between Users, UX, Product Manager, Engineering" in your latest post very simple and useful. Summarising big ideas from a book makes for a good blog post. The only thing I didn't like was that it got too long. Long posts are good but only if there's more of a narrative. Lists are better when they are short.

Maybe I'm not the right audience, but I see your recent posts are quite abstract and almost academic-sounding. Do you think you can convey your thoughts through stories instead? Perhaps thoughts on emotions may be better explored and expressed through writing which evokes emotion.
It's because all cryptography was done (almost) by hand and most importantly the people trying to break it were only really using metal methods. Nowadays people use computers to break your codes, so your code has to be much more complicated. The only way to do that is with a computer.

Codes are an arms race.
Hm, this might explain something. In old B&W videos people's impromptu speech seems much more eloquent than today. I wonder if the luxury of instant text communication has something to do with it.
while you are at it, you may visit blog.lifeasparesh.in. I do have some visitors from different organic sources but the problem is nobody comments.
Uncertainty principle: How evolution hedges its bets
I have to admit that as I last used Photoshop around version 4, it's easier to do without these :)
Email Masking Tool (AJAX) - Emailerr
UltraViolet: Hollywood’s cloud-based movie solution
مشاهدة مباراة الامارات وكوريا الشمالية
مشاهدة مباراة الامارات وكوريا الشمالية مشاهدة مباراة الامارات وكوريا الشمالية مشاهدة مباراة الامارات وكوريا الشمالية
> With higher bit depths, less rounding errors accumulate
> over time as the image is processed,

This could also be solved by another photoshop feature, adjustment layers. Basically instead of applying a filter like levels to an image you make a levels layer that applies the levels affect to everything underneath it. The original data is untouched, and you can tweak the levels at any time.

I'm strictly a hobby user for photos I take, but without support either 16 bit colour or adjustment layers GIMP is not good enough for me. My solution is to use an older student version of photoshop I picked up cheaply; I don't need all features in the latest version.
That's probably not the best example, as Blender was initially closed-source until the creators went bankrupt. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(software)
Watch bad girls club miami season 6
For people who want to try Nu, I haven't had much luck compiling 0.4. You probably want to try getting it from Github: https://github.com/timburks/nu.git
Oh please stop the flame, this is ridiculous. Photoshop didn't support 16 bits before CS, in 2003. Did it prevent people to use it ? Would you say that all magazine covers were "child play" before then?
Apple = God?
This is just ridiculous. Scroll down to the rejections. This is probably not the first and only article in this tone.
Do all devs see apple as a kind of "jurisdiction", a vis major? Is a rejection of your app an act of nature that you have to bow under, and change your business plans to accomodate for it?

To me, this is just another example to why Apple's closed platform can and will never be successful in the long run.
missing option: inversely proportional to the expected happiness yield of my next task
This is just ridiculous. Scroll down to the rejections. This is probably not the first and only article in this tone.
Do all devs see apple as a kind of "jurisdiction", a vis major? Is a rejection of your app an act of nature that you have to bow under, and change your business plans to accomodate for it?

To me, this is just another example to why Apple's closed platform can and will never be successful in the long run.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

I'm not sure what this makes me - but I'm always quite excited when I read something which confirms Hamlet's claim. I really want the universe to escape us - and I'm glad when it consistently does.

Having said that - does anyone understand the research on this issue? I'm going to remain dubious until I hear about it more than just from the New Yorker...
As someone who works with both Wordpress and Drupal, let me just say that theming Wordpress feels easy and fun where Drupal feels too complex and very hard to grasp because there are so many aspects of the system that can be themed and each part does theming differently. Start using Drupal with CCK and views and you will know what I mean, you will know and weep :(
Let me be one of those seven. I started playing classical guitar at 8, quit at 10, picked it up again out of my own volition at 15, and I never ever regretted the five potential years of practice I've wasted.

* You learn most when you actually want to learn, so forcing kids into extracurricular activities can but often doesn't lead to greatness.

* It's very, very easy to neglect any unhappiness that would've followed from being forced to play an instrument, because all that unhappiness is in the past. It feels like a free lunch, but it really isn't.
Yes, though you can also compare MS Office to something like TeX, and find that either option is inadequate, depending on where your focus lies.