skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The hardest part for me in analyzing past (partial or complete) failures is to make sure that none of those will bite me again. if there was a way to guarantee that you only make every mistake once then that would be progress.

Kudos for being able to look at your own project this ruthless and to try to distill the lessons. If you succeed in never repeating any of the mistakes please tell me how.

As for the write-up: you did a good job.
Obviously. Site wide elements obviously changed (I think the site map at the bottom also slightly changed), but that’s not really relevant to the comment. The page content itself – everything minus the site wide elements – is completely unchanged. It being black is not new and also not surprising.
I had thought that maybe the phone was intended for older folks who need clear, easy, familiar buttons on their phones.

But it seems to be more of minimalist hipster gadget. As such it really does need some form display. I don't know anyone under 50 who doesn't SMS.
tweakers pricewatch ftw.
True ... which is exactly why I think it's publishers, not authors, that stand to lose the most from this. When smart authors start selling eBooks cheaper directly on Kindle et al., that's when the real book transition will start.

At the very least, there's a huge potential for a lucrative new market in cheaper eBooks, only it hasn't been fully realized yet because of existing publishers.
Perl 6 is not really an upgrade, except in the most general sense. It's a new Perlish language, and Perl 5 will have a long and happy life besides Perl 6, even when (if?) the latter is used in production.
I got my dad a Doro HandleEasy last Christmas. He is actually using it (which is amazing in itself). http://www.techpin.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/doro-handl...
Ok, right. I wasn't contradicting that the Air page is customized, just was saying that the menu is change. I see what you were meaning now. Sorry!
Hipmunk. Should they change this name?
Some YouTube subscription updates that I haven't bothered to turn off keep getting marked as spam in GMail too.
How very... trusting of you. In a similar vein, I would have expected a motherboard USB circuit to handle an overvoltage from a dodgy peripheral in a contained fashion.

I can point out the blown 7A(!) fuse on the IBM T41 motherboard if necessary.
Discussions about salary compensation are so dishonest on this site. Everyone is so quick to say "its not about the money", yet it's easily proven to be the single biggest factor in any job. If your compensation were 0, literally 0, you wouldn't take it no matter how great it was. However, there are other benefits you could do without assuming everything else checked out.

When your compensation is above a certain threshold other factors begin to weigh more. The only difference between people is where that threshold starts. This should be obvious, and thus renders these posts completely moot.

I'm only ranting here because any honest discussion about salary always gets short-circuited by the "it's not about the money" folks. It's frustrating, and at this point it adds nothing to the discussion.
I see it as more like: Linux users will not pay for something when they're forced to pay for something, but when they don't have to pay for something, they're more likely to pay for it than other groups are. (Most still won't if they don't have to, but some will, in a much higher percentage than users from more mainstream OS's).

I think they're also much more likely to do without than to pirate. Of course, it's easy for people to rationalize piracy in their head -- it has DRM, it's too expensive, the company is evil, et cetera. But I think Linux users are much more likely than other operating system users to do without rather than pirate.

OTOH, OSX users are probably more likely to pay for things than do without.

I don't think the Android/iOS ecosystems have shaken out enough to make broad generalizations yet.

Myself, I'm definitely a "Linux" style user. I've purchased a few Android apps, but all of them have very usable free editions. Typically, all the paid version does is remove the advertising. Removing advertising is not worth $5 to me, but I sometimes buy the premium version anyways.
Fantastic! I want to do such research, too. But now, back to finding that bug in my Java code. Sigh...
Up-voted because I sort of agree: although it's fun to see achievements pop up, and some of these are comical ("I’m Sorry – Created a new Visual Basic Project") some others might encourage bad practices ("The Mathematician – Defined 15 local variables with a single character name"). I mean if they were just in the periphery, that's cute. But if people actually try to "achieve" these achievements, as they do in Steam games, I have a feeling that company might quickly decide to remove such functionality from their VS.

Just my 2¢
I'd personally like to see a 2 hour window. That gives enough time to wait for the app to download, and to take some time to actually use it and figure out if it actually does what you need it to do, and then return it if needed. You just can't make any sort of reasonable evaluation with only 15 minutes to do all that.
In Canada it's the same thing. Text a landline and they get a call with a TTS of the text and a message indicating what phone number it came from.
The establishment of high-quality Makeup | Fashion Ups
Build - Polish - Polish - Polish
I was referring to the grandparent's specific anecdote about surfing for 'porn', not browsing in general.

Chill out, mon.
What an artist can do with Light and a Building Fascade
Italian Scientists Claim (Dubious) Cold Fusion Breakthrough
That is a fricking awesome phone. Dirt cheap, indestructible, and a battery that lasts for 2 weeks between charges. Unfortunately, it has the worst UI ever, and is completely unsuitable for Grandma duty.

It does have an excuse for being so bad -- it's designed to be used by people who cannot read.
Yeah - I was making the point about it being a confusing tool to use. When I'm outside, cars drive on the left; when I'm inside watching a movie, they drive on the right; so my brain isn't getting wired with clear signals.
Sounds like an excuse for their lame marketplace which paid apps are not available in many countries. They do not make it easy for developers of paid apps. Why are they not happy? They are cornering app developers into free app+ advertising model (eg AngryBirds) and they should be very happy with the fat AdMob dollars.
But have clearly maintained their culture post-acquisition (as they said they would)
Learn the shortcuts and remove the toolbars.
Twitter testing self serve ad platform
In Eclipse, the contents of a tab are represented by an IEditorInput instance which only loads the file (or whatever the editor edits) on demand; if your Eclipse starts with a stored session of 50 tabs, it doesn't need to open 50 files.
Yeah you get better. It's like learning to ice skate, maybe... you fall a lot and get a lot of bruises at first but eventually it gets to the point where you don't think about it.

I learned to program before IDEs and I still use Emacs as my primary editor for almost everything. I find the Visual Studio "IntelliSense" type behaviors in most IDEs annoying in the extreme. But I can see how if that's what you started with, you'd come to find it useful.
That's it in a nutshell.

The media and observers will make acute predictions about how everything will play out. And long after everyone has moved on the "war" continues and sometimes is eventually won. Though it is rare that the the prediction and the end result are the same.

I think Facebook will still be around long after the industry has shifted. Just as Live Journal is still around.
Readability and Naming Things
Electric fence? Try poison ivy some time...
I think the mistake was selecting a cofounder who was more committed to his consulting work than to your startup. As a freelancer your cofounder had the option to scale back his consulting or treat the startup as another consulting client. If he had to work to support his family then you didn't select someone with enough runway.

For all its benefits, the conventional wisdom of HN that one should pay off their mortgage prior to a startup may often be a mistake. A mortgage is leverage, and the cash used to pay ahead twenty years would be better used for a longer runway - $100,000 will cover many months of mortgage payments. What would most startups do for $100,000 worth of seed money?

Likewise, if a family keeps someone from going all-in to the startup that's only an issue when the other founders believe that going all in is a point of pride. In this case however, it's not that your cofounder wasn't going all in, it was that he wasn't even anteing up.
Slashdot effect in progress. Anyone have a mirror?
Black Eyed Peas Will.i.am named "Director of Creative Innovation" at Intel
Skeptical About Amazon’s Bulk E-Mail Service
Because the physical spec was dreamt up by electrical engineers, perhaps? I can cut them a little slack because they had to spec something everyone in the consortium could manufacture for peanuts, but not much.

The USB plug is far from the worst connector design out there. My favourite is the audio jack, where you are guaranteed to short the signal lines to earth on connection and disconnection. Really smart, that one...
"I did a bad job" Proofreading this blog post. I'm not usually a pedant, but this post repeatedly made basic grammar errors. It detracted and distracted from what was otherwise a great article.
Or, build up to it. 3 x 1.5 hours and 1 2.5 hours per week should get you ready.
Somewhat Pixar-ish, like a crowd of cartoon characters dashing off stage to be replaced by a new bunch. Will get irritating very quickly.
Some may be unwillingness to pay, but when it comes to user experience, proprietary apps (paid or not) have never fit in that well either. Long before "app stores" became common on other platforms, users of at least Debian-based distributions (and a few others) have been grabbing most of their software from an appstore-like interface from their distro: you click on the app in synaptic and it installs, configures, and someone is responsible for ensuring it plays nice with the rest of the system. Similar story for, say, FreeBSD ports.

If you want software not in the repository, it is usually a much worse user experience. You get some static binary with a .sh install script, which wants to install in /opt/ or something, doesn't add itself to the distro's menu system, doesn't integrate with the settings manager, your default browser, etc., and generally is a pain in the ass. Even true for no-money proprietary apps, e.g. getting icc on my system was a lot more annoying than getting gcc or llvm on it, at least last time I tried.
It is about time!! Was wondering how they were going to keep up! 3 months commitment is a lot.
I feel like a nag. This is the second time that I've criticized a blog post for
poor readability. Light gray text against a white (or off-white) background
is a fundamental usability flaw. It makes the text very hard to read, and
detracts from the content.
An In-Depth Comparison of the Kindle DX Vs. iPad as Reading Devices
Robot (R)evolution On The Way
As for screwness: when I try to enlarge fonts using FF 3.6 Ctrl-+, I suddently get a gray band on the right that hides half of the text.

I cannot read the default font, sorry.
If you don't look back and think you did a bad job, it obviously means you're not improving.
> Its not crazy. Facebook just announced something along those lines today

Yep, and it's not exactly a standardized API, neither would it be easy to move a system built on this to the next greatest thing from Twitter or Google. User data lock-in is nice like that.
I agree with Volokh and most of the commenters that it's ethical to publish a cease-and-desist letter if you get one.
Thanks I'm glad you appreciated it. It is likely that I will make the same/similar mistakes again, no one can prevent it. I think understanding what mistakes you are likely to make, allows you to watch out for them. While you will still make them, you will be quicker to try and remedy the situation.
This is just personal opinion, but the kind of guys & girls that hang around on HN is pretty much perfectly the target audience for this project. I'm a regular reader of HN and not as much an active participant, but would love for the HN community to get behind this project!
Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook Fan Page Hacked
It would be nice if the 15 minutes (or whatever timer) started from the initial opening of the app. You can download a bunch and then evaluate when you have spare time.
IIA Sign-ups First Day: Success - UAV Mission underway…
You are correct about the clock speed, but not the bus difference.

"In 1986, the XT/286 (IBM 5162) with a 6 MHz Intel 80286 processor was introduced. This system actually turned out to be faster than the ATs of the time using 8 MHz 286 processors due to the fact that it had zero wait state RAM that could move data more quickly."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer_XT
Love the way the content seems to 'bounce' onto the page like it just got there in the nick of time all at once.

Does anyone know about the gallery/slideshow widget they use on the Mac pages (and elsewhere probably). the div id = 'herogallery'

Wondering if this is a proprietary Apple thing or can other people use it
My ten minute attempt at recreating the animation found on the product page

http://jsfiddle.net/5rmLv/
Yeah that's one of those weird things in OSX which likely come from its NeXT roots: you can extremely easily configure/customize things you would never expect being able to touch on a non-OSS product.
Well, I imagine most Android users prefer GPL-licensed software, which is overwhelmingly also free as in beer. I know I do. CyanogenMod and FLOSS cover the majority of what I need from a phone-computer-thingy. For instance, I needed some GPS / navigation - OsmAnd and OpenGPS tracker. OsmAnd even allows download of vector data for entire countries and POI databases. Or, you need a timed photo taking application? rrTimeLapse does the job. In most cases, these applications are less cluttered and with saner UI than the flashier paid versions. I would pay, however, for certain applications - such as the excellent Thinking Space mind mapping software (which has a free ad-supported version with very lax limitations), or Titanium Backup. But in my part of Europe I can't pay for apps in the Market. Maybe they should look into fixing that.
missleading subject:
only the rubygem "mail" is affected. Not sendmail or mail(8) itself.
Now it looks like a framed site from good ol' 1997 again. Fixed header, fixed menu cluttering up your 800x600 pixel smartphone screen, and a small scrollable area (of which most is white space) with the actual content. Wow, that went seriously wrong.
Tcl/TinyTcl, IO
LimeJS - HTML5 game framework for web and iOS
Technically the Apple Store app is only for the iPhone. There's a lot more on the Apple site than the store.
It gets absurd very quickly.

Anyone who programs like that is a bad programmer. That's the fact. It's nothing to do with the language being used.
How many Windows users actually buy software at all aside from games? I think most of the commercial software used legitimately by people is either bundled with their PC or paid for by their companies.

Since most games don't run on linux, most linux users don't buy software. Yes, Loki tried to make that work but gamers are very fickle and want the latest and greatest games as soon as they are available on Windows. Without direct support from the game producers and release dates/features comparable to the Windows platform, linux games won't take off. It's a chicken-and-egg problem and it won't change since most serious gamers run Windows as well as linux.

I ran Windows for years before I switched to linux and I don't think I bought any software for Windows except for games and antivirus updates.

I also have an Android phone and have only bought one app in the year I've had it. I only want a smart phone to do certain things - calls, texts, emails, GPS, maps, etc. - and most of that is handled well enough by Google's built-in apps. There are some free apps I use on a regular basis but most are either non-essential or provided by a web site I use (like Last.fm or Pandora). If the non-essential apps cost money, I wouldn't pay for them because I can live without things like wifi analyzers.
With VS it's almost like testing each individual line though, at least for syntax and spelling. What I did was deliberately type things with as little attention to case/formatting as possible, and then watch to see VS transform it into neatness. Which meant it understood the line as expected.

Can't expect every editor to have the same features, but some sort of 'smart' plugin would that monitored your words and picked up things that were 'probably a mistake' would be useful. Then you could run the plugin every so often. A spelling mistake can be practically invisible because of the way your brain processes things.
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Believe it: windowed EPROMS have been used as cameras. Their light sensitivity is legend.

[edit] actually I was wrong about that. The memory devices used as cameras were delidded RAMs, not EPROM. EPROMs are light sensitive, but too slow for that.
Is there a mirror? Page seems to be down :(
New security settings coming to Facebook
SEC Does Right Thing, Shows Sensitivity to Angel Financing
I'm seeing a weird bug with the search feature. Typing a search request and then quickly hitting enter gets you taken to a results page that is missing most of or all of your query (depending on how fast you type). It must be something with the search as you type JS, but is very annoying. I tested in both Chrome and Safari.
The important fact is "You did a job". Some people never get to do the "job" or "work for themselves". Can you believe that for the first year of my product (infocaptor) I had zero sales. At that I kept feeling, "I did a bad job" doing the following
-selecting the market
-selecting the coding language
-marketing and so on..

But eventually I prevailed.
The product is now successful and all the learnings is only going to shorten the path to success for my new product (mockuptiger)

I like to enjoy the journey more than the destination and think financial gain is just a side effect. ofcourse you need mile posts to know that your are going somewhere and these financial gains are excellent mile posts.

So enjoy,live and learn - repeat :)
Everything I stated is public information. Here is a brochure that specifically states that a Data General machine is being replaced with a new system using the radar program written in C.

http://www.esdradar.com/brochures/VME%20upgrade.pdf
That could easily be called a feature, looking at how Reddit's focus changed. Hacker News is able to keep it's narrow focus, but it's the exception rather than the rule.

You're right about the editorial content in the headlines and summary though but I like that the stories have a small blurb explaining the story unlike Reddit or Hacker News.
Unfortunately, audio jacks are also bone-headed.
How My Company Hires for Culture First, Skills Second
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/01/how_my_company_hires_for_cultu.html
Intro to Computer Science and Programming (MIT/ItunesU)
The industrial fallacy in software research
Setting aside the ocular arguments, I think the Slate post overstates things here:

Take Toy Story 3: I've gone on record with my admiration for the scene at Daisy's window, where Lotso finds he's been replaced by another toy. There's no sight gag there, no objects hurtling off the screen; instead, the image contorts visual space into a crisscrossing, emotional depth. If the scene were flat, Lotso and Daisy would be right next to each other on the screen; in 3-D, they're spread across a lonely chasm, separated by rain-streaked glass.

I've seen Toy Story 3 in both 3D (IMAX) and 2D (home DVD), and the scene retains its poignancy (and potency) even on the small screen without the 3D apparatus. He's wrong when he says "If the scene were flat, Lotso and Daisy would be right next to each other on the screen" -- when the scene is flat, our brain stills views the scene as a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional situation, and inserts the gap between Lotso and Daisy.
Solid interview style from Alexis, especially considering the wide-range of topics covered (Reddit, Hipmunk, Venture Capital, Little Brother, Tunisia, and of course the geographic history of self-immolation).

Alexis - did she ask you to wear the hoodie? Seemed to perpetuate a stereotype, though it did allow you to show off your Hipmunk drawing. And maybe that's the image of you that you want to put out there!
It's hard to draw conclusions about the desktop Linux market since it's so vanishingly small.

I'd happily buy games for Linux. But I don't normally buy games at all; I buy maybe one a year. If I'm a typical case, a company could produce a game and fail financially even though they've captured most of the market.
But you can't deny that each language has a culture that promotes a certain set of practices and styles. If this article had been written about Python instead of Java, no one would have understood what the author was trying to say because it doesn't fit the Python culture.
Public key = your address. Private key = the key to the front door.
When it comes to analysis, you really need to think about your ultimate goals first. If you are looking for a minimalist service for the best price, then Amazon SES may make sense for you.

I work for JangoSMTP and we get a lot of clients coming to us from other transactional email providers because they need more. Deliverability is a major issue that comes up. You may be able to send out mass quantites of email, but without an experienced email marketing provider you may struggle to reach people's inboxes. Delivery is as much an art as it is a science, and it takes constant focus to stay on top.

Also, Amazon only offers an API. JangoSMTP gives you the option to send through an SMTP server as well as API. We also offer open and click tracking, as well as advanced reporting (Google Analytics, logging, etc.). If reporting is important to you, you will want to consider a service like JangoSMTP that is more advanced than Amazon SES.
Sorry if it spoilt the experience. I will try to pay more attention next time.

Thanks for pointing it out. :)
I wouldn't mind it, but - for me at least - on a just-before-unibody-gen MBP w Chrome, it is really choppy. I basically see the first 2 and last 2 frames of the animation.

It's better on Safari, but still, it would be better the disable the animation on browsers where it performs poorly.
You're right. The author does mention:

The biggest complaint I have with many Java developers is that they develop a whole bunch of really bad habits.
Maybe it just needs a high score table for functions based upon their cyclomatic complexity.
However, it's still seems to be a trend in almost everything related to enterprise java based software.

Couldn't they just use memorization by passing a hash map in a tail-recursive method and save on a few hundred lines of code?
Here's a Motorola for $20 US: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16875209...
How Writing Libraries Restored my Faith in Open Source