skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
UI: nice look vs distinctiveness and branding
I've been designing web interfaces for the last ten years, and now that I'm working on my own startup, I face critical UI decisions.
I spent the last hour bouncing here and there on dribbble, pointing the eyes on beautiful examples of UI design. What I see, anyway, is an incredible similarity of styles. There is a dominant, yet beautiful, way to design user interfaces and components, but it terribly lacks distinctiveness.
What recently happened with Twitter for Mac and the mail client Sparrow is iconic of what I mean: user interfaces are becoming incredibly similar to each other.
This is probably good for users, because similar UIs means a shorter learning curve. But is it good for branding?

When I surf websites like dribbble, I feel this terrible temptation of approving myself to the dominant mass, but than I think: what about branding?
Branding is all about distinctiveness, and distinctiveness in UI has a key role in influencing brand awareness, particularly when talking about websites.
When I look at web apps like mint.com, posterous or even Facebook, I see great examples of designs with a brand behind, with a great ability of being recognizable.

What I ask myself, then, is if a less nice-looking and more distinctive UI design is what I should focus on. I know, I know what's in your mind now: nice look and distinctiveness can simply live together, this is obviously true. But the real question is: what to sacrifice? What to focus on?
I have a feeling that these changes were requested many times and a long time ago...
We use a different domain for uploaded files. Example: http://andy.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/walkingdesk-e1294433...
This way we can direct those requests to services better designed for serving and caching static files. We use NFS for blogs.dir (iirc) but sparingly.
The Missing Native/Web App Link: Google Says Native Client Almost Ready To Go
Small changes that they apparently didn't want to make, if it took them ten months to get started. I guess getting cut off is quite motivating.

According to Twitter, UberMedia infused twitter streams in their apps with ads. Turning off that 'feature' is probably trivial, but if that's UberMedia's business model, I can understand why they're hesitant to do so.
More like 2011 is a year of over-generalizations.
Good luck trying to find anything you can trust anyway.
the W3 validator is a joke. it rejects many constructions which are widely used and at worst harmless. it overwhelms you with so many BS messages that you can't see where the real problems are.

overall, the bookmarklet version of this doesn't impress me. i deal with web pages wholesale rather than retail, so libtidy and the command-line tidy floats my boat.
Ask HN: Domain name for personal website
Dear HNers.

I am looking to register a domain name for my personal website. Nothing fancy with respect to content; maybe just a personal blog, my amateur photographs and details about research and hobby projects. But being so late into the game, I cannot find any suitable domain name with just my first name or even first name plus last name initial with the common TLDs. Is it okay to get one of those new two letter TLDs like .ws or .at or are they looked down upon? My name plus last name is available with a .com TLD but I don't have a usual western name so it would be tough to remember with the correct spelling though it would be just ten characters hence I want to get just my first name. Plus I don't like .com for a personal page.

Any suggestions welcome.

Thanks.
Ask HN: What else do you do besides computers?
I seem to spend way too much time on the PC. 9 hours as a job. And then comes the hobby / personal hacking. And then there are news/movies and knowlege, and other entertainment.

For inspirational purposes, what do you do that does not involve a PC?
RSA: Ben Rothke of BT Global Talks Data Destruction
Incredibly sleazy, especially since these clients are soon to be fixed and probably brought back into the API.

I'm all for enforcing a license, but I don't think that last line was necessary.
That error would have happened despite if the var was declared at the top or in the loop

addEventListener("stuff", function() {
return function(index) {
alert(index);
}
}(i);

is the fix, either way
Twitter Wants You to Keep Using their client on your phone
Twitter suspends Twidroyd, UberTwitter and UberCurrent for violations
Hixie answered your specific question, but I think you're missing a very important point: "Doesn't every major browser release leave less and less that Flash alone can do?" There are some things (not this one) that Flash can do that browsers aren't yet able to do. The present limitations dictate what you can do today, but they have little relevance to the long-term discussion.
Can Digital Workplace Democracy Make Workers Happy?
If that is the case, then why not direct them to Twitter.com?
The available domains will be located within the members forum at http://dc.dotsauce.com/ - Of course, the available domains themselves are not something I can show publicly.
If anybody knows where this came from, I'd happily attribute it. I don't know if it appeared in a magazine or was home-grown. (When was FreeBSD a big deal?)
Speaking as a long-time reddit user - yes, I remember when it was originally catering to the developer/coder/sysadmin community.

But I also knew that those interests are held by only a fraction of users on the internet. I completely understood that if the reddit team wanted to turn their site into a money making endeavor, they'd have to start catering to the lowest common denominator. And hell - even the original design of the site was going to cause that: It's social news, as dictated by the user base.

All it took was time for enough non-dev types to find the site and then poof the majority of the news would be nothing like when reddit started.

But you know where reddit succeeded? Sub-reddits.

I can customize my frontpage view to be a combination of all the hot / recent content contained only by the sub-reddits that I'm a member of.

Want to improve your reddit experience? Unsubscribe from the reddit.com (main) sub-reddit.

Here's an example of what I'm subscribed to:

apple, blog, BritishTV, carlhprogramming, coding, cogsci, Cyberpunk, datasets, Favors, freegames, gadgets, gaming, geek, iphone, lego, lounge, macapps, MachineLearning, Malware, Minecraft, opendirectories, opensource, ParticlePhysics, Physics, programming, Python, redditdev, redditmakesagame, redditstories, ReverseEngineering, roguelikes, science, snackexchange, software, SomebodyMakeThis, systems, tipofmytongue, todayilearned, trackers, truereddit, worldnews

And I add new sub-reddits all the time. Because of this wonderful system, I can "turn off the stupid" and ignore the sub-reddits where the lolcats/etc. are being posted (or, if you like them, you can subscribe to /r/lolcats).

Every now and again I log out and check what the reddit.com main page looks like without an account - shake my head - then log back in again.

I still love the site. I just consider the other users a necessary evil for reddit to get the funding to keep adding new devs, features, and hardware to make it bigger and better than it ever was.
Oh, have mercy. Do not want.

I can't imagine cluttering up my Google search result page with a Nascar-like line of logos and data. This is really interesting information but that's a pretty noisy presentation of it. At least make me click somewhere to see that much detail.

Ilya, you're a bona-fide genius, so I don't mean this personally. But please, how about a metascore? Varied-size colored dots? A sparkline-like bar graph? Something... less.
Cooking is definitely my top hobby. It allows almost unlimited creativity, and you get to eat the results. Does it get any better?
Apple has not changed your ability to create a web app. I don't think you understood the analogy.
Ah, yes. We made it, indeed, a full circle.

Quite sad, if you think about it…
ElephantDB: A database specialized in exporting KV data from Hadoop
Prefer a FOSS stack to the MS platform, to get the obvious out of the way.
Hurray! Tweeting about ya.
Because it's not like they haven't had an official client on that platform for many months now...
This makes no sense to me. If it's really possible to "resell these domains for considerable profit" then why aren't you doing it yourself? Or, if it's not, then surely you're just preying on the greed and gullibility of those who sign up?
According to the JSHint website it is "an open-source project that is supported and maintained by the JavaScript developer community.".

However, the license still contains the following clause:

"The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil."

So it is not using an OSI approved license, and a such I would not consider it open source. That clause adds a restriction on how you can use the software, and a very vague restriction too. Be wary if you intend to include this in an existing project.
I might be kind of a noob but why can't you show them publicly?
If your revenue is $1M per month, you will almost certainly get to negotiate with them in person for a better rate.
Paypal Reacts, proposes same thing.

Companies offering payment from both services increase prices 170%.
The issue isn't just the 30% subscription fee. The problem is they won't let app developers charge any more than they would on their own site to make up for the fee. Also, they can't link outside the app anymore to where the developer would actually get more of the profit.
I was looking through some of those videos and I felt a very strong pang of envy. These kids have videos that will live forever on the internet of them programming. I wish I had that from when I was 6 to 13ish (before I started coding for money).
First of all: who cares? Seriously, if this is for a personal website, why does the domain name matter?

Second of all: .at is not "a new two letter TLD"-- it is the TLD for Austria, and has been around as long as any TLD.

Third of all: Looked down upon by whom? Who are you trying to impress?

Which brings me back to: Seriously, who cares?
Same boat. I was going to buy a new ipad for my parents but I can't see myself doing that now. However, the problem is that there is no real alternative to it..
You can see the transcript by clicking on "Full Page Transcript"
Dick Cheney could have been the president of the United States.

I'll just wait for that sink in for those who consider cutting costs to Secret Service. :)
An uncustomized front page may be 'shallow and flawed', but if you subscribe to serious subreddits it becomes one of the most useful sites on the internet. Tons of 'small' communities that you learn from and want to contribute to.
There's a certain arbitrariness to this analysis, since all that is being considered is an increment in the major version number. If the author were looking at operating systems this way, Apple hasn't released a new operating system in nearly 10 years! (OS 10.0 Cheetah was released on 3/24/01)

Not to offend anyone, but Chrome major version releases tend to feel relatively incremental compared to what I had come to expect from Firefox.
This piece is essential to Chrome OS. It is the container for legacy code and things where it'll be unrealistic for javascript to handle for years to come.

Countdown to SSH client functionality in 5... 4... 3...
You may not, but many people seek attention.
What about 10 more? 40 more? Tanks? Shutting down the city one block either side of the route? Does the Pres really need a Jumbo Jet to himself?

A lot of it is just wanting to be seen to roll with the biggest entourage. Nothing wrong with that per se; diplomacy has been about impressing your counterpart with ostentation since time began. But it is what it is.
No, then they'll all just move to http://newslily.com ;-)
I believe they have a monopoly in terms of digital music distribution, which is one of the services that would be affected.

I might be wrong, but I don't think Amazon's market share approaches that of iTunes in music.
It's a personal page, so the name/TLD don't really matter beyond your personal preference. From what I can tell, you value having only your first name (much) higher than having a .com, so I would say you should go with one of the newer domains. If you're looking to be technically accurate, check to see if a '.me' is available; that TLD was created explicitly for personal sites.
That scene in The Dark Knight is adapted from a storyline in Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns. If I recall the original, Batman's retirement makes people sufficiently nervous that a gangs of young kids dress like him and do their own crime fighting. The original Batman has to clean up after them as well.
It's at #38 as I look at it.

This sort of question and paranoid conspiracy-mongering would probably not come up as much if articles simply had a visible down-vote instead of the hidden down-vote applied when people flag an article (but not early enough to kill it).
10% is still a bit much, I guess. But it's pretty damn smart of Google. Apple announces 30%, everyone gets pissed. Google comes out and announces their plan and doesn't make a big deal about any of it. Everyone wants to know how much Google takes and when they find out it's 10%, Google wins.
What about .name (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.name)?

Or .me if you want something shorter.
10 Awesome Optical Illusions
Reddit is interesting. There's a lot of crap there now and memes are way too frequent. However, there are still some great and high-quality subreddits. I've improved my browsing experience there by removing popular reddits like /r/pics, /r/funny, /r/politics, etc. Then I added new ones like /r/askscience, /r/space, and /r/worldnews. That's the best thing about the site. You don't like a community, just remove it or don't join.
Good observation. There is definitely a now-ish style in web design. Rich backgrounds, rounded corners, soft gradients, big fonts, and of course those text shadows.

There's even a style of writing on web sites now, especially startups. Very direct with short bold sentences. "BubbleDrubber connects YOU with Bubbles you Drub. None of the Flub!"

I think you should be more distinctive than that wherever you can. There are different kinds of nice that you just haven't thought of yet.
Yea, I am surprised no one mentioned IE6 in XP SP2. Look at the IE in early 4xxx Longhorn builds too and compare.
Unfortunately, NaCl seems to have all the same protocol and same-origin restrictions as JS, so you can't even open a frickin' socket.
That's an interesting point. I'll have to keep an eye on it and see if there's a difference, although our precent of chargebacks is so low, I'm not sure we'll have enough data in 6 months.
Netflix, Kindle, and other resellers will not be able to operate on the iPad. The 30% number eliminates their entire margin. Therefore they will abandon the platform - rocketing up Android in popularity.

I think this is Apple's Plan (To have those resellers abandon their platform) - because they want to have a "Walled Garden" in which they are the only content sellers.

The only problem is that there are a _lot_ of us who like our Kindles, and have no desire to use "iBooks" - the lack of an eInk reader that lets us read in the sun is only one reason. Our large library of Kindle books is another.

Ergo - we'll go to the next platform, and abandon the iPad - reducing it to a niche player in the Tablet world.

This isn't like the iPod where Apple was the major distributor of Music. Apple is _not_ the major distributor of Books, Newspapers, and Magazine and there is _lots_ of competition in those markets. Apple actually only has about or so magazines and newspapers compared to the close to 1000 that PressReader and Zinio have. Apple has NO streaming Audio or Movie presence that I know of.

I think they learned the wrong lesson from the iPod - and now they are going to screw their Tablet market dominance - much to their loss.
get wet (surf), get lost (travel), get warm (icehockey).
I know how you feel. I work 35 hours a week at an internship and I try to keep up with school and my startup but there are not enough hours in the day. I'll keep it up as long as I can. Hopefully I can replace internship/job with startup exclusively.
Because the available domains are for members eyes only. If I was to show them publicly anyone could register them.
Since it is a fork, we can't just change the original license. If there is somebody who is willing to explain if I legally can change the original license, I would be happy to do it. We consulted a couple of people and all of them suggested to keep the original in place. :(
I wonder if there would be some way to partner with Affinity Lab. http://www.affinitylab.com/
Didn't Google pay for a student to the naclssh port as part of the code of summer project?

Something tells me such limitations will be temporary...

"This allowed us to remove the expiration date and localhost security restrictions we had adopted in previous research-focused releases.

We are excited to see Native Client progressively evolve into a developer-ready technology. In the coming months we will be adding APIs for 3D graphics, local file storage, WebSockets, peer-to-peer networking, and more."
Wouldn't that be much better expressed as something like "It's easier to do elegant optimizations in a high-level language", then? Finding the best algorithm to use is almost always the single best optimization you can do to a piece of code. And that certainly is easier to do in a higher level language.

On the other hand, the original quote seems to regard elegance and optimization as opposed. (And really gloss over the step of porting your elegant routines by hand to C!)
This is an easy, cheap, and boring comment. He's the President. He already won. Adding a tank isn't going to make him feel better about himself, and he's not the one who decides what his motorcade looks like.
How did buddypress come about?
I'm not arguing that it isn't crappy for users. I'm saying, if the vendor was warned about this and played games about it instead, they're the ones who did something crappy to the users.
>> What else do you do besides computers?

Wife and one child provide a lot of 'doing' :)

I have a mountain bike that I ride around nearly every evening for at least an hour (a lot longer on weekends)- I ride that same bike to a gym three times a week;

Read a book;
I bet IP lawyers everywhere are rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect of enforcing that license.
Google Realtime Search
http://buddypress.org/about/story/

Andy Peatling invented it before joining Automattic.
It's not ready yet. It's NoSQL, scales to 4EB on the back-end but handles the relational model. Not open source for varying reasons. It will be a service at first. But it's not ready yet. I'll definitely let HN know when it is, and if anyone wants to be an early user, please contact me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law
Don't Short Netflix, Yet
Not if you actually, you know, know what you're doing. This dumbing down of programming does not work--if you have clueless people working on code, it'll end up broken, no matter how many tool-enforced 'best practices' they follow.
I'm sorry, I misread. I thought they were buying them from DotSauce.
Unless they can read the shadow file somehow, or a specific user attack vector makes it somewhat easier than complete guessing...
Should be able to consolidate most of those needs with an aggregator like About.me - wordpress/blogspot for the blog, flickr/picasa for the photos, and maybe posterous for the research/hobbies.

Saves time in the creation/maintenance of the site and spreads your presence across the web.

Regardless, shunning you surname definitely won't help if people try searching for you.
He did say the semantics-preserving transformations were easier in Scheme:

This is where Scheme really won. Because of its extremely algorithmic---almost mathematical---nature, Scheme can be easily manipulated in a sort of algebraic style.
Anyone else notice that #Twittermobile is a promoted trend? Twitter are really pushing their own app today.
I am an experienced domainer and am able to acquire new quality domains on a regular basis. I'm also very busy with manging the publication, DotSauce magazine and other projects.

I wish I could sell domains full time, but I have other commitments. It takes time to market and promote domains and sales don't exactly happen over night.

There are sample domains shown on the signup page. I think it's fairly obvious good keywords and brands are worth more than $19. It's not so far fetched to think someone could resell for much more.
Sometime in the late 90's I was driving north on I280 near Woodside CA. I got off at the Sandhill exit and found myself in the middle of Al Gore's motorcade to one of those private residence fund raisers. Evidently the offramp had been unblocked a moment too soon. Half a mile later I turned off onto the road home without having been forced off the road or tailed or visited by the secret service. I realized what was going on at the time, which made it a very strange experience.
I agree.

There's also another thing that happens, which is to look at a big mess of twisty code and think about it, finally seeing that it should have been done as a simple algorithm. Then you get to delete a lot of code and replace it with a small bit of clear code.

There are many more ways the simple things learned in school help in the real world.
Free Online Crash Course in Startups from The Founder Institute
martial arts and guitar
On one short trip to Brazil, entering at GIG, I was singled out, had my passport held and told I couldn't enter and would have to return to the US. The Federal Police told me specifically and precisely it was for reciprocity - some Brazilians had been turned away in the US and so they were doing the same for me. They had no legal reason to deny me entry, it was simply because I am American.
just ported jshint into the jslint.vim plugin, for vim addicts that write javascript :)

https://github.com/wookiehangover/jshint.vim
When you say #38 you mean this discussion and not the article that someone submitted today, correct? Is that what you think happened then, it was simply voted down? Who would be able to confirm or deny it then? I just went through all 690 submissions visible from the homepage onward and didn't see the one someone submitted today at all. You would think it would show up somewhere in that list, wouldn't you?
Bill Gross on the alleged violations:

Trademark infringement: "UberTwitter will change its name to UberSocial."

Privacy issues: "The privacy issues are related to handling Tweets longer than 140 characters." This information, combined with "privacy issue with private Direct Messages longer than 140 characters" (from Twitter) makes me think that DMs and protected Tweets greater than 140 characters were passed to a site like TwitLonger, which makes the full text accessible by a URL. That site then showed the message to anybody who had the URL without any account authentication.

Monetization: Twitter believed UberMedia used affiliate links, which Gross disputes.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/18/ubermedia-bill-gross-twitte...