skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Chen is specifically talking about a new redesign here, not the overall ability for MySpace users to customize everything.

What's so totally annoying about this is the UX people get overridden by the concerns of the 'business' people. Many companies I've worked with still have rather arbitrary distinctions which divide people and create antagonistic tendencies between teams. Really, truly, everyone is working on the same 'business' problems, just from different angles.

Treating UX people as not understanding 'business' is insulting. Not saying it's been done here explicitly, but as someone who's done a lot of development, I've been talked down to enough by people who think I don't understand 'business' or company X's particular 'business'. The only time I don't understand an aspect of the business needs is when those aspects are specifically withheld during meetings ("for strategic purposes", of course).

I think the UX people probably understand the 'business' of getting users to quit leaving myspace and start using it again - for the long term - better than any of the 'business' guys who can only measure success on daily or weekly ad sales charts. Not saying money and ad sales are bad, but this is a classic death spiral - increase page views (and possibly ad sizes) to squeeze a few extra bucks out of the remaining users before they leave two.

The same network effect of people using MySpace because all their friends did is going to be working in reverse as people quit using it because their friends quit using it too. The absolute first priority should be to keep those friends using MySpace, then devising strategies to get them to get their friends back.

All this assumes the true goal of the 'business' side of things is to have a growing profitable MySpace 5 years from now. I really suspect it's not.
Impact of the Nokia-Microsoft Alliance: Welcome to the Five-Platform World
If you just want to throw something up quickly you can use http://thiss.is
example: http://thiss.is/whycharliesheeniswinning

Disclaimer: I created thiss.is
Fear of Flying: Why the iPad2 isn't even better
So no Indian/Chinese/Japanese/Mexican food? No avocados? No seafood, unless your grandparents are from the coast?

(Food diversity sucket in our grandparent's era. )
Considering that many developers have suggested that the solution to OEM/MOs not updating Android devices fast enough would be to back port stuff..its a welcome sing from Google.
FCC suggests subsidized broadband for poor, instead of telephones
Then you did the exercises in bad form. Years ago my fitness condition was like the article described: little-girl weak. My back and my neck ached a lot after coding sessions. Fast-forward until now doing squats, dead lifts, presses three times a week for 3 months I am much stronger, can run 2x longer and the pain has completely gone away.

At first i followed Stronglift 5x5's advice: start with the bar only, concentrate on proper form for at least 2 weeks and increase the load slightly for each workout. I'm also lucky that there are sport students working as tutors at my university gym. They are taught proper (olympic) weight lifting so I asked them to correct my form if I did the exercises wrong. After that it's like riding a bicycle, once learned you will never forget how to ride.
I'd try it--I've got kids at 6, 8 and 10 years old.
"How to Disk Operating System a developer?"

Oh come on. It's DoS. Pretty please? Not respecting capitalization is definitely a way to DoS a developer...
On a somewhat related note, I 'got' how/why people were so attracted to MySpace in the first place with the 'personal customization' aspect - my own background, colors, etc. But I have to say it would have been even better with one or both of the following options:

1. A toggle to disable a person's styles to a default.

2. An option of defining my own style for viewing others' pages.

I just went to a friend's page (after having not been on myspace in > 2years) and it was 100% unreadable. Doing a 'select all' on the entire page made some of the text readable, barely. Ugh.
Religion to me is any kind of belief without questioning, without observable proof.

Books, worship, in-group perks, rituals, supernatural; are just side-effects and the scale of it depends on the ability of its leaders to bullshit people.

I'm not an atheist btw - that also requires belief and too much energy. As I'm too lazy to answer the question "does God exist or not?" guess that makes me an agnostic - and truly I don't give a shit.

But then again, I'm an Ubuntu user that also uses Windows from time to time.
And Ubuntu Christian Edition is a few clicks away if I ever make a decision :p
Thrutu - do more than talk when you're on the phone
Scoble is a bit of an idiot to be honest, he posted an article a few days ago (just after the iPad2 announcement) about how the Xoom is rubbish in comparison.

The article would have been okay if he had left it at that, he's entitled to his opinion. But he started replying to the comments below and he came across as a bit of an ass.

This article is a backtrack, tail between the legs moment for him I think
Relevance has become Irrelevant
It's too bad the payoffs for the pirates are pretty much nil too.
'Spam king' released from prison, disavows his former ways
How your ability to cope with pressure may be genetically determined
How long do you think it'll take for people to figure out how to game this change? If content farms are dead, what's next? Social Spam?
It reminds me of how the FBI mostly conducts sting operations on "radicalized retards," where they find someone on a Islamist message board and then encourage and equip the recruit for terrorism.

It's an extremely rare thing (as in I can't think of one off the top of my head) to hear about a credible terrorist threat being foiled by FBI work.
Hey, thanks Gruber! "skeuomorph" What a cool word: "a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph
Yeah, all the $30 MP3 players come in a wide range of colors.
Open Source 5-Axis CNC mill and plasma cutter
I think he was making an example.
This is an example of my least-favourite type of HN story: "Devs are clever; users are stupid". While it is not untrue it misses the underlying problem: Devs are generally bad communicators and have an unrealistic assumption about the language and technical understanding of their users which they translate into "users are stupid".

To get a feel for how this feels consider the last time you took a car to be fixed and had to talk to the mechanic, or the first time you took clothes to be dry-cleaned. It feels belittling, doesn't it?
On that brisky sun
Mainstream men’s fitness magazines have no larger mission than profitable advertising sales, which means endless pitches for useless (if not outright dangerous) dietary supplements and articles on “Seven Steps to Great Abs,” always omitting the all-important Step Eight: In order to make your six-pack even remotely visible to the naked eye, reduce your total body fat to an inhuman 10 percent.

This describes just about every issue of "Mens Health" magazine, by the way.
Every crossfit trainer I've met, trained with or by or read has emphasised form over how many reps, there might be sloppy gyms but that certainly hasn't been my experience.
Did Google demo something that car companies haven't been working on for many years, and demonstrated years ago?
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or adding a parenthetical remark saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important."
Hardest captcha ever?
What we can all learn from Twitter's Ubermedia block
Problem is, in twenty years, the car would be handing over to a really amateurish driver.
Did you miss the part of the article where the author is in his forties and suffering through knee and back problems attained in adolescence?

I'm not sure how the joke you relay here is suppose to be anything like an argument, data, or reasoning.
I fully expected it, having read the question/answer session he did for the Washington Post two weeks ago. Utterly hillarious, especially the bit about Watson's voice.

http://live.washingtonpost.com/jeopardy-ken-jennings.html
Thanks. I hadn't really thought about it that way but have changed the title. Mea culpa.
Pitch your app to everyone who will listen. What do you have to lose right?

Whilst this is a simple little statement, a fear of rejection has crippled so many businesses before the even got off the ground.

Well done. I'm glad your honest approach has paid off.
Google hired many of those involved in the DARPA Urban challenge, and they are leading the effort. In particular, Sebastian Thrun, who appears to be in charge of Google's program, was the head of the winning Stanford team.

Additionally, Google's cars are already far more sophisticated than those that won the Challenge, which involved navigating a relatively simplistic simulated urban environment. According to their blog post on the subject [0] Google has been running their autonomous cars on real roads and highways in real traffic, a dramatically harder problem.

[0] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/what-were-driving-at....
"In 2010, there was actually a 38% drop in number of new startups."

Pffttt.... where did this come from? Is it not that after two years of a lousy economy everybody's saving were tapped out?
How do I access to other talks at BOSS last year ? This website doesn't have a central place for them...it seems.
Curated by choice: New design for HN proposal
Thoughts on developer longevity
Yes, but all those carriers have had the prices jacked up to the roof. The US gets a $49 3GS, UK prices range from £59 ($95) to £189 (some offer it free on a very expensive monthly contract over two years). For an out-of-date handset.

Compare the Android phones, where you get HTC Desires for free, on 12 or 18-month contracts with monthly charges in the £20s.

Apple has a big price problem competing in the UK in phones. It gets away with $1:£1 in computing, just, but it won't when Android is "good enough".
Right. I was looking to see if the second page was the "No" list.
This is in no way true. Running on a treadmill is significantly easier than running the same distance on an outside surface.
It's not a mistake if you do it right.

They could have done it like Wordpress does ... i.e. here's dozens of templates to choose from; then you can customize the colors, and the banner, and you can choose your preferred right-side widgets.

This is actually one thing that's annoying me about Facebook - all pages are boring AND filed with tons of shitty statuses and app invites ; I don't bother logging in anymore, unless I get a comment or something to one of my own status updates (that's coming in from my Twitter's iPhone Client).
It's pretty transparent.

http://www.ice.gov/news/releases/1007/100702hollywood.htm

> At a sound stage at Walt Disney Studios in Southern California, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director John Morton announced to movie industry representatives how the agency is "turning the table on thieves" by combating movie piracy. "Working with industry, we will systematically target websites that offer counterfeit or pirated products. We will seize websites, prosecute the owners and forfeit proceeds."

This is from an ICE press release. No secrets here.
GPP [1] is the sort of thing people add to their programs when they're already doing basic weight routines all the time and they want to see even more progress. You don't have to start dragging rocks on day 1.

[1] http://www.elitefts.com/documents/gpp.htm
Good iPad apps can make the iPad feel not like a device running an app, but like an object that is the app.

This sentence alone is worth reading the entire post. Subtract the parts of the sentence having to do with iPad, change good to great, and you get a universal truth.

Great apps feel not like a device running an app, but like an object that is the app.

Apply this to your user's content/data. A great X app doesn't feel like a device running a X app, it feels like you're directly manipulating X. You can substitute pictures, reports, movies, invites, events, etc...
I recognize the "frame" graphics on the homepage from keynote. Very scrappy - good quality design accents with nearly 0 time or money. I like it.
What an awesome idea. First of all, thanks for building this. Like others have said, you've probably added years to our lives.

As a novel bonus, it'd be neat if you could wire up a twitter account that did song recognition and status updates.

Currently holding to: "Michelle Branch - Everywhere" for the 472nd time!
See, but I had done it before - 3/4 years ago I was squatting 315 for 10 reps, so either my form was fine back then and degraded somehow or it was never good and I just got away with it because I was young and in shape.

Either way, the article completely glosses over the "oh, by the way if you do this wrong you will ruin your shit" aspect of squats and deadlifts, which is a pretty compelling argument for machines in my book.
A thorough, simple introduction to the Android framework
"Some of the more common questions that I see posted to various Android development forums are from developers curious about, or new to the platform, and looking for a good, light introduction to it all."
Just go to that dark corner. I'm a skinny guy (less skinny now), I was intimidated by that corner as well.

My observation: the vast majority of those "mostly-large-males" are extremely nice, even if they do sometimes make scary faces while lifting and look like Danny Trejo. If you pick the right gym (typically in lower class neighborhoods), they might even critique your form, which is incredibly valuable.
I didn't mean funny as in 'haha'. I guess 'notable' would have been a better choice.
No worries - I'm a relative newcomer to HN but I remember reading the guidelines and thinking, "hey, that makes sense".
It'd be cheaper than a taxi since there's no driver to pay.
Special economic zones are a convenient way for host nations to introduce reforms gradually and in constrained areas. The flow of kickbacks and bribery can continue in the mainland, while new laws and rules are developed in the SEZ islands. Even better, the political oligarchy can receive rents from these new areas if they become successful.
Seth Godin's ratio of actual stuff made to buzzwords invented is staggering.
I'm not reading that until you stop obscuring it with Facebook and Twitter icons. http://i.imgur.com/ZYuHd.png
The article doesn't really touch on cardio much. The general idea of the article is that in the gym all you really need is the basics of free weights. That's the best you can get out of the gym for the other activities in your life which may include all the cardio you need. There's lots of ways to get cardio, but everyone would do well to follow the same basic free-weight program like he lays out.
BuzzFeed Dashboard
Maybe this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHDwKT564Kk&feature=playe...
It's similiar to my dating tactic:
"Want to go for a drink with me?"
"Want to go for a drink with me?"
"Want to go for a drink with me?"
"Want to go for a drink with me?"
"Want to go for a drink with me?"
"Want to go for a drink with me?"
"FINE YES!"
This is an example of my least-favourite type of HN story: "Devs are clever; users are stupid".

Do two things: Comprehend these stories as a description of the impedance mismatch. Design your systems with this data in mind.

To get a feel for how this feels consider the last time you took a car to be fixed and had to talk to the mechanic, or the first time you took clothes to be dry-cleaned. It feels belittling, doesn't it?

Amazing how many people and institutions encounter the mismatch and do nothing about it. It sucks. It sucks = Pain. Pain = opportunity.
I'll start off by stating that I disagree with you whole-heartily about the benefits (or dangers) of lifting heavy weights -- that is when done correctly and with a full range-of-motion.

I think your 3 point philosophy for life-long health is dead-on but I think the second point "move your body through space, sometimes with volume, sometimes with intensity" is too abstract and certainly open to interpretation. Does the hour of pickup soccer I played last night count? (A pretty intense hour of sprinting) To me, yes. To others maybe walking the dog with a brief jog to the door from the end of the driveway is as intense as it gets. I would argue that "walking the dog" doesn't cut it if that is your "sometimes with intensity" definition.

Every person needs to squat and deadlift heavy things from time to time. And that does not need to happen in a gym -- a good sized rock suffices. Doing so will help with mobility, bone density, strength and balance. And if those movements cause injury then they need to fix the disfuctions that aren't allowing proper movement. Not addressing those issues will lead to hip, should and back problems down the line whether they lift or not.
It's like the police's propensity to attack prostitutes and cannabis growers to look 'tough on crime', but not actually take any risks dealing with the serious criminals.
The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman

The internal design philosophy of any creative person completely permeates their work.

Many developers have very little awareness of this. The primary symptom: randomly indented code.
It can be tough being "that guy" in every dev meeting who always asks the same awkward questions: "Do we even need to do this? Are we sure? Can we get by with something smaller?"

Sometimes it's easier just to let people's pointless bikesheds through committee. I'll save my political capital for something I feel more strongly about.
Doron Zeilberger on computer-assisted proofs
Squats, dead lifts, bench presses, those are the Big Three. That's what you absolutely need to do, and if you do them it is where 90% of your results will come from. It's also the only exercises you need to ever do.

Having said that, if you "like" some other exercise, like cable chest presses, dumbbell flyes, standing barbell bicep curls, crunches, or whatever, then fine do them (I do), but do so knowing that the Big Three should be the core of your exercise, and whatever else is complimentary.
At one shop I worked at, the devs just started filtering the output of one tester to the trash. Not that she didn't have something useful to say. It just wasn't worth dealing with the other 99 posts that were noise.
Coaches discourage running on a treadmill - getting used to the ground moving under your feet makes you slow.
> Devs are generally bad communicators

That's a myth IMHO, there is no evidence that this is true.

Besides, I don't think the author claims that "users are stupid", but that they often don't take the time and diligence to make their case as clear as possible, because they lack awareness that the open-source devs are doing them a favor.

Apart from that, I do fear that writing this article probably won't help solving the problem.
Brain scans reveal the criminal mind
Except that people sign up to have Google ads juxtaposed with their content.
> the only similarity between Android and iPhone is the form factor

That's a huge similarity, though. Didn't the original Android plans have a keyboard and look like a Blackberry? And what about the talk about using a stylus with a touchscreen - that talk didn't die until after the iPhone came out.
When I tried to buy about a half-million dollars in gear from them one time (through suppliers, of course), rather than simply delivering it, they tracked their suppliers, put a hold on ALL suppliers doing business with us, had their internal sales guy call me directly, make me an offer higher than the others were offerring me, and hten kept trying to upsell me on more services.
It took me a month to get a quote, 3 months to get an order, and by then the project was cancelled so we didn't buy.

I was astonished. Nothing wrong with upselling - but here I was, a guy who LIKED sun gear, with cash ready to go, and a product list, the easiest sale in the world - not that big, and for some reason sun had to get all involved and screw themselves out of the sale.

When someone comes to you knowing exactly what they want, ready to pay, SHIP IT TO THEM!

It's no surprise they failed.
National People's Congress of China
The "Two Meetings" between the National People's Congress (something like a lower House) and the People's Political Consultative Conference (something a little like an upper House) are going on at the moment. I find the details of China's legislative body, and its evolution over time, pretty interesting.

Edit: I copied and pasted, but somehow the apostrophe disappeared http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_People's_Congress
Cloud Computing: What is it?
Allah akbar!
Fear has changed sides in the Arab countries with authoritarian regimes
Main Page/elog:elog2 - Gpg
Mobile site with readable font size!
I don't think this article assumes "users are stupid"--I understood it more as "many users are bad communicators". I also don't think developers necessarily have an unrealistic assumption about the technical understanding of their users. That doesn't mean that it doesn't get frustrating sometimes.

Your mechanic example isn't convincing to me (I don't remember ever feeling belittled talking to a mechanic or dry-cleaner). Trying to debug a problem that someone else is having with your code is more like a mechanic trying to fix a car solely by talking to the owner on the phone while the owner, who doesn't know the ins and outs of car maintenance, has the hood open and is holding the only wrench he owns.
Yeah, if you're gonna right a smug article about your profession, at least get the lingo write.
Surgeon creates new kidney on TED stage
I appreciate the time you guys put into writing about your experience. Thanks for that.
"a dynamic range of about 120 dB"
Sound of a jackhammer at 1m has sound pressure level of approximately 100dB (relative to 20 uPa). Leaves rustling gently in the wind have sound pressure level about 10dB. If our hearing actually had 120dB dynamic range we'd be able to easily hear the rustling of the leaves while jackhammer is pounding right next to us, not to speak of normal conversation which roughly has level of 50-60dB.

As an analogy to radio equipment we might say that human ears have automatic gain control which spans 120dB (or as audio comparison we can adjust the volume on that span) but the range which we can discern two sources (the instantaneous dynamic range) is about 30dB or less.

Also about the frequency resolution of the ear vs the eyes the bandwidth are on a completely different scale. Visible light spans about 380THz which means that the bandwidth of that signal is 19 250 000 000 times the bandwidth spanned by our ears. You cannot do just simple octave based comparison as the amount of information is not dependent on the amount of octaves but only on bandwidth. You are correct in the sense that the eye uses this information in quite limited fashion, however the actual processing is not on normal frequency domain but on spatial domain (eye is not just one sensor but craploads of them).
In past years, the talks have gone up slowly during the year after the conference.
I thought it had to be static, but no: the captcha actually changes at each page reload.

At least it will weed out the non-mathematicians easily...
Need a Photoshop mockup for every single screen, including the “I forgot my password” dialog and the Terms of Use page

Works both ways.

I've been doing work for an agency who insist of sending me this stuff. We need to add a new field to a form and I'm told to hold off while the design department sends me a new template. It's horrendous but it's their procedure and they won't deviate. I'm paid enough to grin & bear it though.

I'd like to think I'm good at both. I'm no artist but I can make a nice looking site and I can code too. But I find I'm actually worse off for telling people that. They assume 'jack of all trades eh?'. Maybe they're right :)