skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I tried and quickly stumbled learning abstract algebra from this book. I liked "A Book of Abstract Algebra" by Pinter better because it was lighter on the presentation. But maybe I'm just a wimp. This text by Judson seems to be geared towards graduate studens. From what I can tell it's very thorough, though.
Yea, I think this is part of the attitude problem actually.

Many sites are heralded as an example of 'no design necessary' because they lack the eye candy. However, the minimalism of these sites, the layout of results by date (as opposed to alphabetically or something else) the categories they are arranged by, all are part of the design of these sites. Was a designer involved in this? Hard to say, probably not, but were these decisions made intentionally by someone considering alternative choices? absolutely.

I'm not saying designers are the only people who can design. Just that designers are trained and have experience making decisions like the ones I mentioned above. We can - and do - provide value to software.
Welcome to Hackernews, great to see another designer joining up :) What do you work on?
Much better. The VLC design on OSX has bugged me for a long time. In my opinion all the platforms should move towards the model where the only visible window by default is the player and the controls are temporary overlays over that player. One should always strive towards simplicity in design and optimize for the most used features. Most people will be using VLC to play one video at a time so including things like the video queue in the display by default is just time consuming and distracting.

P.S. Not just being a spoilsport here -- I do contribute to VLC, just through libavcodec.
Yes, this. Should've explained that :)
http://desktoppub.about.com/od/designprinciples/a/alignment....

Here's an article for the interested. Often times, designers will use a grid, like http://960.gs/ offers, to help make layouts with good alignment.

Left, right centre alignment refers to the relationship of text and text frame. You can still have alignment relationships betweens photo and text frame, photo and animation, text frame & text frame, etc.
For the record, this has been a feature of VNC/X forever; in fact, it's harder to run VNC on an extant X session than it is to just start a new one specifically for VNC.

It's just a little annoying when Apple finally integrates tech that's 20+ years old and gets heralded as being "ahead of the curve" or "very cool" for doing it.
Mass. company making diesel with sun, water, CO2
I prefer to think of these as rules of thumb rather than principles. I agree with the spirit of pretty much all of them, but to me, "principle" sounds like one of those rules you're never supposed to break. There are often trade-offs to following these sorts of rules, and sometimes the cost is too high or the process too idealised for real world projects.
An Ode To Typography themepack for Windows 7
that is my writing style. i was also in a hurry because i needed to get my kid to basketball practice at 10am, and i started at 7am.

usually it takes me about 5-6 hours to include the "full insanity" version with fonts, pictures, etc.

(anyway, i'm obviously an acquired taste... i won't be offended if you think i'm offensive.)
I don't get the criticism. Actually seems like one of the most interesting YC startups yet, IMHO. A simple proposition for the user and the charity, and a simple revenue model built in.
"Jimmy Iovine Does Not Understand Math."

Fixed that title for you.
It's not just you. Every new thing that's any good is usually a retake on something already though about in the early computer times. But some of the implementation back then were crude. With the reinvention there is usually a rethinking and polishing.
My general view is that I don't mind something being a memory hog if it's using that memory to make my experience really fast (which chrome does).

Being a memory hog AND being slow really just makes me hate the software (Firefox - although I hear it's getting better in 4+ which I have not tried).
Ted Turner Made No Excuses
I remember the Haskell community actually sat down and had a community discussion about laying down design guidelines for the entire Haskell ecosystem (all packages should use so and so a color scheme, this is our logo, this is our font, etc.). I find Haskell sites almost always aesthetically pleasing, and it was probably due to conscious decision by the community to establish design standards.

I think OSS in general could benefit from giving a designer such broad-brush authority over an entire ecosystem.
Remember that X was developed at MIT to run MIT labs, and that X was originally meant for thin clients that accessed programs in much the same way described. This stuff has been possible for a long time. VNCs are actually much easier to use with its own X server in most instances than running on a living one.
How 'The Social Network' Saved Mark Zuckerberg
Not familiar with the programs at either university, but consider that Stanford is one of the wealthiest private institutions in the world against the budget crisis that the state of California is currently facing. Financial security goes a long way in ensuring that you're in an environment conducive to working on your startup.
I can vouch for Reddit's community being a result of it's "poor design". Most people are turned off by giant walls of text. Reddit is actively trying to build a community out of people who are going to take the time out of their day to sort through a wall of text.

In this way, Reddit's 'poor design' serves a function of repelling undesirable people. If you want to repel people then go for a non-design. If you want to attract as many people as possible, or attract people who are turned on by something other than a wall of text, then hire a designer.
1) Bento.

2) Applescripts do not compile to machine code.
> vector tools are designed to make high fidelity artwork

This might be a valid point against Inkscape, but not against OpenOffice Draw.
I haven't tried learning from it, but it doesn't seem to be higher level than Fraleigh's classic book on Abstract Algebra, which I use and is intended for undergraduates.
If you're interested in learning about some design concepts, I highly recommend reading The Non-Designers Design Book by Robin Williams:

http://www.amazon.com/Non-Designers-Design-Book-Typographic-...

It's a quick, easy read and the concepts can really apply to any kind of visual design. Any of her other titles are also excellent.
It doesn't matter how old the tech is. Apple is bringing it to the masses and nobody has done that before. Why? As you said it's 20 years old.
The Soviet History Primer (illustrated for children and diplomats)
I've forgotten how cool the sky is at night. I'm currently in Montreal, Canada and it's got a horrible problem of light pollution.
I am trained as a designer but I actually work as a lookout observer for Alberta Forestry. I spend 6 months a year alone in the woods. Designing and illustrating fills some of that time :)
What happened to "real world" startups?
You would probably not have a lot of luck using this on private trackers, as Vuze isn't whitelisted on most of them, plus it's a modified version.
Review my startup, Lettur
I've never met you so I can't possibly think you are offensive but I do find your writing style a bit harsh to read, some people obviously like it though.
Balancing a start-up, a day job, and an MBA
That's where the inspiration came from, but it was easier to monitor time use than to measure the cotinine levels in someone's body.
Compare and contrast this attack on anonymity with Glenn Greenwald's:

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/index.html...
Great work! Kind of difficult to believe though that you did it all within a weekend. (I'm not doubting.) :-)
It's true, in trying to come up with a presentation on C++, it's really hard to find anything new to say.
I pulled the classic more then once:

mv stuffwithoutbackup tosomeotherplacewithatypointhepath

curse at typo

rm -rf tosomeotherplacewithatypointhepath

curse more vigorously
يوتيوب توم وجيري
Why Startup Demo Day Is Like The Film Festival
The Velvet Rope Entrepreneur Test
That's fine. Apple "sells" HD movie rentals (~3 GB) which are only useful for 24 hours.
What exactly is the context on this? Am I right in gathering he did something silly and people are attacking for it?

Welcome to the internet....
Because Canada doesn't share a border with Mexico. The southern US border states absorb almost a million Central and South American peasants every year - people who don't speak English and may not have more than a few years of elementary school.
I have been experiencing wierd crashes with some HTML 5 games where the whole browser crashes. It's funny because they are supposed to be standalone processes.
Some great points. Zuckerberg has really weathered the storm well. I am glad The Atlantic points out the split between what the generations think of Zuckerberg.
Look at the new Gizmodo/Gawker redesign: the 'tabletification' of some websites is ridiculous. I've completely stopped using their entire network of blogs because of how unusable the sites are on a normal PC.

Another thing I hate: Middle-Click Hijack. If I left-click on a link/picture, fine, you can do whatever you want. Fancy javascript, lightboxes, the whole jazz. But if I middle-click that same link, by god it better be opening in a new tab in the background. No exceptions.
Maybe also: have a designer high in the project hierarchy whose responsibility it is to merge design packages.
So at an average of $1 per user/month, and a charity giveaway designed to generate at least 15,000 users, the $150k should be recovered in less than year. Good stuff :)
FWIW, DNA analysis is not, itself, infallible:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727733.500-fallible-...
This would kill it for me. I've spent my whole adult life learning to use graphite and charcoal, oil paint and clay. Having my entire effort refused because I don't know what a GIT is just doesn't work for me.

Having communication barriers like this absolutely would stop me from participating. I have no problem with being asked to redesign a logo over and again. I would love to feel like I belonged to a community and that I mattered. But having a developer jack my work and screw it up because it was easier than asking me to do it would completely scare me away from open source projects.
This blog seems like a parody of western civilization.
Kernest lifetime membership sale
It may be interesting to note that probably any computer manufactured in last five years is perfectly capable of playing 24bit PCM at ridiculous sample rates (like 192kHz) as even low-end audio codec chips for Intel HDA support that.
That's overly charitable of you. Why would he bring up the last 10 years of VC returns unless his argument was, "look how bad traditional investor schools of thought are, anything else that kinda seems to make sense must be as good or better". But that doesn't follow.

The past 10 years returns of VC's investment strategy says nothing about his strategies relative performance.
Cheap, local drink specials throughout North America | DrinkOwl
This article is completely based on hearsay. I'd like to have seen the actual emails from TED, rather than just the authors translation/understanding of the responses.

At the same time, I think the authors comments about Group A and Group B is a huge opportunity for another conference.

He seems to think that all these 'group B' people are people who don't have anything interesting to say. How many people get up on stage at TED and make amazing presentations, and all of a sudden are then part of group A.

The Group B's should be searching for other Group B's who have amazing stories and knowledge to share. That is why everybody is supposed to be at the conference.

I've got a few friends who have an incredible nack for meeting ANYBODY and finding out something amazing about that person which adds to their understanding and appreciation about life.

The Group A's are just Group B's that you already have some knowledge about.
Facebook and Us: Generation Why?
Mallory MITM proxy for testing
Here's how this looks in twisted (handling exceptions, capturing (but ignoring) outputs, etc...):

@defer.inlineCallbacks
def insertCollection(collection):
for ob in collection:
yield db.insert(ob)

...as much as people talk about the complexity of twisted with respect to async programming, they've really figured it out over the many years of the life of the project.

I agree with substack that you can do this without changing the language, but you do have to get something usable to people at some point.

I think most people who write any code in node.js run into this issue. I am a casual user, but ran into it a couple of days ago and did some research to find that there are many third-party modules I could bring in to do a for loop, but nothing built-in. The old way of doing this in twisted (manually managing deferreds) really turned a lot of people off. By the time twisted got inlineDeferreds and inlineCallbacks, people already had their impressions of how difficult things are.

I still think node.js is fun and viable, but it does need a for loop.
Should we consider using PIMPL

No. Just don't.

I'll say this about C++: the worst thing about it is that each new job requires you to learn what is 'good' and what is 'taboo' at the new company. One man's natural and elegant is another man's obtuse and illegible.
This is beautiful, and I'm a photography buff, but how does this have anything to do with startups or hacking?
Thanks Matt, I just made that adjustment.
Security and convenience at the expense of control and privacy.

I like knowing what's installed on my computer. I realize that I'm going to have to go into the future kicking and screaming.
Another 100 billion reasons why Lake Tahoe is one of the most beautiful places on earth.
I think the root issue preventing more designers from working on open source projects is that, unlike development, design doesn't improve when the work is distributed.

Development is modular – pieces can be added, removed, or changed out for other pieces. Several developers can work on the same project at the same time and not step on each others' toes (esp. thanks to modern version control). This works great with the open source model.

Design, on the other hand, benefits from being unified and consistent. The best-designed projects have one designer, or a small group of designers working together closely. This doesn't work well with open source at all.

This becomes pretty obvious when you compare Mac systems to Linux systems.

Until this issue is resolved (by, eg, open source projects bringing on dedicated designers) the symptoms are unlikely to go away.
> Many designers don't understand the criticism that usually comes around with each modification in open source project. Many developers don't understand how to speak to designers in a polite way (they think they speak normally, but it isn't perceived as such).

Those are some great points, they're discussed in this book: http://producingoss.com/en/communications.html#writing-tone
No need for the quotation marks. It’s news because you can’t do it with out-of-the-box OS X right now. It’s not innovation (the UI might be, I don’t know) but the article doesn’t claim it is.

Technology, however beautiful, often doesn’t matter if many people are unable to use it. It’s news when said technology might become more accessible in the future.
To Apple's credit, they are one of the few vendors of consumer-grade routers who made it trivial to set up IPv6 (Airport Extreme/Express), including tunneling.
windows was open and look where that got us in the 'long term'.

I don't know at what you're hinting at, but openness wasn't Windows' problem.
You're setting up a strawman.

The problem with Windows was that Microsoft, by means of this monopoly, could force its entry into other markets. The problem with Windows is that Microsoft could force the hands of computer manufacturers to bundle it, forcing competition out of the market. The problem with Microsoft products in general were the closed protocols that only worked right with other Microsoft software.

... pretty diseased ecosystem to me

References please.

Secondly, for all its flaws, its openness allowed for the birth of Corel, Adobe, Autocad, SAP, Yahoo, Mozilla, Hewlett Packard, AMD and countless of others.

I want an environment where everyday users
are not afraid of software

You either have a wild imagination, or you're setting up another strawman.

Everyday users wouldn't even know how a computer looks like if the only company from which you could buy one would be Apple or IBM. And everyday users are only afraid of software complexity (i.e. things for which they cannot form a mental model / not working the way they expect to). If you want to save the world for everyday users, build less shittier apps and set a standard in your domain.

This is actually interesting: you obviously are a software developer that built his skills and even reputation by relying on open systems; and yet you obviously preach against doing whatever users want with the hardware they've bought, even if you did so yourself while growing up. Will that "save the children" in the process?

That's a double standard.
> I love Redis a great deal but I can't wait for the persistence issues to be worked out.

Please could you provide links detailing these issues further?

Thanks.
That isn't what I read. To me it sounded like person X put person Y in TED -- but then rich sponser Z saw person Y in a photo, told the organizers this was unacceptable, and now person Y is perma-banned.
Puh-leese. Apple is "bringing it to the masses", where I guess masses qualifies as < 10% of the desktop market, only because Apple has larger marketshare than anyone who has done it before.

This stuff has been part of every Linux distribution for years. People have even written shiny interfaces for it, see remmina or vinagre or any other remote desktop management suite (and yes, these ship with many distributions by default).

That OS X has more marketshare than Linux shouldn't automatically make OS X more "cool" on its own merits; after all, Windows has 8-9x as much marketshare as OS X, but I don't see a bunch of threads pop up lavishing MS with praise every time they integrate a new feature into Windows.

I don't think Apple should be hailed as super cool and great by technical people just for finally getting around to doing something that has been done thousands of times before for decades. I can understand an ignorant person thinking a feature that's not found in Windows makes Apple "cool", but it's silly for anyone browsing Hacker News to ascribe a bunch of street cred to Apple for this.

It's a nice feature and I'm glad to see it go in, it's nice that Apple is adding nice features, but I'm not going to sit here and pretend like Apple is the coolest kid on the block just because they finally got around to writing a semi-normal implementation of VNC, just as my mind wasn't blown when Apple finally integrated workspaces after 15-20+ years of availability on all other respectable WMs. It's more of an "about time" than an "Apple is consummately cool".
Those aren't previous submissions of this entry, but of (in one case) an earlier "Thing I won't work with" and (in the other) the series as a whole, which didn't then include this one.
This is true. There are only a few vendors out there who support IPv6 at all, and those that do aren't consistent with their products.

For example, D-Link supports IPv6 + tunneling on their DIR-615, but only on revisions C and E (not D), and don't support firewalling for IPv6.

However, most do support radvd for stateless addressing, which OS X supports fine. This is also the easiest option for configuration in home networks.
I think some of the contention comes in the statement "first make it work, then make it work well and then make it pretty or fast (depending on what the project is)" and the belief that without good design in the first place it doesn't really work. Leaving design till the end means it won't really have a positive impact on the use of the software.
I don’t want to do that.
So I have no clue about being uninvited from TED, but if you want to sit up front, there's plenty of opportunity to do so. I'm hardly an 'A' lister and I had no problem joining the scrum (which is everyone) at the rope to trot to the front rows for those sessions that I wanted to see closer.

Mind you, I've only been to the one ted (2010) so maybe I'm not the big authority here, but I found 'A' people approachable and friendly and I'd say it was pretty
great.
A useful data point, thanks for sharing!
I finished my PhD and have failed to get interviewed for positions because I'm also bad at puzzles and algorithm tests. Reading this article made me sigh in relief.

Like the author, I was a developer for many years before returning to Education. I designed a few algorithms in that time and I always had days rather than 1/4 hour to think it through. Ironically, getting a PhD is solving a puzzle - just one that takes years to crack.

As I see it now, the puzzles are a 'fitness function' being used to select the best candidates. In genetic algorithms, fitness functions tend to be compromises which eventually lead to a population that aren't quite what was intended. Time will tell if this is the case with the current selection process.
Try peer monitoring/evaluation for all things off-line. :-)
"rsync --dry-run src dest" will show you what rsync would do, without actually doing anything.
Ask HN: "Scammed" by a website seller on Flippa
Back in October I purchased this site for $1600:

https://flippa.com/auctions/109871/630pm-Ebook-Design-Service-w-Adsense-Income----Google-Page-1---REAL-BUSINESS

Some months passed, it always took the seller forever to answer my emails and finally transfer the site.

Fact is he put revenues as estimates on the sale page which were supposed to amount to more than $600.

More than 3 months after I can safely say I had 0 sales and just 4 inquiries (but see later about this).

When I complained the first time that no one was contacting me on the site I received 4 enquiries from @gmail.com addresses within 3 days, none of those turned into a sale.

I suspect he's sending fake hits because google analytics shows 85-90% traffic as type-in, which can hardly be the case.

So it seems that a lot of data in the auction was bogus (revenue and visits mainly), but I had no idea until I purchased the site.

I have tried contacting the seller, who seems a nice guy on the outside, but without any answers in the last 3 weeks.

Is there anything else I can do beside swallowing up the loss and try to promote the site anyway?

Anything else I could have done better in the due diligence phase?

We all make errors, I'm sharing mine so that you know to do better due diligence next time you buy a web property.
I guess sometimes we get caught up sitting at our desk, hacking around and forget to appreciate the world beyond the internet?
I personally always make exceptions for the cosmos. Nearly everyone here spends all their time and their money and their whole lives dedicated to machines, to computers, to glowing rectangles.

It's very good to sit back - even if you're still looking at the computer - and remember what's out there.
this is also good - and, dare I say, better? http://vimeo.com/4505537?pg=embed&sec=4505537
De-spammed link - http://vimeo.com/14718221
A drawing of the molecule (ClN3): http://chemeo.com/cid/31-110-4
just looking at it, you think, ouch! Insane high level of bounds tension coupled with a Cl detonator.
If people can’t hear the difference in blind tests all that talk about the supposedly better sound is utterly irrelevant.