skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Multivariate Testing 101
Great question. The renter agrees to a rental agreement, very similar to one you would see on Rent the Runway or Bag Borrow & Steal (fashion rental sites). The agreement states that they are responsible for any damage to the work. If the damage is reparable, such as a cracked frame, then the fee could be quite low and if it is not reparable the renter essentially buys the work.
In case you're wondering (like I was)...

Xcode is the complete toolset for building Mac OS X and
iOS applications

http://developer.apple.com/technologies/tools/
Ask HN: Selling laptop, how to wipe information?
I'm selling my laptop, and I'm wondering what everyone uses to wipe computers clean of personal data before passing it on.
I agree with you.

My own "disappointment" is not with 'regular joe' Americans, but with educated Americans. Being from a large city in India, I know from personal experience that majority of the people with college education, especially technical education are knowledgeable about things outside their own country at least in a conversational level, if not they want to know more. I cannot assume the same with Americans. I felt astonished that people who have degrees from top technical universities have lop sided and often dated views of the rest of world.

Many time they are not even ready to acknowledge that things can and often are done better outside their own country. The sense of NIH is very strong.
Is there a typo here?

Americans usually think of nature as something that can be altered, conquered, and controlled for people's comfort and use and in order to minimize the effects of fierce weather conditions. In contrast, many cultures accept nature as something they can change or control.
Reminds me of this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj3iNxZ8Dww

I suppose it's technically correct, but it doesn't sound good at all. Especially since they already just used 'Americans' in the title. "People of the United States" or something like that also reads better.

Sure, citizens of other countries in the Americas could also be called Americans, but in reality, if you're trying to actually communicate clearly with other people, rather than score political correctness points, you would not use that term for, say, a Canadian or a Brazilian, because there are already perfectly good, more specific terms for citizens of said countries.

Likewise, if you were really trying to talk about the commonalities of everyone from Alaskans to Argentinians you'd presumably use something like "peoples of the Americas".
Ha, I actually thought the logo looks similar to a cheap hotel/motel chain I saw when I was in the States, can't remember its name but it's not a good association :)

Sadly this is the limit of my photoshop skills for the time being.

Will update my JS to close the overlay on a zoom event, thanks for the tip.
3D FPS in Silverlight
Ask HN: What would make you quit Delicious?
I have a question - if you're using Delicious what would it take to get you to switch to another bookmarking site?

Full disclosure - I founded a social bookmarking site that launched its beta about a month ago. Obviously I'm biased towards loving my baby and not loving Delicious but I'm genuinely interested in why people like Delicious.
I think Germans are the ONLY exception to the rule. Of course, someone will provide a counter example, I'm sure :)
Of a similar note, but comes off very different (to me at least):

Coders at work
http://www.amazon.com/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft-Programm...

I'm more of a fiction kind of guy so I'll have to recommend this:

Cryptonomicon
http://www.amazon.com/Cryptonomicon-Neal-Stephenson/dp/B004R...

(The kindle edition is more than the paperback but if you do want to travel light the kindle edition will definitely be worth the extra bucks as it is one of those thick thousand page mass market paperbacks)
As an occasional stumbleupon user myself, I can say I'm not in the prime mood to book a vacation while using it. You probably prefer 10 people in vacation shopping mode than 300 people in lol I'm bored -mode.
Rick Webb: Yes, it's a bubble
What we do, as UI/UX people, will become a commodity. It's already happened with design and simple web programming, but the quality is very poor right now. Basic economics suggests that it will improve.

You can sit and whine about it, or you can make sure that your product is so vastly better than the competition that anyone who knows better will pay for it.

We're already a step up the value chain from pure designers or pure web coders, but as long as there are more people willing to do the job than there are jobs, you'd better be good =)
All major browsers will now do this for you, with data: urls. Take a look at the examples here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_URI_scheme
I'd consider Illustrator instead. It's vector based, it's great for layout, and boxes are boxes, not a set of pixels are are coincidentally shaped like a rectangle (admittedly, Photoshop is also capable of this, but it's much more limited). It's also intuitive - you move things by clicking on them and dragging them. Pretty much all of the things it seems that you'd like to do would be possible and easy to do in Illustrator. As you said, you're not interested in photo editing.

If you do decide to stick with Photoshop (and they're by no means mutually exclusive, as long as you're willing to pay for both), stay away from old tutorials. Recent versions introduced nice nondestructive things, like smart objects, smart filters, and layer styles. Those are much preferable to the destructive alternatives that we had to use in the past.
I like this simply for the content on the page, not necessarily the actual project (tho it's cool too). It's snarky, self-deprecating, and dryly funny.
The World’s Simplest Cell Phone Has The Perfect Design
The Trouble With Humanoid Droids
How about American irony and sarcasm? Here in Asia sarcasm is almost non-existent.

Also, Americans value humor as a way of showing affection for someone. Whereas in Asia displays of servitude are a sign of affection. For example, if I engage in a humorous conversation with you, that means I like you. Even if I don't pour your tea for you!
Well, you certainly don't sound very open to me. No one expects you to be experts. It's just that some Americans regard America as the central of the universe and never bother to learn about the most basic facts about "the rest of the world".

Many immigrants complain about the ignorance because some americans have ridiculous ,false or outdated stereotypical information about their countries. It's no doubt that America has the most intelligent people in the world but it is also not too hard to find a lot of arrogant and dumb people (maybe including you?).

So just because they are from a mostly poor and illiterate country, and let's say if some americans assume they are hardcore communists if they are from china or they are terrorists if they are from a muslim country or that all indians smell curry, they don't have a right to be disappointed? What does it have to do with their poverty and all?

I know you parents might fight and work very hard to escape their poor nation and come to america in order to give you a good life. Well,you are "American" now and seem to have totally forgotten your root. But at least have some respect. Don't be too arrogant.
One way to do it: every XXX minutes generate a file containing all the data pulled from MongoDB for the past YYY minutes. Have that sit someplace accessible within the Intranet.

Use some XMLHttpRequest on the browser side to pull the data up. Load it up and parse it into arrays and then throw it into a dataTable[0] or some custom Raphael.js [1] stuff. Reload every XXX minutes.

It seems like that if you just generate data on the server side and then do all the processing on the client side, you can keep the load light on the server and still do neat stuff with your data.

[0]http://www.datatables.net/
[1]http://raphaeljs.com/
Some really clever work there.

Add a timeline slider and it's really usable!

ps. for those wanting to read the source more easily,

paste the bookmarklet into http://jsbeautifier.org/
http://castcurator.com/ Mostly just the music stuff I listen to and a few recommendations that I got over the past few days. I will go ahead and add all the podcasts that pop up in this thread and create a HN feed for them.
LizaMoon Mass SQL injection - A lot bigger than what is being reported
This was kind of my thinking regarding sites like eLance and 99designs. When I first saw them I thought they were a great way to connect with designers that have more modest salary expectations. Though there are a handful of problems with these services, you just have to decide if the problems are worth the savings.

But I've been really disappointed by the huge backlash against these types of sites from the designers. There have been a few anti-99designs articles on HN recently and the attitude is like the massive IT outsourcing panics from a while back. The outsourcing came it changed some things but talented people still have jobs. Designers just have to realize the people working for free, or the outsourced design work, aren't their competition. It isn't work they are losing out on, rather it's work they would never have gotten because some people have small budgets, and that's fine. I think there is plenty of work for everyone without crapping on the design outsourcing (crowdsourcing) industry.
"What you did there", besides beat a dead meme-horse was invent words that no one actually uses, as far as I can tell.
Absent some form of Directed Feedback/Learning you could just end up with a large number of equally low quality software. The only way that Quality would emerge would be by sheer dumb luck.

As usual the title and the intent of the post is wildly simplistic. Quantity almost never trumps Quality without direction.
I always keep up with: This American Life (thisamericanlife.org), Radiolab (radiolab.org), Planet Money (npr.org/blogs/money/) and The Brain Science Podcast (brainsciencepodcast.com). Others are more on a per-episode bases.
Hardcore History: http://www.dancarlin.com/disp.php/hh - Best way to describe it is 'geeking' out on History. The host is a journalist - not a historian - but he does his research.
Trivia: These /dev/.udev paths will most likely disappear from Linux systems soon due to http://lwn.net/Articles/436012/, bookending the timeframe in which that system would have been set up.
FitFeud is a web-based system that allows companies to easily set up, organize, and track the effectiveness of weight loss and fitness competitions amongst their employees. In short, it's "The Biggest Loser" for companies.

FitFeud works directly with senior HR, Benefits, and Wellness executives at medium and large companies, as well as partners in the health, fitness, and corporate wellness community.

FitFeud uses competition as the motivation to help people reach their fitness and weight loss goals, and is an easy to implement, low-cost service that offers measurable results for businesses and their employees.

Competition = Motivation. Motivation = Success.

http://www.fitfeud.com
The Best Web Design Goodies of the Week #4
Here’s week no.4: our friends at WebDesignGoodies listed again the best live deals, discounts, freebies & contests from the design & development community. Quite a hot list we think! Let us know your opinion if you have a favorite resource.
Interesting point to note here (since this article seems to float from point to point) is the fact that tesla's battery to wheels efficiency ratio is 88%, which the article states is 4x the average. Seems to me like Toyota's investment in tesla was a better deal than we initially assumed.
RadioLab from NPR in NYC. Interesting stories from a science perspective, with a very cool story-telling format.

http://www.radiolab.org/
I agree with the author's overall thrust: that the new Skype UI for Mac is horrid and that a large company with lots of cash should generally pay quality, full-time designers who can spend a lot of time understanding the product and producing an interface that gels with the user.

What I do take issue with (Edit: and what it seems that others have taken issue with since I started writing this reply) is the following sentiment:

> "Such Design competitions are a disguised form of crowdsourcing, and are extremely insulting to the design profession."

Aside from the point that there's nothing 'disguised' about this being a crowdsourcing exercise, I've seen the similar view asserted around the place that designers should somehow be exempt from market forces. If you can't compete on price (which you can't if that price is free), then do what most of the designers that complain about this stuff can (or at least should be able to) compete on - quality and experience.
The Changelog,
The Dev Show,
Floss Weekly,
Linux Outlaws,
No Agenda,
Startups for the Rest of Us
I normally use a Linux boot disk to boot in live CD and then I format my disk and use an utility that writes random bits on the drive. I can't remember how this utility is called but I think a quick google search will give a lot of results.
The question of free or cheap is important, but not why I would not submit a design to a competition like this. (I'm not a "designer," so what follows are simply general remarks about my personal experience with things like this.)

Software design of all types, including UX, is an attempt to solve a problem given a set of constraints. There are thus three things involved: 1) solving, 2) the problem, and 3) the constraints.

Crowdsourcing solutions emphasizes the solving part while glossing over the problem and the constraints. Even if the "client" (in this case Skype) articulates the problem and the constraints clearly, why do we assume they are doing a good job of understanding what they want? As Einstein put it, we cannot solve a problem using the thinking that got us into it in the first place.

A big part of "creativity" is being able to redefine the problem or to play with the constraints in a novel way. This is not going to happen simply by submitting a solution to a different problem and expecting the client to say, "Aha! We were trying to solve the wrong problem!!" Humans being humans, you need to go through a process of discovery together and see if you can come up with new ways to reframe the existing problem. This cannot be done in a dictatorial fashion by the "client," nor can it be done in a dictatorial fashion by the designer, it must be done collaboratively.

Imagine Skype asked for keyboard bindings to make managing multiple chats easier. How would you go about submitting a design that used Kinect to implement a 3D gestural interface so that users could manage multiple conversations in 3D space using a different part of their brain to keep track of who is having each conversation?

This might not be a good idea, but if it was a good idea, you can't get there through a design competition, you get there through interviewing the Skype stakeholders and investigating what problem they're really trying to solve.

So coming back to this design competition, if I were a designer I would pass. Not because I'd be giving away my work for free, but because I wouldn't be able to do my best work, which consistes of investigating all the problem and the constraints before trying to solve the problem.

NOTE: This has nothing to do with free vs. expensive. A handsomely paid gig to design the best solution to the wrong problem is not interesting to me. I would trot out this exact same reasoning to a client that came to me with a "spec" or set of "requirements" and who offered to start paying me immediately to code a solution.
Japanese.... In Japan being late is seen as seriously wrong.
Firmin, a JavaScript animation library using CSS transforms and transitions
This. Photoshop has plenty of filters for interesting effects, but layers, in my opinion, are where some of the meat and potatoes sit. A lot of times I find myself going back and forth on style changes, such that I was relieved to find the layer styles feature for myself.

I also make heavy use of solid color layers; the color layer is a layer composed of two things--the layer of color (which extends into, conceptually, infinity) and a mask which helps in managing of the area through which the color shows. The great thing about this is that you can change the color of the layer at any time, over and over. You can do something similar with layer styles, where you choose a color overlay for the layer, as well.
Love the design and use of the patterns in the background. What is the business model behind this? Amazon Affiliate commissions?

edit: Added my profile http://www.shelfluv.com/brianbreslin/

you have some css errors with the inputs and hover states over buttons in chrome 10 mac (borders showing, etc)
Don't ever use illustrator for web design. Monitors uses pixels and you need to work in pixels if you expect to do great work. Use Illustrator when you are illustrating.
GDGT is a bit of a different product. Peter Rojas launched Gizmodo and then Engadget, which are both news sites. When he and Ryan Block left to form GDGT they didn't build "tech news site #3" but a community-driven discussion board around individual products.

Maybe the site hasn't reached the user numbers of its "grandparents" - it has a different mission. Through the GDGT Live events Block and Rojas have created mini electronics shows for the users of tech products. It's also a bit of a party atmosphere, but all in nerd fun.

I went to the Boston event in September and saw some interesting products, including a Boxee box. What are the odds one will be set up to test in, say, Best Buy?

The people behind Springpad and SCVNGR were really cool/fun to talk to. You don't get that experience on the web. GDGT isn't Engadget and I don't think it needs to be.
You want this: http://www.dban.org/

By the way, this isn't really an appropriate question for HN.
Have you considered that not all book lovers are Facebook lovers?
Nine Bad Behaviors of Struggling Startup Founders
I've always been partial to DBAN:

http://www.dban.org/
Coffeescript Presentation
Yes that is one obvious (and current) business model.
I imagine this must be quite sad for the band. If they're creating music for any other reason that just pure moneterily reasons, it must be quite weird to first believe that you have tens of thousands of fans listening to your music (albeit not paying for it) only to realize that almost nobody at all have even heard of your band.
I would use this feature for any instance where I try to explain to a new user what kind of tone our community strives for. It would be a way to assure them that I'm explaining this to them for the good of the community, not to garner more karma.
Before somebody criticizes you for soliciting on HN, I'd consider your post an indicator of existence of bitcoin market.

Out of curiosity, how much do you have for sale?
Algorithms are Thoughts, Chainsaws are Tools (on livecoding in scheme) [video]
I have. This is the MVP. Down the line, I imagine people should be able to login using Facebook, Twitter, OpenID, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL or heaven forbid email.
A Call to All UI Designers: You're being disrupted.

There's millions of amateurs and pros moonlighting for extra cash all over the world, and they're all hungrier, cheaper, and want to work whether it's for fun or for money.

For every established designer who sneers at Skype's competition there'll be 1000 who submit and cross their fingers hoping a) their work reaches 10s of millions of people and b) Skype or others give them a job.
Protected vs Private Scope: Arrogance, Fear, and Handcuffs
37signals Podcast, This Developer's Life, Freakonomics Radio, Hanselminutes (in addition to several already mentioned by others).
IPad publishing platform used for Popular Science now released (free download)
I'm not sure it is "untrue" (in the sense that Americans do not place considerable value on punctuality), unless Austrian society is significantly different than German in that matter - in my experience the emphasis on punctuality is about the same in both cultures.
I was looking for the same thing a while back and a friend recommended a book to me called Photoshop: Down and Dirty Tricks (http://tinyurl.com/3hqdumj). For me it was the best advice because I prefer to learn by doing. The Amazon link I provided has a "look inside" feature so you can see how the tutorials are structured and decide for yourself if it would work for you.

It is meant for people who already know a little Photoshop but if you know enough to use Acorn you should be fine.
Cheltenham Science Festival: GCHQ Challenge
Gmail's New Targeted Ads and Privacy
Hardcore History. It's a very good show about various fascinating topics in history, such as the fall of the Roman Republic, the war on the eastern front in WWII, Apache Culture and it's demise, etc.

It's obviously very far from startups, but I think every curious hacker would be interested and there is such a huge break between the episodes that it doesn't take too much time to follow it.

You can download the episodes here [http://www.dancarlin.com/disp.php?page=hharchive]. If you don't know where to start either try show 32 since it is a self contained episode or shows 27 through 30 if you have more time (and the stomach).
I once completed the sale of zioo.com on GoDaddy. I'd managed to hand-register the name for the regular registration price. The money came off my credit card and everything. About an hour later, I got an email saying "sorry, we didn't really get the name, here's your money back"

I was positively gutted.

(For those who don't know the domain space 4 letter pronouncable dot-coms are often valued in the five digit range ($xx,xxx) - that one probably just a few thousand but still a good ROI vs. $10 to register. I'd have been happy to build something fun on it.)

There is a lot of anecdotal evidence that Godaddy does steal names from searches. I spend a lot of time working in the domain space and I hear about it from the pros from time to time.
America isn't the most punctual culture, but there are plenty of cultures that are much more casual about lateness, including some Middle Eastern, South American, and African cultures. Most Americans brush off as much as 15 minutes of tardiness, but in some cultures, 30-60 minutes isn't uncommon. The German student who consistently shows up a few minutes early may be annoyed that fellow students show up a few minutes late, but a South American student who shows up 45 minutes late is going to be immediately branded as lazy or unserious.
Might be a stupid question, but what's that hexadecimal code?
Show HN: My weekend app, iWagerr. Track and share casual bets with your friends
+1 for Cryptonomicon. It isn't the easiest book to get through, but it's very worthwhile.

Another couple of possibilities might be:

The Soul of a New Machine - Tracy Kidder

http://www.amazon.com/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder/dp/03164...

The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage - Clifford Stoll

http://www.amazon.com/Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Computer-Espionag...

Hackers & Painters - Paul Graham (yes, that Paul Graham)

http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Painters-Big-Ideas-Computer/dp...
Since there is already a clearing central for that, I am going to have to downvote you for spam.
Austria, Switzerland, all or most of Scandinavia...Probably most or all central/north/north western European societies.

IIRC Australia is also the same.
Hey guys, do let me know if my weekend project would be neat to use! I'm wondering (hoping!) if my app might be interesting to some people here (who are active on Twitter).

What: iWagerr makes tracking and sharing casual bets with friends easy. Use iWagerr to challenge your friends on Twitter and keep track of your win-loss record.

Why: My friends and I found it pretty frustrating that there was no easy way to track or share bets we have with one another (e.g. "I bet you that I can down 10 tacos in 20 minutes or I'll pay for dinner next time!" or "If Chelsea beat Manchester United, I'll eat my socks.").

Link: http://www.iwagerr.com - Would love to know your thoughts.