skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This post is nothing more than propaganda to protect established designers from competition (those who are starting out or are just not very good at marketing their skills). Perhaps this was not the author's intention but it is the consequence of his reasoning. I don't think many designer want their profession to be protected by a trade union and this kind of mentality is what leads to it.

I say, if you are not an established designer with a large base of clients, do participate in the contest!
But the thing is titled "Getting to Know Americans", so why bother with an ugly sounding turn of words when you've already crossed that bridge?

I didn't think that "US Americans" was even correct when I posted - it doesn't sound at all right to my ears.

> Chilean, Canadian, Costa Rican grad students who would be annoyed at the implicit exclusion.

Only the ones with a chip on their shoulder.
I'm a big fan of programming to http://jungletrain.net/
As Stalin once said (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin), "Quantity has a quality all its own".
was introduced to MVC by Django, and today it is by far one of my favourite pattern to use in every app/framework that i write ground up. if used correctly, it decouples dependency beautifully, and allow domain experts to work on their area of expertise.

some people might disagree with my belief that domain experts should be focused on their task at hand given the uproar and hype about scrum which i seriously disagree with: of which everyone shares everyone else's code responsibility.

but i'm rambling. mvc ftw!!11
This article talks about "sampling" music. Grooveshark and last.fm are for sampling, downloading is for getting everything..IE: not sampling.

I've heard the argument that most bands don't make money on the albums, only the merchandise and concerts. What's interesting is that piracy has made it this way. When piracy wasn't as mainstream, the bands did make money on albums.

Why can't people admit that they are too cheap to spend money on something they know they can get for free with little effort and little consequences? These arguments have been going on since the mid-to-late 90s and every few years, when the record companies listen to the public and comply with the pirates' demands, the excuses change (which is why you should never negotiate with criminals).

First it was because you couldn't sample music and it was too expensive. The industry listened and songs are now 99 cents (you aren't forced to buy an album) and you can also preview songs (for free) on a multitude of services.

Then it was because artists were getting screwed by record contracts. Now, any artist can sell his music online, without a contract. But the funny part about that is that piracy has destroyed the market for them. Because piracy is rampant, the value of music online has gone down considerably and people aren't as willing to pay for music.

This is the real problem with piracy. It's not about stealing that one song, it's about destroying an entire industry of digital products. The value is only what people are willing to pay and as more and more people know they can get something for free, the closer it is to $0.

But, it's the age of entitlement...
StartUp Britain, One week on.
They're not really comparable. From the article:

no automagic memory management, no garbage collection, no functional programming
A working firefox 4 compatable bookmarklet. The delicious one doesnt work in firefox 4.
I think a lot of the beef with "typical Americans" is with your last type. If you get off the coasts you can find a whole bunch of Americans who are seemingly proud of not knowing anything about the rest of the world.
Death of the Pure IaaS Cloud: Part 2-
This may be helpful:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Canvas_tutorial/Using_image...
Here is a blog post from the band manager yesterday.
http://www.camerontilburypublicity.com/post/2011/04/03/Illeg...

I think the band should be very frustrated. Their manager made a invalid claim without real evidence then decided to take swift and public action. Unfortunately, the manager does not understand the situation and refuses to talk to anyone who may understand it.

What could the band have done here? Was the lack of sales that much more important than the bands popularity?
This is rarely mentioned explicitly, but seems to be behind many of the "green car" claims: uranium "burned" in the power station is CO2-neutral, cheap and plentiful (even in politically stable regions.)
I like the layout - the landing page looks pretty good. A few suggestions:

- While I like the script font in your logo, I think it's a little too hard to read. The letterforms of the "u" and "v" are very similar and could use some slight modification to differentiate them. The kerning is also off - the letters are suppost to connect, but the tracking is too wide.

- I think there's too much movement on the home page. There are three sections that animate (the slideshow, press, and recent activity). All that movement distracts from your call to action. Think about what you want a new visitor to focus on when they first see the page. (This is admittedly not as much of a problem for people with smaller monitors, but I can see below the fold)

- Why not make your search bar in the header wider? Longer titles are cut off.

- I'd shorten your overview sentence ("Share what you read with your friends and discover new books?") and maybe set it in a different color or font to help it stand out. I think this is a very important sentence.

Overall it looks great! Good luck!
A good collective tagging interface is something I'd really like. Give me a bookmarklet that just let's me send something to the site (with a simple, Instapaper-like "saved") and once I've got enough time let me sort them and apply tags. And it should be better than clicking checkboxes... (at least something with gmail-like keyboard navigation)

Don't really care about the whole "social" aspect myself, so it would be nice if there aren't any new features in that area that distract you if you don't need 'em. That includes cluttered interfaces...
defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitOmitPDFSupport -bool YES
Caution: wild stab in the dark here.

"Playing the game" isn't going to lead to $0 for the 'winner' and Skype just rolling out the submission immediately. I'd be willing to be there would be some paid consultation between the 'winner' and Skype, although they probably won't commit to a specific winning $ amount up front.

I understand the basic argument of "they're getting our work for free!". Really, I do. But the notion that "hiring a professional UI designer to fix it" will cut it might not be correct.

First, they've paid people to come up with the current one, so simply paying people doesn't necessarily get the best results.

Second, Skype in particular is used by a huge number of people, all with various needs and experiences. Getting input from a broad range of people informed by their usage of Skype and other apps should yield a final product better than the mind of one "professional UI designer". Possibly not, but the odds are in favor of a crowdsourced approach coming up with something as good or better than pinning this all on one hand-picked by Skype with no input from the community.
Improved Disqus Page Load Performance
Consider transportation of oil and gas (petrol / auto gasoline) along with gas refining versus electricity generation and transmission.

In any case full electric cars allow centralized power generation, in turn allowing more opportunities for clean power.
I still use old school email for signups when I can.
I am Danish but "left" the country 7-8 years ago. The last few months I've been back to prepare for my move to the US, which will be my second time living and working there. It's remarkable how absurd the Danish world-view appears to me now after living abroad in several very different cultures. The social welfare system is more attractive than ever, but the provincialism, the we-are-the-best attitude, and the subtle and overt xenophobia is staggering. One thing I realized with some sadness on this most recent stay is that I doubt I will ever able to move back, if only because the woman I plan to marry would be treated as a second-rate human being.
NASDAQ in open source tech battle with £7bn NYSE bid
See: Arduino.
Shower think
I'm curious as to what everyone's "shower thought" was today? (Refering to pg's idea that what your mind gravitates to in a routine (morning?) daily task can be a good litmus test as to how you are presently oriented in life)

I submit that you keep it to a simple sentence and that you be brutally honest.

Myself?

I keep gravitating to the hope my submission for this round gets me an interview.
Do you intent to make money of it? If so, how do you plan to do that?
I'm not sure how it is for other engineering professions, but for software engineers we have a similar competition but instead of people willing to work for free it's people willing to work for peanuts out of India.
Patents and innovation
I agree that there are lots of issues with alerting based on percentages.

However there are lots of cases where you really do want percentage based alerts. For instance alerting on a random page load being slow is not a good idea. However if more than 30% of your page loads are below some threshold, then you may want to alert. And you absolutely want this to be a percentage based alert, because with absolute numbers you get to choose between never hearing about problems at low traffic times and alerting on every traffic spike.
Ask HN: Anyone using Facebook Connect as the only login option?
Is it worth the lower friction of signup?

What if you really want to know that your users are real people, not fake accounts (e.g. a polling app)?
...my Austrian friend is amazed at the variety of ethnic food available in America. He doesn't see that in his travels, and certainly not at home.
That is true, it's explained in the book. You either need to create massive value for a few or good value for many.
> the supply of currency (...) is controlled by a small handful of early adopters who therefore control the price.

Careful now, this is a big simplification.

The supply is only partly controlled by the current adopters. Each adopter is free to throw more and better silicon & software onto the computations, to get better chances of finding a new hash.

However, the overall pace is moderated by the so-called `difficulty factor', shared by all peers. Which is adjusted periodically so the generation of subsequent hashes doesn't progress too fast -- where `fast or too fast' is about building community of users.

Current difficulty factor, and other stats, available near real-time courtesy of http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/

EDIT: from the bitcoin wiki:

> The network tries to create 6 blocks per hour. Every 2016 blocks (about two weeks), all Bitcoin clients compare the actual number created with this goal and modify the target by the percentage that it varied. This increases (or decreases) the difficulty of generating blocks.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block
What are your fees? Didn't see that anywhere on the homepage.
I think it's actually hypercritical, but I like your name better :)
Betson bahis
Spor bahisleri konusunda uzman olan betson ayrıca poker ve casino oyunlarıda sunmaktadır.
Awesome, until I read down to the end:

Maybe the most spectacular results are those achieved by Dr. Masaru Emoto who proved that sound changes the molecular structure of water. Depending on what kind of sound it “hears”, the water structure consciously shows if the sound evokes positive or negative patterns i.e. emotions.

Zuh?
Show HN: Promotion Platform
Well this would have to be my shortest to develop yet most used and praised application yet.

[link redacted]

I just gave it to my list a little over a week ago, to test and see if it would be something they would enjoy (ugliest website in the world with very little functionality). The result, just under 100 users in a few days. So I decided to go ahead with this one and developed it properly. (just finished tonight)

Essentially it is a platform that allows you to run contests / promotions and use facebook likes as votes (yes it's within Facebooks policies)

I would love the opinion of the tech/business related people (i.e you :) )

How does this app rate and any pointers on getting it out there and possible business models? I am using the freemium model, the plans going on top of that though are what I need to solidify. Any feedback welcome.

Thanks
[name redacted]
Stalin was also convinced that planting crops closer together would yield better results since they would 'cooperate' rather than compete. He was not exactly a pillar of deep thinking.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko
I agree that the project definition is a bit too vague in that page in live.gnome.org. I'll fix that.

My blog post is definitely not targeting people outside the open source and GNOME circles. Maybe that's something I should take into account in the future.

Thanks for the feedback anyway!
Honestly, I'm not sure - hence them not being listed - but I think I'm going to go with 30%. And then for people making >$x a month dropping that in tiers. Thoughts?
12.0.712.0 (79102) Ubuntu 10.10, exactly the same pattern.
He was just linking to the original thread for people to read it. There was no "tone".
Curious. I didn't realise the stream itself wasn't IP-restricted. This could solve issues with flaky VPS bandwidth.
I'd ignore this feedback for now. I'm not saying that these people aren't important, just that you sound like you're solo like me. Stay focused on your product. These folks will eventually come in from the wild once the product is good enough and they realize that you're using fbconnect like they use the power company.
Just curious about what weaknesses you have in mind?
Pinnacle Engines raises 13.5M unveils "revolutionary combustion engine"
5by5's shows are great live as well. They keep a backchannel open on IRC at #5by5 that has a fairly regular crew. Dan's an excellent host in that he's adept at skimming the backchannel for direction and relevant items.
And of course after enabling this for Safari the Mac App Store starts to hang on startup in Certificate check code path. :(

I recently enabled "Logout after idle for [ ] min" setting to be more secure on OSX and LoginWindow just hangs if I leave the laptop idle and let it go to sleep.

Looks like Apple only tests for default and common settings.
I was thinking about a girl, but I wish I was thinking about my next startup.

The "shower thought" is a fantastic barometer of what your priorities are at a given moment. I've tried to be conscious of this since I read that essay.
I'm not so cynical. Voting is supposed to be available to all; the military is a valued opportunity for many young folks with limited means; taxes are sometimes regressive but do follow a curve; rural youth in my area are admitted to colleges by merit.

So "the top 1%" is probably not accurate.
Tell HN: .ly domains starting to have problems (letter.ly)
I got this email from letter.ly:

hello letterly authors,

last week, the agency that we used to register the letter.ly domain was taken down as a side effect of the war in libya (.ly is the libyan top level domain). our domain registration expired, and we were unable to renew it. as the expiration propagated, the site appeared to be dead and emails sent to your subscribers probably bounced.

1) sorry for the hassle. it's amazing that a physical war has affected our service in this way.

2) we are now letterly.net. this means that you will send emails to secretcode@letterly.net instead of secretcode@letter.ly, and new subscribers should be directed to letterly.net/yoururl.

if you have questions / comments / concerns, i am happy to address them.

peace.

- adam
+1 for turning art, an awesome service with some great people behind it. I find that product a lot more appealing than renting/shipping originals without a purchase.
Yes like there are millions of people trained to be programmers that are hungrier than people in the Valley, so everything will be outsourced via elance. (No)

I think everyone can choose how they go on with their profession, so if you don't like contests, it's fine not participate in them. I've participated in contests and even won few, but usually they've been for some non-profit or small a startup looking for a sticker design.

The distinction here is that 1) I don't think Skype needs my help (they could hire anyone) 2) their contest is not about some funny sticker, but the UX of their core product 3) which leads to the fact that Skype doesn't take their UX seriously. Either they're willing to let anyone to design their core product without decent brief or experience with the problems and constrains or they're fishing for some ideas, which will not be implemented.

(Anyway I would be happy with a world of more designers since still most products are crap)
I totally agree with your reasoning although I'd say it only applies to regulated professions (accounting, construction engineering, etc.). Computer/software engineering isn't regulated.
This makes me somewhat more favorably disposed to the Programming, Motherfucker paradigm.

http://programming-motherfucker.com/
You mean that last "can" should be "can't" right? Yep pretty sure that is a typo.
I agree with this, but I haven't actually
been to a country that wasn't like that.

Poland. Supposedly (haven't been there myself) China too.
20-year study: Superior performance at companies that promoted CEOs from within
Clickable: https://gumroad.appspot.com/l/jxrvbk
New £1m fund for tech start-ups
couchsurfing is always an amazing experience. not only because it's a free stay somewhere but because you get to know many interesting people you wouldn't meet otherwise.
This "disruption" you're speaking of has been going on ever since the nineties, when the web became popular.

To many companies design and UX is something that anybody can do, especially software developers and managers/customers with strong opinions, so why hire somebody that does design/UX for a living? Also many other companies hire crappy designers with 2/3 mediocre websites in their portfolio and that are listing photography as their hobby -- for cheap.

The end result is something you can see for yourself -- lots of crappy designs and unusable apps out there.

And crowd-sourcing is the alternative to the above. But IMHO, a good designer is more valuable to user-facing applications than a good developer, and if you want your app to kick-ass, the designer must is a crucial part of the development process.

So it's nothing new really -- good designers will always be paid handsomely, bad designers will have to work harder -- isn't that the same thing happening with software developers?
Not the 'simplest cell phone', it does not exist, and the author of the article is bleeding with excess bias "With his über perfected skills in design..." - also, this article is from July 2010. Not sure on the relevance, this is just a conceptual art project from a design student.

ref: http://www.minimallyminimal.com/minimally-minimal/2010/7/11/...
I'm not sure if you are just trying to make a supplemental point, but this isn't really where I was going.

Either my cell phone drops its signal, or it doesn't. Either my books balance and my checks clear, or they don't. In engineering and accounting, there are absolute and obvious measures of success.

When it comes to UI design, who decides when the design is successful? My boss? He approved the Pontiac Aztek. Lord help us all.
Hm, OK, last time I looked, bitcoin addresses were given in base64.
The patients of foreigner isn't tested by what Americans don't know about their home country, it's tested by what Americans think they about foreigner's home country.
I have been in the U.S. as often as you (like 20 times) and had the same experiences. I go with all your 5 points. I especially like their openness and friendliness. The very positive experiences changed the way I behave when meeting strangers outside of the U.S.

Things changed a bit after 9/11 though, but I can understand that.
It's all about vectors masks and layer styles. Wanna make a sweet glossy button? It's just a simple rounded rectangle vector mask with a gradient fill, drop shadow, inner/outer glow and texture overlay.

Also learn about blending options/modes (i.e. screen, multiply, overlay, etc.) for combining effects.

Also subscribe to the RSS feed of 365psd.com, download each day's psd and figure out how it works.
It's my PGP key fingerprint. Copy the last two blocks and you've got my key ID - with that, my key is fetchable from public keyservers and has my email address on it.
No one has mentioned it yet, but I think the name is brilliant. Clever and memorable.

You might want to get shelflove.com if your site becomes successful, as I imagine lots of typos and word-of-mouth traffic will mistakenly end up there.
My Kaggle partner was trying out Incanter and gave up due to performance reasons. Apparently, when Incanter loads a data set, it loads every cell as a hash as opposed to loading rows or columns as vectors. Correct me if I'm wrong - he would love to use it.
Your argument about not legislating morality is flawed. While the idea that you're trying to make may hold water, abortion is a flawed example.

Let's say that we're playing with the idea that abortion is murder. You say that government shouldn't be able to affect people having abortions because it is a matter of "personal conviction." However, murder denotes killing a living being and, as you stated above, governments exist to "to allow us to live in peace with people we've never met before..."

Now the question becomes is a fetus a living being? OR at what point does it become a living being? Someone needs to make these decisions and for lack of a better option, people turn to the government because if they think that the fetus is a living being then the government would need to protect it.

You have proven that government should absolutely be involved when someone wants to have an abortion because it is no longer a person's personal convictions if she is going to murder another person.

(Disclaimer: I'm not saying how I feel about the subject, just pointing out your arguments.)
A good point. With low weight and maximum torque from 0 to 6000 rpm, it will be interesting to see what performance cars will look like in 20 years.
Top mysql commands
... And If you see Americans in the wild, make sure to stop what you're doing immediately, turn, and walk calmly, don't run, it will only excite them. If you have some food or drink, drop it, it may distract them, and in turn give you a few extra valuable seconds to escape ...
What Google +1 Means for Small Businesses and Site Owners
It might be helpful to remember that historically, most people who came to America as a chance to start over and leave the past behind. People who were doing well usually didn't migrate to the US. In my family, the men's of "We were kicked around until we came here, then we did well," is very strong. So much so, that I'm the first one to travel internationally, except for military service.
the only tutorial you need is:
http://bit.ly/56xOzK
Most smartphones have a mono speaker that only
sends audio to one ear.

Pardon me? I still hear sound with both ears, mono or stereo. And I highly doubt having two speakers so little apart from one another does make that much difference. People who want better experience use earphones. Stereo speakers on the phone is just a gimmick, imho.
Trying to sell the link to Gumroad for $100?! Stop trying to profit off of my work! :D
India is a bit like America in the fact that it is huge and multicultural, and you do not need to leave in order to travel, in my experience.

(incidentally, from Ireland, I must admit I had met and drank beer with several Israelis years before I knew anything about the whole Jewish thing. It's pretty easy to ignore history & geography when you are younger.)