skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi, I made the site. Your criticism and the other points in this thread are valuable to me - so thanks.

When writing the site, I showed the before & after to a few non-designers, and every single one had the impression that the right-hand flyer looked better. In my opinion, that's key - if something _looks_ more understandable, it's more likely to be read. If something _looks_ hard to digest, people aren't even going to bother.

The readability may look like an issue on the site, but when the flyers were actually printed, the apparent problem no longer actually looked like a problem.

@Jabbles - yes, the font differences were a large difference that I don't mention anywhere. Using a sans-serif font for the headers and a serif font for the text creates more contrast, making the headers stand out more and making the headers and details more easily distinguishable from each other.

A number of the points made are excellent ones, and I wish I had incorporated them. For example, the contact information should have been way, way more prominent. Capitalizing the URL is something I've never considered in the three years since I made the flyer, but I can see how that would help.

Thanks again for all your criticisms. I've never created a site like this before, and man, was it difficult for me. I spent at least 200 hours on it, going over the text and examples over and over again. There's much, much more I'd like to do with it, and there are many flaws I want to address, but for now I feel like it's more important that it's just out there.
Thanks! It was very much inspired by The Non-Designer's Design Book.
having "scored" an onsite in 2005, the phone screen was the easy part.
Being from Seattle, I may have a bias here, but the best way to compete with Starbucks is to not to try to be like Starbucks. Starbucks is great for mom and pops because it introduced coffee to a whole new generation; coffee not just for breakfast or dessert but coffee all the time in large quantities. But as Starbucks evolves into McDonalds, this newly caffeinated generation will eventually seek out something better and that's where mom and pops can succeed.
What's with this trend of people in HN using IOS instead of iOS? IOS means (among other things perhaps), Cisco's operating system Internetwork Operating System used to program routers. Please use the correct names. (It's not ambiguous in this case but it would be really helpful)..
your design certainly looks more "current" and "professional", which people will class as better.

but that's not the same as more understandable, which is something you can actually measure. for example, you can do random trials, showing people a flyer for a short length of time and then asking questions about it.

so you're obviously capable of making something that fits in with current taste. but you haven't proved that your version is more understandable.

if you want the cachet of a "scientific" justification for your design then you have to do the science. tacking on an assertion doesn't really cut it.
Agreed.
I think the ratio design/information is too big for the one on the right.
Yeah... if I were doing the flyer again now, I probably would eliminate the circle, and make the contact info larger, spanning the two columns.

Initially, when I was making this site, I wanted to have an area for people to have conversations about it, in part so I could explain all these little details. There's a lot I wanted to explain that I just couldn't fit into the site because I thought it would be too tangential.
I totally agree. Starbuck's legacy is that it introduced the "latte" to the general public. Thousands of businesses around the country are piggy-backing off this new found customer base of latte and frappuccino drinkers. Where was coffee consumption 20-30 years ago?
I've been turned down by Google after the infamous day of interviews; passed all of them with flying colours except the last one, given by an arrogant kid whose every question seemed like entrapment. Recalling the warnings i got from my HR recruiter in the first minute of the day, i have a feeling she knew what i was in for.

I too had an extremely bad vibe about the campus. The ambiance on the whole premises is the same as school : careless playful youth (even coming from the senior engineers), toys everywhere, and the implicit deal that Google will give you everything if you give it everything. I felt a perverse temptation to give in to this, although i knew very well this attitude generates a dependence relation in the employee.

After working in the austere world of avionics for over 10 years, i found it absolutely shocking. But from their point of view, this is a winning combination. It is just not conductive of hiring senior employees, of which they probably have plenty supply anyway.
Ask HN: What's wrong with the landing page of my website?
I built an aggregator of programming stuff, which provides to every user a personalized feed of posts according to his interests. Users have the option to submit links, notes, code snippets and discuss them. The key feature is that you see only posts that are relevant to you.

It seems that the landing page has some concerns with explaining this idea.

Could you please give your feedback about it?

Website:
http://tagmask.com

Thanks
29.04.2011 New UFO Ovni under the International Space Station
DIY Computer Science
Nice concept for self learning Computer Science... though the site needs more content.
Probably ancient China.
Not sure if I can help or not, but feel free to contact me by email and I'll see what I can do.

My biggest recommendation, since you are implementing a lispy language, is to implement macros as soon as possible as this will let you implement most things within the language itself - you only really need a dozen or so built-in features to implement a lisp (except, of course, for performance you may want to add more - but get it working first, then get it fast!) and everything else can be built up from there.

You should also take a look at the source code to a (toy, non-compiled) scheme implementation - they are often extremely small and simple and may give you ideas. If you want your language to be compiled (ahead of time or JIT), I would recommend LLVM.

In any case, I'd be interested in hearing about your experiences, so perhaps you should write a blog post or something when you get it working.
Clickable: http://tagmask.com
The github repo is available to anyone interested: https://github.com/flyingmachine/clean-up-your-mess
Getting to do what you love, with people that are awesome.
Change Your Brain
My weekend project: A Twitter app for the current general election in Singapore
In this posts case it is down to HN automatically capitalising submission titles.
How to remove Computrace Lojack
I agree. The right side image has sub heading fonts that keep 'popping out' as you read the right portion ('regular classes' and 'come visit'). It interrupts the flow of reading and visual appearance.

The left side image uses bold to highlight these sub headings, and the smaller font size maintains a readable flow.

In my opinion, the context of the sub heading/text has not changed enough to warrant such a large font.
It's worth knowing the back-story to Kuler as it relates to another great color resource named ColourLovers:

http://www.colourlovers.com/web/blog/2007/07/06/for-the-reco...
Except for retain cycles. Which are easy to cause with blocks, and even without blocks can make dealing with thread-safety near impossible (think weak referenced delegate and race conditions between its -dealloc and messages that are being sent to it).
All very true! I am taking a break from this site for the time being, but when I revisit it, I plan on:

* Creating new before & after examples from scratch, hopefully with fewer flaws

* Adding a section on going through the process of redesigning something

* Adding more resources

But no, I'm probably not ever going to do the science, unless somehow I get paid for the time I spend doing so.
My selection of top iPad 2 apps
... you can get apple hardware without paying for OSX?
Will Israel's Electric Cars Change the World?
I find it disappointing that there wasn't a single mention of a leather wing-backed chair, or "sitting cushions", or incense.

Also, interesting that the author thinks architecture has always been about aesthetics, not psychology. Do you think the Greek & Roman temples were only about aesthetics? I think their largesse was definitely designed to take your mind somewhere else; to make you think of the heavens; to expand your mind. Same for the great cathedrals of europe.
Wow, this is true care for your customers. And kind of acknowledgement where we're heading with GPUs.
Great opening:

In the introduction to Start-Up Nation, Dan Senor and Saul Singer's best-selling paean to Israeli innovation, Agassi was the soft-spoken software wiz who had a brilliant idea and a terrible time locating a backer. That doesn't seem to be a problem anymore. "Not when you've digitized the most expensive molecule on the planet," he says. "We've digitized oil." He pauses. "I'll put it this way: We have people from China here".
As an American living in Australia, I find Australians as a whole are often more clued-in than Americans regarding US political matters. (They're also far more pragmatic and less idealistic about politics in general.)
you could look at a/b testing. it might be interesting to learn how to set that up... (not sure how you'd use it to measure this particular case though)
"Better" doesn't necessarily mean more readable or understandable. I'm not an expert by any means, but the flow of the text on the right is a bit disconcerting (e.g. spacing of "Regular Classes" - half of typography is negative space), not that it's better than the left. Would recommend reading http://www.webtypography.net/ ... a lot of it won't apply but some of it is very important, and the author does a good job explaining how to implement these principles in CSS. When I first read it, I was amazed by how much thought goes into simply spacing and sizing text.
If you follow those "easy rules," how do you handle race conditions between weak references held to avoid retain cycles and the execution of those weak reference's -dealloc methods? There's nothing to stop the weak reference's -dealloc from racing with messages to that weak reference.

Or, how do you handle the fact that -dealloc can be called on whatever thread calls the last -release, even if you make an effort to only send messages to an object on the main thread (Which will trigger implicit retain/release unless you're incredibly careful). Almost all of the GCD examples out there are subtly broken because of this.

As for GC, I look forward to actually being able to use it on iOS.
If you take the time to read the recently passed legislation in NZ, it's big media's wet dream. Presumption of guilt: check. Bypassing of due process: check (fucking kangaroo court tribunals). Three strikes and termination of Internet access: check. Passed via "emergency" Christchurch earthquake session. The whole thing stinks of Washington arm twisting.
Too much text. Distil the value proposition of your service into a single sentence or two and put it in a nice big font so that I can get the gist in a couple of seconds.

The extent to which you already do this isn't really effective:

"Your personalized view of the programming world"...

doesn't mean anything to me. Plus you've used a relatively soft colour to this header - which doesn't really attract the eye all that much.

If the value proposition at a first glance seems interesting to me - then I'll expend the effort in reading more text.

my two cents...
Scott Adams and The Problem of Sock Puppets
The Casino Next Door
The point of talking of things like royal wedding, American idol etc. is exactly that it is a harmless common ground for starting conversations with people you don't necessarily have much in common with. Like the weather. It is not that most people are that interested in the particular topic, it is just that you need to start somewhere if you want to find out if you have something to talk about.

How do you find out if people are "actually interesting", if you never start talking to them?
What is the worst piece of design ever done?
Put the text into bullet point lists, they are easier to read visually, they separate ideas clearly and it's easy to jump to the next item on the list.

Consider an iframe or a sample of http://tagmask.com/posts if you don't want to actually have that as a homepage. People are much more likely to "get it" by showing an example rather than a description.
It needs some graphics and touching up to look nicer.

The very popular style for this type of website is to have the Your personalized view of the programming world and sections underneath in a highlighted box with the other elements, Use your personal posts-filter, etc, as small, clickable boxes underneath.

See: http://tweetingmachine.com/ (not the best example, but first one I can think of)

hope that helps, cheers
Except this article is from 2009, and concerns itself with why Apple would stick with Objective-C in the first place...
> Assuming that while loop is in your bootstrap FastCGI script

Yes it is.

> For most web frameworks, the change should be minimal and straightforward

Indeed, it seems so.I'll try it out.

>No, they got a performance boost with our preforking standalone HTTP server,

I was talking about these lines in the article, where Starman is not used at all:

--------

I’ve codenamed the project “PlebGUI“, which I think aptly describes the way it makes it possible for the little people to run WebGUI on low-cost shared hosting.

And it actually works. Take for instance plebgui.patspam.com, a demo PlebGUI site site running in FastCGI mode on HostMonster (the prototypical low-cost shared webhost).

---------

Even though, the application did have even better performance via Starman but it is more a server matter than a PSGI related matter.

>fastpass [...] is XS dependency free (unlike FCGI.pm and CGI::Fast) and the performance is still the same with FCGI.pm, roughly like 4000 requests per second on my laptop, with a simple HelloWorld app via an nginx frontend. I guess we could do even better by doing optional XS parsing with pure perl fallback as well.

THIS is interesting.
在上海，无法前往，祝活动成功！
Kavita Radheshyam goes Nude Topless
"I'm familiar with parser combinators, but not the Attoparsec or other libraries. Furthermore, I have limited Haskel experience, so I'm struggling to read this. In particular, the use of symbols and overall terseness are hard to get through. I'm also really uncomfortable with the order of operations of all these operators."

This is why I've never identified with "code should comment itself".

I'm not afraid to admit it: I am a dumb programmer. As a dumb programmer, the only way for me to be a good programmer is to be effective.

To be effective, I need to minimize the "time spent understanding code" phase of software development. Furthermore, I will likely be working within a team.

The opposite of that is to be writing "prototype" code --- code which is written to explore the problem space and to gain a better understanding of specific patterns to best accomplish a goal.

But once the prototype phase is over, all of that code is deleted, and is replaced with commented code. (If possible, I try to explain each step of the algorithm in English, first, and then write the code. This is slower, but results in far fewer bugs and a more solid foundation.)

I look at it this way: when my life ends, either I will have gone as far as my own brain was able to take me --- or I will have gone as far as my team's brains were able to take us. I'm willing bet my life that teams of "less brilliant" people are more effective than individuals of excessive brilliance. I write my code accordingly.

-------------------

That said, there is no excuse for laziness. Even if I am merely "competent", it's important for me to strive to be brilliant, even if I'll never attain it.
One thing I noticed when looking at the two fliers and hadn't considered before, but which didn't seem to be spelled out in the article is that design for fliers is in some ways fundamentally different from design for web pages.

We're only ever seeing web pages from one distance, but a flier has to first call attention from a distance and then when someone comes close give the information needed for them to do something about it.

The original version, when seen from a distance, could easily be mistaken for a demonstration or a movie or such, since only the picture and title are in very large and distinct fonts. The new version, by contrast, has "Beginner Class", "Regular Classes", and "Come Visit" popping out making it clear to someone walking by that the cool stuff in the picture is something you can learn rather than just see.

And once the attention of the potential customer has been caught and they stop, then they can read the fine details.
Cool, only 70 lines!!

(plus a ton of libraries)

j/k ;-) Actually, I like this - it shows how cool Haskell really is! No, wait - it shows how cool Lisp really is! No wait... I'm confused... :-)
I have upgraded and a all of the CPU hogging problems I have been suffering recently have gone away. I am very happy with the upgrade so far.
Strangely enough, it's not something I'm comfortable talking about. This is why not many people know about it.
Key points from the conference summarized on reddit's /r/gaming: http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/h1anz/key_points_fro...
If so many people who are willing to use the app are inherently confused by the use case, isn't THAT the failure point?

I don't remember being confused why Friendster was useful when it ushered in social networking. It worked because the use case was obvious.
True, true - but with funds and 5-10 years, surely we could ramp up a serious shot?
Me personally? Lua. That language is as simple and as rugged as a cockroach.
We did this for about 2 months (on Friday nights) at my current organization, but then the guy who organized this got busy with something else and no one else picked up the initiative.
The predictor should send his decryption key, after prediction was successful.
Sorry if that sounded like badmouthing. Just a comment--I realize I don't have the proper context.
Since you can't see votes, pretty please yes, this.
The Joy of PICKLES (a PHP Framework)
The thing is, nearly nobody used Cocoa from Java. And when they did, it usually sucked.
Wow. I don't think Sony could be handling it any better than that. Bravo.

(Yes, they were incompetent for letting this attack take place. I am merely saying, in the wake of the disaster, there is no better way to handle it than the above.)
I wouldn't say Blu-ray has much to worry about on the "blur-ray" front. Plays on words like that are damaging when they call attention to real or perceived weaknesses in a product, but while I can think of a lot of mean things to accuse Blu-ray of, blurry simply isn't one of them.
It's not immediately apparent to me where my tags will select/filter content from. HN? Twitter? Everywhere?
Non Profit Web design
Our Nonprofit Website Solution includes a variety of integrated online tools and services designed to meet the needs of non-profits. From non-profit website design and web publishing tools, web marketing, and more, we have everything a non-profit needs to maintain a professional website and start building capacity quickly and easily.
As others have already stated, you need to make the important info stand out, and cut the rest. Read a few design blogs to get some tips.

Aside from that, how is tagmask different from reading your favourite programming reddits? i.e. reddit.com/r/python+django+haskell+ruby+rails ?

reddit has more features, is easier to use, and has a larger community.

How is tagmask going to differentiate itself?
Whoa, didn't know there was any of HN community in Beijing. Pretty cool. I'm definitely in!
>When discussing something with some one there are occasions when I'm genuinely curious as to why they have a certain line of reasoning. I want to ask "why do you think that?" but it always comes off condescending.

Don't use an insulting or accusative tone, use a curious tone. It makes all the difference.
Interesting. As an American, the British spelling "Colour" always seemed classier to me than "Color".

So it's interesting to find an example of the "opposite": As a non-American, "Color" is strange to you in the same way "Kuller" would be strange to you.
As someone who's never been able to get the attention of TC, this quote bothers me:

"The team here at TechCrunch will give Color all the mulligans it wants to get things right. They can swing and miss all day and we’ll still be here in the stands, rooting them on."
Ah that stinks, sorry :( It's awful having to wonder "what if". Plus, the on-site interview is an experience in itself.
Thank you for suggestions. I think I should make the demo of a posts filtering, which will allow visitor to try Tagmask in action without registration.
Common Lisp - Lazy Evaluation in Tic Tac Toe
Wait, in the US, we have a "budget crisis" that's letting us seriously contemplate de-funding virtually all social programs, we're in 2.5 wars, and we've got money and time to waste on "intellectual property" and diplomatic arm-twisting?

What a load. Something's fishy.
I would get rid of the full text. Create a few sliding banner with h1 headers with one including a sample of how it looks then move explanation details in a separated "How it works page" available as a top nav link.
Design is subjective. To say something is clean vs messy is to not understand that. To create effective design is to use the elements and principles of design effectively. Clean is not an element nor a principle, it should be the end product of something well designed. "a guide to visual design" IMO should consist of explaining the elements and principles of design in a way that non-visual thinkers would understand. I highly recommend reading, "Point and Line to Plane" and/or "Art and Visual Perception" if you have any interest in design, they are great text's that explain the underlying psychology of visual perception. One is written in "Whacked out art speak" and one in "laymen's terms". Ironically the harder to read of the two is 2/3 smaller in size.
35% isn't much to pay in taxes compared to other counties.

If you earn enough in Sweden you will end up paying a total of close 70% of your income in taxes. (income tax capped at 56% if I recall correctly and the rest if VAT etc)
Definitely. To me, the following each makes the design on the right less readable:

1. The box around the picture draws your eyes more, as does the circle added at the bottom, but neither of those elements provide important information, they're simply distractions.

2. The fonts used are harder to read.

3. Removing the lines in right column slows your ability to parse the information.

4. The address, phone number, and website, some of the most important information, no longer stands out at all.

Some of the alignment changes on the right are better, but on the whole, the original is much more likely to get peoples' attention.
Yes, they exist. Not only do they think ragging on other people is appropriate, they think it's cool to be "up-front" and "honest". I used to interact with people like this on a daily basis.

EDIT: I must mention that spending time with these people can be emotionally taxing. All I feel is uncontrollable rage when I see these people online or at social events. I've spent far too much time and energy thinking about them ...
Climate Change As Religion: The Gospel According To Gore
The left side emphasizes content more like class times while the right has nice headers that steals focus from the important information. At least to me. Maybe I'm more used to these cookie cutter newspaper type ads.