skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wide columns make it hard to read, and too many highlighted words and bullet lists make it feel like an infomercial. He seems to assume that his reader is an ADHD-addled Digg user incapable of reading normal text. As someone who is capable, I find it distracting, and also slightly condescending.
There in lies the opportunity, as soon as a startup gets acquired by one of the larger companies, might be a good idea to start such a company with the same/similar idea.
Gmail Outage or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love GTD Contexts
The iTunes Store: Profit Machine
Along with the business plan:

Step 1) Think of something.

Step 2) ???

Step 3) Profit!!!
If you think something is offtopic, flag it

If I knew what was and wasn't off-topic, I would. in this case there was something that smelled faintly of hacking the justice system, so I didn't immediately jump to the conclusion that this was inappropriate. But OTOH, it did seem irrelevant to hacking computers and starting businesses.

That's why I asked the question instead of simply ignoring it. HN is an evolving site, and many things that would have seem very out of place six months ago are on the front page today.

I'm not interested in retarding progress, I'm just trying to understand where we are going so I can play well with others.
One of the most fascinating things about humanity is the fact that we went through one hell of a genetic bottle neck about 80 000 or so years ago.

That makes us as a whole very genetically similar and sadly the possibility of extinction by virus is real. Not so for chips, just one tribe of them can have more genetic diversity then all of humanity.

But as similar as we are in large groups, the differences between any two individuals can be HUGE. So huge that I can not even begin to imagine what it is like to not be able to learn from repeated mistakes.

Humanity sure is a fun puzzle.
By "talking directly" I mean going to the floor where the software is actually used and hanging out with the users. The bandwidth is so much higher. Talking to them in a meeting room with no computer is almost a complete waste of time.
If you're trying to write software for others, it's going to end up as mediocre and probably not entirely what they wanted.

Stop for a minute and notice how absurd this statement is.

99.9% of all software ever written was for others. Was it all mediocre and "not entirely what they wanted"?

This is the entire reason for systems analysis and requirements specification. You don't need to do any of this for the software you're writing for yourself. You must do all of it and do it well when writing software for others; that's how you insure that it's exactly what they want.
I've been considering getting an Openmoko:

http://www.openmoko.com

Cheers
The power point linked to in the article implies that its from Amazon's own internal data, but unfortunately there's very little substance presented. However, I don't find it surprising that amazon found a high correlation between responsive and overall sales.
Isn't it unfortunate, how few women are trying to start their own companies. Is this just the case for tech. startups or is the same in general?
"I've always assumed that implied in his articles is "my site is how you should do it.""

But why? He doesn't say that anywhere. He doesn't even lay down rules about how you should build any site. He's all about carrying out user testing. He suggests techniques that he thinks are likely to work, but he always qualifies these opinions.

What I find particularly irritating about Hank's blog post is that he seems to me to be saying "useit is ugly" rather more than he is saying "useit is unusable" - the latter if provable is relevant, but Jakob's articles are not about beauty - only usability.
Fortune 50 Marketer In Broad Collaboration With Web Service Companies; Who Is It?
I reacted the same way the first time I saw the site and found it a bit amusing but as I read on what he said made says so I kept reading.

However it is fine from a technical standpoint, it is just not visually appealing.

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

"13 comments:

Anonymous said...

Remember, Dr. Phil has a best selling DIET book.
August 12, 2008 7:27 AM"
Facebook Is Not Only The World’s Largest Social Network, It Is Also The Fastest Growing
Operative Words
This is also where IP comes in... can you reproduce someones product without violating their patents?
At my first development job, I spent a week on the shop floor with the users of our software. I got to see how people actually used the software, and where in their workflow their actions were due to limitations of the program rather than any part of the underlying activity. Afterwards I had a much better feel for how the software worked and how it was being used. Our user experience definitely benefited.
Over complicated business requirements are bullshit.

What if the requirements are complicated?

Go ahead and develop an arbitrage system, a medical claims processing system, or a repetitive shop floor control system without "complicated enough" requirements and see how far you get.
In our anti-intellectual U.S. protestancracy, girls are discouraged from and socialized against both leadership and technical careers from a very early age.
I agree. It's not like Hadoop and a related project Lucene (by the same lead programmer) don't have their own share of problems at some point in time.

(For the record I like Hadoop and Lucene.)
I still remember the concurrency problems Lucene had a few years back which would result in index corruption (a lot of Java programmers experienced this). This was the reason that while I was excited about Hadoop when it 1st came out I was also hesistant. It was by the same guy who didn't fix concurrency problems for his previous major project - would history repeat itself? Well Hadoop first came out it had a similar problem which caused it to fail a task in some scenarios.

All of this may have been fixed by now, but I just want to show that nothing is perfect (regardless of language) and unless you are; you really shouldn't be a jerk about other people's hard work
Second Life has the right idea. Let users earn money by creating content. If you reward users for drudgery, there will always be cheating. Use market forces and subvert human nature to your advantage instead of fighting it.
Captcha, but not for bots, for humans.

The way I found reddit was from a link in pg's essays. And boy was reddit good when pg first linked to it. So we need a place where the only people are the kind who would voluntarily read something like pg or steve yegge.

Perhaps a simple logic puzzle wrapped inside a question about programming? That would require both factual knowledge of programming and at least a modicum of thinking ability.

That's your captcha for posts and voting permissions.

The problem I see is how to generate the captcha question/reply pairs. Perhaps something wiki style?
He did have more than an idea, though. He had a huge audience. And that is why digg didn't follow the usual path of startups that begin as this cartoon.
When you are finished reading the report, can you sell me your copy? I am interested in it too but not $98.00 interested.
Over-complicated is the same thing as too complicated, which does not put a limit on how complicated a system can be.
Branchless Equivalents of Simple Functions
Wow. $40K/month burn? 11 developers? That's a tight budget?
This story is making the rounds, but as presented, it doesn't distinguish cause and correlation. Maybe the people who enjoy running are the ones who were fit in the first place? eg. if you have bad joints and a bad heart, you probably won't enjoy running much. Therefore, runners are healthier...

Of course, the causation theory is very appealing, and I personally find I feel much better, and have greater intelligence, when I exercise aerobically. I definitely intend to keep at it... and suggest you do too. :-)

EDIT from page 2: "People who took up exercise when they were older also improved their health" - that suggests causation, but it also depends on who took up the exercise. Perhaps the people who responded well to it.
Distributed Computing & Google Infrastructure
There certainly are a lot of digg clones nowadays. I wonder if it will be like search where everyone thinks it's a crowded market for a solved problem and then someone with an actually intelligent algorithm comes along and mops up.
Engineers, scientists, philosophers, ethicists and lawyers are taking up the issue

Seriously, what? Are the lawyers planning to sue the climate for changing? Are the philosophers planning to convince the planet otherwise through pure rhetoric? Non-practitioners have nothing to contribute to this discussion.
You are currently forcing people to create an account to see anything besides the Digg-like front page. I recommend you let people explore around before forcing them to sign in. If you really do have something that's different than Digg, you have to let potential users see it.
Let your theme song be your password
This whole critique is based on a fallacy: aesthetics and usability are not the same thing!

I don't see anything non-functional on the linked site at all. It just uses fonts and colors that aren't currently en vogue among the elite web 2.0 cadres. There aren't any background gradients. The text is white on black (horrors!) and somewhat larger than is fashionable these days (though why that should be a usability problem I don't know). It doesn't artificially restrict the text column to half (or less) of the browser width.

The worst thing is that there isn't even a shred of usability evidence anywhere in the post. When the author says that Jakob's site is "unreadable", what he's really saying is that he doesn't want to read it because it doesn't conform to his norms of aesthetics. It's like Picasso refusing to study Da Vinci because clearly he didn't grok cubism.
Why not just say: "Well, I can build the site, but will have to charge extra due to the fact that [reasons]."

Also, you could have just customized an auction script over a few days.

For argument's sake, let's say you built their site and they say it's not half as good as eBay or has even 1% of its traffic, then they'll call you a crappy programmer.

But, even if you built an exact copy of eBay at the time, with a team of 10 costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, it would lack the social capital and trust that eBay retains that no competitor could easily capture no matter how smart (unless maybe an online giant who'd have more valuable opportunities to pursue than go into a war of attrition with eBay). Is Ebay such a poorly run business that it has invited competitors at any point in its life? There are only niche auction sites AFAIK.

Hype is a form of denial or aversion to some deeper truth, that in your situation was a way they could get you to buy into their fantasy.
Because I may not be in the same line of business as my users. For example, my last start-up develops planning software for large agricultural firms. I don't happen to manage a large agricultural firm, nor am I likely to manage one in the near future.

Still think I should be using my own product day in day out?
I interpret the post as just a long rantish way of saying: "If you want to write good software, you've also got to use it."

In my experience, there is a lot of software out there that is deemed valuable by management, produces good ROI, but is despised in some way by its users. I'd say the majority of it. (And I've been in many dozens of shops as a consultant.) That will fly for internal software for a big company, but not for a web startup.

Another way of saying it: really doing "systems analysis and requirements" right puts you in the user's shoes. That's the part that matters, not the artifacts produced by the process. (I'm preaching to the choir here, I know.) In fact, the "systems analysis and requirements" process matters not a bit, only the result, which should be getting the real user experience into the heads of development.
Y Combinator Challenge #17 - New Payment Methods
But Hank's not making an attack on the usability but on the readability. .
Try closing some doors, if you have stuff that you won't use or don't enjoy, get rid of it. Otherwise be careful of ending up with too little stuff and then realizing: "shoot I really need a can opener".

Also, chicks don't dig an apartment that looks like a dorm room and they don't dig sharing a hammock.
Nope, but if you can, hang out with the actual users jockeying the software as often as you can. I know that I learn something new almost every time I go out on the trading floor and have a user walk me through the software I'm writing and fixing.
I believe that Hanks post is stating the you cannot separate aesthetics from usability. If the site is unreadable to Hank it has failed to be usable for at least him.
I'll bet that a pacemaker embedded software developer who personally knew patients with a pacemaker and hung out with them every day would be a whole lot more motivated.
Google "ycombinator demo day" and this is hit #3. Sure, someone that wasn't invited/referred isn't going to be allowed to attend Demo Day, but I thought the list of what the companies are doing this round was interesting. So while the event itself might not be for the public, this info at this link doens't seem to be secret.
Social Network Humor and Tips | TechJaws
The problems are a little more subtle than that, I think. The study was of middle aged runners and non-runners over a 20 year period. It didn't include any elderly, apparently. So the anti-correlation here is between death in middle age (what most people would term "dying early") and running. There is no correlation shown for the lede of the article, which talks about living a "long life". There's evidence that runners don't die young as often, not that they live longer.

As far as causation goes, I don't have too much of a problem with that. The clear hypothesis would be that runners have stronger hearts more capable of dealing successfully with degenerative conditions like heart disease, and therefore they're less likely to die of a very common killer of the middle aged. The hypothesis isn't proven by the data at hand, but is at least very strongly suggested.
I was thinking the same thing-- the article made me feel a bit guilty for not liking SocialMedian when I alpha-tested it.
Most of the time, I reckon, yes.

Does feedburner even have patents?
The best bed compromise (IMO) is a futon mattress on the floor; during the day you can roll/fold it up and store it, as the Japanese do.

As for books, I keep very few; I figure book storage is the library's job, not mine.
Greg Linden used to work at Amazon. From an older blog post of his:

"In A/B tests, we tried delaying the page in increments of 100 milliseconds and found that even very small delays would result in substantial and costly drops in revenue."

http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/11/marissa-mayer-at-web-20....
An example of the opposite as a datapoint: We've all eaten institutional food cooked by people who are following a recipe they may not particularly care a whole lot about and probably won't eat their own cooking.
I think that mattmcnight's point was that Yegge is criticizing an accepted definition of requirements analysis. So, edw, when you say "he doesn't respect it, probably because he doesn't know how to do it" you are a bit off base - you're referring to a practice which is different from the one matt and Yegge are talking about. But you're probably right that they aren't familiar with the kind of requirements analysis you're talking about. It also seems like you're agreeing with them when they say that "requirements analysis is bullshit" - because you think the practices they're referring to are worthless.

That said, I am very interested in the things that you know work every time. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Absolutely! And that was my point-- you need to understand the user's problem-space very well, and there are better ways to do this than the traditional "business requirements gathering" process, which tends to focus on the (sub-optimal) solution the users have already imagined.
Bram Cohen on Taboo Words
99.9%? That's just insane. You're saying that all the games developers never play their own games?

How about people writing languages, compilers etc. You don't think they use them??

I'd say the majority of open source software is written for yourself rather than others. People contribute the most when they are using that software.

You don't have to be the only customer/user of your software, but it helps to be a customer/user of your own software. That's what I mean by writing for yourself.
You are right to not read too much into this study but that doesn't mean it is not worthwhile. An epidemiological study - especially this one with a small sample size and based on self reporting - cannot prove causation. Still, the study should be enough to justify a closer look.
An element that's missing from this analysis is the quality of that time.

In my experience, doing regular exercise greatly, greatly increases the quality of my life. I feel generally happier, more energetic, more determined, more optimistic, etc.

My mother (over 55) took up cycling up a huge hill every day on her way back from work since a month or so ago, and, predictably, she's reporting the same result. She feels much better than she did before she started cycling up that hill every day.

Doing regular exercise is really a no-brainer. Even as a time-poor start-up founder, the benefits of exercise to your start-up (increased energy, wakefulness, optimism) are huge. The question is not whether you can afford the time to exercise, but whether you can afford not to exercise.
My sense is that to someone outside the industry, such requirements would seem overly complicated.

A few years ago, I worked for a company that did patient management software (including billing). In the effort to get the product to market, they neglected documenting the requirements of the billing portion. Over time, because of the requirements of our each of customers were different (depending on what entity they billed, the rules for the billing were different), the application turned into a mess of stuff that was never well-documented (fortunately, I didn't work on the billing app). Had they done a bit business requirements gathering before building, they could have likely saved time and money by designing more flexible software.

It's also worth noting that this wasn't some big, lumbering corporation--it was a start-up.
Dividing societies into individualist and collective mentalities
not really true. what would you say about git ? it has no kernel components, no spec (at least not that i am aware of).
Ideally yes. Go work for one for a year, then create the software...

Of course this isn't always possible, but it's the way to better products.
I'm not much of a popcorn fan either. All popcorn tastes basically the same and they certainly have no marketing to speak of whatsoever.
Yegge is criticizing an accepted definition of requirements analysis

So his title (Business Requirements are Bullshit) was just bait. I guess I took it.

I once wrote a hn post with a lot more "meat on the bones" about what works. Here it is:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=84977
You are probably correct, but if you haven't decided then it probably does.

Just to be pedantic an eye blink takes 300 to 400 ms. Amazon's claim is that delays 3 to 4 times less than an eye blink are annoying to people.

Mean reaction time for a human is around 200 ms for a visual stimulus so Amazon is talking about faster than normal reaction time as well.

Frame rate in video games is between 30 and 60 frames per second or one frame every 16 to 33 ms. Cinema is 24 fps or one frame every 40 ms.

So it would appear that Amazon is saying that a delay that a human can perceive is troubling and results in lost sales.
I knew #6 was going to be on the list, and I've always hated that about the Mac UI. Yes, having one menu bar at the top of the screen makes it easier to get to with the mouse, but there's two problems:

1. Now you can't use the menus in unfocused applications

2. You really shouldn't be using the mouse to interact with menus anyway ( http://sysop073.blogspot.com/2008/03/i-posted-this-with-ctrl... )
Ask YC: Advice re: consultancy agreement (ownership)
In a consultancy agreement that is work for hire, who owns the rights to work done outside the working hours? Is that also implicitly owned by the CLIENT or does it belong to the consultant?

I guess, what does the following mean with regards to work on free time?

"All product and services rendered by Contractor shall be a “work made for hire” and shall be owned by CLIENT and CLIENT shall maintain any and all related copyrights therein. In the event that any content, products or services are deemed not to be a work for hire, Contractor agrees to assign, and does hereby irrevocably assign, to CLIENT all right, title and interest in such."
There are over 800,000 programmers working in the U.S. alone, an overwhelming majority employed by someone else.

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/43888.html

I'm saying that the ERP, accounting, banking, claims processing, ecommerce, order entry, scientific, etc., etc., etc. software they work on is for someone else. They dwarf those working on games, compilers, and open source.

Welcome to the real world.
Yes, we agree. We are working to get rid of all the registration requirements. It was just a holdover from our alpha.
Xero looks fantastic - just what I need but for the security implications. I can't see myself ever being confortable for handing off control of the data that is most important in my life except to someone with whom I have a solid personal relationship.
@Michael -- give it another whirl. We've gone a lot past the initial alpha features. Our repeat usage is very high right now -- about 30% of users returning daily.
Have you actually looked at patents? They are a cesspool of legalese and trolling for settlements.
Actually, this reminded me of a decent password "generator" and rememberer scheme I read about on /. many years ago. Take the first letters of the first line of a favorite song and use that as your password. CIRPOTB was the example used there, from the Pearl Jam song "Jeremy". Add a checksum digit if you like (a number that corresponds the the length of the alpha part (cirpotb7). In most cases this is as secure as anything else and easy to remember.

Another method that I have personally used is to take the FCC ID of a device I carry (pager, cellphone, etc) and use that. After a few iterations you remember it, it's very random, but you also have it written down in plaintext with you if you forget.
When I post something like this, I'm thinking of:

If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Except I substitute "me" for "one's". If it gratifies my intellectual curiosity then maybe it will other users' as well. That said, I think it's personally important to use votes as community feedback for my future posts.

If anything, I worry about a community that becomes too homogeneous because interestingness involves variability. All I can do here is submit links. Whether it's interesting to the community is up to the community to decide (expressed in votes and comments). For instance, I'm often provoked by David Brooks (NY Times columnist). But he doesn't ever really talk about computers or business. Initially, I was skeptical about posting one of his columns. But it was received well and so I posted more.

This article was borderline for me. But what's the worst that can happen? It doesn't get votes? So I'd rather shade toward posting than not while still keeping the guidelines firmly in mind. I've often been surprised that the community appreciates some links that don't "belong" on a superficial analysis. Similarly, I've enjoyed science, law, art, and even political articles linked here (the last in small doses). I think that's a good thing. A uniform community is a boring one.
Things to Know About Super [1]