skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of the biggest, most consistent problems I saw as a Smalltalk consultant was simply poor communication between development and users. There were inevitably at least two groups or levels of management in the same group between the users and development. The result was always the game of "telephone" or "gossip" -- the one where you form a line and one person whispers a message to the next. Information, filtered through too many minds always gets distorted in the process.

I think you can do requirements gathering. But the right way to do it is to have smart actual users talking directly to smart actual devs. Even here, there is a chance for misunderstanding, but at least it's not compounded. (I suspect that the "telephone" game is an example of a nonlinear exponential process.)

Unfortunately, middle managers defending their personal fiefdom will sometimes actually tell you that it's specifically not going to happen. In large organizations, upper management generally wants their representative to be the filter between the devs and the users, because software is generally an instrument of control. (Through workflow, even if the app has no explicit workflow framework, but that's another story.)

Often in large organizations with a software project, devs and users will find some way to get together and talk face to face. It's a sign.
Is this a for real or just a mock up / demo for getting funding
Just remember, Nielsen focuses on usability investments with positive (often large) ROI. Since NNG charges $40,000-$1,000,000+ for a consultation, you'd rather make MONEY off his recommendations than win beauty pageants.
But is Jakob aiming for "remarkable or memorable", or for highly functional?

Put another way-- is there anything in Jakob's (admittedly Spartan) design that gets in the way of the content?
My back does not like hammocks. (And you would need a stand - or trees.)
Linus has an easier task. The hardware the kernel runs on and the software running on it act as an ironclad, rigorously defined spec. Dealing with human users is something else.
Cal scientists on the trail of invisibility
It's ironic that notes on a talk about ethics should be disingenuous - about the only thing he really writes about is how you can click here to read other things he has written.

Although I did learn that RMS likes budgies which makes it worthwhile.
Conditional-CSS
File-sharing Networks Return with Legitimate Ways to Share Music -- and Make Money
i meet people like that everyday, the line is '' i want to be the next (google,youtube..etc).. i used to try to explain .. now i just smile and say no thanks.
This is something of an ad hominem. Jakob's site having poor usability does not automatically invalidate his usability arguments.

See this article for his own view on the matter:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/aug/09/guardianwee...

And then even if we assume that the quality of the site proves anything about Jakob's advice and that the site was intended to be "usable", the observation that the site is unusable for Hank still doesn't prove anything useful.

The whole point of most of Jakob's writing is that empirical evidence from watching typical users in your target market actually use your site is what matters. Hank's opinion doesn't matter unless he's (a) one of the users that Jakob is targeting and (b) representative of them. For which we have no data.

I am not a fan of Hank's writing.
As always with everything.
'lol' has arrived?
Blog Archive PR-less launch kicks off a stack overflow of praise
I'm not actually using the Bold (I'm beta-testing a different device as my personal device) but I've played with it, and I'd say that it's a major improvement over the curve.

It's much faster, the screen is beautifully sharp. It's browser isn't great -- especially when compared to WebKit -- but it works decently well.

Really though, I think the best option is to find one and play with it when it comes out. Try everything you can out yourself. Still, if you were considering getting the Curve before, I strongly suggest waiting for the Bold.
if you don't mind forms, you can get an EIN online

http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=102767,00....
What's to stop someone using this to 'outsource' CAPTCHA solving? (Not that spammers need any help doing so!)

I signed in with my normal Amazon account and had a look; it seems to be full of bloggers paying tens of users a couple of cents to blog about their URL or add it to social networking sites. As a blogger that relies on genuine traffic and social bookmarking, it makes me despair.
agree. watch the price and duration of the registered agent.
Always, but we should also be realistic. We're going to be wrong about this stuff again and again.

Technology itself is something of an exponential process. Basically, we're fuel in a kind of conflagration. If we care about the survival of our species, we need to get off this planet. Right now, we're all in the same basket. The biosphere links us all together in ways that are way too complex for a human being to comprehend. The only sensible engineering solution involves decoupling and redundancy.
I don't find myself paying any attention to who the poster is though. Do you? If the story is interesting or the question important, I upvote it, otherwise not.
yea I am interested
There most definitely are, but the lack of interest in exploration is not necessarily permanent -- it probably only takes stumbling across one or two cool things to reward and reinforce curiosity.

Some people in every field lack the skills or motivation to teach themselves, though programming probably amplifies this difference because there are so many new things emerging and so many niches, and because with enough motivation you can often just download an interpreter, toolkit, or live boot cd and start experimenting with it.
Would you mind saying that again as a Disqus comment here?
http://ourdoings.com/brlewis/photo.html?th=m6/8p/thpb.jpg...

I'd like to collect cool and useful things people remember about last night's event, not just pictures.
Of course Jakob Nielson said this first quite some time ago.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20010805.html
We, the hoi polloi developers, work for industries (retail, transportation, insurance, etc.) we hopefully know some thing about, yet without having the same level of expertise (or even the same point of view) as our customers.

He should get himself familiar with the concept of division of labor...
"You get with them and "live their lives" and suffer with them, understanding what they must accomplish, how they must do it, and what's stopping them now. "

This is a great idea, and the real way to address the problem Steve suggests: Become the business.

However, the majority of your criticism of Steve is way off base, because the methods he describes are not strawmen, but the actual methods described in most of the software engineering requirements books. If you look at Karl Wiegers book, Software Requirements, which is considered by many to be a leading reference on the subject, it describes a process much like the one Yegge criticizes.
can someone provide a cliff's note version of what Yegge wrote? I tried reading what he wrote, but there is too much rambling.
I suppose that it's probably a lot different for programmers who didn't start programming on their own - those whose first exposure to coding some software was through classes in college or whatnot.

I know that for me, almost all of my knowledge of software development and knowledge about what tools are available on a linux system, and how they work (as well as about how the kernel works) came from this process of poking around, reading what was available to me, and then trying things out.
Agreed. Beautiful is not the same as Usable. That being said, try to find a specific article on this page:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/

A little bit of line height would go a long way. The dense, bright-blue links are nearly impossible to scan.

I've really struggled to find articles on this page in the past when I couldn't remember a word from the title. (So I could Ctrl+f)
Why is only building for yourself a bit too far?
This seems like common sense to me. If you're not using your own product day in day out, you should be.
Now.

It's too easy to write this off. And you're called a nutter if you argue that anything bigger could happen soon.

And technology seems to be accelerating, but whether it is, or not, we should at least err on the side of caution, and have some formal way we integrate new things into society.

Whether it will be a force for good, or ill depends on man.
Don't try to find out what potential customers might want, just build something where you are a potential customer - Build for yourself.

That's what I took from it anyway :/
Same here. And MS-DOS before that, and a Commodore 64 before that. :)

The process never ends.
Good to know... and now I'll try to be careful with that too.
He uses the term usability to isolate his principles from aesthetics, since historically there have been a lot of flashy, bad web sites. His sparse design helps hammer that point home.

For UX as a whole I wouldn't advise anyone to read useit exclusively.
Thanks a lot for the link.
If you don't eat their sandwiches, then you'd better have a LOT of friends who eat them every day, or you're breaking the cardinal rule

The point of that long winded article is don't build something unless you are going to use the product or personaly know a lot of people who will. Never ask people you don't know what they want it's stupid. Take the segway it's cool but it's clearly something people want in the abstract even if it's not useful 99% of the time which is the type of thing you build when you ask people what they want without having any idea what you want to build.
How about colonizing the north of Russia or Canada, the ice caps, the deserts, the oceans? All those are much easier than space, and more useful.

Humanity hasn't had an outward frontier since the initial spread. The real frontier is technological and faces inward (Moore's law). The engineering solution is refactoring away the bloat of our bodies, when all we need is the minds. Become smaller, become faster, amplify intelligence, virtualize. This universe is cold, lifeless and slow - let's find a new universe in every atom, that's much more interesting.

</wild-speculation>
Over complicated business requirements are bullshit. But starting a product without researching first is a recipe for disaster, particularly if you are entering a crowded market.
Social Network Tips and Humor | TechJaws
Deafness and the User Experience
OpenID’s Struggle for Acceptance
5 Useful Coding Solutions For Designers and Developers
How to block SSH dictionary attacks
Pirating the Olympics, Then and Now
How Large Software Companies Destroy Startup Value
The big issue with LLC's is that you technically can't be a W2 employee of one and hold equity in it; stakeholders in an LLC are all principals, and have to be compensated through distributions.
I went through this same issue when I moved to and from California. Fortunately, my parents each have large garages so what I did was box up a few 'time capsules' of stuff that I might want later. I'm kind of a packrat.

As for your books, try selling them at a place like Half-Priced Books. Or post a few bundles on craigslist of similar titles that you think someone might want.

Or for a small tax break and charitable donation, just take them to good will.
Social network popularity around the world
We've already seen how the ice caps are coupled to the rest of the world.

Femtotech is a dandy idea, but still speculation. We know colonizing space is technically feasible. Once we're there, we know there can be a self sustaining economy. The problem is getting there with one.
John Baez's stuff, and Overcoming Bias is also good.

I'm dying for non-technical science writing. I want to know what those guys are thinking, not read a popular write up.

They're usually good, even when it's outside their field.
"In short, do whatever it takes to find out what you need to know to develop your software. This is hard work. Hardly anyone does it now, and relatively few have ever done it. Steve Yegge certainly hasn't"

For me, the point Steve makes is that the optimum is to build for yourself. The feedback loop is instant. That's where the best software gets written. When developers wake up at 3am with some idea for a feature that would make the software they want, work better.

If you're trying to write software for others, it's going to end up as mediocre and probably not entirely what they wanted.
Business Requirements:

1) must make me a millionaire
Surprise, surprise: Why I refuse to upgrade to iPhone 3G
Popcorn would be hugely profitable if you could set the bowl out in public but still charge per kernel. If we only had micropayments.
Georgia Takes a Beating in the Cyberwar With Russia
How black drug dealers are using white supremacist legal theories to confound the Feds.
Every unsupported claim you read makes you 1% dumber.
Group Theory via Rubik’s Cube
If I've decided to purchase something from Amazon.com, I doubt an eye-blink's worth of waiting will change my mind.
There was a paper about this at CHI 2008:

http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~echi/papers/2008-CHI2008/2008-0...
Unreadable? Far from it. The content is displayed clearly and obviously given priority. But it can get a little difficult to dig into his archives.

I wouldn't however, call it the worst site I've ever seen.
Something has to be wrong here. 2 mbps, not 22 mbps average download speed would be very near to reality in Finland. 512k is lowest DSL here and DSLs up to 8mbps form the vast majority of Finland's broadband connections.
DSL speeds 10mbps to 30mbps are available, but quite rare (>50$ a month).

More data:
In January 2007 broadband penetration of Finnish households was 53% and 96% had the availability to have one.

According to Finnish operators, 2 mbps broadband is the most common one (info at the site of Finnish Ministry of Transport and Communications). I call bullshit.
Yes, I follow these too. Others are: The Unapologetic Mathematician, The Reference Frame (if you can filter the hating), Symmetry Breaking, Gowers's Weblog, Plus Magazine (sometimes), Not Even Wrong, Cosmic Variance, Backreaction... also some Arxiv rss's.
World of Development: academic paper on gold farming as an economic development activity
I'm just glad that people are starting to recognize that there are other mobile phone OS's out there. For a while there it seemed like everybody thought that the iPhone was the first phone ever to have computer-like capabilities.
I'm missing something here -- the Tufte notion of sparklines refers to "data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics". To me these are much larger and are much more like traditional graphs.
Google Street View captures blazing home
I just hate his use of bold with the lack of space between the lines it makes my eyes jump to the bold and then lose their place.
I guess people will be interested in NickB's News.
Want to live a long life? Run
Whats the best usage of this domain name
hello everyone,
i have recently purchased a domain name propeller.in hoping that propeller.com which is owned by aol have missed to buy it and will be interested in taking it over ;)

but now i am thinking that i can make something useful for the community under this domain name. i was looking for ideas what kind of community site we can develop which will suit the most to the domain name? Any ideas?

one idea i have it to build a community of final year students who can share their project works online...they will be real propellers in real life after graduation :)
Redefining customer service with Web 2.0
Follow up: Fail open or Fail closed
Google-Yahoo Ad Deal is Bad for Online Advertising
> But the right way to do it is to have smart actual users talking directly to smart actual devs.

I find in my own software that the best thing to do, if you're improving an existing process, is to watch (or participate in) the current process, with an eye toward the parts which waste time or irritate people.

In any case, after the initial study, it's crucial to back out of the details of the process and think about the overall goal to be accomplished. You don't want to waste effort evolving a process that's been badly distorted by existing software, when you could simplify the process immensely by writing something directly focused on the actual goal. This is an intensely creative/intuitive phase of the process, so it often takes several iterations (from a fresh state-of-mind each time).

Once you think have the perfect solution, go back and make sure that it solves all the problems noted in step 1. If it doesn't, try again.
By "some" they probably mean all.
Billy Connolly on Business Requirements (profane)
really enjoyed reading this essay, Paul, thanks for bringing it to the world. Couldn't be more true... Will mention it on my blog.
The Much Anticipated DataCase Launches: Turn the iPhone Into A Wireless Drive
Hmm, I'm not convinced about the "only build what you are going to use" argument. The best example I can think of is pace-makers (or any other form of life-saving equipment). A manufacturer of these devices cannot be a user, because they'd be dead...
Against Intellectual Property - were patents and copyrights a mistake?
I'm not willing to call it an ad hominem, because I've always assumed that implied in his articles is "my site is how you should do it." Which I don't agree with.

His techniques for bolding text and frequently making lists means I know what information the author thinks is important, and I am more likely to remember it when scanning a page. But I don't think you should optimize a page for scanning when you're really presenting an essay. Essays shouldn't scream at you; they should be memorable because the ideas as written struck a chord.

When some of the text is screaming at me, it's had to focus on the rest.
The best part is when people give you an idea that has already been done, talk about it like it's completely novel and then mention "you know, kinda like. . ."

I've had people approach me saying things like "I want to make this great site. It would allow people to buy and sell things online and the prices would be determined by auction and we could have user feedback on the sales, you know, kinda like Ebay". They came up with the idea (and by came up with, I mean saw Ebay) and it was my job to develop the site and figure out why people would use it over Ebay. They had done their part, but when I said no, it was in their mind because I was a crappy programmer.
Back story: I was working as the Director of Development with a startup that had become a "work out" (in other words, the founders were ousted and it was being subjected to ruthless business restructuring).

The board hired a VP of Marketing who deftly corralled product management into his fiefdom. We had a big meeting to talk about the new process for product management working with development, and the very first thing he did was play this sound clip.

As he put it, he could be more tactful, but the reality of business was that marketing was going to have a lot of unreasonable demands, and the measure of our success would be how we managed the unreasonableness.

I don't necessarily agree 100% that it is the role of product management and marketing to try to feature creep and bloat the product and schedule unreasonably, but my observation is that marketing and product management and clients and "business" in general always sound unreasonable :-)
Perhaps someone could help me understand how this is of interest to hackers?
Interesting link.

It's amusing that in the comments someone cites SCSI as proof that coding to a standard can be sufficient. The trade association holds "plugfests" ( e.g. http://www.scsita.org/news_events/plugfests/plugfests.html ) specifically because coding to standards isn't sufficient and sometimes you have to actually try the things out with other peoples' hardware to find out if things actually work properly.
A Software Problem, A Marketing Solution
Google tool identifies linchpin species
Everyone in the states seems to lament the amount of broadband we have access to. Frankly, I don't even see it as a last mile issue. I have a 20Mbps connection (via RCN) - and I know I'm getting full speed because anytime I download from MIT, I get speeds above 2MB/sec. However, I never see those speeds from the rest of the web because the other end doesn't have the capacity.

Am I the only one that finds their connection speed is more a function of server capacity on the other end than their last mile connection?
Just want to say that as someone who is just getting into this arena, this was a very helpful article.
Good rant, but I want to talk about dog poop.

Surely there must be an enzyme cocktail that can evaporate poop! You would not use it indoors, only for outdoor use. But there must be something that will decompose dog poo super fast. Any organic chemists here?
I love his execution advice and I have bookmarked it.

The only problem is the site is no different than digg.
Hackers are interested in more than just hacking. This is an interesting new phenomenon. The fact that the title has some words you'd see in a reddit title doesn't automatically make a story politicized flamebait.

If you think something is offtopic, flag it. It gets boring when people use the comment threads to complain about stuff they think is offtopic, just like it's boring when people complain about being downmodded.
I have yet to see a viable business model for any geoengineering company, but when one does come along it will definitely be Interesting Times.
...actual methods described in most of the software engineering requirements books...

Thank you, Matt. You have just demonstrated my number one concern about the nature of discourse here on hacker news. The issue of "book contents" vs. real world experience.

I don't know you and certainly don't mean to pick on you, but calling my criticism of Steve's article "way off base" merits this response...

First a little of my background. Even though I've been a hacker my entire professional life, I had the good fortune to be mentored by an industrial engineer from a user department. He did one thing extrememly well and taught me how to do it: solve business problems to make money. This is the stuff that is rarely taught in any book, much less one that is "considered by many to be a leading reference on the subject".

Shocking as it may seem, many books on business systems and IT offer very little and many are simply wrong.

I have not read Karl Wieger's book and feel out of place evaluating it. However, I did read the synopsis and all 45 reviews on Amazon. Nowhere did I see mention of any of the things from my OP that I know work every time. Instead I saw lots of mention of techniques like rational rose, entity-relationship diagrams, use cases, and modeling. As anyone who has successfully conducted analysis will tell you, these techniques were never actually designed to achieve results; their purpose is to control the people and the process, not the outcome.

I stand by my original criticism of Steve's article. He is dead wrong about analysis. He doesn't respect it, probably because he doesn't know how to do it. Your comment makes me wonder if the same holds true for you.
It's kind of ironic then how slow Radar is.

Seriously though, site responsiveness is important. If you haven't seen it YSlow is pretty awesome (http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/).
Holy crap, are you, me?
Top 10 Usability Highs for the Mac OS
@augustus -- I encourage you to "dig" a little deeper. socialmedian = social news meets the social graph. Very different from Digg, although our roots are from their foundation. What we're trying to do here is personalized news at the topical level -- more about "me" informed by "we" vs. just a popularity contest. Poke around and would love your feedback.
Leaked Video of HTC Dream with Android(Google) OS