skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Wire meets Good Will Hunting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5JPliWh6G4
impromptu Seth Godin blog:

Business ideas are like ice cubes in a tray. You have a lot of different slots, you pour water into each one, and then you put it away in the freezer. A little while later you come back, and some of the ice cubes are frozen all the way through. Some are still full of water. You get both kinds of cubes. The real trick is telling the difference between them. On the surface they both look like fully frozen ice cubes. But the improperly frozen ones have bubbles that move, and the fully frozen ones have bubbles that stay still. You can't tell just by looking at them. The only way to tell the difference is to shake the tray.

Shake the tray. Find the fully frozen cubes.
Because he has a site on usability, and the presentation is unlike other sites I've seen. I assume these are his ideas in action.
I upvoted you but I don't think pg agrees with that flag philosophy. I think the goal of that feature is spam only.

The rule I use: If an article isn't interesting to me (user guidelines), then I don't upvote it or write a comment on it since both actions increase the attention other users would pay to it. Soon enough it will either pass out of sight or it will be interesting to other users. Even then, it will soon fade to the background archive.

For a flag: If it looks like spam - useless product link - and the user has no karma built up, I flag. Otherwise, I leave it alone.
This reminds me of:

Dr. House: "Excuse me miss, do you have cancer?"
[Woman shakes her head]
Dr. House: "Wow. Mango juice prevents cancer"
Part of the problem is that talking about the analysis process is like writing a textbook on romance. How do you fall in love? Is there a set of best practices and a six-sigma process? Well, no. It's an art. It depends entirely on the situation and on the parties involved. You get better at it with practice. There are rules of thumb that are definitely helpful, but you have to know when to break them. Unfortunately, there's also a great deal at stake: If you screw it up it can ruin your life, but if you get it right you can be happy for decades.

The literature on the subject tends to gravitate towards formal techniques: Dance instruction, sex education, grooming, fashion. Not so much because these are the essence of romance, but because they're much easier to describe in print. And because the people who turn to books are not the ones whose relationships are going well, but the ones who need help -- and when the going gets tough, formalism can be a very useful tool. Nobody consults a lawyer on a first date, but when you need a divorce formal procedures come in really handy.
SMS texting is a killer app but a web browser that is actually useful and productive on a small mobile screen is not? What color is the sky in your world?
An interesting article, but why does it seem like every time the good things in OS X are mentioned, a dose of "Windows Sucks" goes with it? It gets old.
He's merely critiquing the aesthetics. The whole 'unreadable' jazz is histrionics.

Now for a pukka critique of Jakob's site take a look at DESIGN EYE for the Usability Guy http://www.designbyfire.com/000094.html
Those are decent because they generate random passwords. I don't really understand this scheme, because if you have to keep track of a file to use as your password you might as well just use a public key crypto system instead
The decision to advertise
with 12 people $40k/month total burn is like paying each person around $30k/year annual salary when you factor in other expenses like equipment, telecom, travel, etc. So yeah, that's pretty tight.
run on dirt. run on pavement and you'll wreck your knees.
If its on your own time and unrelated to what you're doing, its yours. I think that second sentence merely protects the client if the first sentence fails to do so, its not saying "everything you do is ours." There is no rationale for the client owning unrelated things you do outside of work that they don't pay for. There is a reason for the client to own the things you do for them, which is what that part of the contract does.

If what you do outside of work is closely related to what you do at work for the client, you are going to run into problems. ie. the Facebook debacle. Building a website selling widgets using method A and then turning around and saying "Oh, I just decided to build a website on my own selling widgets using method A as well" is going to get you into serious trouble. Working on your blog at home is not.
Have they tried speeding it up 100ms to see if they gain revenue? I can't believe such a minuscule change has such a huge effect, that's astounding
The author's points are mostly general, subjective, unjustified, and unfair.

All OSes let you have multiple windows visible. Stating that OS X's use of 3D is good and Vista's is bad is not a convincing argument. Comparing Clippy to Spotlight is unfair.

Really poor article.
seems like a thinly veiled comparison of communism and capitalism to me
As someone who is capable

Makes it sound as if you make that same assumption, and for both parties, it's a highly unfounded assumption to make.
Of course his title was bait! What else could a title like that be!? :-)

I also think that your response is off-base though. Taking your own statements:

1) Steve is wrong to call "Requirements gathering" bullshit because you know how to do it properly

2) "Requirements gathering" as taught in most accepted books and other texts is bullshit

If you then throw in:

3) Steve was referring to the "Requirements agethering" as taught in most accepted texts (and, I'll add, practiced in many large organisations).

Then we get:

4) You're referring to your own special brew of "Requirements gathering", which has little to do with what Steve was talking about!

Unfortunately, when most people say "Requirements gathering", they refer to the standard, accepted processes taught in books and large consulting companies. And those, as Steve declares, are largely bullshit. I worked in a large, process-driven IT consulting firm for 4 years, and I can affirm without a doubt that the processes they used to gather requirements would fail miserably at attempting to produce a great start-up product.
Pundits fear that blogs are making the world a more difficult place for mainstream media, this is a perfect example; the NY Times reporting on things the blogosphere has long established and followers of bloggers are already well aware of: iTunes makes a lot of money.
Serious question: How do "we know there can be a self sustaining economy"?
andy always has the best stuff
Nurses To Australia
Nurses2Australia provides a personalized service combining quality nursing jobs with adventure. We help suitable nurses who are looking to migrate from other parts of the world to Australia. Experienced and well trained with extensive nursing and recruitment backgrounds. We focus on you and provide continuous support both professionally and personally.
Nursing and Recruitment Service, Immigration and Visa Application Process
Nurses2Australia provides a personalized service combining quality nursing jobs with adventure. We help suitable nurses who are looking to migrate from other parts of the world to Australia. Experienced and well trained with extensive nursing and recruitment backgrounds. We focus on you and provide continuous support both professionally and personally.
ABP, Bridging Programs For Overseas Nurses
ABP program is "Australian Bridging and Placement" program which trains the overseas nurses to adapt the Australian nursing culture. This program will be over a period of 3 to 6 months duration depending on the course provider.
99.9% of all software ever written was for others. Was it all mediocre and "not entirely what they wanted"?

Having lived and breathed (and somehow survived) in the enterprise environment that employs the vast majority of the programmers out there, I can agree with that proposition whole-heartedly.

Yes, 99.9% of the software that gets written is mediocre at best. A shockingly large proportion of it is downright abysmal, but most of it is mediocre. Thankfully, we don't get to see most of that software since it is safely locked away inside the mega-corporations that pay hordes of programmers to write it.
Man's Home Lab confiscated for "doing science in a residential area"
One of my employees ran into this exact kind of problem. We let our guys work on their own projects, but one of his clients wanted rights to any developments he may come up with as a result of any other projects. That meant company stuff as well, and that wasn't going to cut it.

If you haven't signed that contract yet, I would immediately demand the client rewrite that and talk with them about licensing issues before you run into some serious issues with someone wanting to profit from your stuff where otherwise they should not be.

What that quote means is that if you work for this person, and you develop anything that your client can use, even if it's on your own time, you will have to give it to the client, the rights, and any profits you'd otherwise make from that development. That is NOT what you want.

I'm noticing more and more clients who know absolutely nothing about web development/software engineering try to pull this kind of shit all the time. Talk with them immediately if you haven't already signed the contract and change that, share with them your stance on the matter how you want to protect your intellectual property.
Run on dirt (except very flat dirt) and you mess up your ankles.
Where did I say you have to not be employed by someone else???
That's pretty much irrelevant.
Sixth annual Santa Clara University global business incubator program launches Aug. 17
Blog comment correcting startup gets $25m funding
In a little-noticed deal that closed yesterday the Silicon Valley startup apostrophree secured a $25 million first round with Bolus Venture Capital of Palo Alto. apostrophree received seed money from Paul Graham’s Y Combinator earlier this year.
My memory fades, so take this ancient Greek proverb with a grain of salt:

If you want to be healthy run, if you want to be strong run, if you want to be beautiful run, if you want to be smart run.

And indeed it has been shown that exercise improves mental ability.
I should clarify that you and the client should talk about this beforehand and it really matters what you're hired to do. If you're building someone an e-commerce site and you decide to work on your iPhone puzzle game at home, its doubtful there'll be problems. But if someone has hired you to come up with ideas and program them, then you've really sold your idea making process as well as your coding skills, and it will be harder for you to claim ideas as yours.
I'm interested. These are topics I wish to know more about.
Unofficial GM Volt Waiting List Tops 33,000, Potentially $200+ Million
This isn't specific to running, of course. Just pick a form of exercise and do it regularly. Being in shape is good for everything.

I don't like running, it makes my knees ache. Now, bicycling on the other hand...
Robots learn to move themselves (neural network)
Run on sentences and you mess up your clarity. ;)
All this aside, suppose you really do have a new and novel idea that really could be useful and make money. How would you go about finding a web programmer?

On the one hand, you can't really afford to hire a good one because you don't have any money yet, but on the other hand you can't afford to put up a crappy web site either. Seems like a Catch 22.
My Secret Weapon to Getting Contracts
Google Insights shows what sites are mainstream and which ones are still early adopter
This is more accurately stated as run on any surface with inappropriate footwear and injury is more likely.
We do have some that no one will do, but usually that's a problem with the question (e.g. they can't find what we ask for or it doesn't exist). Turnaround varies with time of day. I wrote more about this question here:

http://blog.clayvalet.com/ci/2008/05/21/working-with-mechani...
No, they are not the same thing, but that doesn't mean they aren't related. If you have a very negative aesthetic reaction to a web site, it will affect your use of the site.

Don Norman talks about this in his book Emotional Design. Everything we use elicits some kind of emotional response in us, and that affects our experience with the thing. Something is not "usable" if it's so repulsive that no one will use it. In this case, the goal of Jakob's site, for him and for us, is for us to read the articles. If we don't want to look at the page for more than 30 seconds, it's difficult to accomplish that goal.
My first reaction was "how the f--- did they raise 25 million dollars ?", after reading I see their use but still, why 25 million dollars? Do they need that kind of money to expand?
How many are they? Do founders ever get a large sum of such money as their own money or is it always purely investment money?

I guess YCombinator make money when their companies receive funding?

Anyway, congrats and good luck!
For each problem in Project Euler there is a forum that is open only after you solve it. One of the hard ones has "First!" comment in there.
Diet is probably a larger factor than exercising in living a long life. If you have to pick one I would go with diet.

Also, here's a different perspective from Arthur De Vany:

Death by Exercise: The Aging Running Generation: http://www.arthurdevany.com/?p=797
Nice to see CMSBox there. it uses the Squeak/Smalltalk/Seaside stack.
http://www.cmsbox.com/en/system/technology
It's not the $40K that's surprising, it's the 11 developers. I'd have guessed 3-4 (and consequently a lot lower burn).

Burning over a quarter of a million in 7 months on a web app sounds like a lot these days, but I'm not out there doing it, so what do I know.
Corporate capitalism, though, is a rather miraculous invention. It manages to preserve the stifling collectivism and anti-creative properties of socialism, while maintaining the greed, rampant inequality, and social devolution inherent to runaway capitalism. Worst of both worlds, yay.
What problem is there with that?
After reading the article, I think it relates to News.YC in the terms of it is about individuals who are trying to hack the judicial system using obscure legal theories because they have nothing to lose (besides their lives - government was seeking death penalty). And, to give away the ending, their bold hack succeeded after 2+ years of the defendants' gerrymandering (government dropped death penalty case, now life in maximum-security prison). And these are the types of powerful individuals who will survive but might possibly thrive in the controlled world of prison.
I doubt the dropoff curve is linear. It's probably negligible up to a small threshold (500 ms?) with exponential decay in the tail. I'm willing to believe that a 1-second delay is a 10% hit, though I wonder how that would be measured, but this doesn't necessarily entail that 100ms costs 1%.
We are developers so I think the question is the rate of adoption of new recipe's at McDonalds? They are spending money on new recipe's and advertising them etc but how many of there new ideas catch and are still in use in 5-10 years? And how many of the successes are based on what someone wants to eat vs. what they think other people might buy.
The cheap PC/notebook market is really strange. It gets hyped, but not many people buy it. Asus had a burst of success with the eee, but steam is starting to die and asus realize it doesn't make that much money, so they are massing much more expensive things under the eee name. Also the $400 notebooks we saw last year and early 08 are all but gone. Though for $600 you do get dual core and 3gb ram. Computers should have never dropped below $500. It makes charging $200 to get them fixed look really retarded.
My current understanding is that running is way better than no exercise, but that other forms of exercise are quite likely better for your long-term health because of the impact stress running puts on your knees, feet, etc.
Why is Fibonacci misimplemented so often?
Why is it that so many times, even among good programmers, the Fibonacci function is misimplemented?

Here it is from the OCaml tutorial:

<<#let rec fib n =
# if n < 2 then 1 else fib(n-1) + fib(n-2);;
val fib : int -> int = <fun>

#fib 10;;
- : int = 89

>>

Finonacci 0 is 0, not 1.
Thus: Fibonacci 10 is 55.

Corrected:

# let rec fibo n =
# if n < 2 then if n ==1 then 1 else 0 else fibo(n-1) + fibo(n-2);;
val fibo : int -> int = <fun>
# fibo 12;;
- : int = 144
# fibo 10;;
- : int = 55
#

(And yes it is a superslow exponential implementation but that is not the point here.)
But that's not "usability", it's style. Is style impotant? Yes. But it's entirely possible to have eminently usable software that is ugly to a bunch of people. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that your ideas about "ugly" are the same as other peoples'.

The implied irony was that a usability expert produce a site with poor usability, and it's just plain wrong. Visit the link. It's not even that ugly, frankly. It is spare, clean, and very well-organized. It just happens to look a lot like default HTML rendering. Shrug.
techcrunch was nice enough to credit me for the gmail fail whale image spoof I emailed them for the article. even though it's just one of many links in the article, still bringing in decent traffic today
The start menu in vista works the same as spotlight.

I agree that windows is often annoying, but I find things in OS X annoying as well (such as sometimes having to read the application name in the menubar.)

Both OS handle preferences in a convoluted, unintuitive manner. There might not be an intuitive way to set up your TCP/IP settings, but neither OS has made a real attempt to find out.
great quote from the article for those who despise targeted banner advertising... "It's highly unlikely that you'll stop what you're doing and go purchase their product that minute, but the continuous exposure to their products does influence you the next time you are making a buying choice."
Most: ERP, accounting, banking, claims processing, ecommerce, order entry software sucks.

Scientific software is often started by someone who uses it and tends to work well.
I think that's the case because the Fibonacci sequence isn't interesting as a sequence itself to most developers, but as an example of basic recursion. And as an example of basic recursion, you can have a base case be slightly off without misrepresenting what the essence is.
Here are the links:

Products with demos

CmsBox http://www.cmsbox.com/en/system/demos

FotoFlexer http://fotoflexer.com/demos.php

PrismaPrepare http://www.oce.com/en/Software/prismaprepare/default.htm click on start product presentation.

SQL Diagnostic Manager http://www.idera.com/Products/Tour.aspx?id=24

SugarSync http://www.sugarsync.com/ click on watch video.

SuperSaas http://www.supersaas.com/info/demos

Wufoo http://wufoo.com/tour/

Xero http://www.xero.com/overview/dashboard/

Products without demos

EyeBlaster Campaign Monitor http://www.eyeblaster.com/products/campaign_monitor.asp

Seating Management http://www.themagellannetwork.com/pages/products.html
This is just one more example of "The War on the Unexpected", very well written on by Bruce Schneier.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/11/the_war_on_the...
You literally just made my week.

And you make great submissions to HN too.
Skape open-sourced WehnTrust: ASLR for Win XP
College girl sets goal: whole summer on one tank of gasoline
One of the best forms of exercise is swimming. Near zero-impact on joints. For those of you who think they can't learn how to swim, check out Total Immersion's zen-like, go with the water method. (http://www.totalimmersion.net). I learned how to swim freestyle through their video. Most swimming courses emphasize using your arms like paddle wheels to plow through the water, while TI emphasizes swimming much like fish and advanced swimmers do, by propelling from the core. TI is harder to learn but more efficient once you learn by progressing through their balance and core propulsion drills.
This is incredibly fascinating, and not just because a bunch of killers avoided the death penalty by sprouting nonsense. I love to see cases like these put naked before the audience. You usually only hear of them indirectly, like "This-and-this guy who killed these-and-these was sentenced to death here-or-there"

The judge said "you're throwing your life away" and "you're commiting suicide in broad daylight" on numerous occasions. Do words like these really work on people who will almost certainly be killed anyway? Why doesn't the judge say "sit down and shut up" instead? It's a bit harsh and certainly destroys the illusion that the judge is there to help, but at least it's honest. And prosecutors using nonsense legal defense against the defendant, as if it were in itself a crime serious enough deserve a few years in prison? This smells like a rat.

I actually hope that this becomes a trend during trials for the death penalty or life sentences. Taking someone's life like this is a barbaric custom, but in today's legal system it seems almost legitemate. It's a good thing that "defendants" that have nothing to lose refuse to go peacefully. If all defendants have to be barred from the courtroom, it removes the illusion of a fair proceeding. Sentencing someone to death or fifty years of pain can almost never be justified.
That's a fairly inconclusive link, somebody died who led a full life. They accomplished many things and lived their passions.

A interesting tidbit in today's NY Times (AP story) http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/health/AP-MED-Healthy-Obesit... points out that BMI and risk factors are not necessarily connected.

At the end of the day, if you want to live a long life... live healthy. Or: Reduce Stress, Exercise, Eat Well and Smile.
This is a very good point. It reminds me of a study I saw years ago that said runners generally also had better dental health. The point illustrated is that runners were more likely to floss! So it wasn't running that directly caused their better dental health, but you could say that it running and flossing have some correlation.

I'll try to dig up a link.
As flash is THE standard, i've been forced to use it for 3 versions, i still hate it and still have a hard time figuring out. When Expression Blend beta came out, it only took me 2 days to figure out. I can do animations in blend in about 2 hours what it would take days in flash. Silverlight also scales so much better than flash, i mean flash starts to die after you get past VGA pixel sizes. That's just sad. Silverlight scales literally to gigapixels. If you haven't been to photosynth, check out has friggin fast it is.
Science and technical stuff require a high level of intelligence to understand. It's even harder to comment usefully in a discussion.
The biggest problem in this space isn't a transaction system, the coding, or even the idea. I highly doubt that companies are willing to 'share' their virtual currency since they work closer to gift cards. It's getting big companies like Microsoft and Amazon and Zappos to convert from their virtual fun bucks back into real money. The barrier to entry to work with those guys are HUGE.

The closest thing you can have is an automated system that keeps enough gift certificates from different places to allow exchanges for a fee. (ie. exchange $50 Amazon gift card into $50 Zappos gift card for a buck or so.) Even then, some places like the Xbox 360 points don't have any way of giving to people once it's on your account.

This doesn't even count the fact that some systems, like WoW gold, makes it illegal via usage contract to convert virtual money into real cash.
I'm curious if writing software at home would violate the no "research and development" in a residential area rule ...
Hackers hacked at infamous DefCon gathering