skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems to me that they are trying to update the interfaces to look more similar with Google+ and make them pixel perfect across all their applications.

That's why I think it is good to see all the apps change in a short time span, which makes it easier to get over the changes.

There seems to be some change regarding how they push updates and new features/designs to the world. I remember it took months of testing before they decided that the current search bar at google.com (wider and larger) was good enough. Now they really are pushing total UI revamps in 2 days.
Right. That's why infomercials always say "here's our number, call whenever it's convenient." :)

Clearly there is such a thing as taking too long, but "no correlation" is overstating it. Impulse decisions can be bad.
I'd venture to say that many ideas don't qualify as being a "startup", even if they are "generally" seen as such.

I fail to see what's scalable about an idea without implementation, making the end result, a non-scalable business model (as a business that doesn't have an implementation by definition isn't scaling), the same.

My point is that if you're a business guy who just has an idea, and doesn't have any business creating/building experience, you're going to have a hard time getting technical people on-board. You can get business creating experience without having some Super Duper Awesome Unique Idea that requires a technical guy. And you can do this yourself and earn some tech chops at the same time, which will help at selling your "It's the Vimeo of Youtubes!" idea to other, more technical people.

A successful consulting business is more valuable than having an idea that hasn't been implemented. Having had an unsuccessful consulting business is also more valuable than solely having an idea that hasn't been implemented.

The problem here may be pride: being a person with an idea is seen as a more desirable state to be in than executing on someone else's idea.
I think one issue to note is that Apple and Google have basically won the "universal app ecosystems." They have more apps than anyone else, that can do anything. So to go for a strategy that focuses on the casual consumer market and doing core features really well would basically be running for third place: they'd be fighting against Windows Phone and webOS, not to mention the remnants of Meego.

Though, perhaps, that is a more winnable fight.
Most, if not all the comments are from people/companies that use GAE. I'd love to hear from people who evaluated it and then decided not to go for it.
Their company is named Rearden? Ayn Rand must be smiling in her grave.
Eek. I believe in TDD, but a QA team adds a whole other layer of checks, that you cannot automate. Especially, when developing any kind of UI, there is no substitute for a grumpy QA with a detailed test plan.
I'm on G+.. how-to not lose the chance to send unlimited invitations..
It's sad when you can't be candid in a company and have to resort to sending an external letter to get through to management.

I think lack of candour when problems abound is the kiss of death for many companies.
Link to the actual essay: http://soft.vub.ac.be/~tvcutsem/whypls.html

The guidelines specifically ask that you link to the content, and not a shell or shim.

And the original has already been posted:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2708173
It sounds like companies in trouble is always because of too many managers. Were there any high-profile company failures that were caused by too many engineers, and not enough managers? I don't mean lack of management from managers, I mean literally there weren't enough leaders, administrators, overseers.
No way. If they weren't competing with Facebook, they wouldn't have photo gallery functionality, Hangout, or the upcoming Games functionality. They're going straight for Facebook's throat, but they're doing it in a way that bridges the flaws in Facebook that have made room for products like LinkedIn.

I have Circles set up for groups of work colleagues, professional contacts, family, and friends who I like to share fart jokes with. In each case, I can interact with those people in a manner appropriate to the nature of my relationship with them. That solves the Facebook problem for me (I didn't use it because I nearly never had anything I wanted to share with everyone I knew in the world), and also creates an environment where I can have fun with my friends and be professional with my colleagues without compromising either group.

I really like it.
MinixFaq
Thanks, we'd like to build towards support for a good range of tutorials and other educational and performance-building/enhancing interactions. It may take a bit of time to build it out towards supporting large application development well, but we hope to get there over time!
Seems like the idea behind "Circles" is that it can be both.

"Sharing the right stuff with the right people shouldn’t be a hassle. Circles makes it easy to put your friends from Saturday night in one circle, your parents in another, and your boss in a circle by himself, just like real life."
It takes you a bit to get used to the catchas... I am using it in one of my side projects and it's working very well although we had some throuble to move from SQL to the BigTable and that slowed us down a bit in the architecture phase.

But I am betting on it because I think it will make my life easier in the future...

The memcache is ok to get.

The java subset is the part that bothers me as I had a lot of already made stuff I liked to use in my new site, and had to redo a loooooot of stuff to fit the dawn java subset.
I'm starting to appreciate the black bar more and more. At first I was skeptical, but it fits their new designs pretty well.
So they might as well merge with HP or some other giant!
I built http://www.sparkmuse.com and http://thesparkfoundry.com on AppEngine. You'll have to write a little more code to handle not having a RDMS, but that's only if you need joins.
this is why i love the idea of the model. it will supplement all the other models out there, not displace them, in much the same way as not every producer wants to drive the film in a hands-on manner. why do you hate it?
For those bashing the diaspora guys, remember it takes years to create a successful Open source project. Most popular OSS projects are at least 3-5 years old. Cut the guys some slack. HN readers should understand this more than any other site.
Nnena Ukuku, CoFounder Black Founders:Diversity is Not Just About Gender & Race
#1) Take any money you can and hire a designer ASAP.

iOS customers are heavily influenced by usability and polish.
Google+ first impressions: My big three takeaways
Yeah, I mean I certainly hope so, I am kind of tired of facebook, Google+ feels right. It's sort of like when everyone had hotmail, then everyone switched to gmail.

What was gmail that hotmail wasnt or didnt have? Well no spam... clean interface, did I say no spam? ;) and some more of those goodies, one can hope this may be something similar.
I Am Sparta??

http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/15/facebook-project-spartan/
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I haven't had much utility for it, but I did just realize a useful feature of grids.

I found that you can select (and therefore copy) all text in a paragraph in one grid, while keeping the text in another paragraph unselected.
While this doesn't have any immediately obvious uses to me, there is still some merit.

Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/uycBt.png
> Why not bite the bullet and adopt Android across the board?

s/Android/WebOS. I'd like to see more than two OS players in the market, and at least one with a sane dev model.

While others argue that'd work against RIM's core competency, I don't think that is the case, especially in light of point #2. From what I gather, RIM has strengths in their business partnerships, and decent hardware. UX isn't one of them (point #1).

So outsource the OS to one of the companies that has bucket loads of cash to spend on UX and developer relations, pair it with RIM's own strengths, and reap the benefits of both.

RIM is essentially in the same boat as Nokia, but without a CEO that has the balls to make changes where needed.
I use App Engine a ton. I won't try to list all the positives.
Of course "is it flexible enough to run big, serious projects" depends on the requirements of your big serious projects. Feel free to get more specific here, or (better yet) in the google app engine forums.

One thing not mentioned yet that is a legitimate concern applying generally to PaaS offerings including App Engine - that is vendor lock-in. There are some way to address that including choice of apis and frameworks and also projects like AppScale and TyphoonAE.

There is much to evaluate when considering App Engine for your projects. the flexibility of the platform from a technical perspective is one of things.

Also note, watch closely the changes that are coming in pricing and the way that Google is offering the service. You don't want to get caught evaluating the App Engine of 2010 for 2012.
I don't agree with it. Just by looking at their features and marketing videos/photos, at this time it is aimed towards friends and families than your co-workers or helping you find your next job.

In future they may help you find a job or help you get connected with a senior exec at RIM, but not at this time.
Hi, thanks for the suggestion re interfaces and such, that sounds cool.

I've been able to reproduce problems with the new editor in my copy of Opera, but our classic editor is working fine for me. We'll investigate this more and see what we can do -- thanks for reporting it!

And yeah, we'd like to add more git support over time! ;)

Thanks,
Clearly the author has not used Google+. The service has photos, group video chat where you can watch YouTube with other friends, and status sharing, among other things. It is not a professional network or productivity tool.

Although Google would probably lose if they directly competed with Facebook rather than making their own unique service, it is certainly much closer to Facebook than LinkedIn.
Developers by definition are not QA. And TDD and paring is very poor substitution for the proper QA.
It sure is, and looking back at the way I handled my first few developer interactions, I'm slightly embarrassed. I was ignorant, but try to convince myself that I wasn't. Big learning curve there.
Michael Bloomberg might have a point, but he really isn't in a strong position to complain about shitty overpriced software. Glass houses and all that.
That's the worse part of their design so far. The gray text is hard to read and the black bar is distracting on a otherwise light page.
RIM's core competencies are sales and litigation.
Wouldn't changing OS be switching horses in midstream? RIM just got QNX less than a year ago.

The idea of RIM partnering up with HP is very, very intriguing. It would be basically a Hail Mary strategy for both companies (definitely more for RIM than for HP at this point). Apotheker has said that HP is looking to license webOS with other companies right now. A RIM-HP alliance would be both reinvigorating for both and show that the only way to take on iOS/Android is for former giants to team up together. Or at least make the race against Windows Phone more interesting.
Are the stations supposed to appear on the map? All I see is my location which I just entered. I know where I live and work. If the station locations don't show up on the map then the map widget is fairly useless.
Google Takeout, An Easier Way To Take Your Data With You
(fyi, we're fixing a little bug with publishing that some of you might experience.)
> In reality, she only uses it for calling, texting, e-mail and facebook, and it's not inferior at all for those things.

I was in the market for a decent phone for my own business purposes a few months ago.

I don't use (and don't want a UI to be cluttered by) MyTwitBook+.

I do want phone calls and messaging. I do want some basic PIM tools. I do want some basic web browsing and useful apps. And I want them to be easy to use, efficient, and safe.

For me personally, that means things like a physical keyboard, good sync'ing with other devices and software I work with, and robust security features on the phone. (I tried the leading smartphones at the time, and just didn't get on with touchscreens for typing significant amounts of text.)

Does this sound like any particular company's traditional target market? Of course it does.

Then I went to the store, and checked out the BlackBerry Torch. And I found that its screen was half the resolution of everyone else's model of that generation. I found that its e-mail integration wasn't nearly as straightforward as it could be. I found that it didn't have a well-established browser that could put up modern web sites at an acceptable speed.

Best of all, I found that the store wanted to charge me several hundred pounds to get a Torch on a 24-month lock-in plan. In the UK, I could at the time have picked up a top-of-the-range phone from pretty much anyone else for free on a 24-month plan, or I could have bought those top-of-the-range devices unlocked to use on any carrier's monthly plan for not much more than the money the Torch was going to cost me with the lock-in.

In short, I should have been RIM's perfect customer. I wound up buying a £20 Nokia non-smartphone on a 1-month plan, which still gets me the separate number/phone for business use that I really wanted, and I just use a laptop or similar for the other stuff. As my younger friends might say, epic fail.
Please don't leave us hanging. :) What is her idea?
Yep, I agree. Tastypie has a steeper learning curve, due to beeing more flexible. When I used Piston, jespern was not actively maintaining it, but using a private branch for bitbucket.
Not entirely true, I was sent an invite an invite a few hours ago - works fine.
I don't disagree with you. I'm just pointing out that there's a difference between being "a guy with an idea" and being a guy with a proven record of providing ideas. The latter definitely exist and are valuable, but I did not get the impression that post was trying to say anything to the contrary.
Meet Our New General Partner, Jeff Jordan
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There is no empirical evidence that introducing a minimum wage causes job losses on a scale where the increase of unemployment benefits would outweigh the benefits of its introduction.

The whole idea that the minimum wage causes unemployment is a myth that is based on incorrect labour market models.
I don't like the left sidebar on new Google calendar. The widgets don't have a clear distinction anymore.
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As if. Google+ is competing with Facebook first, and whomever else they squish second.
He's in the perfect position to complain.

The role of Bloomberg the businessman is independent of Bloomberg the public servant. He can sell overpriced software as a businessman all he wants, but once he becomes mayor his responsibility is as a steward of the public's money and to combat ridiculous overpriced projects such as mentioned here.
Facebook needs to makes changes in steps, rather than make huge shifts. Not being able to find something immediately has the same effect as their page not loading. If it takes me 3 seconds to find the "events" button, that's the page loading 3 seconds slower... and more annoying, because it was intentional.
If I have just one criticism of google+ so far, it's that the look-and-feel is just a bit too white and sterile at the moment. It feels like hanging out with your friends in a hospital waiting room.

Of course that's partially just that there's not much going on there yet, compared to facebook... but the other part is a page design issue. Facebook feels more intimate partly because of the use of colour, but partly because of the small fonts and lack of white space and photos everywhere.

Aside from that, the "Circles" feature is precisely the right functionality. Why yes, I would love to be able to sort my "friends" into "people I've met at least twice" vs "people I actually like" vs "people I actually like who also live locally" and so forth.

edit: Oh, and one other major criticism: it's picky about browser, and won't work on either of my work machines. I can understand it not liking the Firefox 2.0.0.12pre that I have on my desktop machine, but the Firefox 3.5 on this laptop can't be that out of date, can it?

On the other hand, that could be a feature too. If facebook didn't work on my work machine I'd probably be more productive.
It is bad. The main problem (besides the black toolbar which blights every new design) is that full day events are black text on the calendar's color (e.g. green). This would be fine if I could select a light color, but the timed events are on a white background. So I can read one, or the other, but not both. Why get rid of the white text for full day events?

The create button looks gimmicky and cartoonish as well. I feel like this is the result of UX testing gone terribly awry. A bunch of individual metrics (how long till a user can figure out how to create an event, how long till a user can identify which page they are on, etc.) without a coherent aesthetic to bind it or any other holistic thinking beyond "make it the same across all devices".
"Timon of Athens" is a play by Shakespeare. It's not among his strongest, by any means, but still significantly better than a lot of the crap on the list.

You'll definitely end up knowing a lot more when you finish than when you started, but I doubt that "Bridget Jones Diary" or a half-dozen separate works of Thomas Hardy are going to contribute much to that achievement.
Reads like someone desperately needed some non-obvious angle to take on this story to drive readership.
Thank you very much for posting this. Learning that good advice/mentorship > bad money (VCs like the one in this article). Budding startups inevitably need funding to survive but it is more important that young entrepreneurs reach out for valuable advice/mentorship e.g. startup incubator programs like YC etc.
And that is how you write a great job advert.

More specifically, it gets across:

- the company culture

- the development practices/methodologies in place

- what's exciting about the work/company

- what technologies they like (and the fact they use a variety of technologies)

- the fact that they get that typical job adverts suck

... all while looking like a regular article.

Great work.
Tablets are still a fad
Translating real world behaviors into awesome online experiences : YakShaving
I don't think his complaint is so much about shitty software as it is about criminal activities relating to its creation. Carl Bell (the executive in charge of the project) plead guilty to approving charges from a contractor for years when he wasn't even on the project. I think Bloomberg has a strong argument that there was fraud going on here.
The One Google Plus Feature Facebook Should Fear
The parent company of myspace was a spam/spyware company, so Myspace's past in general is somewhat titillating. They seem like the Bad News Bears of startups really. Well, if the Bad News Bears did a bunch of obnoxious things of dubious legality. It seems like someone could easily make a movie about Myspace without stretching the truth as they did with the Social Network. I suppose Tom Anderson would be an even less likable protagonist than Zuckerberg, but that could make for a more interesting film.
I don't understand the hatred toward 99 designs. Should people expect the most awesome work from it? No. Is it a good solution for startups with a small budget who can't afford anything else? Maybe, but that's for them to decide.

No designers are forced to participate in 99 designs, and no companies are forced to use them. What they do is legal and ethical, so what's the problem?

I release all of my photos under a Creative Commons license on Flickr, and I've received comments from professional photographers complaining that my hobby hurts their profession. So what if it does? If amateurs are willing to do something for free, then that should encourage professionals to differentiate themselves by being better. If lowering their prices is also a consequence of that then so be it.

It reminds me of people who are against open source software because it competes with people who make and sell software for a living. Again, should open source groups stop what they're doing out of respect for people who do this for a living? I don't think they should. Especially when you realize that most open source contributors are professional developers who make a living building software.

I don't mean to disrespect designers at all. In fact, I have a tremendous amount of respect for great designers, and I've found that you usually get what you pay for when it comes to design. I wouldn't personally use 99 designs, but I just don't understand the hatred that a lot of people have toward them.

P.S. If you're looking for a great designer in the bay area, and you can afford a little more than 99 designs, I recommend Dual Aesthetic. http://www.dualaesthetic.com/
You can say "I wish she was not so informal", but that's a perfectly reasonable use of the word

Surely it should be "I wish she were not so informal"?
CityTime was launched in 2003 at a budget of $63 million, but costs swelled dramatically as the project stumbled along for nearly a decade.

From $63M to $600M? I would have thought that ppl may have noticed when the costs doubled or tripled the budget. Almost 10x the original budget? That type of oversight must go pretty high up.
The Reader's List is making me cry... tears of pure hilarity at Ayn Rand capturing not just first place but second place as well, at L. Ron Hubbard appearing not once but thrice on it, and at both Tom Clancy and Orson Scott Card each making an appearance. This is a breathtaking list.
All of the advice given here is good and none of the tips here are going to hurt you.

It's just another less abstract reiteration of a few truths that encompass much more than programming.

Work with different tools. Think. Talk about what you do with other people. Do all of it a lot.
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The examples he gave are misleading; they tend to suggest consulting.

But his point is right: There are applications that have been written for a small number of clients, but languish because getting that amount of success is something a developer can do on his own. In other words, it's tee'd up: There's a business case, a product and there are existing users.

What remains needed is someone who can get additional users, grow the application, leverage the business, etc.

It's such a good idea, in fact, that I don't know why there isn't a bigger 'reverse market' of devs looking for a business partner. Maybe because once you've got to that point you start thinking you don't need an MBA to do business.