skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I assume for the purposes of this discussion, design and usability have been melded into a single concept. However, sability principles are certainly something a developer can learn and scientifically derive. The SIGCHI proceedings are a great resource.

Making that attractive is a completely different skillset and one I certainly don't have. However, based on the amount of flowery yet wholly unusable crap I come across, it seems many designers don't really have a good handle on usability either. Getting someone great at both is a rare find indeed, but it's not as if there's this huge cognitive gap between the two.
You laugh, but if someone accidentally shipped some code in their unit test library that made assertEqual(1, 2) always return true I might be a very unhappy camper.
1. UX does not "just seem easy" to designers. Most are no good at it.

2. "Are all UX specialists designers?" depends entirely on how we define our terms. If we define UX as a design discipline (as is common, since it basically is), then yes, by definition. If we define it as something else, then no.
Let's throw some theories around, shall we?

I would guess that this an inside job that exploits a flaw in an account address change procedure. That would explain why Apple couldn't resolve the problem by patching up iTunes protocol, which would be the reasonable thing to expect if the flaw was exploited from the outside.
Apt with 20000+ packages waiting to be installed.
Hiring a contract designer is never an optimization, whether you're bootstrapping or neck-deep in venture capital.

Startups are all about learning and iterating quickly. Your contract designer won't help you with that. When you need them to pump out the next iteration, they'll be working on another project and available in two weeks. No, you need those skills in-house.

If you can't persuade a designer to join your team (and man, this is hard when you're bootstrapping), the best course of action is to learn some these skills yourself. Even if it's slow, and even if it's hard.

Of course, this is exactly the same argument we've all made and read a million times before, except with s/developer/designer.

That 'ugh' feeling some of you are feeling at the prospect of learning to design? Yeah, that's the same way the guy spinning his wheels looking for a technical co-founder feels, when you tell him to learn to code. Still got to be done.
Plura Processing tried it a while back with a Java applet. There was a big uproar when one of their affiliates sold visitor's compute time without disclosure.

http://pluraprocessing.wordpress.com/2009/08/24/our-response...
Currencies are goods like any other goods and the people who own them have divergent purposes. When Krugman writes "we want [a monetary system] to facilitate transactions and make the economy as a whole rich", he's assuming a lot. Obviously, some of the people who own bitcoins right now are not interested in facilitating financial transactions to the detriment of their net worth. So, for people who want that facilitation, bitcoin isn't getting the job done, but the people who are using bitcoin as an investment are getting just what they want. Those two conditions could flip fairly quickly down the line, but that's how these things go. But for Krugman to just assume that only one of these is an acceptable condition just begs the question.
Cloud Business Review is Now on Alltop
You can't get past the cheapness of some people. $5 a month for hosting is very attractive to someone looking to bootstrap off of savings.
But won't it also encourage people to be wiser with their money, and not waste them on unimportant stuff? If what you're buying has higher value to you than holding the money, then you'll buy it. Isn't overspending what got us into this financial mess in the first place? And getting into too much debt, whether it's the Government itself or the people.

Also the deflation effect should only be this great in the early years of the currency. Once it becomes a solid popular currency (like say the euro or the dollar), and it has reached its maximum of 21 million bitcoins, the deflation should be a lot smaller and insignificant to people who would want to "invest" in keeping bitcoins to themselves, because there won't be an avalanche of people wanting bitcoins anymore, so the value of the currency won't surge so much from that point forward. The currency would become more stable and with a more steady growth as it also becomes affected by the law of big numbers.
Yea, it seems like a trend these days that if someone controls a majority market share people on the internet start screaming "monopoly!"

Go Daddy has lots of competition, they're just outselling all of them.
No joke. I've attended a few events at GA, the first time I went I had a very difficult time finding it because whenever I looked up 'General Assembly' on Google Maps it sent me to the UN building.

Interestingly, now that I try it, it's no longer the case. Huge cheers to GA, incidentally. It's a fantastic space- one day I intend to be there in a more permanent capacity than weekend hackathons...
Uhh.

I use _.map and co with objects all the time. It works fine. I don't see how it is any different from Maddy.map. What did I miss?

Also, if the major difference is bugfixes in iteration, why don't you just contribute to underscore?
From the article:

>...and my favorite one is...

> 10. Investing in new product development and expanding the product catalog are the most difficult things to do in hard times, and also among the most important.

Wow. I'd love to know what Phil is thinking re: the recent cancellation of webOS devices, given that he singled out this point (which I think is an excellent point by the way).
Dynadot is the way to go
It seems a bit premature to judge that way. For example now that the exchange rate is slowly falling, more people might be considering to part ways with their BTC. So things might eventually settle down. It is still very early days.

Also, I suspect few people realize that they should not hold on to their normal money because governments will continually seek to devalue it (that seems to be the takeaway from the article, that that is the normal procedure for "normal" currencies). Their spending habits are probably more governed by their prospects to earn money in the future, or their savings, rather than a look at the value of their money.
My Year of Riak
I cant stand GoDaddy's hosting product. Their interface is awful, they're constantly upselling you, and changes via their Control Panel never happen instantly.

I have a lot of clients who came to me using GoDaddy and continue to use GoDaddy. So I interact with GoDaddy in some form every day.

But GoDaddy really shines in one area: their support. They're professional, they don't treat me or my clients like idiots, they don't bullshit me, and they're always quick to resolve issues.

(Personally, I prefer name.com and prgmr.com)
DNS wasn't really the problem here, it was the hosting and setting up a ssl cert. I use GoDaddy for my DNS stuff and have never had any problem with them for that. Most of the horror stories come from people hosting with them.
SimSearch - Item Based Search Package
Sure, if you don't like statically typed, compiled, "slow to startup" runtime, you can always go with your prefferred "slow to run" runtime like ruby and python actually are.
"is that I can pull up Vim, make some quick changes and see the results. For most Web apps this is a great thing." That's exactly what Play does.
Being able to work offline.
Whenever HN is filled with items that aren't HN-esque enough for me, I like to go to "new", find some good articles, and upvote them.
Scrolling eats one cpu core and is super laggy for me (Opera on Linux, nvidia)...
Well that's pretty cool.
Facebook Offered to Buy Scvngr for $80M: Could Have Powered Facebook Deals
Does this only apply to hosting or registering domains as well?
Precisely. Imagine some arbitrary point in the past when Bitcoins (B) and Dollars ($) were at parity (around the time the Slashdot article appeared, IIRC). And imagine a product, widgets, that cost $10/ea.

At that time:

$10 -> B10 -> 1 widget

Now move forward to a 10x increase in Bitcoin:

$10 -> B1 -> 1 widget

So the price of widgets went from B10 to B1. Deflation.
One of the only reasonable posts in this thread, sounds like it was more like the users fault than godaddy. I would agree for the kind of low tech shared hosting they provide but I have set some VPS servers up on godaddy that have worked quiet well. As long as you don't need their support and build from scratch without a plex/cpanel type setup they have been fine.
Cv writing service
Reliably original cv writing service cannot be cheap, especially when it is handled by trained writers.
This link will inspire you, or maybe just crash your browser. http://www.textfiles.com/underconstruction/
(Good) Design is much more about how it works than how it looks.
It's super difficult to find a startup PM at the beginning, partially because it's super difficult to find another person who has the same product vision. It's much easier for the founder with strong conviction to see the product through, at least to a stage where it's been proven by the market.
I had unauthorized purchases on my itunes account for the following:

10 songs from this guy who I've never heard of - http://stantonlanier.com/
and
N.O.V.A. - Near Orbit Vanguard Alliance, v1.2.1, Seller: Gameloft (12+)

Both were from my store credit in the span of a day. I changed my password and have been good since then, didn't think about complaining to apple as it was only like $15.
I prefer currency to asset. I wouldn't hold bitcoins to spend.
In my experience, Rails is much slower to start up than Java frameworks, even if the rvm itself loads faster. Also, Play does allow you to see changes instantly. Read the docs for more information.

As far as static typing goes, that's a larger debate. Many, myself included, believe static typing has many benefits for error prevention, debugging, tooling, etc.
Neat. I would like to be able to use the slider (or a similar concept) that you have on the home page so I can just look at the infrequent ones. I want to only look at 8-11 for example.
Seems like everyone agrees that GoDaddy is terrible. What's strange to me is the interface has always sucked and gets worse as they've grown. You'd think with the revenues they see, they could get some good designers to make it much more usable.

I like Enom myself. The API works really well, prices are good, and the UI is clean and usable. I've been much happier since moving all of my domains over.
Catastrophic data loss: who’s got your SSN?
How to Create Multiple Actions Within a Single Workflow Rule Using SageCRM
This is not about typing faster. This is about lightening cognitive load. For instance, I don't use my vision to type. Rather, I think "stretch my right ring finger to get the [O]" (except I don't actually verbalize it, it became automatic now).

That mean my vision is free to concentrate at the screen. That means that my short-term memory don't have to memorize what I am currently seeing at the screen. This means I have more precious short-term memory to do whatever important task I am doing, like, programming.

Subjectively, touch typing is surprisingly comfortable. So even if I'm completely wrong about the above, I still feel better, and that alone is worth the investment.
There are some useful tips in that article.

Using qemu in a no-gui mode is pretty cool. I've used VirtualBox, VMWare Fusion, and Parallels on OSX before, but I hate having to deal with the GUI window (and having the system reserve resources for it).

Since OSX is based on Unix under the hood, it shouldn't be too difficult to for a developer to use either OSX or Linux as their development machine. It's not like the knowledge gap between Windows and OSX/*nix machines. So other than messing around with Linux, the article fails to mention why he doesn't use OSX (other than some unfounded 'flaky' and 'impossible' critiques).
He's just begging the question. That a fixed currency supply creates deflation is not a new insight. The idea that this causes 'hoarding' is highly questionable. Prices in consumer electronics fall significantly every year. Does this cause people to hold onto their money instead of buying computers, tvs, and iphones? Of course not. Why would other types of goods be any different? People still need what they need and want what they want and are going to buy those things regardless of what relative prices will be in the future. The difference with a stable currency supply is savers and fixed income earners wouldn't have their purchasing power sucked away from them year after year--on the contrary, they'd become continually wealthier as the economy grows around them.
Using a downloadable theme on your product is somewhat akin to using Wordpress to program your web app. The compromises will be dictated by the CMS/Theme, instead of you being able to call the shots

Say you need a tool to reorder categories. You know the best way to do this would be with drag and drop, but the theme only has table views! So you place an "order" field in a table view and hope for the best.

Then you realize that having a line chart for displaying open cases in a bug tracker is stupid, but it's the only view you have so you stick with it.

All these little compromises form an incredibly expensive form of technical debt, and pretty soon you have a product that users wouldn't touch with a stick. It's better to have an ugly product that works well than a pretty product that's a pain to use.
Don't be sad. Competition and innovation are good things. XMPP and IRC aren't perfect solutions. I haven't seen this app in action so I can't comment on the "doing it poorly" part, but can you elaborate on that? What is poor about the implementation?
Henry Blodget's plan to save Yahoo
Not sure if serious...
Historical (not sarcastic) analysis of Geocities: http://contemporary-home-computing.org/1tb/
Live announcement here now http://www.cmu.edu/event/sept7/
Netflix cracks down, now enforcing Instant one-stream limit
You are assuming that the programmer uses the theme's markup. I buy themes for their PSD and mark it up myself.
And, if you've set -o vi in bash (etc?), when you're editing a command line and need more than just the limited set of vi commands that make sense on a command line, do this:

esc v

esc gets you out of input mode, and v takes the current command line that you're editing and opens a full vi/vim session initialized with the command line. After you're done editing it, :wq quits vi and executes the command. If you change your mind, delete everything in the buffer and then :wq

This is handy if you're editing a biggish command, particularly one from recent history like a loop or anything with a block.
If Aol cannot accept either of these options, and no other creative solution can be found, I cannot be a part of TechCrunch going forward.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure AOL just told Arrington they didn't want him to have any significant role at TechCrunch going forward.
Entrevista con Arturo Mendoza - Para Pequeños Negocios Rentables
Currencies are not goods and should not be thought of as goods. They are mediums of exchange[1]. They may be backed by goods (such as gold), but currency itself should have no inherent value (otherwise, it's a terrible medium of exchange).

What you're talking about are securities[2]. There is a distinct difference. Bitcoins are ostensibly a security masquerading as a currency.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_(finance)
FWIW I am fairly comfortable in setting up Django so despite that there are a thousand things beyond the gettting it to run. Things like DB, hell even the basic DB choice. For a current project I along with the developer (my brother) realised that we were better off using MongoDB than use MySQL for our quick random features in very near future.

Again I cannot imagine doing this without a developer. At the same time things like Product Design and User Experience (note I am not even touching User Interface- which is what ou get with templates) require a certain level of detail that are perhaps better served by a designer who does this day in day out.

It appears that the general consensus is that just getting it out there is good enough reason to call it an MVP. I think this post from 37Signals nails it down as to what happens to user experience in an MVP http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2963-what-happens-to-user-exp...
I would guess it's a phishing/brute force scam, and the address change is (as mentioned in the article) just a way to validate that it worked.

I would say that Apple's actions around refunds are just a simple way to make sure they don't take too much bad press while they try to find a way to prevent this from happening.
You basically interpreted this backwards. When Krugman says that the bitcoin economy has experienced deflation, he means that a bitcoin is worth more now than it was in the past.

The graph on bitcoinmarket certainly shows this. If I wanted to buy a motorcycle in bitcoins in 2010 I would have needed several thousand. Now I only need a few hundred. Which means that I would have been stupid to spend my bitcoins last year. If deflation continues and bitcoins continue to be worth more and more, then the rational thing to do is never spend my bitcoins at all. And most economic theory says that the more people spend money the healthier the economy becomes so Krugman is arguing that bitcoins are an unhealthy direction for the economy to head in.
I can't believe people are still bitching about GoDaddy shared hosting. I feel like a quote from Richard Pryor is in store: "Boy, it's 1975 you betta get your shit together!"

My point is that if you were smart enough to use GoDaddy shared hosting then you probably weren't smart enough at the time to have a VPS. Take what you have learned from GoDaddy and learn some more stuff and then sign up for a VPS or build a server. GoDaddy can be a good start for those just jumping into webdev and hosting, but after you have the equivalent of a yellow belt, its time to move on.
>> Isn't overspending what got us into this financial mess in the first place?

Nope, it was overborrowing. One of the reasons that the economy is sluggish is that consumers are underspending.

>> it has reached its maximum of 21 million bitcoins, the deflation should be a lot smaller

That's when deflation in bitcoins will get worse, because while wealth will increase, the amount of currency in circulation will not.
If Bitcoin ever becomes a successful, liquid currency, it will have been partly thanks to the current speculators. They're the ones "mining" the bitcoins. They're taking the risk. In a way, it's similar to gold miners of old. They would invest money in digging and mining for the chance of finding gold. They were in it for the profit. Still, it did benefit other people since there was more gold available for both utilitarian and liquidity purposes.
I'd like to point out that this doesn't answer my question. I mean, you're not selling Campfire or Hipchat are you?
An Introduction to Scheme and its Implementation
> It’s a good thing I don’t drink, because the blur of Saturday and Sunday spent on the phone could have really been dealt with better with a couple of stiff drinks to ease the pain.

What.
I was going to post a similar comment, but after consideration, I think it’s important to understand that different markets have different imperatives.

When selling to consumers or startups, you get one-off revenue from each sale. Unless you are selling a locked-in phone plan or you are MSFT extracting a legacy tax on upgrades, you can't take a high lifetime value per customer for granted, you have to keep earning your revenues.

If something isn’t working, therefore, you can cut and run. You aren’t throwing revenues away.

With enterprise products, OTOH, you lock them in for years, maybe decades. Long after you stop making new versions, you are still selling support contracts and charging for minor bug fix releases and ports. They are locked in tight and can’t easily move to another vendor.

So you have a much bigger incentive to stay the course even if something isn’t taking the world by storm: Those customers that do buy have a large lifetime value.

I’m not saying I buy into whatever snake-oil Leo is selling this week, it’s pretty obvious he has no credibility when it comes to announcements about what HP will or won’t do, but I admit that walking away from a consumer product doesn’t exactly mean that they’d do the same thing to a platform that might sell to the Enterprise.
I can imagine how difficult this was to pull off. I came across some old Colorado tapes that had backups of BBS related stuff, files, etc. from 10 years ago. I figured I'd try to dump the data off of them using a Linux live CD only to find that Linux dropped floppy-interface tape drive support a long time ago. Next time around, I'll pull an ancient live CD version and get the data off before it goes the way of the Cray. Constantly migrate your data forward to avoid these hassles!
Where is your iTunes installation? Windows or Mac? It'd be interesting to see what people who had this problem have in common in terms of their setup. It might just be some sort of trojan/rootkit making rounds.
Let's say the total value of Bitcoin's in the world in 15 years is the same as the total value of Australian dollar's (AUD) in the world. Based on the rate of production it's going to take a massive amount of deflation to get there. That might make Bitcoins a good investment but it also makes them a terrible currency. (~261 billion AUD * 1.1USD/AUD / 21 million bitcoins = 13,600$/bitcoin.)

All of which is beside the point, unlike banking transactions each bitcoin computer needs to be connected to the internet so you can't create a truly secure network. If the average American had 10+$ in bitcoins on their computer a significant number of them would get hacked on a regular basis and simply lose all that money. Which means for the average consumer they need to deposit that money into some sort of bank and there is no FDIC for bitcoins so when that bank is hacked all that 'money' goes up in smoke. I think we may end up with a pure digital currency sometime soon but bitcoin’s don’t really work (yet). If you want secure anonymous transactions we already have cash and several digital equivalents based on cash, but if you want stability commodity bubbles demonstrate that finite quantities does prevent bubbles and their associated crashes.
There's a difference between some goods -- electronics -- getting cheaper every year and all goods getting cheaper every year.

Deflation isn't necessarily a problem; but runaway deflation is, and the structure of bitcoin makes deflation a self-perpetuating cycle.
On Slowing Down, Unplugging and Living in the Moment | Joanna Ciolek
I'm not a fan but I'll admit they're pretty good with domains.
I like Play, but I use Grails for my web applications. Maybe it's a little slower due to groovy in it's background, but it has a way better documentation, better build system and more cool plugins. Groovy also is a much easier language compared to Java.
One More Thing: iTunes Match Will Let You Stream Music
Fair enough, but I think most economists would agree that we shouldn't be trying to make savers and fixed-income earners wealthy in the first place. We should make it economically advantageous for the people with money saved up to invest it into the economy.
Apparently I follow a bunch of chatterboxes as almost my entire stream is comprised of high volume tweeters. Explains why I don't pay much attention though!
I am ready for the css/js spinning earth and marquee!
"HP will stop making announcements for stuff it doesn’t have”—Leo Apothekar, January 2011
It starts after his death? Why might that be