skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks man, good to back. I didn't go into too many details on this one, but I think the "secret sauce" to scaling this idea would happen by actually making deals with the major customer service call centers on the back end. That way, instead of the customer service agents having to call the same 800 numbers and wait on hold like the rest of us, they could get a direct line to a dedicated service rep at the call center who could quickly resolve issues for the agents. So what would be a 20 minute call for a customer could only be a 2-3 minute call for the agent.
How to remove client ID from Google Chrome to protect your privacy
hooray for out of context quotes, sound bites, and vitriolic campaigning!

seriously though, whenever a campaign releases this kind of statement it's always clipped down to sound bite size and paraded around the seedier side of the internet. you think they'd learn.
Spoken like a cunning linguist.
Unless you aren't interested in using Ruby on Rails, you might want to check out LovdByLess:

http://lovdbyless.com
Thanks. Serves me right for not reading the FAQ.
Right. That must be why Google, Craigslist, and MySpace are such monumental failures.
Yes. Nobody sets out to make ugly things. It's just that if they CAN'T make it look good, they justify it by saying that it doesn't matter how good it looks.

All due respect to Matt Maroon, as always, but it's SUCH a snotty thing to dismiss a line of products because they're pretty. It's not only backwards thinking, it's snotty, too.
Pharos Pocket GPS Navigator GPS kit for Toshiba
Pocket GPS Navigator is comprised of the iGPS hardware and the Ostia navigation software supplied on CD-ROMs. With the navigation software installed on your HP iPAQ, locating your current position, or finding a destination or point of interest.
Ha, nice. My wife's trick is to make it as non-personal as possible. "I know it's not your fault, but <insert problem>. I'm not mad at you, but you might understand my frustration at <restate problem>.". Also - stay on the line as long as it takes...most of them are measured on how fast their turnaround is and they're not allowed to directly hang up on you (as long as you're not being hostile or overly rude), so eventually they'll do whatever it takes to get you off the phone.
The crap that the average enterprise shop loads on the disk image does way more to slow down the os than anything that comes prebundled with windows. Password managers, sketchy rfid card reader drivers, short cuts to help desks and enterprise portals ugh it makes me sick.
If you have partners or upcoming hires, then you shouldn't look to any blog for guidance. If you're like me, hoping for traction to attract a good cofounder, this seems applicable.
GM unveils Volt (electric car) on company's 100th anniversary
Microsoft should buy Adobe. Flash has the potential to be the next de facto dominant OS.
Being very successful in a saturated market is definitely possible, especially if you have a product that's much superior to your competitors. However, I don't believe that you do, especially as fashion is quite subjective and you'll struggle to have an empirically better product.

The t-shirt space is very crowded - it sometimes feels like everyone in the world now owns a t-shirt company - so there really is a hell of a lot of competition.

I don't see how your company differentiates itself from the others and its branding, something I perceive as quite important in the fashion industry, seems quite weak, despite the quite catchy name, especially when you're competing with bigger long-established names in the area that advertise heavily.

You'll likely be a modest success, but your designs are, in my view, largely quite forgettable. I think the high-quality arty designer t-shirt angle is a better, more profitable, higher-margin long-term direction than the more passé low-end "cartoony" or "humour t-shirt" market that you're focusing on since they both utterly sewn up by big names, overly saturated and a completely cliché. I do quite like the zombie t-shirt though.
I like how you took an idea that was semi-out there, molded it, made it free, and tossed it out there. genius. I think the best thing you guys did with stack overflow was to give the community so much potential power. bravo.
For MySQL you can use the excellent http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQL_Proxy in just this way.

However didn't the Remote Agent bug story posted here recently reveal the weakness in relying on auditing? A bug identified by a formal verifier was accidentally re-introduced later in development after they "stopped thinking about the problem".
Ruby on Rails Code Quality Checklist
2 things: Know Your Market & Find Your Niche.

My guess is that you haven't done either yet.

The apparel industry in incredibly brutal and very often without logic. (Comfort is probably not enough of a competitive advantage in this marketplace.)

You look like you have some cool stuff. Find your place and stay under the radar of the big boys. But don't think you're selling clothes. You're selling something else. You could make a very nice living there.
Google is pretty, downright beautiful in fact.

Notice I said that pretty is good, but not the only good.

Myspace and Craigslist 'can't' make beautiful products, Myspace because that would detract from user personalization, and Craigslist because they never hired the design muscle because it works well enough.
A lot of people have been predicting a New York tech boom, following the collapse of the financial sector. Here's why I am skeptical:

1. Technology people and quants are the least likely to be laid off, because they are the most skilled. IBD/M&A kids will be cut loose, but they're useless from a startup perspective, since no one learns anything in the first 5 years of "soft skills" banking; it's grunt work too low-end to be educational from a business perspective, and the only coding involved is Excel/PowerPoint wizardry.

2. New York's biggest problem, from a startup perspective, is the high cost of housing, leading to a high burn rate. Housing will be "corrected" over time, but this will take years due to the lag, and a lot of tech talent will have bled out of New York in the interim.

New York will become stronger as a tech hub, but I'd bet on the Upper Midwest (Chicago, Ann Arbor, Madison, Minneapolis) before New York, since that area has both educated people and a low cost of living.
The grand-parent is merely suggesting that Pretty is good and ugly is bad. NOT saying that is the only thing that matters. So your comment is not a refutation. (and hence, I see no reason for sarcasm either.)
Google and Craigslist are minimalist relics that do a job and do it well. They're too plain to be _ugly_.

MySpace is popular with the same personalizing crowd that would put stickers on their MacBooks.
"as someone who has been a Mac user since before it was fashionable"

1983? ;-)
How to Profit from This Sell-off (100% Guaranteed): Tax Loss Harvesting
I'm curious. Could you email me? Email in profile.
People don't have an emotional connection to classified ads or search results. This was an epiphany for me which I detail here: http://ourdoings.com/2008-02
One should not choose between great aesthetics and usefulness. One should seek both.
Waterloo, my school.
While this might make it easier for some to adopt a GNU/Linux, adding more closed platforms to a free OS is a step in the wrong direction.
thanks for the link. Seems to have a bunch of features I am interested in. I see that it has had close to 17K downloads and a quick search didn't result in many reviews or fan following.

How mature is this? Would you have a first hand experience using this platform by any chance ?
I would go meta: If you're an experienced Web designer and the boss isn't, then he shouldn't be telling you want tools to use. On second thought, that probably won't work. Maybe try an argument from authority: Major Web sites such as the New York Times are all hand-coded.
He didn't dismiss a product because it was pretty. He dismissed the people who buy products solely because they were pretty.
Live from Web 2.0 in NY: Cal Henderson (Flickr) - Scalable Web Architectures
The Semantic Web: An Introduction
needing 10 million different logins... OpenID adoption is still slow.

Until the Facebooks and MySpaces get everyone used to using apps and not just dinky games, this will still be a big problem.
Zend adds Flex to PHP for developing rich Web apps
Wow, now I don't even have to open my browser to run down my battery faster with 100% CPU load.

Adobe has some severe quality problems with its Flash player already, pushing out more badly written software is hardly going to help. Or am I really the only one who cares?

EDIT: Just as I posted this, I noticed that a rogue Flash process was once again pegging one of my CPUs. Fail. I wonder if there's a way to restrict off-screen Flash processes to use a maximum of 2-5% CPU time? Also, more browsers need to take a no-nonsense approach to crashed plugins.
Why is it that everything I read in this blog pisses me off?

Yes. Of course there is. We aren't nearly at the point yet where the Internet works as quickly as hardware. We don't have a world with wonderful connections everywhere. Desktop apps are leagues faster in every regard. And I'd say we need a long time before that'll be fixed.

Plus, once you work inside a web browser, you don't just have the layer abstraction, you have a visual abstraction. Know what I like about Mail and Newsfire? The fact that they have ultraminimal interfaces for what they do. When I stick that inside Safari, I suddenly have something that's uglier than the original thing was. Even MobileMe suffers from that visually.

For somebody whose URL would imply a high level of criticism, which is always good, these posts always seem to advocate very sucky things.
Dude, it has "military-grade security"! :-)
Are Cocky Developers Worth It?
Too bad I didn't know you were there. I would have looked for you... It's always nice to put a face to names (or aliases).
Shuttleworth: Python needs to focus on future
Looking for advice and / or dev project help.
There are a few discrepancies. I'm not aware of studies done in Israel, for example, although for some reason the authors of the Bell Curve were very willing to color in those lines. As far as I know you can't really separate the IQ gap with the fact that you have an immigrant population. For example, the initial tests of Chinese immigrants in San Francisco showed an IQ of 103 (adjusted for the Flynn effect). Later tests of second and third generation Chinese in America highlighted an IQ of around 98. In other words, there was a 5 point swing as people got settled. If there's a culture where people hadn't gotten settled, (and haven't really been given the chance) it's the Jews. But I expect the differences in attitudes toward academics and effort more than supersede and natural advantage that might exist.

Cite: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/12/17/07121...
Most people don't spend $150 on an OS, they get it "free" with their PC.

The business sector, as it is, inevitably upgrade to whatever Microsoft puts out once they pull support on old versions of their OS. Microsoft have basically no competition in the business sector - they're pretty much only competing with themselves.

A large proportion of people dislike like Vista because they've either heard it's bad or have had bad experiences using it on low-spec computers. This is unlikely to happen with Windows 7, especially considering improvements in computer speed in the meantime.

Apple products make up around 10-15% of the market in the west and much, much less worldwide - a relative minority. People like pretty things whether or not they own, or can own, a Mac.

"Access control" isn't DRM, it's a security decision, and actually a good thing that had to be introduced into Windows eventually to improve its much-criticised security model. There was always going to be some criticism over it.

Microsoft don't need to make a great product, just a better one. Their product is the natural upgrade path, they just need to create a "Windows 7 fixes the problems with Vista" message which looks like the direction they are going.
Posicionamiento en Buscadores - Internet Marketing - Bluesoft SEO
How to Structure A Story: The Eight-Point Arc
I'm sure this conversation has been had on news.yc, but how do you account for ugly ass sites like myspace, plenty of fish, and craigslist?
Ah python. I am more comfortable with php, ruby, java and perl. But can hack anyway if its going to be a huge plus using pinax in terms of features etc.

But what I infer from the video and James Tauber blog is that it is far from being mature and not ahead of drupal either. Your thoughts ?
I hope you know that there is nothing that Drupal can't do.
But I think that's a bit snotty as well. Some people like pretty things, some people like things with insane benchmarks. To each his own if it works.
The Benefits of a NOLS Education
Tradeoffs. Pretty has costs, in one form or another, and each of these firms takes these costs into account.

The original walkman was ugly as sin, but it was cheap and reliable. Had it been beautiful, it would have been even better, but it couldn't, without costing more.
As a former journalist I'd like to hear more. Please email me (profile).
I don't think "good" communication skills are the requirement but rather just adequate skills in a field populated by people notorious for having rather poor communication skills, thus making the basics look good.
Why don't you have a blog?
Unlike languages, they nearly always push back...
One should not choose between great aesthetics and usefulness. One should seek both.

Sun Tzu, is that you? :)
There is a chance, and you know what - there is a market! A huge market that just keeps growing! So why would it fail?

Let me give you an example: There are restaurants everywhere. EVERYWHERE! So is the restaurant business saturated? No, it's just mature. Some come, some go. It's all a matter of financing and marketing. People need to eat, people need to buy t-shirts.

So if you are well capitalized, there is no reason why you cannot capture a significant share of the market. If you have no capital at all, you will fail.

Pick your competitive advantage (slightly cheaper T-Shirts, more mainstream stuff, etc), then create your business based off advertisments. Think of ways to innovate and improve, and there is no reason why you should fail. The market is there, it's certainly not a winner-take-all business.
A Cray that does Windows
Curious, as always. My email is in my profile :)
Cognition Announces "World's Largest Semantic Map"
Rails

http://www.actsascommunity.com/

http://www.missingmethod.com/projects/community_engine/

http://beonebody.org/

http://www.missingmethod.com/2007/01/08/how-to-build-a-socia...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=305191
Equally stupid. People can buy products for whatever reason they want. Why is beauty any less of a valid criterion than any other?

I must have been born without the desire to dictate to people why they should want things.
I do remember one of Windows 7's biggest features is virtualization for backwards compatibility... then again I still remember a lot of Longhorn's promised cool features too. Most of them except for the new UI never made it into Vista.
It's only about 6 months old. My only experience was getting it up and running locally and testing out the functionality. It took a couple of hours to get going (mostly due to updating gem versions). From my standpoint I was happy with how it looked. I had considered Wordpress and Drupal, but I liked the smaller, more manageable codebase - even if it meant I may be fixing bugs in the project code as I went.

I hadn't checked in on the project in awhile. I'm surprised it's not more active. FYI it looks like there was a fork recently and Luvfoo is being more actively developed (but no existing community)

http://www.justinball.com/projects/
Please send inquiries directly to me. My e-mail is in my profile. Thanks for all your interest. It sounds like it might even be possible to pull a few minds together to bash this out pretty quickly and see if it'll fly or not.
http://wiki.ringsidenetworks.org/ is a reverse engineered Facebook with an application platform.
Breaking - Android Official on September 23
I can't recommend NOLS enough. I did a month-long course after undergrad in Australia. Take a semester off from school and do a course for credit instead. Or, if you're out of school, find time to do a course that's as long as you can afford. The skills you learn are innumerable - both practical and psychological - and the views you earn are majestic.
Stormpulse showered with tips.
Bluff: Beautiful graphs in JavaScript
well with laptop prices in 2009 likely to be under $600 for numerous choices of decent hardware, the notion of adding another $150 to the price just to boot the thing is no longer competitve. the pc vendors should just throw weight behind ubuntu, or go download freebsd7, do some work on wine tuning, and ship it. only 20% of people who bought vista will buy 7...the numbers are starting to dwindle, xp is and always will be the most used windows version
The business sector, as it is, inevitably upgrade to whatever Microsoft puts out once they pull support on old versions of their OS.

I agree with this. And, yet... once you cross the line from nominally working for your customers to overtly extorting money from them, you can't go back.

So I doubt that Microsoft will pull support for XP until the demand is gone. And the demand won't be gone until there's a real reason to upgrade to Windows 7. A "Windows 7 fixes the problems with Vista" marketing message will be nice and everything, but I'm guessing that IT departments will not be easily fooled. They've heard a lot of marketing doubletalk; they're pretty used to it by now. They will have to have to be given actual reasons before they will switch.

If you think that it's "inevitable" that XP will eventually be retired... I know some Cobol programmers that I could introduce you to. ;) Not that I believe that XP will last as long as Cobol. I find it hard to believe that it could possibly be supported for much longer than another decade.
I think having somebody build a site in HTML and CSS is a waste of time. There has to be some knowledge of the space and I think almost everyone has the basic knowledge of what is a website now. You've mentioned one development process, but a lot of good shops are doing iterative development, extreme programming and - in particular - test driven development. The big hole I see here is scalability and distributed systems. This is a very technical topic, but the fact of the matter is if you are building a large scale web application it has to, well, scale. That means clusters of servers, managing memory across these servers (memcached perhaps), transactions, consistency all this stuff.
Three basic competitive strategies: cost, differentiation, focus. All these seem identical to your competitors when looking at your site.
Most people, i think, like both. Problem is when some company in Cupertino, CA tries to pass off crap using pretty packaging. Nobody likes to wake up one day next to a fruit colored laptop.

Edit: Too soon?
E-mailed you.
Yes.

Even when I see people using things I dislike (anybody heard of Twilight? That book is the scourge of intelligent life), I find fault not in the person who likes it but in the people that chose to make that product available (in that book's case, the publishing company). People can like whatever they want, and while that might change my opinion of the person, I don't blame the product for it.
Funky, but bizarre and not sure it is very reader-friendly. (or even author-friendly, for that matter since most authors spend a lot more time reading and searching the stuff they write.)
Unmaintained doesn't mean the library is bad.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_follows_function

"It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic,
Of all things physical and metaphysical,
Of all things human and all things super-human,
Of all true manifestations of the head,
Of the heart, of the soul,
That the life is recognizable in its expression,
That form ever follows function. This is the law.”
Aesthetics speak. Craigslist says "cheap". MySpace says "My parents wouldn't like this place and I can decorate it how I want". I don't know what plentyoffish says.
Odopod, Method, Barbarian Group
HP's PC division is exploring the possibility of using Linux for the mass-market
MySpace allows people to customize their profiles and while it may be ugly, it's only because the people who design them don't really know any better. They're still learning how to design.
I use Apple's MacBook Pro, and it runs quickly, its programs are all aesthetically pleasing, and it's an absolute joy to use. I didn't get an Air because I plan on doing some pretty intensive stuff on here, but from what i've seen of it it does a great job of being very fast for basic processes while looking beautiful.

I haven't seen a single Apple product that I think is crap, not in a decade. I think that a lot of them could be BETTER, but Apple absolutely cares about making the best product that they can, and they've shown it time and time again. Also, for the record, I LIKED the original iMac. I like the new ones better, but I think that iMac was great when it first came out. So unless you've got a quantitative argument against Apple, close it: I don't care to hear insults against a company that I like without any sort of backing-up.
Yeah, you're probably wired to dictate to people who they should dismiss.
Unless you can find another sucker. By your argument (which I find quite compelling), the only thing that makes stocks valuable is that there is a large market of people willing to buy that stock from you. The stock itself does nothing for you. Thanks for the insight!
Any chance we get an enlightened rewrite of the article that will serve to correct misconceptions that all startupers can’t distinguish between finance and banking. It won’t make me love my banker anymore today. He's sitting on his fat ass conservative banking job riding the credit crunch!!
If I ever met Seth face-to-face, I think I'd grab him by the shoulders and tell him, "Oh, blogga, PLEASE."
Design firms can be costly. Might be better to hire a talented freelancer. If you do want to go with a firm check out: Behavior Design, Happy Cog, Concentric Studios, We Break Stuff
Correct.

USED to be.
Psh. I think Alanis just wrote a bad song and used the meta line to excuse herself.

I think you shouldn't excuse drivel just because it works. What happened to doing things well for the sake of doing them well? Just because Seth is good at what he does, just because Scoble and Arrington are good at arousing attention, doesn't mean we should look to them for inspiration.
Sounds like he's taking a stab at Python's reticence over removing the Global Interpreter Lock.
Appearance communicates. That's why, for instance, graphic design is not "making things pretty". It's visual communication.
I disagree that craigslist does what it does well. I think it does it extremely poorly. They've managed to get a huge critical mass though which means people will deal with the flaws because its where the content is.
rationalization / post-hoc. If you were setting out to make the next MySpace or Craigslist, would you consciously decide to make it ugly as a competitive advantage? Ugly designs happen by accident [re: neglect] and in spite of the underlying site's success. By the time the site is successful it's too late/unnecessary to change it.
No I'm not. I usually hold fast to the sites I like using, and refuse to move. It forces other people to stick to my game - IF they care about my seeing what they do. Often they don't, and when that's the case neither of us really cares.
we only print our shirts on American Apparel shirts (regarded as the most comfortable tees you'll ever get your hands on).

Really? I thought they were so common just because they were giving printers a good deal or something - they feel average. They're certainly not up to the feel of, say, bamboo t-shirts.