skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was talking from a coding point of view, since the post was asking about finding people to code a GUI. The challenge of designing a good UI is usually swamped by the need to write swaths of dumb code if you're actually coding GUIs. Design work is in a domain of it's own.
It doesn't render well on Firefox 2 on Kubuntu (FWIW). The white text in the header is offset and is hard to read. And there is a big gap between that top image and buttons below it.
Algorithm Education in Python
...(Sun, for example) fancy themselves to be "Workstations" ...

If a train stops at a train station, what happens at a workstation?

I know. The '90s called. They want their joke back.
Here's a bug: I'm looking at Xbox 360 games and I click on "under $10" and the criteria to remove in the box on the top left says "under $25".

I clicked on Bargain Bin on the home page and couldn't find out how to restrict the listing to Xbox 360 games. The links I found removed the bargain bin restriction. When I clicked in Xbox 360, I immediately got a listing which started off with the systems, which I am definitely not interested in. A landing page with recent releases and recent top sellers would be more appropriate, especially if it made it easier to separate the systems and games.

I assume your business is a game-specific price comparison portal. It's not a bad idea, but you may need more content before you provide value over game store sites (ebworld.com) or game review sites (gamespot.com). Along those lines, why would I log in? There doesn't seem to be any community content that would require me to identify myself.
i come from a somewhat similar background (i'm 23).

to add on: this is why i'm very happy with .NET. the overlap between web apps in ASP.NET and client based apps is large. no mac or linux, obviously. recently i've started building a small windows app again, and i've been so pleased by how quickly and smoothly it's been - even though it's been years since i've worked on a windows app.

when i first saw this post title - i instantly thought in my head, hey - doesn't rescuetime do that?! i absolutely love their product. i'd work for them in a heartbeat if my skillz were better.

i don't think client-based apps are dying, at all. if anything, rescuetime is showing that they are on the rebound. good work, guys.
Naz Hamid - http://www.weightshift.com
Executive summary: it is a shit hole.
Yeah - I don't know why we had so much trouble with Windows fonts. We'll definitely be cleaning it up. Thanks for forgiving us this transgression. :)
"Who is to blame? We are - i.e. you and me"

This guy is so quick to judge, so quick to place blame on such a complicated issue. What a massive over-simplification on such a dynamic and complicated issue.
Agreed. My secret shame is that I love tinkering with GUI and trying new things. I have a deep dissatisfaction for most GUI apps out there, and I take a lot of time when I write my apps to try and get it right.

Most coders simply aren't meticulous enough when it comes to interfaces. "Slap a button on the window" or "just throw an item in the menu" without thought are not usable solutions.

This is especially problematic in client-side software where marketing is only interested in bullet-point features. The accessibility and workflow behind these features tend to be suspect at best, downright unusable at worst.

I wish more coders would be interested in these things. The people I talk to about interfaces are either disinterested hackers who'd rather work on backend code, or artists with no conceptual grasp of the technical underpinnings of GUI. Ugh.
We process all the payments and take a 11.99% commission for our services. That's less than eBay's 15% plus 5 cents listings for 30 day fixed price and less than Amazon's 15% plus $0.99 for Marketplace listings.
Try out http://mydj.musicip.com or the MusicIP Mixer, http://musicip.com/mixer/index.jsp

This technology combines acoustic analysis and comparison with aggregated acoustic profile info and a really deep metadata and social data database for interesting and TUNABLE mixes and discovery.
Did you look into Asterix?
We have access to inventory that no one else does through our partnerships with in-store point of sale partners. Dawdle is the first marketplace, in any vertical, to let retailers list their items online with one click from within their existing POS systems.

Also, our ability to let buyers create StandingOffers - "I know what I want and what I'm willing to pay" - is the first time any marketplace, in any vertical, has allowed buyers to initiate transactions. We're really proud of this technology - there's no back and forth. If a listing comes in that matches your criteria, you buy it automagically.
Non-conformity is only relative to the social and intellectual norms in your life. A sci-fi convention is essentially a huge collection of socially tone-deaf individuals, so of course they're going to be tolerant; there's no coherent metric for conformity in the first place. This is probably why intellectual movements form: they create a context in which new and unconventional ideas lack the stigma they would have elsewhere.

This means that you can't measure the level of a person's non-conformity by some objective metric of how "strange" they are. A person who is well integrated into their social or intellectual milieu can do something less eye-catching than wearing a clown suit and still be much greater non-conformist. It depends entirely on your environment, your audience, and how well you understand both.
MySQL 4.1 Gotchas
I feel like this is a brilliant move. Lyrics are a HUGE natural search category that don't have a clear leader. If Last.fm can leverage it's existing resources to have a complete, accurate database and kick ass on SEO, they stand to make a lot of money.
We've probably hit an intermediate term capitulative low here.
Thanks - we have to use the TM because we intend on protecting the mark. It's a key technical differentiation that we offer that Amazon and eBay don't.

Stupid lawyers.
DuckDuckGo is awesome. Voted up. I also like the idea of SocialMention, but it didn't work well for me. Most of the results I got were not relevant.
It's moronically easy and I am that moron. (It's a standard line. :) )
this is a pretty good list

GMail is not an "excellent AJAX effect you should know"
Ok, this convinced me to at least give git a try. I made the move to SVN from CVS years ago to be able to rename / move stuff in the repo, but the offline version control would keep me from keeping a bunch of updates in a branch uncommitted while I do a major push.

My current offline version control system has been leaving all the files open in TextMate to take advantage of undo/redo. (Horrible I know).
Awesome - that's the information we needed. We'll fix it. You rock.
I didn't vote for this post or your original post. But I can tell you if you hadn't already been downvoted to 0, I would have downvoted you because your comment added absolutely nothing to the conversation.

It was no different than saying "It might rain tomorrow, or it might not."
I'm curious- do you know what the economic definition of a recession is?

Do you know any other country with such a debt to GDP ratio? Do you know what the significance of having that much debt is?

Do you realize that's equivalent to someone who makes $100k a year having ~$70k in credit card debt? That's not "normal"- that's the person that has the Dr. Phil intervention on Oprah.

To you, things may look okay. I'll tell you what's actually happened though, as you've looked outside at your normal life. Over a million people this year have lost their homes. Over a million people are projected to lost their homes next year.

Education: More and more of our jobs are being taken up by H-1 foreigners. I'm the son of immigrants- this isn't meant to be xenophobic- we're not producing graduates capable of tomorrow's challenges. Too many college students are too focused on how they're going to get their next handjob and not on their D in calculus.

Research: Bush has cut funding for science and research dramatically. Don't just make assumptions, look it up. Most academics and professors hate Bush. There's a reason why most schools are liberals now.

Intellectual Capital: Our best asset. Slowly being trickled a way by a generation worrying about what happened on Gossip Girls and Lindsay Lohan's lesbian relationship.

Natural resources: what resources? Timber? grass? food? The only one that matters, oil, is in short supply. We only produce 3% of the world's oil supply, and use 25% of it. Meanwhile, rather than eliminate oil entirely, half the population thinks drilling more oil and adding 4% to our supply 15 years from now will fix our energy woes.

This is not a rant, and I'm not some bitter curmudgeon. I'm a young, healthy 24 year-old, and this is reality.
Mercurial's also in Python. And I think in most benchmarks it comes out ahead of Bazaar. Might be worth a look.
So you can see literally every listing that's available for sale on the site. We'll suppress stuff listed by crappy sellers by default.
Git itself is growing on me.

GitHub is just awesome, especially for open source projects. (of course I say this just as GitHub goes down for the first extended period of time since I started using it)

"git bisect run" is incredibly cool for tracking down when a bug was introduced: http://tlrobinson.net/blog/?p=51
I don't like the phrase "moronically easy," but that might just be me.
There's not a chance the Icelandic government will actually go bankrupt. It would be historic. Sovereign states do go bankrupt once in a while, but I've never heard of one choosing to bankrupt itself in order to partially pay off the bad debt of a corporation.

If Iceland has obligations to some of these companies, they'll likely just default on the debt. The end result would be the same, but perhaps with somewhat less political turmoil.
That's why it is so bad there are so many authoritative forces telling us we don't have free will.
This article talks about VCS as if they were airlines.

You or may not find it helpful. Hope you do.

http://changelog.complete.org/posts/698-If-Version-Control-S...
I have a 250gb hard disk, and no spare minutes per day.
6 months ago when I put 90% of my savings into CDs, people around me told me I was playing it too safe...let me tell you, right now I am one happy person.
Your question parses, but makes no sense, semantically. Somewhat like "do colorless green ideas sleep furiously or seductively?".

Firstly, free markets are not entities which can act, they are a social systems which organize people, and secondly, "moral character" is a complicated abstract concept linked to personal choice and ethics.

Rephrase your question more succinctly and the answer will be obvious.
This isn't meant to be an accurate analysis, but it gets halfway there. Have your grain of salt ready.

Wufoo has pretty standard conversion rates of 7% signup, 15% free -> paid. Each paid user nets about $13/mo. (http://particletree.com/features/web-app-autopsy/)

Compete (500k/mo | http://siteanalytics.compete.com/wufoo.com/) and Quantcast(250k/mo | http://www.quantcast.com/wufoo.com) have vastly different total traffic numbers, but Quantcast suggests that only 15% of their traffic are regular users.

MY GUESS:
Their monthly active users are probably between 30k-75k.
30% of their active users are paid users.
I'd say they make about 250k/mo.
How Will We Live in 2015? The future is now for sustainable cities.
His advice that the average person should not speculate in equities is sound, but he kind of ignores the fact that if you're 100% CDs you're a currency speculator. You're betting on the dollar and the US banking system. There is no true safe haven.

The more history I experience the more sense Harry Browne's old "Permanent Portfolio" makes. He said (if I recall correctly): A third equity indexes, a third bonds (weighted sovereign), a third gold, and make sure a third of the whole mix is not only internationally diversified but actually outside the control of your government. Rebalance once a year.
[Self link.] I am building an API into the perceptron: http://theperceptron.com/api
Thanks, that's a good suggestion. Any specifics you've found useful?
Ah, found it:

"At this juncture, I wish to apologize and formally atone for any role 43 Folders or I have had in popularizing 'hack' as the preferred nomenclature for unmedicated knowledge workers dicking around with their 'productivity system' all day. 43 Folders regrets the error." - Merlin Mann, "Four Years" (http://www.43folders.com/2008/09/08/four-years)
> Mercurial's metaphor for local branching is awkward.

That may be true (honestly, I don't know), but I haven't yet needed to maintain different branches of projects I'm working on and so it's a non-issue at this point. If at some point it becomes an issue, and I find Mercurial lacking, then of course I'll take a closer look at git, who probably does it more appropriately.
Also, the project maintainers seem to place a very low priority on portability. People work on Windows, BSD, and OS X, too.
No Recession for Bicycle Makers
Indeed. One of the features he hypes most

"If Apple can build a feature like this into the iPhone itself, it will be a smash hit feature, and, if it were something that only worked with Mac OS X, yet another impetus for iPhone/iPod users to switch from Windows."

is 3G tethering, deliberately removed from the App Store by Apple, and already available to Windows, Linux and OS X users of any old free-on-contract 3G Nokia.

Even Ubuntu (in 8.10) includes support for 3G modems, which should give you some idea how old hat they are :)
I recommend rolling your own. Grab FreeSwitch and you can get things going for pretty cheap.
Loved this:

FTA:

In the 1970s the average size home was 1,400 square feet, today the average is over 2,300 square feet. Are we that much bigger?

Sadly, yes.

http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/obesity/trend/maps/index.htm
Bingo! Vista's competitor isn't Apple, it's XP.
Mercurial also has bisect, FWIW.
If you want to write to MFC, which I'm sure would make the most sense, then that's probably your problem.
If branching and merging matters to you at all, switch to git or mercurial immediately.

You won't look back.
Tortoise is also available for mercurial. (http://tortoisehg.sourceforge.net/)
Recession-proof yourself (and your team)
Working for Barry Diller is awesome
> In all fairness, they should have seen this coming and they should have had more cash on hand.

That may be true for existing business but that is a pretty harsh sentiment to apply to a business just starting out. It's pretty hard to save when you are just starting to grow revenues or when you are even earlier in your business cycle.
Hehe, I thought you could buy World-of-Warcraft-Gold, based on the title.

Cool site though!
Dirty Sexy Money - The Silent Auction
Tripp and an old acquaintance from his work with United Way, Flavia Carozzi, chance upon each other as Nick tries to start with putting up his children’s hospital. Nick convinces Tripp to ask the help of Flavia in organizing a silent auction to raise funds for his project.
Finding songs that sound the same isn't really enough. It might make do for superfluous listening, but if you have more than a passing interest in music your requirements will be different.

Emotions and lyrics are much more important than the "sound" when I choose new music, and it will be a while until a computer program can categorize these. Remember that it isn't enough to just produce something that matches a pattern. This is a creative field we're talking about, music and movie tastes contain more human factors than just about any other problem tackled by computer scientists.

As a case in point, Ayreon may do an excellent job of copying the darkly brooding and reflecting atmosphere of certain prog rock bands...but it's still a copy, and just under the surface it stinks of hypocrisy.

Media recommendations is a huge problem (it bothers me on a personal level every day, I would pay at least 200$ a year for a service that works), but nothing I have seen so far has impressed me. I won't be sold until I get at least two recommendations that made me cry.
Obviously not. People treat each other horribly in the least economically free countries. I think the pattern generally holds as you move along the spectrum, too.
Project Runway: Finale Part I
Four contestants remain, but only three will show their collections at Bryant Park for New York Fashion Week.
IPhone App Store's Brutal Reality: Get Viral Or Don't Quit Your Day Job
Gorgeous design, and I think you could fill a niche with it.

Note that Buy It Now is an eBay trademark for "operating online marketplaces for sellers of goods and/or services" according to the US trademark office so I'd remove any and all references to that term.
Currently on SVN switching to git soon, just don't have the time at the moment. git looks like the best choice, and if I was starting anything new I would start with git now.
Ask YC: Scalability advice for web apps
I am currently hosting my web app on Media Temple's Dedicated Virtual servers. It has been working great, but since we are pretty early, we aren't getting crazy amount of traffic either. Our web app is basically a social network, and there's a matchmaking algorithm which could potentially become a bottleneck (think Match.com or eHarmony's matching system).

Given that, and as we are growing about 25% every month. I am just curious on what kind of scaling issue we should be worried about? Are there any best practices in both back-end / database design to accommodate future scaling issues?

I read database performance is usually the bottleneck for most web apps -- and since our matching algorithm does hit the DB pretty hard, what kind of things I could do to improve DB performance and scale it accordingly (besides the obvious, e.g. caching and index).

Thanks for any advice!
I'm gonna have to start again -- wish you could save games.
Menopause in a Positive Way at Fresh Start After Divorce Blog
No kidding.

And just who exactly is he calling WE? I've worked like crazy to pay off my credit cards/loans and keep them paid off. I bought a house I could afford (<1/3 of income) with a large down payment (> 20%). I've saved on my own as well as in my partially matched 401k. I have a 6 month emergency fund. Sure, this all means that I don't have a car and take public transportation- and my computer/stereo/tv/etc aren't brand new. But have those TINY sacrifices been worth it? Absolutely!

I am not we.

So explain to me why I should bail them out? Whey you've got things you can't afford, or you're a bank leveraged at 30 or 50 to 1, you are risking it all! When you lose it all, it's not exactly a shock to those of us that have been extra conservative with our money.
Think of the value (real wealth) in the system (the farmers farming, etc) like ships. The financial system (the money, the credit, etc) like water.

We need both. If all of the water freezes, the ships are still technically there. The wealth still exists, but there's shit-all the boats can do but wait for the spring thaw if they're frozen in the ice.
Technology - the party really is over
I think you just might have a legit candidate for a MapReduce-like algorithm here since your work seems to be a great candidate for parallel work. Check the Hadoop article that was posted here not too long ago.

It will let you scale the work over many nodes in a fairly linear fashion.

You might not even have to go that route if you properly shard your data among your computers. If you store user profiles based on locality or the like, the work is guaranteed to be local. Also, you can try segmenting your users based on general factors that group them (a course version of your matching algorithm) to preserve locality.
Nike, iPhone, are all made in China. Levis are made in Latin America. I am not sure that will be counted as "made in U.S.A"

But I am sure we have made a lot of pornos because U.S. constitution protects them for the freedom of speech. And it is really risky for any people in Middle East to shoot porns than in U.S.A. . So probably this is one of few things that we make that poor men outside U.S. truly rely on.
"Not a single new technology firm has come to the stock market this year, according to the British Venture Capital Association. And further back the evolutionary chain, venture capital investment in start-ups is now stalling in the US, and it's hard to see that pattern not being repeated in the UK."

"Last time we had a serious downturn in technology investment at the beginning of this decade, the world did not stand still. In a harsh climate, smart new ventures - from last.fm to Skype - were born, and consumer behaviour was transformed by the arrival of broadband."
Why yes, yes I did. Thanks.
I'm fine with my eeepc's 7" screen, it's the small keyboard I can't get used to.

This isn't any better on the 9" versions either...
Social Network Marketing Basics - Video
Of course it is easy to build cash reserves if you are an established company, but an early stage services company would be hard pressed to work without short term credit.

A world without short term credit looks a lot like the third world. I prefer living here (at least I used to).
This is great, but the article touches on one downfall imo: You can't open up the radio and watch the lyrics flow through.

That, would be awesome.
#1 and #2 are basically the default. Not good news for moral character.
Admittedly it could've been trimmed to 15 or even 10 items.
We as in US citizens. George Soros has done a great job of living within his means and obviously so have you, but WE as in at least 43% of Americans haven't. Also, YOU (i.e. WE) keep electing these freaks in Congress and in the White House. Why do we have a 10 trillion dollar debt? Why do we think we can keep borrowing year after year?
Thanks. Of course morons everywhere are offended. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moron_(psychology)
Correlation does not imply causation. The social and government restrictions that allow capitalism to function (enforcement of contracts, property rights, police/military protection, etc) also prevent lots of bad moral behavior.
FYI:  GitHub is Back Up
So you can push if you have been waiting.
Git works without any problems on OS X. On Windows it is getting better and better, and about BSD I wouldn't know.
Wow, I've never actually seen someone fellate a phone before.
LOL - I knew when I wrote that someone would pull up obesity data... :)
Earthcomber Sues TechCrunch
well, if you are upgrading, and the only choice is Vista (as it rammed down the throat by MS), Mac Os looks more appealing.
I actually think that while risk (uncertainty) in the general economy has increased, little has changed for young startups. Does the tumbling economy really affect the likely success of a startup that much? In my view, the current economic climate makes startups relatively less risky.
None. From where I stand, it seems like extra management duty, for marginal benefits.
nice design:

bad fonts

the search button is slightly offline with the search box on the main page

"Buy & Sell Video Games, Systems, and Accessories with other Games online" tweak that?

Can we make the URLs prettier?

I just dont get the word "Moronically"

Why when clicking the blue triangle next to "Bargain Bin" or "Hot Deals!" (drop the ! btw) does it take you back to the homepage? I'm on the homepage.

Can we increase the font size of the "For Games by gamers" blue box?

Kudos for not using a statement like "For Gamers /Buy/ Gamers" or something!
If you just want the offline aspect, you can use svk (http://svk.bestpractical.com/view/HomePage). I also switched to git for that (and stayed because I liked it better in a lot of other respects), but I found out afterwards that you can use svk to use svn offline.
This seems much less organized than a typical Cuban post.

Most disappointingly, he didn't give any supporting thoughts on his most interesting opinion:

"All that said. The stock market can humble me or anyone in a nano second. It could go a lot lower. I DO NOT SEE IT GOING DRAMATICALLY HIGHER. NO CHANCE IT GETS BACK TO 11k anytime soon."