skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I agree with what the general gist of the article entails, don't let the UI get in the way, I don't particularly agree with all of the specifics.

My main problem with this article is the fact that the author pits "experience" against "function," and thereby separates the two into different camps. He doesn't have any in-between, wherein there would be a balance of experience _and_ function; instead, he focuses only on the two extremes.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there is anything wrong with a very functional website. I'm a fan of minimal (functional) design, but at the same time, if you're able to make a site beautiful as well as functional, there is no reason not to do so. I thought his use of newspond was a particularly poor example: it is a perfectly functional website, but happens to be very well designed. As a designer, I obsess over the design, but as a user, I have no trouble getting content out of the site.

I would say that experience, from a user's perspective, is about 40% of what is expected. A good experience, a smooth interface. On the other 60% is the functionality, which is a given.

There is no reason you can't have both, you just need to know _how much_ of each is necessary in your particular application.

(This article reads a little like cannon fodder, as well, but at least it brings up a valid--albeit age-old--discussion.)
Large home. Hundreds per month on electricity. Hmmm. Maybe they need the space and power for their dozens of computers? ;)
But most of what he said was dead on. It just happened to be hilarious as well.
If you find this useful, you might find this better because it works even when you are not on the same network:

http://ringlight.us/present/About
Rural areas don't have the population density to support the high up-front investment costs of the WiMax towers. As the WiMax companies start turning profits and the cost of installation becomes cheaper I expect to see deeper rural penetration.
Study: Social Media Transforming Our Influences on What to Buy
Another possibility is that the rise in melanoma and the increase in sunscreen use are caused by the damage to the ozone layer and the corresponding social alarm, respectively. We have mostly forgotten about the ozone layer, but it was a hot topic not so long ago.

OTOH, some 10 years ago, some sunscreen makes were forbidden (at least in Spain) because a component in them (I can't recall the name) had been proven to cause melanoma.
I totally agree - most of SEO people are scum
Ha, thanks a lot. Very good overview, I will start digging each one of those.
Well, I wouldn't exactly rate them as "scum", but IMO a lot of the SEO stuff is basic "best practices". It's really not magic (or art), just some basic rules to follow.

The majority of the SEO stuff is, to me, similar to what we saw with HTML "programmers" in the mid to late 90's. It's not rocket science, and it's not hard, but it seems to be new and misunderstood by a lot of people.
The Economics of Happiness
"It seems almost unimaginable that economists would be now thinking of ways to design the tax system so that we work less, consume less and value each other and the planet more. But Layard would not stop there. (Advertising executives be forewarned.)"
Can Twitter Authors Capture The Magic Of LonelyGirl15?
You could write apps to run on the [Openmoko](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openmoko) [Neo FreeRunner](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo_FreeRunner). The [Rasterman](http://www.rasterman.com/) used to work for them (some info is on his site about related work he's doing now).

Some more info about the platform is in [this fsf blog post](http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/5-reasons-to-avoid-iphone...).
New maskless lithography trick may keep Moore's Law on track
You do? When? Love, Your Cofounder.

P.S. If you mean the 2nd day of YC Demo Days in Cali, it's not a fair comparison because we didn't use powerpoint.
Sitemaps only help the googlebot understand the link structure and contents of your site. It doesn't actually do any of the crawling or directly help indexing. It indirectly helps by telling the bot more about your site.

Atleast this is from all that I've ever read about SEO and indexing, but always curious to hear from experts.
it's interesting to hear this from what some folks think of as the 'other side'. i spent a month in india this may training a dozen replacements for US programmers. this was in a company that has had traditionally very low salaries, and is located in Backwater, VA. the spiel from the CTO was that it's being done to provide 'round the clock' coverage, but in practice, not having an american developer on hand who can make decisions can hold up the indian developers.

the problems i saw in the dev team across the ocean had nothing to do with their technical skill: they were for the most part technically competent. but they were by and large incapable of self-direction. there were a few exceptions, but for most of the team, once they got into a corner they didn't know how to get out of, they punted to an american developer and asked for help.

in my career i've worked with outsourced labor many times. i'd happily trade 5 butts in seats overseas for one guy locally, or even just stateside that understands initiative and can solve their own problems, even if the overseas developers are more 'technically competent'.

you can learn technical competence. you can't learn initiative. getting rid of those on the team with the most initiative can be very expensive.
The overall WiMAX picture is about providing a foundation for next generation devices to innovate. That's not BS and I'm not a CEO, so forgive that it sounds kind of mission-statementy and let's dig in:

Devices are getting bigger and faster at every announcement. Today a college graduate can put into an Altoids tin a device that is faster and more powerful in every dimension than the desktop computer they started high school with. A similar thing has happened with mobile data networks -- the phone I purchased eight years ago could not send text messages, and the only "browser" type functionality it had was a very crippled WAP implementation. The back end was overwhelmingly voice oriented. WiMAX is about bridging the gap from IP on your phone as a novelty to IP as an expectation -- IP as the default, and possibly only protocol for communication.

WiMAX itself isn't some kind of miracle protocol. It has some very desirable attributes, and was subject to a large amount of review by companies, from carriers to silicon vendors. People that say that WiMAX itself is going to revolutionize anything are dreaming, just as naysayers are missing the bigger picture.

The bigger picture, here, is that new radio links are capable of consuming enough bandwidth that carriers need to rethink their backhaul, or site to main internet connection, infrastructure. One of the reasons, to date, that the incumbent carriers have treated data so gingerly is because their towers are frequently served by a small number of T1s, each 1.5 megabit. If you have 4 T1s to a site, you only have 6mbit total, which of course could be consumed by a single aggressive user, even with existing 3G technology.

The backhaul requirements of WiMAX (and LTE) are going to require intense effort invested by the carriers. The carrier(s) that do the best job on this aspect of the network are going to be in a position to offer the most flexible data plans, which may drive a lot of customer adoption (innovative platforms that can't work anywhere else). Carriers that punt on this are going to need to traffic shape to keep the network under control, and this will limit what they can offer their customers and at what price.

Disclosure: I have skin in this game.
FiveThirtyEight.com: Electoral Projections Done Right
Great work matt. You nailed just the right tone. I believed it was real right about until the end.
Fact check: GOOG still has tons of cash. There's still a chance to get acquired by them!
I'm guessing it would be great for anyone using a computer on which they don't have administrative access, like people in internet cafes, jobs, or schools. It would also be good for people who want to enter some text but don't want to go through the hassle of setting up the operating system's IME, like a first-time language student eager to jump in or a person who just needs to reproduce a few characters of foreign text. I suppose it may also be useful in contexts where an IME isn't available (some mobile devices?) or where cross-platform IME instructions are needed.

Great idea, btw. I have found myself looking for something like this in the past.
Hilarious. Someone should do one about how the Web 2.0 denizens would go about with their life in a Depression. Tweeting from the government food lines, posting pictures of the day's crappy dished-out gruel on Flickr, posting Facebook updates of their hunger pangs and the number of pounds lost...quite a few possibilities.
Free nationwide wireless service on the way?
I agree. I'd say if you have a decent content manager and an average web-designer who can read english and stay up-to-date with todays web-practices SEO consultants are completely useless.
Some people always have to bail on something as soon as it becomes popular otherwise they don't feel cool any more.
Why the $700bn bailout needed to happen - some sanity for once
What a great quote:

“We are what we repeatedly do.” - Aristotle
It simply doesn't matter if anyone has Silverlight installed or not. If you build a killer app with it, users will install it if you tell them to. How do you think Flash got so big?
A Capitalist Manifesto : requirements for true capitalism
Wow that's terrible. And I think it did get worse:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/200...

> Between 1989 and 2006, the median inflation-adjusted price of a Seattle house rose from $221,000 to $447,800. Fully $200,000 of that increase was the result of land-use regulations, says Theo Eicher — twice the financial impact that regulation has had on other major U.S. cities.
a really intriguing method of storytelling, i find it far easier to become immersed in the storyline. it's just somehow more... real.
i have yet to view anything that makes me want to install silverlight. that's unlikely to change.
I like how the UI is very clean and straight forward. Not sure if this technology will be used by the masses in the US.
It would be a lot cooler if you allowed your users to type in special symbols like copyright or emoticons.
There is a reason: it reduces the reading distance from variable to initial value. It also reduces the amount of effort you need to exert to map them to each other. This is especially true when you are using () which impact the meaning of ','.

There's also no reason to keep it on one line :-)

Newlines and equal signs are cheap; go wild!
Yeah, but Youtube got acquired, and it really hasn't had a business model.

I think this getting big fast is really useful when you want to get bought.
Photovoltaic systems: solar energy based technology
Photovoltaic systems uses solar energy technology.
Works out of your network too, as long as port 8000 is open and accessible…
It was a training refresher on advanced cover tactics in urban combat. I had people in tears. My NCOIC ordered me to convert it to Powerpoint so he could use it, hahaha.

P.S. I wouldn't really have a place taking any credit for the laughs at our demos... I was laughing too since I had no idea what you were going to say.
Ad Serving in Erlang
Welcome to the world of mega corporations. The economies of scale in these are great but so are the dis-economies of scale often due to information defects. The nth upper level manager has no idea of the individual capabilities or the individual contract that people are hired under from across the world. Indeed, with several tens of thousands of employees spread out in (optimistically) four of five different legal jurisdiction, it is unreasonable to expect a human to keep track of all this information.
I disagree that it's a valid attack. They aren't telling people to stop taking any risks-- they are telling people to prepare for a down market, which DOES affect the trajectory of a startup (even if they are on the right track). Pasting bits from my comment on SvN:

In a happier financial times, customers are flush and buying. Buyer confidence is high. Growth is easier, your sales/marketing spend can be a touch lower, etc.

In happier financial times, VC-backed startups can count on more investment if they are generally moving in the right direction. Whether you think VC-backed startups are stupid or not, that’s how the game they are playing works. Funding in a down market is scarce and terms are rougher.

In happier financial times, VC-backed startups have a better shot at an exit (IPO, M&A). Again, whether you think it’s stupid or not, that’s the game.

Your Google/Pets.com argument is kinda strawmanny itself. Pets.com died because they didn't create much value. There were times in Google's growth that they would've DIED if they couldn't get funding. Growth costs money and revenue can be realized months or years after smart spending. If you don't have a big war chest and capital is scarce (and expensive) it makes sense to grow a touch slower.
See PostgreSQL views and rewrite rules combined with expression indexes to see a significantly more mature and functional version of the same.

It nice to see MySQL finally catching up in some features. Now it needs to get rid of the stupid gotchas, get reasonable concurrent transaction speeds, and get ACID and it will be well on its way to becoming a serious RDBMS competitor.
"If you aren't doing everything that the deck suggests, your startup probably isn't going to do well."

It depends on the business models. Some companies can be built cheap and they can reach profitability quickly. Not all companies can follow this model. Sequoia doesn't just invest in YC style companies that can be built by 2 people over 3 months. I highly recommend you take a look at http://www.sequoiacap.com/company/all-stages

"Google, while a startup, added value to the universe and soon enough figured out how to take monetary advantage of that value."

How do you define "soon enough"? IMHO soon enough at a time where there's plenty of venture capital to go around might be very different from soon enough at a time when capital is scarce. Take a look for example at the story of how Amazon reached profitability. http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/158315_amazon28.html Amazon also figured out how to become profitable, but it took them 6 years to do so. That was soon enough back then, it might not be soon enough today.
...with four swift clicks of the mouse, I canceled my account. Gone was the entire online persona I had created for myself – profile pictures, interests and activities, work history, friends acquired

Maybe! But all of those pictures, interests and activities, work history, and friends are still sitting there on Facebook's database waiting to be made visible again with another 4 quick clicks of the mouse...
Why are we talking about leftists and economics and stuff in this thread?

Oh, right - it's completely off topic argument bait.

Here's a libertarian economist on some of Krugman's work:

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2008/10/pauls_nobel_nic....

As a non-economist, one of the ways that I look at their work is to observe when they go 'against the grain' politically: when the left-wing ones argue for free markets, and when the right wing ones argue for intervention.
Fight Club helps keep us grounded in a sense. As for Léon, it is an amazing film to be sure. Transformers I first saw on DVD after it had been released. Maybe it was due in part to my circumstances at the time, but it was somehow a profoundly surreal experience.
I've gotten it from time to time, usually at 2 or 3 AM eastern, probably doing some upgrade.

Though, I can't even get a response from the server right now...
How does this compare to say Python2C and pyrex?
Do that and the terrorists win. The zombie terrorists.
So, this means SourceForge is not completely asleep at the wheel, as they seem to have been for the past few years or maybe they just woke up. Y'all recall, I assume, that SourceForge was a spin off of VALinux, which in its day (the first boom) was, I seem to recall, the fastest rising IPO in history (which means the funders, founders, and underwriters made off like bandits, and the company ended up with far less capital than it should have gotten out of the deal, and I won't even mention the folks who bought shares at those prices). And, certainly, it was the biggest Open Source related IPO in history.

I've often wondered why they've waited out the whole web 2.0 thing, as seems to be what happened. Now that we have another bust on our hands, they're starting to try something new. Fixing Sourceforge might have been a good place to start, in order to slow the bleed of projects to other hosting options, but I guess trying new things is good, too. (We're still hosting our OSS stuff there, but I wouldn't choose it for a new project.)
While the quote is insightful and galvanizing, it's actually a paraphrase of Aristotle's ideas written by Will Durant. See:

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Aristotle#Misattributed
If you read this, please tell me what kind of share you are using and what router you have... the issue is profoundly frustrating.
The author reportedly quit Facebook because his (her?) usage of it made him feel egotistical and/or narcissistic. After quitting, he wrote a lengthy article to make sure everyone knew his exact thought processes and feelings, and used some historical references to back up and legitimize his newly-found outlook on social networking. Seems like he hasn't yet solved his problem.
The Legacy of Hiroshima: Nobel Prize lecture by Thomas C. Schelling (43 minutes)
i highly doubt that a government stake in banks is a good thing. they're just going to drive into the ground like everything else the government does, and add 700 billion debt to the taxpayers.

it's bleeding us dry over here. we need to invest in COMPETANCE not idiocy.
I was thinking more in terms of a Bucky Fuller-style $10,000 house that would be as good as a house that costs $100,000 to build. If you can't find anything around $100,000 in your area, that probably is due to a land shortage.

There are actually still affordable new homes going up in areas with lots of land and few regulations on construction. As you can see, you can easily find a new home in the Houston area for little more than $100K:
http://www.lennar.com/findhome/city.aspx?CITYID=HOU&_kk=...

I'm sure you could buy an older house for much less.
I'm 85% sure Primer was shot on film.
Nate Silver (the guy behind 538) is a pretty famous baseball statistician who has applied his trade to politics and polling. It's politics for geeks.

I wrote more at http://www.altgate.com/blog/2008/10/nate-silver---t.html

He just started last year, but over time I bet he's going to discover things about politics that have been overlooked (in the same way Billy Bean found out OBP was overlooked).
Or the crickets. Demo Day 1 in Cali - Ugh.
One hedge fund manager meets another outside Michael's, and they notice they are both wearing the same Cartier watch. "How much did you pay for it?" asks the first.

"$11,000," replies the second, preening.

"Ha!" the first says triumphantly. "I paid $25,000!"
It's worth noting that Bucky Fuller, designer of the Dymaxion House, had terrible problems with unions and regulations. That's part of why his homebuilding business was a failure.
Did you have trouble converting the characters for "computer" to katakana, or was that just an oversight?
Founders shouldn't network in place of building.

You can always network after you've got a product, but if you can't do both at once, product comes first.
How Can $220,000 Trump $200 Million?
FCC Clears Free Wireless Web
I'm pretty sure I'll find a use for this at some point.

Thanks!
Joining Mozilla to create new dev-tools for the Web
In a small startup, everyone needs to take a lot of initiative. But in a BDC (big dumb corp), there are several roles where initiative doesn't matter much. In fact it's challenging to both encourage initiative as well as control chaos at a large scale.

It's a slow cultural change: Indians are starting to feel more confident, and -subjectively- it looks like technology innovation in India is growing.
Gartner’s worst case for 2009 IT budgets isn’t so bad
I agree. From a technology perspective, it is very clever.
Silverlight 2: Google Chrome support, yes; iPhone, no
280slides definitely looks sharp, but it seems to be the only application so far that's a working example of a fairly complex web app built on cappuccino. This despite the fact that in the video he claims it's pretty simple to port a mac app onto the web using this framework.

Has anyone taken a test drive of this framework yet? Know of any good apps out there besides the ones posted at http://cappuccino.org/learn/demos/?
On the two extremes - this is quite interesting. One of the key value-adds that we have on Portfolio Executive is simplifying complicated processes. On one our forms we've got the number of required data fields down from 16 to 4, with a few more being presented as required.

To make the form responsive and interactive we're obviously using ajax and js, and we add in some sexy transitions and graphics. i think there are many sites that do similar things where necessary.

in examples like this i think the user interface/experience actually becomes the functionality and so the distinction is difficult.

for me i always do the 'Apple test': can i make it simpler? faster? more obvious?
Or maybe because devalued houses are no longer worth keeping paying for?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=319990
Online Capture The Flag's Turf.net (YC winter 08) Raises Seed Round
EVERYBODY PANIC

A lot of startups no longer need VC money. With services similar to Amazon's in numerous other aspects of business (accounting, outsourcing, admin work, HR, research) and ridiculously cheap server costs & hardware, most startups don't need near the amount of capital that they used to.
This is a terrible article. I completely disagree with the sentiment. As Dan stated, just because you could do it yourself doesn't mean it's not worth hiring someone else to do it.

Of course there are simple things that make a difference. Keyword density, whether you strong/emphasize your keywords, use it in titles, duplicate content, the type of hierarchy and organization on your site, and of course: backlinks.

And how about analyzing what keywords are driving traffic to your blog, so you can see where you rank, and modify your own internal backlinks and perhaps change the text on the page so that it ranks higher for keywords it already ranks for?

These are all additional, mundane tasks that do NOT fall in the realm of "just writing it." So what, if I just write a blog these will all magically take care of themselves? No, of course not, These are "search engine OPTIMIZATIONS" because you take the time to review your own work and optimize it.

So, I am in agreement that anybody "could" do it, just like anybody "could" do their own taxes. Are we going to see H&R Block go down anytime soon? Unlikely.
You want to start at the FAQ:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/03/frequently-asked-ques...

His methodology is pretty crazy; he's used historical data from all the pollsters from the tail end of the last few election cycles to rate them, and uses that to weight poll results; he has a regression model for each of the battleground states that he uses to reconcile polling results with on-the-ground reality; he uses monte carlo simulations to give percentage odds on who's going to win in each state. It's pornographic.

Sean Quinn's state-by-state tour of the ground operations of the two campaigns is also fascinating. Obama apparently has 2-1 and 3-1 field office advantages in the battleground states, and his offices are open 7 days a week; McCain's are a ghost town.

Nate Silver was recently on Colbert, also worth watching:

http://blog.indecision2008.com/2008/10/08/the-colbert-report...