skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People generally don't care if software is bloated if it has a reason to be. If you're not a hacker, you use a computer to run applications, not to run an OS, and there's no excuse at all for a fresh Vista install to consume 800MB of RAM to idle. It drops to 700MB with Aero and Superfetch turned off. Really stupid.

On the other hand, my modern, much-more-flexible-and-capable Linux desktop uses 250MB idling at the GUI. With all four workspaces full, Firefox running for multiple days, Sonata, Pidgin, many other apps all going right now, I'm still using barely a gigabyte of RAM. On Vista, that's enough to run the OS and Firefox. Kind of dumb.
seems like a really dry introduction. Tons of info I'm sure but anything called an "Introduction" seems like it would be friendlier.
Yah, this sucks but atleast they can buy something (or a lot of somethings) on Amazon .. I have about $20 in a tipjoy account but I may just hold out until I can actually withdraw it
if this doesn't make it, something a lot like it will.

also checkout rdfabout.com ... great mini slideshow.

it can be hard to make it through the exhaustive specs and academic terminology, but it would be so huge if it were already so huge ;p
...aren't people supposed to listen to their boss?

You're kidding, right? Being a manager of really smart people that can easily move jobs is not easy.
I think perhaps James has missed the point. It's a case of perspective and he's read too much into it.

Last time I looked up this site was called Hacker News, not Hipster Fashion Daily - or any other derivative you care to come up with.

It's nice to have nice things, I don't think anybody here would disagree. It's really nice to have nice things that work really well, but when it comes to these kinds of objects and the primary readership of this site, computers are tools in 95% of situations.

I think sacrificing function over form when you're talking about a tool is plain silly... it would be like trying to compare the pro's and con's of buying a ferrari over a pickup truck. They each have their target customer.
I might live in opposite world, because the Goldman Sachs guys I know are actually very successful at their startups. So were the physics grad students! And, one of them was a physics grad student, who then worked at Goldman Sachs, then worked with me at a startup. He was amazing.
The flash on this site made this unreadable for me - after the ads obscured the page for the third time I had to give up.
Tim Berners-Lee Announces Creation of New Foundation to Bring the Web to All People
Your boss won't read a three page argument either. If he still isn't listening after you have made a brief argument it's because he doesn't trust you, not because your argument isn't good enough.
Cal just gave a great (also very entertaining) extended talk on scalable internet architectures at the Web 2.0 Expo in NY. My live notes here and will digest and add pictures this evening.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=306078

http://www.krisjordan.com/2008/09/16/cal-henderson-scalable-...
Surprised that Bush was #2 to be honest.

Aside from economic policy, there were other major factors (the cost of the Iraq war for one).
That line of thinking has worked out real well for some software companies...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/04/arts/television/04conan.ht...

http://www.smh.com.au/news/biztech/apples-mobileme-meltdown/...
I disagree. As other's are pointing out, a site's design says a message, and having an ugly design might send the right message.

Dove is using this idea in their "Campaign for Natural Beauty" (http://www.dove.us/#/cfrb/) . The models aren't ugly, but they also aren't the usual perfect-looking models.

When I was in grade school, I remember there were anti-smoking and tobacco posters on the wall of severely aged, sick looking people along with some text about how "chewing cost me my mandible". Those were examples of actual human ugliness, and they worked.

So that's all to say, ugly could be part of your message. Which isn't really a novel idea.

What's more interesting, in my opinion, is when something seems bad from a usability standpoint and still succeeds. plentyoffish.com fits under this category.
Does anyone trade in second and third derivatives?

For example, the value of the risk of a credit derivative. Or the risk of the risk of a credit derivative.
First of all, I think tipjoy is a fantastic idea. We initially saw tipjoy as a perfect fit and also appreciated Ivan's communication with us.

However, as the graph shows we ended up deciding against continued use of tipjoy as a revenue stream. This wasn't because we were worried that we'd only ever be able to get an Amazon gift card (although I did spend a few minutes one day thinking what we could buy). I truly believe that the tipjoy team will get the legal taken care of and allow users to withdraw cash.

So why did we take it down? Ultimately there was some confusion around tipjoy's functionality and benefit ... and no, I'm not referring to the man that told us he would be passing our site on to his attorney that keeps a list of abusive web practices. Rather, I'm referring to actual emails from users that were concerned about our financial well-being and wanted to make sure we were compensated in some more tangible, verifiable way.

While we don't let our users decide things outright, this turned out to be a move we don't regret, given the number of direct donations we have received (we managed to trigger a flag inside PayPal and got a phone call). However, I will use this opportunity to add that if the tipjoy team made a few changes (being able to change the default payment amount, not asking users to ante up $5), I think the service would be a no-brainer for many a website.
This isn't breaking news, it's been out all morning.
Any recommendations on a specific python xmpp lib? Will look up ejabberd also.
May I ask why you need an open source solution? My company does exactly what you are looking for, but it is a hosted solution.

Email me if you're interested in discussing further.

wbarrow@realitydigital.com
SBCL gives a type error:

* (type-of 1203981239.123)

SINGLE-FLOAT

* (type-of 129381723987498237492138461293238947239847293848923)

(INTEGER 536870912)

* (+ 1203981239.123 129381723987498237492138461293238947239847293848923)

debugger invoked on a SIMPLE-TYPE-ERROR in thread #<THREAD "initial thread" {A7BD411}>:
Too large to be represented as a SINGLE-FLOAT:
129381723987498237492138461293238947239847293848923
Great MIT video lectures on Copyright (and IP) Law - Great startup primer
Quick summary: technical skills != people skills.

(But: people skills are learnable, sometimes).
Social Media ABC's - E is for Eye Rest
Too long; didn't read (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tl%3Bdr)
Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population
Both, but primarily the latter.
37Signals listens, they just act on very little of what they hear. Sometimes it works out well, sometimes not.

Certainly they can't implement even all, or even a majority, of the requests they get.
An In-depth Graphic showing relations between financial firms
In essence - yes.

Firms will hedge and hedge and hedge (and hedge) internally and between each other. These are essentially derivations.

Also, a complex instrument might require multiple hedges. These hedge positions might be confounded in themselves - so you might put together a strategy between your hedges.

It's becomes a bit of a financial Jenga - which is why one or two key failures is getting people very nervous.
Whatever the merits of how people make decisions, this is the market.

I've found the most effective way to deal with it is to aim for a very simple base design, and add design elements iteratively rather than attempting to build a complex design and forcing it into place. A few highly polished and professional graphics make a site seem polished, and are easier to get working across multiple browsers.
I recommend John @ http://www.skyrocketmedia.com/
Yeah, but not invading Iraq would have only delayed the inevitable.
Funniest thing are the charts (particularly the one at 38:00). While they are probably as accurate as 90% of the charts from other presentations, the "hand made"-esthetics reflect the randomness pretty well.
I'm beginning to suspect that many problems are a result of people not being able to keep track of what does what for who's benefit. Seriously, it sounds like a bankruptcy seminar I went to. Banks trying to foreclose were getting upset when judges started to tell them to produce the title to the loan. It turns out they had repacked and sold them and never actually delivered the titles. The excuse was "its on someone's desk somewhere." But the laws in some states require you to bring it to court to prove you own the loan. And they couldn't, even though everyone knew who owned the loan, nobody had the piece of paper.

Once the Jenga pile collapses, I highly doubt people will be able to figure out who owes what to who, even though they claim to have hedges against this, that and the other.
I agree, this is a really difficult balance. In the real world I think Tyler would have said "Ok, I'll try and be nicer to those other folks" during the one-on-one meeting then returned to his original behavior w/in a matter of days or weeks.

So, do you compromise the technical strength of the team by firing Tyler or do you compromise team unity by keeping him?

My thought is that this is not a simple one way or the other answer. The post took the middle ground of talking with Tyler, which I don't think would really work out the way he wrote most of the time. Is there something else he could have said?

If you've had several conversations and this behavior is just the way it's going to be then what are the boundary conditions around when it's best to keep Tyler around vs firing him?
So, to take the WiFi partnership comparison a little further: Microsoft=McDonalds, Apple=Starbucks. Zune=McNuggets, iPhone=Latte. Hmm...
How to Usability Test your Start-up for Free
I think he's talking about this: http://grail.sourceforge.net/
This has to be one of the more idiotic statements I've read on here. Sure, crappy software that uses more disk space, memory and CPU cycles probably requires more power, but you can't seriously believe this is a real issue. If you do, in fact, believe this nonsense then saying your priorities and efforts are misguided would be the understatement of the millenium. There are plenty more environmental issues that need to be tackled before even speculating about the power consumption of bloated software.

I'm still holding out hope that your comment was a joke gone awry.
> The supply/demand curve for investments is shifting as the baby boomers retire

It's well researched that the number of 45 year olds is a major important economic variable. They're at their peak earning, investing, and consuming stage.

Japan's baby boomer 45 year old peak came a bit over ten years before ours, which is passing now. Not a good sign considering what has happened in Japan.
Any idea what the legal hangups are? Trying to avoid being part of the regulated banking industry? They have been around a while and not letting people have their money seems like a huge deal breaker to me (I wouldn't have launched the site without it honestly).
Then it's convenient that, additionally, those two tend to go hand in hand.
UK government responds on Phorm
♬ Use ☛ these ✌ symbols in Twitter to ♨ up your Tweets ♫
Background on Phorm: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phorm .
Well, we will need a new bubble once this one is deflated. The search for candidates is on. Front-runners are: Alterntaive Energy, Clean Tech, Bio Tech.
legend, thank you. :)
The article is dated December 19, 2007
yes it is a strange thing. I guess there just has to be One More Sucker to liquidate your stock too...

having said that, a lot of old school companies (at least here) pay good dividends still - so there is a class of "dividend" stock versus growth stock - although some growth is still expected.
Me:

Cocky Youngster

Wrote a memory manager in C++ for Windows

No beard

Don't think I've ever used the phrase "mad skillz" to describe myself

Never played with Ruby

---

Well, you got one point right anyway. :-)
Yes. Give a man a fish - feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish - he can eat till the river runs dry or gets fished out. But if a man learns how to learn to fish, he can learn to do anything.
On Prioritizing Feature Development
IMO they are not worth it. The cost of tolerating the cocky developer is the productivity of the surrounding team.

In reality very few developers exhibit these borderline autistic traits that seem to result in complete lack of social skills and they are NEVER worth working with.

When the team suffers the product suffers.
Utilize Space Efficiently for a Better UI
The Web back in 1996-1997 (how far we've come!)
Code comments are not for tracking code changes
I have been watching this Phorm business for some time now - While I am disappointed that the EU are letting them continue on with it, at least they have stated that companies involved must obtain consent and provide useful information about what people are consenting for ... I still wouldn't bet on the ISP's gaming it somehow though!
IMO PyPy is Python's best hope. PyPy can be used to make a new python runtime that supports multiple cores more elegantly.

http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/home.html
Hah, I always love the reaction of people doing user testing for the first time. It's universally (as per the article) "I never really did this before and was AMAZED how people use the site vs. what I expected"

Some problems with the article.

1. Craigslist is fine but it will bias the users. If you ask people to do it for free, you're getting one subset of users (who are actually usually pretty decent). If you pay people, you open it up to a much wider, more motivated pool -- but you get "professional" test subjects.

2. Going to a random public place and asking people to try it is good for a shotgun approach, but if you're trying to get coverage for your target audience (particular if there is a certain demographic you need for monetization) this is a no-go.

As to the rest of the article's content... well, I don't want to rain on the guy's new-found usability evangalism, but this is pretty basic, heavily skewed stuff. It seems like he's passing on what his 'mentor' has told him completely uncritically. Particularly the Nielsen stuff. Ugh.

For people who do want to do free user testing for their site, I highly recommend ethnio.com. This allows you to target your existing site users and works great.
Also, someone with really bad people skills can undermine the entire team's technical skills.
I was a manager for many year and ran into this situation. I tried many techniques and found that:

1) My company really likes people to get along. It was very difficult to promote and pay my star developer more.
2) It did have a huge impact on the team. More than one person actually quit in a direct response to the less-than-subtle criticisms.
3) Having a group of mediocre to good programmers means that you simply cannot do certain things. The memory management issue was a good example in the article. It is a slippery slope and one I'm simply not interested in following to the bottom.

I kept (and am now trying to recruit for my startup!) this star simply because truly great programmers are hard to find and once I found one, I would do almost anything to keep them.

To answer the actual question, though, yes I talked with this person often, sent them to classes, read books and sought advice on how to teach them better people skills.
I love how folks create non-profits and big elaborate plans to "push along" something that is already historically inevitable.

The "One Laptop Per Child" is an example of this: people are getting wealthier (especially in the third world - the last decade had the biggest movement out of poverty in the history of mankind), and computers are getting cheaper and cheaper, so it is a matter of WHEN not of IF everyone on the planet will have a computer.

...and then the OLPC gets out in front of this, as if they're needed, or something.

Web access is the same: everyone on the planet WILL have web access, thanks to Moore's Law and free markets.

...and now TBL is getting out in front of inevitability to "make it happen".

Sigh.
If you can't communicate well with your compiler, communicating well with other humen beings about the software you're trying to write will most likely not be in your skillset.
I love to develop javascript library!
Thanks.

OCaml is designed to always catch that type error at compile time.
tim, totally good call. its insane to watch people. i remember at facebook people would click a certain link to do something and i yelled at them. why are you not doing this? i dont understand!!!

1. know what you mean about sample set. its hard to get exactly the right person but close enough is good for me.
2. for the public places, i have seen a few people on sports sites and go up to them. (we built a new sports site)

i've seen ethnio.com, good call. in terms of being an evangelist, im not at all. the real issue is that most startups NEVER do this, i wanted to document what i've done and if people want to use/benefit then good. if not, sucks for them.
Facebook: no social networking here | The Social Web | ZDNet.com
Sure. Here's the execution tree necessary to "Hello World" in Cocoa---at least as given in the Apple tutorial I followed. It's possible to cut it down, but only after you've digested all of the material Apple lays in front of you.

main()
|
-> UIApplicationMain()
|
-> Info.plist (Never referenced by name!)
|
-> MainWindow.xib (Interface Builder. Contains no code!)
|
-> HelloWorldAppDelegate .h/.m (Not clearly indicated)
|
-> didFinishLaunching()
|
-> IBOutlet UIWindow *window
|
-> *myViewController
|
-> ControllerView (IB Nib, needs dragged connection)
|
-> Etc.
|
-> HelloWorld ?
Mudbug Media is a good design firm based in New Orleans. http://www.mudbugmedia.com
If you're in the area, I run Hackers and Founders Meetup: http://entrepreneur.meetup.com/1737/

I enjoy meeting people from Hacker News as well.
Yeah. I am pretty sure Apple´s iPhone business would collapse the moment they decide to sell unlocked phones to anyone who wants them, anywhere in the world. It would also not resist if Apple decided to allow people to install software from any third party phone owners wanted to.

With all the demand for iPhones, the only reason to this closedness is maximizing profit at the expense of end-user flexibility.
It seems pretty obvious DHH uses Macs to impress girls on Starbucks. That is why he finds the Thinkpad comparison so offensive.

Repeat with me: It´s just a computer. It´s just a tool. It´s not a fashion accessory.
I was having a conversation about communication skills with a few colleagues just today.

I work with a lot of off-shore people based in India, and yes most of them are just code monkeys. While their English is generally (but not always) excellent, the single worst trait we have spotted is terrible communication skills.

If you work on something that is technically difficult and requires a great coder and not a code monkey, then perhaps great coding trumps communication at all times, however in the big enterprise world, I already know I am going to encounter countless code monkeys, but if they cannot communicate its just sole destroying attempting to set their direction and manage them.

This can be in several ways:

* Extracting information is a painful process - they are never keen to offer it up and when they do, they leave vital pieces out, or forget bits and don't tell you about it until you ask as second or third time when you suspect things don't seem quite correct.

* Developers send you emails with questions or explanations devoid of context assuming you can read their mind - This just wastes everyones time, as I have to then reply asking for more information or call them.

* The communication is so bad, that they explain something in a way that it allows it to be assumed to be something else entirely, and the team/project/whatever heads off in the wrong direction entirely, until someone hopefully catches it!

* They give managers extra anxiety, as they never send progress report of keep him up to date on what is going on, which means the manager has to spend a lot of time chasing things up.
"☺✈☎♬☹" = ☠

✂.
I definitely appreciate the effort you've gone to. Unfortunately user testing without careful evaluation can wind up hindering or hurting a product. If you look at a site like 37signals (hah, had to make sure I got the capitalization correct - http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1088-how-not-to-apply-for...), they do a great job without it, and manage to upset the great Donald Norman while they're at it (http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/why_is_37signals_so_1.html).

I do agree that startups should be doing more. You have done a good job of giving some steps to get started, so kudos.
This is probably a bad idea in a lot of cases and fb replication probably is rather complicated, most likely relying on some sort of system that relies on stale data when it can and asks for fresh data when it needs it. Number one if you're high scalability then you don't want to run a query when you already know how the underlying data has changed so any kind of invalidation trigger would be ill advised. Further, if you're replicating data over a large distance what's the chance that you'll ever have the right data in the right state. From the moment the data is changed on the master you probably need to fire off an invalidation, if not an update to that data, which is where some sort of collection class to manage this is probably more suitable. Invalidation will often quit to work well, even in a small replicated environment, if replication takes more than even a very small amount of time, which happens quite easily if a server is overloaded. Imagine I change my friends, wait on my process for replication, invalidate and some friend of mine views my page and re-caches my friend list from a mysql server that hasn't yet replicated my newest data. It's fairly solvable but even then you aren't sure that an update will go through on memcache so you have to have some sanity check to know whether you think the data is actually what you want to be seeing. I guess I don't really have a point but just more open ended problems for consideration for those of you wishing to scale. I think it's all pretty common sense but it's by no means simple. Best of luck.
Don´t think about ladies in black dresses. Think about a black Land-Rover. Not pretty, but very rugged and functional. It will take abuse no Macbook could ever tolerate.

The only reason to buy a Mac is to run MacOS (and it´s a good one). But it´s not enough for me: I got used to manage my software with a package manager and Mac software management is jurassic in comparison.
You: need to work on reading comprehension.

He said he was describing an archetype, and made no claim as to whether you fit it or not.
Expect more comments like the GP on the back of reports like this:

The global information and communications technology
industry accounts for approximately 2 percent of
global carbon dioxide emissions, a figure equivalent to
aviation, according to a new estimate by Gartner, Inc.

despite software itself being accountable for only a small portion of that 2%.

http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=503867
I noticed Cal's "Happy Face" looks an awful lot like Zoolander's "Blue Steel"
This kind of stuff is where services like tipjoy just might change the economics of the web.