skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've forced myself to wait a minimum of 24 hours before rejecting a design and it has always served me very well.

I've just completed designing a logo for the project I'm working on. Lacking experts around me whose judgement I could rely on, I came up with the following creative process:

1. Come up with an idea and prepare a demo/prototype.

2. Show the demo to a few people around you, preferably those who have some semblance of taste, but they don't have to be experts. If you own a smart parrot, the parrot will do. Since you want to avoid disclosing your idea to competitors, those people should preferably be either close friends or ones who work in a completely different field.

3. Note their reaction. If it is silent or if they say something generic and don't go with an enthusiastic "WOW" in the first three seconds, they are unimpressed. Expect them to be unimpressed, but don't worry about it right away, because even if you showed them, for example, a Paul Rand-designed logo pretending to be your work, they would not recognize it either and would remain unimpressed (they are not experts, remember?).

4. Wait 24 hours. Then ask yourself if you are bothered at all by the disinterest of the people you showed your work to. If you are indeed bothered, it means that your intuitive/emotional brain is telling you that your work is not good enough and that you should go back to step 1. If you are not bothered at all, it means your work is as good as your intuitive judgement is, and you can move on.

The goal is to convince yourself that your work is good enough. Once you achieved that, the opinion of others doesn't really matter. I find this algorithm to be pretty efficient; it lets me hone in on a correct design within a week's time. Your mileage may vary.
Enough with the Steve Jobs worshipping. It's just stupid and demeaning.
You definitely have to make a case that the expensive wine passes the second test.
I used SMS because it is a) ubiquitous and b) already used by almost everyone.

Scanning barcodes is (at least right now) neither.
I can't thank you enough for taking the time to write up this feedback. I'll post again when we rewrite it later today.

We've had customers and revenue since day 0, and since we're three technical cofounders, we have largely (and, I now see, mistakenly) focused on building our platform as quickly and thoroughly as possible, to the expense of everything else. Our plan was purely serial: focus on the tech first, then build an image and a brand[1] later.

The whole reason we applied to YC was to learn how to better communicate what we do. A YC S11 founder made it clear to me that YC could help us to fix our communication problems before they became problems, and only then did I apply. He said YC could help us learn how to communicate to three audiences: investors, the press, and customers. I give us a F, F, and C- for those respective audiences. We will get to A, A, A.

[1]: Frankly, we're not even happy with the name "Schmetrics", now that we know how hard it is for people to pronounce and spell.
Startup School Heyzap Open House happening now with Burritos and Bouncy Castles
Q: Can you guys and a gal, not post to articles behind paywall
Can you guys and a gal, not post to articles behind paywall. I am sure it is covered elsewhere whatever the news may be. Articles in NY Times and others.
I'm probably going to get downvoted here, but they usually do not verify income (or anything really) for credit card applications in the US.

(As a college student I just used my parents' incomes, using a broad interpretation of "household income")
>I hope you cry for a lot of other things as well, otherwise, I would find this disturbing.

Should we cry at every tragedy? If so, we would always be crying. A death of a great man has moved him(her). Leave it at that.

EDIT: I hope more people downvote me into oblivion because I really don't give a damn. I was the kid who had a really bad life growing up, had friends who chose a very wrong path and read three newspapers everyday attempting to either find answer to the pain in the world or to look at a different journalist's critique of the situation in the hope of finding something positive. I concentrated on every single tragedy I was aware of because I wanted to save them but I could not. Heck, even to this day, I still care about every single life on this earth.

At some point you learn not to cry to about what happens. It begins to wear you down. I no longer read the news because I no longer want the negativity. As always, if I can change things along the way I do so. But I'm willing to bet many of you do not.

To cry about everything is a child's notion. Adults are not afforded that option.
The Boston comment may get the most press, but I think the most important thing he said is the next 5-10 years comment, that it will be about what we build now that connections are mapped and, importantly, available to tap into. It's not a secret and not the first time he's said that, but to me it reinforces that FB will keep doing app-friendly things like Open Graph.
I've also noticed this. I don't know if there's a name for this tendency, but I've called it the "spiral staircase" of knowledge.
I think there were be less complaints about Unity if it didn't feel like an unfinished, half-baked piece of software. There are numerous issues with it that probably should have been solved before deciding that it was ready for 'prime time.' In trying to forcibly push everyone in the direction that they want to go, they may just sour a lot of people to the platform... Oops!
This is getting quite off-topic, but I agree; I think passing the second test means that there are big industries and a great deal of labor devoted to trying to brand and distinguish slightly different wines, which strikes me as negative.

But very few activities would pass a "what if everyone in the world did this" test :-)
>I can name almost no consumer web startups from the past decade that weren't built in Silicon Valley. Stack Overflow? MySpace? Some fashion startups in NYC? Anything else?

I believe Etsy is based in NY.
What a coincidence. Mine is the other way around: born in a liberal Christian family, went away, and now I'm back with more appreciation.
> Trained in Zen Buddhism, Mr. Jobs came to value experiential wisdom over empirical analysis. He didn’t study data or crunch numbers but like a pathfinder, he could sniff the winds and sense what lay ahead.

A choice quote from a man known as Osho...

> Intellect takes things apart to see how they work; intelligence puts things together to see the functioning of the whole.

(note that the above is greatly simplified, both are needed, neither is better, and there is overlap between the two)

One is analytic and clinical, it can be put in a book and taught to people. It has a limit that's set by your neuron connections.

The other is more spontaneous, exploratory, and creative.
Facing user reality sucks
Beautiful writing. Thank you. I always thought why people cried reading such stuff.....until now.
This will be a good thing for the world, because a lot of this stuff is common knowledge yet not published because journalists don't want to be beheaded along with their families, but it will be bad for the kidnapped kid, who will likely end up slowly tortured to death and mutilated.

So I have mixed feelings.
OWS as in Occupy Wall Street?
Today's entrepreneurs don't aspire to be public
’s For Creative Builders
Historically maps have been closely guarded military secrets. As late as the Renaissance possession of the wrong map could get you executed by European powers, even in peacetime. Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim is largely based on the true story of British surveying and map making in India and central Asia.
Uhm, I would wager that there are a lot of smart engineers who don't live in California.
Actually, I have first-hand experience of this process. My comment was not made offhand.

It took less than 18 months from starting work as a H1B to receiving my green card. I started the green card process a month into my job.
8
How come? The system is ridiculous; I am lucky enough to have been born in the UK, and not in one of the countries with long years of backlog. I also did a Master's which qualified me for EB2. Between these, my priority date was current so the processing time was simply paper shuffling. Given the suspicion of USCIS around marriages and the process I am going through with my husband's green card, I certainly wouldn't take such a blasé attitude to marriage if you are also, fortunately and entirely randomly, in a current priority class.
Could you give a specific example?
Losing weight with a minimum of willpower
Because there's a difference between trying to prove a proposition and trying to provoke thought.
Outlook Generic Avatar = Bill Gates
Reminder: Post Startup School Distributed Open House Happening Now
Come visit any of us in the SF-Bay area!

Addmired 555 Hamilton Ave, Palo Alto.

Aerofs 639 High St, Palo Alto.

Airbnb 99 Rhode Island St, Second Floor, San Francisco.

Comprehend Systems 235 Alma St, Palo Alto.

Dropbox 760 Market St, Suite 1150, San Francisco.

Greplin 300 Brannan St, Suite 501, San Francisco.

Heyzap 251 Kearney St, Third Floor, San Francisco.

Justin.tv/TwitchTV 23 Geary St, Suite 800, San Francisco.

Scribd 539 Bryant St, San Francisco.

Stripe 522 Ramona St, Palo Alto.

WePay 455 Portage Ave, Suite B, Palo Alto.
Sounds like they are associating Anonymous as having been spawned by Wikileaks.org, which is a fallacy.
seriously? downvotes for an opinion different to yours?
posting bot + weight loss = perfect for HN!
The classic quote about Feyman by Mark Kac

In science, as well as in other fields of human endeavor, there are two kinds of geniuses: the “ordinary” and the “magicians.” An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what he has done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. They are, to use mathematical jargon, in the orthogonal complement of where we are and the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark. They seldom, if ever, have students because they cannot be emulated and it must be terribly frustrating for a brilliant young mind to cope with the mysterious ways in which the magician’s mind works. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber.
Stratfor says that most of Anon's information is on people who are being extorted by a cartel, and when the info is released, these poor people will be murdered by competing cartels.

Basically it's not the cartel bosses and soldiers who are going to die when Anon releases this information. It's the people they extort like Taxi drivers and business owners.
I live close to Los Angeles. We can definitely do it online. I subscribed for your service. So I'll give you a good feedback when the beta is open. I would appreciate it if you would do the same. We are currently in close beta, and we are testing our idea.

BTW, your facebook profile is closed to people outside your network. So I wasn't able to add you.
Thanks for this good resource -- and the link to your book, which looks very promising. Two comments, or rather references to ongoing work. First, we have a conference focused on OA every fall here at the University of Tromsø (in English), which has really become a big event. Maybe some of your readers will join us here in a few weeks! http://www.ub.uit.no/baser/ocs/index.php/Munin/MC6
Second, we have a national organization in Norway, Current Research System in Norway (cristin.no) (which i chair the board of), with responsibility for (i) documenting research activity (especially publication), (ii) negotiating national licenses, and (iii) pushing forward on OA work. We're relatively newly into it, but it could be promising.
I blog now and then about OA stuff, too:
http://curtrice.wordpress.com/category/open-access/
A CRAP way to improve usability
32 minutes... are you sure you want to miss this?
This list was worth it just for liveReload, this one is really a time saver. Thx.
What's wrong with just e-mailing link to yourself?

If your phone can view a website, it's very likely it can read e-mails too.
On Dennis Ritchie: A conversation with Brian Kernighan
Java is faster than Javascript on V8? This is accepted fact? Can you provide a reference?
http://www.livemyjourney.com
I, too, am very interested in education and policy, but the devil hides here:

as long as we are honor-bound to seek facts and verifiable information about the subject of how XXXX works and how it can be improved

I like other political discussions (of XXXX) here- when the above is adhered to- because I seem to find the facts more quickly here than on any other site. The diverse points of view and contexts of experiences of the people here nearly always makes me realize something I hadn't previously considered. But I think the broader consensus is that too many people won't feel bound to adhere to the facts, and the conversation will tend to devolve as patio11 suggests.
Facebook’s Account attempt by hackers , over 600,000 thousands by FB Officials
>...but I think being smart, or having some kind of intellectual capacity, is probably the best common ground between definitions.

Being intelligent is no the best common ground because there are so few of them out of many intelligent people. It is creating an artificial common ground.

>Dan Marino and JFK are geniuses based on their prowess in their respective fields.

As great as those you mentioned were, they are not geniuses. Dan Marino did not change the game of football. He had a great arm and was very good at recognizing defenses. People like Joe Montana and Lawrence Taylor changed the game because opposing teams had to develop strategies just around those two players.

JFK, while great, was not a genius. Though he does have the Cuban missile crisis as his crowning achievement, he didn't even finish his first term. Much of JFK is about symbolism rather than accomplishments.
I also think he was reflecting on some of Steve Jobs' views. Jobs had repeatedly bemoaned the flip mentality and respected Zuck a lot for not selling. I got the feeling that made a big impression on him and has soured him a bit to a portion of SV culture.
I don't think that he is necessarily conditioned to see it. Seeing the difference between a BluRay movie and a DVD movie is very clear (at least to me). The BluRay movie has sharper edges, its motion is clearer and the image pops more.

Could it be simply the difference between the camera technology then and now? Maybe, but even between the same movie in BluRay vs DVD I have been able to tell the difference, my dad for instance put in the DVD instead of the BluRay disc by accident and I asked him if he used the BluRay disc or not about 2 or 3 minutes into the movie.
The political power of social media
Illustrated: http://www.wastedtalent.ca/comic/simplifyd
With this you don't have to navigate to your email client every time you want to send yourself something and you don't get a cluttered inbox. This is pretty simple and smooth.
This might be silly but I was thrilled that Jobs couldn't nail the monkey banana brain teaser. I was asked that at my first MSFT interview 6 years ago and struggled with it (I hated those brain teasers they did)
What gets in my way...I think "Xcode 4" sums it up. Almost everything Apple did to that once-great IDE has created endless frustration and slowed me down considerably (not to mention making my 2nd display practically useless). It was apparently designed by someone who doesn't do much programming, or at least someone who doesn't know how to multitask.

I can still use Xcode 3.x and Interface Builder for now, but I'm sure their days are numbered. So what I need (again) is a decent set of high-level Mac development tools. If I could open-source Xcode 3.x and start from that, I would.

Note that I've never used an IDE exclusively (I use makefiles and terminal-based text editing for instance), but basically Xcode is no longer suitable for the things that an IDE was useful for.
> I don't buy that "never". It's not that black and white.

We, the hackers, would (by definition) simply hack any computer trying to control us. Granted, it's not quite so black and white as that, but I think that the HN crowd would be able to do something if their workplace tried some of the computer monitoring crap that is currently foisted upon those at the bottom of the food chain.

That said, I wonder if middle management types won't start to vanish a bit more. I mean, they already let the computer make almost all of their decisions for them. At some point, they have pretty questionable utility. Sure, maybe they want a babysitter or two, but they hardly need a full management crew if the computer does all the work.
Perhaps "Osho" said some nice things, but he was also a grade-A crazy in some ways - some of them decidedly not 'good' ways - and had some followers who were outright dangerous:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_Rajneeshee_bioterror_attac...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_Rajneeshee_assassination_p...
I can tell you what I do. With a turist visa, I spend 1 month in the US one month outside the US.
Also after you create a corp you can request a H1B through that corp(a lawyer charges $5,000), but you have to pay yourself a salary(that means you need to pay taxes), I am planing to do this once I raise money.
Ex CEO of Myspace discusses why it failed
Canon SX40
I think the frontpage is great. That's probably because it's heavily moderated. I don't think there's a way to save the comments. Tragedy of the commons is inevitable when forums grow beyond a certain threshold. I 've even turned "showdead" to on as i 've found some great but controversial (read: thought-provoking) comments get completely buried under the usual HN popstars.

Might i suggest a crazy idea though: For every submission, ask 2 random members (who have a minimum but not high karma) to review it before it gets posted. If they disagree, ask a third. It's something i am testing out on my site, but i don't have sufficient user base.
Absolutely not. The appellation d'origine contrôlée is not an indicator of quality, but a sort of family (both in taste and location of production, and named after the regional location, because it has a critical influence on flavor) which gets assessed by professionals so you can identify wines without actually opening the bottle. If I'm at the store and I see a Haut-Médoc, I have some high probability of liking it more compared to a Médoc, because I like tannic wines, and Haut-Médoc show more of a bias towards tannin. That does not mean that one is of higher standard (and there are some Haut-Médoc which actually taste like crap).

What might create a link with quality is that some flavors are quite strong and can take time to get used to, combined with subtle tones, and may require some technique to appreciate. You start with very raw, basic wines, then you grow up an ability to appreciate the more subtle ones, like you would go from appreciating child paintings and grow on to like Matisse.

Then there is each one's unique taste: there are some very tasteful Sauterne wines, but I absolutely loathe sweet wines, so I can't for the life of me come anywhere near drinking them.
With the ongoing rhetoric that America is on the decline and China and India are the superpowers of the future, I think the important takeaway paragraph is this:

"China and India are likely to produce many rigorous analytical thinkers and knowledgeable technologists. But smart and educated people don’t always spawn innovation. America’s advantage, if it continues to have one, will be that it can produce people who are also more creative and imaginative, those who know how to stand at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences. That is the formula for true innovation, as Steve Jobs’s career showed."

It is for this reason, short term economic maladies aside, in the longer run the United States will remain the strongest nation in the world.
Eloquent JavaScript on GitHub
Yeah, but I think the moral of his story is: "look at this crazy thing I did, isn't that crazy." And then he points out that hey, that's what we do every time we update Facebook. He brings a very interesting perspective to the use of social networking. He isn't suggesting we send info to the FBI, he is saying we already do. And it's true, you don't think at least 5 different intelligence agencies in the US alone already look at everything you do. (I don't mean that in the sense that an "person" analyst is there looking at your pics, but you better believe they are crawling, storing, and analyzing your data in code.)
Although I agree there are plenty of people who want to start a company before they have a product or passionate area of interest I don't agree this is a reason for him to have stayed in Boston.

Zuck is not appreciating the fact the one of his most valuable assets (Sean Parker) was out here and help him raise a tremendous amount of capital for facebook. The story could be much different if he was in Boston without Sean Parker. I certainly think they wouldn't be doing better, and he might not have control of the company anymore. I just think its silly to rewrite history in your mind and assume you would have the same success.
Glad you liked them. Best of luck with the app.
How about an option of email along with sms. Email is free for me, sms costs $0.20.
Why??? How can you be proud of something you dont control? Its irrational.
Ranking Live Data Streams at LinkedIn
The article discusses how LinkedIn ranks discussion in Groups in a scalable way
[Warning: HD evangelism ahead]

It really depends on how far away you sit from your TV, what the screen size is, and how good your vision is. When I'm sitting three feet from my 28" HD monitor, you bet I can tell the difference between HD and SD. My vision's not quite 20:20, though, so on the couch 15' away from a 100" projector screen, I'd have a hard time telling 720p from 1080p just based on sharpness, but the larger size of any macroblock artifacts would give it away.

In the right conditions, I'm positive you'd see the difference, too. Try renting both a DVD and Blu-ray of the same movie from Redbox, and watching them a little closer to the screen. The Blu-ray will let you see more individual hairs, individual distant bricks, etc. But even SD on an HD screen can be better than SD on an SD screen, due to increased pixel density and reduced flicker.
>Same for all IP packets, if they had the budget

This is already done to a limited extent. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Good points. It seems he certainly has an interest in startups in the tech industry. It would be great to see him work with or invest in companies he has a lasting interest in.
Because people don't like change. I bet he'd hate going from Windows 3.1 to 95 too.
That's really interesting. I haven't done any mac development (I'm almost entirely *nix or web dev), so I'm not aware of the difficulties with Xcode. I'm generally only using vim, but I've struggled through Eclipse (and its roughly weekly crash cycle) when doing java development to know the kind of problems IDEs can introduce.

I've been meaning to do some iPhone & OSX development, so I will check out Xcode with a toy application and see what gets in my way.

Thanks for the suggestion!
Separate the man from the media image and the actions of the organization and people that grew around him.

Osho was not all seeing and knowing. The events that took place did so due to power hungry people that were attracted to him.

Would you blame Christ for the sins of the Church?

If you read any of Osho's material you'll find more insight on a single page, then you've received in your entire k12 education.

He might have made some mistakes but I doubt he was actively poisoning people and herding children like they were cattle.