skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Holy cow what an ill-informed article. Many on this thread have illuminated it's weaknesses, here's my two cents.

To single out design from any other process involved in creating value makes zero sense. In fact in many products design, including visual design is a key differentiator that actually gives the product value (think iPod vs all other mp3 players).

Only programmers or engineers creating extemely cutting edge products that have no competitors could take this attitude than design issues can be set aside till later.
What serious person would consider starting a business without incorporating design from the beginning?

Whatever meme out there about design being an edge in a startup is responding to what I see is an incorrect undervaluing of design in the tech community.

Another subtext in the discussion is many tech start ups are making software, web based or otherwise. On a typical program huge amounts of value are delivered as pixels. The user interface is also pixels. A lot of software are tools. Graphic design is mandatory for the thing to exist! Widgets are make or break whether a software tool even works at all.

I use audio software in my job (all day) and many competing applications in this space are at feature parity. UI and Ux is what separate apps that work really well from apps that are painfully slow and frustrating to use. Just consider how color is used in a complex app. It communicates feedback, breaks up function grouping, it helps you find and remember features, it provides a hopefully not unpleasant visual experience since one is staring at for extended periods.
I think we are in the Dark Ages of human computer interaction and that bad visual design is a huge contributor to the problem.

BTW, anyone have examples of web services with great design don't offer value?
Fox News Finds a Unique Way to use Twitter: #Answer or #Dodge
How to tell if a corporation is evil
Anki and Mnemosyne (http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/) are both available from the Ubuntu repos.
I think Stephen Fry put it best during a tour of Salt Lake City that was conducted by a Mormon evangelist:

----

She gave us a good tour and we saw this tabernacle here and this here and so on and then at one point she said, "I just want to tell you a little about the church of the Latter Day Saints." And we all politely stood and then she said how in the afterlife all families will be reunited. "You’ll be with your families forever!"

So I put my hand up and said, "What happens if you’ve been good?"

http://bigthink.com/ideas/17866
Vonnegut on wishing a person was in heaven:

"I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that functionless capacity. We Humanists try to behave well without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. We serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community.

We had a memorial services for Isaac a few years back, and at one point I said, ''Isaac is up in Heaven now.'' It was the funniest thing I could have said to a group of Humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, ''Kurt is up in Heaven now.'' That’s my favorite joke."
I don't know the screen is large enough and crisp enough that this may replace my tablet.
I can definitely appreciate that viewpoint. I think I fall somewhere inbetween. Josh's writing style can strike me as mushy or even cowardly at times.
Is Syntek Global a Scam? Or is it a Legitimate Home Business Opportunity? 
Is Syntek Global a Scam or is it a legitimate business opportunity?
Let’s look at the facts:
Syntek Global is a US based company headquartered in Draper, Utah with an International presence in Canada, Australia, the UK, New Zealand and Italy.
>It's a stack of 3 complementary and orthogonal technologies that don't overlap.

Irrelevant. I need one language to describe the data, a completely different language to specify how to lay it out and a third completely different language to do any dynamic work (which is a lot these days). In e.g. iOS I can do all this with Objective-C.

>For me it all comes down to developer happiness, that is, achieve maximum effect in less time.

Agreed.

>That's why i m a webdev diehard and will never endeavor on proprietary closed frameworks.

That's why I'm not and hopefully will never have to be.
I don't think more complex aural warnings would have accomplished anything [1]. (Edit) This guy basically had his brain disengaged due to panic and was useless at that point. The tragedy is that the other pilots couldn't prevent it.

The plane also warned them aurally that they were giving conflicting inputs. None of them "understood" it, in the sense that they thought about what that must have meant.

[1] Though, having the stall alarm go off when the stall was too deep is very, very weird and may have contributed to the issue.

(Edit: I initially said that pilots are deeply trained to use stick down to recover from a stall - but apparently this isn't really true for commercial pilots who are trained to avoid height loss when near a stall.)
Soccer shoe designed to fool opponents
It's an interesting rant - and quite amusing, but it sounds like the author is debating against aesthetically pleasing visual design, rather than design in general.

Graphic design is visual engineering.

Sometimes the value proposition put forward by a company is 'a way to [do x] better'; if better is equivalent to 'more efficiently', 'more cheaply' or 'more easily' - chances are design is going to be factor that allows the change to happen.
Hitch asked us to think, to question, and to appreciate. There is surely no better embodiment of a hacker ethic than someone like Christopher Hitchens: a unique voice who challenged the world not to accept the status quo.
Here's a cached version from Google. Seems some of the pictures didn't make it through though :(

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:YvdCxzu...
I think it means that any crash, even if caused by the pilots fault, is seen as a fixable technical problem, either in automation, equipment, reliability, or pilot training.

We don't send all car drivers back to get their license if somebody crashes his car. We do try to "fix" the pilots if something like this happens.
No matter how many times I see fractals visualized, they never cease to amaze me.
Microsoft quietly moving into iOS ecosystem -- so why not Android?
I think that SLS was the first "complete" distribution. Things like MCC and TAMU were nothing more than a set of bootdisks that would get you a kernel, a simple init, and some basic utilities up and running.

Slackware and Yggdrasil soon followed as a way to cleanup and remove bugs from SLS.
SEO Best Practices Beyond the Basics
HTML5 SEO New Information
Is there any reason to use this over DocumentCloud's pixel-ping? http://documentcloud.github.com/pixel-ping/

Don't forget the annotated source: http://documentcloud.github.com/pixel-ping/docs/pixel-ping.h...
[video] Hitchens on rejecting certain religionious belifies
Mandelbulb
In Chrome on Mac, I open Preferences, Under the Hood, Languages and Spell-checker Settings..., drag another language to the top of the list, and Google starts giving me whatever language I put on top.

I'm a native English speaker, so I only do this for testing app i18n support, but it seems straightforward (if cumbersome) to me.
True. I'm sure it is the same in Singapore. It is likely a (valuable?) relic of Confucianist paternalism. I'd like to know if it is similar in Japan and Korea.
I know about dribbble - it's actually why I asked the question here.

The people there are good, but also mainly very busy - probably because of the site's popularity.

Just thought I'd ask around here in case there were others who aren't on there (yet) and could be recommended.
My Love Affair with iA Writer
> Customers don't care how "well designed" (graphically AND in "how it works") a service is, if that service does nothing useful for them.

This is a good point; the value proposition is independent of design. And in fact if the value proposition is strong enough than people will fight through terrible design as long as it minimally works. However for most products the value is either middling or else obscured by novelty (often the case with new tech), and this is where bad design can sink a viable product by frustrating too many people, or great design can flip the viral coefficient to positive growth by increasing conversions of casual visitors.
Tower Heist « Gratis Films Kijken Met Ondertiteling | ikwilfilmskijken.com
That or specialize. Lua, Javascript, and PyPy all have more efficient storage of integer-keyed hashes. Lua's solution is particularly simple and could easily be transferred to PHP.
Enterprise iPhone Applications Development Portfolio
Check out the portfolio of iPhone Application Development Company based in Chicago, IL. We have developed iphone applications for twitter, game applications, enterprise iPhone Applications, Business Applications, Restaurant Finder App, Performance Tracking App & much more.
HN effect? probably this news got into reddit and slashdot too.
Julian Assange's clear and present danger
Yes, they do have load balancing. But not elastic load balancing - there's no automated way to scale the size of your platform in response to load. So you end up futzing around with a bunch of scripts to do this and inevitably do it it badly.
meta is all relative and means 'beyond'. A metaclass being a class, it can itself have a metaclass, and so on, and they are all only objects, where the author's following excerpt embodies:

MyClass = MetaClass()
MyObject = MyClass()

Those two code blocks are effectively equivalent:

class Quux(type):
#__metaclass__ = type is implicit
pass

class Qux(object):
__metaclass__ = Quux
pass

and:

Quux = type('Quux', (type,), {})
Qux = Quux('Qux', (object,), {})

the __metaclass__ attribute merely puts in words what's the callable being called when the keyword class gets parsed and subsequently handled in the current namespace.

This class/object unification is one of a bunch of unifications I find extremely satisfying when thinking about how Python ticks.
I Really Hope You Hire Me After Graduation
I don't see it on slashdot and refuse to hit reddit from work but my guess is just budget webhosting.
New Android Training by Google
Some folks get funded based on track record and/or reputation. For the vast majority of first-timers (99.9%) who might need to raise money, doing so before having a product or at least fleshed out idea is not going to happen.
He's still wrong: human error is a factor in the overwhelming majority of aviation mishaps (I don't have stats handy, but it's something in the neighborhood of 85% IIRC).

This must be understood in the context that while it is almost always a factor, it is rarely the only factor. Aviation mishaps typically occur when three or more factors combine. For example, if you're just low on gas, or just in bad weather, or just a little bit tired, you probably won't have a mishap, but put all three together and things can rapidly get out of hand. In the case of AF 447, they were in bad weather (which caused a malfunction in the FCS), they had CRM problems (Captain was not in the cockpit, and the two pilots who were in the cockpit did not coordinate well), there were serious flaws in the HMI design (the most egregious example, in my mind, being the averaging of the stick inputs), and the crew was not sufficiently trained on how to respond to FCS failures.
Every programmer does not need to know this.

Coming from a programming background and moving more in to the management side of things, I've come to learn that while it's a lot of fun to know the minutia, it is not necessary to do your job. It can even be a waste of time.

The Six Sigma (I can feel you rolling your eyes) folks have a tool they call KPI (key performance indicators). KPI is like an abstraction for management. Think of it like a benchmarking or profiling utility for your organization. The purpose of the KPI is to abstract away the underlying complexity of the tasks being performed and answer the question: "Is our performance adequate?" This should help managers to avoid micro-managing their staff.

A generalist programmer does not need to know the internal differences between SRAM and DRAM because there is no change or improvement they can effect by knowing these details; not even on the optimization side of things. They only need to know how the two affect application peformance. To dig deeper is to commit to micro-managing the computer. Even worse, there's nothing you can change about the way SRAM or DRAM operates.

I understand completely if you enjoy knowing this kind of thing. I do to. I just don't accept that every programmer needs to know this.
+1 for the Checklist Manifesto. Gawande is an excellent writer. I liked his other books, particularly Complications (http://gawande.com/complications).
pixel-tracker works with express out of the box. It doesnt quite work the same way as pixel ping. It doesnt imply that you will want to aggregate hits with a key, it just provides information.

You have a number of different ways to distinguish between pages so it's a little easier to work with and it provides more information.
"The tragedy here is that I'm also enough of a scientist to know that the odds of there being any kind of afterlife are vastly against us."

You presume, of course, that these things apply to the dead. But when dead, materially, you can reason about nothing because the bases for reason, perception and memory, no longer exist. Seeing yourself as disanimated material after you die is a trick of the mind, and not one that comes naturally, but that is learned in training as a part of survival in your time and place. But in many ways, to yourself, you are unlike anyone else, and in these ways you can conclude nothing about your dead self from your perception and memory of all others that have died.

In short, you can conclude nothing about yourself when dead. Even the laws of physics and nature are not a help to determining the nature of your dead self; these are artifacts of perception and memory.

I do not claim that we have hope for life after death, whatever that means; I only claim that for the living it is, and will likely always be, the "horror of the shade", the mystery of mysteries, and why music and poetry are as important to human beings as science and reason.
Holding tech journalism to a higher standard
I'm sorry to be that guy but this has bubble written all over it.

Mydunks.it, really?
I don't think the US is perfect by any stretch of the word. I just have a hard time imagining a third party deciding that Iran is the example they'd rather move towards if given the choice.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_the_Islamic_Rep...
vs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_the_United_Stat...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Freedom_Index

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index
I have a really hard time with this. Yes, he's probably a fantastic founder and will do something great (and I hope like every other entrepreneur, he does).

But I hope that aspiring entrepreneurs raising funds realize what an incredible anomaly this type of capital raising is.

Heaven forbid we get a whole slew of entrepreneurs saying "I heard that you can raise money without a business". It's bad enough we have people running around trying to raise money for features, not even companies. This takes it back even further, which is probably fine for him, but not for the people I fear are going to take this to heart.
stop crying
Well, they shouldn't. I expect far more from someone calling themselves a "designer" than their ability to draw a nice button or pick decent fonts. I expect them to be thinking about interaction, flow, "how it works", and so on.* If not, then they're qualified not as a "graphic designer", but as a "bad designer". If someone only wants to draw, they can call themselves a "graphic designer" and I'll call them when I just need a graphic (i.e. never, since I don't work in print).

* I expect the same from anyone who has anything to do with a UI/UX.
In case anyone cares... I was curious about the source of this quote and did a quick search. Although I found this exact quote many places on the web, the only source I could find in an KV book was in God Bless You, Dr Kevorkian, which (according to Amazon's "search inside", looks something like this):

I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great, spectacularly prolific writer and scientist Dr. Isaac Asimov in that essentially functionless capacity. At an AHA memorial service for my predecessor I said, "Isaac is up in Heaven now." That was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. It rolled them in the aisles. Mirth! Several minutes had to pass before something resembling solemnity could be restored.

I made that joke, of course, before my first near-death experience--the accidental one.

So when my own time comes to join the choir invisible or whatever, God forbid, I hope someone will say, "He's up in Heaven now." Who really knows? I could have dreamed all this.

My epitaph in any case? "Everything was beautiful. Nothing hurt." I will have gotten off so light, whatever the heck it is that was going on.
http://salleedesign.com/home/

Super designer. Good rates also about €25 an hour.
Pixel Tracking in Node.js
"You can't place a restraining order because that's not in the DMCA!"

--

"The takedown wasn't a DMCA related takedown."

Am I missing something here? Are courts really so blind to the major label's bullying games that this wasn't IMMEDIATELY approved and an injunction placed until further proceedings?

I mean, no I'm not a lawyer but I have studied contract law and these just seems moronic.
Wait... Rebecca Black was the most searched for? WTF?
Purple site that got to the front page a few months ago?
It looked really nice. I wanna look at it again.

Thanks in advance. If you don't know it, you're welcome to point me to pretty web sites.
[Edit: I wrote this while thinking that we're debating "design" without a common defintion. I've made an attempt to express two different sides of "design".]

Those who aren't building the product often can't express ideas about what they don't see or know about. To them, the design is the surface, the user interface. So naturally they assume that if they want to create a product with "good" design, they should hire someone who does the visual part, and make their product look just like other products that they think are well designed.

If you want a good counter-example, about good design that is very subtle and runs very deep, read "The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance" by Henry Petroski.
Of course, but it still makes a funny app review.
Haha... best thing is the name.. "Buddhabrot".. Still laughing!

To explain: "Butterbrot" is german for a slice of bread with butter.. spelling is nearly the same as "buddhabrot"
"...when someone in the former Western block countries calls you a "marxist" or as a follower of Marx supposedly it is something bad, very bad?"

Our Western popular[1] perception of Marx is heavily colored by the usurpation of his name, and bastardization of his philosophy, by Lenin, Stalin, et al. These days, most people simply conflate Stalin and Marx, and they're unable to separate the two. (I bet many people probably assume Marx was Russian!). After 50-odd years of cold war with the forces of "Marxism," people in the US are still pretty wary of the name and the title. Add to that mix the fact that the uber-right-wingers have been all too eager to toss the epithets "Marxist" or "socialist" at the first sign of political opposition.

[1] I specify "popular," rather than simply catch-all "Western," because within Western academia, Marx is still studied and taken seriously.
This is definitely a sign of a bubble. When I was a college student in Boulder in 2000, one of my roommates worked at a startup as an intern.

He told me during his first week, the team all just sat around a table and thought up ideas to pursue for days on end. The only way I can fathom that being possible if they were a pre funded team. I'm pretty sure they split up within a year or so of him working there.
I agree with your sentiments completely. I think that the internet should be as much a tool for their sales and lead generation than any other successful industry. Although many of the things realtors did 10 years ago can now be done by the homeowner, the knowledge, experience and network that a real estate agent can provide can be totally worth it (although at a lower commission to compensate for the work the homebuyers can do themselves).
Show HN: multimethod.js - a Clojure-inspired multimethod library for JavaScript
Bad Optimization is Like Firing Clay
24% of the EU have never used the Internet
Yeah it got into reddit at least:

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/nf659/how_super_mari...

I always find this sort of DoS attack interesting. What would be the best way for an indie guy with a budget hosting to share an interesting article?
Beg to differ, but he wasn't flying the plane. He knew he was on manual control, but he apparently did not understand or did not appreciate the implications of the fact that the plane was flying on "alternate law".

With the normal flight laws, the pilot cannot stall the airplane because the flight laws prevent it. On "alternate law", that protection is removed and the aircraft can be stalled. When flying "normal law", pulling full back on the stick is arguably a reasonable approach to stabilize the flight of the aircraft because the flight control system will fly the plane in a stable, just above stall, attitude and speed.[1]

On "alternate law", pulling full back on the stick resulted in the plane no longer flying, but stalling and falling. I would contend the copilot was not flying the plane, he was relying on the flight control computer to key off his "nonsensical" input and take over flying the plane.

Trivia: the report indicates the flight speed sensors de-iced and the flight system recovered full correct data input quite soon after the incident started. I'm rather surprised that the flight control system did not go back to "normal law" mode, but rather stayed in "alternate law" mode. I don't know what it takes to revert the flight mode - if it is a manual reversion or if the plane simply has to get back into normal flight, which never occurred for AF447.

[1] AF296 crashed at an airshow while the pilot was flying with full aft stick. It crashed not because it stalled, but because the pilot ran out of energy (altitude) and the engines could not spool up fast enough to stop the plane's descent before it hit the ground. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_296
“Entrepreneurs get distracted by fundraising, so I just did that part first."

It is like a Hollywood diva saying (after getting into the 'circles'): "Women's hands get ugly because of the lot of washing and cleaning, so I've bought myself people to do that for me. What matters is how great I am: I can do this because I am great."

Venture capitalists are a parody of themselves. You have to have social proof, or you have to be already profitable to gain their attention. Basically they give money to people who do not need it.
It's hard for me to see a problem with this. The guy has a track-record (Vimeo, anyone?) and has impressed some investors enough for them to part with their money. Good luck to him.
@domr Just verified the video feed is working. Like others have said, simply tweet #cheerlights and a color to change the tree!
>Still a bit confused

Clearly that is not a situation I can remedy for you. I suggested you read the thread, as that would resolve the confusion for anyone with basic reading comprehension skills. If that is not sufficient for you, then you'll need to ask an adult to explain the words you don't understand.
There may be more to the situation. I wonder if Normalcy Bias also played a role in Air France 447.