skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So this is "Swearing is F*cking Insane" debate on HN all over again? I think we talked about this before.
She was very nervous she decided to tell me she was pregnant; I told her that I was excited (which was honest) and that we should think about it and discuss it later. Then we developed a plan up until the month of our launch and her pregnancy. And to be honest, we haven't discussed what will happen going forward from there.

You're right, we need to have that conversation sooner rather than later.
Zocial CSS3 Buttons
Very nice list! I recently also wrote on this topic: http://sachagreif.com/google-webfonts-that-dont-suck/
I still don't see how any of this validates such an immature response from the copied company. Don't they have a PR guy or something to shut them up before they say things they might regret?
Curebit shouldn't have used assets off the 37Signals site, but I don't think this is a huge deal. If you write an article talking about how to do a/b tests (like 37Signals did), and talk about how great your results were from adding people instead of text to the landing page, then you have to expect that some people will use that information to influence their design decisions.

The whole point of technical blogging is to help other people solve a problem the author has already solved. In this case, it was how to improve conversions on landing pages. If you put that content out there, don't be surprised when people use that content to help them solve a problem. You loose the right to whine and complain about someone using that information as soon as you blog about it. In return, you get more credibility (people treat you as a thought leader) and more page views.
اهداف الاهلى والمقاولون العرب اليوم السبت 28/1/2012
Thanks for the positive comments. Really appreciated!
Why do fonts look like ants chipped away some pixels in chrome/win7? They look better in Firefox but I remember OSX looking better still, can be wrong about that though since I hadn't access to one in a long time. But fonts in Chrome are plain ugly, someone please turn on AA.

FF on the left, Chrome on the right: http://i.imgur.com/SxlaT.png
Once again I am happy that non-competes are generally not enforced in California. Otherwise, the companies involved wouldn't even need to reach illegal agreements to interfere with the employment free market.
Www.lephpfacile.com : Domain Valuation, Website Valuation, Daily Visitors
Having no readers is a bit of an over-statement. I have some friends who read it occasionally and ask about specific topics, and a few random people who probably glance at it once or twice a week.

Point is, blog's are useful even if only a few people are reading it, because it's just important as a tool for you as for other people.
ShowHN:Introducing Feedbacker-lite: Free feedback widget for your website
I'm a horrible windows admin. Here's a demonstration.
Thanks for the advice, the article was helpful.
We failed to raise our seed round of funding, so essentially we ran out of money and couldn't continue working on it.

As for why we failed to raise money, we were in a crowded space and investors wanted to see some really strong breakaway growth before they'd back us, and we didn't deliver.
Isn't it a little ambitious to call yourself a veteran $foo programmer when you've been doing it for a little over a year?

Particularly when the blog post before this is discussing how .m and .h files totally confused you. God help him if he gets asked a linked list question in an interview.
Doesn't it depend how you handle it?

If they say 80k and then you say, casually, "Oh, really? I was thinking more like 175k." then I don't think you're going to be stuck at a 10-25% upward mobility.

You might blow the negotiation, but you aren't stuck at 80k+25% max. And you shouldn't be worried about blowing negotiation. If 125k would work for both of you, it's still possible after this start. If they are rational, and you are rational, there is no reason you can't proceed to figure that out.

Since you can always do something like this to totally ignore/invalidate/reject their first number, I don't think letting them give the first number is dangerous.

But if they say 80k and then you say "let's add 5k because reason X, and 5k because reason Y" and then after that you try to get another 5k for reason Z, repeat, then yeah you're going to have a hard time getting very far away from the 80k initial number.

Meanwhile if you say the first number and give 175k, then if they are terrible at negotiating they might not be able to lower it more than 10-25%, but don't count on that.

How many people are competent at negotiating and able to rejecting initial frames when appropriate I'm not sure. If you are terrible at negotiating, or you think the other guys might be bad at it, then in both cases I guess saying the first number is safer. But be warned: if you say a high number and they suck at negotiating too much, they might just not hire you. Sometimes there is a number you can agree on but they ask you to come down to a number above their max and then even though you say "sure" they still have to come up with a reason to cancel the deal. This is dumb, but it happens.
Agreed. 37Signals generates numerous "lessons learned" posts under the pretense (implied or otherwise) of helping other people learn from their experience. If they don't see it that way, they should add the text "This design is ours and if you copy it or produce anything that looks like it, we'll publicly humiliate you f'ers and insult your investors as well!" to the beginning of each of their supposedly educational posts.

Or, they should spell out the degree to which something has to be changed before they'll be okay with it. Such as "you can put a big customer image on the page because, well, we didn't invent that. You can also put screenshots on the page because, well, we didn't invent that either. And same goes for customer quotes, checklists, and company logos. But we'll take you down if you put checklists with green checks to the right of the giant customer image, a quote to the right of the client's head, and two screenshots below the checklist, etc., etc."

That said, it is an unfortunate that Curebit linked to 37's assets instead of creating their own. And it is clearly a copy beyond just the linked assets. But I don't think it's an international incident on the order of Wikileaks or such. But that's how it's being treated for some reason.

Personally, I would have emailed Curebit privately and asked them to change it instead of trying to tarnish an individual's and company's reputation. That's called "being civil," but that's not how 37Signals works. Remember the time Google created something that resembled Campfire as a demonstration of what Google App Engine could do? It was a 3-pane window with a chat log on the left, the name of the room and a list of people in the room on the right, and a text entry area across the bottom. 37Signals treated it as if they were the first and only company to develop a chat client that worked that way. Here's a link to that incident: http://techcrunch.com/2008/04/08/google-to-close-huddlechat/

Here's the choice (dangling) quote: "we’re just disappointed that they stooped so low to basically copy it feature for feature, layout for layout…We thought that would be beneath Google, but maybe its time to reevaluate what they stand for."

Really?
I'm not trying to justify anything. I'm merely pointing out that there is a mythos surrounding Jobs that he was some sort of design god or product messiah. The only thing he ever was was a businessman. If your opinion of him changes knowing that he colluded to keep his cost of engineering low (much the same as he manipulated the market for flash memory to keep those prices low), then you probably didn't pay enough attention in the first place.

Of course, that's the danger in a cult of personality, isn't it?
How can "nothing" be taken personally?
Serious question: if an accelerator asks participating startups to not hire employees from one another, does it violate laws governing fair competition?
Luckily someone has already brought GORILLAS.BAS to the iPhone:

http://gorillas.lyndir.com/demo
Are you offended by the tone? What would you call a person who steals your ideas (no value), steals your work ($$$), steals your bandwidth (~$), passes it all off as their own and then brags about raising money, a venture which was probably aided in no small from the theft? And when caught redhanded, further insults you by offering you credit for your work?

What would you call that person? I call those people scumbags.
Windows XP reaches end of support in 800 days, have you upgraded yet?
My two cents: everyone is making this a big deal, and it isn't. 37signals is respected, and they do great work. For a startup trying to get funding, a few images and a layout goes a long way, especially if it's just a small team of devs with zero design experience, etc. Sure they shouldn't have copied, but sure I shouldn't have googled the answer to that coding problem I just spend 2 hours slamming my head against the desk over.
I am a software developer, I believe strongly in copyright.

I also believe strongly that people should not have their lives ruined, and citizens should not have their freedoms curtailed to protect it on a large scale.

I do believe that businesses who take a relaxed attitude to using copyrighted material that belongs to someone else are displaying a lack of ethics that is worrying and deserve to be taken down pretty hard.

There is a world of difference between some random person downloading a movie for viewing, copying a website for their personal blog etc and a company doing it.

These guys have made a really unfortunate decision here. To be fair, based on their response so far I expect its because they dont have a clue what copyright even means, so its about ignorance rather than malice, and it will soon be rectified.
Dropbox now with 2.25GB for new users
It’s Not Silicon Valley Versus Hollywood – It’s Greed Versus Greed
Ask HN: How should I go about creating a product video?
I'm working on a web application and on the homepage, like many such applications, I plan to have a brief video explaining how the product works.

First, the voice-over: I think this would be better done by a professional than myself - feel free to discuss whether or not this is a good idea, but any tips on where to hire a professional for the job and the kind of price range would be very much appreciated.

Next, the video. I could make this myself using a screen-casting application, but I'd rather not. I'm looking either for a company that will make such an application for me, or a tool that I could learn that will let me create a walk-through of my product. I want cursor movement to be smooth, typing to be consistent and clicking of links to be instantaneous - that kind of thing.

Finally, how should I host it? Does anyone have any suggestions for a decent hosting platform? I'd prefer HTML5 by default which falls-back on Flash if there is no HTML5 support.

Have you ever created a product video and what advice can you give me? Thanks
Hm, not sure what happened there. Chrome isn't applying any anti-aliasing to those fonts. No greyscale, no sub-pixel, nothing.
What would you have done different if you had the opportunity to try again?
Any reason why I should use this instead of the (very simple to implement, very good avalanche behaviour) FNV hash?
I wrote this up for my non-technical friends. Is there anything I should add to this "consumer guide" to a better, cleaner internet experience? Anything new I'm not yet aware of?
When a language has dialects, you kno you are doing something right... go coffee-script!
This incident strikes me as a glaring example of how broken web design is.

A simple page like that should be easier and faster to create from scratch using a WYSIWYG tool, and then publish to a web platform that support it.... than copying the source and then editing it in a text editor.

I know in the past such WYSIWYG tools were too rigid and thus we have a generation of designers that work in text.... but it just seems so archaic to me.

Like building images with text, rather than using photoshop.

I write code on the backend, that lives on servers, I don't write HTML for a living, so maybe I'm missing some necessary requirement that forces people to work in text editors.... but a straightforward page like that should be much faster to create by dragging a button element onto it, even a generic one and picking the image, and then putting text boxes in there and setting their style, etc, should take maybe 2 minutes if the assets are already created. Not being able to do so seems like such a time sync.

I remember once not too long ago tweaking a landing page, by going back and changing absolute pixel offsets 2-3 pixels at a time in text. I've done this with iOS code as well. Change the text, compile, run, how does it look? ok, need to go farther, back into the editor, bump it up 2 more pixels. etc.

FWIW, if anyone knows of visual tools from startups or open source that are trying to solve this problem, I'd be keen to hear about them. (I'm building a web platform, and rather than create my own design tool would rather support existing ones with my platform.)

The closest I'm aware of is Cappucino which supports using Apple's Interface Builder to layout UI for Webapps, and then export the IB files to the Cappucino format. Sproutcore had Greenhouse which looked even better, but seems to have been abandoned.

A better tool would mean easier AB testing, maybe even ABC testing... faster development and more iterative design. I see no reason that such a tool couldn't be made, or would have to necessarily impose restrictions that limited its functionality... and I think that boosting web designer productivity would be hugely valuable. On the other hand, I can't imagine why nobody has tackled this.

PS-- on the mac there's Flux, which sorta does this, but it doesn't integrate with a common web framework like rails, etc. I mean, you can, but it seems more suited to static pages. http://theescapers.com/flux/
Male. Parent. First kid born during a startup I founded. My spouse works with me in my current startup, reads and occasionally posts here, and will smack me down publicly if I'm wrong about this.

(1) A full year isn't "maternity leave". Companies are (reasonably) expected to work around maternity leave, but professional moms routinely come back to work a few months after giving birth. Staying at home with a baby for a year is totally reasonable, but casting that as "maternity leave" is less reasonable.

(2) But please note that there may be benefits-related reasons to maintain employment status or calling a stretch of time "maternity leave". The next 9-12 months are going to be health-insurance-intensive. COBRA is very expensive and suboptimal for other reasons too.

(3) If neither of you have left your day jobs, neither of you have started the company yet, and this is all a moot point.

(4) All else equal, the primary thing you're valuing with founder equity is risk taken. Outside of exceptional circumstances, you shouldn't be giving equal allocations to people who aren't full-time at the company. But re-read point (2) and don't look for reasons to call someone "not full time" when they are effectively full time. There are also knobs you can turn here; for instance, if cash flow is the biggest problem in the first year of the company, and your cofounder is still pulling in a salary, maybe she can kick some back to the company to retain status. Or maybe you can keep the allocations simple but start the vesting clock for her later than yours.

(5) Remember that your startup idea, as excited as you may be about it, is going to fail. Virtually all of them do. There is an overwhelming survivorship bias in the stories we read online about startups. You will have 100 better ideas for startups over the next couple years. You will not find 100 ultra-compatible cofounders. So another knob you can turn: keep this current idea small and side-project-y, don't go out of your way to grow it, wait out the new parenthood stuff, and then pick something else up next year.
Why would they regret what they said? We should all be glad they called them out in such a public and unequivocal fashion. It means that scumbags might think twice next time before ripping off other people's work verbatim. Your response would have been more apropos if DHH's allegations had turned out premature, but the reality is that the extent of their plagiarism went much further than initially assumed.

Calling them out in no uncertain terms was a community service. Let's not quibble over vocabulary.
I uploaded a huge hi-res image, did the two-for-one, and the output images it gave me were horrible quality! What happened? Cool idea though.
This is one of the great things about doing language work on GitHub -- folks can start experimenting in their own directions, and some of it will make it back into the original project (ES5 strict mode early warnings: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/issues/1547) ... and some of it doesn't: https://github.com/satyr/coco

There's currently an open pull request for Iced to be merged with CoffeeScript, and the merge will happen if the fork manages to:

* Provide a seamless veneer over sync patterns in async code: defer in loops, with try/catch, within the middle of an expression...

* Handle both synchronous and parallel style "maps"...

* Prove to be more pleasant / powerful to use than callbacks and promises, in practice.

* And then the hardest bit -- do it all without breaking CoffeeScript's golden rule: it has to compile into straightforward JavaScript -- i.e., the callbacks you would have written in the first place.

It's a tall order, but if Max manages to pull all that off, it'll be pretty great.
Yes, but in the isolated world of this thought experiment, that's more reasonable: Commercials are most often targeted for a specific market, so there is no value in someone watching them thousands of miles away. This is true even for global brands ("They call it a Royale with Cheese").
How about CarMax? They are flat pricing no haggle if I recall and they're going like gangbusters.
We have an HR 'consultant' that does half a day a week
I've seen FNV have some unfortunate properties around symmetric keys. I'd at least use Jenkins instead. If not Murmur, this, or Spooky Hash.
Noticed it, too. Pretty disappointing after waiting years to really be able to play with great typography. Especially painful coming from a Google site rendered inside a Google browser.
Now that I have been thinking about this comment that I posted earlier, I am infuriated.
I don't really care about the overtime, as I do it because I see it as necessary to the job, but I do care about having extra unpaid hours unilaterally tacked on to my working week without any discussion of remuneration. Or even a raise to match inflation.
"It's true: the worst places to work will be the ones who are most aggressive about negotiation."

I'm not sure that's true. Google is a notoriously tough negotiator - not just for salaries, but for their food suppliers, data center locations, acquisitions, basically everything - but it's also a pretty good place to work. I've heard Warren Buffett and the Berkshire Hathaway properties are too.

The best people to do business with seem to treat negotiation as a business transaction that they will press every advantage they have on, but then once you're in, you're in, and they'll be loyal to you. And they expect you to do the same. It seems to be worth cultivating that skill - respecting the other party, but also respecting yourself enough to ask for what you want and be willing to walk if you can't get it.

Come to think of it, this is generally called "assertiveness" and is typically seen as a desirable quality in life.
Try and fail faster.
Just because you can read the source doesn't mean it's open source.
You can get access to read the Windows source as well, that doesn't make it open source.
Legal: recording the OTA broadcast and watching it two hours later without skipping ads

Illegal: Downloading the same TV show with the commercial breaks intact as broadcast by your local affiliate and watching it two hours later without skipping ads
You could assert that not paying $25 for a season of Weeds is a whole different ballgame than taking down a website with hundreds of millions of users.

I do so assert. One might constitute (need a trial) copyright infringement, not even theft. The second is an abridgement of human rights on a mass scale, something to be ashamed of, and something to shame others for doing.
I've been slowly building a high fidelity WYSIWYG web design tool called Lean Designs that might interest you: http://www.leandesigns.com

It's hard to get folks to switch over to a less-than-complete web design tool (and building an unconstrained editor that generates quality HTML is a challenge), but I think it will get there eventually. I'd love to hear your feedback on the current product or advice on how to proceed long term.
+1! And I think I already read that post. Altucher is one of the most down-to-earth and at the same time inspiring bloggers.
Thank you sir.. watched the screen cast on youtube, and immediately purchased. I have an ongoing Python/Gtk app for work and this simplifies my UI tasks tremendously.
Legal, not ethical question: in US, is it a copyright infringement to hot-link an image that resides on another server and belongs to another site?

Let me explain better: the file at `http://example.com/background.jpeg` is a wonderful image and indeed it is used on `http://example.com/index.html`. I run another site, example.net. I have my own `http://example.net/index.html` page and I decide to add a `<img src="http://example.com/background.jpeg alt="A wonderful landscape">` to it. Is this an infringement?

If it is, why? Because it has been "contextualised" in another site? Please note that I did not copy the file, nor I distributed it, I just made a reference to it. You did use it, you did download it, your browser on your computer did all the composition.

If hot-linking an is an infringement, then also distributing a bittorrent file is, the mechanism is very similar, just with one more level of indirection. And it is common option (mine as well) that the distribution of a bittorrent file does not constitute any kind of infringement by itself.

Do you know how US copyright law deals with this?
I think one of the most valuable points made in the article is the opportunities that came out of the failure. The default of staying in your current job is a choice too, and one that people often don't judge against the risks of moving on.
I'm still confused. Are those key-value pairs? What is "i" actually doing?
Honestly I think they are the same in term of impact in the spirit and fun they bring to the workplace. The "n/a" versus "ø" discussion will be settled by me sticking to use "n/a" as it's most commonly understood. No need to A/B test it imho. But that's not the point. My point is that it's not "always" required to crack down on silly discussion. I am not saying you should let your guys spend their day discussing that kind of stuff. I am simply don't kill all the fun as long as product is being shipped.

Does that make more sense?
Bloat: How and Why Unix Grew Up (and Out) - Rusty Russell,Matt Evans
1 web page

22 HTTP requests

442.61KB transferred

Thankfully we're not facing an increasing use of mobile devices on high latency networks. Oh.

Platform and browser defaults have come so far that nowadays my preferred font stack is this:

font-family: sans-serif;
Rogers uses charter claim to fight truth-in-advertising law