skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nice little writeup that skims the surface of "User Interface Designs".

Problem is that when you decouple interface design from system design, that's all you can do: skim the surface.

#10 provides the perfect example: how to label your dialog boxes.

Once you take a larger, more organic view, you reach a much simpler conclusion: don't have dialog boxes. Just do it and provide an Undo, and leave the user alone. Millions will thank you.

An outcome you can only reach by looking at the whole system, not just the way it looks.
the content is more important than the format. I thought the content was pretty solid.
But it's not a Top Ten list. It's a Ten list. Those are fine.

I think that proclaiming the "top anything" is pretty damn annoying, but this isn't that. It's more of a "Here! We thought of some neat ideas you might like!" And I liked a good four or five of the tips.
That's the approach I am looking at. Consider a workout program for one reason for this approach. Many gyms are in basements and places where reception is crummy. The application should be able to run in these places, and offload to the webapp when necessary.

Consider travel applications. An American going to Europe will not want to spend the money to use your web application. (We've already heard about the incredible bills by people who didn't realize what was happening.)
"... So why did Cohen agree to vote for the transaction? Speculation abounds, but one aspect of the transaction is suspicious ... That mostly means Cohen, who is reportedly getting the lion’s share of the 30% of the company put aside for current employees. Cohen, who has recently had highly publicized financial troubles, may have simply been bought off ..." ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=398803

But ... here we have an allegation that might have a simpler explanation. I found this article in 'Business Week' reading through his blog. Don't let the lack of facts or another possible explanation get in the way of a good story.
different class.
Forgot one thing -- don't forget about the iPod touch market. Webapps are useless for those in many cases.
Ok, now please explain hiccups.
Could "recently" mean 2003?

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/12/technology/circuits/12shar...

While writing the software, "I lived on savings for a while and then I lived off credit cards, you know, using those zero percent introductory rates to use one credit card to pay off the previous card," Mr. Cohen said...

"This past September [of 2003] I had, like, no money," he recalled. "I was just scraping along and doing the credit card thing again."...

All along, Mr. Cohen had accepted donations from BitTorrent users at his Web site, bitconjurer.org, but the sum had been minimal. In October [of 2003], however, Mr. Cohen's father prevailed on him to ask a bit more directly. Now [2004], Mr. Cohen said, he is receiving a few hundred dollars a day.

"It's been a pretty dramatic turnaround in lifestyle in just a few months, with the job [at Valve] and the donations coming in," Mr. Cohen said. "It's nice."
Not that we need another Office Space reference, but I would do nothing. For a while, I would drift and do nothing in beautiful and interesting places.

When I'd done enough of nothing, I'd create and record some music. Rock, techno, maybe a hybid of both.

Then I'd try and rediscover the joy of programming, now that I didn't have to do it for money.

I don't think I have to be rich to do all of this (though that might get me nicer accommodations, better guitars, and more impressive equipment), but haven't yet figured out the details of how to do it from my own economic situation. Getting out of debt is probably a good starting point.
That depends on whether or not anyone can build an app to be used in Gmail. Link?
Movable Type’s Motion is Microblogging In a Box
Ruby’s Top Hitter in 2008 - Jeremy McAnally
"... Forensic specialists at PwC are advising businesses to mount extra checks on areas where staff will be most tempted to defraud the company, such as expenses, access to sensitive customer data or massaging performance figures to win a bonus ..."

How did the "Forensic specialists" miss the mismanagement of the sharp pointy end of the business in the deregulated financial market?
Google response to WSJ art.:
http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2008/12/net-neutralit...
It's sort of a big legal crazy gray area full of pitfalls and madness. I am far from a laywer, but it appears that if you intentionally turn a blind eye towards the user generated content UNTIL there is a complaint, ract with an immediate and complete takedown, then it seems OK. Maybe? Who knows?
"never have to work"?

That doesn't mean anything to me. I want to build things. And some things I want to build cost lots of money.

Robots, micronations, space elevators...

I'd probably buy a good home theatre system, with giantrobotlasers
Hopefully anyway
Bullshit, you linked to rankings (one where PHP's wart is omitted), not results, and your 'faster machine' is many times slower. It's not really so simple:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...

They go back and forth, but on the meteor contest (which is the alioth people's favorite) Ruby's delta is 260, while PHP's is 36,117 (!!)

My main point was that templating frameworks written in PHP are WAY slower than using PHP directly, as you're doing a ton of pointless string operations. Benchmarks back this up, even ROR is >= the PHP frameworks (especially when there's no opcode cache): http://www.avnetlabs.com/php/php-framework-comparison-benchm...

PHP is really fast when you use it as a straight templating system, but once you start writing real applications in it, writing your own high-level PHP inside PHP, it is the slowest thing around.
Definitely agree on your assessment. I started questioning this guy's advice after his bit on button spacing. Having the words in a button "balanced" within the button does not make it any more of less useful.

Intuitive, functional, and pretty aren't always the same thing. Having a pretty interface doesn't make it inherently usable.
Ahhrr... Sorry I must have misunderstood you then. If you insist on calling any dev stack with built-in code fetching capability a browser, then I think we both agree we need a better one. :)
There is some truth to this. I also think that when people say "compiler" they commonly have an expectation that is closer to something like GCC. What he's describing is akin to a code to assembly translator; in college in the first week or two of the compilers class we wrote simple C to assembly code translators in yacc. It's really not much more to it than that. You simply lex it, you parse it and if your language is simple enough you can pretty much just emit instructions. Traditionally, those were some of the hardest and most time consuming parts of compiler development.

When you start to add all the translations to perform advanced optimization and those optimizations, you're talking about some very very cool stuff and it is kind of hard and I think of lot of people think of that when they think "compiler." Those simple code translators really ignore that which is the part most compiler users are really thankful for.

How did Bruce Lee say it? "It is like a finger pointing away to the moon. Do not concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory."
Sure... it's not like twittergadget.com has a special deal with gmail.

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/new-in-labs-calendar-a...
Yes I am. Is he giving the bailout to himself? No.
If you have kids and a wife, hang out with them. You owe them, as likely as not.
Wake up world, Amazon's MP3 store deserves better. Doesn't it?
Reminds me of the DBAs complaining that the programmers have no idea how to construct a database. Anyone can create an X, but only Xers can do it well. You are always going to get better results from people dedicated to the particular problem domain, but in certain situations and with certain tools the extra quality might not be necessary.
In many ways, PHP is itself a framework. Only an idiot would make a high-profile website using ZF or CakePHP. Good luck using straight Ruby for a website.

Please don't force me to link to some of Terry Chay's work. There's a very good reason that PHP is used for many high-profile websites whereas Ruby is not.
Depending on where in the US, I'm happy to introduce you to my company over there. Shirlaws are whole-of- business coaches, so we may be able to craft a specific sales course for your guys as part of your business.

Pros - Personalised, smaller group, easier to schedule

Drop me an email if you like.
Tip #7 works if you put in a bit of extra effort, and make sure that the text field you're taking the focus away from hasn't been altered from its default value.
Yes, exactly. The subtleties are so dangerous that even Google gets it wrong (Google Images did this wrong, at least for a long time)
i hate number 7. as a user that navigates web pages by keyboard (and most of the time by vi keys), i hate it when sites focus a text box on a page that has enough other content to require scrolling.

it's one thing if it's on a solitary login page or google.com where the primary content on the page is the text input field, but when you focus a search box or some other field when i'm trying to scroll with the 'j' key, it's very frustrating.

i was actually using a site the other day that not only focused some search box way off to the corner, but actually re-focused the text box every time i hit a key. it took me a short while to figure out why i couldn't scroll down (the search box was by then filled with "jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj").
The button tip makes sense if you align the button to other text. Then, the baseline of the text in the button should be aligned to the baseline of the text outside it (if both texts are of the same font-size.) If buttons center their text vertically, and themselves are centered with respect to the half-height of the smaller characters, this can misalign the text within them; playing with vertical padding can help with this.
"writing your own high-level PHP inside PHP"

If you're smart, like smarty, you'd compile your high-level PHP into PHP and then you're not doing a ton of pointless string operations.
Go meta - use Mechanical Turk to ask what would be a really cool idea to run using Mechanical Turk.
Undrln (new social news site for "advertising, marketing, and design")
no, that's quite alright, you've added enough nonsense to the thread already...
I didnt really understand the Why couldn't you grow up in India; bred, born, and raised to write code? bit ..

I was bred ,born and raised in India .. and received a pretty well rounded education.I like to think we can do a little more than write code ...:)
Discussion with George Soros at MIT
Man I hope we get to hear the whole story on this one when the smoke clears. This is so damn unusual, a company voluntarily giving up money and valuation for no reason, that there almost has to be more to it.

The only thing I can think of that would explain this is that the company was caught having lied about something significant during the due diligence process, and this was an effort to stave off an investor lawsuit. It's either that or someone got ripped off, or I'm missing something.
Although it's a nice success story, you are marginalizing the majority of Americans and, in fact, the majority of people in the tech world, that has to spend a considerable amount of time and effort just to make ends meet. Paying your way through college and dealing with the current lack of jobs means that I can't necessarily just work on what I love and I have to make concessions. It has nothing to do with whether I want to contribute something of worth to society while doing something I love. Its about the hope of being able to do those things without having to wonder whether I'll make it to the end of the month.
Gmail does this wrong when you add an attachment. After it has been uploaded the textarea cursor is moved to the bottom and you end up typing after your sig.
> They were obviously planning on making a little bit more than $5 million a year.

Actually, that seems like one of their biggest problems.
99translations: smart applications for busy people.
I apologize for an off-topic, but this question has been itching for a while and I just couldn't resist:

"... did so specifically to solve his or her immediate problem in a manner that catered to his or her unique needs ..."

I understand that speaking/writing like that you come across as a super-cultured, modern liberal or whatever, but am I the only one who finds this bastardization of English awkward? I've learned this language about 8 years ago at the age of 23 (relatively recently) and even then it wasn't so crippled by such idioms, and to this day every time I stumble upon a sentence like that, it pings my ear, kinda like seeing "chickenfucker" in the middle of Declaration of Independence, totally out of place, out of context.

Does anyone else feels this way?
But almost no one really follows this advice to its core. Imagine an operating system designed this way: you could quit Photoshop, then "undo" the quit, and all your windows would reopen without anything have to re-load from disk (because it wasn't really unloaded yet to begin with.) You could "rm -rf /" and then press Ctrl-Z in your shell. You could send an email, and then pull it back from the server (or all the way from the other person's inbox), as long as they both had the same system installed.

If the entire world worked this way, you could even wire $5000 to a Nigerian scammer, then pull it back out, undoing the purchase of anything they spent it on in the process. Of course, cash would have to be replaced with a reversible commodity (credit chips that really just referenced a row in a central, though distributed, table) so money could flow back into your pocket without anyone having to hand you anything.

Taken even further, to the point where you can take out a hit on someone and then press undo after the person is dead, this begins to sound like the start of a good Science Fiction. "The Reversible Society", perhaps.
Why Geeks Make the Best Lovers
You said: Because people can't get over Lisp's lack of syntax.

"People" are getting over it all the time. Lisp is back, baby! Don't miss the elegance train.
"... I've read all of these books myself, so I have no difficulty believing that any moderately competent programmer has read them as well ..."

Books, books doesn't anyone read code?
flagged, this might belong on a subreddit for condescending marketing fluff, but it is not news or of interest to hackers.
WSJ has some of the best journalism on the planet. The editorial page is crap, but no other paper has as many in-depth articles about global markets. Want to read about China's problem with renegade mayors? Want to read about how western fishing policies are decimating African octopus fisheries? You're not going to read about that anywhere else besides the Wall Street Journal.

The closest approximation to the Journal is the Economist, and that's a weekly.
I think that would be key. If they were all individual, wow, that is sincere. If not - then its really just his writing style and you need to translate that into what it really means.
How to Build a Better Economy
I'm by no means a top-flight Rails programmer (or programmer, for that matter), but be that as it may I am occasionally contacted for various types of consulting. (Frequently SEO or marketing because I'm sort of good at those.) I tell them that I'm busy. This is both true and not true. I am busy -- I run my own business, have a day job, and do occasionally like to have free time. But if you dangled a big enough check in front of my nose, I could be less busy in a hurry.

"Not available for hire" is a polite fiction that I tell people to avoid saying "I'm not available for hire at any price near what you are willing to pay". You can sort of tell, right?

"Hey, I read your blog and saw that you were a Rails developer. Cool! How much would it cost for you to do a simple five-page website?" => "Oh, terribly sorry, I'm busy. (Forever.)"

"Hey, you seem to be pretty good at SEO? Could I hire you for some consulting work? How much could I get for $500?" => "Oh, terribly sorry, I'm busy."

More broadly I think that contract programming gets progressively less attractive the better you get at being a businessman. Even if you command premium rates (and you darn well better command premium rates if you're that good), if you just buy your own time for a few weeks and then release the app that people were going to pay you to write, then you can scale your income past the number of hours you invest. Far past. Programmers are smart people, most of them are capable of doing this math.
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time. Resources. Lack of artistic/design skill

(actually, I'm selling about as fast as I can get servers up, so marketing is not high on the priority list right now)

check out http://prgmr.com/xen/

Horrible, no?

I'm moving to a design based on http://prgmr.com/~lsc/css/ - very minimalist (when I'm done, most words on that page will be links to more information)

The idea is that I have no taste. I can come up with something that conveys the idea, but I'm pretty much operating on blind trust when choosing a designer.

I can give you a long list of links to designs that I've got from people which were either clearly bad, or that other people told me were horrible.

In my business, credibility is very important. Well, that, and price, but I'm the cheapest of my competitors by quite a lot, so it's really only credibility I need to worry about. A web presence is part of that.

I was also approached about writing a book on the subject, so I imagine that will help: http://nostarch.com/xen.htm though I clearly have missed the hype sweet-spot.
I totally agree. Like I can spend all my time working on a startup when I work 20hours in a week as an intern and do a very high load class schedule.

I keep telling myself someday...
Wouldn't it be easier to just donate it to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation? ;)
A programmer's editor talking about how important programming is?

And it being rated up high on Hacker News?

Wow, who would've seen that coming!

I donno about the rest of y'all, but I'm a little tired of this self-serving "programmers are special" crap. IMHO there's a thick grey barrier between programmer and user, which gets thinner every day.

Especially in the newer generations of users, who are far more accustomed to the ways that computers operate. Let's be honest: 75-90% of programmers use terrible languages to write terrible software -- internal applications in vendor-supplied crap languages. They're not special, they understand little more than a few complex if/then/else blocks, and they're the vast majority of programmers.

We can argue that the upper crust of programmers are truly special, but if we could get rid of the garbage they had to interface with, I suspect their code could replace most of their own work as well.
Apparently. I stand by my decision though. Time\effort is worthy of defending.

Edit: It occurs to me now that I don't think I even dismissed the author summarily, just that website... I think I will be borrowing a copy of the book from a friend.
Move to the US. I wouldn't need to be super rich to do this - just have $300k or so in liquid "doesn't matter if I lose it" funds. Yes, the US's immigration rules are tricky ;-)

But then? Pursue all of my crazy number of hobbies to excess. Attend Stanford or a similar institution (for the love of learning, not for a specific goal). Be able to let my wife find the job she wants rather than the one she needs. And so forth.
A good deal of these techniques are applicable in an intranet setting, but are there any design tips for non-designers working on internal backend web tools?

The emphasis, of course, is on usability for long-term users. I'm not really concerned about users being able to easily learn the interface or grabbing their attention one way or the other; they are going to be trained to do that. I am more interested in making it convenient and usable for long-term users who are going to be using this software almost 40 hours a week. The vast majority of the app is asking for a few variables of input, showing tables of output, and pages of links to the forms that provide this functionality. Really boring stuff, but there is probably room for improving the usability and readability of the forms/tables.
Unlike many good engineers, however, it appeared he had the cojones and confidence to push his ideas. It's an unfortunate reality that confidence and ambition can trump raw talent almost any day of the week.
Moving Songbird from waterfall to an agile development model
One reason why they shouldn't: It makes them money.

Not that open source != profit, but I guess it'd be less efficient.
The nature of consulting (no ongoing support) means that most apps built by consultants are trivial. That doesn't mean they aren't talented programmers, but it also means that if you're looking for something that could legitimately be a 10k line Rails App you may want to think about whether it's appropriate to even be hiring a consultant.

Also, a lot of people that are famous for "community work" are the last people you want to be working with in the trenches.
How is he "marginalizing" anybody? He built a business doing something that he loved, it succeeded (<-- probably not a coincidence), and now he wants to do it again. Do you think it was handed to him on a stick? I don't. I bet he had to fight like hell.

Unless I'm misreading you, you appear to be saying "that guy had options I don't have". In my opinion, that's the kind of mentality that causes a person to "marginalize" himself.
Kind of like "cease and desist"? Doesn't cease have the same meaning as desist?

I read that the legal doublespeak comes from English roots. When the Anglos and Saxons had to start getting along, their lawyers had to use a word from both languages. Big [citation needed] here, so I hope someone obliges. I'd love to know the truth.

But back to "his or her." I often use simply "her," to be both consise and politically correct. ;)
I dunno. I think the title of the article combined with the domain name is pretty funny.
You will find A LOT of people with Asperger's in the computer world. Its very easy to become obsessed with something like C++ when its your job. I mean I can literally walk around my engineering campus and point out the students with Asperger's. Its really kind of scary.
This is clearly digg-bait by a new startup looking for traffic. Unsurprisingly the submitter is brand new here.
This is poorly written garbage based on meaningless stereotypes.
After some googling I found something:
http://plover.net/~bonds/genderedlanguage.html

"... The problem is that in the English language, the "traditional" gender-neutral form -- "his" -- happens to be the same as the masculine form. And to say or imply that an arbitrary or unknown person must be male, as those who use "his" are claimed to do, is discriminatory... "