skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"1. Someone in the executives actually likes the site the way it is."

That one is probably the main reason why companies stick with awful-looking websites. I'll never cease to be amazed at how many people have no design sense or eye whatsoever and genuinely cannot see the difference between an absolutely horrendous-looking logo or page and a well designed one.

In fact, not only can they not see the difference but I often see them preferring the godawful version over the well designed one. There's a reason why every home-made flyer uses Word's multi-colored 3D fonts and wordart - a lot of people genuinely think that they look absolutely amazing :)
It's a watermark. Unless you know how to embed clickable links into a jpeg, I don't see what your complaint is.
As a counterpoint to commenters who are going with their gut instinct, see the blog post by patio11 about redesigning Bingo Card Creator http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/04/19/ab-testing-is-frustratin.... He found that a new design did increase trial sign ups but did not increase sales.
This technology isn't exactly new but it seems like now it is coming to market. I think the implications of this in mobile phones could be huge, especially for peripherals such as Google Glasses, Sixth Sense, etc. The more I think about it, this could be huge for the wireless personal electronics space.
It's a functional programming thing; stands for "Haskell Time To Party". It might sound funny, but it is very, very serious and esoteric.
This watermark takes up way too much of the image, but I suppose that's the whole point; they don't want to make it easy to crop out the attribution.

This may seem like an intractable tension, but I don't think it necessarily has to be--at least not in the following situation:

1) The content creator cares more about attribution than monetization.

2) The content sharer cares more about sharing unobstructed images than about passing off the content as their own original creation.

In this case, there could be some sort of standard metadata that accompanies the image and is only displayed upon some user interaction, such as a mouseover. We could even use steganography[1] to do this right now, without needing to settle upon a new image format.

I realize this is a bit too idealistic to be taken seriously. Just interesting to think about, is all.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography
If you were dying of thirst in a desert would the style of the canteen matter when you were offered water?

Businesses concentrate on providing water to thirsty people, i.e., find something that people want and provide it to them. If they want it enough, nothing much else matters. This is the goal.

Artists concentrate on providing visual joy and passion in the world. Make people enjoy things they normally might not.

For the vast majority of us, we'd do much better focusing on finding something people want. A lot. Society and culture will tell us otherwise. There are a lot of nice canteen builders in the world who will take you down a nice rosy path. You'll be building wonderfully decorated canteens that are empty. And you'll never ever figure out what you are missing (Which is kind of what your question sounds like)

That's not to say there's anything wrong with art and things of beauty and drama. It's just not directly applicable to your question. Perhaps your question would be better phrased: to what degree should I apply aesthetics to prevent losing potential customers. Much better question :)
So you're automatically hating him without trying to understand the joke he was making?
Of course he would say that after buying all those newspapers. He actually wants to make money from them, and for that he needs people to believe they need to pay for news.
Actually just 18.5K were stolen and it didn't affect bitcoin's valuation. We are enjoying very good stability at this moment there are very few people leverage-trading.
I'm sure some of the large media companies will look at these numbers and say "Our scare tactics are working!"
This is really annoying. I lost track of what was happening with the government investigation into the Nortel bidding but apparently they silently let it slide. And now we have this.

Is there realistically any chance of the DoJ or FTC stepping in here again to make the parent consortium (i.e. MS, Apple, RIM, etc. not Rockstar) answer for this?
Also, why would using virtualenv make anything easier? If anything, it's slightly more of a pain. Once you learn it, it's fine, but it's certainly not something I think about on a daily basis, and it sure isn't impacting my enjoyment of the language.
I don't know what all the negativity is about, I think it's a brilliant move that both serves its purpose for Getty, gets them more eyes to the actual images and is less of an eyesore and more informative to the viewer than just a logo.
Drop one of these off at Insite and they'll figure it out in an hour.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insite
The magnitude of the help of course depends on the type of business, but generally the answer is yes.

Usually, when people make decisions without full information, they fall back on simple heuristics. One of the most common one is to derive hidden features of the product or brand from the visible ones. As an example, I don't know if service X is reliable (as I don't have prior experience or other knowledge), but since the price is high, I assume that price and quality (reliability) are connected and the same goes for looks. If the business looks (as in graphic design) nice, then I assume that the business is also nice.

At least in the context of eCommerce, the perceived quality of the information is among the biggest factors affecting the perceived trust and risk. It has been researched, that both trust and risk affect consumers intention (in addition to the potential benefit) and thus when consumer trusts the service and perceives low risk, she's more likely to make a purchase.

This comment is more focused on the web graphics -point of the question and visual parts of the design. I'm aware that design is much more than just deciding the right shade of blue.
I'm seeing a "6to4" in the first hop when I try to tracert Facebook's IPv6 IP. It looks like Comcast has me covered until I can get an IPv6 router and modem.

I also saw a dead:beef.
thanks! any feedback or help is absolutely welcome. this is my first major github project so i'm still figuring things out (long time svn user, new to git) but the framework development is very active and in use on production servers.
People make decisions based on whats in it for them.

Not oh this website looks great so I will buy from that company. Sames thing with logos, people think oh I need a great logo, no you don't you need a great product (offer).

Most businesses can just grab a $30 template from themeforest, that more than covers the design part of their website needs.

I used to custom design websites, I know it definitely was not adding any value to my customers businesses.

Of course for some audiences design is super important and of course usability for web apps etc. I think it can help build trust and get people to stay for a few more seconds to check out your site if they are browsing.

But your average small business, two people care about the design, the business owner and the web designer.
Clearly, you've never been paid for goods or services by someone overseas. Even in this day of highly-networked banks, I have to wait 4-5 days for an international wire payment, and I get charged $12. My counterpart overseas pays $20 for the transaction, and would love to pass that cost on to me (but I refuse to pay it). Many banks charge $20 or more for incoming international wire transfers. So it can cost anywhere from $25 to $40 USD to make an international wire payment.

However, if my clients used Bitcoins, I would receive the money in an hour or less, and pay like a $0.10 charge. Any no one would have the power to suddenly say, "oh wait, we're going to have to raise our fees".

Thousands of freelance writers, translators, programmers do a significant portion of their work with international clients. But the banking system rules out doing any job worth less than several hundred dollars, unless you want to lose 1/4 or 1/5 of your income to fees. I routinely turn down jobs that I could do in 30 minutes and make $150 because it's not worth the hassle of arranging an international wire transfer.

Do you understand now the legitimate need for this kind of currency?
When I first heard about the setuid patent, I thought it was pretty cool. That was, I don't know, 1989.

I think it was 1992 or so before it was really clear that patents were the true and final nemesis of my chosen profession. By "clear," I mean "obvious to anyone not in denial." Of course there's a lot of denial.

By 1999 I worked for a company that routinely filed what we called "linked list... on a phone!" patents. Unwired Planet - the geniuses behind WAP. In fact, I think there never would have been a WAP Forum if we hadn't muscled Motorola, Nokia and Ericsson with our HDML patents. (These crap patents probably provide most of the remaining market capitalization of UP's remnant, Openwave.)

Across this continuum, I have heard a continuous strand of discourse denying that there's a pit at the end of this tunnel. This discourse relies existentially on the belief that just because people could be evil, doesn't mean they will be evil. Which is true, but only in the short run. Facilis descensus Averni.
"we will unleash hell and shiver on you". Oh Anonymous, you make me laugh.
I don't like it.

There are three purposes mixed in this "watermark":

a) Give the innocent viewer a way to know the name of the photograph and go the original source of the image, maybe to buy the picture.

b) Make it harder for less-than-innocent people who want to take these images and use them for illustrative purposes without people noticing they did not actually take these pictures.

c) Inject a fingerprint in these images so that can serve as a proof of ownership in case of legal issue, and that may also help crawling the web searching for them.

For a), it seems much preferable to have a classic caption, where more useful information may fit (date, place, etc)

For b), with my limited gimp skills, I guess I would need 30 minutes to remove the watermark the first time, and then it would take 2 minutes.

For c) I suppose a real invisible watermark is actually much harder to erase and a better proof of ownership, but maybe they do add such a fingerprint also?

Anyway, I see here yet another contradiction of DRMs: content provider want more and more people accessing their content for free, but they also want, at the same time, this access to be unpleasant enough so that these users would buy the paid content. I don't think this scheme will survive in the long-term.
Serious answer: Yes. These factors indicate a lack of attention to detail in the very first thing a potential buyer sees.
"Once again, we see that these two large companies are using the patent system not to innovate, but to stop up and coming competitors from innovating."

Apple and Microsoft aren't the only "large companies" involved here - Sony, Ericsson, and RIM shouldn't get a free pass just because they don't look as good in a title.
Alot of us make visualizations during data exploration, where we don't have a message.
This is good to hear, Thank you!
Edit: the picture on the cover is that of the electric field of an electron as it approaches the speed of light. This was the only book I know that actually tried to illustrate this..I simply love the beautiful illustrations :)
This is seriously better than the old "gettyimages" watermark. And it's a very thoughtful way to get traffic back to their website. It (almost implicitly) expects people to use and share the watermarked image.

I predict a greater use of watermarked images and greater traffic back to Getty Images.
I think you are misunderstanding where I'm coming from. While the government isn't driving IT growth in India, it is still able to hinder it fairly effectively. After all, it is the government that must legislate the IT industry and the bureaucracy that must administer these laws.

If this is the parlous state of both the government and the bureaucracy, then I suspect that growth will be hampered.
It's also almost a year ago. It only does the dupe collapsing when within a certain timeframe.
I experienced one of the older versions of this injector at a free vaccinations offered by my college. I'd say it hurt more than the needle, but it was faster. They were also vaccinating a huge line of thousands of students fairly quickly.

After the injection was done it looked like there was a tiny worm sticking out of my arm (where the vaccine was kinda leaking out). Weird!
Voeding: hoe gezond is water met een smaakje?
Fair comment (though I don't see what it adds to the discussion).
>> How would an Operating System do that, without essentially duplicating what virtualenv already does?

This, I think, is backwards: virtualenv must do it already because the os doesn't. I concede that creating something now may be too late not to suffer the "15 competing standards" effect.
> website helps define a companies image

Let me say this as a designer by trade: yes, we learned this thing with the image. But why is images important? Because the classical agencies from Madison Avenue are selling i"imgae" to BigCo. That is why they teach the design students to create "image" and how "image" works and that "image" is important.

For a typical small business however, "image" is another thing.
> The difference between deep red and orange is a lot bigger than the difference between dark blue and slightly less dark blue.

That may be true, but is it better? Does the scatterplot underemphasize differen densities, or does the density plot overemphasize them? I think the scatterplot is more intuitive. There are 21 equal steps between 0 and 100% black. Two points are twice as dark as one, four points are twice as dark as two. Darker means more, lighter means less.

Compare that to shifting from blue to red. Does the shift from orange to red indicate the same density difference as the shift from blue to orange? To decide you need to consult the color scale. The scatterplot is intuitive, and requires no scale.

> The hexbin has lower spatial resolution, it's true, but I'd argue that the spatial resolution you get in a scatterplot is illusory. It doesn't reflect the underlying probability distribution, only the particular sample.

The spatial resolution of a scatterplot represents empirical reality. Each point corresponds to a single observation, with no probability distribution implied or imposed. The density plot, in contrast, imposes a probability distribution, which may or may not reflect the true distribution of the population. The larger the bins, the more likely the displayed pattern is 'illusory'.
I think it was 1992 or so before it was really clear
that patents were the true and final nemesis of my
chosen profession.

The real issue is that patents favor large players (even if they are 'branching out' and aren't an incumbent in a particular area) to the detriment of smaller players.
It was a cheapo cloud VPS server, I shit you not. After getting their ass stolen for that very reason at Linode.

This site had a massive running profit and still went for the very cheapest option. Rackspace even offers financial services grade servers. I bet these aren't cheap though.
That's Portuguese.
I like how in the first paragraph he assures himself that the criticism came from people who didn't read the article properly. After all, if you didn't read it properly you'd surely agree.

Poor way to bolster support for your follow up really, 'you didn't understand what I was saying, I'll use different words'.
Four Degrees of Separation, Really
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This is just a dumb cry for attention now.

Any "noncoder" who has ever repeated the same menial task on a computer for a week straight could benefit from programming. It's not a career. It's a tool and a useful one.

People in general need to love coding like they need to love hammering in nails or vacuuming the house, or manually massaging data for reports to various organizations.

>And if you're reading this and thinking, "screw this Jeff Atwood guy, who is he to tell me whether I should learn to code or not", all I can say is: good! That's the spirit!

And fuck Jeff for changing his tune from "Not everyone should learn to program" to "Well if you think you need to program, good for you! That's what I meant all along!" He still needs to walk it back. You can't possibly know when programming could be used without a basic understanding of programming.
"to what degree should I apply aesthetics to prevent losing potential customers." ... that is a very good question indeed to ask one-self.
I'm curious how "YouTube" and "HTTP" traffic are segregated. Is "YouTube" traffic everything related to the youtube.com domain, or just traffic from their video CDNs.
http://www.screenr.com/7wp8

what... just happened
Those pictures look really nice, so I clicked through to see how much it would cost to use them on a website. It asked me all kind of bullshit questions like which industry I want to use them in, whether it's a site or an ad, TBH I don't think there's even a good way to answer their question. At the end it gave me a quote of $160 to use the image for a 1 month period. What a joke.
I love it! I Was looking at doing something similar with Scala.
Why is restaurant software so complicated?
Yes, they clearly thought thru the white-image issue:
http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/ice-extreme-close-up...
The box is just a low-contrast region (not adaptive). But I still think there will be lots of conditions where it will be tough to read. http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/chess-board-royalty-...
OTOH, 'Modern C++' does not have much in common with Real World C++.
Including the photographer's name is the really smart bit. Before, if you used the watermarked image, you were screwing "Getty Images" (a big corporation, i.e. who cares) out of some money. Now, if you use the watermarked image, you're screwing an individual person whose name is right there in front of you out of some money.
Looks like someone just found Camus.
Like many things it's generally useful but not a law that applies to every class.

Some counterexamples that come to mind...

- [NSImage initWithPasteboard:] (must NSImage retain the original pasteboard and/or its contents for all eternity, in case you want it back, even if it was in some odd format like NSPICTImageRep that probably doesn't match the internal representation?)

- [NSDictionary initWithContentsOfFile:] (must NSDictionary remember the file path for eternity, and/or its contents, in case you want it back?)

Yes, if an initializer is basically accepting things that become properties anyway, it makes sense to expose those properties. But initializer arguments are not necessarily sensible or useful to keep around in all situations.
Anydoby remember GeekCode?
Cool demo, made even cooler because they stuck "contenteditable" on the style tags so you can play around with the shapes to see how they work right in the browser.
This is the core of my question and puzzle. As a consultant, I can see the 'image' value for the company. Let's say Company X is currently making 1M in clean profit, and their overall image is low-end (business cards are cheap, website is cheap, their trucks are dirty and cheap); then I'm of the opinion that they are a cheap, low end company. I'm guessing most businesses do NOT want to be seen the low end type. My assumption is that many companies want to be see as equals or better than their competitors ...
So wouldn't it stand to reason that a better brand image would equate to dollars in the bank further down the line?
I waffle back and forth between agreeing with you and disagreeing with you as I've asked myself that same question time and time again. Right now I agree with the one caveat being that awful design can only pass when the information presented is well organized and easily found. I've seen designers changing tens of thousands for sites that look like they were built using a 90's style WYSIWYG editor measurably boost business because everything was easily found and understood despite how cheesy it looks. On the other end of the spectrum I've seen the same expensive design place so much emphasis on cool effects and be such an exercise in vanity for the designer the business got nothing from the site.

I disagree that designers place too much importance on what they do. Design is very important. The mistake designers make is not knowing when it's important. They just want to design everything whether it's necessary or not. I was going to put an analogy here but I lost my train of thought.
All that hyper-technology and not one desalination plant. For that matter, I would guess before the USA ceded any territory to Mexico, we would try some geoengineering to bring the temperature down.
This guy is too entertaining.
I remember this one. The problem is the statement and his design is that it also changed his sales funnel. There was too much of a change to tell exactly where things fell apart or why specifically sales did not increase. Was it the initial offer? The middle? The actual offering? ect ect ...

I agree with this assessment that new/better designs don't always increase sales, though I believe (should he ever choose to pursue it more, though I don't think he will) he'll need to do a lot of split testing on the new design to optimize it like he did on his old design.

Plus, with the new design comes an increased brand image/presence which will help him in the long run.
> Maybe with enough experience you start to realize that it happens close to never that a proprietary fork of an open source project ends up outpacing the original project.

Apple's MacOS uses BSD code. Safari uses WebKit. In terms of audience outreach, I think both have obviously outpaced the original.
Justin Beiber Was caught sucking a guy in an ally.
They don't charge you for bandwidth, except as part of their normal charges.

You can be sure they would cut off downloads if you started serving any significant traffic.

(Mainly because of the crazy-long opened connections. Bandwidth is so cheap now this system would fall over long before Dropbox started caring about that cost)
Sorry, I wasn't clear about this. I meant the single-file approach of Bottle.
It's just a part of the "will the company survive" question.

How they behave is another part, competition is another, product quality is yet another... is you're doing great on these 3 and have much more sales than you can manage, why bother with a new website?
I like it though (despite it being "amateurish speculation").

Allow me to add my own. I would love to see them purchase a carrier though.

Imagine it. How much better would things get if Apple owned the towers and spectrum too.

They've got more hardware and software talent in units as small as 5 or 10 then some of those companies have in their entire workforce.

And for all the ridiculousness they've put us all through over the years I would love to seen them squirm as they try to figure out how they are going to compete with Apple.
Seems like it would be easy to make a GIMP script to remove. I think the watermark needs more entropy/randomness to make it more difficult to separate the image from the watermark.