skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Language of Creativity
In the last month I've been having a a major brain block on the design of my website.

I decided to take a step back from the coding and immerse myself in movies (Slumdog Millionaire is indeed Oscar worthy), books (Haruki Murakami rocks), music (can't beat Cat Sevens), and design (i've included a link to John Maeda's site).

http://www.maedastudio.com/index.php

After this creativity pilgrimage I feel refreshed and full of creative vigor.

Now, let's see if I can convert this energy into a profitable social networking site!
My advice for those who want to be get better is to invest in a good paddle. For example, the Butterfly brand, $35+. And forget hard rubber "paddles", without the right rubber, you will never be able to spin the ball effectively.
This is a great list which any programmer should be familiar with if they are not already.
This is a strong point for a bootstrapped company. We used EC2 for 2 months and then switched to Slicehost (and we'll try linode one day). That reduced our expenses a lot and we have the same quality of service. Think about it!
• Silverlight could be an issue, the adoption rate isn't that great so the majority of visitors would have to install a plugin to be able to do anything — people get turned away from sites because of a slow loading page, so being prompted to install a plugin may be enough for them to bounce back to where they came from. Plus of course a lot of corporate environments have a ban on installing new software, and a lot of mobile devices (iPhones, etc.) don't even have Flash, so Silverlight is a long way off...

• Black — arrggg! Personally I hate websites which have a colour palette ranging from #ccc to #000! They even disorientate me a bit…I think! It may just be me, but somehow I doubt the rest of the world loves such a dull colour.

However it's a very impressive app, you can tell you [guys (?)] have put a lot of work into it, and I wish you the best of luck — if I needed such a product I'd be MORE than willing to pay for Colaab! :)
Thanks, Will check it out.
Financial decisions are heavily influenced by early experiences
Office Space was prophetic.
I'm surprised that no one else has mentioned EditGrid. For me, the user experience with EditGrid has always been better than the user experience with Google, and EditGrid has always had more and better features as well. See:

http://www.editgrid.com/tnc/pkchan/EditGrid_v._Google

The thing Excel doesn't do as well as I'd like is Text to Columns, specifically for 13F filings. Many people like to track what major investors are buying and selling and would like to do this directly, from SEC filings, instead of through websites like Gurufocus.

For example, here's the Gurufocus page for Seth Klarman:

http://www.gurufocus.com/ListGuru.php?GuruName=Seth+Klarman

You can also find the data for his investment firm, Baupost Group, at SEC Info:

http://www.secinfo.com/$/SEC/Filing.asp?T=1ZCS7.t61_1wt

Clearly, it's possible to automatically get the data from Baupost's freely available SEC filings (http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1061768/0001061768080...) into a spreadsheet. It's just that Excel seems to make it a lot harder than I'd like.
Jeff's point is kind of trite.

I imagine people that routinely had to substitute 10.2 from 10.21 would notice.

This title should be something like "Don't expect much of a buzz if you don't change the UI". Swombat's comment perfectly highlights how UI affects human psychology. If people feel a difference then they will talk about it.
I'd very much like if I could right click on a chart in excel and select "get GoogleChartsAPI url".

That'd be sweet.
Ok. I spent 10 minutes to download SilverLight and restarted my browser just to view the video. Why don't you just use the flash video player?

Then, when I proceeded to the sign up page, I were "amazed" that you created the price plan with SilverLight too. And, it took time to load again just to view the price and to login.

When I stumbled upon the sign up form, there were too much information that I have to give. This doesn't really favor any users who want to try the service (first name, last name, email, username, etc in SilveerLight). And, I have to wait for a confirmation email to get started?!? Luckily, the confirmation email reached faster than I thought and I gave my actual email. I wish that you won't spam my mail box.

And, finally, I cousd get started with the service. I stared at it for 2 minutes and had no clue how to use it. Then, I clicked the close button. I will try the service again if someone in HN give a good review about it.

I know that it is partially my fault because I didn't watch the 8mins long intro video and the popup tooltips in the working platform.

http://riastats.com/ < You can see that there is only ~15% of penetration of silverlight on internet. Hopefully microsoft will put in more marketing budget in Silverlight despite the "failure" of Vista.

Sorry if I am too harsh on my language and I am not trying to discourage you at all.
>IMHO, it is a better and more open RIA technology than Flash

A lesser evil is still an evil.
This is a general point of view but I don't see the perks in using any RIA technologies (Flash or Silverlight) when javascript librairies are available everywhere (and I'm talking about jquery). What can you do with silverlight that can't be done with jquery?

I didn't try the app (because of silverlight) but I really like the design. Is black the new blue?
Why should I go through the hassle to evaluate something I won't potentially use? Even the intro video is in silverlight. Perhaps if it were in flash I could make some determination if it's worth the hassle.

And what's the point of the hassle in the first place? Someone has yet to explain why SilverLight is better for me as the consumer than Flex/Flash.
Humor is a way of dealing with psychological inconsistencies. It can be an outlet to deal with the unpleasant. So killing in the military can becomes humorous. 1st year medical school students routinely joke about dead bodies in anatomy lab. Hackers have this site: http://thedailywtf.com/ .
I see I wasn't very clear about the point of my rant... I apologize to everyone who has taken the time to thoughtfully offer me solutions of how to get Excel to do this, but I know about that. I should have explained that I know about getting Excel to extend a range when I insert a row using techniques such as having the range include a blank row at the bottom, and I'm not surprised to hear that Excel has a feature like "list builder" bolted on.

When I said, "I'm frustrated every single time I use a spreadsheet", it's not that I can't do whatever it is that I need to get done, I just get annoyed when products are made hard to use when they don't have to be. It's not so much a personal frustration as that I've spent a lot of time at non-profits helping non-computer people use computers, and it's a huge waste of their time and of my time to have to train them how to manipulate the software to get what they want instead of the software just doing it.

C2:C11 was a tremendous advance in 1979 when personal computers had 48K of memory and 40x25 character screens, but goodness gracious, it's thirty years later!

Making something easier to use is a tremendous amount of hard work, but it isn't conceptually all that hard to understand: you look at what people are doing, and you write software to implement that, instead of making them manipulate the software to do the implementation themselves.

I haven't looked at it myself so I don't know if Apple got it right or not, but from Timothee's comment that "Numbers actually manages tables as independent objects of a page", it sounds like they're at least trying.
I think having a flash tutorial (as well as a silverlight one) is a great idea.
In the languages that I mentioned (js,lisp,py), you will write a small function in the interactive shell (repl) and play with it and tinker it until it works perfectly. Then you'll write another function that uses this and other such functions etc. You'll build functions on top of functions until you have a fully usable system. As you know, this is bottom-up programming. While you can continue to improve things and refactor code as much as you want, at no point do you have to throw everything out and start clean. You don't lose any work.

I don't know much Objective C. I've just written some tiny iPhone apps in it. But my feeling is that it strongly encourages top-down programming, which results in the programmer having to do the things mentioned in the article (plan ahead, rewrite from scratch etc).
Gartner's Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2009
Graphs comparing this recession to others
Thanks. The reason for using Silverlight for the video is to encourage people to get over the Silverlight installation hurdle as soon as possible.

I've been back and forward on whether that's a good idea, and whether we should replace the demo video with a flash version. Will definetely think it over again.

We're currently redeveloping the sign up process as a more standard html form, clearly this was me getting a bit too swept up in my Silverlight development efforts!

I'm also working on a "Try it now, in a demo workspace" feature to allow people to try it without submitting any information at all. Maybe I should also change the email confirmation step to be something that needs to be completed in time, rather than something that needs to be completed before you can log in.

Do you think 8 minutes is too long for the intro video? Should we make a shorter / snappier version?

Thanks for all the feedback, very useful.
I wonder if there are some trends for the people that were the minority in this kind of experiment.
I wonder how this lines up with Ebay. As soon as someone has put a meager bid in they feel a sense of ownership. This might explain some of the bidding wars as people fight not just to win, but also not to loose something they now see as theirs.
How are we paying that off if every year the deficit only grows? You can effectively pay back the loans even with a deficit.

36.8% of GDP payed back at 1% per year would be (Interest - inflation - 1%) = ~.03 * 36.8 = 1.14% of GDP. Which is bad but below the average annual increase in GDP over the last 30 years. The deficit would increase every year, the debt would increase every year, but debut as a percentage of GDP would decrease.

One of the failings of democracy's is it's so easy for people in office to pay for current spending by increasing debt and then pass the buck to the next administration. The real story about the deficit is graphing as a percentage of GDP over time, doing so tells a different story than you might expect. http://zfacts.com/p/318.html

PS: A little blast from the past http://usgovinfo.about.com/library/weekly/aa101500b.htm
The 10, for 2009:

Virtualization
Cloud Computing
Servers — Beyond Blades
Web-Oriented Architectures
Enterprise Mashups
Specialized Systems
Social Software and Social Networking
Unified Communications
Business Intelligence
Green IT
extracting some constructive criticism from this (and my own thoughts:

* make the intro video in flash as well as silverlight! :)

* I'm personally really against confirmation email things.

* price plans/intro as HTML/PNG/Flash as well as silverlight

I think its important to really sell your site to users without silverlight - they will absolutley install silverlight if they WANT your service.
Silverlight will be bundled into all versions of Windows from now on so you won't have to worry about adoption.
I agree, that would be a better title.

I never thought about this and it may be a good idea to make UI changes so improvements are more visible, but he just goes way overboard with his last statement:

Don't bother improving your product unless it results in visible changes the user can see, find, and hopefully appreciate.

I would say improve your product regardless if the changes aren't visible, but make UI changes every now and then so users feel improvements are being made.
That's sounding good to me. Going to add detect for Silverlight and switch in a flash version of the intro video if Silverlight isn't present.

Thanks!
It only takes MS bundling it to make it popular on the client end.
I dont think 8 minutes is too long, but make sure you have a bullet list that says what your app is, what it does, who its for. Make it simple, make it exceptionally clear what you're doing and why your customer NEEDS your service. Re-iterate how bad collaboration is without your software.
You can be sure that the US Senate got their information from US Military and intelligence sources. I'm asking the source for a good reason: what's the more likely scenario?

A) The US invades Iraq and suddenly tens of thousands fly there (not the US) to do their bombings and beheadings.

or

B) The US ends a dictatorship that kept the 65% Shiia majority down and there's civil war, which includes bombings and beheadings, and the US Military declares it to be Al-Queda to give soldiers the idea that they're "fighting evil" rather than just killing the people that live there.
I think you're right - allow them to evaluate the service with as few hurdles as possible first and then deal with the Silverlight install issue once they have made a decision. Working on it already!
I believe in this case, "no one" = most people.
You apparently aren't most people.
I never realised this could be a chore to other people. On linux you just select the url with the mouse and middle click.
Will that work in firefox/safari/opera on windows?

Also, the web isn't composed of windows machines. It's a mishmash of a billion different devices. The vast majority of which, know html, javascript, and not much else. Seems a bad idea to only write for a small subset of them.
I was able to install silverlight on OS X and FF. When I clicked to watch the demo it asked me to install and I clicked the link which downloaded 2.0. I didn't even have to restart my browser when it was done.
"As dramatic as some of the features are in Version 2.3, Ruby 3 looks to be the bigger blockbuster upgrade"

Ruby 3 sounds awesome! snicker
Leading comment as a tooltip?
I like this group:

cmd/xfe/prefdialogs.c: Motif is such a categorical piece of shit. I hate my job, I hate

cmd/xfe/prefdialogs.c: away, probably because of some bullshit to do with it being a modal

cmd/xfe/prefdialogs.c: exactly what that fucking two-stage-destroy bullshit was supposed to

cmd/xfe/prefdialogs.c: of these days, I fucking swear. I'm going to go Postal Worker and
And the Money Comes Rolling In | Interview with plentyoffish.com founder
Also if the operator can't see an alteration in the graphs, he can think that the subject has been "inmune" to the machine and try to break him "manually" like in the linked article or like arockwell's wife. The drugs would be used because, as the interviewer himself said in the linked article: "everybody have done drugs some time", so it's a good guess, even if it's "most people" instead of "everybody".
At the moment if you want to turn it into a desktop application then you've got two choices:

1. WPF application - copy / share the code with a full blown WPF application and fix any incompatibility errors (Silverlight is a subset of the full .NET framework so there shouldn't be many).

2. Mesh Application - Live Mesh applications include the ability to run Silverlight outside of the browser, like a desktop application (short cuts, start menu items etc). I've done a bit of a proof of concept of this (http://www.vimeo.com/2542327 for an overview) but this introduces a hard dependancy on the user having Live Mesh installed so for the moment it's just proof of concept.

Thanks.
In the case of something like rack and pinion steering, there is a direct physical connection between this steering wheel the driver is holding and the wheels. If done well, this kind of high fidelity connection can allow the driver to directly experience the physics of slinging their car around a turn. In this case the "user" has a very direct connection to those physics. (There's an actual physical linkage!) In many cases, an engineer can add something to this like power steering, but still maintain this high fidelity.

In lots of software, the connection is very indirect. It's as if one were sitting on a hydraulic platform, watching rendered 3D models on screens, driving an actual car by remote control. If this were implemented well, it might feel great, but if it were implemented badly, it would absolutely suck -- just like a lot of UIs do. Heck, even something much simpler like badly implemented power steering can still suck.

In essence, there are often too many layers of abstraction in lots of software. At each level, you can lose some fidelity, and the end result is discomfort for the user. There is no "physics" involved, but there are often underlying models which are not represented with high fidelity. (Relations are a prime example.)

(I was watching an account by an Israeli Mirage pilot who also flew the F-16s. He felt there was some "immediacy" missing from the "fly by wire" F-16.)
OWASP Testing Guide v3: Best practices web application penetration testing framework
or, just a flash one, since it's what is commonly used for videos.
Obama's big idea?

“By computerizing health records, we can avoid dangerous medical mistakes, reduce costs, and improve care.”

--President George W. Bush, State of the Union Address, January 20, 2004

http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/technology/economic_policy...

It isn't hard to see that electronic medical records are "the next big thing" in medicine. Every hospital administrator knows it is coming, and many big software companies are trying to build it.

http://www-304.ibm.com/jct03004c/businesscenter/smb/us/en/he...

http://www.emc.com/solutions/samples/healthcare-life-science...

Bush and Obama just want to have their name attached to some "electronic medical records" law, that way they can take credit for it once it arrives.
Your username clearly indicates where you stand :-)
This list is correct but mostly obsolete and heavily dependent on your technologies of choice (and how well you use them).

For example, half of the first bunch (Insecure Interaction) are automatically covered for if you use (properly) a framework like Rails. The resource management bunch is also pretty much irrelevant if you're using a dynamic language like ruby.

The last bunch is the most relevant today, but those are hardly "programming errors". They are security design shortcomings... i.e. things that a security-minded application architect will be aware of, but that you need to think long before you write any code.
Was the confirmation email in silverlight too? ;)
I think your point falls down because it appears to only apply to physical devices. In which case, the only shortcoming of software (all software) is that it's not physical... Can you come up with an example of an interface to a non-physical device (whether software or something else) that doesn't have such a "shortcoming"?
For me personally I was able to build colaab faster and more enjoyably using Silverlight rather than jQuery (which I love and use a lot in other projects).

Of course this is of no matter to the end user, but where it does have impact is that hopefully I was then able to spend more time working on features that add value to the application, thus benefitting the end user.

There's also some area of the application (like commenting on videos) which would have been really hard to develop using just javascript.

In terms of the design there's definetely been a trend towards darker colours. I love the style that Adobe have used for products like Photoshop Express and this was definetely an inspiration.

Thanks!
Will Someone Please Invent iTunes for News?
Ask HN: What to do with a spare computer?
I'm about to get hold of a spare computer, and this thread from earlier today ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=429573 ) prompts this question:

What are some cool/useful things to do with a spare computer?

I'm looking for interesting extra functionality I can add to the house.

Thanks!
Could one use this list to evaluate an implementation stack? Maybe someone should evaluate LAMP, Ruby on Rails, and Django with regards to this list?
That's another way to do it. The problem is that this way and other ways are not similar, making it hard to go from one form to the other. It's also not the same as declaring a class.

I talk a bit more about what I'm trying to fix earlier:
http://justin.harmonize.fm/index.php/2008/12/a-better-object...
I wonder why the discussion section for each topic tries so hard to be funny:

"Buffer overflows are Mother Nature's little reminder of that law of physics that says: if you try to put more stuff into a container than it can hold, you're going to make a mess."

"Just as you should start your day with a healthy breakfast, proper initialization helps to ensure that your software will run without fainting in the middle of an important event."

'''Spider Man, the well-known comic superhero, lives by the motto "With great power comes great responsibility." Your software may need special privileges to perform certain operations, but wielding those privileges longer than necessary can be extremely risky.'''
Amen.

As a CS guy suddenly having to do statistics (which my crypto prof called "Sadistics") 10 years after my last calc class, I completely agree that you often feel stupid.

OTOH, once you've felt stupid & worked through it in a few areas, the rest of science suddenly feels more accessible to you. You know that you can pick up a textbook on the topic and muddle through until you know what you need.

My dad had to learn a good amount about electronics to build his physics experiments. To this day he's better at it than I am.
I think you're more likely to lose people immediately with that hurdle - I certainly wouldn't install Silverlight just to view a video to see if I was interested in a service, but if the video made the service look interesting enough I might well download a plugin to try it.
Paul,

I'd like some (low-key) visual indication for the text of "comments" links that I've already visited, as a reminder that I've already looked at the comments.

Although with the HN page's clean design, I'm not imagining right now what specifically would fit unobtrusively.

With HN, my memory is better as to what I've examined. Actually, I've commented on reddit a time or two on the desirability of this feature. There's so much clutter over there these days, that I'd like a reminder for those links where I examined the comments and decided to go no further.
Sorry, you are just missing my point. Of course, software always involves abstractions. Another way to put it is:

* Not all abstractions are created equal
* Not all implementations of abstractions are equal
* Not all presentations of abstractions are equal
* All else equal, fewer abstractions are better

(Your rebuttals seem to rest on the opposite being true.)

Returning to my original post -- UIs are a fiction created for the user. The salient point here is that the range of possible fidelity is huge. You can write a piece of historical fiction that's very close to actual events, or you can totally butcher the facts. The range of freedom afforded programmers allows them to think they can get away with way more than they actually can.
funnily, this approach is the complete opposite of the way of the samurai, which stresses swiftness and decisiveness

cf. kamikaze
While the effort is well meant, I find it hard to respect a list that advocates the following (in section CWE-665: Improper Initialization):

"Requirements: Use a language that forces the programmer to explicitly initialize all variables before use."
Newspapers won't disappear entirely. The point of aggregation is that by filtering and organizing the news, even if there is only 1% of the amount of quality reporting as there was in 1990, you can still get better reporting overall.

I would prefer a Hacker News based on only 1% of the original reporting that there is today, rather than a fully funded New York Times.
Hell yeah. One of the first things we did in Cali was get a ping pong table. It was a great breaktime activity.