skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting comments. Thank you all for commenting.
@Axed: I worked long and hard for The Grid System. Parody site? I don't get it!?
@njharman:Good observation. It does look like print magazine :)
@all: This is not tabele v.s css article or project. CSS is just the tool. It is about web grids, dimension, geometry and my personal quest to better web layout.
Fun, but they should really let you design a few base cars, plugin the genetic algorithm and let it go
Maybe it's because I'm not a member, but the next meeting date shown is January 13.
GIMP vs. Photoshop isn't just about features. It's about polish.

I don't think I'll be able to convince you of this, but proprietary apps are usually more polished than the open source counterparts. I'm talking about every sense of the word polish: usability, reasonable bug levels, compatibility, etc.

It's not that open source is bad. It's that for-profit software companies pays programmers to polish the apps in such a way that open source programmers aren't intrinsically motivated to do (real usability testing, compatibility, etc.).
Sorry, link fixed: http://www.meetup.com/coworking-nyc/calendar/9607959/

And this is next Wednesday if tonight is too soon: http://www.meetup.com/coworking-nyc/calendar/9607969/
The article tries to match software troubles and problem to a kitchen. Maybe right but I don't think Mr Ramsay's way to motivating people should work in any creative (software) or peopleware shop.
Shouting at people usually don't work except in the military (and I'm not convinced that it really works there in the phase of teaching people things they can't do).

For a different approach build a team like http://books.google.se/books?id=LgHHfzec33UC&dq=Software...
There are really two "Midwests"-- and more if you count the plains/mountain states (I don't) as part of the Midwest. The rust-belt (Detroit, Milwaukee) is in bad shape, but Chicago, Minneapolis, Toronto are solid places. So are Madison and Ann Arbor-- top-5% mid-sized cities.

The Bay Area I would fold into the Pacific Northwest, since it's culturally a part of that region, although it has a lot of California's problems (expensive housing, budget crisis). It's more similar to Seattle than to L.A., I would say.
Jose Antonio Abreu: Help me bring music to kids worldwide
It seems like everyone involved - homeowners, banks, corporate executives, the government - has an incentive to drag this out, so that this quarter's results won't be as bad as they otherwise would be. (Or in homeowners' case, so they don't end up on the street.) Why take some pain now when the rewards will likely go to your successor?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Penfield_Jackson has tried to fix Microsoft.
The same thing could have been said about Linux, Apache, MySQL, Python, PHP, Rails, Firefox, etc, etc, etc.

Open source runs the web. Don't make the mistake of thinking that open source == programmers writing hobby apps in their spare time.
Imagine a pipe in your new house sprung a leak. You contact the builder, but they don't answer your calls. Dammit, you need it fixed now!

So you go into the phone book and hire the first plumber you see. He comes over, fixes the pipe. Sweet!

Except now, two months later, the builder [i]does[/i] answer your call. And when you tell him you got the pipe fixed by someone else, he slaps a lawsuit on you, saying you're not allowed to disassemble or reverse engineer your house.

I think the biggest benefit for users is that you are free to do what you want with the software. You can get plug ins, pop it on LiveCDs, share it with friends, anything. Yes, "freedom" may not be a great piece for marketing, but when it comes to a users true benefits, freedom is the best thing Open Source has to offer.
yes. all marketeers are liars.
The inflation rate isn't the only (or even a particularly good) predictor of gold's value. From 1971-1979, gold shot up from $35-$900/ounce, a 30x increase, yet cumulative inflation was only 6-8x. Then over the next 5-10 years its price fell from $900 to ~$300, a 3x decline even though cumulative inflation ran about 150%.

Gold is like any other commodity: its price behaves according to supply and demand. When there's massive economic uncertainty, people demand it, so its price shoots up. A bubble, in other words. Economic uncertainty includes deflation, panic, and social unrest as well as inflation.
How Bespin makes use of canvas
awesome. if you have a group feature, i'll be using it for a hackers meetup here in montreal. we meet monthly and need a tool to aggregate hacker projects. (or maybe use tags?)
Why You Should Design Fixed-Width Websites
yes props for making each and every one of those customers feel like suckers, brilliant marketing move that's sure to pay off handsomely over the long term . . . although something tells me t-shirt hell's customers don't have a problem with being made to feel like suckers.
Thanks for the suggestions! Actually the intention was to make project administration happen through comments, but indeed some common pieces of information are likely to come back in every project and allow for better filtering and smoother/more straightforward project progression.

As for project length, the core idea is for projects to have low time demands, and "small" can be interpreted in many ways. Maybe we should change that to "a few hours", though.
It's that for-profit software companies pays programmers to polish the apps in such a way that open source programmers aren't intrinsically motivated to do

You say this like it's a fact. Could you cite a source?

(I like your "compatibility" argument. The other day, we received some Word documents that crashed MS Word. OO.org opened them just fine, and the version exported from OO.org didn't crash Word anymore. Clearly Word is more polished, which is why it segfaults on invalid input.)
No Photo Ban in Subways, Yet an Arrest
The worst thing about the culture of living outside one's means is that it encourages, and sometimes forces, others to do the same. Wages can go down, and prices can go up, financed by a credit time-bomb we all end up having to pay for, collectively, in the future.

Take the housing bubble. If you bought a house in California between 1995 and now, you paid a massive premium because you were competing against financial morons with no sense of history, much less fiscal responsibility. It's like the admonition about never arguing with idiots, for fear of becoming one.
This reminds me of my philosophy class, where I learned that it is a significant open question on what color is.
Already flagged and deleted yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=484639
Not if you ask a goth teenager what their favorite color is...
I can't believe they are going to win this. This is going to have interesting long term consequences.
I was wondering what kind of crazy bug bit HN the other day with that "Magenta is not a Color" bitty.

Even though the title is not true, the article was still interesting.
Hey I _am_ in Montreal! :P And sure we'll add group/location features if they're useful to actual real-world meetups.

Thanks for the comment.
One isolated incident? Please... Have you ever seen Adobe's PDF reader on Windows? I don't have anything against Adobe, I haven't ever spent a dime on their software, so who am I to complain, however:

Just about the only reason I need to reboot my Mac is whenever I watch flash video (southparkstudios.com) and forget to close it before I shut the lid down. When laptop wakes up, it's frozen and I can't kill the browser.

Buggy flash from Adobe is probably #1 reason stopping adoption of Linux right now. Not only it's slow, has numerous issues with sound, but it also crashes regularly and generally looks and feels completely fucked up: wrong font rendering, steals focus and mouse clicks form the browser, etc. Ughh..

Photoshop is the only Mac program I've seen that uses "setup" and "uninstall" paradigm, two idiocies from the Windows world.

And finally, their ridiculous Flash implementation burns my lap, I'm not kidding - whenever I visit a heavily flash-infected site, my MBP gets burning hot even for small video inserts on ESPN. BTW it also greatly reduces my battery time. Adobe software is probably the only reason why surfing the web on a 5 year old PC is a very unpleasant experience.

They are one of these old, big fat monopolies the world would be better without, but we have no choice.

Suggesting switching to GIMP isn't an argument. All our designers use Photoshop and nobody needs conversion headaches, Adobe owns the industry, it's called the vendor lock-in.
Obnoxious isn't a marketing concept.
I know I'm walking into a field of landmines in replying to this, but I'll try to tread carefully:

The plumber/pipe metaphor is better suited to consulting & custom corporate apps. For wide-release software (like Adobe's software) it's in the company's best interest to fix bugs and keep the user happy.

And I think pierrefar made a good point. The only reason I use Firefox is that it's a higher quality than IE and Opera. This might be a result of the openness of the software, but the openness of Firefox wasn't the deciding factor when I started to use it.
This is really cool. Taking one look gave me quite a few new ideas.

I'm slightly confused about its focus, though. How is it different from those sites that list webapp ideas? Nothing is stopping me from taking one of the ideas described on this site and just doing it myself...
Yeah, this is definitely a use case we're interested in supporting. One solution is to use a particular tag, but we'd love to add something more useful & targeted. If you have any thoughts on what this should look like, shoot me and fsav an email!
I'm actually saying that the rule you have stated above holds true even more so if we take into account the high availability of actionable information. Take for example that with "TARP 1" all sorts of irritating loopholes were exposed in a very short period of time (how long did it take for the general public to be informed of the tax exemption for a specific type of arrow used by child archers??).

I want to emphasize that what I'm stating is that in the past, when critical changes took place, it would be some time before all of the information/knowledge of those changes propagated to everybody and this had an impact on the economic cycle (how long or short they were). In today's "Internet Age", the time it takes for changes to propagate is going to be reduced dramatically.

I should add that a direct consequence (and this is purely hypothetical but not unreasonable to include) is that the volatility of the economic climate will increase with the availability of information.
Yes, this is true. We spell and grammar check the popular questions on the service in order to make it a more pleasant experience... I know if I misspell something on the web I would appreciate someone fixing it for me, as opposed to 10 folks attacking me.

In fact, that's the other big secret of why Mahalo Answers is having a fairly strong start: we don't allow obnoxious behavior. If someone responds with "why don't you google it n00b?!!?" we delete the response and warn the person once before closing their account.

We have a "no a-hole" rule basically. I'm going to do an email newsletter about the things we've learned with community building. My email newsletter is at http://www.tinyurl.com/jasonslist if you're interested.
so who goes through this? the web developer? the web integrator? a project manager? and also it seems to me that a few of those could be automated
On morning's light, that won't do what you think. random.sample() gives you a unique sampling. No character will be repeated. try this instead:

alphanum = string.letters+string.digits
''.join([alphanum[random.randint(0,61)] for i in xrange(12)])
Another explanation might be an increase in Twitter spam. I can only speak for myself, but I've been getting tons a spammy followers over the past couple weeks. You'd think that the most popular accounts (like the ones highlighted in the article) would see the highest levels of spam, thus the sharp increase in new followers. I'm sure the suggested followers feature Ev mentioned plays a part as well.
hmm have you been to the freehackers meetup @ bolidea?
So it took him 2 hours to install so I guess he consults at about $300 an hour.. then he complains that it's too expensive?

This “free trial” download experience does not encourage me to shell out the $995 Adobe wants for the product. (Hell, at my consulting rate, it’s already cost 2/3 of that to install the damn product.)

If you can buy a key tool for merely three hours of your labor, it's cheap. It's equivalent to someone on minimum wage buying a DVD or something..
And yet they kept discussing it and were interested in the (non)story. Proves human nature.
Definitely a combination; depends largely on the structure of the organisation in charge of the website (e.g. whether or not they have access to dedicated testing).

It may be interesting to add another column to the list that allows individuals to take responsibility for each item, as there's definitely a range of skills required to tackle everything on here (from design to sys admin).
Fair enough. Ok here is the most important stuff, sorted by program category.

Photoshop 5
This is a standard in forms of UI. What sequences of movements are necessary to get results. Like DJing or vim. The Gimp is absolutely horrible in that regard and completely ignores what the absolute majority of professional graphic designers are used to.

Font handling under X in general is pretty weak.

Color management has to work.

Vector Grafx

Inkscape is pretty good. But in some ways not good enough. It crashes to often with heavier files. But ok. I actually use it but would like to have Freehand back, UI again. Inkscape would be nice as native Mac App, yes, for UI reasons. UI is pretty important because it drives workflow, speed, productivity.

Quark 3
Was a classic. Everything about it was done right. Again, main thing the UI. Font inspector. Main window resizing. How to create new pages, how to link Texts. It was dam fast, with hundreds of pages open and links to database full of graphics. Doing a magazine in real production time with any of the OSS alternatives? Bad idea.
Check all bespoke/complex functionality

One of our recent suppliers is a security provider that offers a service we want to resell.

Their management website has a "mailto:" button for support. It doesn't work.

How can you a) break a mailto link in the first place, b) not notice the support option doesn't work, and c) expect me to trust you with security with attention to detail like that?

Maybe you can add "Check basic functionality" and then I can forward this to them... ;)
It can be - it's just rarely a good one. Rich Jerk is a great example of this - a heavily cross-promoted product that's done very well.
Nope, haven't been to much Montreal tech events except CUSEC for the moment. I'll have to check it out.
A lot of Microsoft's customers feel like suckers but most keep paying for upgrades and buying more. It works.
That's a great how to article. Our mission at Mahalo, since not everyone here has spent 20 minutes having coffee with me (yet) is the following: "to help people find information they can trust."

We are testing different ways of doing this including:

1. hand crafter search results with content
2. a knowledge exchange (Mahalo Answers)
3. how to articles
4. (coming april 10th)
5. (coming September 15th)

The real goal of Mahalo is to build a service that combines the three most important services on the internet: content, search and knowledge exchange.

For an example of this look at our bob dylan page:
http://www.mahalo.com/bob_dylan

This page has nice wikipedia/About.com style content on the left, search results and Q&A on the right.

If a normal person (i.e. not a ycombinator/Techcrunch50/Scoble type) comes to a page like this they have a really nice spam-free experience.

We know this because we actually have a lab at Mahalo where we study human behavior on the web. If any of you would like to see this here is a video from before we launched:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoehBwTAH5Y

In these studies we found that folks LOVES our model.
The discussion and votes given seem to indicate people are interested in the story nonetheless. censorship--
> Could you cite a source?

Like a research paper? No, I'm afraid not. All I can provide are similar anecdotes like you provided (except for the opposite argument).
Google Answers already had that feature and it was also commonly used. I think Yahoo copied Google really.
That's right... we try a LOT of different things, put them in the lab and test them in the real world. We're getting over 5m uniques a month and the largest growing part of the site is the direct traffic to Mahalo Answers.

IF anyone wants to try Mahalo Answers create an account and email me at jason at Mahalo.com and I'll put M$5 in your account to play with. 60 days in where getting fairly good answers to a range of questions.
I was about to leave a comment about how this isn't really news. It feels like every search market share update for the past few years has been the same - Google gains, everyone else loses or stands still.

I love Google's search product, but this trend is deeply troubling. Websites live off of search visitors, and you wonder as the Google monopoly grows stronger and they feel the pressure to increase quarterly earnings, how they might try to siphon off even more of the search traffic for their own profit. With no other alternatives, it could mean bad things for the web.
I didn't like them. (They're not coming back, at least not as implemented before.)
They should try and pull dick moves like this all the time. If they get caught they can score a 9 in customer relations by retreating. If they don't get caught they got away with something. Can't fail!
Agreed.

The key is to avoid slavishly following a rule. You should not shy away from breaking a rule, provided you have good reasons for the violation. First learn what the good rules are (as applicable in majority of cases) and then learn when to break them. The best practices are not supposed to be carried over verbatim into every development project.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=485460

Never underestimate an angry customer...
The surprising thing was that TechCrunch wrote about it.
This is why I <3 HN.

Go to a website, comment on it and watch your feedback be used to evolve the website... in under half an hour! There are even comment threads where PG has a <5min read-hack-deploy-announce cycle on HN itself.
Switzerland threatened with bankruptcy
Cool, open source runs the web. Why? I guess one reason is that LAMP & Co are actually better performers than their commercial counterparts? Well, open source production software for the content creation industries as it exists today, sucks.
Actually, I've talked to search engine companies about syndicating content between blogs and they have said over and over again that there is no issue with this.

Everyone has a blog roll, and most blogs have a "WIN Grid" at the bottom (a feature I created at Weblogs, Inc. where at the bottom of engadget/autoblog/joystiq/etc you see the headlines from the other sites).

From what I've seen said at conference the search engines only pass a small amount of page rank from these areas so it's not a major deal to syndicate your content around.

HackADay is now owned by Mahalo (we didn't sell it to AOL in the WEblogs, Inc. sale for obvious reasons... like hacking TimeWarner cable boxes :-). There is nothing wrong with syndicating headlines between mahalo and HackAday. If we're told there is we will stop.

This is just the SEO community upset at me for saying that "seo is BS" back in 1995!
Crossroads between Pacific Northwest (liberal mindset, educated people) and California (entertainment, ambition). This is why it has been so successful.

As the tech Midwest (Chicago, Minneapolis, Toronto) heats up, I'd imagine that Pittsburgh has similar potential, being also at a crossroad between that region and the Northeast.
Would've appreciated an NSFW on this.
Its everywhere right now, not just the YooKay. This week alone, I've seen Twitter stories in most major and local newspapers that I read.

Hell, one of my professors uses it as a primary distribution point for assignments and notes... for a Master's level class.
That's the work of paid _designers_. Graphic designers, user interface designers, interaction designers. How much respect get those people in open source project land? How much art school students know what the heck "open source" even means?
Ask HN: Any book recommendations for Geek Humour?
I loved the sillyness of Douglas Adams, the even more old school sillyness of PG Wodehouse(wasn't geek but still pretty good).

I've searched and read some random sci-fi humour but wasn't blown away. Perhaps I was reading the wrong things. Do you guys have any suggestions?
Can you elaborate? Unfortunately for some reason there aren't that many firsthand accounts of what is required to become a lieutenant in a drug cartel. If you can find time to write about your experiences, it would be a substantial contribution to the public discourse.
People buying Macs are a threat to Windows. Even the idea that there exists an alternative to Windows is a threat to Windows.
Please, Word and Photoshop. Don't put them in one bed, ok?
thanks for the suggestion! Ok, I bought that now.
Yeah sure you could just run away with other's ideas. But the focus is on meeting others while implementing the ideas.

I guess if you have a revolutionary idea, you better keep it to yourself :P But if you have a small project that'd be useful yet not likely a huge profit maker, by sending it there you can make it an opportunity to meet other programmers.

And it's much easier to generate buzz around your project if you 2-3 trying to do so than if you're alone. That's a reason why we suggest project members describe the project on their blogs when it's done.
Did the NYT just change their policy about letting you read a certain number of articles before making you register? The site tried to make me register to read this even after I cleared all my nytimes.com cookies. Bugmenot, however, worked perfectly.

This company is so incurably stupid...
That might be true, but that's not what your comment communicated, to me anyway. To me, your comment communicated (rather snidely) that it's ridiculous to think that a bunch of programmers could create open source versions of the apps you listed in their spare time without financial compensation. All I was pointing out is that a lot of other software sectors have made the same mistake, and I don't see anything about content creation software that makes it immune to the same forces.