skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hmmm, never heard of it.

I think to defeat Picasa and Flickr, first, it has to actually be known about...

The reasons given in the article are well, nice enough features, but they're absolutely not enough to guarantee success or domination... not even close. Major success is of course extremely fickle; it's not just major features that are important but all sorts of incidental stuff. In many cases, much of this comes down to luck as much as anything else (e.g. FB's big advantage was being in the right place, at the right time, and not screwing up that advantage completely), and is notoriously hard to predict.

So... good luck, I guess, but, well ... meh.
"That doesn't keep the email private from Google, but if your only concern is to keep your communications private from your email provider"

If you use Gmail, then Google is your email provider.
Right, I was talking about you in particular.

People that do popular mobile apps are usually far more concerned with what other people will be using 6 months from now than what they personally prefer to use right now.
I don't necessarily agree with the idea of declaring something a national treasure but the problem of companies screwing around with APIs is a big one, and it is probably better solved by having developers group together in some way to get better bargaining power against companies who do it.

The whole bait-and-switch method that a lot of large companies have employed in the past is unfair, and it usually involves companies enticing developers to pour huge amounts of resources into building on their platform, only to pull the rug out from underneath them and clamp down on API terms or ban applications (see Twitter with API tokens, Facebook with Social Reader etc).

It would probably be better if developers got together and threatened to pull all their apps off an ecosystem unless companies negotiated in good faith, even if only a small subset of developers stood to get screwed over. It's a principle which works quite well for unions aside from when they take it too far. Hopefully it wouldn't skew the balance too far either way, but it would definitely make negotiations bilateral instead of unilateral and result in a much fairer deal for developers.
This thread is bringing the worst of Hacker News out of the woodwork. The author is not claiming to be a design expert, nor is she publishing a "how to design" guide. She's demonstrating a skill which I think a lot of developers could use: taking Bootstrap, which is a good start for a front end these days, and making it not look like Bootstrap. She even says this in TFA. It's for developers without a designer to make their site look half-decent in half an hour. That's the TITLE.

Since we all like MVPs and demo days here, I would think this is applicable to a lot of people on Hacker News. You want to stand apart from the other ten demoing startups that used Bootstrap as well, don't you? Put a little effort in, which is all she is advocating.

Based on the quality of the majority of the comments here it seems like most people opened it, saw the ugly design of the site which is only publishing her work (she didn't design it), made it a few paragraphs in, then ran back to comment about how articles like this are killing our profession, making them ill, making them cry, or how she shouldn't be giving design advice.

Dreadful. Truly dreadful. You're better people than this.
> Arbitrarily adding fonts, colors, and background images take a perfectly usable layout and make it look like something straight out of 2002.

For sure. I've seen a lot of these "improve bootstrap" articles that advocate adding fonts, colors, etc. But, at the end of the day, the webpage is still obviously twitter bootstrap with a few tweaks (almost always for the worse. I'm not a designer, but "oversized header + buttons for links + 2 or 3 columns below the header" (and often with something functionally equivalent to a menu bar at the top) is so clearly bootstrap that I don't understand making any effort to hide it.
...I think everyone in this thread should state where they live. I am a German and I've only ever seen them in business circles, and they were certainly cool among business students (which are "cooler" than engineering students to begin with); however in Singapore I still see many people typing away on BB's in the subway. In contrast, I haven't seen a single one in Taiwan, ever, probably because they are all QWERTY/QWERTZ?
i remember Haskell in college...shudder
It’s not Twitter — this is just the way the news works now
I miss the keyboard. My fingers are too big to even begin to use an iPhone, but I can get by with some androids and swiftkey. I would kill for a blackberry shaped Android, I'm not a fan of sliding keyboards because I like to fiddle around with moving parts, so I have a tendency to wear them out. I just can't see paying for data on a BB when that same data is so much more useful with Android.
I suspect, and I could be wrong here, that the reason YC associated so much value to those questions was that Power Law function which describes the ROI on their companies (so far) indicates that only 1 to 2 out of the 50 startups they fund (if that many) will be the ones worth investing in, the others can be written off.

So, PG and the rest of the crew probably looked at the limited supply of "Hits" that they had, and tried to identify, in their minds, what characteristics they associated with successful founders.

For whatever reason, the ability to overcome obstacles, sometimes "creatively", (aka "hacking the system") was one such characteristic.

They may also have had a few successful startups as well that worked "within the system", but I suspect those made up small percentage of their hits, and therefore would be much harder to predict.

From my limited exposure to very successful founders (Those who exit with an IPO or acquisition of > $1B), they are all mavericks willings to do almost anything to be successful. Many (most?) of them come very close to the line of what a reasonable person would consider generally acceptable , and they all have vast number of detractors, and quite often casualties and lawsuits on their path to success.

Think about the various legal issues associated with AirBNB - the AirBNB founders were funded, in no small measure, based on their unwillingness to let anything get in the way of success, and certainly weren't going to let some status quo/system which said what they were doing was wrong slow them down.

I'm sure it's possible to be a breakout hit, and create a $1B+ company while working within the system, but the large majority of times it's done (80%+), it's done by those who don't completely work within the system - ergo a demonstrated ability to work outside, increases your chance of falling into that 2-4% of very successful companies.
I'm not sure if you're wanting the appearance of HN to improve or update the markup to the latest hip-HTML5 tags.

The latter is a waste of time.
Gravity causes or is (depending on how you look at it) curvature of space so the light goes "straight" but doesnt leave. Sorry if that means it "curves away" but that's what having an escape velocity greater than the speed of light means.

And what does that have to do with conservaton of momentum? If i throw a rock upwards it curves away rather than leaving the solar system — momentum is still conserved and the rock has much more than a photon.
Well, apparently I don't know what I'm talking about at all - it does work in the 3 major simulators. Typo in my code. Ooops.

It appears to be valid, and does not require "assign".

This is what I like about HN - smart people keeping me on my toes!
> A significant aspect of the Japanese market is the prevalence of $1,200 electric bicycles, which now appears to be at around 30% of bikes seen around in Tokyo

Electric bikes are a somewhat popular niche lately, but there's absolutely no chance they account for anywhere even near 30% of the bikes in use in Tokyo. The number of bikes, and biking population, in/around Tokyo is immense, and the vast majority of them are not electric (nor new, nor particularly fancy). Even amongst the recently popular small-wheel-two-kid-seat bikes, most don't seem to be electric.

But you're absolutely right that the Japanese bike market would be a good one to target; it's very big, more upscale than many other countries, and oriented around practicality.
There Is No Ctrl-Z In Life
I use MariaDB on my Mac for most things that require MySQL. It's a drop in replacement for most things. Is there a special edge case with media wiki they had to solve or is it now just formally announced as being supported?
DTCoreText was not mentioned yet - we've used it with mattt's TTTAttributedLabel and it worked okay on iOS5.

https://github.com/Cocoanetics/DTCoreText
I'm not one, so I don't have a good answer.

In the worst case, if no one provides a good answer, I would approach it starting with the following. Refine as it makes sense to you.

web development: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=web+development&t=canonical

web development tools: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=web+development+tools&t=canoni...

(Your browser, Safari, Chrome or Firefox, has good to excellent front end tools and debuggers.)

(And, since you said complete newcomer, be sure to use a text editor (vim, emacs, notepad++, etc), not a text processor like wordpad, word or libre office.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_developer

http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=%22web+deve...

http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=web%20development

Go broad at first, not deep. Eventually you'll get a feel for what's most interesting to you; then go deep.

Identify the major pieces of web development. Decide where you want to start. Don't ignore the back end as a possible area of interest. Identify tools and languages. Decide which ones to focus on. You can't learn everything at once, you just have to choose, and it doesn't much matter which among the major choices.

The best way to learn something is to do it. Once you've decided what to focus on (for now, your career is never cast in stone, so don't worry too much about it), then build your first portfolio site or project. Keep it simple and narrowly focused.

You'll want a place to develop and host.

virtualbox, a virtual machine, is widely used by individuals, it will give you a place to experiment and develop, without messing up your physical machine's environment and without paying (yet) for hosting.

Linode, AWS (Amazon) and Slicehost are frequently recommended for VPS (Virtual Private Server). Linode's basic is more than enoough for a first portfolio site, at $20/month. AWS can be cheaper, but I don't understand the pricing model very well, nor the various offerings. [Anyone?] My impression is that google's app server is fading out of favor, but lots like it.

There are many more hosting services and options.

If you host a site somewhere you'll want a domain name. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=domain+name+registrars&t=canon...

I use pairnic.com, they're not the cheapest but they're not expensive. Don't use godaddy for anything, not hosting, not domain registration, nothing. They hate elephants, people and the internet.

Depending on the nature of your first portfolio projects, you may not even need a host and domain, it may be enough to put whatever you've done on github. But if your project is a site and pages, you'll need some sort of hosting.

People make sites and entire businesses on WordPress. You could look at that if it turns out to be interesting. I might not call that web development, others probably disagree. It doesn't matter what you call it, it just matters if it's interesting and you can make a living at it, and some people do.

Good luck, have fun.
How We Started Calling Visual Metaphors “Skeuomorphs”
I'd bet against this happening... nobody knows about this.
Also, hasn't twitter, shared photo streams and Instagram/Facebook already "defeated" simple image hosting platforms?
If you do indeed have 6 weeks - and it's not a spare time thing - you could do the following:

- Find a computer
- Install a programming language of your choice (mine was PHP, but Ruby and Python are also fine)
- Learn the basics through some web tutorial, there are plenty, and only spend a week on this until you're comfortable in the language
- Find a website that you use often, like Facebook or Twitter. Clone it in your chosen language. It does not need to be webscale. You can use MySQL - in fact, you probably should.
- Once you are done with the above, throw away the shit you wrote, find a framework in your chosen language (preferably a popular one!) and learn the basics of that framework.
- Rewrite that site in the framework.
- Go to a meetup in your language of choice. When it comes time to say hi to people, just be friendly and ask for pointers.
- If you have time, redo these steps in a different language.

My recommendations are:

- PHP for the language. It is pretty simple to pick up, and while it won't win awards from the HN crowd, you're here to learn how to be an entry-level web developer, not a Node Ninja.
- CakePHP is my preferred framework. You could try CodeIgniter, FuelPHP, Lithium, Symfony, whatever. Just make sure the docs make sense to you and you can find answers somehow (IRC, Google Groups, the guy at the coffee shop)
- Just use Twitter Bootstrap for UI. Done.
- Use jQuery. You don't need Backbonejs. You don't even know Javascript, so as long as you know how to make an ajax post and update the page contents, you're in pretty okay shape.

You do not need a webserver for any of this. Just do it all locally. You can learn about setting up webservers later.

At this point, you should know something about something. Good luck.
1. It's Saturday night.

2. It still looks like bootstrap. Telling people, "use bootstrap, but quickly change the fonts and colors and maybe add some images" isn't helpful. I wouldn't mind an article outlining how to use LESS to make bootstrap not look like bootstrap (which would involve, at a minimum, not using a 12-column grid, because I associate that with bootstrap more than anything else). And that seems like something developers should be interested in.

3. There are an ungodly number of blog posts that say, "use bootstrap, but change the fonts etc so that it doesn't look like bootstrap." The specific details: "use textures" for example, made the example site look worse, so it's hard to see what this article added.
Ask HN: Options for modern development with Node.js?
I'm sorta new to Node.js and want to write some rather simple applications. I know there is Express and a bunch of frameworks built on Express, some in Coffee and some in JS. I'm wondering which are "the best", still active and worth looking into.

I had looked at Zappa a year ago and liked what I saw, but it seems it hasn't been active this past year.

Care to share experiences with various frameworks and some good options on where to start?
> Notice that PHP is pretty much the sole language garnering this reaction?

Nope.

There's another one. JavaScript.

PHP is the most popular language on the server, JavaScript is the most popular language in the browser. Coincidence? I think not.

Do you know what the definition of a hipster is? Hating that which is mainstream and popular.

You, sir, are a hipster.
I never used Blackberry until I got one for work and the most used feature is: BBM, it's so fast and efficient.

Most times people working with each other know what's going on so a To: and Subject: then type a message in the body then Send seems so stuffy in comparison. Most times people end up putting the entire message in the subject line, like a pseudo-BBM message.

Now the trend seems to be BB is dead so iPhones are popping up for managers and Android for others. It's stifled the back and forth banter of BBM messaging, people who had a BB but switched just seem to disappear from group discussions due to the awkwardness of e-mail.
Who cares if the html is crufty as long as it works. I use table layouts quite often, and if you look at the source of stackoverflow they use tables too.

What I would like to see are a few functionality tweaks to make HN more useful. The main ones that come to mind are: increasing the timeout before you get an 'unknown or expired link' and optionally emailing you when someone replies to one of your comments.
I love the idea of a cheatsheet for Haskell, but I'd like to point out that the things covered by the cheatsheet are also the things I had the least trouble with starting out.

Things like the syntax of pattern-matching and datatypes I'd repeatedly Google for until I remembered, but relatively speaking it wasn't a huge time sink. The things that I did burn time on were things like getting types right inside monads, various other type-theory things, and cabal quirks.

I hope this cheatsheet helps people get started with Haskell, but my gut feeling is that the bigger hurdles will need another cheatsheet.
> 1. It's Saturday night.

Granted.

> 2. It still looks like bootstrap.

To you and me.

> I wouldn't mind an article outlining how to use LESS to make bootstrap not look like bootstrap (which would involve, at a minimum, not using a 12-column grid, because I associate that with bootstrap more than anything else). And that seems like something developers should be interested in.

Please write it.
"Based on the quality of the majority of the comments here it seems like most people opened it, saw the ugly design of the site which is only publishing her work (she didn't design it), made it a few paragraphs in, then ran back to comment about how articles like this are killing our profession, making them ill, or making them cry, or how she shouldn't be giving design advice."

Do you not see the irony?

We are visual creatures, we judge a book by its cover (and the only time we don't do that is if we know the author or it's recommended to us) That site reminded me of Geocities (though not as bad), I'm already put off from reading it. That was my first impression. But with so many comments, I forced myself to read through it.

With a bad taste in the reader's mouth, they start off immediately with a negative impression, which could explain why a lot of negative comments.

My issue is that the author thinks half an hour is sufficient enough to make a their site look 'half-decent' or make it non-boot strap like. As a non-designer, it's not that easy. Her points are valid though, just a lil optimistic with the time.

Another easy way to make it non boot strap like is get rid of the gradient on the buttons. Go flat with a border, ala Google Style.
Try Foundation. http://foundation.zurb.com
Mindfulness and concentration are not the same thing, though they are related skills. You can't really do mindfulness without a little skill in concentration. They tend to be trained together and not always trained in a distinct way.

It's not exactly opposite, or opposite. "Concentrating on a crime scene" means you chose a crime scene as a concentration object. Any concentration object you choose will always appear to be a separate reality from the here and now. Mindfulness will (eventually, with practice) take you to non-duality where there are no opposites. Eh, difficult to explain, and for most people, this isn't important right now.

Mindfulness is pretty easy to describe in terms of what it is not. Mindfulness is not mindlessness. Mindlessness is letting the zombie eat out your brains. It's what happens when you walk out the front door and get to work or get to class and blanked out everything in between there. It's what happens when fear paralyzes you into impotency, and anger consumes you into saying something or doing something rash. It's entire possible to be mindful of the commute even though you've done it many times. It is possible to be mindful of the fear or anger as they happen.

This "emotional regulation" is far more important and significant than avoiding "multitasking". The latter is framed in default way people are conditioned into being more "productive". Being more productive won't help you feel happier about your life.

In any case, concentration is easier to learn and ince you need some skill in it to practice mindfulness, you might as well start there.
Code on dead wartime pigeon is cracked
They are not concepts. They are different skills and practices that are related to each other. They are things to do or be, not things to think about.
I think it turns on the distinction a lot of people have been pointing out between design as the superficial appearance of the app in the first fifteen minutes of use, and design as something that goes deep into the stack and brings everything together into something beautiful.

What you're talking about is more like the second kind, and I agree that the tools to do that are sorely lacking.

The problem as I see it is that the world has been building tools that allow a college freshman to build a superficially professional-looking app in a month (which often turns out to be unusable crap upon close inspection), rather than tools that allow a team of seasoned professionals to build something awe-inspiring in six months instead of two years. Because the current market allows you to get your dollar from millions of suckers selling the superficially pretty junk before they realize what they paid for.

To extend the development tools analogy, it's the UX equivalent of having loosed Visual Basic onto the world and thousands of noobs are happily churning out Visual Basic software, when what we really need is the C family and its toolchain. So the hope is that the incentives can be to produce that rather than just iterating onto the next version of UX VB.
Based on the instructions in the article (tho I haven't tried it out), putting a semicolon before the hash would work...

proc some_proc {a b} {

} ;# some_proc
Cheers. I've used RailwayJS in the past but I switched to LocomotiveJS[1] which I find much nicer to work with and it's incredibly flexible too.

I'm using locomotive in this project on top of express to help with controllers and routing, though I'm thinking about using flatiron[2] which is a pretty solid looking set of modules for routing, middleware, etc.

[1] LocomotiveJS: http://locomotivejs.org/
[2] Flatiron: http://flatironjs.org/#data
I'm not sure how this article falls below the bar. It's packed with design resources that programmers can use to make clean, not-ugly sites in very little time.
Sure, but the post kind of just glosses over this instead of seriously evaluating whether uniqueness of design is very important to the business. And if it isn't, why is home rolling your own design as a non-designer a better business decision than themeforest etc.?
Poor phrasing on my part.

Pi is a great example.

The full length of Pi cannot be compressed using traditional means into the same number of bytes that the algorithm that generates Pi can exist in.

The point is that a function can generate a dataset that is complex, without redundant information in the data. A dataset that cannot be reduced to a smaller dataset.

The idea that a complex function can only generate a simple data set with 'high redundancy' is obviously nonsense.

My point being that the OP is suggesting the DNA that is the functional generator for the brain generates highly redundant physical structures because there is a limited amount of information in the functional generator (DNA).

While the DNA may generate redundant or repeated structures, it does so (if it does) because of the function. Not because of the information density of the DNA.

As your example of Pi shows, a trivial information density can generate complex datasets without repetition.
> Anata ha Nihongo wo hanashimasuka?

You should probably change this to something like 「日本語版はこちら」 (Japanese version here), and not write it in the Latin alphabet.
Even though it would be cool, I think that the situation is similar to Diaspora/Facebook, i.e. end users won't run their own servers and it would not be profitable for third parties to run them either.
Cool. Just the thought of driving kids to read more books is fantastic. Even older farts like me think this would be fun.