skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What works for me is this:

(a) Routinely keep an eye open for nice website designs. If I see something I like, I take a screenshot and put a little note on it as not to forget what exactly I liked. So far I have about 70 shots, and this covers a lot of ground.

(b) When sitting down to design the page/site, I'd pick the one that seems to fit the best and then start evolving it by changing elements that don't fit or that I don't like. This is purely subjective process, and it takes a while to converge to a stable point. All sketches are done in Photoshop, no HTML/CSS work at this point, none.

(c) When I have a sketch, I show it to at least 3 people, usually my wife and friends, describe the project and what feelings the design should evoke. Then ask for an overall 3-second impression as well as what "sticks out" or doesn't look visually pleasing. You'd be surprised how much people actually like to critique when asked.

(d) Fix stuff based on the feedback. Repeat (c), preferably with other set of people so that fresh eyes would look at it.

Additionally, I frequently need to decide between multiple (smaller) options, like the fonts, sizes, minor color variations, etc. For these I put together a side by side comparison sketch and simply ask people to tell me their preferences.

The feedback loop is helpful and incredibly important, because after first few sketches I cannot objectively evaluate design anymore and need fresh eyes to look at it.

In short - do not hesitate to start off someone's work. It is an A-OK. Building a portfolio of inspiration pieces is a standard way of kick starting the design. Iterating over the design tend to evolve it quite dramatically and get you to a design that is uniquely your own.

Secondly - if you are lacking the inspiration, have a look at sites like http://minimalsites.com, http://pattertap.com and similar.

Thirdly - unless you do this professionally, it is a lengthy and sometimes tedious process. It takes me on average 4 to 6 weeks to decide on a general look and feel for the site.

Lastly, here's a post on the subject written by a professional designer. Have a read, it gives a nice view into the process as employed by other people:

http://siglerdesign.com/blog/article/jivesite_20_its_alive

Specifically have a look at this photo and its title :)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/chibbell/2415207558/in/set-7215...
Well if this goes open source maybe we will indeed have a dropbox for private servers.
Could you describe your ideal customer in detail?
An intelligent person, particularly one with natural aptitude for programming will end up fine regardless of which language they start with. Also, anybody that truly starts programming in college is a rather sad candidate to begin with.

Also, Python is a much more practical choice than Scheme, and has technical merits which are at least as attractive as Scheme, and arguably more so. Scheme is elegant. But Python is also elegant, yet more practical. From that angle, looks like a net change for the better.

MIT also strikes me as a school oriented more towards producing engineers rather than programmers. And if you're going to school at MIT just to get into a career in programming, that sounds like a terrible waste of money. Robotics or electrical engineering? Probably a good choice. But programming? Come on.

Then there's the whole argument of why anybody needs to go to MIT, or even get a college education in CS. We live in a world with the Internet and scads of free books in libraries and documentation online. Follow that line of thinking and the whole controversy over this tweak in some random school's class content seems silly. It is as if nobody can learn anything outside of a class, so if it is not taught in that particular class at MIT, it will never be learned, and the world will end. Hilarious. :)
Shelf Life
If you read my original post, you'll see that it has absolutely nothing to do with teaching marketable skills nor popular languages. The point was that the change in languages was not a goal in itself, but merely an incidental consequence of what the real goals were. (The title of the blog entry was meant to be ironic.) http://danweinreb.org/blog
maybe dropbox will one-up them by open-sourcing their software?
Creativity is hard. Let's go shopping!
Good tip. This is something I should be doing but I always neglect, and then when I really need a particular design element, I end up thinking "I once found something suitable, but where was that again..."
I hate to say this, but this is really digg material rather than HN material. Please don't post "8 plugins for X" or "15 tutorials for Y" posts here! Please?
You should also check out http://qcu.be/
It has a very cool auto-gen function
Virtual Worlds Behind the Firewall
This has already fallen off the front page, so I'm not sure anyone cares, but...

Look, I put my picture onto my Twitter profile for use and recognition by the broader community. So people know who I am. I don't put it out there to be part of some (in my opinion) derivative, uninspired and shallow excuse for "entertainment".

No one puts their pictures on Twitter up for that reason.

So, if you're going to build something in a race to the bottom, at least have the common decency to tell me that you're lifting my profile picture and give me the option of getting the hell out of there. And don't use my picture until you have my permission.

Anything else is just jackassery.
"You're being misled if you think that popularity and marketability were not factors in selecting Python for the new course 6 curriculum." Well, I suppose it's possible that you belive Prof. Sussman and Prof. White are lying. I've known both of them for a very long time and find that utterly implausible, but I suppose you have a right to your opinion, however informed or uninformed.
The right amount of two distinct traits within an individual does in no way imply anything about where the medium distribution of those two traits exists within the general population.

You do want someone who processes both conformist tendencies and initiative in about equal percentage share. Yes, that is unlike a vast majority of people.
Edit: On further reading everything I speculated below is pretty much wrong and inapplicable.

That, and now that people are paying for subscriptions they (pragmatically, if not strictly legally) have to guarantee a particular level of user experience.

Even though AIR is cross platform (write-once look almost same almost anywhere) having only a single platform that's legal to use helps cut down on customer support headaches.
Apple Doesn't Like BitTorrent, Bans Drivetrain From the App Store
Even that is a fuzzy barrier. You have lots of languages that have the compiler built-in to the runtime environment (Smalltalk, and I guess most lisps?). Anything with JIT blurrs the line, too.
Interesting idea, but... if I'm a new user arriving there, why should I start using it instead of, say, amazon? You need to make sure there's a good reason for me to use it even if I don't have any friends on the system, or else it will be very hard to get those first users.
He's sort of right. At least they would have been more competitive with apple.

Sony's engineers are good and their design teams have a decent aesthetic sense. Their problem is lethargic and dull management.

I was involved with TWO different companies since 2001 who tried to partner with sony offering exactly what he describes: open standards / open source tools for distributing content to sony devices, and they dropped the ball both times.
Yuck, we're going to be seeing a lot more of this, users being created just to leave self-serving comments and get stories on the frontpage.
API accesses are important. Did it get answered definitively how Nielsen accounted for that?

I'd like to run a test to see when the last tweet was from N users. It would be easy to extract a basic cohort analysis from that.
When I read a lot of comments on HN, I am reminded of this. People place all their faith in rationality, yet fail to see that they have the ability to rationalize anything.

This is a powerful yet profound lesson. It doesn't mean that argument itself serves no purpose, rather it means that collective discussion in search of common understanding is about a million times better than point-counterpoint. 'Cause we can play that game all day long.

It also means that varying up your sources of input is critical for growth. We need extremes, both in personalities and in opinions, for creative progress to happen.

Unfortunately all of the trends I see on the net are more in line with hanging out with people you agree with and talking past one another (in an effort to score points) rather than trying to find answers.
Again, weird how bubba1234 was created 4 minutes ago.
It could monetize really well, actually. I'm sure that jtv has already thought of this, but they can be the hulu of live broadcasts. I've seem ad overlays as well on Justin.tv for what it's worth.

(Also, copyright violation is not the same thing as "illegal". It is a civil violation.)
Based on this, I think it's reasonable for me to explicitly declare that I flagged this story and encourage others to flag it too - and to ban the IP(s) that created these comments....
I meant to imply what you call the "more mainstream free market argument," though I think it is now the standard view of people who study this stuff. The question is "harmless compared to what?" Conceivably, a regulatory environment in which all-knowing and benevolent bureaucrats costlessly implement and enforce regulation would outperform a laissez-faire approach to natural monopoly. But Hayek won the Nobel prize for showing that government is not all-knowing, and Buchanan won it for showing that it is not benevolent. It's not useful to judge natural monopoly against an alternative that does not and cannot exist.

Compared to the relevant alternatives, natural monopoly is basically harmless.
I certainly agree that learning C illustrates some extremely useful compsci principles. I also believe you can be a wizard at solving computational problems with very little practical programming experience - I met many such algorithms phds in my failed journey to become an algorithms phd. That being said, I made this comment because the title of the post is "The 75% answer to all newbie questions" C is not a language that a newbie who needs a 75% answer is going to do well with! There's a reason they don't use C for CS1.
> the browser is the best reader out there

This is a joke, right?
0 ~ > ~/local/adobe_air/Times\ Reader/bin/Times\ Reader

Unknown desktop manager, only Gnome and KDE are supported

lame. nytimes, invest in portable technology.
The sweet spot is right down the middle, and is extremely rare.

The sweet spot is context dependence, which isn't rare at all. A champion boxer submits to his coach's criticism and his trainer's discipline so he can dominate and control other boxers. A smart entrepreneur with an innovative product doesn't gratuitously innovate in his accounting or his contracts.

And contrary to what you say, successful risk takers are often obsessive about risk.
What the hell? Is the RTE part of the government? If so, why don't they just be honest and raise taxes?
That's a 200 level class, as far as I know there is always a CS1 100 level class that usually starts with some EXTREMELY high level language, sometimes a metalanguage just for the class itself? I heard somewhere Python is in style for this. Here is one such course : http://www.academicearth.org/courses/introduction-to-compute...

*EDIT - I made a stupid comment... they have C assignments in that class. I'll leave it for others amusement. I have seen that style of starting with a high level language though...
1) We're fully DMCA compliant.

2) The vast majority of our content is user created.
Out goes the geek and in comes the hacker.
I like your "big elephant leads little elephant" logo: it's inviting and representative of your biz.
Which service do you use? Do you have any sample sites they've done to take a look at?
The child was only 4 so this sort of unethical behavior may be excusable. Children are still learning right and wrong at that age. Maybe this kid grew up to be a thief or maybe he's just clever and ended up working in computer security or something. ;-P
Only, by the time that happens, Apple will have moved onto their next product. At the rate they're currently going at least.
The most successful kids were the ones who found something to distract them from sitting still.
Yes it doesn't hurt to ask and be polite.
These are not only omens for Justin.tv but also for any new media intermediary, such as youtube or vimeo, where even if their ToS prohibits X, users continue to violate X on a day-to-day basis. . .users of these sort of services are almost always ignorant (except the users who study or know copyright law) or simply don't care how or where they're republishing content of entertainment merit, and I don't think they should. DMCA is a pain in the ass, and unfortunately it results in a superfluous amount of content and user banishment.

This omen reminds me a lot of what occurred in TPB trial.
Ok, sorry for posting this here. I thought it's ok to do it. Have nothing to do with those comments, except mine.
It would be nice if they gave a link to the research itself. This goes in general for all popular science news.
In the real world, how likely is it that such an ActiveX tactic would go unpunished by Google's competitors and browser vendors? Microsoft would just stand idly by? There are benefits to being good that exist outside of the law (http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html).

But come on, I don't want to argue your specific example -- it is clearly meant to be ridiculous. Real-world natural monopolies tend not to last very long without government support (or a strained and narrow definition of what their market is that ignores substitution), particularly if they aren't serving their customers well. The exceptions that you can think of are just that, exceptions. And even at that, I can't think of very many good counter-examples. Microsoft is perhaps the best case, but even there, by strangling the desktop they arguable accelerated the move towards innovation in the cloud (so that we could get around them). You can see this effect even as early as 1995, when PG started Viaweb as a webapp in part because he didn't want to develop for Windows. Substitution is always the death of an otherwise strong monopoly. The government didn't breakup Microsoft, but no one is worried about them these days anyway (http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html).

You keep falling back on what is or is not lawful. I'm not interested in debating that. It takes an expensive discovery process and a lot of lawyers and judges to determine what is or is not lawful in a complex real-world situation. In my book, lawful does not equal moral, and unlawful does not equal immoral. I find morality more meaningful to talk about.

As for the terms I use, they simply reflect my moral approach to the problem. If you can imagine a scenario in which taking the fruit of a peaceful individual's labor from him or her by force is moral and just, then you're starting from different moral axioms than I am.
> fresh water ... pristine country side

Nah, in the middle ages you'll be drinking whatever water is in your village's stream or watering hole, and you'll be glad for it too, after you carry it half a mile on your back to your house. If that water gets contaminated with cholera, you'll blame the sickness on the wrath of an angry god, or perhaps a jealous neighbor who witched you.

> Bathing [...] is not that important for health.

What???
No.

Selling software downloads is not a new business, though it maybe for Apple. They had predictions for numbers of iPhones sold, and know in realtime how many developers are signing up. Even if it is unexpected growth, that's part of the problem discussed in the blog - if they had good management and processes, they could scale well.

There ought be no subjective involvement in the approval process if it's to be fair to all developers. A checklist of what to avoid doing so your app can be approved has been long called for - they are not judging apps by quality after all, but against a list of restricted points such as no-scripting, no-undocumented-API-calls and others. This list is currently secret and maybe even ill-defined which could lead to a requirement for subjective decisions - but again that's part of the problem discussed - a good process would help and make that go away.

Stop making it look like a disaster because it is not.

It's one of the crummiest areas of the whole Apple-world border, the only worse area I can think of right now is the failed launch of the new .mac/mobile me(?) last year.

It is the greatest example of what can be done in online purchase and delivery of software

Hardly. There are any number of small shareware sites where you can pay/download/use in a few minutes, and never have to deal with a problem that the developer has solved but the fix is stuck in an inscrutable service for an unpredictable amount of weeks for an unknown review process. Loads of open forums where the developers are allowed to reply to negative feedback.

Most software companies are just jealous they didn't come up with that idea first.

Maybe, maybe not - either way, utterly irrelevant.

Clear? So stop the FUD now.

I don't know if there's a common term for anti-FUD (hype doesn't quite cover it), but your post would be an example of it. Positive Blustering, perhaps?
If I want to buy a specific new camcorder, can I sign up as an expert and take my own recommendation?:)
With 90% of traffic being foreign, the odds of being able to successfully monetize is slim.

And copyright violation is illegal and you can go to prison for it (though JTV has a good excuse in that it's user generated). Making it the cornerstone of your business is risky. People go to prison for copyright violations fairly frequently, the owners of EliteTorrents are a recent example:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/06/jury-convict...
wow. this is fantastic!!
Automated namespace pollution. Wonderful :-|
Agreed. I'm just thrilled they're having these revelations now, but everyone was complaining about all their little proprietary hardware storage back when it was released. So instead of saying "we told ya so", how about "eh, screw em".
Copyright and patent are not property, but special privileges granted by the government. The fact that you're using arguments from how copyright and patents work to attack actual property shows, I think, just how far off the rails the "intellectual property" advocates are taking us.
Report: Intel to join Microsoft in EU antitrust purgatory
Anyway, they didn't. It's easy to talk after the fact.
Yes, since only the expert needs to be signed in, you could technically take your own recommendations. It's more useful to browse together with someone else, though :)
Pixelmatic Entertainment launches social network for gamers on Facebook
You make a platform really easy to illegaly carry live video and then skirt around the law because if you get caught in the act you nuke the feed. How awesome of you. If you looked at your site you could kill feeds left and right, they are obviously illegal. Why don't you do this? (Here's a guess--it would kill your business.)

Percentage wise I believe you that most of the content is user created. But attention wise it can't be close. Let's look at your "sports" section:

http://www.justin.tv/directory/sports

Right now there's a bootlegged feed of ESPN, a couple of soccer games you don't have the rights for and a variety of other content that is copyrighted. Those are the most viewed, your user generated content is being watched by no one.

You're running a scam.

(And for what it's worth, on the technical side I admire what you guys have done. I just think it's super shady to base your business on looking the other way when your users steal content. You're building an online cable network without paying for content.)
Thanks! That's exactly our reasoning behind it.
was intended to be a joke equating being a columnist with being professional.
Personally I think for JustinTV to go the next level, they need to create their own webchannel. By this I mean 1 official channel promoted on the front page that runs the same concrete shows at the same times.

To start with you obviously wouldn't do 24/7. I'd probably just do it Saturday/Sunday from 12 to 5 pm. That gives you 10 hours of content to fill. And you'll be hitting your main audience when they are home and can tune in.

For content, the first couple of months just reuse the content posted by current users. And in the meanwhile hold tryouts to fill host slots. If you do 10, 1 hour shows, each host will have a whole week to produce their piece.
OK, I've given it my usual one minute test...

1. Love the concept, the idea of someone hand holding me through (say) buying an LCD TV is interesting.

2. The 1 2 3 Workflow failed the first time I tried it, since apparently there were no registered experts for the particular item I searched for. However instead of saying 'Sorry there aren't any experts on this area at the moment' it displayed a "Everyone's an expert Become a personal shopping expert" banner, which confused the socks off me. I was about to come here and say 'the workflow is broken' until I happened to try another category where there was an expert. Make the 'sorry no-one available' message explicit rather than coughing in an embarrassed way and saying 'look - over there!'.

3. Having clicked on the expert's (JoeBloggs) face I got a brief bio and link to "Request JoeBloggs and get connected". Apart from the grammatical horror, I'm a shy soul. What would happen if I clicked? Would my Webcam suddenly turn on and I'd find myself talking to this bloke? Very Scary stuff. I bet you get 80% of people backing out at that point.

But because I'm a kind soul, I put my trousers on and clicked. Phew I got an input box and a suggestion to "Please describe the type of product you're looking for.
We'll notify JoeBloggs privately with your request. We can't guarantee response times, but being polite and descriptive usually helps."

OK that's a lot less scary. My strong suggestion would be to put That text and the input box on the preceding page with the experts profile. I don't want to click some 'message him' link without knowing exactly what I'm in for.

Lots of other thoughts, but those are the main starters.
It's hard to ever be happy with a design, at some point it takes too much time to design it yourself if you have a lot of other coding to do. I resort to hiring a designer to just make one and be happy with it.
(un)fortunately there are less audiophiles than consumers perfectly happy with 128kb mp3's pumping out of substandard earphones. and as long as that is the case: apple > sony.
Not all causal relationships are created equal
I rail against the railing because, frankly, so much of it consists of "how dare anyone call themselves a programmer if they didn't build their own Lisp from scratch in 6.001!"

This simply is not a useful approach. And, honestly, as a working programmer there are lots of things that aren't compilers or REPLs that I can think of, all of which would be at least as useful for students to have experience with, and none of which are, so far as I know, part of MIT's or anyone else's curriculum.

But I manage to live with that, rather than demanding that MIT build a curriculum around what I happen to think is important.

(and, honestly? I still feel like Scheme is the derivatives-by-limits approach to programming -- yeah, you can do it that way your whole life, but that doesn't mean you should)
I don't think "create a viable competitor" automatically follows from "lower barriers to entry". Some ways to lower barriers to entry might be to eliminate tariffs, taxes, and regulations, or to implement a minimum guaranteed income. Of course, lowering only some tariffs, taxes, and regulations might well raise barriers to entry in some markets, as might an MGI. Interference in the marketplace never has only one effect.