skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There at least one glaring flaw in his argument. He implies you can't bolt a good UI onto open source software after finishing the core functionality, yet the article revolves around CUPS which Apple themselves took and bolted a good UI onto. Strangely he makes no mention of this fact.

Apple also hired the author and now own the copyright to CUPS which is still Free Software (http://www.cups.org/). It's worth noting for those who weren't early adopters of Mac OS X that printer compatability sucked pretty hard before the adoption of CUPS since Mac OS X was both new and unpopular at the time. Is it technically "usable" if it doesn't work? Apple clearly saw the benefit of jumping on the bandwagon of an open standard, and this let them concentrate on other things like the UI. The same could be said for much of Mac OS X.

Both the positive OSS examples he mentions, Firefox and Camino, were likewise primarily GUIs bolted onto the Mozilla core after the fact.

Gruber is mostly right about usability being hard and about it being a skill but he generally doesn't get Open Source, nor Free Software, nor Unix even though Apple now dabbles to varying degrees in all these things. And his lack of insight shows. How many hackers would agree that "More often than not, you get what you pay for" holds true for software.

But the 20:20 hindsight award goes to the second last paragraph:
"It’s easy to ridicule the estimated 2006-or-2007 ship date for Longhorn, the next major release of Windows. But do you doubt for a moment that Longhorn will provide more improvements from Windows XP than desktop Linux will gain during the same period?"
Apps for America 2: The Data.gov Challenge
A fascinating account, I always have found discussions about the teams chasing this prize interesting.

Most interesting to me though was that it finally gave a clear description of how the contest worked. I've never looked into getting involved with the contest and the past articles I've read have rather glossed over the format and the way in which they run tests and judge entrants.
i don't necesasrily disagree with you here, but i think that the process would be better if it were a rolling review with constant feedback and dialog, instead of something built up as an important once-a-year event.
I don't think the cutoff was arbitrary. Rather, it had to do with the differences in the interruption quotient of those technologies. Books don't vie as aggressively for your attention as the newer tech he's frustrated with. Especially if you're already talking with someone else.
His articles on The Reg often tend towards trolling.

Totally. He's like Ted Dziuba with added rhetorical cleverness. Here's "Angle bracket defenses breached" for example: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/17/web20_worm_knocks_ou...

I love the opening line: "It's been a rough weekend for Tomorrow's People."
Want to Keep Your Job? Stop Trying to Fit In
However you want. Nginx or Apache. It doesn't need a special server.
Any interaction to the site/db/etc still goes through ruby or php or whatnot.
You know, you'd be surprised but I don't have the slightest damned idea what the best selling music is right now. A pop song can come out and I don't hear it for weeks. And I don't own a radio outside of my car.

There's a slight bump when you get into something esoteric for the first time, but afterwards, you just kind of naturally lose touch.
obviously I'm going to tweet this
Most engineers I've worked with find things like "yes, it really matters that those labels are lined up pixel perfect" to be annoyances at best. We tend to work at a deeper level, thinking behind the screen, so we don't often see the screen.

This statement suggests to me that you missed the entire point of Gruber's essay. To whit:

This idea, that the hard work of development is in building the underlying foundation, and that the easy part is writing a “GUI wrapper”, has been the Linux/Unix way all along...

UI development is the hard part. And it’s not the last step, it’s the first step.

I'm with Gruber. Good UI is not aligning pixels after the fact. Aligning pixels is to usability as formatting source code is to programming. I abhor the idea that programming is a "deeper level" than usability. In fact, it's the other way around: Usability is a deeper level than programming.

Let me give you an example. Dave Winer had to edit a lot of hierarchal text in the form of Pascal programs. He then got the idea of editing hierarchal text in the form of outlines, and an entire category of software was born. That category was later subsumed by other programs, to the point where nearly everything we use today has some sort of outline editing capability.

UI design was not arguing about which symbols represent collapsed and expanded headlines, or whether the target of dragging an outline should highlight the parent or hilight the space between elements where the dragged outline will go.

UI design was thinking up the idea of editing outlines instead of editing characters and words.

http://www.outliners.com/

p.s. That being said, I agree with you as well. Many so-called UI designers don't get Gruber's point either, and they will natter endlessly about pixels and colours and CSS grids while having nothing but tired cliché opinions about the actual mental model and functionality of software.

When a "designer" is really a stylist, it is very tiresome to work with them. Since they have nothing else to contribute, they become infuriating nitpickers over trivia just as you suggest.
That was submitted an hour earlier...
Might be some confusion here between Spivak's "Calculus on Manifolds" and his book just called "Calculus." The former is a more advanced book that might be used for part of a beginning graduate course. I say there might be confusion mainly because _I_ got quite confused when someone mentioned "Calculus" and I assumed they were talking about "Calculus on Manifolds."
Think of the kittens!

There is some truly adorable and precious content on YouTube which is totally appropriate for small children.
Fruits as Beautiful in the Garden as They Are Delicious
Rolling feedback should be part of the annual review process at any competent company.

Where I work the annual review looks at those above, below, and beside you and doing that several times a year is far to time consuming. IMO, the trick is managing the less formal feedback and using that as part of the formal review. Which is why your manager does not create your review. They might be biased by something from last week but your coworkers tend to think back to the important projects over the year.
Apple under fire in Taiwan
TAIPEI — Labor rights groups are stepping up their campaign against a Taiwanese supplier for Apple Computer. This morning disgruntled employees protested outside Apple's Taipei office.
Is it just me or does it feel like people here spend way too much time wondering if something feels like reddit?

I had the unfortunate necessity of reading some reddit comments recently, and believe me, nothing on HN feels remotely like reddit. When it does, I'll be sure to sound the alarm bells, I promise.
I agree that you can find a way to bolt good UI over anything, much as we've done amazing things with the "stateless" web. But there is a large truth underlying his argument, which is that you will have much better results if you design for usability first not last, and also that the amount of work required to make good usability can be an order of magnitude more than the amount of work required to build a raw API.

My big takeaway when I first read it was that you can't think that 80% of the job is the implementation and that the UI will be 20% of the work to be done after you hammer out its functionality.
Oh I agree with that - it's important to cultivate an environment where constructive feedback is constantly being exchanged. That's hard to do - but when it happens, it makes a big difference.
See also http://www.firstdaycottage.com/Main.html . A friend of mine built one (http://www.firstdaycottage.com/pictures/completed/Completed0...).
Good times...

Also in the same light: Samsung SSD Raid (while we are at the RAID topic)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs

(it's a Samsung backed video, but still awesome)
Great post, Daniel. The more of your stuff I read the more I see how much we think alike. I just realized one big thing we share in common:

We are both 20-something high-tech entrepreneurial free spirits trapped in 40-something bodies in cubicles where we do not belong.

This is a not a bad thing! In fact, it can be pretty good as long as we always remember:

- We were born at a time to now have the best of multiple worlds: modern technology, good work experience, and some domain-specific knowledge.

- No matter what the sitution, the ability to drill down > 1 level is a great personal differentiator. I love being a hacker.

- In large institutions, illogical is the new logical.

- It's OK to be a fish out of water, as long as you realize that you're a fish out of water.

- Always find the "takeaway" from a bad situation.

- There are a whole bunch of things we probably can't change (Ex: everybody being plugged in). The trick is determining what to do with that data.

- Positive mental attitude trumps all. When things don't make sense, always think, "What can I do about that?" When not sure, write some code. That ususally seems to solve some problem somewhere.
I would love to see it with Illustrations. Excellent Posting, well done.
I had a similar realization when it dawned on me that my computer performed about twenty instructions before the light from my monitor arrived at my cornea...

(edit: light travels about a foot in a nanosecond, or 6 inches per clock cycle in a standard 2ghz pc. multiple simple additions can be done in a single clock cycle; multiple by number of cores)
Rudin's "Principals of Mathematical Analysis" is an excellent intro to real analysis for self-study. Axler's "Linear Algebra Done Right" is good for linear algebra. Neither makes any effort to bridge the gap between theory and application, so if that is a difficulty, you might need other texts as well.
Constant honest and open feedback is always a good thing. My point is that performance reviews are often used as a substitute for constant honest and open feedback. And as such, they are a failure.
Outliners & Programming
New memory material may hold data for one billion years
Dutch Supercomputer Establishes New Record in Go
Not even necessarily #2, our valevictorian in high school went to Harvard - and at age 14 was arrested, convicted, and went to juvie for a few days for shop lifting. You have to commit a violent crime to really screw up your life because everything else gets erased.
LifeCase & LifeApp Solution Wins $10,000 Diabetes Challenge
Talkinator on 5 Watts
I understand that this really can be a problem in a business setting when you really want the people who are physically present to interact with each other. This kind of argument has been going on for a while though, about how we defer attention to distant people, like answering the phone when you're already conversing with someone else, or texting under the dinner table. I've ranted about that kind of thing myself a couple times; it annoys me. (I'm ~30).

But outside of business settings, it really a problem? I don't know that we can really say that in social settings it's necessarily better to be unplugged. Teenagers nowadays feel comfortable enough with their peers behaving the way this guy describes. Eventually it'll become the norm, unless somehow that same group collectively decides to behave differently.

Not sure why so many people are crying foul. Unless it's because they're used to having your full attention, and now they're frustrated with having to compete with the friends you're texting/tweeting/facebooking. That's sort of narcissistic, isn't it? Do you deserve their full attention?
Dave Winer's recollections of inventing an entire new category of software while embroiled in Silicon Valley's early startup culture.
Isn't Infosys the name of the company from Office Space?
SATA certainly does support DMA. DMA isn't a feature unique to firewire; rather, USB is (nearly) unique in that it's the one high-speed standard that doesn't support DMA.
thanks, that's helpful... yes we're thinking of exactly those two points...registration funnel and purchase funnel to begin with.
I would call that NSFW.
How Down Syndrome Stops Cancer
A pile of phone books makes a great backstop for bullets when loading and unloading firearms. I imagine that the straw-bale works under the same principle. Neat stuff.
My take is this: The general culture for Linux is that there are and should be more than one way to do it, versatility is encouraged and that placing significant emphasis on one way over the other is frowned upon.

Given that this attitude is pervasive amongst all aspects of Linux, this is like a sausage enthusiast trying to get his neighbor excited about his vacation photos from a kill-floor when the neighbor just wanted to stop over and have a wurst.
I agree. However, if you won't do the easy stuff (which is critical to making a good interface), how likely are you to do the hard stuff (understanding the user to know how they are going to use the software)?
"Not sure why so many people are crying foul. Unless it's because they're used to having your full attention, and now they're frustrated with having to compete with the friends you're texting/tweeting/facebooking. That's sort of narcissistic, isn't it? Do you deserve their full attention?"

If I don't deserve someone's full attention, why are we having lunch together?
It is pretty, although I think our chart is more useful:

http://twist.flaptor.com/?gram=ycombinator&span=168
Susan Boyle: A Lesson in Talent Management
Investigators replicate Nokia 1100 online banking hack
Modafinil, anyone?

Since I got on the stuff I only drink coffee in social situations.
I will venture a defense for the teenager who came over and listened to her mp3 player. I remember reading that in Japanese culture (specifically in the first half of the 20th century; don't know if it is currently true) close family members might visit each other and, if they had nothing substantive to talk about, simply sit in silence together and count the time as well-spent. I certainly understand that someone might feel the need for human proximity without needing to exchange information. Isn't the teenager's behavior quite opposite of the typical modern tendency, which is to obsessively exchange trivial information without any physical togetherness?
Halfbakery: Distributed Rendering
Interesting article. As of 5/13/09 "BellKor in BigChaos" team in the article have improved the algorithm by 9.71%. (http://www.netflixprize.com/leaderboard)
Providing Derrida's Works For Free 'Harms The Diffusion Of His Thoughts'
Startups just feels easier.

Most start ups fails because the passion for the company fades because of the work involved. If you have the "safety net" of welfare then you might not be willing to put in that extra 3 hours to keep your company afloat every night.
See also: "Forces of Production" by David F Noble, for an account of how specialized skills and self-reliance were usurped my management in a slow but deliberate war of many losers between the early 20th century and the late 1970s. He takes particular aim at the role numeric control played in abstracting the skills of machinists into CAD-CAM. Just to say that I think management usurped self-reliance in many fields. And here we are.
Maybe this is obvious, but why does this link use the archive?
I don't know about suburban as in "within commuting distance to the city", but rural poor largely have cars because they need them. You absolutely cannot get by in a rural area without a car, and that is a huge barrier to entry to the job market. Contrast this to living in the city (or close enough so that you can commute there), where you can commute whenever/wherever you want with a MetroPass for $70 a month .

The cost of living is much lower in rural areas, but the pay for an equivalent job is much lower as well.

If you're a poor person with an unskilled job, if you are in the city you can get another job the next day. In a rural area, this is close to impossible - jobs are very few and far between, so if you lose yours you might have to move to an entirely different location. (for an unskilled job, there are obviously more choices, but if you lose a skilled, professional job in a rural area and you don't have enough saved up to move somewhere else, you're pretty much fucked.)

So I dunno about the city vs. the suburbs, but if you are poor, you do not want to be anywhere near rural areas - they are absolute traps that leave you either on government assistance or at best in a situation with a single point of failure.
I'm just trying to play the devil's advocate here, because honestly the behavior annoys the ever-loving crap outta me. But I think the conversation is interesting...

Why are you having lunch together? To kill time? To work on a deal? To coordinate the secret drop location? Do you honestly need their full attention during lunch? What does the pause (while the other guys replies to a text/tweet) detract from lunch? Maybe context matters more than it used to.
Custom Patios and Chain Link Fences Are a Great Thing to Add to Your Home
Is the contest over, or is it an ongoing one?
doesn't seem like a very good idea in the first place, sending banking passwords via SMS.

you lose your phone or it gets stolen and someone has a pretty easy path to your account.
Sorry, but I don't %100 agree with this statement:

"Definitely stay away from petty compliments about earrings"

Women love small compliments...

The key is to be genuine about it. Do not just pick a
random article of clothing and compliment it. Only mention
things that truly strike you as unique and beautiful.

But admittedly it isn't the best way to start small talk
with a stranger.

The conversation from there on will be colored with
the idea that you are hitting on her.

But she won't find it creepy either, if done correctly.
Wow. That man did not hold back words. He'd have done great on 4chan.

I tried some of their "Grilled" chicken yesterday and I suspect he'd also not approve of that. It was not very good.
This statement suggests to me that you missed the entire point of Gruber's essay.

You are right that I made my point overly trivial. It was supposed to be the extreme case of understanding the importance of UI design: how it looks and works is very important.

I've designed many interfaces, but I am not a designer. Understanding the user, how they use the system, and how the system needs to react to that use is what matters.

You can build a great UI without being pixel-perfect, but, in my experience, engineering teams who fight pixel-perfect will fight the effort that it takes to understand what a great UI for their system is.
XMPP solves many of the issues with email only because it requires explicit whitelisting of message senders, and because it's still a niche ecosystem compared to email. Most users don't even try to accomplish cross-domain message sending, much less extensive file transfers or server-side storage and archiving of messages, no matter what the server capabilities might be.

As a set of protocols, SMTP and IMAP are both pretty well-suited for the task they set out to accomplish. Furthermore, the delays you mentioned in message delivery are largely due to intermediate spam filters and store-and-forward queues, not inherent issues with email as a transfer mechanism.
That the UI is important and hard work a standard opinion for Gruber and Apple fans generally (myself included).

This particular article is about how Open Source software cannot achieve this, mostly due to limits placed on it by Gruber's own stereotypes. Why can't it be commercial? Why can't it hire UI guys with training and insight. In fact it does both these things.
infosys is not a call center, it a pure s/w company with more then 100000 s/w professionala. It is a second largest s/w company in India. Number 1 company i TCS having around 200000 employees. TCS is also 9th largest consulting company all over world
I’ve never had good results using a french press with a blade grinder. You need such a coarse grind for the press, and fine grit is just inevitable with a cheap blade. I got a burr grinder several years ago, and my french press coffee has improved immensely. Of course, the clean up still sucks - I only break out the press for fresh, interesting coffee that I happen in to.
Oh, it wasn't really saying anything; I thought you knew something I didn't. I got Spivak hearing that it would be good, and it is, I really like his writing style, but its going to take me a long while before I can tackle Spivak.

How did you get to the point you could tackle Calculus? I still don't know how to convince myself if my answers are correct or if I'm making assumptions that I shouldn't.

EDIT for Reply: Thanks for the link to Strang. I think I'll begin reading it this weekend. :)
No one's won the Grand Prize yet, for which they're still offering $1M.

It'd be fascinating to know how much each percentage point increases sales.
Machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch
This job is for fresh engineers for s/w development.
Because the article is from 2002 and not available on this URL anymore.
Presumably the author here is drawing a distinction between performance reviews and development reviews? It seems like it's quite a good thing to review how a developer is getting on regularly, and find out what things they'd like to do more of and how they could develop their skills, without it being tied to bonus distribution.
I once worked with a manager who was very up front about using performance reviews to retaliate against any subordinate who crossed her. Luckily she wasn't my boss.
What Great Managers Do
Audion - The Story behind Panic's 2nd product
If you have more data than a single server can hold the best thing to do is hashing. For instance the Redis-rb client supports consistent hashing.

yes "ALL" in Ram :) this will work for twitter, facebook, everything: what they are doing is to use only the RAM even if they have MySQL, with tons of memcached around. With Redis of course the memcached layer goes away.
All the links at the top of the page (ie, link to blog, contact, review, classes) and the text below "for a beautiful web" show up as boxes with numbers in them. Is this some font or other problem on my system (Ubuntu 9.04 + Firefox 3.5 beta 4) or are other people getting it as well?

I see them once in a while on other sites, and it's pretty annoying.
That was Initech.
I agree in general, SQL is like magic (this is why it can't scale). You write abstract tables and then automatically you can do incredible queries against it, and this is very cool indeed.

But there are some kind of problems that Redis can fix in a very natural way. For example the idea of PUSH and LRANGE solves the get-last-N-items problem in a trivial way compared to MySQL.

Also Set intersection is able to solve tagging easily compared to the complex queries needed in a SQL db.

So SQL is very flexible, but strangely enough some trivial data access pattern is hard to model and slow even if it is as direct as take the last N items from a list.
I've expressed exactly this point to many people involved in C#. Partly, they do not appreciate that most PL features can be implemented as libraries in more powerful languages. Another part is they understand that blub programmers are interested in features, not libraries. Being popular means appealing to the masses.

If a language does not have closures nor more complex control flow features, you really can't implement PL features as equivalently easy-to-use libraries. IMHO, that's why most mainstream languages continue to add superficial features rather than fix the core problems in their PL.