skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My colour blindness is relatively mild, but I struggled with many of the charts. I'd suggest putting the labels on the actual lines, either in the chart area or one side or other next to the line termination.

It sounds trivial, but with 20+ charts that I had to stick my face up to the screen for, I gave up after about 5.

Regarding "Due to SPEC rules governing test repeatability (which cannot be guaranteed in virtualized, multi-tenant cloud environments), the results below should be taken as estimates.". I'd like to have seen some attempt to migate this with, say, some kind of averaging of x tests over different instances. Although, I understand this would have extended an already long test process.
On the Ethics of A/B Testing
As a heavy HN user, I often skim the front page to see what's happening. The point/comment ratio often tells a lot about an article.

First thing I don't like: the Y meter. Most HN readers are nerds, and nerds like exact values (same reason I have the percentage on for my devices's battery)

Second thing I don't like, which breaks the design completely for me: my eyes have to travel a huge distance to see how many comments stories have. It makes skimming the front page much, much worse.

HN's design is about extreme conciseness. There are a few things that could be done better, but if you redesign it that has to be your #1 goal.
Hi mzarate - In the first draft, the comments were inside the "Y-Meter" - I do too check out the comments first to see the buzz around the article. Later it was overload with information right at the beginning.
Thanks :)
I would mark the turning point for Microsoft from the great disrupter of the mainframe and minicomputer age to sclerotic incumbent at the point where they fully embraced DRM and announced Palladium. At that point, "disruption" was limited to what content publishers would approve of.

A Google that kowtows to Comcast will be similarly uninteresting.
You can google the title and site, and most of the times you can find the original article.

I think that there are very few harmful links, but most of the [dead] articles are blogspam (just copy an article and change the background color), or spam for unrelated topics (do you want to buy real state in New Zealand?) .

I also saw a few false positives before, interesting articles in site that usually have low quality articles, or the user is hellbaned by a mistake.

If you find something interesting, you can try to contact the moderator: hn@ycombinator.com
That holds true only if the code is repetitive, for example big site with a lot of similar pages. If the code is not repetitive, e.g. composed of modules that do very different things or implement non-trivial algorithms, then knowledge of one part does not necessary translate into another.

And if it it is big enough, then everyone knows only small subset of it all, whether you pair program or not.
Anyone wanna demonstrate how one would formalize the phrase "pass it on"?
You'll still want to validate that it's a problem others share, that others share deeply, and that others share the same way.

That last part is critical. Human psychology is a funny thing. Two people might experience the same pain point, but articulate two wildly different needs. Or they might have tangential pain points, nominally clustered around the same topic. And sometimes, one user's problem is another user's solution. All of these things can happen.

It is totally valid and worthwhile to start with a pain point you have. A lot of startups began that way. But never assume you (n=1) stand in for an entire market. You can't use personal anecdote or self-insight as a proxy for market validation. Not even Steve Jobs got to do that, despite popular misconceptions.

Insight can be a path to validation. A shortcut starting point. But treat it like a hypothesis, not a foregone conclusion. Hypotheses should be tested.
"privacy must be better and stronger than what institutions like NSA can intrude. And this, I fear, will be an ongoing war. Cryptography cannot solve the issue for obvious reasons"

Really? It's so obvious that cryptography cannot give us better privacy that you're not even going to bother justifying your claim?

Hm...
If anyone knew they wouldn't certainly wouldn't share it. No one seemingly knows because no other fund has a comparable return, which is surprising because typically ideas diffuse as employees go work for other firms.

I suspect they use the ability to continue to invest in Medallion as an incentive to prevent people from going to work elsewhere.
This post was posted in #startups.

Nice effort. A larger font is definitely something HN needs (considering a significant amount of HN readers are 30y+)!

It is difficult to determine which comments-count "box" belong to each title, and the reader should not be forced to move her/his eyes/head to the right, considering this information can fit perfectly on the left.

While I like the idea of the Y-Meter, it is more likely HNers like and are used to know the exact amount of votes. I do understand you wanted to make it minimalistic, but an UI should never need an explanation (referring to the Y-Meter explanation in the bottom).
Will shoot you an email! One more thing: you seem to be hotlinking to images on nasdaq, e.g. apple pe ratio shows http://www.nasdaq.com//charts/aapl_per.jpeg - what determines is a datapoint is presented as a hotlink/image vs a number (like apple's price to book?).

Aside from as-of date on each datapoint, ideally you should provide attribution as well (anyone who worked in finance knows that all data sources provide different data for same query at any given time :)
Something that bugs me in Haskell, and which Mars inherits as it is mostly the same semantics - you've taken the effort to create a good type system with optional types and type checking, only to decide to not actually use them for some common operations you're performing in the language (namely, head/tail).

?> Nil.head
Runtime Error: List instance has no field 'head'

Such runtime errors could easily be avoided by making head/tail return Maybe, and using Nothing in the case of Nil. This hardly complicates code, but it provides the correct behavior, particularly when it comes to doing "records" properly. The Mars docs give an example of how I consider copying Haskell's semantics directly without improving them leads to flawed code.

type Foo:
X(u :: Num, v :: Num)
Y(v :: Num)

There's nothing wrong with `v` here, as it is total, but you can easily introduce a runtime error by using `u` incorrectly.

?> x = Y(1)
?> x.u
Runtime Error: Foo instance has no field 'u'

This is why using records in combination with sum types in Haskell is widely considered a bad idea. It's a misfeature as far as I'm concerned. If given the chance to redo Haskell's awful record system, I'd fix it.

The problem can be trivially avoided by making `u` return `Maybe Num` in this example, where it returns Nothing for Y and `Just 1` for X. Ideally, the compiler should check if field names are total over the constructors - if not, it should automatically return an optional type. If the fields are total there's no need. I doubt there would be any noticeable performance cost to moving the error to compile time - particularly because you don't actually need to use it in internal implementations of map/fold and such - you could have an internal function which mimics the current behavior, but don't expose it from the module.
Absolutely they do. As is bypassing IAP, if you're going that route.
Chilean skies in ultra HD
This is intriguing. Large implications when applied to private datasets ---- think Factiva, etc. There the data schema differ so wildly that natural language can really make it more useful. Publicly traded equities is the facile, simple place to start, obviously.

Can I spin off a search and get pinged on updates?

Love to learn more.
Show HN: Curated Stock Photos in your Inbox every week (royalty free)
I'll counter your ArnoldC with http://shakespearelang.org/ But only because

You are as brave as the sum of a fat little stuffed misused dusty old rotten codpiece and a beautiful fair warm peaceful sunny summer's day

is pure art.
I think there are good takeaways here. I think having the comments-button contain the # is efficient, and I believe placement on the right side will encourage reading the article first, before diving into the discussion. Perhaps there will be a bit less discussion, but it should be of higher quality. It's worth trying, anyway.

To be honest, though, I'd rather see a better mobile experience first, before a re-design of the normal experience.

Or, ensure the re-design includes an improved mobile experience. No more itty-bitty links (I too often tap the wrong thing), no more itty-bitty text (to be readable, I have to scroll sideways a lot, and please please please no more triangles so small I have to tap the screen like 5x to be sure I don't accidentally hit "down" when I want to "up".

... and do I spy a gradient in the orange header?! I like gradients, when used minimally. 8-)
Which is why simplicity remains the ultimate sophistication in software architectures. At some point, you cannot continue writing code without structure. Then you slowly and deliberately introduce meaningful abstractions along the necessary dimensions.

And no more.

Abstractions are also useful to separate the arrangement of work from the actual work itself. These boundaries are useful for dividing up work among colleagues.
Too much orange for me. I much prefer HackerNew: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hackernew/lgoghlnd...
It's not necessary to know what quants are trading at the moment to write about the "type" of trades they make.
This extension has made viewing HN for me much more pleasant since the author first published this.
The only thing I don't like is the Y-Meter and the comments being all the way to the right, that's such a far distance just to click on comments...
Nice effort but bad idea: leave the number at the left and the number for the points. The visual icons don't give the same amount of information.
I would love to see hackernews be more tablet friendly. For voting and clicking through to comments, its not always intuitive to click the links with my finger since the target is so small.
Introducing Transport Layer Security in pure OCaml
The text on hilapeleg.io is nearly unreadable on Windows 7 with Firefox 30. The font is rendered strange, way too thin and uneven with gaps in the strokes.

The link color is just as washed out as the very light grey of the body text.

Maybe they could design their own site properly before re-designing HN?
You can't, because humans are not an asset that can be owned. The nearest thing you can do is lend people money as generously as possible then take their interest repayments.
Love seeing the reasoning behind the curtain of design. I like the idea of the Y-Meter, with the current system the points are somewhat meaningless unless compared against each other and the meter makes that a lot easier to visually parse. Let's try it!

Side notes on my own user preferences: I personally like seeing how fresh something is, as if something's on the homepage and brand new it's probably pretty important -- I also use the number of comments as a gauge, and splitting them to the side might make this harder.

How will this layout work on mobile?
I thoroughly enjoyed /The Physics of Wall Street/, but I found that it was heavier on the "physics" than on the "Wall Street". It depends on what you're looking for. If you want accessible, non-mathematical descriptions of the analytical tools that have been imported into finance from physics, or even an insightful look at the culture of physics and how how physicists tend to approach problems, Weatherall's your man---though I wonder how intelligible those descriptions really would be to someone who hasn't already seen the material in a more formal way. (I'm reminded of the description of the Feynman lectures from the introduction to that big red boxed set, IIRC: "Rereading the books, one sometimes seems to catch Feynman looking over his shoulder, not at his young audience, but directly at his colleagues, saying 'Look at that! Look how I finessed that point! Wasn’t that clever?'".)

Thing is, my background is in physics, so I'm more interested in what physicists call "sociology": how institutions are put together, what the incentive structures are, how individual personalities affect outcomes, etc., and I found Weatherall's descriptions of such things lacking. His analysis tends towards hagiography of individual scientists, with less attention for context. This intensely biographical approach to the history of science is a common-enough failing in books that focus on the science, not the history---it reminded me a bit of those boxes about the lives of prominent scientists that dot some introductory textbooks---but it's still frustrating.

I actually found Roger Lowenstein's /When Genius Failed/ much more illuminating---he gives more attention to institutions, incentives, and personalities, and how they interact.

Edit: missing word, style
Don't forget about catering for the symbol formerly known as Prince :) No but seriously, names are horrendously complex, just as adresses are. But you might be better of ignoring some detail than trying to cater for every possible case.
Looks bad on Windows 7 Chrome as well.
You are literally accepting my premise and then telling me I am wrong.

If you accept that Usain Bolt is a astronomically rare genetic freak (which you just have) then you accept that some people have innate genetic factors that make them better at a sport than others.

Because people exist on a continuum and not in discrete boxes that means for a given subset of people, some people in that group have innate factors that advantage them over others in a particular tasks, just not at the extreme level of Phellps.

That means some people have 'talent', or as I like to say physiological factors that give them greater maximum potential.
Google was already a big pusher of HTML5/OS DRM, which I thought was quite similar to the Palladium debacle.
While they do make sense in certain situations, they also add more complications. On linux, it's much easier, but If I want to run this on windows, or osx, they tell you to run Docker inside of a full VBox VM (and maintain it), this is not ideal as VBox destroys my battery and other annoyances.

You also have to maintain those containers/images (not to mention lug around a 600+mb base OS image and update it). I am not sure how Docker handles keeping images updated, I assume overlayfs makes it easy to keep your base docker OS images updated, but not sure how it'd handle certain package configurations.
The difference between framework and software developer is often glossed over by people, especially on HN. In the position of the former, you're pushed around by your tools. In the latter, you learn how to push back and impose structure that speed development, clarify thinking, and reduce bug counts dramatically.
The humans being vastly more expensive than either the software or the hardware... which is why Munich is most likely in a deep financial hole over this project, due to the huge waste of staff time
I was a big SCI0-era Sierra fan, and while I did buy a few of those invisible-ink hint books, their best games overcame most of the frustration factor. I was particularly fond of The Colonel's Bequest, where the clever time mechanic drove the game to its conclusion whether the player had solved every puzzle or not.
The other reply linked to the forum thread, but just to elaborate, fans of the game obtained a box of Saguaro wood, then proceeded to measure the solid density and reported their findings.

That said, what actually prompted the raws to get updated was this: http://imgur.com/EPtgt

And the jokes on that page will only make sense if you play DF.
For me (and many others, I'm sure), the top requirement of a redesign is to get the flag link far away from the title and comments links. When using on a small mobile device, I frequently find myself accidentally hitting the flag link. It's why I'm currently using the "Hacker News 2" app (which frustrates me in different ways) instead of the website.

This design at least has the link far away from the title; I can't see the flag link or the comments link, so I don't know whether those are good.
They were probably concerned about people entering offensive words phrases that would presumably later be spit back by the computer so they went with a white list.
YouTube's 2013 Revenue
Anyone would think it's difficult to block Google Analytics
perhaps faint separators between stories - a small, light line, or alternating colors, would be helpful ... that way it's much easier to tie the comment-info to the story.

I'm like you: I also insist on the % showing, not just the icon (though I like the icon, too).

I wonder if it would be useful to show the ratio of comments to article points.
What to Learn from the Man Who Managed Reddit's Community of Millions
Next seven days is doable. So weekly product roadmaps is what we can/should have for now.
Likewise: another stylesheet overload for Hacker News is Readable HN - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/readable-hn/jpnbja...
Now stop Google seeing your email: http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-bec...
Yes, yes do your market research, identify pain points, find a compelling value proposition.. do all those things.

But once you've defined the technical aspects of your product-market fit, write a story. The story of why you are doing what you're doing (not how, or where or when.. but why). This story must be true and it should resonate with you so you don't get sick of re-telling it a million time in a million different ways.

Then build that story into your product and find the most frictionless ways of enabling your users to spread that story for you through your product. Finally identify any and all channels where this story might garner a captive audience and go and share that story yourself.
Agreed (see my mobile comments). I would prefer putting the "upvote" link on one side, and the "flag" link at the opposite side of the page, so that there's little room for accident. Same for comments.
Option and Null in Dynamic Languages
Show HN: Really Easy Authentication for Express.js
Inspirational !
Private datasets is brilliant, great idea. As of now, updates aren't available but definitely could be in the future.

We'd love to chat more and get some feedback! My email is jay@pennywhale.com
I find it difficult to believe that dropping the price by 80%, from $100 to $20, resulted in no increase in demand. Another post mentioned some possible confounding factors related to the sequence of price changes ($100 -> $10 -> $20) that might explain it.

Although a very different market, I'm still amused that online gaming portals like GOG and Steam consistently get me to buy games I would not otherwise buy by running sales more-or-less continuously. I wonder if HttpWatch could capture the lower end of the market in a similar fashion.
2546 days ago....

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079
Congratulations on launching! Cool idea and a good start. I think since you're targeting the non-professional market here, you need to focus on user experience a bit. Some feedback:

- Found it a bit slow, but guess that's partially the HN effect.

- As per above, I'd make the queries ajax rather than refreshing the whole page every search, should improve the UX a fair bit.

- I expected autopredict when I started to type $... to predict a ticker, would be nice to guess company names as well if no ticker is entered. Probably an essential feature for non-pros.

- You need a clear signup link. And the redirect when you run out of free credits should go to the signup page with small link to login, not the other way around.

- Also look at highcharts.com, they have a stock chart product as well. Hands down the best JS charts, mobile friendly, highly customisable etc.
You can't really provide much value without knowing the goals / intentions behind the campaign / activity and obviously decisions on channels would be massively dependent on verticals, circumstances and budgets, however content campaigns alongside paid activity can be good from a launch branding POV.

I've seen people combine offers with quirky / creative content, which is leveraged via paid StumbledUpon, Twitter and FB advertising to generate brand impressions and traffic.

I've also seen sponsored YouTube content work quite well for startup brands.

Obviously SEO and PPC / displayed are more acquisition channels - but dependent on the goals, these represent good channels for quality / qualified traffic.
How does an email address validate that a user is real?
hahaha we'll add an easter egg just for you ;)

perhaps check out http://www.premise.com/ or https://kensho.com/
My thoughts exactly, have to strain to read it on Windows 7 using Chrome. Would expect more from a post on design...
EdX platform used by millions of students around the world now open sourced
I just finished building a really cool plugin for our startup, Stormpath (https://stormpath.com) which makes adding user registration / login / etc. into express.js apps really easy.

Would love any feedback!
> The square "y-meter" idea is neat, but it's difficult to parse at a quick glance. A circle might be a better alternative, where the size and intensity of the circle indicate the strength of the story.

Yes, yes, yes. It's funny because the "y-meter" is at the same time the thing that interests me the most & the thing that I find the most inscrutable.

* The scaling feels off. Half the box means 51 points and the whole box means 401? In eighths, the transitions go {1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8} which just makes my head ache.

* When you have crummy eyes some of the transitions are hard: [51,100] looks too close to [101,200] and [201, 400] and [400, +inf) is just impossible without squinting.

Overall it feels like there is more noise than information, which is a bummer. Maybe if it scaled a little more smoothly or changed lightness as an added visual indication it'd work better for me.

Of course if there's one thing everyone loves to do, it's bikeshed!
Ask HN: Website to trade programming skills?
Hey HN, a while back I remember visiting a website where you could list what you know–Ruby on Rails, NodeJS, for example–and list what you want to learn–iOS, Android, whatever–and you could try to find someone who you would compliment. I can't remember if I learned of this website through Show HN, but I don't know where else I may have found it, and I'm having a hard time finding it using hn.algolia.com and Google.

Do any of you know what website I'm talking about, or do you know of a website that serves this function?
http://www.inf.usi.ch/phd/wettel/download.php?f=Wettel11a-ic...
WAT?

https://www.google.com/takeaction/
A screenshot (Windows 7, Chrome 35): http://i.imgur.com/I7KTlZs.png

Doesn't look any better with Firefox 35. I don't know how brilliant the OS X font rendering must be, but the strokes are 1px thick when the font is zoomed to 300%. How is this supposed to work?

This is exactly what I expected when web fonts came out. Does anybody know how to deactivate them globally in Chrome? I'm really tired of constantly changing fonts via F12, just to be able to skim some random article.
I thought it was weird/annoying how the Y Meter fills up inconsistently. Sometimes when you go up a tier in points, the bar extends 1 unit (half a side) and other times it extends 2 units (an entire side). It doesn't event alternate between those. What's up with that?
DConf 2014: Designing an Aurora by Adam Wilson
CppCon 2014 Conference Program
Font is rendered ok on chrome/ubuntu but the text is way too light to be readable
Sieve of Eratosthenes : FP Implemenation how-to [pdf]
You can't win Tour de France if you don't start cycling. With his attitude there is no point in getting on the bike in the first place, because probabilistically it's unlikely you will ever win, right?
Building on this, I'd suggest that your goals should be primarily focused on early stage branding activity and building foundations for long-term acquisition.