skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Design depends on your target audience.

1. Page Width

If your target audience is tech un-savvy folks - go with a narrow screen width. 780 pixels. If its folks keep up with technology, go with 960 pixels.

If you're designing for cellphones, reduce your width accordingly.

2. Column width

Readability tests have shown that 50-60 characters per line is the optimum. More text than that per line and people's reading speeds decrease. And their comprehension takes a dive too. So sticking with 500 pixels per column of text is generally a good idea.

3. Landing page style

Basic formula to keep in mind is: AIDA

* Attention

* Interest

* Desire

* Action

Follow them in sequence.

Good post to read:
http://zygote.egg-co.com/designing-to-sell/

Advanced formula is creating landing pages based on your target audiences personas.

Step 1: Figure out all the types and segments of people who will visit your website.
http://www.futurenowinc.com/personas.htm

Step 2: Determine what you need to do to persuade each of these types of personas to take action

Step 3: Create different navigational pathways for each of these persona types.

Good book to read: Waiting for Your Cat to Bark
http://www.amazon.com/Waiting-Your-Cat-Bark-Persuading/dp/07...
(Note: its a book with excellent content but reads like a boring textbook.)

Good website to deconstruct and learn from:
http://www.theleodiamond.com/
(This website is created for 6 different persona types.

* Very curious analytical type people who research before buying

* Folks who are fashion conscious

* Girls choosing the diamond

* Guys choosing the diamond

* Media, investors etc

* Folks who already know about Leo Diamonds and just want to find the nearest location

Can you see how different keywords and linking / navigation structure is used for each of these personas?)
While I don't have a degree at all, myself, when I get one, it will probably include quite a lot of distance learning, given that I have a full time job I'm loathe to give up.

Can you explain in what way my earning a degree will invalidate yours?
It would be nice if this could caused colleges to focus on the experience more - have more face-to-face seminar style courses where people learn to think on their feet, express themselves verbally and dissect the material they've already gone-over on-line.

But it seems more likely that result will be just the death of another dinosaur...
I like sites that mix liquid width style and fixed width (centered) content. I vary my site's width with how much content there will be and try to balance the whitespace out with the amount of text/content, usually between 800 and 950 pixels wide.

As for landing page, I think it should highlight whatever is the most important part of your site. The first thing I should notice is what you do and if I'm interested, have a well defined navigation so I can learn more.

On a truly personal note, I love big footers from both a design and usability point of view :)
A late to the party comment: I (just now!) finished a submission for an SBIR grant.

Even though I understand why the SBIR submission is the way that it is, the simplicity of this application form makes me jealous. :( I've been doing 6am-2am for two days in a row now and not even writing code.
If the web properties could successfully argue that their copyright extends to how the content is displayed, I think it is likely they could get a lot more bang for their buck by suing Microsoft for the mangled content that comes out of the many millions of IE 6 browsers still being used out there. :)

That said, I highly doubt either lawsuit has much of a leg to stand on. Content transformation is a long standing and tacitly accepted feature of web protocols. Caching, zooming, and even assistant technologies such as a screen or braille reader would run afoul this argument.
I imagine this is related to GSOH, where zombie references are automatically hilarious.

More surprising to me is that "pretty" is a win while "beautiful" is a loss. Is that coming on too strong?
"Not Even Wrong" is a good book, but a little dry. Lee Smolin's "The Trouble With Physics" is a much more enjoyable read and was much more engaging. But they both deliver a strong case against String Theory.
My theory is that products that are designed to provide comfort are more susceptible to scorn because being "tough" makes some people feel good.

There obviously are real technical reasons when choosing between a Snuggie vs a blanket, or a Segway vs a bike, or TaeKwonDo vs Pilates, but I think it's naive to think that:

- we choose products/services solely based on rational analysis

- our tastes are not affected by our perception of social expectations
Experimenting on Mechanical Turk: 5 How Tos
The punchlines are all in inversions of 'jive' stereotypes, however. The men are not dressed per 'jive'-speaker steretypes. The 'translator' is an elderly white woman. The men take umbrage at her implying they didn't understand the stewardess's English, and then she keeps telling them off in jive even after it's unnecessary.

Sure, a racist could laugh at that piece, but only at the very superficial level at which they can take anything to confirm their prior prejudices.

The drivers of the humor are all anti-racist: calling attention to unconscious stereotypes and challenging them; presenting the idea that a subculture dialect may be treated respectfully as a distinct language (compare 'ebonics'); portraying the native speakers sympathetically and the out-of-culture translator a bit pissy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fZwMcoDVJM
I think the debates about online education confuse the different roles that educational institutions serve:

1. Impart knowledge. And when it comes to teaching grammar or differential equations, online education is probably a more effective delivery agent than classrooms ... sorry guys.

2. Train people in face-to-face social skills. Much important work is done in an educational environment by teaching people how to behave in their later professional careers. This goes FAR beyond technical skill, into things like how to make appropriate jokes, how to drop names, how to socialize off work, how to dress at what occasion, how not to expose the fact that you came from a poor background, etc, etc. I think high level centralized education is probably pretty good at this; some of this can be done online, but online interaction doesn't give you practice at face work.

3. Grow social networks with a high level of emotional charge. One goes to Yale largely so that one can become a Yale Alumn and mobilize those networks. This network building doesn't work without an emotional attachment to the university, though, and this is probably more easily cultivated when people are there in person, lose their virginity on campus, go to rituals together, etc.

4. Control the flow of people into various levels of the elite. I think there are a lot more capable people in the world than there are open positions, so education partly serves to withhold training and entitlement by imposing fairly arbitrary cutoffs for admission and by making people feel personally responsible for their prior lack of training (a lack which is generally due to their bad luck in being born into a less fortunate segment of society). Better to have unemployed pissed off illiterate peasants than unemployed pissed off educated folks -- the latter organize and execute revolutions while the former just break windows and make a lot of noise. This categorizing based on supposed talent begins at a very young age -- google "Pygmalion effect". Choking off the flow of talented people who might make trouble will be harder if education escapes its current stranglehold by the academy.

5. Provide physical equipment. If you need to provide access to lab equipment and libraries, it is more efficient to put them in one place and share them. This is obviously changing rapidly, with central libraries becoming obsolescent in many ways (not all though -- browsing the shelves is a good thing and impossible to do in the same way online).

So, if we are discuss the pros and cons of online versus offline education, I think we should do it broken down more, either my way or some other.

Two more comments -- it is pretty funny to hear professors going on about cheapening the value of a degree from Fort Whatever in Kansas. And as far as I am concerned, the sooner the internet bomb goes off in academia, the better.
Not sure what the legal excuse for tivo's existence is, but I have seen dvds which don't allow the option of ff'ing previews when they are played on a standard topbox dvd player.
This was talked about before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=638752

(and submitted earlier than that too)
The use case for a company like backblaze though allows you to buy bandwidth very cheap because it will be mostly upstream, the direction in which datacenters are normally not seeing much traffic.
Working on my own: http://doleaf.com

Not that guys can't be into gardens as well. I love getting my hands dirty :)
>Sun is selling peace of mind

Right upto the point where they are sold to a database company that isn't interested in selling disks.

the nice thing about the blaze is that if seagate decide to double their prices or much you to a new expensive platform - you just buy toshiba instead.
So does this put computers up with humans on the sentience quotient?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience_quotient
yeah, many people selling, for example, bandwidth also try to keep prices secret; as far as I can tell it's nothing more than an effort to make the market less efficient.
Man, how on earth did you find this comment?
Any numbers to back up that claim?
At first, I thought this was going to be a software idea, which would be exciting. The fact that it's hardware is even more important; this could mean faster-than-human parts in the not-too-distant future.

Of course, when your desktop develops schizophrenia, you'll wish for a classical processor.
I find OKCupid to be a very interesting business. The guys who run it are also definitely hackers; they've written about the science behind their matching algorithms, their in-house web framework (which is Open Source, though I'd never touch the stuff, as it is a C++ web app framework, which is just weird and masochistic), and quite a bit about their user data (as in this post). It's very often interesting. At least one of them used to comment here at HN occasionally, but I don't recall his nick so I don't know if he's still a regular. Nonetheless, as a community, I think this is definitely relevant to our interests.
"Snuggie" is a southernism for "wedgie."
Please keep in mind that these numbers are not 100% accurate. We do the best we can to parse out the add-on version check pings that this number is based on, but what we don't do is systematically attempt to track users. That means we don't have a cookie that we can rely on to determine exactly how many users are using a particular add-on. We can only count the number of pings.

Firefox will ping for a version check multiple times during the process of a browser upgrade. The user can manually check for updates as many times as they like. There are weird mis-configured proxies that can spam a single ping a hundred times for some reason, and there are browsers that have been recompiled for a variety of reasons that can behave in a non-standard fashion.

In each of these cases, we do the best we can to eliminate spurious or duplicate requests, but because of NAT and DHCP, we can't really rely much on an IP address to determine the validity of a set of requests.

Personally, I'm happy to provide less accurate statistics and be able to feel good that I am not violating Firefox users' privacy. This extends down to things such as not even storing IP addresses in our data warehouse once the access log data has been parsed. Regardless of the fact we have privacy policies that state we won't do anything bad with the data, I prefer to not even have the data available in a database at all.
MMS? On a phone? Get out.
"Fixed your response"?

Is this reddit?

I find that really rude.
I don't know what University you went to but having known people who "partied their way through the Ivy league" (by their own admission) I feel pretty confident that people can get through any 4 year university without working all that hard. So even if you did work really hard your degree was probably "invalidated" by those people far before this came along.

Beyond that I'd present the question that's already been asked: What makes you think people who get degrees online aren't working hard? Did you study 18 hours a day like the woman in the article? I suspect not.
Back when I worked as a programmer at a hedge fund, I would reply:

"I teach computers how to steal money within the law."

It's accurate. Sounds badass. And the ladies get enticed by the aura of mystery around it.
Reverse engineer md5 hashes
Braidwood killing SSDs? Bollocks.
Exactly - this is a replacement for a tape library, not a database server.
I think (smart) women can usually deduce that you've done that, and tend to react negatively.
It's basically like Apple not selling xGen ipods anymore. They will still support the software, just not sell the actual hardware anymore.
and HotBot
Cool. I wonder what sort of density could be achieved with slow solid state storage. The line between disk and tape continues to blur, I guess.
If I'm gonna spend a couple years doing college I might want to move somewhere with other people my age whom I can study with. More concretely, I might move to Portland with all the other unemployed 20-somethings, or Boston, or the Valley. Doesn't mean I have to get accepted to an actual school in those places if I can college on my own time.
Author needs to read (or re-read) Strunk and White. Specifically, "Omit needless words."

Even skimming this article made me tired.
or DogPile!
You poor schmoes, Sweden has had MMS and Tethering since the release of 3.0 (free too). ;P
Haha! Now that was really funny. By the way, we never treated him as a slave. He was also promised a fair amount of equity.
Ironic though how Sun spent the last 20years trying to persuade companies that networks of Unix mini-computers were a cheap reliable alternative to mainframes - yet when it comes to putting disks in boxes you need to have everything stamped with the magic 'enterprise' badge.

If you believed their spin presumably you would buy from a proper enterprise company like IBM or EDC - not some failed workstation vendor.
Lycos!
Yes, this was my first thought. If I was seriously stressed for time, then I'd agree with idea of optimizing for overall percentages. But if you really want to optimize the chances that a specific person will reply to you, then it seems as if longer is better. Still, I'd like to compare a short, witty, well-crafted, personally tailored message to a longer, more-generic one. (Not that that could be measured statistically...)
Flash has its place, for sure but it has many short comings when developing an entire web-based app.

As far as I know, the answer to these questions is no for Flash based sites:

1) Can it be indexed by most search engines?

2) Is the text always selectable, & copy and paste-able?

3) Does the structure of the Flash movie imply anything about the information it presents? (e.g. <table> elements imply tabular data.)

4) Is Flash & Flex an open platform which can be developed on for free?

Your argument against HTML doesn't point out any weakness in HTML itself. It does point out the lack of a standard and accepted HTML UI library, as well as a simplified, cross-browser compatible development environment for that UI library (the notable exception here may be cappuccino.org and some other, larger dev environments like WebObjects, neither of which I've used extensively).
The premise that an adblocker would need advertising to flourish is just hilarious.

People don't install adblock when they see an ad for it.
They install it when they have been pissed off by intrusive ads once too often.

Hence the main promoter of adblock is the content industry itself with intrusive popup ads, auto-playing audio etc.
Do you use jQuery for your ajax? That should resolve many of the cross-browser issues.
Oh, my god. A gopher reference! I spent many, many days in school trying to find cool sites with gopher and via anonymous FTP, generally without success. That's what happens when you get your coding assignments done too quickly...

That said, we did have a frame relay, which was state-of-the-art for a high school at the time.
in my humble opinion, flex is like polishing a turd. premature optimization.
Drive. Persistence. Focus.

Knowing what needs to be done now and what can be put off (or never done).

Analyzing and knowing what the user wants - and then building something to meet that want.

Knowing one's own limits; if you can develop the best product ever but have no idea how to market it - then finding someone (and trusting them) who can do it for you.

Finding solutions where other people only see problems.
What put me off was that mxlmc was really slow (10-seconds-to-compile-a-hello-world kind of slow). Also, I find that debugging HTML/CSS/JS stack is really easy with Firebug et al, whereas debugging swf's isn't quite a walk in the park.

With that being said, every development environment will have its warts. If you're sick of HTML/CSS/JS, nothing is stopping you from using whatever you want. Look at the QuakeLive guys, for example.
Rewriting code is paying principal. Dealing with the shit caused by bad code is the interest.

The longer you go without paying the principal, the more interest you're paying.
App Engine SDK 1.2.5 released for Python and Java, now with XMPP support
Calling him a nonphysicist isn't correct. Woit's just not employed as a physics professor. Instead he's got a nontenured math post at Columbia. Given the number of tenured physics jobs available versus the number of graduates, it's not exactly surprising to see a physicist who isn't a "Professor."
It's user-hostile.

Flex code runs inside a sandbox element, much like Java applets. It doesn't feel native to the browser - the Flex app can change things only within its own little canvas. (Okay, there's ExternalInterface as well, but then you're back to writing JavaScript and DOM manipulations.) It's not aware of browser resizing - you're locked into a fixed width layout. It can easily result in horizontal scrolling if you have a full-width Flex app in a small browser window. It generally doesn't show up on mobile devices. It takes forever to load. It disables UI conventions - like being able to right-click on the page - that users are used to. Hitting Ctrl-T when a Flash app has focus does not open a new tab. It's not easily indexable by search engines.

I look at it as Flex:Javascript::Swing:native GUIs. It makes development easier, but at the cost of never quite meshing right with the rest of the platform. You may like it, but your users probably won't.
Good point. I haven't listened to high bitrate MP3s through something like an iPod but with a high-end outboard DAC. With a setup like that I believe it could become hard/impossible to tell the difference.
Does anyone have an opinion on the best visualization tool?
I disapprove of the smelly green lines that will constantly be emanating from riders of this new device.

(see video)
Before Google, I remember guessing relevant-sounding URL's just as often as I remember actually using a search engine. Now if I'm looking for Volkswagen, I don't even try vw.com, volkswagen.com, etc. etc.--I just google "Volkswagen".
I feel like writing today!

It seems that there is actually no way to get around the halo effect or winner's bias etc. We all look at the winners, we say "how have they done it" and we think "well we can do that too". The problem is in the details. They have done it, we have yet to do it. What worked in the past may not be true in the future. Most of us just slap the LUCK sticker on their series of events and call it a day.

I actually fell in love with "Good To Great" (Jim Collins) because the book tried to make a science out of success. However, reading the Amazon reviews enlightened me to the very real statistics flaw in the entire book's analysis.
Something about how there will always be top ranked companies by the simple fact that they are ranked. You have 10 companies. They will fall in rank. Does that really mean anything?

So I think there is indeed a problem in soliciting "how to succeed advice" on the general plane. What works for one person may not work for you, simple as that.

However, rather than get depressed and attribute our happenings to the stars, I think its smarter to believe in and invest in principles.

The richest Man in Babylon is a book of principles.
Think and Grow Rich is a book of principles.

I am not saying we should read these books as the gospel, rather acknowledge that there is a real difference between the principle of "saving 10% of your income" and "use google adwords to grow your fb app 1million percent"

So, here's a change: some advice on how to be successful from a guy that is not yet successful:

1. Be a scientist.

Science does not lie.

Sure, things change, sure people get lucky, but all you have to do is test things and keep on testing things. And learn from your tests.

All this advice is just icing on the cake of science.

Be disciplined, be agile, be scrappy, network, manage risk, evolve,
blah - what is the actual method you'd use to acquire and optimize these things...?

TEST IT.

Being a part of HN over the last year has been very beneficial for me. If any group of people can understand and embrace the idea of being a scientist relative to EVERYTHING we do, it's HN.
In trying to answer my own question I had come up with some of the same ideas, but you put together a great list. Gracias.
Rest assured, I have not forgotten any of those. :) But my personal tools were conservative - Lycos, Altavista, Excite. That's why I was wary of and didn't initially buy into this newfangled so-called "Google" bandwagon.
Introducing kamaloka-js: amqp JavaScript Bindings
1. There are a million small disadvantages to using proprietary plugins, it is not "the internet", google can read flash, but not well, you dont have firebug, your site cannot be scraped, these may not all affect you, but there are lots lots more.

2. The flash plugin sucks on most browsers, its a slow unreactive user experience, compare a few full flash sites to their equivalent in javascript.

3. Flex's layout constructs are similiar to pretty much every widget manager around, are in no way close to the power of xhtml/css, I for one didnt find it enjoyable at all to develop for.

how long have you been doing html/css? its a pain that goes away quite quickly, if it hasnt, I would ask some more experienced developers to look over your stuff and see if anythings being done wrong.

and you might want to look at graceful degredation, if ie isnt a particularly large chunk of visitors, your exact problems are very easily solved in a way that very gracefully degrades (-moz-border-radius:, font-face:)
Astronomers Turn To Omniscopes For Low Cost Observation
Original paper here:
http://arxiv.org/abs/0909.0001
The range is only 9k :(

For comparison, a Segway can do about 40k.
Pandora Radio - Listen to Free Internet Radio, Find New Music
pandora is the best music station ever
Really, higher ed needs a major overhaul! Straighter liner is a start, but there needs to be more flexibility, less hyperbole classes and lower cost.
What angels want
No you couldn't, suppose your A does better in the first market and your B worse (accounting for size) in the second. You choose A. Which does even worse in second market. B was doing the best job for the second market, it is just that market is less open to your product, B would have totally pwned in the first market.

You have to do the A/B within the same market to get useful results.