skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe they are artificial but they are still there. It doesn't really change anything.

Like the parent poster, I too have worked in a large company. I was hired mainly to re-develop the intranet (it looked like it was designed in 1995). When I resigned 9 months later I still hadn't done any work on it. Now I had access to the files. I could have just changed it myself but there would have been an uproar and I probably would have been fired. In fact, just making minor changes such as cleaning up the CSS got me in trouble because other people used Dreamweaver to edit some pages and my changes made things look different in Dreamweaver.

I imagine the people responsible for the AA website are in a similar boat. They have access to change things but there are these barriers - artificial or not.

Now I've worked at some different sized companies and I've realised that is the way things were supposed to be at that company. This company handled people's pensions and needed to be conservative. The systems in place were DESIGNED to slow things down to make sure that everything was done right.

Startups have their own speed of work and large companies have a much slower pace. There are reasons for both.
I think bringing Bertrand Russel into this is going a bit far. People aren't upset because Dustin's ideas shatter their stagnant world view, but because he presents them as having far more importance than they really do. AA is not doing as badly as it does because its homepage is messy.

It used to be that software was as close as you get to meritocracy. It seems that the web, and especially "web 2.0", changed that. We now have people like Scoble or Arrington who gain their status by pouring their energy not into building great stuff, but into ceaselessly promoting themselves. Many of us see this as crass and pushy.
How does that work? Like this? That's not really following the "pattern" though, which is to keep adding 1 down the left edge of the triangle. Choosing to put a 0 in because we ran out of terms in our series is pretty arbitrary.

1 2 4 8 16 31
1 2 4 8 15
1 2 4 7
1 2 3
1 1
0
This would be interesting, but I'm not sure if I would be comfortable discussing private business matters in a public forum.

That said, for issues I am comfortable discussing in public, I would just post them here (which I often do).
I'm sure the "Creating Controversy..." writer has some reasonable points. Perhaps Dustin Curtis really is only fourteen years old and is a frightful bounder who drops his aitches and has cocoa and bloaters for supper.*

But really, Dustin Curtis makes some good points. The reason sites like AA's are so much worse than they could be is precisely because of bloated and poorly-organized infrastructure and competing interests. That excuse isn't going to stop customers from going to better, more easily-navigable sites if they have a choice. I have bought plane tickets more than once from airline B instead of airline A just because I couldn't get what I needed on airline A's site. About a year ago USAirways.com charged me eight times for the same flight and never sent an e-ticket. I don't buy from them any more. If I can't find and buy the best flight from airline A because their web site doesn't work well it's the same result to me as if they don't have that flight.

Look at how much more market value has been created by companies like Kayak.com who have used a lot less resources to create a much more effective buying experience than the most of the big lumbering airlines. Their gain has come about because the airlines have not been able to overcome their organizational problems.

Also, what Mister X* wrote was quite tactful. While it acknowledged some internal problems at AA (which certainly are obvious anyway) it did so in a very graceful way and provide a pretty good counter-argument. It was about the best statement American Airlines could have hoped anyone would have put out in response to Dustin Curtis' piece. You might argue that they were justified in firing him. You might be right (and you might not) but they were also very clearly very stupid to fire him. Had they merely given him a mild rebuke and then promoted him then they could have maintained control over what has turned into a small scandal for AA. Instead, he's no longer bound to watch his words so carefully. I hope he'll have more to say.

So if Dustin Curtis really does chew broken bottles and turn into a werewolf at the time of the full moon* that's too bad. All I know about him is that he seems like a pretty decent designer who has strong opinions and isn't afraid to voice them but who probably hasn't read Frederick Brooks.

Maybe if someone upstairs at AA had an attitude like Dustin Curtis and Mister X I wouldn't be putting them on my list of "companies to avoid doing business with whenever there's a reasonable alternative."

* P.G Wodehouse "Service With a Smile"

* Why does this name make me think of "For British Eyes Only..."

* Another P.G. Wodehouse reference I can't place.
It's odd that the author can criticize UCD when they apparently don't know what it is. Focus groups and "just asking the user" are exactly what UCD advocates discourage.

The "contextual" part of Contextual Design means real users using real products in their real context. That is how you extract useful data from your users and enable yourself to design something centered around them.
Hubris? Hubris is a loaded term that is purely subjective. He's one of the most talented designers I know, and he deserves to speak strongly. Humility doesn't need to enter here.

A humble designer is one who affects no change indeed.

Designers should be less humble. When engineers or business guys or management or anyone makes a product lousier, they should get up and shout, and raise hell.

Apple wins because the guy who cares the most about user experience happens to run the show. And last I checked, humble wasn’t really a word you could use to describe him.
The benefit (if you were in the bubble list) being that your startup would have more recognition when posting.
So, I think you're a really talented designer, I don't entirely disagree with you, and I understand your frustration. However...

Brand development is complex and takes years to develop. All this brand-strategy-through-design is fucking nonsense, stop drinking your own kool-aid. That's why I got out of the advertising industry and into consumer products. I'm sorry but designers are not that critical to a brand, and proclaiming such sounds extremely ego centric and naive.

Furthermore, you're criticizing one of many sales channels and generalizing the entire company based on that. You can buy AA tickets through a variety of websites, retailers, travel agents, etc. -- not solely AA.com. In fact, I don't think I've ever bought an AA ticket on AA.com.

When I read your response to Mr. X's response a few months ago, I was quite surprised that YOU were surprised about all the moving pieces in a big corporation. I think you lack quite a bit of business experience, and snail mailers aren't going to get you there. I caution you to think about your word choice when you say things like clueless and incompetence because you're branding yourself a millennial.
Same here. My demo has been down a number of times recently though because of memory issues and my analytics didn't show visits from the Bay Area. Still, whatever the decision is, I'm excited to know.
Yeah yeah, we know: "just do it."
this story is getting old (but is, of course, still true)
Tell the FCC to Say "No" to the Cable Kill Switch
Yes if you pass it a pointer to a null string
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_HTML_editors
Corporations are so very dehumanizing. The good of the few shareholders at the expense of the human experience for the individuals who labor typically a minimum of 1/2 of their waking hours but are summarily fired if they so much as speak their mind.

We've accepted this system. Many people at this site will vote me down for questioning the good of the corporate body over the good of the individual. Many will simply vote me down just because it was in the poor guy's contract. But the bottom line is that American Airlines fires people who try to reasonably speak their mind. Simple as that. And the people who vote down against the good of people in favor of the good of the corporate body are the enemy.
I look to lease rich-media tools for plastic surgeons' websites. Instead of clinical copy to sell procedures, Moxe’s media player will use voice, photography, text, and 3D animation to engage visitors. Practices can shorten the sales cycle with marketing that sells more effectively to women.
Been at it two years.
Tomorrow's Software IPOs
Patent Lies: Who Says Saving the Planet Has to Cost a Fortune?
> In that case, I don't understand why we are celebrating the soul-crushing mediocrity of these Fortune 500 companies.

I think that bears repeating.
I get the impression that only some of the basic logic gates have been implemented yet, and that the rest is still theoretical.
It's a funny thing...when people talk about iPhone development, many times they remard on the quality of the tools - specifically XCode. IMHO, XCode is good, but loses out in a comparison to Visual Studio Express. It's a really great, and free, offering.

When you start from VIM, Emacs or even TextMate, XCode is going to look good. Starting from the Visual Studio experience makes XCode look less stellar.
OW MY BRAIN.

char *cp = NULL;
for(cp = tmpfn; cp && *cp; cp++)
if(isspace(*cp))
*cp = '_';
What's wrong with that code, Computer Guru? =)
We overproduce food, and produce far more of particularly inefficient kinds of food (e.g. corn) than we need.

Although the ultimate long-term solution is to bring the world population down to a more sustainable level, at least if we want everyone to be able to enjoy a First World standard of living, in the near term there is much that could be done to reduce impact without everyone suddenly starving.

The status quo is not the only way to feed everyone. The status quo has created an obesity epidemic on one hand, and an environmental disaster on the other.
Same here. Visual Studio is the best IDE I have used.

I have been using Eclipse for Android and Django development. I know it is free but it doesn't even come close to VS.
esr calls him a fool for his position that meaning can be derived from structure.

I fail to see the difference between that and calling someone a poor programmer based on 1000 lines of prototype code.
Mostly assumes object-oriented programming, of course.
For the record, I almost voted you down because when I read things like "many people at this site will vote me down", I take it as a dare. Your point is no weaker if you leave out the baiting and reverse psychology.
It is definately Hans Zimmer, but with the short part they used in the movie it might as well have been the theme to The Rock.
it's not that simple.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/09/24/food.leftovers/i...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11...

There are more articles if anyone is interested.

The average person in industrialized nations wastes a lot of food per year. It's even worse when you go through the whole supply chain. There are a lot of inefficiencies.
I don't mean to say that the fact that xbox is technically inferior is some evil strategy.

Buying a developer so that they can make something exclusive is no different from buying exclusives. It is somewhat anti-competitive. If Sony does this, I'm pretty sure it's much less than Microsoft.

Buying a company after after they release a hit is different from commissioning a company to make a big hit. The former is not promoting innovation.
Oh hey Mike. Like I said in the post:

"I love Dell servers"

"I even love their network hardware"

"Mick my old sales guy rocked!"

"As did his hardware team."

"I’m going to take my hard earned dollars and hand it over for more of that great hardware they have."

The update has even more glowing adjectives and I've chatted to both Reed and Loree today. I'm was a fan and still am. The post is tongue in cheek. So chill out.

..and I'm pretty sure it's a stock photo. But if it isn't I'll be happy to send the guy a razor.

Mark.
That's why I suspect lying (over-promising, making outrageous claims, whatever) would be needed for an unheard of company to make a large sum of money on nothing more than a promise.

Yes, Blizzard could pre-sell products, because they have millions of fans that trust them to produce good games. Can a company no one has ever heard of do the same? If the founders are famous from prior ventures, perhaps, but completely unknown? It seems unlikely.

So, I guess if one could concoct a scheme that would work, honestly, and for unknown founders and an unknown startup, that would be interesting and inspiring. I lack the imagination required to figure out how to do it (as do the folks behind this particular scheme, since it seems pretty obvious that they chose the over-promise and outrageous claims path).
Joel said I was the only one that got latte art :(
Simon Cozens on PSGI/Plack
I'm tired of this meme of unsolicited and superficial redesigns of Company X's front page. I understand this economy is tough for designers and there's not a lot of portfolio jobs around, but I think it's more impressive to design for a little nonsense webapp that actually does something. At the very least if would demonstrate you can take something from Photoshop into the real world.
Learned them in 5th grade "wings" class in Minnesota.
"Answers go out by mail at almost exactly the same time as rejections. I’ve never heard of YC finishing them up before relatively late at night." Scott Wheeler of DirectedEdge (YC), http://blog.directededge.com/2009/11/05/the-interview-with-y...
NULL is how strchr tells you the character you're looking for isn't present. (Yes, the *p check is also superfluous).

Kids these days.
Want to learn django?  Come out to the first Django-NYC tutorial session
You'll probably get farther with self-study. I suggest picking a field or two (discrete mathematics, number theory, graph theory, topology, and abstract algebra are probably the most useful and accessible ones to you right now) and then meeting with a professor a few times a month to go over homework problems.

Doing it that way will prepare you to teach yourself the material, giving you the confidence you claim you don't yet have.
As someone who has been through the education system in Israel, I am very suspicious of anyone claiming anything about Israeli high schools is better.

The state of education there is terrible & getting worse. It is common for high school students to go to private tutors who in 5-10 sessions can do more for them then school does in 2 years.
The Physics of Bras
This would be very funny (and cool) if it happens.
I hardly think saying "This is the way we always do it" is a good enough reason to stop criticizing American Airlines. Designers may not have been critical to brands in the past (just buy authenticity through well-intentioned PR and ad placements)...

But that will not be true in the future, and bringing attention to bad experiences is THE WAY designers can bring about a better world.
Most heinous hoaxes on the Net
BTW, I have witnessed this behavior time after time on WoW.
It's the Trough of Disillusionment and So Much More
I haven't gone through their high school education system, but I studied with plenty of kids who went through it. I don't know if they went to tutors to be honest, since it never came up, but many of those who came to us in grade 10 were much further ahead of those of us in grade 10 in the field of mathematics.

As someone who did study in Israel until the end of grade 6, I can safely and without exaggeration say that when I started grade 7 here, the material we were covering in math was equivalent to what I learnt in grade 5. In fact, I was advised to skip grades, but my parents decided not to advance me as my English was quite poor at the time.
I think its perfectly acceptable to make a public statement when you have been publicly accused of ripping people off
Probably, but I really don't get the impression that Joel is motivated purely by money. There is a certain genuineness there about wanting to help the best programmers become better.
This has some good examples of what can go wrong in a free-for-all environment, as well as some other just plain bad behavior. (Although the people who believed Bonsai Kitty weren't thinking.)

We have debated the pluses and minuses of requiring real names when sending messages to third parties from the 'relative' safety of your computer whilst hiding behind a cartoon avatar and a nickname.

I think many people exhibit the same behavior as they do from the 'relative' anonymity of their vehicles. Just plain meanness and selfishness and Social Networking sites need to have things in place to prevent it to be relevant.
This is provocative comment. I use svn every day. It seems to meet all my needs. I find it logical, fast enough, tags, branches, and merging make sense, etc. When I started hearing about git, I looked at the docs and a couple of tutorials, and my conclusion was that it was esoteric. Nothing stood out as "wow that would be really cool" or "wow that's something I have wished I could do but svn doesn't let me". If it's "fast" that's nice, but not enough of a reason for me to switch; I don't feel like my productivity is really hampered very much waiting for svn operations. So, I never actually tried using git.

But, your remarks have intrigued me, so I might give it a try on a couple of personal projects I want to get done.
Larry Ellison, uber-consumerist: I remember when Steve was my neighbor in Woodside, Calif., and he had no furniture. It struck me that there wasn't furniture good enough for Steve in the world. He'd rather have nothing if he couldn't have perfection.
Ask HN:  Website awards, any recommendations? 
Hi, I occasionally see sites reference awards in their press section. This might include Webby, Time 50 Coolest Sites, SIIA Codie Awards, etc... I think they add a lot of credibility to sites and probably could increase conversions in an e-commerce site like ours. Have any companies applied to these awards? Any recommendations on for paid and unpaid awards? Did you feel ultimately feel like winning an award helped your business or was it a distraction in hindsight?

Thanks!
What the hell was that? Ah, gnumonks.org, makes sense. I was wondering who in their right mind would be flipping out because a mobile-freaking-phone didn't have 20 years of GNU userspace laying around. What until they find out it's not running X11...
Video from Meetup with Tim Berners-Lee @ ISWC 2009
It's not reverse psychology. It's my disappointment at this public forum when it collectively decides something is too far out of the norm of opinion.
wow very interesting! I can imagine the market is good. Especially here in California.
me too. I have been working hard at mine for months, the demo is really working good now (although I could not show it for the application deadline) I have a new server I am loading up to host it.

We are all smart people!
I wasn't implying that one should settle, but companies have life cycles too. The original people/passion that ignited the company moves on, retires, or dies. It happens all the time in every sector, it's good for capitalism to have this kind of churn. Fighting change in some big businesses is like trying to teach an old dog new tricks.
Getting a better deal and spending less time are the two main reasons I go through a rep.

We needed to purchase some blades a year or so ago, and they initially quoted us 45k (which seemed to be well under their website's price). Since we were comparison shopping, we let them know IBM's quote, and after some intense back and forth we got the price down to around 37k (and with some ADDITIONAL components not in the original quote)... a significant savings.

Along those same lines, if we need a new laptop or desktop, the refurbs are usually well-priced, but if speed is important we just shoot them a list of specs and get a quote quickly (instead of spending time on the website comparing optiplexes vs. latitudes, or whatever the different models are.)
Justin.tv is hiring for technical and nontechnical positions
It's not quite as bad as PrototypeJS -- the most ironically named library ever. The whole point of it is to force Class-based bullshit onto the only pure Prototype-based language anyone uses. It's named after the concept it's designed explicitly to stamp out.

So depressing.
I think there are certainly advantages to exposing your working process to your customers (and other folks who you may have need to market to -- my business gets a lot of links because I have a blog that vanishingly few of my customers ever read, links lead to SEO, etc etc). However, I'm not seeing the gain between presenting focused highlights from your process and a live stream.

Its sort of like "reality" television. After capturing several weeks of film, it gets edited to within an inch of its life and strung into a narrative framework by trained writers, to provide a 30 minute episode. With commercial breaks.

An unedited stream of what I did to, e.g., fix a bug worthy of a blog post would be confusing (bordering on incomprehensible) to anyone without encyclopediatic knowledge of my code base and work practices. Which is, well, everybody but me.
We accept this system for a few reasons:

It works. There are no examples of large companies that do different. Small ones? Sure. But once they reach a certain size they either change, or go under.

You sold your labor. End of story. It's not your company, you don't get to decide how it should run. If you don't like it you don't have to work there, if you want to work there you have to accept it.

If I hire a landscaper to make me a wall, and he decides the wall will look better 1 foot over, I'm fully within my rights to fire or not pay him.

You can speak your mind inside the company, but the public "speakings" of the company do not belong to you.

It sucks, I know. But changing it would make things worse, not better.
I disagree, there is a lot of substance to the presentation.

My summary: Google hacked the snot out of linux to produce android.[1] The result is still nominally linux, but much of what a developer expects when you say "linux" is no longer there.

As a result of the hacking (including the lack of X11), it is going to be difficult (possibly to the point of being unrealistic) to port "standard" linux programs to android.

Trivia: Nokia's n770/n800/n810/n900 runs pretty vanilla linux and X11 with Hildon[2] (Maemo) layered on top for the user interface (on-screen keyboard, etc.). It still takes some effort to port a "standard" linux program to Nokia/Maemo, even though it is pretty straightforward. As a result, the number of available packages is nowhere near what you can get via Debian/Ubuntu.

[1] I image they did it to skinny up the memory footprint and speed it up (for some definition of "speed").

[2] It didn't help that Nokia kept the Hildon user interface layer closed source for several years.
I think the "Lockhart's Lament" explains a good part of the source of this apparent paradox: http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_03_08.html

For some reason they don't teach math in high school, but instead "math" class seems to focus on developing your memorization and robotic homework-completion skills.
For one, he repeatedly makes a point of dcurtis' age. That's not really appropriate.
Yes I rly do
The awesomeness starts from git init; git add . (or in my case, hg init; hg add). Even if you don't use anything else, this is a big improvement over Subversion.
Haskell does not semantically have closures at all, because functions have only their arguments -- no scope to close over.

Lexically, there's where clauses to scope function definitions, but that gets desugared very early, and is really not the same thing at all anyway (the name binding is completely static).