skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thx for the link upgrade. Ubuntu forum comments show a little more for those of us who aren't experts on this type of stuff: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1349678
Tail-calls and an easily accessible mono VMWare image which includes F# and mono is the only thing keeping me from making the jump right now
Its impossible to accurately classify something subjective into a top X list. The lists will always be skewed into the tastes of the judges or list compiler.

Take music charts for example. The top 20 could be renamed, the '20 records that teenagers like at the moment'.

That said I would like to say that UI designers that work for one company who have one product, do not deserve the same amount of kudos as really skilled agency UI designers who work on upwards of 10 UI's a year. They solve 10 times more problems than those who work on one product.
Self-Destructing Bacteria Could Be the Key to Better Biofuels
How to improve Websocket
Startup Board Stress Remains Prevalent
You can teach tools in a month, but you cannot teach analytic skill.
I think Amazon is an awful UI. I'm not saying I could do any better, but for me, I hate it.
I might be wrong, but doesn't NY-Times has exclusive subscription deals with Kindle? If so, its better to take this review with a grain of salt.

Oh come on. If you're going to accuse David Pogue and the New York Times of corruption just come out and say it.
The photographic amateur may be better-educated, better-equipped and better-practiced than the professional. He may know things about lenses, filters, lighting and gamma correction that an Ansel Adams would never have considered. The difference is that, when faced with a difficult or seemingly impossible shoot, the amateur will explain why it can't be done (or at least why it can't be done satisfactorily) and walk away, while the pro will explain why the customer's vision may need to be reigned in a bit, but will find a way to get it done the best way possible if the customer insists. It's not just "anything for a buck", but having a professional attitude toward customer service.
Yes, in a month that is. Of course deep understanding of analytics takes time, but it can be learned (but not within a month).
> This fact, while not empirical, is reflected in the literature about humanity.

It seems to me that when you compare what is happening in reality to the 'literature about humanity' they are very different. People are increasingly comfortable with allowing information about them collected and made public online. They are often prepared to give up significant aspects of their privacy for the slightest additional convenience. Check out Google Latitude or Rescuetime for some extreme examples. I fully expect this trend to continue to the point where significant chunks of people's life experience will be stored online.

I'm not sure what humanist literature will have to say about this. If you have an interest in where the world is headed with regards to issues like these you would be better to read some good transhumanist literature instead.
Indeed. It's easy to criticize from a distance, easy to be disgusted by egregious fraud by a rare few when it's trumpeted left and right by the media, deliberately harming the interests of the great majority. I too have been on 'both sides of the track' at times, and noticed that people who've never known real misfortune are most likely to criticize situations beyond their experience. Many people live with situations that the fortunate can hardly imagine.

What many people can't afford is preventive medicine. As a result, they arrive at the clinic or hospital with advanced disease that costs far more to treat. Anyone can understand this, and it makes perfect humane and fiduciary sense to make preventive visits as affordable as possible. That's the meaning of basic health care - and to deny it to anyone is illogical and mean-spirited.
New York Times Self-Service Advertising
I understand this analysis as a heuristic and not rules to follow by the letter.

Disruptive innovation can invalidate the analysis.

For instance, I suspect such type of analysis would have classified web search as a no go domain when Sergey Brin and Larry Page started working on the google web search algorithm. There were plenty search engines provided by the big players at the time.

The added value (or problem solving) criteria is a much better heuristic to determine where to go or not.
Best 20 TV bosses of all time
Product is the only real criterion for judgment, isn't it? There are people who are really, really good at design, but who are almost completely unaware of the rules they intuitively follow, and there are others who've spent years (or decades) learning the rules, the history, the trends, and can write long, scholarly papers about the subject, but who cannot create anything original. (I fall into the latter category, by the way -- but at least I'm aware of it. Enough people are pleased with my reiterations of past successes that I'm not too disappointed with the rut I'm stuck in. And there are few surprises in store for the clients when they are free to ask "can we have that one in blue?")
It's clearly aliens trying to communicate with us. Or with the other aliens who live on Titan.
Evan Weaver blogged about Cassandra (http://blog.evanweaver.com/articles/2009/07/06/up-and-runnin...) awhile ago and used Twitter as a sample schema to show how it worked.
fwiw, for me it defaulted almost everything to "everyone", which was a bit alarming. Don't know why we'd have had different experiences. Maybe they panicked and changed it?
How To Make Money From Emerging Technologies [pdf]
Cheap Xbox 360 Store
e-ink devices will continue to move slowly until there is competition in providing the screens.
LTO 1 Linear Tape Open Ultrium 1
Best online seller of data backup tapes around the world. All data tapes are available in low prices.
link is busted.

try: http://blogs.webtide.com/gregw/entry/how_to_improve_websocke...
surely off-topic and probably silly, but I was wondering where do all the designers get the pictures they use? is there a market going on for such thing?
(I assume they won't shoot the photos themselves -- division of labor and all :D)
Ask HN: Free calorie count API?
Does anyone know of any open APIs for retrieving calorie details about various types of food?
I read: "We evaluated a lot of things: a custom mysql impl, voldemort, hbase, mongodb, memcachdb, hypertable, and others"

I wonder if among the others there is Redis too, if so (and somebody at twitter is listening) I could love to know what do you think are the biggest weakness in Redis and if you think in the short term it's more important a fault-tolerant cluster implementation (the redis-cluster project) or virtual memory to support datasets bigger than RAM into a single instance. Thanks in advance for any reply.
It's called stock photography :)
One such site is http://www.istockphoto.com/index.php
Amazon is fantastic, basically everyone in the industry that I know has been going there for inspiration first forever. Recently, Facebook has taken that place, and Google to some degree (although Google's case is a very specific one).
Which is exactly what they want you to do :)
StackOverflow is, from a UX perspective, indeed very well done.
From what you've described, she just needs Excel, but if it's more complex than it looks, Access is actually a fine alternative.

I do think you're right, though, that there is a place for a competitor to Access. My startup intends to compete in that space.
Disagreed. I find that the agencies don't tend to "solve" problems, because they're not there when their solutions are measured/exposed to the real world. Agencies tend to take a stab at solutions. In house designers need to solve things.
"Want to pay less for analysts? Convince a bunch of people to learn analytics."

Why? Sales commissions are probably about the same today as they were in ancient Greece. I think the rule here is, "Always overpay with free money."
man the voice over style in the video was borderline late night infomercial.
Facebook is awesome user experience. The visual design is pretty decent, but it's the UX that's awesome.
HTML 5: Do Flash Developers need to Worry?
Bread Crumb Navigation
Digg was considering Cassandra too http://blog.digg.com/?p=966
Perhaps that is the case when the relationship is not right. In a lot of cases we run the sites for our clients and dont have to ask them to make UI changes. We spend a lot of time fine tuning and getting this part right. We do this on a permanent basis.

But I accept your point if this kind of relationship doesnt exist and the site is 'handed over'
Growth as a Process
Expect to see PHP, Python and Ruby "self-service ad manager" modules for ever CMS package on earth right about .. NOW!
Wow, thats amazing. Its the last place I'd look for inspiration these days. Perhaps 8 years ago. It just doesnt make sense to regurgitate things that could be done better.

I find the whole UX clunky, especially the checkout process. Its trying to be too many things to too many people and have solved some hard issues - just not very well.
Language learning games
What the Google Web will look like in 10 years
Just because they want you to do it, doesnt mean its very good.
Digg is in process to convert all data to Cassandra (mentioned in their NoSQL East presentation).
Feedback requested on Coconut Martini
Coconut Martini. It is as easy as 1-2-3. 1.Select a Restaurant 2.Create an Invite 3.Invite your Friends. Coconut Martini lets you select your friends from your Facebook account or from your email address book, and send an invite to them.
In most areas, fire spreads uncontrollably. Even if I don't buy firefighting services, I benefit when firefighters put out your house fire and prevent it from burning my house down. That's the non-rivalrous and non-excludible element.

But you are absolutely right under some circumstances - in a sparsely populated desert, firefighting would be a private good.
I visit Urban Airship and my first instinct is to hate how little padding there is between your iPhone image and the image right below it, which strikes me as overlarge.
How (or does) this relate to ADD and ADHD? Can ADD be trained away? I ask this seriously, I personally think our ability to literally change our minds is not well understood and extremely underestimated.
I do not refute it. In the general case, you really should stick to three sentence total and possibly one question at the end.

I provided a special (but annoyingly common) case where it is useful to diverge from the rule. The case is where there is a low probability that the reader will understand any given sentence.

Given that the reader has an estimated 60% chance to understand any given sentence, if you repeat the content in three different sentences, you get a 94% chance that at least one of them will be understood.

As an actual example, I give a shortened transcript from a recent discussion with PayPal support. My first 3 emails were all variations of:

I keep getting "The card cannot be used, try again
later" when trying to pay. This has been going on
for months. What should I do?

2-3 sentences and one question; they were completely unable to understand any of it (likely because the support people are paid by the number of tickets they reply to and just skim any incoming case). I estimated their reading comprehension hit rate to about 30%, which means I had to fire at least 7 explanations at them to get a >90% chance of success. This is my 4th email to them, which was rewarded with an actual helpful answer:

Hi. Thank you for the answer, but since you also
recommend "just try again at a later time" it seems
you are missing a vital point I'm trying to make:

I have been "trying again" for months.

I have been trying again weeks later several times.
This has been going on for months.

As you recommended, I tried repeating the process at
a later date, but this did not help.

[skip 5 more reformulations]

Please let me know typically how long this "security-
related" issue takes to pass through PayPal's bowels.
How much "later time" do I have to wait to try again?

[signature]

When trimming the fat, this email is identical to the first one which has 3 sentences, the last one of which is a question.
The Metalab people were involved in a dispute with one of the Tumblr designers on IRC the one time I entered the Tumblr IRC, so I've got a bias that comes from that designer ranting at them for an underhanded design, but I find that I really dislike the Metalab style. It's too undiscriminatingly open, and it wastes a lot of space doing/saying simple things. I prefer people who're capable of packing a lot of information into a small space and keep it looking good.
From that post: "Don't use EC2 or friends except for testing; the virtualized I/O is too slow" kind of restricts Cassandra usage for an average Web 2.0 startup

Added: just to clarify that: when starting small the last thing you want to do is either buy expensive infrastructure or hack something cheap instead of doing it properly. If Cassandra won't perform well in the virtualized environment, it will be necessary to first use some other means of storing data and "go cassandra" later if needed.
Drawing Fractals with Git
Let me cast my vote for Shaun Inman, whose two web apps are brilliantly designed and brilliantly functional. His homepage is pretty dandy, too: http://shauninman.com
I did read the article. But I didn't quite catch the distinction. Thanks.

So basically, the extinction part is not new. It's the fact that if you remind them of the fear right before, the extinction training is far more effective.
But when their blog design is built to emphasize images rather than text, that turns having those images distract into a design issue with the theme.
Atom smasher catches 1st high-energy collisions
You are assuming a fear of heights is not a learned response. I think it is, only you don't remember learning it, which makes it much harder to overcome.

> how does one expose oneself to a height that will not illicit a fear response?

The goal is to show that nothing bad happens at a great height. After a while the fear will fade. It's simply not possible to stay permanently afraid while nothing bad happens. (But it's rare that people are willing to subject themself to that.)
Wouldn't giving the code to a friend violate non-disclosure?
Facebook | Beranda
hay...Ghost2k
STANDBY: INITIALIZING: DIGITAL ATMOSPHERE

...really?
My personal opinion is that he's very good, but not great. His designs work very well, but he never strikes me as ambitious or risk-taking in his work, which I feel is a must for great.
Ideas for the new catonmat.net website
I was wondering this as well.

I can only assume it means reminding them that they got a shock last time they saw the square. But it doesn't totally make sense, since wouldn't you think of that on your own?
Facebook, Twitter boost online sales
Not an API, but a public data set:

http://www.ars.usda.gov/Services/docs.htm?docid=8964
That Ruby is much more popular right now and used more than Python.

Everyone has said Python is simple, simple, simple, though.
Joel Inc., Stackoverflow Careers and Jumping Shark
Eclipse e4 highlights
Rate our iPhone app (iRewardChart)
The X-Factor Diet
I really agree with that. We keep forgetting that all of these devices essentially depend on the same company for their screens, which are arguably the most important components of the devices anyways.
Who: Parents of kids between 3-13

Why: To motivate the kids to be good and earn rewards

How: Kids earn stars for the tasks assigned and later star balance converted to actual rewards.

Versions:
Free: http://itunes.com/apps/iRewardChartLite
Paid: http://itunes.com/apps/iRewardChart

Comments, suggestions?
But everything resembling a DB is slow on EC2 since I/O is slow and memory accesses are slow, so I think the problem is EC2 and not Cassandra, MySQL, ...
Some of these ideas are pretty good, but some are not. To take a couple examples:

Here is a concrete example: Someone links to www.catonmat.net/artikle when they wanted to link to www.catonmat/article. I’d simply insert an entry to 301 redirect /artikle to /article and everyone’s happy.

Everyone's happy? I think not. What you've just done is taken on the the onus for fixing other people's mistakes. In the long run, that's not sustainable-- it's more work for you, and only encourages sloppiness on their part. It's not a road I'd like to go down, I'll tell you that.

47. Add A Job Board.
As my site is getting more popular and popular among programmers, it may be a good idea to add a job board. Joel Spolsky made a million $ in a year with job boards. As the popularity of my site increases, I might make a few dollars out of it as well.

The value (and revenue) from a job board is not linear-- if your site gets 5% of the traffic that Joel gets, your job board is not going to have 5% of the value. In fact, until your site is extremely popular, a job board has almost no value whatsoever. It takes a critical mass.

Catonmat's a great site, btw-- I really dig your content. And that's why I'd hate to see you putting your energy into low-value, high-effort activities like the aforementioned, instead of concentrating on the core: producing good content.
I loved the ridiculous physics and damage modeling in this game. You could literally get your car bent in half and still drive around... barely :)
From the title, I thought the article would go the other way, admonishing the lackadaisical one-a-week which becomes once-a-month practicing that simply peters off.

The article compares the dedicated amateur to the club owner, not the starving musician. The dedicated amateur, with an hour a day of self-motivated practice, is able to succeed in a low-stress non-demanding environment, whereas the club owner is a high-stress, high-demand environment.

I don't view either environments as being inherently better than the other. Different people thrive in different environments. I have a researcher friend, whom, given a task and some time, will come back with results and he'll do an excellent job. Put him in a frazzling high-demand situation? He quickly falls apart.

Someone else I know, given a task, will waste the day reading blogs and watching TV and only start working on it after midnight, but put into a high-stress situation does much better work than the researcher is able to output in the same situation.

I see this akin to individually being a producer vs. a consumer. Neither is inherently better, but, like consumers outnumber producers by a large margin, so too, do the club owners vs the guitar players.
You're asking about UI designers and most people have provided links to Designers

This is the crucial point in this whole discussion. If the user has a task to accomplish, the user may indeed want the task to be accomplished in a beautiful environment, but most of all the user wants the task to get done. User interface design is first of all tested by seeing whether or not any typical user anticipated for the site or for the application can accomplish the task successfully.
I'm not at Twitter, but what's the tuning parameter to specify that every x seconds data goes to disk?
to clarify, Cassandra is still faster on a per-node basis than relational databases on EC2, but if you compare EC2 numbers with real hardware and wonder "why is it so slow?" that is why. :)

that said, there was a thread yesterday about Joe Stump's benchmarks showing EC2 I/O not being as bad as most people think so possibly they have made some improvements since. As j3fft mentions, Joe Stump is also in TFA talking about using Cassandra.
I'm intrigued by the Knowledge Database idea, care to explain a little more about that pkrumins? I may build something similar for myself.
Hence the hopes it won't be much more slower
The 404 page resulting from a request for www.catonmat/artikle could say "did you mean: www.catonmat/article".
hello, it's documented in the default redis.conf comments, the parameter is called "save": http://github.com/antirez/redis/raw/master/redis.conf
if you look on the OP's thread, Joe Stump talks about using Cassandra for SimpleGeo, which I believe is completely hosted on EC2.
I don't know about ADD/ADHD, but the ability to focus can definitely be improved with training; this is a major benefit of most forms of meditation, for example. Similarly, there's a lot of techniques in Attention Management coming out of the Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy community (and the Meta-Cognitive folks, as well).

Personally speaking, I'd say that if you've got a diagnosis, you ought to talk to the appropriate medical/psychological people for advice; if you're simply interested in improving focus, find a meditation center. YMMV, naturally.
The clients have degraded because many list managers are inconsistent with how headers on list messages are set.

http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html

There isn't any way, for a given client, to ensure consistent behavior when replying to all lists, and for the lists there isn't any reasonable expectation that all users will have the same client behavior. Things are a mess all around now.
I have to agree with this -- I like to read the HN take on what's going on with AWS. Most of us here use AWS for something or another (if not everything), so Jeff's posts seem pretty relevant.
Thanks for the feedback.

About the 301 redirects - it doesn't take much effort. People don't make mistakes too often, but when they do I wouldn't like to lose visitors that came from their link. I have currently fixed a few links that I have noticed via URL rewriting, but it's web server specific, and I want to brink it to application level to have all the site configuration centralized from admin menu.
Managing this tiny feature won't take much of my time and I will still be able to produce quality articles.

About the job board. Oh, didn't think of that. You are right. I will set this idea a lower priority and just keep producing good content until I hit critical mass. :)
My pick:
- Ryan Singer of 37signals
- HappyCog
- ClearLeft
- Unit Interactive
- Made by Sofa

Also, I think UI design is different from Visual design. I found that some of the posts below are referring to visual specialists only.
This has been around for a while on nytimes.com

But another interesting thing about the Times' approach to online advertising is they don't use the low-quality ad networks that you see on many other publishers' websites. The front page and "above the fold" ads emphasize luxury brands and rich media from mainstream advertisers, and there is some AdSense running at the bottom of article pages, but you won't see scammy teeth-whitening ads (which can be readily found on the Washington Post website). It's a smart move, even if they are leaving some revenue on the table -- it makes the brand look respectable, and increases its ability to charge a premium on ads it does place on the pages.
Personally speaking, my biggest complaint about your site is that the Lecture Notes you publish are for courses I have already taken online-- I only wish you had gotten there first. Damned space-time continuum!
Reasons to Choose Community College Over University
This is an awesome idea. Wrote it down. :) But I will want to correct that URL transparently to the user if I know what it should be.

It doesn't happen too often. I could even automate some of the patterns. One of them is when you put your link in parantehsis like this (www.domain.com/path), some regular expressions include the trailing ) in the path and the resulting URL is 404. This can be fixed automatically by dropping trailing ')'s.
How could they possibly solve it? One of the most important features of Google Mail is fast searching of e-mails. For them to search e-mails, they need to be able to index them so they can't just encrypt the emails on their storage.

Frankly, for me the abilty to search my emails quickly outweights the risk of some nosey Google employee with a shallow private life reading my private email or bank stuff or whatever.
Note to self: if I ever choose to test launch an ICBM, don't do it off Norway the day before the US President visits to pick up his Nobel Peace Prize.