sunspeck

> We operate under the assumption that users will not do what they don't want to do...

This assumption is either totally disingenuous or shows an extraordinary lack of self-awareness on Facebook's part.

Possibly it is true, in sensu stricto, that "users will not do what they don't want to do". But for far longer than the internet has existed, the foundation of the advertising industry (of which Facebook is unquestionably a part) has rested largely in convincing people to "want to do" things that are actually contrary to their greater interests.

In other words, Facebook has the critical mass to spawn an "opt-in" culture when they damn well please. And a network as large as Facebook has the potential to be quite corrosive to civil liberties and the social milieu, merely in how it it structured.

I love this breed of editor. Your implementation is pretty sweet, especially the quick save/email controls.

I'd much rather, though, just see a list of my documents than the too clever hidden dropdown. Right now it's two clicks and a three-key stroke just to open a saved document. Not so wabi-sabi.

And the word count is useful, but for "distraction-free writing" I shouldn't be forced to see it all the time.

A hammer or a different brand of hammer?

This irked me as well, and as usual when some small technical detail irks me in an article, an HN commenter has already made the complaint...

I might just chalk this one up to bad reporting instead of needless redundancy in the implementation.

The comments here suggest that many folks don't realize you can correlate to a precise dataset, not just a hand-drawn trendline.

Click the link next to the search button. "Enter your own data" or "Edit this data".

Anyone got a good time series?

This .js option was recently posted on HN and is not without errors, but is an interesting solution: http://html2canvas.hertzen.com/

There are other ways to go about this, though.

Is it just me, or do the two faces paired in each image on the homepage all look oddly similar?

If the software were to enforce this, I wonder if I would have a more enjoyable/didactic/narcissistic experience speaking with my Chinese mirror-image...

Games are eminently sharable, and I suspect there is a large overlap between people who would like to play games made with your platform and people who would like to make games with your platform.

Have you considered publishing an arcade of really playable games? Or how about a hosting platform for your user's creations? Then users would do the work of propagating your URL. A cross-Scirra high score system could also add a lot of appeal and virality.

In other words, I think there are some really promising ways for you to show off your product entirely apart from SEO.

Could you bear to increase the contrast of the light grey on white font color? And remove the long sequence of queries from the recipe URLs. Otherwise I really dig this design. The guiding arrows on the homepage are a nice, casual and inviting touch.

Yes. Many people in the Bay Area live on far less than $60,000/year.

A fine idea, and a nice service, but not something I'd ever pay for. And your design looks more Enterprise than Indie Hipster, which is kinda offputting.

Some notes on dashboard design and implementation from Panic: http://www.panic.com/blog/2010/03/the-panic-status-board/

Really? WWW ethics, anyone?

Yes, it will be.

http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-live-webchat-...

Cutts confirmed what Google said when the +1 button launched: Google will use +1 activity to influence its search results.

“It’s definitely a signal we’re paying a lot of attention to,” Cutts said. “It has tons of potential. It looks very promising.”

I'm not saying that CDs will ever be inaccessible to the motivated technologist. But the media will continue to degrade and disappear at an even faster rate with optical drives no longer commonplace.

And while I'm sure that Apple buyers were among the first demographic to ditch physical media, this development is certainly another nail in the coffin of the brick-and-mortar data archives that are record stores.

PSA: There's still a ton of excellent, obscure music on CD that hasn't reached the cloud. Get ripping your local libraries and dollar bins while you still can.

(Incidentally, the optical drive in my last machine, a Macbook, was as good as useless. It failed multiple times because of the flex in the plastic case. So much for impeccable Apple design standards.)

It might be fun to extend this idea to bet on RottenTomatoes scores before the reviews start flowing in.

And if it turns out that your users are any good at predicting movie biz metrics, there might be some value in the data you collect.

The wording "Pricing starts from free." seems a little ominous with no actual pricing information up front. How much personal information will I have to fill in before you spring some charges on me?

I'd rather read something like "File for free" if that's what you do at your basic level.

By "feel" do you also mean grammar? Because I do believe that immersion is necessary for an intuitive understanding of the structure of a language. Rote grammar will get y9ou so far, but it's a different beast.

I agree that vocabulary is a more mechanical memorization task. Knowledge of linguistic antecedents (eg. Latin for the Romance family) greatly helps this along.

“We are also trying to satisfy ourselves that Stern graduates know what they are talking about when they represent themselves to practitioners and in the world of stiff competition with graduates of other top schools.”

Wait... is he actually admitting here that NYU wants the post removed because it reveals that >1/5 of its grads are cheaters?